There are no armed guards in Tel Aviv’s Ben
Gurion Airport
Because the El
Al jet ride from Newark had been
less than comfortable, it was my hope that Israeli ‘land life’ would offer
better things. My flight was packed tight with Hassidic Jews, men in hats and
long sideburn curls who carried hat boxes of various sizes who seemed to take
great delight in lounging or blocking seat entrances or pacing around the plane
without letup. For this passenger it was like listening to endless renditions
of Ravel’s Bolero. Everyone in our mostly Jewish press group had El Al horror
stories. On both my arrival and departure flight, for instance, an Orthodox man
refused to sit in his assigned middle seat because there was a woman sitting by
the window. At the end of the day I felt grateful that Jewish Orthodoxy had
provided me with ample leg room.
Once in Tel Aviv, a
driver met me at Ben Gurion and drove me to the Herzelya Ritz Carlton Hotel
where the traffic was five times the density of the Schuylkill Expressway. We
traveled on a special toll road that got you to Herzelya in half the time.
Along the way I took note of the billboards and random graffiti on buildings
and reminded myself that cities the world over are the same when it comes to
urban blight. When we arrived at the
Ritz the world became a Meditereanean luxury spa with a harbor of yachts, an
ocean beach and blue skies. My hotel room overlooked the luxurious harbor.
Management had also arranged a swag surprise: gifts of body lotions and a small
plate of gourmet chocolates. I devoured the chocolates, showered, then took a
walk on the beach and watched as teenagers played Frisbee and two guys in wet
suits surfed in an ocean that reminded me of the surf at the Jersey
shore.
I’ve no doubt that
some people go to Israel
for the food, in this case, salads; salads of every variety with vegetables and
ingredients you’re not likely to have heard of before. The breakfast buffet at
the Ritz was beyond compare, attracting the likes of Tony Blair who rushed past
our table with his security entourage.
“It’s Tony Blair!”
one of the LA writers said, even though all we saw was the back of the former
UK Prime Minister’s head. Blair seemed to be in important business mode. Israel ,
after all, is about the size of humble New Jersey
but surrounded by large monolith Arab countries, Jordan
being the most peaceful of the lot unless at some point, as our tour guide
indicated, “It has an Arab spring.” Naturally, fears of possible terrorist
activity during our 5-day whirlwind tour of Tel Aviv, Jaffa ,
the Dead Sea and Jerusalem
were very much on our minds. Before
signing up for this press trip, our group had done its homework: An American
tourist stabbed to death in Jerusalem in 2010; an attack on taxi passengers,
all U.S. citizens in 2000; in 2001 a shooting at a bus stop; October, 2015, the
storming of a bus in Jerusalem (3 fatalities); in 2015 a couple and their 4
children were attacked by gunmen in the West Bank. Two days after our press
trip, November 19, 2015 ,
terrorists open fired on cars stuck in traffic; another attack in the West
Bank where five people, including an 18 year old student from Boston ,
were killed.
Prior to my coming
here, for instance, some people had advised me to drop out. They prayed for me
in my local parish church. They told me to be careful. I was even taken out to
dinner and my hosts jokingly referred to it as The Last Supper.
The instructions
from the Ministry were clear: we must remain with our fellow travel writers at
all times. Solitary excursions through Tel Aviv or Jerusalem
were forbidden. The reality of this hit hard after our first dinner out in a
Tel Aviv restaurant when we could not locate the tour bus. We were lingering on
a dark Tel Aviv street. “This cannot be
happening,” a member of our group said, panic evident in her eyes. “We are
standing alone on a dark street in Tel Aviv. A car could come up at any time
and blow us away!” She wasn’t kidding. This was not New
York or Philadelphia
but we had been lulled into momentary complacency with good food and good wine.
Inspired by her words of caution, we high tailed it around the block and
hurried to the parked bus since moving along in a group is better than standing
idle on a street corner, where anything can happen.
Our apprehension
abated somewhat during our first daylight tour: a walk through Jaffa ,
the ancient seaport of the Babylonians, Egyptians, Romans, and the Crusaders.
From its star-studded history—everything from Greek mythology, Jonah and the
Whale to a long stay by Peter the Apostle—we listened as our guide explained
how after the Jews won a local battle here with the Turks, resident Arab
Christians and Muslims were given permission to remain in the city although
newcomer Arabs were not allowed in. Jaffa ,
the story goes, was founded by Jacob, one of the sons of Noah after the Great
Flood. When Napoleon came to Jaffa
to fight the Turks and the British his troops contracted the Plague and for the
beleaguered emperor there was only one solution: to have his General surgeon
kill the sick so that the disease would not spread. When the surgeon refused,
saying he was in the business of saving lives, not killing them, Napoleon asked
the Turkish sultan’s General surgeon to do the same thing but got the same
answer. Although there are various stories about how the afflicted soldiers
died, our guide told us that Napoleon walked away and let his troops die in
agony on the vast portico outside the church
of Peter
The church
of Peter Europe
although when I snuck a peek I was amazed that it was in total darkness with
tourists milling confusedly about, some walking to the altar while others hung
out near the back pews. It was enough to make your imagination work overtime
and so it occurred to me that this would be a sinister place for terrorism. I
noticed an adult man sneaking up behind a friend of his who was sitting alone
in a pew and watched as he poured bottled spring water onto his friend’s head.
Was this a Monty Python skit making fun of baptism? I left the church shortly
after this.
As for Saint Peter,
when the apostle came to Jaffa he
stayed at the home of Simon the Tanner, a house that is still very much intact.
The scriptures (Acts of the Apostles) tell us that during his stay Peter raised
a woman (Tabitha) from the dead. He also
fell asleep on Simon’s flat roof whereupon he had a series of dreams in which
he was told by the Lord to abolish the old Jewish dietary laws. Peter had to be
told to do three times, but once he enacted the change, the new religion was
able to spread among the pagans. Had the dietary laws not been abolished,
Christianity could have died out as just another Jewish sect.”
Officially
designated as a Health and Wellness press trip, we journalists were treated to
a number of massages. I don’t think we were fearful of terrorism here, although
body lotions could easily be replaced with poisonous substances and do strange
things to the pores. After a spin around
Tel Aviv’s Sheinken Street
and the Carmel open air market,
each of us prepared for our 40 minute rubdown at the Ritz spa. In individual
cubicles filled with sweet aromatic scents, we undressed and were lathered
appropriately with oils and balms, wrapped in hot towels and then set upon by
our assigned body rubbers. In my case it was a talkative Israeli girl who,
because I told her I wanted a firm massage, went to extreme lengths to pummel
my back with road construction drill jerks that had me bouncing off the
mattress. Although she did manage to deliver some pleasant sensations, she
became even more animated when I told her that during much of the rub that in
my mind I kept seeing the face of an infant. Was it her child perhaps? She told
m it was not her child but that when she was massaging me she was thinking of her sister’s new baby. “Are you a medium of some sort?” she asked.
“No,” I said, “but massages send me places.”
There would be two
other massages on the trip. At the Mitzpen Hayamim Hotel Spa and Farm, we
donned white robes and slippers and took turns in the various cubicles for our Sea
of Galilee rubs. My body rubber was a sturdy albeit bullish short
haired woman who was coming to the end of a long day. She did not speak English
but she was adept at pointing, so there was no conversation, no jerking motions
just a methodical but thorough deep tissue application that was heads above the
first. By this time, of course, we had heard about the killings in Paris ,
so our group was on high alert. The Mitzpen Hayamim tour guide, after giving us
a tour of the farm, pointed to a not so distant mountain and told us that just
a few weeks prior he had hiked to the top and was able to look over into Syria,
“Where you can see all the carnage down below.”
News of the Paris
killings heightened our apprehension about traveling along the West
Bank to the Dead Sea and into the city of Jerusalem .
Our tour bus, we were told, would waver among zones A, B and C, B and C being
the safe West Bank zones and A being the one to watch
out for. The journalist who wanted us off that Tel Aviv street corner was now
concerned about our entry into Jerusalem .
She told us that she had not even informed her mother that she was taking a
press trip to Israel
because the news “would have given her a heart attack.”
Our bus driver,
a sturdy man with a lot experience driving buses along the West Bank ,
Haifa and the Jordan
Valley West Bank zones
we were careful to avoid the window and sit in the aisle seats. Along the Jordan
Valley Jericho ,
the oldest city on earth (and home of John the Baptist) as being an especially
dangerous place. Its small scale very biblical looking skyline seemed too close
for comfort. Looking out the window from a safe distance, I couldn’t keep my
eyes off the desolate Judean wilderness with its mountains and caves that were
once populated by the Essenes, Jewish Zealots and early Christian hermits. I
also took note of the abundance of abandoned tractor or military vehicle wheels
that seemed to dot the landscape every few miles. Periodically we would pass an
Arab settlement and what looked like the remnants of isolated, bombed out
buildings. As we approached Jerusalem
we were greeted with the timeless spectacle of Shepards guiding their flocks of
sheep up and down the sides of mountainous hills.
Our final group
massage occurred near the Dead Sea . In my case I was
told to strip and lay face up on a small table by a tall completely bald man
who reminded me of Yul Brenner. He painted me with a brush in warm Dead
Sea mud and slashed it around like he was swabbing a fence then
wrapped my body like a mummy in two layers of cloth. After that he left the
room without a word of explanation, returning fifteen minutes later with an
order to shower. I was then supposed to float in a rectangular shaped mineral
swimming pool with a group of pot bellied men and their wives, the latter bobbing
about in flowered bathing caps.
Needless to say, I
opted to get dressed and help myself to complimentary tea in the foyer of the
spa.
