Pt1 - 19: SAFED, MEGIDDO AND THE GOLAN...

The ancient town of Safed stands atop Mt Canaan in the steep Galilean hills north of Tiberias. Along with Hebron, Jerusalem and Tiberias itself, Safed was one of the four most sacred cities in Judaism and the centre of Jewish mysticism. These days it’s more famous for its artist’s colony than any deep religious pursuits.

The city, no more than a village 20 years ago, tumbles down the hillside crowned by the Citadel Park. Fires were lit here in ancient times to signal the start of Jewish festivals and to look at it today you’d think the last one got seriously out of control and the park is still recovering. It is woefully neglected, overgrown and strewn with windblown rubbish. The few scrawny cedars struggling to survive up here look like they’ve been under sustained acid rain attack for a century, sad echoes of the once majestic trees that graced the hilltop. Add the fact that the excellent vistas across the surrounding hills I remembered from my last visit are now polluted with rampant development and you come up with one word: Disappointment.

Hoping the Artist’s Quarter might have something more positive to offer we threaded our way down the steep slope via snaking streets and long flights of stone steps to the old British Police Station, a concrete bunker-like block decorated with Arab, Jewish and British bullet holes. More staircases took us to the Artist’s Quarter…we should have known better. If the absurdly priced tatt displayed in this warren of renovated alleys is any guide the good people of modern Safed are more interested in sucking money from tourist wallets than providing spiritual succour.

Gloomily we trudged back uptown to the cave of Shem V’Ever where twenty years ago a consumptive old character fleeced me a greenback to light a candle for the spirits of Noah’s sons Shem and Ever, who allegedly studied the Torah here. It was locked. Following the instructions in our guidebook we knocked on the door of the nearby synagogue. No joy. Now royally pissed off we caught the next bus back to Tiberias and lifted our spirits with a succulent meal of fresh whole St Peter’s fish and rib-eye steak at a small restaurant on HaBannim.

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On a truly glorious spring morning we boarded the bus for Afula, ultimate destination Megiddo. The road was lined with Australian eucalypts and wattles behind which lay sparkling white but soulless barrack settlements set in bright green fields of young wheat. The only hint besides the settlements that this wasn’t the Australian countryside was the Hebrew lettering on on-coming buses, but even then it’s not hard to visualise Hebrew as the English alphabet with bits of the letters missing.

At Afula we stepped off one bus and onto another and struck into the broad, green Jezreel Valley. Fifteen minutes later we were standing at a crossroads in the heart of the valley and looking across to Megiddo two kilometres distant. It was such a splendid day for a walk that we barely registered the passing meters and before long we found ourselves at the visitor’s centre.

Rising from the flat plain, the huge mound of Tel Megiddo has been scalped to reveal something like twenty generations of human settlement from the Calchedonian Iron Age through to Solomon’s time. The most engaging display in the little museum which charts this long history is a large interactive model with coloured lights that illuminate when you push the relevant buttons and cutaways that rise electronically to reveal earlier strata. We’d arrived on the heels of a school excursion – imagine that, an excursion to a 5,000 year old excavation. When I was a kid at Denistone East Primary School the most exotic place we ever got to visit was the Robertson Cheese Factory, established 1923.

Anyway, as I was saying, we’d arrived behind a busload of primary school kids who now surrounded the model and watched politely as their teacher operated the controls and explained the various layers. As I lurked impatiently in the background waiting to play with all the buttons and lights I noticed the group was chaperoned by three armed men in mufti. Whether this was routine or a response to the recent shootings in Jordan and the escalating political tension I wasn’t sure, but I made a mental note to recommend it as a classroom management strategy at my next staff meeting, if I ever attended another staff meeting.

The teacher eventually led her little charges off to the site proper and I leapt to the control panel. Before long I had the layout dancing up and down and flashing coloured lights like a disco on acid. It was great fun and worth twice the modest admission price.

Out on the tel itself we drank in the extensive views from Mt Carmel in the north-west, through Nazareth in the north, to Mt Tabor and Mt Gilboa in the east. The fetching day induced a mild euphoria and our feet barely seemed to touch the ground as we tripped around the dig for two hours collecting pottery sherds – there were thousands of them and no signs forbidding it – admiring the public grain silo with its double-helix stone staircase, marvelling at how small the rooms were – in the ruins of some of the houses the largest wasn’t much bigger than your average laundry – and generally enjoying our good fortune with the weather.

We navigated our way out of Megiddo via the tunnels of the water system constructed by King Ahab in the 9^th century BC. You descend into a deep hole to find an opening in the floor. Through this opening you take a further 183 steps down into a rough-hewn but well-lit passage which runs several meters along to where a spring bubbles from the rocks and a small cistern is carved to contain the precious water. From here it’s an 80 step climb out into the sunshine.

We strode the 2kms back to the intersection and flagged down the first bus to Afula. It was so packed we had to stand and I noticed a young female soldier, rifle slung over her shoulder, straddling her kit bag about halfway along the aisle. As she swayed to the rhythm of the bus the muzzle of her weapon waved around in the face of a civilian woman sitting in the seat beside her. The woman gently tugged the soldier’s arm and politely asked her to remove the gun barrel from her face and I thought, there’s something you wouldn’t see back home. Then again, The Australian Army doesn’t comprise 50% of the population, females don’t comprise 50% of the Australian Army and the Australian Army doesn’t generally ride civilian transport.

We were back in Tiberias for one of those wicked shwermas and a stroll along the promenade in the warm sunshine. Lured by the promise of a “Galilee Experience” and against my better judgement we went into a large tourist tatt emporium right on the water. Amongst the assortment of mind-numbing kitsch I came across a religious souvenir that made the stuff on the Via Dolorosa seem tasteful. For a pocketful of sheks you could take home to Calabria or California a cellophane bag containing a little pewter Christ on a miniature balsa cross, a phial of holy water from the River Jordan (via the owner’s kitchen tap I’ll wager) and a sachet of terra sancta from the owner’s backyard. I went outside and had a Regurgitation Experience.

Our last official excursion in the Middle East took us on a day tour of the Golan Heights. On another sublime spring morning we followed the Galilee road north through avocado and mango plantations to the church at Tabgha where Jesus is said to have performed the loaves and fishes trick (as an aside, this must be the only instance in the English language where the plural of fish uses the –es suffix). The church itself is undistinguished save for the mosaic depicting the miracle which shows two fishies but only four loaves of bread instead of the generally accepted five. Evidently the discrepancy has fuelled serious scholastic debate over the centuries but I personally can’t see what the fuss is about; maybe the craftsmen ran out of bread-coloured tiles – who cares? These religious scholars should get a real job.

We moved on to Capernaum which was the epicentre of Jesus’ ministry and the location of Simon’s house. The site is tended by the Franciscans who’ve excavated both the black basalt synagogue, which in those days was just a meeting place like the local town hall, where Jesus is supposed to have taught, and Simon’s house on the shore of Galilee, whose placid waters this morning stretched away into the shimmering distance like a satin sheet.

Simon’s house tickled my fancy for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was built on the best piece of real estate in town. I could easily picture him sitting on the front step with his morning coffee and fag with his feet dangling in the water, it’s that close. Secondly, it’s a concentric hexagonal design, pretty radical for the time and aesthetically very pleasing. He seems like the kind of guy who today would go for a rammed earth, energy efficient, environmentally sustainable habitation, maybe even a yurt.

Finally, and this is the clincher, the Franciscans have built a glass-bottomed flying saucer chapel right on top of it, I kid you not. I had a premonition as I climbed the steps that I was about to undergo a close encounter of the third kind, and in a sense I did. As I entered the chapel I saw a woman kneeling at the railing which surrounds the glass floor directly over the core of Simon’s house. She sobbed in an ecstasy of prayer that reminded me of the Italians on the Via Dolorosa. In the context of this quiet chapel though I caught myself momentarily envying her faith. Alas for this miserable 20^th century sinner, the concept of devoting my inner life to a dead carpenter whose story has inspired more bloodshed, mayhem, greed and hypocrisy than anything else in human history is entirely alien. If Jesus appeared on the streets of your town today he’d be just another loonytoon proselytiser, but enough of that. Little did I realise I was about to have a close encounter of the irritating kind with which I shall rest my case.

As I left the Capernaum site I was accosted by a small Asian woman thrusting a glossy four page leaflet into my hand. It featured the sort of hysterical, ranting drivel that left a bad taste in my mouth and the earnest desire to go back and throttle the woman in my breast. The first two pages were devoted to The SOUND of the LIGHT, how the world is a sink of sensuality (not where I came from sadly) and we are all evil zombies doing the work of THE BEAST and destined for PERDITION! Our only hope of salvation is the imminent SECOND COMING! An inset declared JESUS WAS PHOTOGRAPHED!!, telling the tale of a 27 year old nun from Rome who prayed 7 hours a day and regularly chatted with the  “Apparition of the Adorable Jesus”. The box was accompanied by two photos; the Before shot showed your traditional white Caucasian Jesus figure with long hair and a beard and soulful eyes, the digitally enhanced After shot showed the same face with orange blood streaming from the eyes and looking like Alice Cooper on a bad day.

But wait, there’s more…

The last two pages raved incoherently about the CRISIS OF 666, how we’re all about to be implanted with microchips with the devil’s number in them, how…O what the hell, here’s a direct quote:

        The spelling of the computer is converted to 666. The alphabets used in the World Bank are numbered: A=6, B=12, C=18, D=24… and the spelling of computer is: C=18, O=90, M=78, P=96, U=126, T=120, E=30, R=108. Adding the numbers is 666!!

Leaving aside the question of how empty your life has to be to subscribe to this cult trash, it seemed especially offensive to be distributing this patent nonsense at a Christian shrine like Capernaum, where people of already fragile acuity are vulnerable game. At best, it was a gross breach of taste.

Now, moving right along…

We passed around the base of the Mount of the Beatitudes where your actual SERMON on the MOUNT!! was delivered and steered for the northern-most corner of Israel. Up on the Golan proper spring had truly sprung. The snow-capped eminence of Mt Hermon loomed in the backdrop to an ebullient display of wildflowers. Yellows, golds, mauves, whites and reds dusted the rich green highland carpet, punctuated here and there with sprays of red poppies thrusting tall in the clear sunlight. It was a sight to lift the most jaded spirits.

Our avuncular host Avi led us to a Syrian gun emplacement overlooking the upper reaches of the Jordan Valley which I recognised immediately, although in 1977 I’d not been treated to the risible story of how the Syrians lost the strategically crucial Golan. Mind you, it has to be said this is the version of an Israeli ex-commando.

On the eve of hostilities in the Six-Day War in June 1967 an advance column of three Syrian tanks rumbled into the Upper Jordan Valley from the west beneath this very emplacement. Believing they had the element of surprise and that the Israelis would have their hands full repelling the massive Egyptian force in the Sinai, the tank commander rashly took it upon himself to order an advance into the Upper Galilee. He doubtless had visions of returning to a hero’s welcome with big kisses from President Assad in Damascus. He got the warm reception much sooner than he anticipated.

A lone Jewish settler spotted the column and took an inspired course. He torched the tinder-dry fields and raced home to alert the authorities. The crew of the lead tank were roasted where they sat while the other two tanks, after bumbling around like clockwork toys in a desperate bid to avoid incineration, were abandoned.

This little sideshow cost the Syrians any tactical advantage they may have enjoyed and the rest is an hilarious history which illustrates, if it needed illustrating to anyone but the belligerents, that whatever it was the Arabs had when they overran the sandpits of the world 1,400 years ago they don’t have it anymore and the world is a very different place.

The emplacement is preserved, corrugated iron-covered trenches, bunkers, rusted barbed wire, anti-tank tetrapods and all, as a memorial to the Israeli soldiers who lost their lives in its defence during Yom Kippur in 1973. A couple of Americans in our group wandered off the path and were reeled in with stern warnings from Avi that the hill, indeed much of the Upper Jordan Valley, is still mined.

Our bus traced the Yom Kippur ceasefire line to a lookout above the once thriving Syrian market town of Qunietra. Here the wry Avi described the Israeli capture of Mt Hermon, which dominates the Golan landscape with its rounded, snow-covered twin peaks. How much of his story was fact and how much military mythology I’m not sure, but his delivery was highly entertaining.

During the last days of Yom Kippur the Israeli military commander in the Golan, Yitzhak Hofi, climbed aboard a chopper for an aerial reccy. As they approached Hermon Rafi ordered the pilot to ascend the mountain. Finding no resistance he urged the pilot higher. The airman had a job keeping the chopper airborne in the thinning atmosphere but Hofi pushed him to the upper limit of the machine’s capability, eventually putting down in the saddle. Hofi jumped out, planted the Star of David, jumped back in, lit a cigar and home they went.

When the US interceded to establish ceasefire lines in the Golan the Israelis kept Hermon and lost Qunietra, which they gutted before they left. Qunietra is still a ghost town. The valley floor is littered with abandoned buildings carrying the scars of years of conflict here. We passed through the quiet, dirt poor Druze villages of Mass’ada and Bugata, skirted the Fortress of Nimrod – an imposing pile of hilltop rubble – and arrived at Banyas. In a word, Banyas is beautiful.

Banyas is one of the four sources of the Jordan, together with the Dan, the Iyyon, and the Hasbani. Today the picnic area was comfortably crowded with Israeli families enjoying this perfect Spring Shabbat. The salivational aromas of barbeques wafted through the clear air; the crystalline waters, fed by snowmelt from Hermon bubbling up through the stones at our feet, gurgled happily over a series of low weirs.

Further down the road the Banyas Falls cascade over a five or six meter drop into a turbulent pool. Humble by most standards, the sight and sound of rushing white water is a rare pleasure in this part of the world and against the backdrop of semi-tropical flora along the banks of the stream and the carpet of yellow wildflowers on the distant hillsides they were truly a feast for dusty senses. We stood on the bank below the falls and felt the fine droplets of mist on our faces like tiny electric shocks. It was enough to make us want to burst into song.

Speaking of water and song, the refectory at Kibutz Dafna, where we stopped for lunch, brought the memories of Hanita flooding back. The stainless steel tubs beside the kitchen doors, the menu of turkey, salads and rice for mains and fruit salad for desert, the cafeteria atmosphere catapulted me back to the identical refectory at Hanita and the endless tides of turkey Bastock and I consumed there. Ah, nostalgia. Strangely, I also recalled the night the Israeli National Choir visited Hanita and sang in the refectory. It was the first time I’d ever heard a professional choir and was so captivated by their power that I immediately gave up singing in the shower out of new-found respect for the human voice and the aural health of anyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot.

Alas, they don’t make kibbutzim like Hanita anymore. In fact, they don’t make true kibbutzim anymore. The idealism which drove the original kibbutzniks has gone the way of drive-in theatres and vinyl records, replaced by a materialistic individualism that sees young people flocking to the cities and the struggling kibbutzim relying more on hired labour and commercial industry for survival. Dafna produces shoes.

From Dafna we headed to the town of Metulla on the Lebanese border. If Akko had lent the geographical dimension to my recollections of Hanita and Dafna had provided the spiritual dimension, then Metulla was the psychological dimension. I might have seen the Golan at its Spring best and stood in the refreshing spray of Banyas, but Metulla was a sobering return to the siege reality of everyday Israeli life.

The barbed wire and guard tower capsules at the border post were identical to the fortifications at Hanita; they reminded me that Israel is still at war and that in all these years very little has changed along the Lebanese border. Only a few weeks ago a chopper carrying Israeli troops into the southern Lebanon buffer zone had gone down in a field right beside Dafna, the Hezbollah routinely lob shells into Qiryat Shemona from their bases in Lebanon…New Worldies like us can’t really have any idea how deep these ancient hatreds run in this part of the globe.

We had come to Metulla to see The Good Fence. The story goes that at Christmas 1971 the Israelis began channeling much needed supplies to Lebanese Christians and Druze through this post and allowing them in to visit relatives and to work. The tradition continues to this day.

On the leisurely drive back to Tiberias along the rim of the soggy green Huleh Valley I lost myself in reflections on Israel. Of course, they were coloured by two considerations: the experiences of my previous visit, and that we’d come here via Egypt and Jordan.

Buttressed by US support and the wealth of the diaspora, contemporary Israel has clawed viable farmland from stony desert; established tidy, if soulless, pop-up communities and created a streamlined, prosperous, thriving modern society. If their ingrained defensive mentality sometimes manifests itself in arrogance then it's hard to deny their right to both – they are still very much at war and they more than punch above their weight in a region riven with insoluble strife. 

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We watched CNN reports on the current crisis as we packed our gear for Turkey. The situation seemed dangerously stable; there hadn’t been a bombing for more than a week and we were well overdue for another. We’d be a potential target from the moment we boarded the bus for Tel Aviv until we were safely in the air for Istanbul. I don’t think Tess shared the frisson of excitement I felt at the prospect of tomorrow’s journey.

Although our senses were finely tuned all the way, the two and a half hour bus ride to Tel Aviv was uneventful. We passed through the central bus station like castor oil and arrived at Ben Gurion Airport to learn the flight we’d ticketed for before we left Jerusalem was delayed for two hours which meant a seven hour wait ahead of us. This was a serious challenge to my sense of humour.

As we settled in for the duration we came to the conclusion we were too old for this brain-glazing aspect of travel; the endless waiting, the irretrievable downtime. You spend three hours hanging around till you can pass through a door so you can spend another two hours studying your navel till you can join a crush of equally desperate people to push into the next room so you can stand in line for half an hour, get a stamp, pass through your umpteenth metal detector for the day and spend another x hours tapping your toes in the departure lounge. That’s 3+2+x hours we could spend doing something constructive and productive. Terrorism has made travelling, especially flying, a tedious chore. Granted, this was the Middle East and things might be different once we moved around the Mediterranean, but we were resolved that one way or another something had to change in Turkey if we were going to make the best use of our time.

The boredom was alleviated only by the 10 minute bin checks conducted by airport security and an intense 30 minute interrogation by a woman young enough to be our daughter. Who made our travel arrangements in Australia? Why had we flown Malaysia Airlines and why had we stayed in Kuala Lumpur? Had anyone given us anything to bring into or take out of Israel? Could we produce receipts for our accommodation? And so on…

At 8:15pm, cashed up with 11 million Turkish Lira, we left the ground in Tel Aviv on Onur Air OHY 403 to Istanbul. As the lights of Israel receded it occurred to me that sometime during the last fortnight, probably in Jerusalem, travelling had ceased to be a romantic novelty and become a lifestyle. Tomorrow morning, Day 40 of the Awfully Big Adventure, we would wake up in country number four.

Here endeth Part 1!

Thank you for coming this far dear reader :-)

There'll be a bit of a break before we tackle Turkey, Greece and Italy - see you again soon...