Mat 50
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Modernity and history mesli in Israel
From ancient ruins to gun-toting soldiers, Bedouin teas and $25 lox and bagels, Israel intrigues.
2
ROBERTA STALEY STAFF REPORTER
While a small fire of bright orange flame keeps black kettles of sweet tea hot, Abu Badil, in his white robe and kef-fiyeh, pours the spicy, dark hq-uid into cups set primly before a sea of crossed legs.
It is tea time—Bedouin style. And for most of the Canadians seated comfortably on a woven wool rug or propped against colorful pillows xmder a sheltering black tent, it is their first brush with these shy, gracious, nomadic people.
Like many other cultures and peoples, Bedouins have lived and flourished in dry, hot Israel for centxuies. And like other groups, their presence — and past —is inextricably linked with Israeli and Jewish history.
Cover photos of Israel taken by Bulletin reporters Baila Lazarus and Roberta Staley.
Strategically stationed at the crossroads of three continents, Israel — heavily treed centuries ago until it was slowly denuded for firewood — has been a highway of trade and a battleground of war. Caravans travelled the Spice Way through Israel carrying perfumes, precious stones and other valuable cargo.
Some cultures, such as the pagan Nabateans who traversed the Spice Way, disappeared during the seventh century.
Others, like the Jews, endured, although not with the same splendor and power during, for example, the time of Herod the Great in the first century of the Common Era (C.E). The murderous, infanticidal Herod was a third-generation Jew who, with Rome's blessing, built great mon-uments during his reign, from . the formidable rock fortress at Masada west of the Dead Sea to the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple to the Herodican Temple next to a new royal fortress palace, the Antonia, which helped turn Jerusalem into a city of pilgrimage for the Diaspora.
Some of these sun-baked monuments, still breathtaking despite crumbling walls, are as much a part of Israel today as the
garish new, yellow-and-white condominiums sprouting like poisonous mushrooms in the Red Sea resort city of Eilat on Egypt's border.
It is a juxtaposition of modernity and history that makes up today's Israel - a collage of European sophistication, English common law-based democratic institutions and Mediterranean culinary influences - hardened by the reality of war or the threat of it since being created in 1948.
Green-clad soldiers, many bearing the cherubic, pimple-faced countenances of teenage-hood, march or lounge on city streets or at Negev Desert outposts, black machine guns slung over their shoulders with the ca-sualness of back packs.
In Old Jerusalem, blue-clad city police spend their shifts checking all the bags of those leaving or entering the Jewish and Muslim quarters.
It is where a non-Jew, foolishly writing on a notepad near the Western (Wailing) Wall on Sab-■ bath, is accosted by an enraged elderly woman for breaking a holy day rule.
Old Jerusalem is also the place where one can follow the final steps of a beaten and cross-bearing Jesus Christ along the polished stone pathways of the Via Dolorosa, or Way of the Cross. It is also where swarthy young men politely ask the obviously foreign visitor if they're in need of a husband.
Israel, too, is the place where more than 50,000 Muslims at a time can be seen ambling down stone roadways after Ramadan prayers at the magnificent golden Dome of the Rock or the copper-domed El-Aqsa Mosque with its intricate stained-glass windows and deep Persian rugs.
Israel is also the place of beautiful, five-star hotels with their omnipresent Italian marble, such as the luxurious King David Jerusalem, where a lox and bagel lunch costs about $25 Cdn and bomb-snilfing dogs patrol the hotel for hours before the arrival of Likud party's Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, scheduled to speak to a group of New York visitors.
And, while it is not all-pervasive, Israel is full of the ghosts
and memories of the dead. Memorials—fixim the grafiitied walls and crudely rendered likenesses of Yitzhak Rabin at the Tel Aviv site where he was as-
sassinated in 1995 to Yad Vashem, the primary national Holocaust museum — are reminders that Jewish history is also full of incredible tragedy. □
As Israel gears up for its 50th anniversary, reporters from around the world are heading to the tiny Middle East country to see whal^iptore can look fonf^^
Jewish Bulletin reporters BaiSl^fe^ffjEfMi Roberta Staley recently returned from such^a tl^. \ t
The two journalists joined otlwr meinbers of the Jewish media from across Canada for a week-long'toar of southern Israel.
The trip,,which took the writers fiitmJerusalem to Eilat to Tel Aviv, and tigm^'^%esatW^Jt!^^ja^ by the Israel Government Tourist Office and El AI. \
Ms. Staley went as a representative olfheBu/feim while Ms. Lazarus was representing WbrW Jcu)ts/i iJodio.
WEsr^jEWISH
Bulletin
Vol.LXV,No.4Januafy30,1998
Serving Greater Vancouver since 1930
Executive Vice-President Andrew A. Buerger
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' Associate Editor Howard Fluxgoid
Staff Reporters Baila Lazarus, Roberta Staley
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