The presentation begins. Prager is introduced by a bald, fit, velvet-voiced Israeli named Reuven Doron, the man on the ground for Genesis Tours. “We are here for one purpose,” Doron tells us. “We came to stand with Israel.” This extracts a few vaguely amenish sounds from the audience. Doron goes on: “You are our strength, and our encouragement, and a joy to our hearts.”
Eventually Prager himself ambles over to the mic. He is a big man, around six-foot-four, with fine white corn-silk hair. In his khaki slacks and open-collar blue-striped shirt, he could be the provost of a university. (He is, kind of. Prager University—“Free courses for free minds”—offers a catalog of five-minute online videos covering a variety of subjects, from anger management to electric cars.) There’s a collective titter from the ladies as Prager gets ready to speak. He has a lot of female admirers here, including his third wife, a six-foot blond amazon standing in the back. Trisha will later tell me that she gets why women like Prager, pointing out that when he smiles his dimpled face adorably resembles that of “a really wise Muppet.”
Prager begins by talking about something he calls the Israel Test. What is the Israel Test? The Israel Test involves seeing “how people react to Israel,” which is, he says, “about as quick a way you have to understand their judgment.” Meaning, essentially, that if you ever find fault with Israel, you’re horrible. President Obama fails the Israel Test, even though, in 2012, he sent the single largest military-aid package America has provided the country to date. John Kerry is an even worse Israel Test failure, Prager tells us, because he often takes a “middle position” on the Israel-Palestine contretemps, “as if there really wasn’t a dark and a light.”
Prager continues, “You can’t imagine how proud I am of you. I’m very serious. It means the world to me. To be honest, when there were these attacks that started a month ago”—more than a dozen Israelis had been stabbed in the street by Palestinian assailants—“we really didn’t know how many people would cancel. And the answer is almost nobody.” I’d written an email to Genesis Tours when the stabbing frequency got bad, wanting to know if the threat of violence had at all altered our itinerary. The “Dear friend” form letter I received in return assured me, “These incidents of Islamic-driven violence are isolated, and thanks to our alert security forces and citizens, they are contained within seconds.”
Prager emphasizes that he’s not getting paid to be here with us. He also believes that American parents—Christians and Jews alike—should send their children to Israel between high school and college. Why? “The moral compass of the world,” he says, “is upside down. If your child can spend time in Israel, and then become clear as to how upside down the world is, they will return to the university already immunized against the most morally upside down of all Western institutions, the university.”
I listen to Prager’s speech with these preconceived views: Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself. Palestinians have been collectively wronged—by Israel, by their leaders, and often by their own actions. The growing religious fundamentalism within Palestinian society, which was once more secular than most of the Arab world, scares the hell out of me. At the same time, I’m sympathetic to the plight of average Palestinians—most of whom are not violently “Islamic-driven” en masse, like those referred to by Genesis Tours. I’m equally sympathetic to the plight of average Israelis—who, contra other accounts, are not mindless bigots. And I realize that, in the past twenty years, there have been at least seventeen full-fledged failures of the peace process, for which there is a surfeit of blame to go around.
Too often, the subject of Israel becomes just another way for Americans to refract their own views of America. Liberals tend to assume that right-wing evangelicals support Israel because of how it fits into their imagined apocalypse: only when God’s Chosen People reoccupy the entirety of their biblical territory will the Final Dispensation, the rise of the Antichrist, the Tribulation, the eventual return of Jesus Christ, and his Last Judgment commence. In many ways, the founding of Israel in 1948 was the Woodstock of fundamentalist Christianity. A recent Pew study of Christian fundamentalism found that 63 percent of white evangelicals believe that the creation of a Jewish state in modern times fulfills the supposed biblical prophecy of Jesus’s Second Coming. Yet not one evangelical Christian I will meet on tour seems interested in any of that. Rather, the conservative Christian love of Israel that I will encounter, over and over again, seems bound up in a notion of God the Father, who has two children: Israel and the United States. This Israel—not a nation but a wayward brother—lies beyond history, beyond the deaths and wars that made it, beyond the United Nations, beyond the Oslo Accords, beyond any conventional morality. Understand that and you have passed the Israel Test.
III. Black Arrow
The following morning I eat six different kinds of cheese at the buffet breakfast. Later there will be a buffet lunch and a buffet dinner. (Wherever we go in Israel, no matter how remote the place, several tons of warm food will be waiting.) Outside our hotel ten tour buses are lined up; Trisha and I have been assigned Bus Five.
Around 50 percent of Bus Five’s occupants wear cross pendants. A few older women have on velvet tracksuits. The men, for the most part, wear boonie hats, T-shirts advertising corporate cruise lines, and red-state suntans. Trisha and I have already made friends with a quiet Quakerish couple who recently finished their Peace Corps tour of duty in Azerbaijan, and with Marty Schoenleber, an evangelical pastor from Illinois who can read the Hebrew Bible and New Testament in their original languages, and who will later lament to me the core problem with overtly Christian fiction, which is that it’s usually written by hacks.
As we get rolling, our guide, David Westlund, a bearded and curly-haired man who is in his late fifties but looks a decade younger, introduces himself over the bus PA system. Originally from Minnesota, David has lived in Israel for thirty-five years. Neither he nor his wife is Jewish; eventually, I will learn that he’s a devoted Christian. He’s as Israeli as an American Christian can get, in that he speaks Hebrew and all his children served in the Israel Defense Forces. When not guiding tours, he works in construction, which has kept him fit. He asks how many of us have been to Israel before. Most of us haven’t. “I like first-timers,” he says. “They don’t know much, and if I make mistakes, they don’t catch it.” David tells us that he once got a scathing review from a British couple irritated by his “endless prattle.” He will keep using that phrase—“Time for more endless prattle”—throughout the tour. Trisha and I agree: David is the tour guide to have while standing with Israel.
We drive south through the gray, lunar landscape of the Negev Desert, out of which erupts an occasional green blob of habitation. David explains that the flowering and settlement of the Negev has been one of Israel’s major environmental accomplishments, much of it traceable to Levi Eshkol, a farmer and water engineer who served as Israel’s prime minister in the 1960s. Eshkol likened the national irrigation system to the “veins of a human body.” Much of the water that the Negev receives is diverted from the Sea of Galilee, 150 miles north. The events that led to the Six-Day War, in June 1967, began two and a half years earlier, when guerrilla fighters under the command of a thirty-five-year-old Yasir Arafat raided a water pump on the Lebanese border that fed the Negev. Israel’s Arab neighbors had long worried that an irrigated Negev would be able to support millions of additional Israelis—an entirely prescient fear.
We pass by a few tidy Jewish settlements, along with others that look like tidy Jewish settlements after five weeks of riots. These are Bedouin villages. Unlike most Arabs in Israel proper, Bedouins serve in the IDF, often as trackers. Thus, David tells us, Israel “bends the law and rules” for Bedouins. Polygamy, for instance, is officially illegal, but Bedouin men are allowed to take multiple wives. (As it happens, Bedouin men sire a spectacular twelve to twenty-five children per male—off the demographic charts—meaning, at this rate, Bedouins will make up a quarter of Israel
’s Muslim population by 2030.) These and other accommodations by the Israeli government have led to anti-Bedouin sentiment among many Arabs; Hamas, especially, despises Bedouins as rootless traitors.
Someone asks whether Bedouins and Jews could ever live in a village together. David replies by explaining that who lives in what settlement is determined by “the nature of the town,” by which he means its existing ethnic makeup. “It’s an unwritten rule,” he says. “You just stay with your people. Why would you want to go somewhere you know you don’t belong?”
Conservatives often point out that Palestinian citizens of Israel enjoy more rights than Palestinian refugees do in neighboring Arab countries, which does not address the negligible rights Jews and other religious minorities enjoy in most Arab nations. But most Arab nations don’t claim to be democracies. Israel is a democracy in which interfaith marriage is illegal. (A couple of weeks after our tour, Israel’s Ministry of Education would ban a novel from being taught in Israeli schools because it depicted a romance between a Jewish woman and a Palestinian man. One ministry official explained to the press that young people who read the book might lose track of the “significance of miscegenation.”) Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up more than 20 percent of the population, face entrenched legal obstacles in everything from buying property to receiving equitable funding for their schools and hospitals. “The worlds separate when you go home,” David tells us, without much relish, “but they come together when you go to work. Christian, Arab, Jew, Muslim—we all work together.” No one stirs or says a word against this stick-to-your-own logic. Is anyone uncomfortable? I am, but I also live in the single whitest neighborhood in Los Angeles.
At long last, in the middle of nowhere, Bus Five stops at a palm-tree-encircled cluster of Gilligan’s Island–style thatch huts. I overhear one guide tell another that the idea for this fake oasis was ripped off from a similar tourist trap near Jericho: hire fifty Bedouin, lease a herd of camels, make believe it’s an ancient desert settlement, and count the money as the tourist-crammed buses start rolling in.
When you’re part of such a large tour group, everything seems designed to make you feel like a child. One of our guides blows his trumpet whenever he wants his group to form up. Another has stuck a large plastic flower into his backpack so people can pick him out of a crowd. David, admirably, has forsworn such theater. As he walks into the fake oasis, he holds up an oversize ping-pong paddle marked “5,” and we obediently follow him to a large tent. Inside, two long-haired Israeli hippies wearing T. E. Lawrence robes over blue jeans retell the story of Abraham, who passed this very way all those years ago, or so we are told.
Off to another tent, thick with the sweet, resinous smell of a wood fire. Body-size pillows have been scattered around; we recline while a Bedouin boy pours us fire-warmed coffee and tea. Soon a Bedouin elder named Muhammad enters through the tent flaps, wearing a robe and keffiyeh, both a bright boiled white, with a curved dagger tucked into his cloth belt. Muhammad has apparently been prepped on his audience’s political sympathies. “We have to welcome everyone into our tent,” he says. “Even Obama.”
Before we leave the fake oasis, we’re supposed to ride the camels. Twenty-five camels are here, a gastrointestinal symphony of snorting and farting and groaning. I consider Muhammad’s parting words to us—“Don’t touch the head or the neck. They don’t like it”—as a Bedouin guy helps Trisha and me atop a camel. Me: “Do they bite?” Him: “Okay.” Me: “Wait. Is this safe?” Him: “Okay.” Our camel walks fifty feet and stops. As Bus Five drives away I look back at the fake oasis and see another Bedouin guy with a rake solemnly erasing our footprints from the dust.
We’re scheduled to end our day with a visit to an IDF camp on the northern edge of the Gaza Strip. As we pass through the northernmost Israel–Gaza border crossing, I see a massive wall, observation towers, and endless spirals of barbed wire. It could be a piece of dystopian concept art.
We arrive at Camp Iftach, where we’re told many of the soldiers stationed here were among the first into Gaza during the 2014 war. When they’re not fighting Hamas, the officers of Camp Iftach are a combat-engineer unit. This explains the earthmoving heavy machinery we see all around, including the massive snub-nosed military bulldozer known as the Caterpillar D9. These behemoths, which can withstand multiple mine hits, are used to destroy Hamas’s arms-smuggling tunnel network into and out of Gaza. Within Camp Iftach proper, several baby-faced soldiers wave and smile as our bus slides into its parking space.
Most Israelis serve in the IDF. In the 1970s, Saul Bellow marveled at how Israel had become a society both Spartan and Athenian, by which he meant that you saw teenagers in baggy green fatigues with automatic weapons slung casually over their shoulders everywhere you went. Israel is tiny; in Bellow’s day its wars happened an hour’s drive from where many soldiers grew up. But after two horrifying insurgencies—the Intifadas, with enemies not at the border but clawing from within—Israel’s Athenian face has withdrawn. Here, instead, is Sparta—a garrison state, securely walled and tensely patrolled.
We visitors are herded into a dilapidated concrete hangar while a Merkava Mark IV tank—pale green, with loose-paneled armor intended to lessen rocket-propelled-grenade impacts—rolls out in demonstration, churning up dirt and sand while the tourists clap and cheer. A teenager pops out and explains some of its features. It’s got a 1,500 horsepower engine (that’s five Hondas), a 120mm smooth-bore main gun, three additional machine guns, and a 60mm mortar. The Mark IV’s big barrel swings around, hitting the antenna on the stern with a small twap, and stops once it’s pointing directly at us. Many of us throw up our hands and beg, in jest, “Don’t shoot!” A Namer (“leopard”) troop carrier rolls out next. It’s built low and flat, with a sloped hull and a machine gun on top, which is controlled from inside the vehicle with two joysticks. “Like a video game,” someone says. We are adults watching children play in the mud. Another soldier walks out cradling a shiny yellow artillery shell. Big cheers when we’re informed that this shell was made in America. Trisha turns to me and asks an eminently reasonable question: “What the fuck are we doing here?”
At dusk, we travel to a nearby site called the Black Arrow Memorial, which honors eight IDF soldiers who lost their lives during a retaliatory incursion into the Gaza Strip in the mid-1950s. Off in the distance are the twinkling yellow-orange lights of Gaza City. In 2005, Israel ended its direct military occupation of Gaza, around the time when the Palestinian Authority, the mouthpiece of the Palestinian people since its founding in 1994, formally renounced violence. In the next year’s parliamentary elections, Hamas was voted into power, triggering a Palestinian civil war. A succession of brief but horrendous wars since then have all played out in similar ways: Hamas fires rockets. Israel responds with air strikes. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of Gazans are killed. The international community chides Israel for its tactics. Israel withdraws. The smoke clears. Hamas claims victory. The Gazan people climb atop their rubble piles and applaud.
Israel now enables foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority, to fight Hamas terrorists. Hamas and Fatah, the largest Palestinian political party, might hate each other more than they hate Israel. (Fatah fears that Hamas will trigger another intifada in the West Bank; Hamas fears that Fatah will forcibly end its rule of Gaza.) In recent years, Gaza has given rise to a violent group of Salafis who think that Hamas cares more about Palestinian rights than it does about forging the perfect Islamist society; these Salafis believe that Hamas is not extreme enough.
The most recent Gaza war, in 2014, displaced close to half a million Gazans and killed more than 500 children. After 5,200 Israeli bombardments, the damage was so extensive that the estimated time it will take to rebuild Gaza is two decades. Of course, little construction material is arriving, today or any day soon, thanks to an Israeli and Egyptian blockade that has made Gaza into a twenty-five-mile-long, five-mile-wide penal colony.
At the Black Arrow Memorial, we’re tol
d to gather around another young Israeli soldier, who recently finished his third year of service in the IDF. He’s dark-haired and bearded, with a long face. “I don’t know what percent of the people,” he says of the Palestinians he’s encountered, “but most of them really want to live in peace.” He spent two years in the West Bank, and whenever he encountered young Palestinians throwing rocks at cars, he knew they were young and aimless, “not focused about anything. They’re immature.” The young soldier pauses, searching for a better English word to describe these Palestinians.
Someone in the crowd suggests, “Thugs!”
The young soldier either ignores or does not hear this. He goes on to say that many Palestinian teenagers have nothing to do but throw rocks. He adds, “We don’t need to think about all Arabs when they do something wrong, because I know a lot of people from their side want to live in peace.”
A collective unease falls over the crowd. You can almost hear the cognitive whir while everyone’s brains rewind and replay. The soldier goes on to say that religion factors in too. “The radicals from both sides are taking part, very good part, very big part, and this becomes very, very, very complicated.”
A woman—not a Bus Fiver, I’m relieved to report—pushes through the crowd. She’s in her forties, and is wearing oversize sunglasses, a puffy winter jacket, yoga pants, and colorful sneakers. “When you refer to radicals from both sides,” she says, “you’re talking about radicals who teach their children at a very young age to hate the Jews, versus the radicals of the Jewish faith?”
Yes, the young soldier answers.
“But Jews do not do any of that.” She begins to gesture in an am-I-going-crazy way. “Somehow you’re saying that both have a role to play? Am I understanding that correctly? When the mentality is completely opposite.”
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