The Road to Zagora

by Richard Collins

  In front of us was the Mediterranean, not as stunningly beautiful as it is in somewhere like Greece but nice enough. On our left the ground sloped up and there were handsome old limestone buildings and trees. To our right we looked out at the curving line of the coast backed by a cityscape of tall buildings. We walked along a little. There were people jogging and cycling and hanging out in cafés. There was a bizarre old junkshop. There was some very classy graffiti. And wherever there was a patch of open ground there was the colour green. We were in a sophisticated cultured city and we weren’t in the desert anymore. It looked good.

  Jaffa had plenty of old buildings from the Ottoman period (the Turks ruled this part of the world for three hundred years until the First World War) some beautifully restored, some pleasantly decrepit, and many in a state somewhere in between. We saw a fine church by the side of a park and a fine mosque by a busy street. And on the opposite side of the road from a busy market stood the Old Jaffa Hostel. We checked in and the young man at the desk told us we would like it there. He was right.

  In the hallway was a plaque engraved in Hebrew and English with the words: This house is dedicated to my parents, Mali and Itzhak Salman, who had love, compassion and respect for every living soul. Upstairs in the kitchen on the roof we met an older Israeli woman who said: It’s our land – the Palestinians are trying to take our land away from us. Confused? Welcome to Israel.

  The hostel housed an eccentric collection of old furniture and photographs and our room had a balcony overlooking the street. We looked down on market stalls selling carpets and antiques and fruit and children’s toys looked after by middle-aged Jews in skull caps. They spent the day arguing good-naturedly, playing backgammon, arguing again, serving the occasional customer and arguing some more. A large man of diminished mental capacity walked up and down looking self-important and sometimes organising people who didn’t need organising. He was a fixture and tolerated by all. While we were there we saw the market vendors set up in the morning and take down in the evening and found something likeable in their good-humoured disputatious manner.

  On the rooftop were banana trees, cacti, bougainvillea, and views over the patched up roofs of the market stalls, the old buildings and new buildings and a mosque at the end of the street that broadcast the call to prayer five times a day.

  In the morning we walked around the hill to the old harbour which housed a fleet of smallish fishing boats and a large number of gulls, cormorants and white egrets. There were warehouses with imaginative graffiti on the walls and an exhibition of big photographs on controversial themes and posters advertising art exhibitions and joggers and dog walkers. We passed The Arab Hebrew Theatre and A Stage for the Deaf-Blind and saw signs written in Hebrew, Arabic, English and sometimes Russian. We visited the park where we saw hoopoes feeding on the grass, looked past a modern sculpture to the big city buildings beyond and listened to church bells ringing. Across a little gulley near the top of the hill a footbridge had been built. A sign in English among other languages read Hope Bridge. Another sign read Closed – Do Not Approach. It was badly in need of repair.

  Back in the harbour we saw a bird that we had seen once in India: the pied kingfisher that hovered like a kestrel and dived like a gannet. From the sea wall I pointed out the rock where Jonah was said to have been eaten by a whale. Flic wrote: this country is full of places where things were supposed to have happened. In a café we saw a woman well into her sixties who wore her hair cropped and dyed blond with one very long thin plait. Flic said, I like your hair, to which the woman replied, my mother doesn’t like it.

  There was an energy and creativity about Jaffa that reminded us of New York. Flic commented in her journal: clever people have worked hard to make this country something. We didn’t buy an I Love Tel Aviv t-shirt; I don’t think it would have gone down well at home. But in the course of a morning there we found ourselves immensely stimulated. We felt at home and happy. It was not what we had anticipated.

  In the afternoon we went to a cycle hire shop and rented bikes. Then I felt ill and dysfunctional. Flic took the bikes back and returned to the hostel to find me feeling better. We went back to the bike shop. The woman there was kind and understanding and we set off again cycling along the seaside. We stopped at one of the many beaches and Flic swam. I commented that she had bathed in three seas on our trip: the Dead, the Red and the Med. We spent a long afternoon cycling the length of the city’s sea front and returning to Jaffa.

  In the evening we had to come to terms with some new perceptions: we loved Tel Aviv; we liked Israel; we found Israelis to be, in our very limited experience, rather nice people: warm hearted, kind and fun. Yes, I know, there is the issue of Palestine and the appalling treatment of the Palestinians, how does that fit in? We had yet to decide. The next morning we walked all around Old Jaffa and the harbour again. In the afternoon we went to a very good modern art gallery. And the next day we set off for Jerusalem and the Palestinian West Bank. We had more to see and more to learn.

  In Jerusalem we stayed in the old city, in a Palestinian-owned hotel by the Jaffa Gate. The place was run by unhelpful teenage boys who offered us an appalling tiny room downstairs. We settled in but then asked for another room. And then changed again to be higher up. Now we had a cold room with brown nylon curtains, a fluorescent light, and sheets of wrapping paper glued to the windows in lieu of net curtains. It was raining outside and on the metal balcony we had our own private puddle. We weren’t happy.

  But, in truth, the place had the seedy charm of faded grandeur. On our floor was a large space that may have once been a ballroom, at one end of which was a view of the city through cracked and dirty windows. And when we went upstairs onto the flat roof we found that the Citadel Hotel, as it was called, had the best possible view of the old city of Jerusalem. The land sloped gently away from us and we could see flat roofs and domed roofs and church towers and minarets and television aerials and water tanks in abundance. Most eye-catching was a large mosque some distance away, its roof covered in gold. Beyond that were hilltops outside of the city with posh new apartment blocks and more church towers.

  I read somewhere that Tel Aviv plays and Jerusalem prays. It’s true. We preferred Tel Aviv but Jerusalem was a fascinating city. We visited religious sites and saw pilgrims aplenty. It reinforced my atheism. First we went to the Western or Wailing Wall. This is the part of the wall surrounding the Dome on the Rock (the gold roofed mosque that we could see from our hotel) the site of which is immensely significant to Jews, Christians and Muslims. They have been arguing about the rocks and stones in this little corner of the world for centuries. Religiously inclined Jews pray there in large numbers and carry out strange bobbing motions as they do so. Flic commented: we began to walk down to the face of the wall but I was asked to go to a different end of it for women. I couldn’t be bothered. How will the world ever be peaceful while people hold such ridiculous rituals so seriously?

  We visited the church of the Holy Sepulchre, the place where Jesus was supposedly buried. It is very important to the various Orthodox Christian churches who have argued about access for, you guessed it, centuries, to the extent that the key to the door is traditionally kept by two local Muslim families. Greek Orthodox and Armenian monks have come to blows quite recently and had to be separated by Israeli police. Inside we saw nuns and headscarfed orthodox Russian women pilgrims crossing themselves and kissing a stone. It all seems mad, Flic wrote.

  We couldn’t enter the area around the Dome on the Rock; it always seemed to be the wrong time or the wrong day. We didn’t go into, or even notice, any synagogues because they are such modest buildings as to be invisible. We did see and visit some more churches. And Jerusalem was full of pilgrims and other pious folk. We noticed that Muslim men often carried prayer mats on their shoulders. We saw Orthodox priests with their long black robes and dark beards. There were very many Hasidic Jews, always hurrying, nearly always bespectacled, and looking particularly strange, with hombu
rgs on top of skull caps and occasionally a hat like a cake tin covered in fur. We saw joyous colourfully-dressed pilgrims from African countries. And one morning we stepped out of our room to find the hotel full of devout headscarf-wearing Russian women and their Orthodox priests.

  We took a walk along the city walls and came down by the Damascus Gate where we dropped into a café owned by a Palestinian who spoke good English. His sense of humour failed to hide his sadness and cynicism. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, he said, the centre of all the misery in the world. I don’t give a fuck [he really did speak good English] if you’re Jewish, Christian, or Muslim... and he went on to say that what he really objected to was Zionism – the belief that Jews have a God-given right to take other people’s land. He showed us copies of old photographs of the Damascus Gate under Turkish, British and Jordanian rule. All gone, he said. And one day the Israelis will be gone too.

  I have two very positive memories of Jerusalem. First there’s the ice cream in the Italian ice cream shop in New Jerusalem. The best I’ve ever tasted. And then there’s the Israel Museum. I don’t like museums that much; I like to be outdoors and I like to see the world as it is, not dusty relics of the world as it was. But the new museum in Jerusalem is wonderful. It is situated on a hilltop and has a good sculpture garden including a work by the British artist Anish Kapoor. This is a highly polished stainless steel tube, shaped like an hour glass. It gives marvellous distorted reflections, changing as you move around it. The concave surface gives an inverted image, hence the name of the piece: Turning the World Upside Down.

  Inside the museum two things struck me. The architecture is beyond brilliant. There is a sloping entrance corridor 50 feet wide and maybe 200 yards long lit by translucent glass on one side, all muted silvery grey but leading up to a great spectrum of colour on the top wall. It houses only three sculptures but also a host of shadows and reflections and silhouettes of people passing along. The other thing is the archaeological section. I’m not much interested in archaeology and I’m not much interested in history but I was enthralled. What can I say? The Land of Israel has been home to peoples of different cultures and faiths for more than one and a half million years, as it says when you come in. That’s a long time, a lot of culture and many faiths. I would be daft to even begin to describe it here. I can say that like most people I was struck by the human-shaped clay coffins (anthropoid sarcophagi, if you need more syllables), dated 1,400 years BCE, and a stone mask, 9,000 years old.

  We spent just one day in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, in the area known as the West Bank. We had been recommended a particular Palestinian taxi driver called Khaled who would give us a tour. We caught a bus at the Palestinian terminal outside the Damascus Gate of Jerusalem and met Khaled outside of Bethlehem where the bus route terminated. The political geography around Jerusalem is complicated but all the same you would expect there to be a clearly marked border between Israel and the West Bank with passport controls and security procedures. There wasn’t. We showed our passports to Israeli soldiers on the bus coming back but not on the way out. We didn’t have them stamped. The other passengers on the buses were Palestinians who had their papers checked in the same way as we did.

  Khaled was an ordinary family man who we got to know a little during the day. At one point he made a phone call on his mobile and then a short detour and picked up two of his children so they could come out with us. The son was a shy twelve-year-old and the daughter was a quiet twenty year old with a baby. She was dressed very modestly in a long coat and headscarf. Flic managed to find out that she didn’t have a husband but it didn’t seem to be an issue. Khaled told us more than once that he loved his grandchild more than he loved his children and carried the baby about proudly whenever we were out of the car.

  Khaled spoke with some sadness and anger about the Separation Wall. It had been built by Israelis to improve their security, in particular to keep out terrorist suicide bombers. Unfortunately it didn’t keep to the border but wandered into Palestinian territory causing all sorts of problems. But Khaled was an ordinary working man who wasn’t too bothered by politics. He believed that some sort of just peace settlement would come in time; it was a matter of waiting. He was genuinely optimistic. He had struggled and succeeded in learning Hebrew because he thought it would be useful for him. At some point in the day he spoke of jobs he’d had working for Israeli families. He spoke warmly about them and said that they had been very good employers. It is governments that are the problem, he said. Not the people.

  We went first to see part of the separation wall that was covered with lots of graffiti. There were big murals including one of a female Palestinian terrorist/freedom fighter carrying a machine gun. Nearby someone had stencilled very neatly the words Until justice rolls like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. Further along were the words They will force us, they will degrade us, they will not control us. We will be... and the words ended there. I don’t know why. We read don’t forget the struggle and LOVE and Make hummus not walls. There was very little written in Arabic.

  Khaled then took us to an awful souvenir shop packed with useless items carved out of olive wood. We were determined to buy something as a gesture of support but it was hard. I bought a tiny box. When we asked if they had any Banksy postcards the shop man showed us some unenthusiastically. They found it hard to understand why we didn’t want their beautiful trinkets and instead bought postcards of graffiti.

  We went on to see some Banksy murals including the one of a protester flinging a bunch of flowers which is on the wall of a petrol station. Khaled had met Banksy and like the other locals didn’t get along with him. It sounded like the artist worked in a vacuum and didn’t connect with people very much.

  We also visited the church built on the place where Jesus was born. On three different dates, as Flic noted. And outside, in Manger Square, we saw a very large, very fake Christmas tree being erected.

  I noticed a pointy shaped hill nearby that I thought would have a good view and asked Khaled to take us there. He parked at the bottom and we walked up. It had some religious significance unknown to us and was under control of the Israelis and we would have to pay to get to the top. I don’t know why but I got a little hot under the collar about paying Israelis to go up a hill that wasn’t in their country and we decided to go to Jericho where there was a cable car owned by Palestinians. We would pay Palestinians to go up a hill in Palestine.

  Khaled and his children enjoyed Jericho very much and so did we. The cable car took us to a monastery on the side of a hill where something was supposed to once have happened. I think Jesus might have been involved. We treated the family to a meal in a café in the seedy desert town of Jericho and then we went back to Jerusalem.

  We spent only a day in the West Bank and I don’t want to say much about it beyond describing our limited experience. We saw very grand Israeli settlements on the hilltops. We drove along a smart new road that had been paid for by the EU because the old transport hub was Jerusalem to which Palestinians were not allowed to travel. We went to ordinary Middle Eastern towns where people didn’t seem particularly poor or well off. And we went on the lowest cable car on Earth, at the top of which, we were told, we were still below sea level.

  I have read much and thought a lot about Israel and Palestine – more than many people I meet who are fiercely opinionated on the subject. I know a little about why the Israelis treat the Palestinians so badly. But most of all I am aware of how much more there is to understand. I realise now that as well as disapproving of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians I was prejudiced against the Israeli people themselves. But I had the experience of meeting many kind and friendly Israelis and getting to know them to be just ordinary people, with all the good and bad characteristics of people anywhere in the world. I remember that before travelling to Jerusalem I was feeling very negative about being on a bus full of Israelis. I never had that thought about a bus full of Peruvians or Turks or Indians or T
anzanians or any other people. I was wrong to be prejudiced. On the last of our big adventures I learnt something that I need to remember. Perhaps Khaled was right and it is governments, not ordinary people, that create problems. Is it as simple as that? I really don’t know.

  We got up early on our last morning in Jerusalem, walked out of the Jaffa Gate, took a tram to the multi-storey bus station, a bus to Eilat, and crossed the border into Egypt. There were no signs or help or explanation at the border crossing. We bought a visa which we didn’t need, asked for a refund, and, because there was a shortage of change, were given more money back than we paid. We took a taxi along the coast, overtook a Toyota pick-up truck with a camel in the back, and arrived at a small resort called Dahab. We checked into a cheap hotel and went up onto the roof to watch the sunset.

  Dahab was a tourist resort, nothing more. In front of our hotel was a promenade, a few metres of beach and then the Red Sea. Behind was a dusty road, some suburban streets, then the large steep hills of the Sinai Desert. But it was warm enough to wander around in shorts and swim in the sea and we liked it there. One thing that struck us about the Middle East was the lack of wildlife. But here we could swim ten metres out to where the reef dropped away and snorkel among any number of colourful fish and extraordinary coral formations.

  After a few days in Dahab we took the ferry from Nuweiba across the sea to Aqaba. We went to see the stupendous desert scenery at Wadi Rum. And then we went home. Here is part of the last blog post I wrote before we flew back to the UK. It’s dated December 17th, 2012: