Back to Blogging - Petra

First off, I want to apologize for my extended absence from blogging. Things have been quite busy for the last few weeks, with my mom and my brother’s visit, an aunt visiting from Montreal, and spending some time with Amy’s family who were also here for her cousin’s wedding. Throw in a dash of interesting developments at Seeds of Peace and you have a recipe for blog-silence. I am sorry. I had no idea that there were so many people who looked forward to reading these entries, and I appreciate the encouragement that I have received to keep this going.

There is just too much to catch up on now, so I’ll just write about the highlight of the last few weeks for me – Petra. Amy’s parents graciously invited me to join them on a trip to Petra last week. Though you may not know what Petra is, if you have seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, you have seen this archeological marvel, which is featured prominently in the closing scenes. The ancient Nabataean city of Petra is over 2000 years old, located in what is now southern Jordan, with over 700 incredible tombs carved into its sandstone cliff faces.

I set out to meet Bernie and Karen (Amy’s parents), and Jodi and Michael (Amy’s sister and new fiancé – they got engaged here in Israel) in Eilat. Since I didn’t feel like spending 5 to 6 hours on a sweaty bus through the Negev desert, I decided to fly down. My ulterior motive was the desire to do some airline-industry reconnaissance on Israel’s two domestic airlines, Israir and Arkia.

On my flight, I was treated to an incredible view of the Temple Mount and the Old City of Jerusalem. It’s amazing how small it looks from 15,000 feet. It really demonstrated to me how difficult the issue of Jerusalem is. Three world religions all collide in an area barely 1 km squared. Here you can see the Dome of the Rock from the North-East.














I arrived in Eilat Wednesday evening, and we made our way into Jordan on Thursday Morning. The Wadi Arava border crossing into Jordan is 5 minutes from the beachfront strip of hotels in Eilat. No cars are permitted through the crossing, so visitors have to walk about 100 meters through “no man’s land” between the two sides. Here we are making our way to the Jordanian side of the crossing.

Before this crossing was opened (after the signing of the peace treaty in 1994), the area on either side of this walkway was a minefield, with snipers on either side.

After crossing over to the Jordanian side, we went through the process of obtaining our visas and having our passports stamped. This seemingly simple procedure took 45 minutes and three different stations. Finally, we made it through, and joined our driver/guide, Ali, for the 90 minute drive to Petra.

On the way we had a rest stop at a local souvenir shop, where I tried on a keffiyeh, an Arab headdress. There are three main styles of keffiyehs in Jordan: the plain white ones typically worn by Bedouins (and Lawrence of Arabia), the black checkered style popularized by Yassir Arafat that is representative of Palestinians (who make up over 50% of the population of Jordan), and the red checkered style that is typically worn by native Jordanians. Here I am trying on a keffiyeh with Amy’s sister Jodi.














We finally made it to Petra, passing through Wadi Mousa (Valley of Moses), a town that derives its drinking water from a spring purportedly created when Moses hit a rock with his staff (disobeying God, who told him to talk to the rock, as the story goes). The nearby hills are also said to contain the tomb of Aaron – Moses’ brother and high-priest of the Israelites.

Petra is incredible. As we walked through the natural gorge that was the main entrance to the city, we could see dozens of niches carved into the stone, where idols once stood. Along the walls, a carved trough would have carried water into the town. After a little more than a kilometer of walking, I caught a glimpse of the jewel of Petra through the crack of the gorge.

The Treasury is the best preserved ruin at Petra. It was actually a tomb for some members of the Nabataean royal family. It was given the name “The Treasury” because locals believed that this structure had had been built by an Egyptian Pharaoh in order to hide his treasure. It was this belief that partly led to Petra being lost to the Western world, as locals believed it was sacred and wished to protect the treasures from foreign hands. When the Swiss explorer, Johann Ludwig Burkhardt came to Petra disguised as a Muslim going on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1812, he was the first European to visit the site in over 400 years.

We continued our tour though the ruins and had lunch at a rest stop located at the end of the gorge. After lunch, the hike back through the gorge was daunting, so we opted instead to ride donkeys up the hill to a neighbouring town, where Ali picked us up. I had never ridden a donkey before, and I was a little nervous, but I was able to snap one picture:














On the way back into Israel, we passed through a building called the Yitzhak Rabin Border Crossing (named after the Israeli Prime Minister who signed the Peace agreement with Jordan in 1994 and the Oslo Accords in 1993). In it were dozens of pictures of Yitzhak Rabin throughout his life – as a soldier in Israel’s wars, and as one of the country’s greatest statesmen. There was one picture that I especially liked:

Here, the late Jordanian King Hussein lights a cigarette for Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995. I couldn’t help savoring the thought of these two peacemakers enjoying a light moment after signing their historic treaty. I only hope that someday everyone in the region will share in the vision of peace that these two men sought to create.

Overall, it was an incredible experience and I particularly want to thank Karen and Bernie for inviting me to join them.

Until next time,
Seth

Special Guest Blog - Seeds Cafe

Hello All, Tonight we have a very special guest entry. As I mentioned before, my mother and brother are visiting me here in Jerusalem. Yesterday evening, we had an event at the center, and I invited my mom to share her thoughts with all of you. Here they are:


On Sunday evening we all went to the Seeds of Peace building to one of their monthly Sunday programs, called Seeds Café. That night they had an exhibit from Israeli artist Azriel Cohen (originally from Toronto, Canada). He painted some paintings of cafés in and around East and West Jerusalem - Israeli and Arab cafés. As part of the program each café that was painted sent food and representatives and talked to us a little about their establishments. Particularly interesting were the people who showed up for this event. I would say more than ½ were extremely interesting Arabs from different parts of Jerusalem. It was very interesting to watch the friendly and comfortable way everyone felt together. It did not feel like we were in Israel at all. This event could have taken place in any city in North America. Everyone was relaxed and joking and I felt a real feeling of warmth. The thought of joining art and different backgrounds together was great. I think everyone came away with a happy heart and stomach. The evening was a success. I spoke to many people there and found them to be bright and interesting. The artist’s painting reflected each café and you really felt the essence of each establishment. Some of the owners had funny little stories about their cafés and the people who frequent them. All in all, people had fun and communicated, and that’s what it’s all about, communication. We all took a little time and met someone we would never have before and enjoyed the evening. Thank you Seeds of Peace and Azriel Cohen!

- Cheryl Ross


Here are some pictures from the event:


Here is Azriel Cohen, addressing the group at the Seeds of Peace Center. Cohen painted all of these works and interviewed all of the cafe owners during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, a time when coffee shops were sometimes targeted by terrorist attacks. During this difficult time, people on both sides of the conflict still sought the refuge of a good cup of coffee.




Here is my brother, Zach, posing under a painting of the cafe at the Ambassador Hotel with an authentic Nargila (a water-pipe for smoking flavored tobacco - not for illicit drugs, as my mother thought). The Ambassador Hotel provided a delicious spread of smoked salmon, salads and pastries. Yum.

My mom and brother are leaving tomorrow night. This visit went by very fast, and I'm sorry to see it end. My mom says that this has been the most time we've spent together in years.

Cheers,
Seth

Independence Day

Happy Birthday Israel. On Tuesday night and Wednesday of this week was Israeli Independence Day, or Yom Ha’atzmaut. It’s a day that is celebrated in most of Israel with a wild night of partying in the streets, copious amounts of alcohol and people running through the streets spraying each other with silly string. For many Palestinians, it is a day of mourning for what they call Nakba, or “the disaster”, which they say resulted in the exile of thousands of Palestinians.

My mother and brother are visiting me here in Israel for ten days, and we were all invited to join my aunt, uncle and five of their seven kids on a trip to Ashkelon, where the eldest daughter of the family, Neherah, lives with her husband, Guy, and their adorable 8-month old son. Neherah and Guy are settlers who were evacuated from their home in August 2005, along with roughly 8,000 others, when the Israeli government decided to dismantle the Gush Katif settlements in the Gaza Strip. Neherah was 8 months pregnant at the time, and the experience was a very emotional one. Since the evacuation, Neherah and her family have been relocated to Ashkelon, a growing Israeli city on the Mediterranean coast, about 8 km north of the Gaza Strip. All of the families of Kfar Darom (the settlement that Neherah and Guy lived in) were placed in the same apartment building in Ashkelon, keeping the close-knit community relatively intact. With the memories of the state forcefully removing them from their homes still fresh in their minds, this Independence Day was a complicated one for this community.

We arrived in Ashkelon in a mini-bus and went up to the spacious apartment that Neherah and Guy are living in now. As the whole family was catching up and playing with Nehera’s son, I told her that her apartment was beautiful and I asked her how she liked it in Ashkelon. Her answer was short and simple. “This is not my home. I would rather be in Kfar Darom.”

At around 7:00pm, we all went down to the parking lot, where the building’s residents had put together their own Independence Day ceremony. At one end of the parking lot, the residents had set up a podium and two flag poles (one with the Israeli flag, and one with the flag of Kfar Darom). At the beginning of the ceremony, the Kfar Darom flag was raised, and the Israeli flag was left down. This represented the feeling of these people that the state had turned against them. After one community leader’s speech, in which he urged his listeners to maintain hope, to be thankful for the state of Israel (despite its imperfections) and to remember that we are on the path to the coming of the Messiah, he signaled, and the Israeli flag was finally raised as well.

After the outdoor ceremony, I joined the men as they went down to the basement of the building, which had been converted into a synagogue. We then had a special evening prayer service for Independence Day. As I was leaving the synagogue, one of my cousins pointed out a plaque next to the door of the synagogue that had a set of keys attached to it. Under the keys was inscribed, “One day, we shall return.” The parallelism struck me – there are thousands of Palestinians who wear old keys around their necks, dreaming of returning to homes that were left behind (abandoned or confiscated – depending on whom you ask) when Israel was declared a state in 1948.

After dinner, we stepped out onto the balcony to enjoy the spectacular fireworks presentation. The kids loved it, but I could see that Neherah was visibly shaken. When I asked her why, she said that the fireworks made the same sound as the Qassam rockets that used to rain onto Gush Katif. Guy told me that there were over 6000 Qassam rockets fired onto the settlement bloc of Gush Katif, and that it was a miracle there weren’t more casualties from them. Even in Ashkelon, the occasional Qassam rocket reaches the outskirts of the city, fired from the northern edge of the Gaza Strip.

As we piled into the van and headed back to Jerusalem, I couldn’t help thinking about a conversation I had last week with soldier on a day off whom I had met in a bar. Yishai, a medic who works around Gaza, and was stationed in Gaza before, during, and after the disengagement, gave me an interesting perspective. He told me that he felt that the disengagement was “the smartest thing the government could have done.” He felt that the costs incurred to protect these 8,000 settlers in a territory of half a million Palestinians were simply too high to justify, both in economic terms and in human lives. I told him the story of Yusuf, a former Seed of Peace from Gaza, who was accidentally shot in the back when the IDF occupied his family home. Yishai got very serious, took a quiet sip from his beer and he told me that he had heard of other stories like this one. He also said that Gaza was a “terrible place” and that most soldiers were just doing the best they could. With that, he looked me in the eye, raised his glass and said, “Enough politics, tell me about Canada!”

This was an Independence Day I won’t soon forget.