Tel Aviv and Yafo
We arrived in Tel Aviv in the dark. As we drove through narrow streets, the Chicagoans among us were scoping out places near the hotel where they could watch the Bears game if there was time. Instead, after dinner - the same rice, chicken, vegetables and salads that all the hotels have been serving - the Israelis and group leaders had an intense and serious discussion to figure out a place both Shorashim groups could fit in that would give us something to do in addition to drinking, since the Israelis are on military duty and not allowed to drink. We ended up spending a really nice night at a low key club on the beach, just a few blocks from our hotel, mostly outdoors - smoking hookah and drinking Israeli beer, dancing, tossing a disc...and a few of us stayed inside at the bar and watched the Bears game. It was so mild out, it was hard to believe it was January. This morning we dragged ourselves out of bed to go to the Israeli Independence Museum. A recent immigrant to Israel gave us a quick overview of the history of the modern state of Israel (with some help from a vintage 80's video), which helped to put a lot of what we saw for the rest of the day in context. She told us that Tel Aviv is only about 100 years old, and was created when a group of 66 Jewish families bought land outside of Jaffa and built homes for themselves in the sand dunes. The museum we were sitting in was on the site of one of them, and was also the building in which Israel was declared an independent Jewish state in 1948, which started the War of Independence in which tens of thousands of Israelis died. We spent the rest of the day outside in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. It's hard to believe Tel Aviv is so young. It has busy city streets, tall and shiny skyscrapers, gentrified little neighborhoods with expensive shops and cafes, small residential streets with orange trees and flowering vines overflowing out of little courtyards and windowboxes, clean public squares full of trees and people sitting in benches, and some really good ice cream. We walked on the sidewalk along the beach uphill to Jaffa, looking out over the blue Mediterranean and the unfamiliar black and gray sea birds. Jaffa, on the other hand, is something like 4000 years old. It's the port where Jonah boarded a boat to escape God's command, and the water we were looking at was the water where the Bible says he encountered the whale. Jaffa is historically Arab, and we heard the call to prayer from a minneret over the water. There are also traditionally Christian Arabs, and of course Jews, so it's another place where all three religions are crowded into a small area. We had lunch in Jaffa's Shuk, or marketplace, and after lunch a lot of us practiced our bargaining skills in the small and shops crowded with everything from cheap trinkets to artifacts of putative antiquity to old clothes to lace tablecloths. I swear I heard a shopkeeper say to another member of our group, "You are an American? Ah! For Americans I have special price!" (I'm sure he did). I thought I did pretty well, but the record in the group definitely went to Mike who talked a shopkeeper down from 120 shekels to 20 for a small carving of a frog. The last thing we did before boarding the bus for the Negev was to visit Yitzhak Rabin Square. We started by asking Israelis hanging out in the square about their memory of Rabin's assassination, and how they think it affected Israeli society today. It was interesting what a wide range of responses we got. Everyone remembered it, and what they were doing - some had even been at the rally - but only a few people thought it had a long-lasting effect on Israeli society. One woman some people talked to was an exception. She had been involved in the peace movement and saw the assassination as a big turning point in Israel. Leading up to it, many Israelis were very hopeful about peace. The assassination destroyed the hope that had been growing. Instead, people felt more and more that peace needed to be achieved by force. She saw the assassination as a big factor in a movement towards hopelessness, cynicism, and hatred. She's working today to try to heal Israeli society through an organization that puts on plays with Arab and Jewish Israeli kids to help them see each other outside of ideological contexts. Other Israelis we talked to were less optimistic about peace, and said that peace treaties such as the one Rabin was working towards were not the answer, and would only give Palestinians more victories in their quest to push Israel into the sea. The Israelis in our group also talked about their memories of his asassination, which are very strong even though they were very small children when it happened. We looked at the spot where Rabin had been shot, which is marked in the pavement, and the memorial next to it, and sang the peace song they had sung at the rally right before Rabin was killed, which was eerily reflective of the moments that followed. Lior told us that when Rabin was killed, the message many Israelis took was that while opinions will always differ in a democratic society, and often strongly, we cannot let ourselves believe that we have such a monopoly on truth that it's worth killing those who disagree with us.
