The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Page 6

  The number of Israeli settlers in occupied Arab territory has grown from 230,000 in 1992 to 570,000 in 2015; many of these people are religious fanatics who regard the Palestinians as murid intruders on land promised to them by God. According to one 2015 poll, half of all Jewish Israelis would like to see Palestinian citizens expelled from Israel. Another study found that nearly half of all Jewish Israelis wouldn’t want to live in a building with Arabs and wouldn’t want their children to attend school with Arabs. The Palestinians are no better; almost half want to continue to use violence against Israel, and 60 percent believe that their goal should be to reclaim the whole of Israel from the Jews. Since 1987, at least 1,600 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians. During the same period, at least 10,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis.

  The young soldier looks gape-mouthed at his interlocutor. He tries to inform her that many Jews who live in the “complicated areas” of the West Bank raise their children with the same kind of hate.

  At this, she throws up her hands. “Respectfully, no,” she says. “Respectfully, no.”

  A man near Trisha mutters, “If Dennis Prager were here he’d rip that guy a new asshole.” With the crowd now against him, the young soldier stands silently, gripping his microphone. Another soldier steps in, takes the mic, and says, “Maybe there’s a small language issue here and let’s move on, yes?”

  I walk back to the lookout point. In the distance I see a sputtering red dot, out of which twirls a corkscrew of smoke. In Gaza City something is on fire.

  IV. “Mercy Is Kind of Punched Out of Me”

  A century ago, Caesarea, the first-century Roman capital of Judaea, was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, the last caliphate. Important archaeological sites—relics of Palestine’s non-Islamic history—were left entombed beneath sand dunes. Sitting in Caesarea’s restored theater, Trisha and I sit in pinprick rain and wait for another Dennis Prager lecture to begin. Not terribly far away, the caliphate reenactors of the Islamic State are busy destroying every pre- and non-Islamic artifact they can find.

  We have a good view of the remaining bits of Caesarea from our seats: the foundation of the seaside Herodian palace, the track of an old hippodrome, the outline of a royal pool, rings of worn sandstone and pitted marble. I’m reading aloud to Trisha passages about ancient Caesarea from Josephus’s Jewish War—how King Herod built its harbor in a spot “as awkward as could be”; how the statue of Herod’s benefactor, Caesar, was “no whit inferior to the Olympian Zeus which it was intended to resemble.” A couple rows ahead of us, someone is reading Ben Carson’s autobiography, Gifted Hands; a dozen others have copies of Dennis Prager’s book, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code.

  Prager himself appears, wearing a sport coat, his shoulders gray with damp. The guy reading Ben Carson looks up. “The emperor has arrived,” he says. Meanwhile, two dozen people from another Christian tour group are singing in the theater’s wings, their voices dreamlike, as rainfall patters on the marble around them. Once again, Reuven Doron from Genesis Tours introduces Prager. By now, the drizzle has almost stopped, and Doron says that this is proof that “God loves Dennis Prager.”

  Prager tells us about his university days as a twenty-one-year-old student of Russian, buying copies of Pravda from a Forty-Second Street newsstand. One day, someone from the Israeli government contacted him and asked him to travel to the Soviet Union to smuggle in Hebrew Bibles and prayer shawls. “It was somewhat dangerous,” he says. “I was sent because I knew Hebrew and Russian.” He emerged with names of Jews who wanted to leave the USSR, and then began to deliver lectures on Soviet Jewry. He describes this as “the beginning of my public life.”

  He would speak around four times a week. “Almost every synagogue in the United States—for that matter, Australia, France, anywhere in the free world—had a sign: SAVE SOVIET JEWRY. To my shock, no church had a sign, SAVE SOVIET CHRISTIANS . . . More Christians were being killed by the Soviet government than Jews were. So why weren’t there SAVE SOVIET CHRISTIANS signs but there were SAVE SOVIET JEWRY signs? Because Jews are a people, whereas Christians are a religion.”

  According to Prager, this helps explain why, even today, there is little collective outcry for the Christians being murdered by the Islamic State in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere. “I don’t know why Christians aren’t going crazy over the decimation of Christians in the Middle East,” Prager says. “I’m going crazy over the decimation of Christians in the Middle East.” I have another explanation: those being targeted are all Middle Eastern Christians who belong to sects—Syrian Orthodox, Maronite, Chaldean—so conceptually unfamiliar to Western Christians that they may as well be Muslims.

  The rest of Prager’s speech concerns Judaism’s convergences with its sister faith Christianity. He affirms that Jews are the Chosen People, while “Christians are doing God’s work.” He doesn’t understand the Christian ideation of Jesus, he confesses, but, he says, “I am closer to a Christian who shares my faith and God and the Bible and my values than to a Jew who doesn’t. We’re doing God’s work together. Who is right? We’ll find out.”

  Back on the bus to Nazareth, a largely Arab area, where we’re having lunch in an old immigrant-detention center that’s been converted into a hotel. We ascend a twisty-turny road to see hillsides awash in trash. Someone asks David, “Why is every Arab town we see filled with garbage?” Another person wants to know: “How’d the Arabs get Nazareth?” David explains that Jews never lived in great numbers in Nazareth; it was always an Arab town, built up by Arabs for Christian tourists. “It’s not like Arabs took it from the Jews,” David says. No one appears satisfied by this.

  The hotel conference room is filled with silver platters of food. Trisha and I sit with some Bus Fivers, all of whom are discussing Matt Bevin’s recent election as the governor of Kentucky—thanks in part to his campaign promise of gutting Obamacare. We have a Kentuckian at the table with us, a self-avowed Tea Partyer, his voice so deep and resonant it could split wood. Despite his strong anti-moocher convictions, he returns from his dessert run with enough pastries for everybody, which is more than I thought to do.

  My fellow Stand with Israelites say things like, “These people need the Prince of Peace.” They say, “I’ll have to pray on that one.” They are warm and funny. They talk about the foster children they’ve raised, the people they’ve helped lift out of meth-induced darkness. A man describes a young friend who lost his wife to cancer as a “trophy of grace.” Another describes his regrets about homeschooling his children, which, he worries aloud, may have damaged their ability to socialize. In that unguarded moment, as he stares at his plate, I find myself wanting to share my own anxieties about parenting.

  After lunch, we head for a kibbutz on the Lebanese border. We ride through the changeful topography of the Galilean high country. One minute it’s gorgeous valleys, then extinct volcanoes, then parched hills, then Crusader castles, then papyrus groves, then half-hidden dirt roads, then aqueducts with hundred-inch pipes, then Druze villages. It’s the first century, it’s the twelfth century, it’s November 2015. The questions my fellow Bus Fivers ask of David are getting more wide-ranging. At one point David is fielding inquiries about Mexican immigration in America and his personal feelings on the European Union. Finally, he admits that guides are discouraged from discussing politics and religion. At this he laughs, as that’s pretty much all he talks about.

  We’re now moving along the Naphtali Ridge, a world of sky and evergreens and maize-colored stones aglow in sunlight. The valley directly beneath us is Lebanese territory: here are the cedars of Lebanon. Syria is just to the east. David points out Syria. We all look toward Syria. David redirects our attention back toward Lebanon. We all look toward Lebanon. It’s like we’re on safari: “To your right, the beastly hordes of the Islamic State. On your left, Hezbollah.” Between Israeli and Lebanese territory is a big, mean double fence; shots have been fired across the patrol road that runs through it as recently as 2010
. The village we’re approaching, Adaisseh, along with much of southern Lebanon, used to be predominantly Christian. Israel occupied the area until 2000, and in the past decade, it has become Hezbollah’s turf. David points to a tiny outpost on a distant hill on the Israeli side of the border and tells us that his son was stationed there while serving in the IDF. He describes how he used to stop there, along his tour route, to drop off cookies.

  We arrive at Misgav Am: THE KIBBUTZ AT THE END OF THE WORLD, according to its welcome sign. It is famous as kibbutzim go, founded in 1945, two years before the state of Israel itself, by members of the Haganah, an underground militia. Three military-intelligence units are found within its walls. The people who live here aren’t freewheeling kibbutzniks making artisanal soap, like you’d find down near the Dead Sea, but rough-edged farmers living within tossing distance of a Hezbollah grenade.

  We’re greeted by a Misgav Am old-timer whose huge gray beard, as thick as it is wide, suggests Yosemite Sam in his senescence. He tells us, “Those of us who live up here, I tell everybody—and you’ll forgive me if I insult anyone, it’s not on purpose—we’re Israeli rednecks.” This particular Israeli Redneck was born in Cleveland and moved to Israel in 1961, “after I decided I was wasting my life.” He’s fought for Israel “in four and a half wars. I was with the paratroopers in the liberation of Jerusalem in 1967. We had fifty percent casualties.” As a result, he says, “Mercy is kind of punched out of me. I have no love for my enemies, and I have no problem shooting them. I take a little white pill in the morning. It keeps me level, and I sleep real good every night.” This gets a big laugh from the audience.

  He is unapologetic about the fact that territory was taken from Palestinians. To say outright that Jewish fighters ethnically cleansed historically Palestinian land remains taboo in Israeli society, even though a number of historians—Benny Morris, Tom Segev, Ari Shavit—have found documents in the state archives that admit as much. (The diary of Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, which dates before the founding of Israel, contains plans to expel Arabs from Arab land and the belief that “we are not obliged to state the limits of our state.”) Netanyahu tightened access to the national archives before any more embarrassing documents could be discovered. According to the Israeli Redneck, though, “Possession is ten-tenths of the law around here. If you can hold it, it’s yours.”

  He continues his speech. “The people in the Hezbollah are committed,” he tells us. “The Palestinians are committed. Some may want peace. Some may not. It doesn’t matter, but they’re committed to the destruction of Israel one way or another.” He adds, “In this part of the world there’s no such thing as innocent civilians. There’s combatants and noncombatants. Nobody’s innocent except children. Children are always innocent.”

  During the question-and-answer period, the Israeli Redneck is asked if he would consider running for president. (Yes, we’re now deeply within a peculiar American epoch: those who claim they want liberty search only for Cincinnatus.) He smiles. “I’d be willing to be king,” he says. Someone then asks about the extermination of Israel’s enemies. “Believe me,” he replies, “if we were China or Russia or the United States or somebody, there wouldn’t be a Palestinian problem and there wouldn’t be a Hezbollah problem. They’d just turn their army loose and that’s it.”

  I excuse myself and stroll outside. I notice that someone else has also walked out early: Pastor Marty. He tells me that he was troubled by the violence of the Israeli Redneck’s speech. I tell Pastor Marty that I don’t fault a man who’s fought in four wars for sounding like a lunatic. What bothers me is the way people were applauding him.

  Pastor Marty tells me that he blames increasing partisan belligerence on talk radio and Facebook—the way they allow us to “vent sideways,” as he calls it, in our little simpatico cocoons. The tiniest disagreements get amplified—from sharing and liking and retweeting—until they’re all anyone hears. When was the last time, he asks, that anyone was forced to have a civil discussion with someone who thought differently?

  The Israeli Redneck has finished speaking. Stand with Israelites are streaming out, laughing and raving about what they just heard. Two of our tour guides walk past us. One says to the other, “That’s totally how I wanna talk, but I’d lose my license.”

  V. The Occupation of Bus Five

  Our daily itinerary is now established. Get a barbarically early wake-up call, overeat at the buffet breakfast, ride a bus, meet Israeli soldiers, ride a bus, overeat at the buffet lunch, hear a lecture, use the phrase “I need a vacation from my vacation” ironically, ride a bus, see some sights, meet more Israeli soldiers, ride a bus, use the phrase “I need a vacation from my vacation” unironically, check into a new hotel, overeat at the buffet dinner, hit the mattress like a lumberjacked tree.

  We’re in Tiberias now, it’s just after sunrise, and Trisha and I trade yawns on the lakeside dock of our hotel. The Sea of Galilee sloshes unseen beneath a layer of fog. As a couple are telling us about how, in the middle of the night, they sneaked down here and went swimming, the sky suddenly clears and what cinematographers call God rays blast erumpent through parting clouds.

  The plan, once we’re picked up by a boat, is to sail into the middle of the Sea of Galilee, participate in what has been ominously described as a “ceremony,” and cross over to the northern bank, where we’ll visit famous New Testament sites. I’d been looking forward to hanging out with Pastor Marty while touring Galilee, but he and half our contingent set off for the day with Dennis Prager to visit Safed, the birthplace of Jewish mysticism. “I have two advanced degrees in ancient history,” Marty said. “I’ll live without seeing Capernaum.”

  The awaited boats finally pull up to the hotel dock. Hulking and wooden, they’re designed to resemble first-century Galilean fishing vessels, intact remains of which have been excavated from the sea’s muck. Most of our boats have apostolic names; the boat Trisha and I board is called Matthew. Rows of white plastic chairs line the deck. Every member of our boat’s crew is wearing a white T-shirt that reads I’VE SAILED ON THE SEA OF GALILEE. These sailors (their website is jesusboats.com) have an apparent lock on trans-Galilee travel: from where we float I count more than a dozen in-transit Jesus boats, all filled to the gunwales with members of at least three different tours.

  While we drift away from the western shore, “How Great Thou Art” is blasting over our boat’s loudspeakers. It’s as catchy as Rodgers and Hammerstein. Dozens of people are singing along as Tiberias disappears behind us. Others are doing the mellow rocking-out thing sometimes seen in evangelical megachurches: eyes shut, swaying to the music, a single hand raised as though to wash some celestial window. One person is crying, then two, then ten. Some of these people saved for years to afford this trip, for the chance to sail over Christianity’s ground zero.

  All the Genesis Tours–booked Jesus boats meet in the middle of the sea, whereupon they’re lashed together by men of unsmiling industriousness and dexterous knot-making skills. The people on one boat are taking pictures of the people who are taking pictures of them on the other boat. The mood of peaceful singing and swaying from five minutes ago is gone. Laughter, callouts, selfies—it feels like a booze cruise without the booze. We relax in our seats. Reuven Doron gets on the Matthew boat’s microphone and tells us how special this morning is, how special this lake is. He’s proud of us, he says. Then all the Matthew boat guys begin to raise the American flag.

  We’re asked to stand and face the back of the boat. A loudspeaker is right next to us, so I hear static first, followed by a drumroll. “The Star-Spangled Banner” begins to play. When it’s over, up goes the Israeli flag, followed by Israel’s national anthem. Hearing the two songs side by side is instructive. One anthem, militaristic and silly, emerged from a single battle in a war whose origins only a professional historian could explain. The other, harrowing and heartbroken, emerged from exile. It might be the least triumphalist national anthem on earth. Almost everyone is crying by the
end.

  Doron tells us, “Thank God we can fly the American and Israeli flags together this morning. May this bond endure forever.” He talks about Ezekiel 38 and its “northern nations” prophecy. According to the common evangelical interpretation, fighters from a five-nation confederacy (including one army on horseback) will attack Israel, ushering in the End Times. “It’s a difficult passage,” Doron says, understating things quite a bit. “A difficult prophecy. But let them come. They’ve come before. It never works.” He holds up his Bible and gives it an affirmative shake. “It will never work, because God wrote this book.” Throughout our tour we’ve been told, over and over, how dearly Israel needs our support, how endangered it is by monstrous forces. Yet at the same time, we’ve been told, just as frequently, that Israel cannot lose, because it is protected by God.

  We disembark on the other side of the sea. David leads us to the Mount of Beatitudes. Beside a small, dark-stoned Byzantine-style church, he reads to us from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel According to Matthew. People I’ve watched applaud the suggestion of gunning down Palestinian teenage rock-throwers are now nodding in agreement to the blessedness of the meek, the merciful, and the peacemakers. When David finishes, he holds up his Bible and says, “Jesus calls us to attain something we can never really attain.” He looks around. “This is all temporary. All of this. Everything we can’t see is permanent.”

  An hour later, we’re standing on the Sea of Galilee’s gravel beach, behind the Church of the Primacy of St. Peter. In the last chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus, Peter, and other disciples eat breakfast together shortly after Jesus’s resurrection. According to local lore, this is the spot where that meal took place. Unfortunately, the shoreline remains thick with haze. Several people, needing no prompting, remove their shoes and socks, roll up their pants to reveal knobbly old-person knees, and wade into the foggy water. In the sea, everyone looks big and childlike. Fellow travelers I have not yet seen smile are smiling, including the man who so perfectly resembles Rupert Murdoch that I’ve begun to suspect he is Rupert Murdoch.