Friday, January 28th

Depart Tiberias
Teva Ivri and the Sakhnin Region Towns’ Association for Environmental Quality
Travel to Tel Aviv
Visit Independence Hall
Enjoy the Nahalat Benjamin pedestrian mall’s Crafts Fair, including lunch
Join Bet Tefila Yisraeli for Qabbalat Shabbat
Shabbat dinner at hotel with guests from Bet Tefila Yisraeli

The bad news was that we had to be up, dressed, packed, fed and on the bus early this morning - at a point in the trip when mornings are getting rougher and rougher.  The good news was that we had several hours on the bus to make up for lost sleep, as we left Tiberias and headed back towards the center of the country. (The other good news, for several of us, is that my precautionary bottle of Mucinex seems to be working.)

We stopped off at Teva Ivril for a presentation and tour of an environmental facility which is teaching classes (to both Jewish and Arab youth) and pioneering low-tech ways to purify water and walk gently on the planet.  Our host examined with us the concept of living not a life filled with "stuff" but a "worthy life" of service and community.  Their building was designed with a central courtyard to allow natural light into all rooms, and what appear to be glorified hood scoops to capture breezes up high, run them through a swamp cooler and then funnel them into the building for summer cooling.  Prisms embedded in several rooftops reflect light into work spaces to minimize the need for electrical lighting, and a small outdoor seating area tucked between the gardens and used for teaching and presentations was created from used auto tires and local plaster.  I was also offered a wonderful cup of herbal tea - but our host couldn't remember the English names of the herbs and with my sense of smell on strike with this cold, I'll just have to guess from the look of things that anise, mint, and lemon geranium were involved.

Driving on to Tel Aviv (more sleep time!), we disembarked at Liberty Hall and listened to a docent wax enthusiastic about the events surrounding Israel's May 14, 1948 declaration of independence.  The museum consists of a short movie and a presentation in the actual hall where the ceremony took place.  The movie featured sprightly music and a series of historical photos; at one point (as the happy, hopeful music continued), the announcer pointed out that many of the people shown in a particular photograph were exterminated by the Nazis shortly thereafter.  The docent's refrain was that Israelis "wanted to survive" and had been attacked time and time again.  She said that the war for independence may have ended in the 1940's, but that Israel had "never yet had real peace."

Later, we attended Shabbat services at a Humanist Jewish congregation in Tel Aviv, followed by Shabbat dinner at our hotel with some congregation members as guests.  One thing which had been frustrating me during our adventure had been the limited opportunities to talk to Arabs about their situation, and I jumped at the chance to share the dinner table already staked out by our heroic bus driver, Raji.  I learned that his son was getting ready to take college entrance exams, and hoped to study computer science.  Raji had been in middle management in Jerusalem in earlier years, but had to switch to driving a bus because it allowed him to better support his family.  I asked him if it was difficult to see all the things he did and to migrate between the Jewish world, the Arab world, and the world of self-entitlement inhabited by visitors like us?  He said that it was necessary in his position to "see without seeing."  Personally, he doesn't think there will ever be peace.  I also asked him if he had ever considered visiting the US?  He said he was only allowed to go to Israel, Palestine, Egypt and Jordan, and couldn't have gotten the necessary permissions to go anywhere else.  For someone like me, who craves travel and is only limited by the practicalities of time and money, it's an incredibly depressing through.

So, how do I reconcile this?  Freedom to go where I will and do what I want seems to be a very basic right; but I've talked to enough Jews here to know that the long history of Jewish persecution and attempted genocide weighs very heavily on their mind, and they feel besieged by the dark possibilities of an unknown future.  From the Palestinian side, Israel looks like an ugly bully; from the Israeli side, they are doing what they must to secure the very existence of their children.

Recently, Dr. T joked with someone that "At CTS, we do dilemmas."  Well, this one is a doozy.