“The notion that one religion is right and others wrong is really a Christian innovation, and the Greeks and Egyptians fully accepted each other’s deities. The Second Commandment doesn’t say there are no other gods, rather ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’”
— Paul William Roberts, River in the Desert

“Shortly after Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, published The Jewish State in 1896, two Viennese rabbis decided to travel to the Middle East to explore for themselves Herzl’s idea of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Their visit resulted in a cable home in which the two rabbis wrote: ‘The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.’ ”
— Michael Petrou, Why Israel Can’t Survive, Maclean’s May 5.


The land of Israel is no less infused with religion and history than the land of the Pharaohs and, in very different ways, is no less intense. While the country itself is only as old as I am (60), Jews have lived on the land for some 32 centuries, often ruling it in the old days ... before the Romans came. Even then, The New Yorker notes (May 5), “the faith of the Hebrews remained a religio licita, a tolerated religion, throughout the Roman Empire.”

And why not? They don’t proselytize — it is forbidden — and a desire to convert to Judaism is tested, often for three years or more. “Jews are the Chosen People, not the Choosing People,” says Ido Yavetz, and he is fierce in his belief that this is not a religious war, even for Muslim extremists. It’s about turf and about vision, especially that which can be seen from where you belong, the eye in identity.

The summer the country and I were both 12, I (along with my sister, our mother, and her mother) was close enough to see Israel from the deck of a small Mediterranean freighter, which was navis non grata because its flag was Egyptian. I understood completely because I had done my final grade-school ‘thesis’ on “Mohammedanism” and had spent much of the crossing being roiled as never before by Atlantic waves and Leon Uris’s Exodus.

Even now that I understand less, it’s important to have a narrative, and for Kris’s and my first visit we had the enthusiastic story-weaving stimulation of our Yavetz hosts, four family members who were severally survivors of the Holocaust and defenders of Israel, founders and graduates of the University of Tel Aviv, published professors of history, and parents of kids with their own gifts and articulate opinions. For a week three generations collaborated to make sure we had a wide-ranging intensive.

Orientation began the first morning with the Pahmach Museum, which is mostly a subterranean walk through the history of the underground army that repelled first the Brits ... and then the five Arab armies that converged just hours after UN-sanctioned Independence was achieved. The story moved through diverse settings, composite people on screen representing those seen (on two or three other screens) in historical footage. With wireless phones translating the dialogue and narration into English, this was an accessible reminder, from what was to me a new angle, of the fierce challenges that cornerstoned Israel’s present prosperity and ongoing difficulties. Ido’s dad was a member of the Pahmach.

Two days later I was guiding myself at my own pace through Yad Vashem, the Holocaust history museum ... and was soon grateful my reluctance had been overcome ... for it turned out to be an innovative invitation to come to terms with what is both terribly familiar and still barely conceivable ... set into acres of natural beauty and artful symbolism.

The heart of the experience is an extremely powerful chronological walk through the past in a building the size of a Toblerone bar two football fields long. It starts with a diorama on screen — slowly revolving montages of pre-war film-loops of Jewish life ... and winds up with the diaspora of survivors cruelly constrained. Within this macroscosm are individual voices on film and tape, in letters, diaries, artwork, propaganda, cartoons, philosophy, religious expression and memorabilia ... Schindler’s list at a desks with drawers that pull out to reveal the pottery his workers made, a stamp he forged ... toys, shoes, captured silver, the Auschwitz gate, Cyclon-B, resistance weapons, ‘final solution’ documents, personal stories from every country involved, a hodgepodge with the pace of great art ... culminating with an escape into a glorious appreciation of life and of the preciousness of each life lost (a hall of names with many volumes still awaiting filling) ... and a great view at the end of the escalator equivalent of an infinity pool ascending into the sky.

The beauty of so much of Israel was my first and most lasting surprise. Jerusalem itself, the unflashy focal point for three great religions, has its ruggedness wonderfully accommodated (likewise its spiritual diversity — I particularly loved hearing multiethnic worshippers singing in soulful harmony in ‘the room of the Last Supper’.) The north is now richly treed and vineyarded. The Bala’i World Headquarters on Mount Carmel features a cascade of 18 of the most meticulously ordered gardens I have ever seen and stepped fountains descending to a dozen infinity pools in lotus-shaped confection. The Syrian bunkers in the Golan Heights are being overrun with wildflowers. The Sea of Galilee is Vermont-postcard idyllic, so still when we visited (aside from the startling slaps of leaping fish) that I believed it could be walked on. The Dead Sea, famously the lowest place on the surface of the planet, is a thousand square kilometers of brilliant blue, set into landscape borrowed from Utah. Masada rises iconically on its west side, somehow separated from the ridge to which it belongs. And I can’t think of any city that has done a better job than gently rolling Tel Aviv of being open to its miles of waterfront, new and old, accessible to bikes and strollers, joggers and waders, windsurfers and fishing boats. Naomi Klein has compared the country to a gated community; certainly everywhere we went felt ... protected ... peaceful ...

All this variety seems particularly amazing when you consider that Israel is almost exactly the size of New Jersey, and its survival to date no less amazing when you consider that it is set in an Arab World almost half again the size of the United States.

Inasmuch as any people has any right to any piece of the earth (which is certainly arguable), Israelis do. It is, I have come to see, the only place in the world where their languages come first, where their culture thrives without the overshadowing of more dominant cultures.

But there can also be no wonder why Palestinians feel their displacement keenly.