Sunrise on Tel Aviv

When our flight to Ben Gurion Airport departs, it is almost sunset in New York. I'm sitting next to a Haverford student who is on a separate birthright tour with her school. We start chatting and she turns out to be incredibly interesting to talk to...grew up in a mostly black neighborhood in Brooklyn, spent time in Indonesia working with women with AIDS, wants to design her own major around liberation theology. Naturally, the conversation turns to our respective trips, and our shared skepticism regarding their content, as well as our own biases. Some of this conversation is carried in unnecessarily hushed voices, as though we'd get in trouble if someone heard our topic of conversation. I have a sense that this might be the only conversation like this I have with another birthright traveler, and I definitely don't take it for granted. As we fly into Tel Aviv, the sun is coming up again, and though from the center isle I can't see the full view of Israel that my Bubbe told me about, the sliver I can see looks amazing, and I transition into 'wide-eyed traveler' mode for the time being. ___________________________________________________ At the airport we are introduced to Elad, our guide for the next ten days, and after a brief introduction by a staff person of Young Judaea (the organization running my specific tour) we quickly get on our bus and taken to the Negev, the desert covering southern Israel. We are taking an indirect route to the east to avoid areas near Gaza where Hamas has been shooting missiles. I feel like a schmo because I still can't figure out if our route went through the West Bank...I don't recall any checkpoints or other indicators but unless I was mistaken, Elad pointed out Jericho at a gas station. I ask him about it and he gives an answer about "two west banks" that I don't really understand, and when he shows us our route later at the grave of David Ben Gurion--'the architect of Israel'--the West Bank isn't shown on the map. ___________________________________________________ Elad is a charming, sharp, and genuine guy, and he quickly endears himself to all 30 members of the trip. During our drive south along the Dead Sea he plays us Israeli hip hop (I can say with complete confidence in my objectivity that Palestinian hip hop is considerably better) and takes us on a short hike in the afternoon. The Negev is pretty--at some point I'll throw up some pictures--and the 'you must love and support Israel' message is not being laid on us too heavily yet so it ends up as easily the most relaxing section of the trip. In the evening we head to a kibbutz (which sort of reminds me of a makeshift retirement village, only with playgrounds for kids) where members of our tour begin to get to know one another--it's by and large an amicable group of Jews, and with Young Judaea being one of the more progressive of the 25 or so agencies doing birthright, most of the group shares similar views. ___________________________________________________ I wake up at 2:30 the next morning and, after trying to get back to sleep for a couple hours, I decide to trek to the top of the kibbutz to watch the sun rise over the desert and practice my boxing technique for a while. The whole set up makes me feel sort of like Rocky Balboa, only terrible, and I appreciate to moment of solitude...soon we're all back on the bus together and heading to the 40-km Ramon crater for a long hike. On the way, we see a stray dog and a donkey playing together by the side of the road, which was not only unbelievably cute but was also the best example of co-existence I think I saw the whole trip. The hike is absolutely great. I spend a lot of it talking with an evaluator who has joined us to check up on our safety--I'm not sure how we could possibly be unsafe in the middle of a humongous crater, but anyhow, she's also had some experience with community development work and trying to change cycles of poverty in northern Israel, and we end up having a really good conversation. At the end of the hike, Elad shows us how the crater was formed using a roll from last night's dinner. ___________________________________________________ After visiting an especially odd dance school and later meeting a member of the impressive Ayalim (the "Rolls Royce of Zionism", an elite group of students dedicated to social service--clearly Young Judaea knows its audience), we head back to the kibbutz. After dinner and an evening activity, we're all out on the deck again, drinking and trading jokes along with our guard for the trip, a sweet young guy with a big smile, who ends up being a lot of fun to have around. In a field adjacent to the hotel, a different birthright group is being introduced to their soldiers the hard way (each group is accompanied by Israel soldiers for a few days during their trips): the soldiers are leading them in mock drills--push-ups, laps around the lawn, etc. Meanwhile, someone asks our guard to tell any Palestinian jokes he knows. "I don't have any jokes......They're dumb. I can tell you that they're dumb. And they smell bad. Not clean. When we arrest them, we don't enter their houses." I look back and the soldiers are now leading the other group in what looks to be team wheelbarrow races. Absolute absurdity.