When I returned from Israel I fully intended to write about it some day without making it political. It is all too rare to see anything about Israel that is not obsessed with politics or terrorism, even though the country itself, like most other countries, has little to do with politics or terrorism. I wanted to focus on the culture, architecture and food without dwelling on the people who want it to be whatever they want it to be. Instead, I wrote about politics without making it about Israel. As it turns out, Israel is not what I wanted it to be.
When I went to Israel I wanted to see just how normal Palestinians are. As a bleeding heart liberal, I fully believe that the average Palestinian is your basic decent human being. It is always the leaders in dictatorships that do the wacky shit that makes headlines while the people are simply trying to get by. Unfortunately, I came away with an impression of the average Palestinian that is not entirely positive. I never met any of the dictators, so I really cannot comment on them.
Comparing Palestinians with Israelis is inevitable. The leaders of Palestine want the land that is currently the state of Israel. Some of Israel’s leaders want large chunks of land currently occupied by Palestinians, which Palestinian leaders want to be the future state of Palestine. The people of both nations do not seem to share the fervor of their leaders. It is as though they simply want to keep what they have and be left alone. People who speak at the UN talk about borders. Most Israelis and Palestinians will never speak at the UN.
From my experience, Israelis are terribly friendly people. Maybe not as friendly as Africans, but who is. Israelis have been compared to New Yorkers in their attitude toward strangers. I see no problem with that. New Yorkers, like Israelis, are often misunderstood by people who think that everyone should deal with people in the same way. But when you look beyond your own ideas about how everyone should act, you will find that your typical Israeli and New Yorker is mostly positive and will probably not stab you in the face if you ask for directions. Parisians are another matter. They genuinely do not care for outsiders.
There is an old joke.
Jersey girls ain’t trash. Trash gets picked up. Say this about someone from “the heartland” and they will be morally offended. Say this to someone from New Jersey and they will laugh. Say it to someone from New York and they will agree with you.
We went to a shop in Tel Aviv that sells tchotchkes, baubles and assorted knick knacks. The Israeli shopkeeper had the typical you want buy, you no want buy, you let me know, I over there attitude. He seemed happy to see us enter his store. Maybe he is a people person. Maybe he was stuck in a tiny shop with his wife all day. I cannot say. We walked away spending very little money. The Wife bought some postcards. She is going to buy postcards from whatever city we are in, so it might as well be from this saba’s shop. He made enough money off of us to buy a bottle of water, but he was friendly throughout our brief stay.
We went to more than a few shops in Jerusalem that sell anything from spices to kippot. Many of these shops are owned and/or operated by Palestinians. Some are owned by Arab Israelis. Fewer still are run by Jewish Israelis. The level of customer service between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem was graphically apparent. Whether this was because Tel Aviv is far more liberal than Jerusalem or because Jerusalem’s population is quickly shifting from predominantly Jewish to Arab is beyond my level of comprehension. There could always be other reasons, but then that takes away the black and white fun of it all.
Most of the Arab shopkeepers were aggressive. It was very important to them that we buy whatever crap they were trying to unload. The Wife made the mistake of trying to haggle for some cheap bauble of which she was not entirely interested. In East Asia, she would try to lower the price to something ridiculous and then walk away if the owner refused. But the Wife is clearly neither Jewish nor Arab. She is obviously a foreigner, just as I am on her side of the planet. When Arab shopkeepers see her Chinese face they get dollar signs in their eyes, just as Chinese shopkeepers react when they see me. I found it amusing. Soy sauce for the duck and all that.
But where the Chinese will inevitably lower their prices from the standard 1000% markup to something reasonable, Arab shopkeepers seem to think that haggling is knocking off two percent. Many of them were personally offended that my millionaire wife did not want to pay $50 for 10¢ trinkets, even when she actually wanted to buy them. She learned her lesson in Paris. People sell Eiffel Tower trinkets at the Eiffel Tower, of all places, for €25. After she bought a few, we noticed a small shop on Place du Petit Pont (the blue one near the phone booth) that sold the exact same thing for 50c. In South Africa, she wanted to buy some brightly colored wooden animals that are sold pretty much all over the dark continent. Despite her preternatural fear of the Big Black Man, she got into a heated debate over carved zebras.
Loud arguments over prices are common in East Asia. That is how people haggle. In the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, I found my white American ass completely surrounded by dark hairy Arabs. It started with the Wife and some shopkeeper going back and forth over prices. When I haggle, I give up fairly quickly. If we cannot agree on a price, I move on. The Wife can haggle, some would say argue, all day. Other shopkeepers, apparently not too terribly occupied, gathered around. When the first shopkeeper suggested that we follow him into some back alley to look at additional merchandise, I suggested that we probably should not. Mostly because I had better things to do. But when the Wife is shopping, there are no other considerations.
We eventually walked away with some cheap crap that the Wife was proud to have bought for 8% less than she saw somewhere else. It was only later that I reflected on my white American ass being surrounded by dark hairy Arabs.
At no point during our Old City trinket shopping extravaganza did I feel that my or my wife’s safety was in jeopardy. What bothers me most about trinket shopping is that it is a complete waste of time. I am also not too excited about turning a place with such a rich history as the Old City into a shopping mall. Jesus walked on this very road, buy a commemorative thimble. That house was built five thousand years ago, half off baseball caps. Being surrounded by Arabs in the Muslim Quarter was just like being surrounded by Christians in the Armenian Quarter. I doubt anyone saw me as the enemy. I looked more likely like a giant bag of cash. The locals have seen plenty of people who look like me, though less dashing, spend far too much money on tourist bullshit. If only they knew how little money I had in my pocket.
Arab shopkeepers, like African shopkeepers and Chinese shopkeepers, are just trying to make a living. They are mostly not criminals. Other than their ridiculous markups. If they wanted to violently rob people, they would probably not sit in front of their shops smoking all day.
I feel no fear in these back alleys surrounded by people who refuse to be white because I do not believe that all Arabs are terrorists, all Africans are thieves, all Chinese are Triad. If there were anything to paranoid white xenophobia, there would probably not be very many white people left. About half of the world is Arab, African and Chinese. Whitey would not stand a chance.
Our European forefathers enslaved half the world in their travels, so one might assume that these people do not fully appreciate our loud visits to their most sacred sites and the Big Mac wrappers we leave behind, but in my experience most people are not nearly as vindictive as we are.
And the Old City has uniformed IDF soldiers with M16s all over the place. Few places are safer for the white man.
What I was very conscious of was the disparity in the quality and cleanliness between the Muslim Quarter and Jewish Quarter. The Jewish Quarter was about as clean as you can get a million-year-old stone and dirt city to be. The Muslim Quarter reminded me of China. Not in the suicidal driving and public urination, but in the use of their own streets as garbage cans. At the end of the day, the Muslim Quarter looked like a place where Fred Sanford would be comfortable. The Jewish Quarter looked the same day and night, other than lighting and crowds.
Someone could probably argue that the Muslim Quarter becomes a garbage can at night while the Jewish Quarter stays clean because the Israelis in charge of waste management treat both areas unequally. I have no idea if that is true, but regardless of what the Israeli authorities do, there is no requirement that people dump all of their trash on their own streets. It is just as likely that people throw their garbage on the streets to force the Israelis to do more work. It is even more likely that they simply do what their ancestors have been doing for as long as they have been there. People in cultures older than mine have a funny way of not always doing things in the most modern and progressive ways.
Another amusing difference between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem was our hotels. I spent a bit of time before the trip looking at hotels and maps of Tel Aviv. For my effort, we ended up in what has to be one of the better hotels at which I have ever stayed. I did far less research for Jerusalem and simply went with one of the hotels recommended by the organization that was hosting the Wife’s conference. I mostly chose it because it was around the corner from the conference hotel. We would have stayed at the conference hotel but, try as I might, I simply cannot get money to grow on trees.
The Jerusalem hotel is supposedly five stars and well beyond our price range. But there was a substantial discount through the conference and I thought it might be a nice idea to stay at a highfalutin hotel for a change. I could have found a much better hotel at a lower price had I done any research.
The Jerusalem hotel also claimed to have Jacuzzi bathtubs in the rooms. I live in a country where large bathtubs are seen as a luxury, like soap. If I have a choice between a hotel room with a large tub that shoots water out of the sides and one without any kind of tub at all, I go for the watersports. Probably not in a deviant way.
Israel, like the rest of Asia, most of Europe and large parts of Africa, is a smoker’s paradise. Most of the people on this planet disagree on pretty much everything and are willing to kill and die to show that their opinions are more important than yours. Humans will happily kill in the name of their religion, nationality, race, social status, economic classification and favorite sports team. The one thing that most people can agree on is that shoving into your face a stick full of twigs and chemicals which will kill you slowly and painfully and lighting it on fire is a good thing.
As someone who prefers not to breathe in noxious fumes, I am a minority. But unlike those whiny Indians who are still complaining that we stole all their land and killed most of them, or someone who tortures and murders babies, I have no rights. I am not recognized by anyone anywhere as a minority and I will get no preferential treatment from any university or court of law for my status. What I will get are annoyed looks from hotel personnel who find it inconvenient that I do not want to be poisoned.
The Jerusalem hotel booked us into a smoking room. I reserved a non-smoking room, of course, but what one reserves and pays for in Asia often has little to do with what one actually receives. I had hoped that Israel would be different from the rest of Asia, but even though we think of tiny hairless people with funny eyes when we say Asia, Israel is still in Asia. The reception staff at the Jerusalem hotel was none too happy that I wanted a different room and that they had to push two buttons on their keyboard and click their mouse once or twice. I got tired just watching such strenuous labor.
This may be why the room we were eventually placed in was a bit of a dump. The smoking room was probably nicer. If you can ignore the hideous stench. Or perhaps this was simply not a five star hotel. The service was certainly not five star. It only took them a few minutes to show how much my existence was bothering them. Nice hotels usually wait at least an hour to show their disdain.
I ordinarily do not care about five star service. Just give me a relatively clean room with a refrigerator and the fewest number of insects crawling over me at night as possible and I am satisfied. But when I pay more, even at a reduced price, for something that advertises itself as five star, I do not look forward to one star service. I have no doubt that the room would have been nicer had we paid full price or even accepted the smoking room. When groups like the Wife’s conference get package deals on rooms, they do not usually get the best rooms. I knew that our tiny room would look nothing like the two bedroom family suite decorated and professionally photographed on the website. I understand how these things work.
But I do not expect a five star hotel to treat me like a waste of their precious time. The people at the front desk were offended when I shamelessly asked them where the nearest grocery store was. I often print out my own maps when I go somewhere I have never been, as I did for this trip, but your average hotel will have maps of the city or neighborhood, and sometimes their maps are better than mine. Given time, I will always wander around the hotel and see what the neighborhood has to offer, but I have found that the easiest way to find something very close to the hotel is to simply ask someone at the front desk. They usually know where they work. When I asked if this hotel had such maps, the response might as well have been, “They’re over there, asshole”. And they were not in a display case easy to see from the lobby. They were in a box behind the front desk.
The attitude of the staff was nothing compared to the quality of their work. We tried the hotel’s breakfast on our first morning there because the Wife likes hotel breakfasts for some reason and the Tel Aviv hotel had the best hotel breakfast I have ever had. This is not much of a compliment since most hotel breakfasts are little more than airline food at hotel prices, but the Tel Aviv hotel had quaint neighborhood bistro breakfasts at no price. We thought that great hotel breakfasts might be a nationwide situation. It was not.
The Jerusalem hotel’s breakfast was horrible. Outside of Tel Aviv and Japan, I have very rarely had a good hotel breakfast. This was worse than soup kitchen food. I have had better meals in high school cafeterias. And I did not go to a five star high school. My high school cafeteria actually burned down, and their food was better than this.
The housekeeping staff had a habit of not cleaning the house. I do not insist that the bedsheets are tight enough to bounce quarters. I do not even care if they are not changed every day. I do not change the sheets at home every day. But I am enough of a spoiled American to want the sheets and pillow cases that I will sleep on to have the lowest volume of blood stains available. When the Wife and I returned from our outing one day, it looked like someone was twirling razor blades between their fingers while making the bed. Each stain was little more than a few drops, but there were hundreds of stains all over the sheets and pillow cases. There is no way that anyone but a blind person could not have seen all the blood while making the bed.
When I called the front desk and very calmly, but maybe a little more sarcastically than necessary, suggested that most guests probably do not like bloody sheets, the person on the other end of the phone accused me of lying. Not on the bed but about the bed. I asked her why anyone would possibly make up such a story. She had no idea, but my call clearly interrupted her game of minesweeper.
The reason all of this was important, other than the health issues of sleeping in someone else’s blood, was because this was the first time the Wife and I had been to Israel. Your first trip to any country decides whether you will ever return. Your hotel can make all the difference in the world. Travel snobs say that the hotel is only a place to sleep and that most of your time should be spent outside, but where and how you sleep will most definitely affect your attitude and your impressions of what you see and do outside.
I stayed at a nice little hotel the first time I went to Korea. It was nothing fancy, but very clean and very comfortable. The only bad thing about it was that the Krispy Kreme across the street did not yet exist when I was there. That hotel helped give me a good first impression of Korea, and I have been back a few times. I stayed at a dump the second time I went to Korea. It was a cockroach motel in a terrible location. Had that trip been my first, I would never want to go back to Korea.
While Israel is an impressive country, the Jerusalem hotel left a giant blood stain on our memories. Even with all of the conference discounts, it is not a free trip. This is not somewhere we can go every day. Had we only stayed at that hotel on this trip, I doubt I would ever be able to convince the Wife to go back. Fortunately for us and Israel, we also stayed at an exceptional hotel in Tel Aviv. The staff at the Tel Aviv hotel went out of their way to make us feel welcome. I interrupted whatever they were doing several times with my existence, but they never let on that they had anything better to do. We checked in at 2am, because shit happens when you fly from Hong Kong to Tel Aviv, but the service at the front desk was as good as it would be at 2pm. All hotels should be like this, but most are certainly not.
The Jerusalem hotel was supposedly five star, but nothing about it felt like a five star hotel, except the price. I think the Tel Aviv hotel was supposed to be three stars, but it felt more like a five star hotel to me. I have nothing negative to say about the Tel Aviv hotel, and I know how to find the negative in pretty much any situation. I suppose I could complain that one of the free bicycles we rode around town had a slightly flat tire once, but I am not even sure how that is the hotel’s fault. And by the time we came back from using other free bicycles, the flat tire was fixed. Also, the free laptop that they let us use with the free wireless internet did not know Chinese.
Israel is one of those places that tend to have a lasting effect on people. It is where three of the trendiest and the two most violent religions were made up. Millions of non-Hindus travel to Israel every year to see where someone did something and told other people to do things. It is where Moses brought back his people after Yul Brynner let them go. It is where David Bowie killed Willem Dafoe to free the rest of us from sin, thus ensuring that we are never sinners. It is where a Danish cartoon learned to challenge the corrupted word of the Great Turtle in the Sky and teach people the true meaning of fashion. Sadly, there are no good movies about this.
Jerusalem is important enough to enough people that it has been fought over since the dawn of time. Countless people have died to conquer and defend it. Jerusalem is a good looking city, and that new light rail system is a blessing, but it is too close to the desert for my taste. If an invading army came to massacre in the name of their one true god who is the same as everyone else’s one true god, I would go to Tel Aviv. I prefer coastal cities.
Some people go to Jerusalem and buy Old City snow globes. Some people develop a messiah complex. I never buy souvenirs.
I walked the Temple Mount and Via Dolorosa and saw grown men openly weep. I had a front row seat on Calvary and waited in line to look at an old tomb where women cried. I touched the Western Wall and felt nothing other than relief while entering the tunnels. The naturally cold shaded stone walls are a miracle when it is 35 degrees outside. I sat at the Torah ark and popped open a book, surrounded by people looking for knowledge. Not being able to read Hebrew, I came away without much enlightenment. I left Israel with neither Chinese-made t-shirts nor Jerusalem syndrome. But the hummus was fantastic.
I have been to a few places that tend to have a lasting effect on people. Africa is one of those places that wraps itself around you as soon as you get off the plane. Like walking into an air conditioned shopping mall in summer. New York and Amsterdam are cities where I would gladly work in the food service industry just to be able to live there, if only it were economically possible to survive in New York or Amsterdam on food service paychecks. But I am not at all willing to kill and die for these places. There is always somewhere else to go.
Perhaps it is because I am a soulless heathen.
