Bethlehem

I was only in Bethlehem for a short time and I never really got out of the car. I got fleeced by an Israeli couple who ended up making 500 shekels off me. The original offer was 400 to get me to Tel Aviv where I would spend the day, and then they would drop me off at the airport. That would have been worth it. Then he basically insisted on taking me to Bethlehem (because I'm American and therefore a devout Christian) spouting a lot of nonsense about how he was one of the only ones who could get me through. While it is true that you can't pass through on foot, getting there is not as difficult as he made out. Certainly not for a white American who just screams tourist. After getting there (and not stopping since he said it was too busy for me to get into any of the churches) we went back where I found that the price had doubled. Doubled for a ten minute stop over! I was utterly disgusted. I had to say to screw Tel Aviv and just have them drop me off at the airport for 500 shekels. Worse than that he wanted me to be happy about it. I was sitting in the back seat fuming quietly and he told me to be friendly because I got a great deal. I can handle being fleeced, but I draw the line at having people tell me I should be thankful for it. I may have gotten ripped off in Jordan but at least there it was only business. I wasn't expected to like it. Which made this an absolutely rotten end to an excellent trip.

Bethlehem is mad close to Jerusalem. I was always kind of suspicious about those biblical films where Mary and Joseph stop off at Jerusalem on the way to Bethlehem, but it's really quite close and on the way. Score one for Hollywood. Inside the city there was a lovely wall of graffiti saying (in English) "Merry Christmas to the world from the Bethlehem slums." I couldn't nab a picture unfortunately because the car went past it too quickly, but I  thought it was cool.

When I first saw these buildings I though, "All right, Minas Tirith!" Clearly the Palestinians aren't doing quite as bad as they make out if they're building new housing complexes of such scale. I still think it looks absolutely beautiful, but about a month ago I saw a picture of the new Israeli settler complex near Bethlehem. And guess what this is? So that nice beautiful impressive monument is essentially there rubbing Palestinian noses in the fact that Israel builds better, nicer houses and is doing so on their land. This isn't a very big zoom. This is it as seen right from the center of Bethlehem. It can't be more than a couple miles away. Suddenly the fortress that I thought it looked like doesn't seem so far fetched...

The reason that travel to and from Bethlehem is difficult is because it's right at the beginning of Palestinian territory. This giant wall separates Israel from Palestine. They let tourists right through with their foreign visas, but most everybody else gets a serious check. All in all, not a nice city but I'd be willing to give it another chance since I clearly never saw the good bit. The Christian churches here are supposed to be very nice.

My opinions on Israel as a whole kind of took the opposite path of Jordan. While Jordan started off leaving a very bad impression before going good, Israel started off good and then went bad. Not that I hate the country but I've seen enough of it to have some very strong opinions on the way they handle things. The way they treat the Palestinians is just wrong. There really is no way around it. They take over more and more land and then get mad when the Palestinians fight back. Not that the Palestinians are in the right either. Their methods of fighting back often involve killing entire settler families or suicide bombers. Still, there can never be peace in the region as long as Israel keeps taking over more land. Whether you support them or not you cannot deny that basic fact. If the Palestinian resistance died out tomorrow they'd be living in refugee camps the following day. Waiting for the plane back I heard one of the most disturbing comments ever. I was hanging out with a Jewish friend I'd made while over there and who happened to be getting the same plane back as me and he ran into one of his old friends. This guy was a nice friendly Israeli who grew up in Manchester but moved to Israel. And what scared me about him wasn't that he acted like a crazy fanatic, or started preaching at me or anything. It was what he said. He was telling his friend about how another friend came back from Eilat (in Israel) and he had asked him how he enjoyed his time in Egypt. The joke being that Eilat is outside the borders of Israel as outlined in the Torah. He then went on to tell me in a matter-of-fact voice that while he was absolutely against giving up an inch of Israeli ground as outlined in the Torah, he would be willing to see Eilat abandoned. The flip side of course being that to get the rest of the land outlined in the Bible they needed to drive the Palestinians off it. He said quite clearly that this land was given to them by God and no one else had the right to it. So there you have Israeli fanaticism. It's not as showy as the Muslim kind with the shouting and machine guns but it exists and it is deadly.

I should say that I don't think all Israelis are like that. It seems to be more common in the ones who immigrate from overseas. They come to Israel for deeply religious reasons and it is not surprising that they are fanatical. It worries me because that is exactly what was happening during the Crusades. The local lords treated the Arab lords much like they would treat Christian lords. They fought them when they felt they could gain something but when the fighting ended they had to live with them and their crazy pagan beliefs. But when new Crusaders came they wanted to fight the infidel. Any infidel would do. Starting with the ones who served under the local lords. For that reason they could never live in peace, even if they had wanted to. Carrying the analogy too far is useless but I believe that the basic concept still stands. The foundation of the state of Israel is based on the idea that they will recover all that was once theirs. It's nice to see that the United States is distancing itself a bit from a nation that refuses to back down from driving its neighbors from their land.

Apart from that minor detail Israel is quite nice.

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31°42'16.21"N, 35°12'26.77"E