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A Journey, Part 6. The Human Spirit

Having obtained visas for Eritrea in Cairo, arriving back in Jordan we applied for Saudi transit visas in Amman and were told the application could take up to a month to be processed. We’d heard that we could cross into Israel at the King Hussein bridge without getting our passports stamped by either country, so we decided to use the opportunity to spend a few weeks in Israel.

I’ve always loved crowd watching and I loved watching the pilgrims in Israel. No doubt there’s a fine line one has to keep when mixing the profit motives of commerce with the earnestness of religion, but the guides and merchants of the Holy Land have had centuries to perfect their craft. Our travels in Israel started at the Sea of Galilee and as I watched the guides, I imagined the first guides, telling stories and inventing places as they went, for the benefit of the first pilgrims. Nowhere is the commercial aspect more blatant than in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem, where the gaudiness of the wares has to be seen to be believed. Of all the artifacts, my favourite was a holographic picture of Christ’s face with closed eyes, but if you stood directly in front of him, his eyes would open. I found that if I stood in exactly the right place, I could get him to give me a conspiratorial wink.

All through my school years, Christianity was part of the program and we said prayers, had readings from the Bible, and sang hymns at school every day. As a child I can remember wondering about the Jews. Who were these people and how was it that they came to be the chosen ones, rather than us or anyone else? As I’ve grown older, although naivety has lessened, the underlying interest has never waned.

So many of my icons hail from this scattered and disparate group of people. Einstein, Sagan, and Bohr. Bizet, Mendelssohnn, and Mahler. And that’s just the start of physics and music. Wherever I look to human endeavours, especially in the humanities and sciences, I am astounded by the contributions that Jewish people have made. How can it be that such a small and dispersed cultural group that has faced such adversity could have had such a profound effect on getting us to where we are?

Although it’s human nature to go about life skirting difficulty on the path of least resistance, I think it’s an irony that as people we’re often defined by the adversity we’ve faced. It’s through adversity, perhaps more than anything else, that we grow. When facing the most difficult of circumstances, we dream, and dreams are the wind to the embers of the soul. What person enslaved doesn’t dream of freedom? Are there vanquished who don’t dream of vindication? What alchemy starts when we combine dreams with the appetite for risk and opportunism that adversity encourages?

In a recent interview, jazz legend Hugh Masekela was asked what it was like as a young black man growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, he responsed;

What people don’t know about oppression is that the oppressor works much harder. You always grew up being told you were not smart enough or not fast enough, but we all lived from the time we were children to beat the system.

Through the ages, it seems that the Jews have always faced adversity. From their Biblical enslavement by the Egyptians to diaspora following conquests by the Babylonians and then the Romans, and from the ghettos of Europe and North Africa to the formation of Israel and to the present time, Jewish history has never been without struggle for survival. More than any other group of people, they have survived everything that has been thrown at them and somehow come out stronger.

I still have such vivid memories of the holocaust museum in former Jewish ghetto in Prague that I’d visited a few years earlier, where the weight of the experience overwhelmed me. We’re all too familiar with shocking images from that dark chapter in human history, but it wasn’t that. Instead, I was caught off guard by the drawings of the children. In those places of death and deprivation, facing their worst nightmares, they drew pictures of rainbows and flowers and butterflies. They dreamed of freedom.

Standing amid the ruins of the hilltop fortress at Masada, I experienced a similar feeling. It was to there, after the fall of the second temple in 70AD, that about a thousand Jewish rebels retreated, refusing to surrender to Rome. In the two year siege that followed, the Romans spared no effort to bring about the downfall of this last pocket of Jewish resistance. By the time that the massive ramp up the side of the mountain was completed, the besieged Jews, now close to starvation, chose to take their own lives rather than surrender to slavery.

To me, more than any other group of people, the Jews represent the indomitable nature of the human spirit. Their history, more than that of any other group, shows the futility of oppression and persecution. In the terrible conditions of the ghettos of Europe and North Africa, they never lost faith in themselves. Facing pogroms and persistent insecurity of their physical possessions, they developed intellect and culture, the things that nobody could take from them. Confronted with hostility, they took strength from each other and developed their deep sense of belonging. A people without a country, they never stopped believing that their dream of returning to the promised land would one day become reality. I believe that it’s this sense of belonging that so many Jews have, that draws them in numbers to Israel despite generations spent in exile. If ever a group of people deserved first nation status, surely it would be them.

When I look to the situation in Israel today, and despite the affinity that I have always felt for the Jews and their plight, I can’t but be astounded by the incongruity of what is being played out in the occupied territories. Entire Palestinian communities are fenced and walled off. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in a recent letter to student leaders at the University of California – Berkeley;

I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid. I have witnessed the humiliation of Palestinian men, women, and children made to wait hours at Israeli military checkpoints routinely when trying to make the most basic of trips to visit relatives or attend school or college, and this humiliation is familiar to me and the many black South Africans who were corralled and regularly insulted by the security forces of the Apartheid government.

For me though, it’s not in the parallels to South Africa that I see incongruity, but rather to those in Jewish history itself. In essence, the very systems that were used against them for centuries, and which they should have pledged to outlaw forever, they now use against the Palestinian people. But the Israelis of all people should know that the oppression wrought on these people will ultimately only make them stronger. I can’t help wondering where it will all stop and whether it will escalate into madness as it did in Europe. Isn’t it obvious that peace and reconciliation is the only long term solution?

Most people would agree that suicide bombing is a crime against humanity, but I can’t help asking myself what would make, for instance, a well educated twenty year old girl from a stable family, strap herself with explosives? What threshold of desperation has to be breached? At that level, I think there is little difference between her actions and those of the Sicarii at Masada, who might have done the same thing had the option existed when they took their lives.

And as with almost all modern conflicts, the situation persists despite the tragic reality that the vast majority of people on both sides want peace and would be prepared to compromise to get it. I recently came across a quote that stopped me in my tracks;

Naturally, the common people don’t want war … but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

Fittingly, it was said by Herman Göring at the Nuremberg trials, and I believe that it applies not only to Israel and it’s antagonists, but universally. War breeds war. Where are the peacemakers among our leaders? By this, I mean the true peacemakers, not those who talk about peace while increasing military spending. Why should we have war when we know that peace is the only answer? I fear that as long as ordinary people remain silent and allow the hawks to lead, peace will remain forever elusive.

What would Christ, that Jew and greatest of teachers and peacemakers, say of the reality that most of today’s weapons of war come from supposedly Christian countries run by openly Christian leaders? Or of the wars carried out by those same countries, in His name? In truth, it is impossible to reconcile war with Christ’s teachings in any way and many Christians have lost the true meaning of Christianity; It’s not about greed and power and war, but about faith and hope and love.

A Journey, Part 5. Smoke, Mirrors & Machismo

From the few weeks now spent in the Middle East, we were already becoming used to the prevailing gender polarization that manifests itself in so many ways. Everywhere, the theme of men in the public limelight and women occupying the private shadows, was repeated. I noted in my journal that while just about every man smoked, I handn’t seen a single woman smoking in public. 

Leaving Damascus, we continued south and crossed from Syria into Jordan. Knowing that our entry to Africa would be through Eritrea via Jeddah, we approached the Saudi Embassy in Amman to see if we could get a transit visa, but were told that we first needed a visa for Eritrea. The closest Eritrean embassy was in Cairo and so a few days after arriving in Jordan we left the car in a customs store in Amman and took a bus south to the red sea port of Aqaba, to board a ferry for Egypt.

I’d given up smoking a little short of a year earlier and as a reformed smoker I will never forget the five hour bus trip to Aqaba. We were accustomed to non-smoking buses and trains, where smokers would take the opportunity of a stop for a quick fix. This trip was the exact opposite; smokers ruled the bus leaving the non-smokers to flee for fresh air at every opportunity. It turned out to be the same on trains in Egypt where no-smoking signs in carriages served a purely decorative role.

Once in Egypt, we planned to travel down the Red Sea coast of the Sinai peninsula and then across to St Catherine’s at Mount Sinai before heading for Cairo.  From Cairo, we would travel up the Nile to the delta and then down to Aswan, visiting the major historical sites on the way.

This was one of the most frustrating periods of the journey. If Syria was hassle free and hospitable due to lack of tourists, I found Egypt to be exactly the opposite. I don’t think it’s that the Egyptians are any less friendly than people from other countries, but rather that the abundance of tourists seems to have created a veneer of hardened individuals, intent on profit and well practiced at deception, that can be hard to penetrate and that unfairly shapes ones perceptions about what Egyptians are like as people. It’s not something that is unique to Egypt or to travel; Hidden agendas and deception are often present where vested interests exist and external or public buy-in is required.  I certainly see much of this surrounding the everyday events on today’s larger political, commercial, and military stages.

From the time that we got off the ferry in Nuweiba until we finally left for Jordan from the same port a few weeks later, we were subjected to a near constant barrage of misinformation, almost all aimed at parting us from our cash. Just trying to find out where the bus station was yielded half a dozen different explanations, in each case too far to reach on foot and accompanied with an offer to take us there for the best price. In the end we found the bus station ourselves, a short walk from the port. In this environment, we soon learned a few rules of the road, the main one being always to regard any solicitation with deep suspicion. But the downside of rules like this is that while they may offer some protection against charlatans, they also reduce the likelihood of genuine and meaningful interaction.

Some of the scams we encountered were elaborate. On one occasion, while walking up a main street in Cairo, a tout approached us with the usual offers for hotels and Giza. Almost immediately, a car pulled up alongside and a uniformed man jumped out and roughly bundled the tout into the back seat before confronting us. Claiming to be from the secret police, he demanded to see our passports. This all happened in a few seconds. Then he fired off more questions about where we were going, why we were consorting the man, and demanded that we come with him. I insisted that we were guests in Egypt, free to walk in a public street. As the exchange drew on and grew more heated, I noticed that he was becoming increasingly edgy. Realizing that it might be a scam, I started making more noise, demanded to see his identification and walked around to the front of the car to note the registration number. No sooner had I done this than he shot back into the passenger seat and they sped off. Looking back, I shudder to think what might have happened had we got into that car. This wasn’t the safest time to be travelling in Egypt – in the months leading up to and following our visit, 27 tourists were killed by extremists.

Although this was the most frightening instance of deception that we encountered, in Cairo the next scamster always seemed to be waiting in the wings. To make matters worse, it was nearly impossible to walk any significant distance with Hayley without lewd cat calls from ever present groups of youths, strutting their stuff and full of the bravado that thrives in the group and evaporates in its absence. The truth, I’ve found, is that while machismo masquerades as a public display of individual manliness and courage, in reality it’s more a mask used to obscure insecurity. When a large dust storm finally blew in, we were only too happy to take the train south to Luxor.

I’ve been fascinated by the ancient Egyptians for as long as I can remember, possibly because there’s so much mystery surrounding their endeavours. Starting more than twice as long ago as the beginning of Greco-Roman period, so much less has survived to shed light on how and why they did the things they did. In Greece and Rome, I’ve never had much difficulty in imagining the Greeks or Romans in their ancient roles, but for some reason I found this more difficult in Egypt. The sheer persistence of the kingdom, enduring for more than three millenia before Egypt finally became a province of Rome in 30 BC, seems alien in today’s world.

Of all the historical sites, it’s images of the temple complex at Karnak, with its massive graceful columns and numerous detailed carvings, that remain with me more than any other. In the statues and friezes we get glimpses into their daily lives and the truth that many aspects of their civilization were little different to ours today. This was a male dominated world, with records of only a handful of female pharaohs. Friezes showing piles of severed phalluses and hands are reminders that war has always been barbaric and brutal. Among the powerful at least, the fear of mortality and death was pervasive; It’s a telling truth that most of what we know about ancient Egypt has been gained from the elaborate tombs designed to ensure the smooth transition of the rich and powerful to the afterlife.

Today it’s hard for me to separate the cause of many of the ills that beset us from the history of male dominance in our societies. So many of our institutions, including business, government, and of course the military, have been designed for males, by males. Should we then be surprised that males continue to dominate? I think not. Institutions designed for intense competition, with conflict and dominance playing an central role, will naturally appeal to the male psyche rather than the female, which is centered more on nurture and cooperation. Despite this, the tendency is to regard this as a failing on the part of women. My view is that it’s not a matter of aptitude at all, but of inclination.

Instead of bemoaning the gender imbalances in our institutions and trying to alter women to partake and perform equally in our male dominated realms, I sometimes think we might be better off turning the analysis around to address other imbalances. Why is it the men who haunt our streets and fill our prisons? Who are those obsessed with power? Who dominate through use of force and violence? In South Africa, we’re beset by violent crime, but it’s not the women we’re afraid of. I suspect that if we males could somehow change our ways to leave our societies without violence and with empty prisons, then the gender bias elsewhere might disappear by itself, along with a host of other problems that plague us.