19) A Walk in the Gardens

 
After Yad Vashem, we retreated back across the Green Line. The taxi wanted to overcharge us, and so we paid him less than he asked for. He honked at us, and shouted out the window, but we simply walked a few metres in front of the Damascus Gate. Once we crossed that imaginary line, we were no longer in Israel. We were in East Jerusalem; we were in Palestine. And although I felt perfectly safe there, the Israeli Jews did not. In fact, often I heard that there were some cases of even murder that went uninvestigated in East Jerusalem. The police would not go in, because it was universally understood that it was too dangerous for them.

Our hostel was right on the line dividing the two tribes. This afforded us the luxury of being able to enjoy the benefits of both cultures by walking only for two minutes in either direction. What I liked best was that whenever one culture got to you, you could simply walk across the line into the other.

Tired of garbage on the sidewalk that keeps sticking to your shoes? Tired of dingy little restaurants and hankering for a place that feels like Starbucks? Cross onto the Israeli side. Tired of high prices and expensive food? Annoyed to have to wait at crosswalks when no cars are passing? Cross to the Palestinian side. Want to go find a shop that sells alcohol? Cross to the Israeli side. Stores closed on Saturday? Cross to the Palestinian side. Stores closed on Friday? Cross to the Israeli side.

Jerusalem really is one of the most unique cities in the world. It is divided into two clean-cut halves, with the walled old city forming a nucleus in the center. It is a far cry from Beirut, with its crazy patchwork of warring tribes, where your personal security and street smarts can alter so radically from block to block. And although it is certain that the whole city lives in tension, and that each side is suspicious of the other, they do live out each day in a tenable peace. And that does indeed make it one of the world’s great multicultural cities.

——

I awoke to a loud, business-like knock on my hostel room door. I opened it to find a female Israeli soldier standing on the other side, in military fatigues bulging with radios, tasers, and other equipment. She looked at my half-naked body, and I stared back at her, mouth gaping, for half a minute. Then it occurred to me to reach for a shirt. Sean, lying in his bed in nothing but a pair of shorts, looked up from his book and frowned.

“Passport.”

I gave her my passport. She flipped through it while I stood there, watching her with concern, wondering what on earth gave this woman the right to wake me up, open up my room, and demand to see my identification. She seemed unfazed.

“You were in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan?”

“Yes.”

She gave it back to me. I’m really glad she didn’t ask me what I was doing there. I’m sure I would have responded by saying something incredibly flippant, and I promptly would no doubt have received a full interrogation on my travels and my intentions, and probably so would have my comrades. And then, after the soldiers left, Nickie would have ripped my face off.

“They come by every once in a while to check people’s passports. The checks are totally random.”

I asked Ali, Osama’s cousin, what business the soldiers had showing up in their hostel. I thought it might have been because of the freckle-faced American who came to the hostel and took a hundred photos of it a few days before. But it appeared the checks were relatively regular.

“You see, in Israel, every hotel and hostel has to register a person’s passport online immediately after they check in. That way, the security services always know where people are. But in Palestine, we don’t give them this information. So the only way they can keep track is to show up here themselves.”

“Where’s Osama?” I asked him.

“He always leaves whenever they come. They don’t like him because of all the films he makes.”

“How does he know when they are coming?”

Ali smiled. “Someone calls him. We are all friends here in Palestine. We look out for one another.”

I remarked on this to Osama when he came back. He smiled benignly at my uncomfortable shock that the Israelis regularly invaded his hostel.

“This place is known. Most of the journalists and foreign activists choose to stay here. Even the Lonely Planet says ‘come for the politics’. You know, Rachel Corrie stayed here for a couple of weeks.”

“Did she?”

Rachel Corrie was an American girl who came here to protest the occupation. She died in 2003, when she stood up in front of an Israeli bulldozer that was there to demolish a Palestinian house. She refused to move, just like that famous video of Tiannamen square, when the democratic protester held out his hand and forced a whole line of tanks to stop.

Only sometimes, the tanks don’t stop. The bulldozer crushed Rachel and flattened the house she was standing in front of. She was 21 years old.

Osama was helping to film a documentary on the incident. There is a memorial website up for Rachel right now, and a play has been put into production, called “My Name is Rachel Corrie.”

Indeed, the Faisal hostel was a haven for foreigners coming to document the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And for our group especially, it was a haven for a different reason. At nine dollars a night, it was the cheapest hotel in town. And we developed such a firm repore with Osama and the other owners that we felt completely comfortable leaving our valuables there. All this was easily worth putting up with the cold showers and the frigid temperatures during the December nights.

But we got ready quickly. We were taking the bus to Tel Aviv that day. We had only three days left until the girls flew out…we wanted to see a few other places in Israel, and the Jewish cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa were on the list.

Tel Aviv was just as uninteresting as we thought it would be. It was only 60 years old, making it one of the newest cities in the world. It was a port on the Mediterranean Sea, and of course, 100% Jewish. It held Israel’s international airport, and no excellent sights. Except the beach. And that’s precisely where we went for Maccabee beers at one in the afternoon after we arrived.

Tel Aviv was cool in one respect: we were sitting in a city that was entirely North American in style in the Middle East. Everywhere else we visited was clearly influenced by Arab culture, even the Christian cities of Lebanon. But in this one, the buildings were new and made in the modern, office-building style, the streets were well layed out, there was a city bus system, and all the shops were of the same style and cleanliness as any city from home. It reminded me of Vancouver or New York, except that every street had a Hebrew name.

The city also showed the diversity of Israeli Jews far better than Jerusalem could. In Jerusalem, if you lived near the old city, you would think that every Jew was either a practicing Orthodox zealot, or a non-practicing European taxi-driver or shop owner who spent their time listening to music that was something out of Fiddler on the Roof. But in Tel Aviv, you could hear groups of American Jews speaking English, and the streets were lined with Moroccan and Ethiopian restaurants.

As we walked half-bored through the sunny streets, the gang urged me to call our contact for the next day. “You can only go as part of an organized tour, and there are two terraces. They had a spot in the Upper Terrace tour for tomorrow, but the tour is only in Hebrew. I reserved a place for all of us.”

We were on the train to Haifa the next morning. We were going with one purpose only: to see the Baha’i Gardens.

——

The Baha’i faith is one of those small-time new religions. It was born in the 19th Century in Iran, and today it holds only about six million believers. Even so, it is one of the most international faiths in the world…its texts have been translated into over 800 languages, and traveling preachers have brought it as far east as Southeast Asia, and as far west as Europe and America.

The two most major Baha’i shrines in the world are both in Israel. They are in Haifa and Acre. In Haifa, a small orange-domed building housed the bones of the Bab…one of the founding fathers of the religion who was executed in Iran over a hundred years ago for preaching a doctrine contrary to the teachings of Islam. His remains were smuggled out of the country and brought to the holy land.

The Baha’i have bought a mountainside in Haifa and created a magnificent garden out of it. It is a fantastic geographical choice for a monument…because it is composed of an entire hillside, everyone in the city can see the beautiful terraces from far away. Also, when we showed up at the top of the Upper Terrace, we had a sparkling view of Haifa: thousands of white buildings shone in the sun, and the sapphire ocean stretched across the horizon.

The terraces themselves were tailored and beautiful. Each of them had their own fountain. Running beside the flights of seven hundred stairs were small streams of water, also flowing down channels cut in a stair pattern. Some marvellous architect had cut the angles of them so that as it flowed down each set of ten stairs, the water in built to a head, and splashed louder and louder as it went. Between that and the fountains, the whole gardens were filled with the therapeutic sound of running water.

We passed on our right a building known as the Universal House of Justice. It was all white, constructed with domes and pillars. It is the seat of the governing body of the Baha’i faith…a council elected to deal with all its affairs. The Baha’i believe that Moses, Jesus, Muhammed, Zoroaster, Krishna, and many other prophets around the world were all messengers of the single God. They believe that all religions aim at the same thing, and they work against the racial and religious prejudice that divides the planet.

They are perhaps the only religion in the world that believes, as a central tenet, in the establishment of a world federal system. They believe in the political unity in all humankind.

To my annoyance, however, we were not allowed to go near the Universal House of Justice, since we were not Baha’i. The same with the Shrine of the Bab…we could take photos of its exterior, but we were not allowed insider it, or even near it. It’s the same principle by which we were not allowed inside the Dome of the Rock. Even the Baha’i faith, with its all-embracing acceptance of the rightness of every other religion, knows the value of drawing boundaries. By excluding outsiders from certain places, they tighten the bonds between the faithful.

——

We bid goodbye to Nickie and Kristen on the night of the next day. We packed their bags into the taxi that had come to the door of the hostel, and sent them on their way. Nickie still needed some more footage for the mental health short film, and Sean and I had plans to go north to Ramallah and conduct some more interviews.

Nickie got a four-hour interrogation at Tel Aviv airport, where Israelis went through her film equipment and her computer in excruciating detail. And finally, she and Kristen boarded a plane and made their way back to Canada. It was one month, but it felt like four. For them, and excellent odyssey had come to a close. But for me, it still had barely begun.