TEMPLE: Israel's life beyond the headlines

By John Temple, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Judith Cohn Temple / Special to the Rocky

Revelers celebrate the holiday of Purim in downtown Jerusalem last month.

It had been almost 37 years since I first walked alone, carrying a backpack, down the dusty dirt road leading to a kibbutz high in the Galilee.

This time I drove a four-door Mazda sedan along a paved driveway to the same place, with Judith, my wife, and Abby, 17, my youngest child, at my side.

If in a dream I had been transported there, I'm not sure I would have recognized it. Somehow it felt, sadly, as if the country had left it behind.

The land of Israel that I found on a spring break visit this year was bursting with energy, in the midst of a boom only licked by the currents that are dragging down the U.S. economy.

Headlines from the region are usually of Gaza and rockets - of conflict. And, of course, that story deserves attention. But there are so many other stories , a few of which I would like to share with you today.

In this Israel, the spring air is rich with the sweet scent of the first blossoming fruit trees.

In this Israel, the streets of Jerusalem are mobbed with young and old, many in outlandish costumes, laughing and dancing, celebrating Purim, a holiday of revelry and abandon. The holiday's story of Jewish survival is as real today as it was more than 2,000 years ago.

In this Israel, yes, the apartments have "safe rooms," but they also have outdoor terraces abounding with flowers.

In this Israel, there is such a demand for labor that manual workers are likely to be Filipino or Thai, and travel is so easy that the country of Turkey is a weekend jaunt away.

The Israel I visited in 1971 was still a simple land, where the needs of the group seemed more important than individual aspirations. The country wasn't isolated, but it did seem distant from the more advanced life of Western Europe and America. Shipments of oranges and flowers were symbols of its connection to the developed world.

Today, although they still face great threats, the people of Israel are an economic force on a global stage. The airport destination boards list cities across the world. The nation's new, dramatic highways are jammed with cars, symbols of how individual Israelis are taking charge of their own destiny and the price that carries for their society - a widening gap between rich and poor that would have been unthinkable on the kibbutz where I worked long ago.

In this Israel, every individual seems to have a story, as does every place.

In the old city of Jerusalem, in the Jewish quarter, a father and his daughter carry on the work of generations of their family, crafting jewelry the Yemeni way, traditional silver and gold filigree work, delicate and rich. We talk for hours at a workbench in their shop, with the father telling me of watching his own grandfather doing the same work the old-fashioned way.

At a restaurant in the same city, two cooks - members of "Chefs for Peace" - prepare biblical foods using the native ingredients of the hilly region. The land comes alive in the dishes they serve.

At an Armenian ceramics gallery and workshop, the owner and his wife describe their attempt to start a new life in Canada to escape the violence of the intifada and how they decided to return home after four years in the new world.

In the Jerusalem market, entryways are guarded by armed police. But inside, the stalls overflow with strawberries, tomatoes, cucumbers and all manner of things.

The country feels a bit like the Wild West, with pistols visible on the hips of guards at every restaurant and soldiers carrying more powerful weapons. But, no, even after the massacre at the Yeshiva just weeks before, fear doesn't hang in the air.

On Easter Sunday, the Via Dolorosa is alive with pilgrims, many singing of faith as they move from one sacred site to the next.

The city - and nation - is a crazy mix of decay and modernity. Construction cranes are everywhere. So are tangled wires. Gleaming towers, bearing the names of companies that would be familiar around the world, are testament to the vibrancy of the country's tech explosion.

Yes, the shacklike stores of old still can be found with clothing hanging every which way. But they are being replaced with cut stone buildings. And yes, the decaying plaster of the three- and four-story apartments with walls of shutters is everywhere to be seen. But so are renovations of beautiful earlier structures and handsome new apartment buildings.

Tel Aviv hums to the tune of opportunity. But it, too, is a place of small stories.

Brides and grooms living out their fantasies in the evening light of the old city of Jaffa, where photographers capture glamorous scenes for memory books.

And the Iraqi community, where women still make by hand their traditional foods in a restaurant kitchen that's closer to a tent than any building we would know, an open and welcome environment where the customers seem to serve themselves.

In the hills of northern Galilee, in a special place where families built their dream houses scattered across the land, we sit in the garden of a vegetarian restaurant. When we say we're from Denver, we learn that the one family the owners know from our city are our friends.

At a nearby home, impossible you would think to find among a maze of narrow winding roads, a champion of Ethiopian Jewish women artists sells their ceramic work. There, with a grand view of the Mediterranean, she tells how tour buses arrive and spend hours with her learning the importance of the clay figures in passing tradition from generation to generation.

It is a land of contrasts. There, in the peace of the hills, she talks of the price of her son's service in the Army, and her daughter's, too. She tells of his learning Amharic and traveling to Ethiopia to work with children.

As we drive, we see a country rich with fields of grain, with beautiful valleys carved from the earth by pioneers who believed in the promise of a Jewish homeland.

As daily life goes on, the powerful of the world visit. The German chancellor speaks to Parliament. Vice President Cheney stays across the street from our hotel in Jerusalem. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice drops in to prod the peace process.

But on the street you find little optimism for her efforts. Already, people are looking ahead and asking about Obama and comparing him with Clinton and McCain. The voices of Hezbollah and Hamas and Iran are louder. The rockets falling almost daily on an Israeli town, Sderot, are a reminder of the controlled conflict that people seem to have come to accept.

It is hard to imagine that those threatening the country's extinction could believe that the day might come when all that has been built, all that has been accomplished, could be destroyed.

But 37 years ago, walking on that dirt road to a community I would come to know and love, I never would have imagined the country that has emerged or what would happen to the kibbutz - that in effect, its dream wouldn't hold.

Across the land I met no one who felt the country had the leadership able to make the tough decisions to reach the peaceful future they all seemed to dream of. No David Ben Gurion, no Menachem Begin. Even no Ariel Sharon.

I never could have imagined what the country would feel like on a return visit with a daughter who is about my age when I first arrived there.

I returned home with great admiration for the energy and intensity of the people, for the feeling abroad in the land that, despite their differences, they are all in it together. The cafes are filled deep into the night. The bars have no closing time. There's a love of life, a passion for living, that's unforgettable.

As Israel approaches its 60th birthday in May, I am filled with the feeling that something special is still taking place in this sliver of a nation, something worth appreciating and supporting to enable the stories, still untold, to go on.

John Temple can be reached at editor@RockyMountainNews.com or by mail at 101 W. Colfax Ave., Suite 500, Denver, CO 80202.

• April 8, 2008

  3:22 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  Ztliano writes:

  I still would never visit.

• April 15, 2008

  9:04 a.m.

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  mortonca writes:

  I lived in Jerusalem for a year. It's a beautiful country. I've wanted to go back ever since I left.

• April 15, 2008

  1:34 p.m.

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  Jackiekc writes:

  I have visited Israel a number of times and each time find something more beautiful than before. Last time, I spent mostly in the Negev,close to Sderot, which is now being bombed to shreds. It was a lovely town filled with people who could not afford the high prices of housing in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

• April 16, 2008

  5:54 p.m.

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  stephend writes:

  Thank you for an article obviously written by a true journalist. Someone with all his senses open and available to see, hear smell and touch all that he comes into contact with, and without preconceived notions and blinkers.