Amman, where internet is not free

Sadly, our five-star hotel here in Amman does not have free internet access, so updates will be sporadic at best.

Farewell Jerusalem

View of Old City Jerusalem from the Mt. of Olives.

After two and a half weeks, we’re departing Jerusalem for Amman this morning.  Although we were getting restless last week, over the last couple of days many group members have expressed their fondness for the city and their desire to stay longer.  A part of that feeling due to the generosity and kindness of the staff at the Legacy Hotel – it was an invaluable place of escape and comfort at the end of our long days in the city.

Today, on our trip to Amman, we’ll stop at the ancient Greco-Roman ruins in Jerash after we cross the checkpoints at the King Hussein Bridge.

More Jerusalem photos:

Olive grove in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Jerusalem at night.

Above the market just inside Damascus Gate.

Ramallah

The central square in Ramallah.

Last week the group spent three days in Ramallah to visit Birzeit University, the Ramallah Friends School, the Ramallah Friends Meetinghouse, and to meet with Earlham alumni living in Ramallah.   Thanks to Charmaine Seitz (a local journalist and Earlham Alum) who organized and coordinated many of our activities in Ramallah.  Charmaine helped to start bitter lemons and currently blogs here.

Day Trip: Masada, Qumran, and Jericho

On Saturday we traveled along the Dead Sea to sites at Masada and Qumran, and ended our long day with a quick drive through Jericho.

The Dead Sea and the mountains of the Jordan Rift Valley.

We spent most of the day at Masada, where a Roman siege suppressed a Jewish rebel group in 66 CE.  The ancient fortress – originally built by King Herod – is set on a large, flat mountaintop.  Despite it’s modern discovery nearly a century earlier, the site at Masada wasn’t excavated until 1963 – however, the excavation was made easier by the accounts of Josephus, who documented the stories of the only two women to survive the siege.  In lieu of Roman defeat, the rebel group decided to kill themselves, and the two women, along with five of their children, managed to hide in a cistern until they were discovered by the Romans.

The cable car we took up to the mountaintop settlement. To the right of the car is one of four Roman camps established for the siege.

Storage rooms in the first palace, originally constructed by King Herod in 32 BCE.

An early sauna, of sorts, where Roman soldiers would relax after working out and bossing around slaves.

After an extensive tour of Masada, we traveled to Qumran – where Bedouins discovered the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947.  To date, nearly 900 scrolls (in three languages) have been found in a series of caves outside the settlement of the Essenes – a Jewish sect group – at Qumran.  The scrolls can currently be seen at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

The caves of Qumran

Our first encounter with checkpoints

The separation wall near a check point just outside of Jerusalem.

After a wonderful day in Ramallah (more on that later), we experienced our first checkpoint delay on our way back to Jerusalem.  A drive that took 20 minutes from Jerusalem to Ramallah neared two hours on our return from Ramallah to Jerusalem.

Journey to Yad Vashem

On Sunday a group of us set out to visit Yad Vashem (The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Memorial) – and to get to the memorial, we decided to walk across the central part of the city from our hotel just north of the Old City in East Jerusalem all of the way to the western edge of Jerusalem – we estimated it would take us an hour and a half to make our one way trip.  Two hours later we found ourselves here:

Not lost, but not in the right place.

Another busy day…

And so the updates promised will (hopefully) come tomorrow – after we return from an early morning trip to Masada, Qumran, and Jericho.  Here are some photos from today’s visit to Tel Aviv.

View of Tel Aviv from Jaffa Port.

Amphitheater facing the Mediterranean in Old City Jaffa.

High-rise apartment building in Tel Aviv.

Beach along the Mediterranean Sea in Tel Aviv.

Off to Tel Aviv and Jaffa for the day

Updates on yesterday’s Armenian Quarter of the Old City, a journey to Yad Vashem, and our fascination with mint lemonade when we return.

Yitzhak Reiter and Hebrew University

After visiting a local Al-Quds University campus on Monday, the group visited Hebrew University yesterday for a lecture and a tour of the campus.  Dr. Yitzhak Reiter greeted us and gave a lecture on the history and current state of Israeli Arabs, as well as a brief tour of the campus which included views from the Rothberg Amphitheater and the top of the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, of which he is a member.

The contrast between Al-Quds University (Arab) and Hebrew University (predominantly but not exclusively Jewish) was immediately clear. Al-Quds University (or, at least, the small local campus we visited) felt like much of East Jerusalem – make shift, a square peg in a circle – in a place with such an extensive history, it seems that most things were something else before.  (Just this morning, we saw a neighborhood built into what was formerly a Roman jail – and most of East Jerusalem feels like this – like it was originally designed to be another thing.  Likewise, it seems that what makes many of the attractions so attractive – in addition to their religious and cultural importance – is that they are still doing what they were originally intended to do.  I digress…)  Hebrew University, on the other hand, looks and feels more like a traditional Western campus.  The stark contrast, the powerful, institutional feel of the campus, combined with the tone and narrative of the lecture, all culminated with the view of the West Bank and Jerusalem from the Rothberg Amphitheater – the site of Hebrew University’s founding in 1918.

The view from The Rothberg Amphitheater at Hebrew University.

In a place where politics and power control so much of daily conversation and life, the view was a stirring physical manifestation of the current power dynamics in Israel and the occupied territories.

Ihna Zurna Gami’at Al-Quds oo The Educational Bookshop

After our Arabic lesson this morning, we visited Al-Quds University to for a lecture (“Jerusalem in the Qu’ran and the Sunnah”) from Dr. Mustafa Abusway and to meet with our university counterparts for the first time.  Despite some organizational difficulties (i.e. a lack of counterparts), it was a positive experience, and – at the very least – a reprieve from the sun on a 100 degree day.  In between the lecture and our counterpart meetings we visited PASSIA (Palestinian Academic Society for the Studies of International Affairs), an independent non-profit that “seeks to present the Palestinian Question in its national, Arab and international contexts through academic research, dialogue and publication.”  In addition to having an abundance of publications and posters on location, PASSIA also has an extensive and informative website, which you can find here.

In the evening we visited the Educational Bookshop here in East Jerusalem, ate a large and delicious dinner, and watched Occupation 101: Voices of the Silenced Majority.  A description of the store from the Educational Bookshop website:

The EB is a well established and leading bookstore focusing on Middle Eastern culture and the Arab-Israeli conflict. The books are mostly research-based and published by highly respected institutions and publishers world-wide. Our book collection also includes a selection of Arabic literature, guidebooks, dictionaries and Arabic teaching books.

Needless to say, I think many of us intend to return to the store to do some shopping. (In addition to being a bookstore, the Educational Bookshop’s new location is one of the very few bookstores in the Mideast that doubles as a café.)