Day Six - Masada, Dead Sea, Western Wall Tunnels

Just a couple camels filling up.

We got up a little earlier today because our first destination is further outside the city.  Today we are going to Masada, which is a mountain fortress out in the desert.  To get to Masada, we actually passed through the West Bank.  It was painless and honestly somewhat anti-climactic.  We drove through a portion of the desert and finally arrived at the base of the mountain. 

The desert, date farm on the right, and Masada on the left side.

Chase (Pace U) and Nathan (The Ohio State)

Leaving the guest center on the "Snake Path" up the mountain.

            This mountain was one of nine fortresses built by King Herod, and it eventually became one of the favorite fortresses of Israel because of its isolation.  To get to the fortress, we walked up something like 800 steps (Someone said that.  May need to fact check that).  Regardless of the number, it was an intense hike.  Not all of us survived.  Just kidding.

Couple things to note here.  1) Girl on left hiking the mountain in leather pants and boots.  Must be so sweaty.
2) Jared (Airforce Academy) talking to said girl in Mandarin Chinese.  No big deal.  Turns out she was
a grad student at the Wharton School, U Penn.

           

I was a little hot from the hike so this was as close as Abbie
(UNF) wanted to get for a photo at the top.

The top was beautiful and looked like a small city.  Iftah told us the story of the final battle that took place at this fortress against the Romans (not during the time of Herod, later).  The Romans could not attack the fortress directly but laid siege, trying to starve the Israelis into submission.  However, it was to no avail.  After many failed attempts to scale the walls, the Romans built a ramp up to the fortress and then wheeled a tall machine with a battering ram up to the wall to try to break it down.  The Israelites fortified the stone wall with wood to give it elasticity to defy the battering ram.  However, the Romans took note of this and then set the wall ablaze.  On the final night of the battle, the Israelites knew they were about to fall.  The men met together and agreed on a course of action.  They went to each of their respective homes and killed their children and wives.  Then they returned to the center of the fortress and 11 men were selected to kill all the others.  Then they cast lots to determine who would be the last to live and have to kill himself.  When the Romans came into the camp the next morning, it was silent and all the Israelites lay dead.  However, one woman and child survived and helped to document the story.  There is speculation that perhaps there was no man in their household.

            This story is very significant to the history of the Jews, as the men of Masada are seen as never yielding their free will to the Romans.  During the Holocaust a narration of this story became popularized to try to motivate the Jews to not give up, coining the phrase, “Masada will not fall.”

            The fortress and the ramp stand today, and offer beautiful views of the nearby desert.

Alex (Flagler) rocking my scarf.

Iftah tells us the story at the top.

Steven (Duke) loving the view of the desert.

Maddie (Gonzaga) pumped for the hike down!

           

The Dead Sea on a rainy day.

From Masada, we went to a kibbutz near the Dead Sea where we ate lunch.  From lunch we proceeded to a beach resort where we were able to get in the Dead Sea.  This is one of those surreal experiences that I think you always imagine yourself doing some day, but don’t ever actually see it coming.  Along with those experiences also comes a dynamic of anti-climacticism.  We got in, walked through the shallow mud out into the water, and literally as soon as you lean back, the 33% salt salinated water causes you to float.  It was dark and overcast, and rained for a good portion of the time we were in the water, which was not totally consistent with what I imagined.  We rubbed the mud all over our bodies and then rinsed off.  Pretty amazing!

            From the Dead Sea we drove back to Jerusalem.  At our hotel we had a session with Arab-Israeli journalist Khaled Abu Toameh.  This talk proved to be incredibly interesting.  Being Arab-Israeli, the only difference between him and the true Palestinians is essentially geographically where he lives.  He lives in Jerusalem instead of the West Bank or Gaza, and he has full Israeli citizenship.  However, when we asked him to identify what ethnicity with which he most belongs, he listed “Arab, Israeli, Palestinian, Muslim, but in no specific order.”  This is not exactly typical, but he explained why he feels this way. 

As a young man, Toameh worked for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (the “terrorist” organization that was led by Yasser Arafat for many years).  After working for some years, Toameh went to Hebrew University in Jerusalem to study journalism, and he never went back to work for the PLO.  Since then he has served as a liaison for international media agencies, meeting them in Jerusalem and then escorting them into Palestinian territories to meet with leaders.  Meanwhile he also writes for a paper called the Jerusalem Post, which tends to be moderate and critical of any extremists.  He attributes the failure of peace processes so far to a failure to educate peace to children in Palestine.  Over a decade of incitement has demonized the state of Israel to Palestinians.  He criticizes Palestinian leadership for not actually having control over its people and not actually representing them.  At the end of all of this, he believes that the international community cannot much help the situation, that Israel has actually sewn some seeds for peace but is still not perfect, and the Palestinian people need to overthrow the Hamas and Fatah in order to begin shifting the culture towards peace.  This Pro-Palestine, Pro-Israel perspective is very interesting and different from the view I would gather from the media.

Finally, at night we went to the Western Wall Tunnels.  When the Mamluks occupied Jerusalem, they constructed arches surrounding the Temple Mount to expand the city.  This left much of the original walls around Jerusalem built by King Herod buried under the street level.  Charles Wilson discovered the buried segments of the Western Wall in 1864.  There have been many further excavations that have revealed areas leading all the way to the bedrock of the northwest corner of Temple Mount. 

The tunnel got pretty tiny.

Alex (Flagler), Terryn (Airforce), Clare (UNF), and Sneha (Brandeis) in front of where the walls King Herod
built meet the bedrock of the Temple Mount.

One last look at the Western Wall.

After a long and exhausting day, we returned to the Prima King hotel.  It’s probably safe to say no one had trouble sleeping.