Life Is Old Here

Our first meeting was during dinner Sunday night at the hotel, shortly after our arrival. We met with Dr. Einat Wilf, a Labor candidate in the recent elections. She also serves as a policy and strategy consultant for the party. If just one Labor member choose not to serve (a distinct possibility as of this writing), she would be elevated to the Knesset – sort of like the last baseball player sent down to AAA – also likely to be first brought back up.

(Briefly, Labor was THE dominant party in Israel for the first 30 years of its founding, but as it has become the lead party of the Doves, has fallen onto hard times, holding barely ten percent of the seats in the Knesset.)

She was very frank about the problems facing the party, and the dinner was delicious. Afterwards, a large group of us decided to go for a walk. (As the Iron Tourist, there was no way I was simply going to bed or to the hotel bar without spending time walking around the city my first night there!). Apparently, in previous years you could not go out without security, but the security fence has made life much safer.

So we wandered up King David Street, walked another half block, and then walked through the Jaffa Gate into the Old City. (The rest of Jerusalem is relatively new). Marilyn didn’t want us going through the markets, so we wandered some of the winding, twisting pathways through the Armenian Quarter and then the Jewish Quarter before reaching the Western Wall. (Note – I always thought it was called the Wailing Wall, but apparently that ended with the Six Day War in 1967).

Wandering through the Old City at night is quite inspiring (we were told to never go in the Moslem Quarter at night). There were times when you felt transported back 2,000 years, as the city was silent and dark, and the pathways led here and there, but then we would come upon the equivalent of a convenience store and be reminded that Coca-Cola is available pretty much worldwide. Suddenly we rounded a corner and came upon the lit night view of the Western Wall, the Dome of the Rock, and El Aqsa Mosque.

We descended down, went through security, and spent a bunch of time at the Western Wall, and I even went underneath into what is the equivalent of cavern-like libraries. Then, we re-gathered as a group and hiked back through the Old City, retracing our steps. Jersualem IS built on a hill, and after walking downhill most of the time from Jaffa Gate to the Western Wall, it was all uphill on the return from the Wall.

On the way back, we stopped at the famed King David Hotel, where several of our party had decamped for drinks. We stayed there till quite late, telling political stories and sharing impressions of the walkabout. Some of us shared some excellent Israeli Pinot Noir. The King David has a famous view of the Old City, and also has signatures of famed guests in stone tile throughout the lobby. Such great names as Churchill, Sadat, Begin, and Thatcher are there. And, then there is the comical, such as Yoko Ono (each tile square is the same size, implying some sort of equivalency that just isn’t right!).

Given that we rode to Jerusalem in the dark and had our walkabout at night, I still don’t feel as though I have a good feel for the city.