Noah Alexander Isaac Stein

Unknown date

In Akko I find the places of my dreams, winding corridors, and open expanses, naked stones and presences that I partially recall, half-remembered, half imagined. We sleep that first night beneath the stars, high above the city on decayed walls, awkwardly huddled. She sleeps in an new sleeping bag, layered above an inflatable, sleeping pad, and her childhood pillow. I lay beside her on the ground, among the weeds and stones, covered, mostly symbolically, in her large, purple travel towel. It carries the fresh smells of the first flowers of spring.

She is young, pretty, stubborn, German, and deeply open. Come across the sky to this desolate place for some private reason, unknown perhaps even to her, this is her first great adventure. We meet as I am tieing a bandage around my ruined and blistered feet, stained in iodine. Despite a spattering of eastern Europeans, and the odd American, the hostel has been conquered by Germans. Here neither English nor Hebrew is the common language, but the dark guttural tones of central Europe abound. And in her inexhaustible pursuit of electronic dance and synthetic drugs, she is not alone.

The rhythms of Tel Aviv are seductive, and the truths, history, and lifeblood of this dry land are quickly drowned out by the cascading rhythms and delirium of the hot night. Is the connection so easily accounted for by the economics of international air travel, or is there something darker in this link? If the restless ghosts of Polish forests and abandoned cattle cars still so profoundly haunt this modern country, what then of the grandchildren of the perpetrators? What stains of the collective soul draw them here, into the Judean wastes of history?

Inside her exhausted heart; too open, too abused by cocaine and MDMA, too innocent and well-intentioned for these cold expanses of conflict and suffering, my companion nurtures deep reserves of Christian faith. Though she revels in the hedonistic extremes of Tel Aviv, the ancient names of Galilee and Nazareth draw out something perhaps not altogether disconnected. Her ecstatic descriptions of the drug and exhaustion fueled unity of dance are almost religious in their undertones. And most significantly, she carries with her sacred treasures; the written prayers and notes of loved ones. The scraps, are not destined for any monastic house or church however, she will deliver them instead into the yawning cracks of the Western Wall.

-Alex

9.05.16

In my return to the Holy City I feel like a lost desert prophet, returned to the world of men, altered, perhaps inextricably in parallel, still in some remote waste. It is disorienting and intangibly uncomfortable. Oh tragic Jerusalem! So near the center, always at the intersection; of insubstantial spirit and manifest political necessity, of just peace and the defilement of war, of Israel and Palestine.

The divides are mirrored in the landscape, where the ancient walls and cobbles of the old city quickly and inexplicably dissolve into the blinding modernity of West Jerusalem. The global commonalities of communal culture and minor poverty, found in variants marked by their character, not their utility, from Beijing to Cairo. Hanging meat, finger food, toilet paper bins, undrinkable water, sleeping mats, and the same small plastic chairs. The same sterile glass and metal stretching into empty heavens, the same dreams of safety and fear, the same efficiency, and the same isolation.

The history of this city is written with clarity on its walls. The empires, revolts, conquests, and genocidal massacres. The Ottaman-era walls are a patchwork marked by ever constant razing and rebuilding; the city has been destroyed to its foundations twice. Cananite, Egyptian, Hebrew, Babalonian, Macedonian, Seleucian, Hasmonean, Roman, Persian, Byzantine, Umayyad, Turkish, Fatimid, crusader, Ayyubid, Tartar, Ayyubid, Ottoman, English, Israeli, Jordanian, Isreali; confronted by such roiling successions, it is difficult to believe in the solidity of the current victors.

Stasis is an alluring concept in places with a more linear history. Here the lies of national narratives are made clear. Even as they struggle to find new life, expulsion and conquest mar the clean stories of the growth of a people, and the indulgences of common culture are in constant threat as culture expands, merges, and fades, leaving us to sift for some dim shred of meaning in the bloodshed and ash that accompanied their heraldic arrival. There is little to be found. Instead, the stories we tell, of struggles and victory, mask a darker truth; the violence we inflict is, in its final moment, naked and devoid of greater meaning. The battle-lines of chimpanzees, forgotten in the chaos. They will be buried and forgotten, like bones in the desert wastes, leaving only the momentary imprint of their suffering.

-Alex

9.04.16

It is disorienting and inexplicably uncomfortable to be back in Israel. The feeling is not unlike what I experience entering the tourist districts of Bangkok after the mud highways and remote villages in the highlands of Lao. The sudden shift of amenity from the worldwide commonalities of the global have-nots, full of decay and improvisation built from the leftovers of the affluent, to the fresh leavings of European and American youth. The culture shock is intensified by this surface of modernity, but it is also entrance to a country that is no less strange, only shrouded in a guise of delicate facsimile. I find myself slipping, referring to Palestine when I should say the West Bank, forgetting which aspects of my identity must be concealed among strangers. Here I can unguardedly be Jewish, here I cannot be…

-Alex

9.01.16

I wander lost through the fields outside of Jericho. I have unwisely decided to stay at a much decayed “Eco-village.” 17 Kilometers outside of the city of Jericho, there is a small meandering track through fields and lush, verdant, yards that leads from the crumbling and windswept compound to a small roadside restaurant, surrounded by several small supermarkets, and at least 5 stores that seem to specialize in the same multicolored plastic chairs. The scenery pleasantly conjurers memories of remote villages in Lao and Thailand. I considering the common cultural elements of both the decomposing, trash strew, brightness of the poor east, and the remote sterile cities of affluent European descent. Cheap building techniques, decay, and the vibrancy of chaos.

On the way back I stop to talk with the owner of one of the supermarkets, who seems anxious to aggressively complain in a manner that is recognizable in the chronically angry the world over. In a surprising change of pace he declares “America bad”, mirroring the otherwise ubiquitous “America good.” Despite frequent denunciations of the occupation, he is surprisingly open and welcoming to his Israeli customers, seemingly no less comfortable with them than their Palestinian counterparts.

The delay costs me the last light, and walking back from the turn off I am quickly disoriented by the winding paths and terminuses. Beneath an ancient sky where I do not recognize the foreign stars, and in this, the most ancient of cities, at the bottom of the world, where the pressurized air is heavy and hot, I find myself at last aware of how far I have wandered…

The “cooperative” eco-village seems like all things peace related, a decayed-relic of a more optimistic time. A result of the ambitious Friends of The Earth Middle East; in its mud building techniques and bright children’s play area, and incomplete geodesic dome, I recognize a common guiding-hand shared with other, more active, eco-villages. Despite bold claims about its cross-border team, it is as devoid of Israelis as it is a reminder of the prospect of peace in this war torn land.

As is the crack strewn tower I have run my fingers across today, which dates from an age so far distant as to be forever unrecognizable. The depth of the passage of time is barely comprehensible, and the walls I have walked were an ancient legend already when their story was first retold in the Book of Joshua. And yet, their is a familiarity, and each epoch of its 10 millennia journey is punctuated in marks of suffering and conquest.

-Alex

8.29.16

8.24.16

Each local attraction I visit is closed for, in succession, the day, the week, and the month. In my heat-born ascents and and descents among the step hills of Amman however I find myself beginning to grow into the surroundings. In each trip up the twisting stairs that wind through the bright cream of decaying stone buildings, through narrow alleys, past the shuttered homes and smaller cloistered yards, and through the strewn trash of modernity; soft-drink bottles, scraps of cardboard, discarded children toys, I find the inhabitants becoming less strange.

As the veil of otherness slips, the conservatism of the culture begins to remind me of a not-so distant age in America’s past; the old, judgmental man on the bus begins to remind me of my own grandfather, slipping into the sea of time, assaulted by confusing values in changing world; speeding out of control towards a future past the imaginings of even of his descendants, the supposed authors of this new dawn, from which they too must learn to fear in time.

This impression is heightened by a trip to a local dance-club, where Amman’s youth drink and sweat with abandon among the foreign accents of distant countries, until they are carried out, quite literally on the backs of their fellows as the music bellows and swells to the same American songs that play in the same winding succession in identical rooms in Tel Aviv, London, and likely even still, in some recondite, cloistered alley among the ruins of Aleppo.

-Alex

8.23.16

Fanning the flames of conflict the world over are the righteous. The zealots who pull the trigger are matched by the outsiders, who gilt in their own armor of ignorance, bay for the blood they will not have to taste. I was asked today by a determined American how my Jewishness related to my views on Israel. It was an accusation posed as a question. While seemingly satisfied by my opposition to occupation, the conversation brought out ugly and ancient stereotypes with ease, and more importantly drew a line between us. It reminded me not at all with my conversations with my Arab friends, but quite a bit of conversations I have had with politically conservative Americans.

In my experience many liberal western outsiders are often equally as boldly sanguine as their hawkish conservative counterparts, equally ready to excuse and promote the atrocities they will never have to suffer. Will they still remember conflict and occupation in another decade I wonder? Or will they forget the role they played, forget the seeds of violence they encouraged, move onto to some new war or cause célèbre even as the blood continues soak into the sand, unchanged. The alternative to peace is not justice, and I doubt either will be birthed out of the womb of war.

-Alex

8.22.16