Today we went to see some ancient places. Ismael picked us up, with one of his delightful daughters in tow, called Duha. I had invited him to bring a member of his family because we had a spare seat and one of them was sure to enjoy the trip. Ismael had thought, for some reason, Liz needed the company of a woman because she was afraid. This doesn’t fit Liz at all – on a journey alone through five countries, she has hardly batted an eyelid at Palestine’s rougher edges. But the daughter had a fine time with us anyway, and it was the first time she had ever visited the Herodeon and Mar Saba. We went first to Irtas, down the valley from the school.
Irtas is a tranquil Catholic monastery village, though populated mainly by Muslims, and it’s a verdant centre for market gardening. The statue of the Virgin Mary still had Christmas lights draped around it, making her look vulgarly tied up. The best bit was a visit to the spring at Irtas – the springwater was slightly warm and very clear. Ismael told us that, when he was a boy in the Six Day War, his family and many other refugees living in Deheisheh came down to Irtas to shelter from the Israeli bombing. They would collect water from this spring. I think that war deeply traumatised him.
We progressed then to the Herodeon, through Hindaza, Assakira and the countryside south of Bethlehem, populated by a large population of settled Bedouin. The Herodeon (or Herodium) is dramatic. It is a natural, geologically anomalistic, human-shaped hill with the ruins of a dug-out palace in the ‘cone’, dating back mainly to the time of Herod the Great – the final heyday of ancient Israel before its dismemberment by the Romans. It compares with a British hill-fort, except the stone buildings inside the cone are far more developed. Around its base was a town until it was destroyed.
What a location: the 360° view from the hill is outstanding, and the hill is militarily unassailable. You see a wide sweep over the Bethlehem conurbation, the Bedouin countryside southwards, two Israeli settlements (Tekoa and Nokdim) and many Palestinian villages, the Judaean Desert, Dead Sea and Jordanian mountains – a landscape photographer’s paradise. Down inside the hill is a series of tunnels leading down to the internal water system in the hill.
As a student of ancient sites and earth energies, despite the bitingly cold wind, I could sense an ancient power here which must have made this hill important long before Herod’s time. Its Arabic name is Jebel Fereidis or ‘the hill of paradise’. The hill dominates the landscape, drawing the eye toward it from a distance – much like Glastonbury Tor but more so. With internal water springs higher than the surrounding plateau, it has levitational or upward-vortical energy properties which are uncommon.
Traditional descriptions say it is ‘like a woman’s breast’but, frankly, it is far bolder than that, more thrusting and masculine. It was the site of a last stand of the Jews in the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132-136, after which many of the remaining Jews in these parts were driven away by the Romans, ending the ancient story of Israel. No wonder two strategically-placed Israeli settlements now lie just below the hill.
 |
| The Israeli settlement of Tekoa, just below the Herodeon |
Then we progressed to Beit Sahour on the eastern edge of Bethlehem, turning right along the main road through Dar Salah to Ubeidiya, and turning right again along a winding road into the desert hills to Mar Saba.
Mar Saba is a Greek Orthodox monastery perching on a cliff overlooking a deep gorge through which a river flows. It’s the Kidron valley, which begins at Jerusalem – the valley that separates the Old City from the Mount of Olives – and it flows down to the Dead Sea. This place has an intense stillness that easily explains why the early Christian hermits came here to live in the caves – some of them have been expanded, and some have walls and doors at the opening. I went down into the gorge and inside one of the caves and it was quite warm, very quiet and a wonderful location for a meditative life.
The caves are similar to those at the Mount of Temptation above Jericho –the kind of places where ease of access to and from the wider world is definitely not the intention. These guys would live on a flat-bread cooked on a stone and a few dates each day. The gorge hosted perhaps some forty hermits by the look of it, about 1,700 years ago at the very beginning of the monastic period.
We were all quite spaced out after an hour or two here. It transports you to another world. The high desert location is somehow purifying, stilling, enclosing yet starkly wide-open. Back along the road at Ubeidiya is the St Theodosius monastery, which must have been related to Mar Saba, overlooking a dramatic valley 2,000ft below – Wadi Nar, the Valley of Fire. On the other side is the Mount of Olives, a seriously high mountain, and Jerusalem, with the desert and the Dead Sea in the other direction. It’s an otherworldly landscape – the kind of stuff that people write things like Bibles about – and it’s now quite densely populated with Palestinians.
We went back to Ismael’s family home in Deheisheh camp for tea and home-made Arabic sweets. The whole family sat with us – a warm family circle. One of them remarked that I’m bringing a stream of English through their home. “Yes, actually it’s a secret invasion. We’ve decided to reoccupy Palestine, to give you a slightly better occupation than the Israeli one.”
Reoccupying Palestine is a war Her Majesty’s armed forces wouldn’t fancy. I’m here to ferkle around in the background quietly pulling the few strings I have available to jiggle. Well, good try. Meanwhile, it has been good having a break with Liz, seeing some sights and filling another few gaps in my advancing collection of pictures of Palestine. Tomorrow I must sit down and write a report. And she's off again in a few days.
 |
| And here are Ismael and Duha |
