Lines in the sand: The Red Sea and the Negev

"You must admit that these people are filth."

This series was written in 2012. But not this piece. I have wanted to write the story of my time in the Negev for many years, but I never got around to it. As a result, I have forgotten a lot of what was said, especially by Roni at the tent hostel in Mitzpe Ramon. I have pieced this piece together from emails I wrote to friends, family, and other loved ones at the time. All of the quotes come from those emails, and the story that opens it has been so well-told, over so many years, that I can quote it verbatim. Nevertheless, I should have knuckled down and written a proper account sooner. What I do remember, very clearly, is the vibe of the Negev, and what it looked like. I think that comes across. The rest of the series is available on the main page of this Substack.

After a week-and-a-half talking about nothing but the Arab-Israeli conflict, I decide to take a bit of a break before heading into the West Bank. There, I assume, I will talk about it even more, so I hightail it south instead, to the Red Sea, where the town of Eilat sits facing Aqaba across Israel’s border with the Kingdom of Jordan. The unrepentant cinema nerd in me experiences the undeniable thrill of approaching Aqaba, with its massive Jordanian flag fluttering above the coast, from the desert, like T. E. Lawrence and his Bedouin army, only on a bus instead of a camel. But my assumptions are otherwise very quickly shattered.

I am sitting with my laptop in the lobby of the Arcadia Spa—the cheapest place I have been able to find, which isn’t cheap at all on my shoestring—when an American woman comes up to me and asks for the wifi password. She clocks my accent as soon as I open my mouth and asks me where I’m from. I tell her.

“Oh, how wonderful!” she says, breaking into a huge smile. “Are you here to claim your birthright?”

There is, it occurs to me, no escaping any of it. I tell her that I am not in fact Jewish.

“Well, there’s a lot in the Holy Land for a Christan as well,” she smiles.

“I’m an atheist,” I say. “I’m here to report about the place.”

Her smile does not so much fade as die, as though a switch has been flicked.

“Oh, I see,” she says, very cold now. “Well, thank you for the password.”

“Enjoy your trip!” I say facetiously, but her back has already been turned and she is gone.

I don’t spend very much time in Eilat. I go for walks through the marina and buy copies of of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. I go swimming in the Red Sea at North Beach, where I fall asleep on a beach chair and wake up looking like some very non-kosher suckling pig. But even the cheapest hotel in Eilat is too expensive for me. (I have asked friends to wire me money. I am getting very good at navigating Western Union.) Additionally, I know that, in a few days, I will need to be back in Jerusalem, the better to make a quick break towards Ramallah. In order to save myself some money, and to shave some time off my return trip, I leave Eilat on Thursday. I am trying to avoid the inevitable mess of trying to take busses on Friday, when, at sundown, they stop running for Shabbat. I am heading to Mitzpe Ramon in the Negev, where I can, I hope, sit on my own and read my books in peace for twenty-four hours.

The Negev is an amazing desert. The road from Eilat to Mitzpe Ramon runs along the Egyptian border for about twenty minutes, all razor wire and watchtowers, mostly on the Egyptian side. The few brief glimpses I get at the Sinai are striking, as is taking a bus in this part of the world at any time. I am primarily riding with young IDF members doing their mandatory service, many of them dead to the world. Young girls are to be seen leaning asleep against M16s. Some of the boys, also carrying guns, wear tefillin on their foreheads, those little leather boxes containing scrolls containing verses from the Torah. All are being dropped back home in time for Shabbat tomorrow, and will likely return to their bases on Sunday. They far outnumber myself and the few Bedouin who happen to be on board.

Mitzpe Ramon is in the middle of the Negev, on the cliffs overlooking a huge meteoric crater that, apparently, used to be a sea. After arriving mid-afternoon and setting up shop in the tent hostel I’m staying in—not Bedouin-style, as promised, but rather just a giant marquee in some dude’s backyard—I walk up to watch the sunset from a rocky outcrop shaped like a camel. The crater seems to dissolve into indigo before my eyes, like a photo developing in reverse, and the skyline becomes hazy and indistinct. Moments after the sun has disappeared on one horizon, I turn and watch an even more beautiful sight: moonrise over the Negev.

We who do not live in the region often ask what these people are fighting over. It’s nothing but rocks and sand and almost impossibly saline water out here. Obviously, religion plays an outsized role. Promises were made to various peoples in books written by lunatics thousands of years ago. But then you see the moon come up over the Negev and your heart stops beating for a moment. God’s own country? No. The country is God. Sitting atop that camel-shaped rock, I see a million millennia stretched out before me, each moment of each written inexorably on the landscape. I am in touch, as I rarely am, with the numinous. It is one of the few great moments of my life.

For a while, it looks as though I’m going to have the whole tent to myself. But I eventually wind up sharing with an Austrian girl, Ruth, who has spent nearly a year meditating throughout India and Southeast Asia, and with two male students from Madrid and Milan, who are putting in ten days in Israel before heading home to get back to their studies. Me and the boys walk over to the service station, which also serves as a bottle shop, to buy wine.

The tent leaks a little during the night, even though it isn’t raining outside, and I have to hoist my bed out of the way lest I subject myself to some form of Israeli water torture. Like the inexplicable water in the night, more people trickle in over the course of Friday. By the time the sun goes down and Israel shuts up shop, the tent is occupied by myself, Ruth, a Dutch couple, and a very softly spoken Israeli woman whose name I never quite get close enough to catch. Roni, the owner, cooks up a big Shabbat meal, and Leo, the Dutchman, plays his guitar. I made one last booze run before lockdown came into effect and, within a couple of hours, we are all very pleasantly drunk.

I’m not sure what I think of Roni. He’s generous, I suppose, but a braggart and, I’m pretty sure, a liar. I would list his claims to fame here, but they are many, and they are, at times, quite ludicrous. I don’t much go in for that sort of thing. He is also, it seems to me, a leech, eating his guests’ food and drinking their drinks, and, worse, a lech. He is handsy with Ruth in a way that I find unbecoming. His insistence that she stay with him and his partner, Mati, causes Ruth to cock an eyebrow at me.

He also doesn’t call her Ruth. He calls her “Ruthy,” which, given his accent, comes out as “Rooty”. This, for some reason, annoys me considerably.

We are having lunch a few hours before I am to take the bus to Be’er Sheva, from which I will be able to catch another back to Jerusalem. Ruth, sensibly, has decided to come with me. Roni is trying to convince her to stay and work for him, but, in so doing, is almost all but ensuring she will not.

“From the river to the sea,” he says. “You have heard this saying?”

We nod.

“We will take Judea and Samaria,” he says, “and the promises of God will be delivered.”

“They say the same thing about you,” I say.

“Yes, but they weren’t promised it,” he says. “Listen, I am a Holocaust survivor”—by virtue of his age, he definitely isn’t—”and, I can tell you, we are owed this place.”

I push back, he pushes back again, Ruth doesn’t say a thing. Roni doesn’t seem to know whether Israel’s right to exist is based on scripture, the Shoah, or the fact that it is, in any case, a fait accompli. (I mention that I also live on stolen land, and that I’m not really in a position to give it back and leave because, like, I’m from there, too. This sets him off on a tangent of agreement, which wasn’t my intention.) The only thing Roni knows in his heart is that Palestinians are bad.

“Well, I mean, Rooty,” he says, gripping her arm, “you must admit that these people are filth.”

Ruth does not agree, and we leave. We sit together on the bus, but do not speak. This time, the bus is full of Bedouin. No IDF kids are heading for Be’er Sheva. The bus does not have stops per se, but rather pulls over whenever someone needs to disembark, usually carrying a live chicken by the neck. I would like to spend some time in Be’er Sheva, primarily because of its connection to the famous 1917 charge of the Australian Light Horse, but I have other places to be.

My trip to the desert to detox from “issues” has obviously been a bust, but Ruth says that she’s heading to the West Bank, too, and that perhaps we will be able to catch up in Ramallah. I put this in my pocket as I board the bus back to the centre of the action. I never see her again.