Good Walls and Good Neighbors

I landed yesterday, saw the baby twin cousins for the first time, hung out with the family, and successfully staved off jetlag. The secret: sleep as little as possible the night before—I was at the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the NuArt Saturday night and got four hours of sleep—and as little as possible on the plane—three hours Sunday night thanks to a crying, flailing toddler—then sleep a full night on arrival—Monday night, making sure to stay up to a normal hour—and awake on Israel time. Today I walked the Old City, visited the Kotel, got lost in the maze of stone streets, found my way out to the market at Machane Yehuda and then to Ben Yehuda Street. I saw kids no more than fourteen smoking, fish heaving their last in a bin in the market, live chickens in small cardboard boxes in line for kaparot, two people I knew walking on the street, and lots of walls.

There were bullet-riddled walls, 16th and early 20th century, scarred in the War of Independence. Herodian walls with more recent improvements: the Western Wall with Montefiore’s additions, a sleek new area under Wilson's Arch, and spotless bathrooms. Offices with electrical wiring in plastic runners over the stone and swanky new commercial and residential complexes rising above dilapidating homes and shops. Metal gateways, to markets and holy sites manned by army personnel checking IDs of Arabs, and others keeping everyone out of the rampant construction sites. And off in the distance, the new walls separating Israel from the West Bank, demarcating with cement and steel the boundaries of old feuds. In archeological sites around the city, the past emerges from hiding; generations of building, each directly on top of the last, making strata like that of canyons, with the modern city emerging above it. This is a place adamant about living in the past as it reaches into the future. The struggles are apparent. Languages shout for priority in the streets and on signs, dogma fights dogma for dominance, ethnicities hold to their heritage as they navigate the waters of nationality. There are old walls and new walls, and people who build them and curse them. Welcome to Israel.