The North

 It's impossible to convey the beauty of Israel's north to those who've never been. In some ways it's just another piece of Mediterranean. Merely another landmark on the world's most historic region teeming with grapes and olives: a biome containing Tuscany, Venice, Genoa, Pompei, Nice, Rome, Sicily, the Greek islands, Barcelona, Dubrovnik, Ljubljana, Marrakesh, Alexandria, Anatolia, Tangiers, Ephesus, Cyprus... are the Galilee and Golan really that special?

There are all kinds of theories for what makes Israel special: here is mine. Israel, the geographic meeting point of Europe, Asia and Africa, is the ultimate place where one feels connected to the entire world. Whether ruled by Jew, Muslim, or Christian, the dynamism of the entire world is packed into that tiny place in which one feels connected not only to the present, but the entire human past, and therefore to the entire human future. Metropoles like New York and Tokyo can make you feel connected to humanity as it exists today, but only the land around Israel can make you feel connected to humanity in all times and places.

But it's not the South that feels that way. The South has its own beauty. You feel as though Abraham and Moses trod in your footsteps, but the South is Israel's unique secret, it doesn't belong to the world; and I'm not qualified to say whether the beauty of the South is any different than the beauty of the Sahara or Patagonia.

And it's not really Jerusalem either. Jerusalem, for all its fascination, is too urban for the feeling of which I speak. Whatever mystique Jerusalem carries within it, the earthly Jerusalem is too disputed, too teeming with actual humans and their annoying desires. Even as you're entranced by the beauty of those mournful stones, today's Jerusalem is too loud to hear how those stones weep.

It's only around the Northern District, Ha-Tzafon or Ha-Galil, where you hear that real connection: Akko, T'veriyah, Tz'fat, Kesariyah, Rosh Ha-Nikra, the Hula Valley, the beaches around Chadera and Nahariya, the shores of the Kinneret, and of course, the Golan Heights.

I'm not a prodigious traveler, I haven't left the US since 2012, but in all the world, the only place I've felt something similar was Delphi, rural Greece: a spiritual presence that emanates from the floor. The very flowers and trees speak of things they've seen: the history that's passed through, the armies that crossed, the cultural eminences who set up tent, the mystical spirits the place still conjures thousands of years after its greatest eminence, the longings of millennia of pilgrims.

But here is the ultimate irony of the North: to this day, it's majority Arab. Not majority Muslim, but majority Arab when you count the Christians and Druze people who live there. So it's not Jews Hezbollah's rockets hit, and if the North of Israel is mostly Arab, is the distinction between the North of Israel and the South of Lebanon entirely arbitrary?

Perhaps all Middle Eastern borders are arbitrary and we are yet another people parsing out a land that belongs to the Arabs in its entirety, but white people invented neither colonialism or conquest, and few great civilizations were more imperious or expansionist than the Mohammedan Caliphates. Arabian civilization was a conqueror here like everybody else, unique only in how long their presence lasted. What happened to all those ancient nations of which the Bible speaks? The vast majority of Palestine's indigenous were not killed by Israelites, either they were sold into slavery by Rome, or the Islamic Caliphate presented them with the ultimate choice: crescent or sword.

But if you're ever in Israel, go to the 'far North' and you'll realize one obvious thing: everybody's left. It was already starting when I lived in Israel, how much moreso today?

The Golan, for all its beauty, was never particularly settleable. The land's kept pristine because war covered the whole region in landmines, but even in once prosperous cities like Kiryat Sh'mona, hardly anybody's there anymore. Technically, Kiryat Shmona has a population of nearly 25,000, but currently, it's 3000. The entire population is displaced to hotels around the country: the only people left? Critical workers, army reservists, the elderly, and people with disabilities. From the moment a siren warns of an incoming rocket, people have ten seconds to get to their bomb shelters. Sometimes the rockets explode and the siren only goes off afterward.

Any country would find this an untenable situation, but then you remember that there are people on the other side of the Israel/Lebanon fence, much more than 25,000, who have neither hotels nor basement shelters to take them in. If Israelis find the situation untenable, what must the Lebanese?

Is there any real distinction between the landscape in the North of Israel and the South of Lebanon? I have no way of knowing. Like every Middle Eastern border, it's an arbitrary demarcation between two bits of landscape that saw the same history, the same vegetation, the same animals, the same ruins, and the same conquerors. Before the Lebanese Civil War, Beirut was widely known as the Middle East's most beautiful city. It was called the Paris of the Middle East, so if Beirut was the Paris, was the south of Lebanon the Provence?

...My record isn't great for the last while but hopefully I'll finish this later.