A Journey to Jerusalem

Extract

A March afternoon. At Ascalon, five miles from the Gaza Strip, in a hot, windless silence smelling of orange blossom, three of us had picked up fragments of Roman glass and pottery two thousand years old, had looked down from the broken ends of the ruined Crusader walls to the long white beach and the dark Mediterranean. We had forgotten the huge factory and the new settlement to the north. We had forgotten our plan to drive on to Beersheba, thirty miles to the south-east. For the moment we were isolated from the pressure of work against time which makes Israel an invigorating, exhausting, nervous country.

Now there was no time to visit Beersheba. We must drive fast to reach Jerusalem before dark. Our guide, tirelessly informative, drove eastwards. As we approached the Jordan frontier a prospect of wild, hilly, stony, deserted country opened out, the edges of the Negev. We were suddenly aware of tension and anxiety. We stopped to pick up a young soldier who wanted a lift to the next military post. The tension dropped momentarily: we had a revolver aboard. That mound on the left; That was the mound of Gath. Yes, there was heavy fighting here during the war. Which war; The War of Liberation, the most recent of the endless conflicts which have raged across the landscape of Palestine.

A few miles further on, at an army camp which used to be a Palestine Police Station, the soldier got out. Tension mounted and we drove faster into the bare, rocky mountains of Judaea.