Leon's No News Bulletin 89 Sunday 21st Sept 08

Shalom everyone,

Let's face it I spend a lot of time on no news events. The life of a tour guide is going from one no news place to another. No news places are places that don't make the headlines yet they are the most attractive places to visit for tourists because they commemorate places where there was news in the past. Tourists who come to Israel come here especially to see those places of past sensations.

The Ghetto Fighters Museum is one of those places. The people who made this museum are survivors of those terrible events which we must never forget so that they won't ever happen again.

This is a museum where they are constantly finding new ways to help visitors remember.

This museum gave me a feeling that I was there. I especially liked the histories of the Ghetto fighters and the eye witness accounts of their struggles against the Nazis. But it doesn't only tell about the past, it tells about the future; that is it tells what those survivors achieved in building a new life for themselves after the holocaust. They were first survivors and then they became builders of a new and better society. They didn't allow their memory of the holocaust to submerge them in depressions and drag them back into the dark of the past. Instead they used it to hoist them up into a new world with a bright future.

The best place to see this transition is in a room of electronic screens where the pictures of the present, beautiful kibbutz they've built gradually change, as you walk past to old pictures of the difficult and dismal past that faced those people. The sequence is from the present to the past and back again. You can witness the struggles to build a new kibbutz, then go back to Europe with the survivors to see the even more difficult circumstances where they came from like the Warsaw Ghetto and then back again to the brilliant future they created here in the Western Galilee.

I recommend every tourist visiting Israel to visit to this museum. It will inspire them and encourage any person never to give up hope, no matter how difficult life is.

The Museum's in the North of Israel, only about 20 KM from Rosh Hanikra, Israel's border crossing into Lebanon, only about 50 KM from Tyre and Sidon, the ancient Phoenician  cities where Jews lived from Biblical times to the present.

After the Ghetto Fighter's Museum my program called for a visit to Acre, the most important port on the eastern Mediterranean coast from the time of the ancient Israelites to the medieval Moslems and Crusaders. Remains of grand, old mosques, where, Moslems claim, Mohammed himself worshipped, churches, castles and harbors where Crusaders and Moslems fought, bartered, anchored their boats and fished, lay scattered wherever you look.

It was obvious we were going to be late for two appointments we'd made for this day; the first, a meeting with a Jewish pioneer of the Jezrieel Valley, born there of parents, chased here from their Ukrainian Diaspora home by persecution, at the end of the 19^th century. The second, a Bedouin family displaced from their nomadic way of life when the land on which they were grazing their sheep was sold by the landlord to the Jewish National Fund for the settlement of Jews who came here to make a new life after being persecuted in the Ukraine, Russia and other countries of the Jewish Diaspora.

Today both the Jewish farmer and the Beduin tribe are citizens of the state of Israel. They don't fight each other as they used to but each features prominently in the stories each tells of the difficulties they had in the old days. Each was the other's biggest problem.

Many people think that they were fighting each other over possession of the land but they were really fighting about the use of the land.

Throughout history, the Arabs who were desert nomads valued the grazing that the land produced, without forming an emotional attachment to the land itself; once grazing in one area had been consumed by their sheep they moved on to another area of grazing.

Jews, on the other hand were traditionally sedentary people; they had always lived in one place, mostly as farmers or sometimes as craftsmen in urban centers. Their dream of settling the Land of Israel was a land of farms and cities where they would be emotionally, nationally attached. They envisioned a land of "wheat and barley, figs, grapes, pomegranates, olives and date honey" (Deut 8:8)

It was clear that Haim, our host at the settlement of Nahalal had achieved the Jewish dream; the home where he welcomed us was surrounded by about 100 other homes, each with several acres of beautifully cultivated farmland. When his father came here this was swamp land, infested with malaria, where the Bedouin used to graze their sheep and move on. It never occurred to the Bedouin to cultivate the land and become attached to it. His father had loved the land itself and he poured this love into the land, making it beautiful and livable and so making it his own.

Aida, the Bedouin lady welcomed us in their tent. Although they have adapted to living in a permanent house in the village of Shibli she still bemoaned the loss of their nomadic way of life and the tragic deaths of many of her ancestors who were killed when they tried to graze their sheep on the crops of the Jewish farmers. She didn't think this justified their being shot.

She told us about the Bedouin way of life, especially their traditional hospitality to strangers. We were welcomed with coffee and then a good meal of fat lamb which was so delicious I took some home with me and have made a note to return for more next time I'm in the Galilee.

The Bedouins still retain their ancient tribal names. This tribe is known as Arab Sbach. Possibly the name originates in the Arabic word "sabha" which means the good sweet grass for the sheep and the goats.

The tribe has now become completely urbanized; some of them have settled in Sweden.

The Bedouin had a great respect for Jewish farmers who took an interest in raising sheep rather than being farmers. One of these was a young Jewish pioneer called Fleischer, who came from Germany at the beginning of the 20^th century and lived for several years among the tribe, tending their sheep, living in their tents and joining the young Bedouins in their forays into Jewish crops to graze the sheep.

He finally returned to kibbutz Merhavia but the Bedouins always remained loyal to him and always welcomed him as a brother.

Wishing you a great no news day

Yours truly

Leon Gork