Point by Point: From Israel to Lebanon

By this time I thought I would have my feature story—that I am still in the process of finishing—finished. I was elated when my new friends at the Ma’an news agency asked me to write such an account of my travels. I think Bethlehem was good “half way” point to reflect on what traveling through the Middle East with a surfboard was really all about. So, after long debate at this Lebanese coffee shop in West Beirut, I have decided to give a point-by-point outline of my travels thus far. Pull up a map for this one; there is a lot of zigzagging involved. Enjoy!


1. Sign up for an Israeli Birthright program and experience a free, 10-day, sell you on Zionism tour of Israel.

2. After the trip ended, hop on the coastal train in Israel and roll an hour north to the ethnically mixed city of Haifa.

3. Meet up with Lee, a few notable others, and surf the Israeli side of this Biblical coastline.

(This is of one of "the guys" making a nice Mediterranean style turn.)

4. WHILE ONLY TENS OF MILES FROM THE LEBANESE BOARDER, take a bus, with only little explaining of my surfboard, southeast to Jerusalem.

5. Walk from the Jerusalem bus station to the Muslim Quarter. This took about a half-hour; perhaps more because of inquisitive strangers questioning my sanity for bringing a surfboard to the holy city. Duh, right?

(Abu G walking with his board through Jerusalem.)

6. Taxi to “the wall” that separates Jerusalem from Bethlehem. Of course arguing with the taxi driver about the proper way to strap a surfboard to the roof of a cab.

(What else can you say? "The wall" that separates Israel from the West Bank is in the background.)

7. With a bag on the shoulder and a surfboard under the other, stumbling through the cattle-like checkpoints into Bethlehem. Not a single question by the Israelis who were guarding the station.

(Fitting through this Israeli checkpoint is no easy task. And just to make it clear, there is no "check your bags" option. You may take only what you can carry. )

8. Arriving late to al-Saleebi’s apartment, formally known to the Casbah readership as “Abu Danger,” I rested my board on the closet door. Remember, the West Bank is landlocked.

9. The next day, I followed al-Saleebi (The Crusader in Arabic) to a protest of “the wall” in the small West Bank city of Bilin. Both al-Saleebi and Abu G got tear gassed by the IDF. Good pictures though, didn’t you think?

10. Shaking hands and parting with al-Saleebi at 7am the next day, I took a taxi to the bus station in Bethlehem. The “big day” begins… (Now you really want a map!)

11. Taking a van—meaning an 8 seat shared vehicle that costs only a few American $’s—I went to the main transit station in Ramallah, clearing my first Israeli-run checkpoint of the day. Then, I got into a taxi bound for the Jordanian consult in Ramallah, where I got a visa for my 8PM flight out of Jordan later that day. It costs me 70 Israeli Shekels; 35 for a German citizen. Americans always seem to pay more.

(Tired and ridin' the bus on the West Bank with a surfboard. At this point, Abu was getting ready to lose it.)

12. Back to the main station in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the West Bank, and back to Jerusalem. (Yes, "back" as into Israel proper where I went through four of these roundabout walk-through gates you saw in the picture above. One hour of lines and hassle, aka checkpoints and questions. It was rough.)

13. Half-hour walk to the bus station in Jerusalem, only to find out that the last bus was at 11:30 AM. It was 11:42. Walk a few blocks to find a taxi and another round of: “How to best rack a surfboard.” Then, back to the West Bank, and to the Allenby crossing into Jordan. I cleared two Israeli checkpoints. The cab was 130 Sheckles. (This is the only crossing you need a visa for. Not a person I met told me I could get the visa in Ramallah and make my flight in Amman, Jordan in the same day. Wow.)

14. Clear final Israeli security before bridge and wait in 105-degree heat for an hour for the bus that takes people into Jordan. Final Israeli exit fee was 150 Sheckles. Good thing I removed the wax on my surfboard!

15. Clear Jordanian customs in about an hour and got offered a ride to the Queen Alia Airport in Jordan by some random American defense contractors who had become enamored by my outlandish surf story. Thanks guys.

16. Arrive at the airport at 5PM for my 8PM flight. Check the surfboard. Nervous because A) the Jordanians didn’t charge me for the board and B) because they didn’t ask a single question about it. Perhaps they didn’t know what it was…? I made sure they put at least two “handle with care” stickers on it, though there was no Arabic translation on the sticker.

17. Take off from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and land in the Republic of Lebanon less than an hour later.

18. Carefully switching to my “other” American passport—the one without an Israeli stamp—I put my stamped one in a place that I still don’t feel obligated to publicly expose. Just kidding, ha, it was the back pocket.

19. Lying and answering, “no, I have never been to Israel sir” to the Lebanese boarder guard, I was admitted into Lebanon with a “1-month tourist visa.”

20. The Arabic language program I am doing covered the ride from the airport to the university. Thus, a nicely-dressed Lebanese man was waiting for me with a sign that had my Jewish-sounding name written in clear, bold letters for all to see: Jesse Aizenstat.

21. Opening the surfboard carrier in the hotel, on nerves from the harsh reputation that Royal Jordanian Airlines has acquired for their handling of bags, I opened my 5’10 Dave Johnson surfboard, with a stomp-pad of Che Guevara stenciled onto it, to find it shockingly dingless.

(Since opening it, my surfboard has become a rack for drying cloths. Surf is flat at the moment. After all that, huh?)

Wow! From Tel Aviv to Beirut, from Israel to Lebanon, this is the profound hassle people face when trying to get up what was once the same coastline. Though I understand that many of your more likely candidates to sojourn in Israel are not the most eager to visit Lebanon, and vice versa, this experiment still shows the restrictions on travel. At first, I was going to try and get a transit visa through Syria, and make this an all-over-land adventure, but this would have been more expensive and the Syrians would have likely turned me away out of suspicion. Keep in mind Casbah guerrillas, nobody shows up to the Syrian boarder with a surfboard!

Though many of the details from this epic voyage have been left from this post, I want to be clear that this was just a general skeleton of my trip thus far. Expect to read better detail and a more personal account/reflection in my upcoming feature articles in Ma’an and The Surfers Journal.

Thank you Casbahites. Your support—and daily interest and comments—are truly what keeps this blog alive!

(This is the Lebanese sunset that I watch every night as I wait for surf. As they say in Arabic: inshallah, or God willing, it will come.)

Gaining the trust: Israel/Palestine

As the breakdown of Oslo taught us, trust is everything. So many have been asking: "How do we rebuild trust between the Israelis and the Palestinians?" Though I don't claim to have a solution to the conflict, I do think that the release of Gilad Shalit would be a good first step. Let's just see how reliable this "source" actually is:

Abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit will be transferred to Egypt within a few days as part of a prisoner-exchange deal with Hamas, European diplomatic sources said Thursday.

The move is part of a new United States initiative that includes Egyptian and Syrian pressure on Hamas, internal Palestinian reconciliation and Israel's opening of the Gaza crossings.

Update: Arab sources confirm!

IRAN ON MY MIND...AND IN THE HEADLINES

Since I have been doing a ton of reading lately about Iran I thought I might share some with you and get your marbles spinning too. Recent Reads and thoughts:

Joe Klein's new Time magazine piece asserts that: "The truth is, Iran's government is a conservative, defensive, rational military dictatorship that manages to subdue its working-class majority softly, by distributing oil revenues downward. (On June 23, Ahmadinejad announced that doctors' salaries would be doubled, for example.)"- Very thought provoking.

(Ok, before I continue, I offer a disclaimer. I'm not the wildest fan of Joe Klien, mainly beceause he thinks George W Bush is an honorable man, to which I must disagree. But I will say that Klien is a good writer and analysist. I respect his opinions, even when I do not agree with them.)

Here is another great article in Time by Klien that I think is a MUST read if you are following the situation in Iran.

Check out this rant from Nico Pitney:
"Some Middle East watchers believe the timing of news last night that the United States would send an ambassador back to Damascus Syria after a four-year absence is no coincidence, and may be related to the new Obama administration tone on Iran.
Asked about that theory, a U.S. official said: "You're warm." Syrian Embassy and Middle East expert sources noted that news reports on the envoy to Damascus seemed to have originated with the White House -- which has been in the midst of daily meetings about Iran for several days -- not the State Department.
"I think the Obama administration strategy -- while not fully formed -- was always that it wanted to engage with both Iran and Syria, and it wanted to play one side off the other," said Syria expert Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "This does have to do with that. I don't think we fully understand all of their reasoning on this ... but by announcing that it will send an ambassador to Damascus, it sends a message both to Damascus and Tehran.""

Great stuff Nico, exactly what The Rooster was thinking. Play Damascus against Tehran, classic political strategy, the stuff that Kings and Kissinger are famous for (Damascus/Tehran = Beijing/Moscow? Anyone?).

Finally here is a very insightful NYTIMES article on how Ahmadinejad maintained political power in Iran despite the mounting dissent. Mainly it asserts that he has effectively replaced upwards of 10,000 key government positions, not including the military positions he filled with his cronies, with his close friends and supporters. Analysts estimate that this was to cement his loyalists through the bureaucracies, so that his allies run the organizations responsible for both the contested election returns and the official organs that have endorsed them. These facts coupled with the downward dispersion of oil funds and the illusion of fair democratic elections is how he is able to create what I call a "Soft Dictatorship" role.

Well thats enough homework for you Casbahites to read. Please hit me up in the comments section.

The Faces of Beirut

It has now been three days since I left the checkpoints of the West Bank, the senseless bureaucracy of the Queen Alia Airport in Jordan, and landed in Mediterranean paradise of Beirut, Lebanon. I am staying in the Sunni dominated district of West Beirut--the very place that Hezbollah decided take over during the semi-coup, just over a year ago. My neighbor (well, at the end of our block) is Saad Hariri, the leader of the pro-Western Future Movement. But mostly, I am down the street from the Lebanese American University, where I am doing a language intensive program in Arabic.

The purpose of this post is two-fold: First, I wanted to let all you Casbahites know that Abu has survived his three countries in one day travel stint with his surfboard. (The article I wrote for the Ma'an News Agency is now in its editing process and will be tagged here when it is done.)

The second reason for this post... How do I say this? I am flabbergasted by the thumpin’ streets of Beirut! Sure I was here early in 2007, right after the war, but it was a ghost town with bombed bridges. It seemed like every Lebanese person with a foreign passport was using it, while everyone else was bound to the war-torn, fruitless, economy.

Now, however, Beirut is the #1 destination in 2009. Tourists are in the streets, shawarma is spinning and the newly rebuilt district of Gemmayze is bustling with exotic culture and spunk. It is like a French flair that has been intertwined with an Arabian beat. Truly, dear guerrillas, Beirut is back.

***

I have to study Arabic now, but for the next post I was thinking about going to the same spot as the picture bellow (downtown) and comparing it to what it looks like now--so alive and hoppin' that you can't even think straight! Good idea?

(Abu, Jimbo and Jeff walking through the deserted streets of Beirut. This picture was taken in early 2007.)

Dreaming of kunafa from the Queen Alia Airport in Jordan...

Whoa, getting from Bethlehem to the Queen Alia Airport in Jordan is no easy task--especially if your dumb enough to take a surfboard with you. But don't worry, I took good notes and yes, it was completely absurd getting here. So, to blow off a little steam, let me share one of my favorite things about the Middle East: Nablus kunafa. Thanks Ma'an!

Nablus – Ma’an – A Palestinian company in the northern West Bank city of Nablus has received approval from the Guinness Book of World Records to prepare the largest kunafa in the world.

The plate of the Palestinian delicacy will be 75 meters long and two meters wide, and will weigh 1,350 kilograms, according to Muhannad Ar-Rabi, director of the Palestinian Company for Real Estate Development and Construction.

(Abu munchin' some Haifa kunafa. Not as good as Nablus, but damn fine if I say so.)

In two hours I will be in Beirut, Lebanon. When I get a second, I will post my account of traveling through the West Bank with a surfboard. Thanks guys for following!

HER NAME WAS NEDA.

Yesterday I posted the un-blurred link for the video of a young innocent woman who was shot and killed by the Basij militia at a protest in Iran. I took down that link and and re-posted the link to the liveblogging of Iran from the huff post to make it easier for readers to link to. The video is heartbreaking, and it shows how ruthless the violence in Iran has become. The young woman has been identified...her name was Neda.

Click Here For The Video.

The Rooster is watching you Iran.