Jerusalem, Jerusalem 2002

Circa 1500 BCE to 2011 CE pretty much the same

Our taxi pulled away from the office in Hertzalia and headed to Jerusalem after lunch. Farenc, Gopal and I were using a well liked taxi driver that often took American visitors to Jerusalem and back on a half day excursion. Yuhuda drove a Spoda [czech] and spoke perfect english.

Yehuda flew attack helicopters for the Israeli army. He launched into a rant about the settlements and the deranged folks that lived in them. I heard this story from Jews and Arabs alike. First the government picks a spot that is many times occupied by Palestinians as a compound. Natural selection has formed sites optimum for long term human habitation. These go first.

Next the settler family moves in after the army throws the current occupants out into the street. Finally, after the settlers are in the settlement they act like bad neighbors and call the army in to fire off rounds in the direction of some piece of valuable Palestinian property.

Forever thereafter an army patrol is on almost continuous guard for each individual settlement. The threat of escalating violence never, ever goes away.

When we arrived at the entrance to Bethlehem we stopped for just a minute. The entrance was guarded by a permanent guarded gate. The city of Bethlehem is in Sumaria, the southern province of the West Bank and within the borders of the Palestian Authority ruled by Fattah, formerly the PLO.

We drove straight to the gates of the old city through modern Jerusalem. Jerusalem today looks like Avignon or any other European city built around an ancient, walled city center. The difference is that the holy wall that faces Gethsemine and the view west is at the dividing point of three regions. The first is the shared authority of the holy site of the walled city between Isreal and the state of Palestine. Next, Israel takes a diagonal stripe down the center or the pre-1967 borders. Last the Palestinians get Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

Gaza is a post-apocalyptic waste land. No body blamed the Road Warrior for guarding his turf by whatever means necessary. The urge to destroy the man with his boot on your neck is a tectonic plate of civilization. Two populations with a shared culture; a culture of freeman and slave that rigidly enforced class distinctions. These same class distinctions remained in the legal and common venacular as the black mark of defection.

Polite manners are generally accepted behavior among your people. These behaviors are normative but fluid over intervals. Slang comes and goes as it fosters future slang, which perforce exists in the present moment. The time it takes me to bring up lolcats on my monitor to the time I snicker at the kitteh; that interval of time from the time the photons first hit my retina [3.1416] until the smile appears on my face, exists as a specious moment
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[3.1416] and flag the time-zero to this vanishingly small time increment