Thinking Allowed: Hi Israel, Bye Israel

It's no coincidence that this much-delayed update is about Israel. We spent two weeks exploring the Holy Land, and it's taken that long for me to digest my feelings about the country.

Israel is the weirdest country I know. It is miraculous and meaningful and brilliant, and it's also chaotic and callous and sketchy. It's a surprisingly small place - go look at a map, it's mostly the Negev desert and Palestinian Territories. The actual Israel part is tiny.

And so crazy that this little patch of wasteland is THE place for THREE major religions! It's like a metaphor for why incest is wrong! Within half an hour, we ducked our heads into Jesus' deathbed crypt, passed by the Dome of the Rock (where Mohammed is said to have ascended to heaven on his winged horse) and also passed by the Foundation Stone, the single most sacred spot in Judaism, oh which happens to be the SAME ROCK! The odds of which are 1 in x, where x is the number of rocks on Earth.

All of this only explains a minority of the 44 times Jerusalem has fallen. It's like a city with vertigo. Usually it's due to Israel being smack in the middle of the Army Highway between Egypt, Rome, Assyria, Persia, and basically every other warlike civilisation you can think of (except the Inca).

A byproduct of the endless conquests is that Israel is simply soaked in ancient history. We explored a labyrinth of manmade caves at Beit Guvrin, quarried into cisterns, columbaria and baths between 2500 and 1000 years ago. We saw the foundations of the Second Temple deep underground, laid by Herod a couple of millennia ago. We explored Masada, a mountaintop fortress where hundreds of Jewish rebels chose suicide over Roman slavery. We splashed through an endless black tunnel that channelled water into the City of David directly from the spring, protecting it from siege. We saw Roman roads and mileposts, donkey-powered olive presses (pro tip:'lens-shaped stones revolve much better than cylinders), Byzantine murals, the ruined Church of St. Anne, a hospice for Knights Templar from the crusades, and on and on and on.

I also struggled to deal with how unapologetically differently Israelis live their lives. They drive like complete maniacs, as aggressive as I am in, say, a bumper car. Merchants and cityfolk are blunt, rude and inconsiderate most of the time; Tamar got the worst of it, since she speaks Hebrew so is (mis)treated as a local. Infants eat Bamba, a Cheetos-meets-peanut-butter snack that is heralded as nutritious, and kids have no bedtime ever. There are police and guards everywhere, a grim reminder of how close to tragedy people live. Most homes have a bomb- and gas-proof room.

And there were wonderfully soothing times spent with friends and family. We traveled with Tamar's parents plus her brother Yshai and his family, saw cousins, uncles and aunts in Qiryat Gan, and reconnected with old friends from Montreal and INSEAD. Sophia became fiercely attached to her cousin Yeshurun and once again seemed happy to defect to another family. Hmmm...

So as we leave the country with the highest per capita rates of both Nobel Prizes and Bamba consumption, I am grateful for the sense of belonging and history it afforded, grateful to have seen so many loved ones, grateful for the delicious hummus and falafel...but above all grateful not to have to drive amongst Israelis anymore.