PART I
I just got back from a two-week trip to Israel, spent eating hummus, riding camels, and dodging suicide bombers.
No, I kid: While I did eat a ridiculous amount of hummus, a flatulence-inducing spread made of mashed chickpeas — I didn’t engage in either of the other two activities.
I drove past camels (and their Bedouin nomad herders) in the desert, but didn’t ride any. As for suicide bombings, apparently the death-wishing, Jew-hating Islamic extremists have decided that strapping a bomb to themselves just isn’t terrifying enough and have taken instead to driving bulldozers at high speed through crowded streets, flipping over public buses, crushing cars, and injuring and killing innocent people, which is what happened last Thursday in Jerusalem, the city I was visiting on that very day.
Fortunately, Israelis are total badasses and a random bystander — an off-duty soldier (but then, every Israeli has to serve in the military, so they’re pretty much all on- or off-duty soldiers) — grabbed the gun of a nearby police officer, climbed on top of the moving bulldozer, and shot the fucker driving the thing four times, killing him dead.
Speaking of badass — I’m not Jewish, but my wife Maya is, and one of the main reasons I was in Israel was to visit, along with her and her dad, my wife’s 90-year-old grandparents (whom neither she nor her father had seen in 13 years). And let’s face it, if you’re a Jew — meaning most of the world hates you — and you make it to that sort of age, you’re a fucking badass, no questions asked.
And if you make it to that sort of age and you’re still downing shots of cognac, as Maya’s grandmother proceeded to do each time we got together for a meal, you’re really fucking badass.
While in Israel, Maya’s dad stayed with his parents, while Maya and I split our time between her uncle’s place in Haifa and her cousin Zeev’s place in Tel Aviv.
Zeev lives with her boyfriend Yoav, and they’re both super cool. And Yoav is super metal. I mean, so super metal that when he hangs out all day wearing an Overkill T-shirt, he comes home and makes himself comfortable by changing into a cut-off-sleeve Overkill T-shirt.
So super metal that he has this tattooed on his right arm…
Zeev and Yoav’s apartment is in the center of Tel Aviv, Israel’s biggest city, and just a few blocks from the beach, which is awesomely pronounced in an Israeli accent as “bitch.” Like, “What a beautiful bitch. Let’s go swimming.”
Even better, their place is just a few blocks from probably the best record store in Israel, the accurately if redundantly named Metal: The Metal Shop.
Inside, the store’s left wall features a mural with the cover art of Dio’s Holy Diver, Obituary’s Cause of Death, Sepultura’s Beneath the Remains, and Doro’s Warrior Soul, and the shop, as a whole, features a great selection of metal CDs, LPs, DVDs, and T-shirts. I picked up albums by three Israeli bands: folk-tinged black metallists Arafel, sludgy tech-thrashers Breorn, and Pantera-esque power-groove quartet Betzefer.
When not shopping for metal goods, going to the “bitch,” and eating hummus, Zeev, Yoav, Maya, and I piled into a rented car driven by yours truly — the Israelis are notoriously aggressive drivers, but I hail from motherfucking Brooklyn and can more than hold my own — and roared off through the desert to the Dead Sea, the saltiest body of water on Earth, located at the lowest point on the surface of the planet on dry land. Roaming around the arid landscape were some of the most metal-looking species of animal I’ve ever seen: the Ibex, a wild goat distinguished by the males’ massive recurved horns.
There we visited the ruins of the clifftop fortress Masada, where in around 73 AD, Jewish rebels — besieged by troops of the Roman Empire — committed mass suicide rather than be captured. “Now you know why a bunch of Jews killed themselves,” explained Yoav as we sweated our asses off in the blistering sun up there. “It was just too hot.”
Then we floated in the bizarre, oily, hypersalinated water of the Dead Sea and coated ourselves in its famously curative black mud.
We might have looked pretty stupid, but we felt like Sepultura in the “Territory” music video.
Driving back to Tel Aviv, we passed an absolutely massive brush fire alongside the highway, patrolled by soldiers and ominous military vehicles. The flames and smoke towered hundreds of feet above us, and crisp, blackened trees lined the road.
We assumed that the conflagration had some natural cause or perhaps someone had unwisely tossed a cigarette from their car window or something, but when we got back to Zeev and Yoav’s place, they learned from the news that five Palestinian militants had crossed over into Israel from the West Bank that morning, intent on fucking shit up, and the Israeli army, in the process of trying to take the terrorists out, had set off a small missile and that had started the fire. Not a cigarette. A small fucking missile. (The would-be terrorists were later apprehended, having escaped being blown to bits.)
Another day, Yoav helped Maya and I track down some metal shows to go to while we were in Israel. Turned out the only two concerts going down during our trip fell on the same day: Friday, June 27. There was the “Battle for Jerusalem,” a black-metal show held in, uh, Jerusalem and featuring Arafel and Azamoth, among others. Then there was the “Summer Fury Metal Fest” in Haifa, featuring Israel’s answer to Lacuna Coil, Distorted, and melodic death metallers Prey for Nothing.
I really wanted to go to the show in Jerusalem — seeing a black-metal gig in the holiest of holy cities just sounded too awesome to be missed. But unfortunately, we didn’t have a place to stay there, and since the Israeli weekend falls on Friday and Saturday and corresponds with the Jewish day of Sabbath, called Shabbat, during which pretty much everything in the country shuts down — shops, offices, and, worst of all, public transportation — we didn’t have a good way of getting there and back.
Basically, religion kept me from seeing the black-metal show in Jerusalem, which seems pretty fitting.
So, Maya and I swung by “Summer Fury” instead, and it was a good time. The club was a dark, scuzzy shithole on the wrong side of town, and the maybe half-capacity crowd included a surprising number of young girls (and not just the reluctant tag-along girlfriend variety — I mean cute little metal chicks rocking Obituary T-shirts and shit) and a lot of drunken Russians. Metal chicks aside, maybe the best part of the show was hearing stage banter in Hebrew.
The standout bands were definitely the prog-tastic Xenolith, who had kind of a Death-meets-Opeth thing going on, and Prey for Nothing, whose skinny-ass, banshee-shrieking frontman Yotam “Defiler” Avni reminded me of the Wicked Witch of the West, especially when the green stage lights hit him.
The band also had some pretty rad T-shirts for sale; on their back, the slogan “Violent times demand violent music.” And in a land where missiles start brush fires and bulldozers are used as weapons of hate, I have to agree.
PART II
The morning before my flight to Israel about three weeks ago, I received the following message in my MySpace inbox from some guy named Sam:
Subject: welcome to Israel!!!
Hey, man!!
Just saw on www.revolvermag.com that you are coming down for a vacation. I’m a huge fan of Revolver for 3.5 years now. Would be pretty cool to meet you. Just to say hi and may be couple pictures. If you’re cool with that and will be in Jerusalem… Also when you gonna be in the Old City in Jerusalem make sure you check out Lina’s. It’s a humus place. Anyone in the Old City will give you directions. It’s the best humus in the world and a true middle eastern experience.
Peace, Sam
I had a mix of thoughts and emotions reading the message (among them, Wow, they know Revolver in Israel! I need to delete my MySpace page. And, what if this dude turns out to be a total psycho stalker?), but mostly I was pretty psyched, in no small part because Jerusalem was the one major Israeli city in which my wife Maya and I didn’t really have any contacts, and we had heard that the Old City area, in particular, is positively labyrinthine to navigate. Here was someone who might be able to help us find our way around. So, I shot Sam an email back and set up a tentative rendezvous.
A few days into our trip, the wife and I took the bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and met up with this Sam character. He turned out to be right around our age, married, from the former Soviet Union (as is Maya), and totally cool. He knew the Old City well and was more than willing to show us around. He took us to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where most Christians believe Christ was crucified and buried. He took us to the Wailing Wall, perhaps the holiest site in Judaism.
And he led us through the Muslim quarter and its bustling middle-eastern bazaar, where — rather remarkably — “I heart Palestine” and “President Arafat” shirts were sold freely next to “Super Jew” and “Israel” shirts.
Here are Sam and I outside the Damascus Gate of the Old City.
Sam also took us to what he claims is the best hummus place in all of Israel (every Israeli we talked to had a different, but no-less-passionate recommendation for the country’s best hummus). Later, the three of us sat down in a coffee shop over some cold drinks and shot the shit about religion, traveling, Russia, the U.S., and most of all, metal. By the time Maya and I bid Sam farewell at the end of the day, we both felt that far from engaging some “total psycho stalker,” we had made a new friend.
Excited by our exploration of Jerusalem, the ol’ lady and I decided to enlist an actual professional guide to lead us through more of the country. One of Maya’s other cousins, Zhenya, works in the tourism industry in Israel and he hooked us up with a good friend of his, Sergei. For two days, Sergei — a portly Russian with a motor mouth and a wealth of knowledge — drove us through northern Israel, acting as our private guide, leading us to amazing spots off the beaten trail.
We rumbled up into the Golan Heights, exploring abandoned tanks and bunkers from the Six-Day War of 1967.
We passed minefields along the borders with Israel’s mortal enemies Lebanon and Syria.
We clambered through the ruins of an old Crusader fortress that was conquered and co-opted by Arabs…
…and climbed down precarious mountain faces to explore a bandit captain’s ancient hideout built right into the cliffs.
Talking to Sergei, we learned that, while not exactly a metalhead, he is a big fan of hard rock, and so on our second day he brought along some of his CDs, and as we roared through the Israeli landscape, we blasted Guns N’ Roses.
But as cool as the sites were that Sergei led us to, by far the strangest and craziest adventure of our time in Israel came when we got together with Sam again. It was the fateful Thursday of the bulldozer attack in Jerusalem, but when that shit actually went down, we — just the three of us with our flashlights — were a good 45 minutes outside the city, deep inside the near-total darkness of a man-made subterranean cave. 2,000 years ago, Jews used the cave as a hiding place from Roman soldiers, and it was full of secret rooms, crawl spaces, nooks, and crannies.
At one point we crossed a narrow rock bridge some six feet off the floor; this led to a wall with shallow hand-holds and foot-holds carved into it. Climbing these another eight feet up from the bridge, we pulled ourselves through a hole in the wall barely big enough for us to fit through and scrambled into a small chamber.
In the corner of this there was a square hole in the floor, which led to a tunnel just big enough to allow a person to crawl on hands and knees into it. Sam explained that this was the final hiding place for those in the cave — should the Romans have breached the refuge, everyone there would have crawled into the tunnel, packing in as many as 50 people in the tight, claustrophobia-inducing space.
Maya and I crawled in; Sam, having been in already once before, understandably declined. The tunnel wound deep into the rock, maybe 50 feet, hitting more than a few blind corners. Reaching the dead end, we lay there, turned off our flashlights, and imagined, in the utter darkness, what it would have been like to be hiding there with no light and almost no air, packed in with friends and relatives, hunted by Romans eager for your blood.
Needless to say, it was a very intense experience.
What is maybe the most striking thing about Israel is how deep the history is there — sometimes literally, deep into the Earth — and how much shit hasn’t changed, even from those ancient days 2,000 years ago. Where once there were refuge caves and tunnels, there are the military bunkers of 1967, and bomb shelters, and now there is a wall between Jerusalem and the West Bank. Where once there were murderous Roman troops, now there are suicide bombers and killers in bulldozers.
But as much as Israel is surrounded by and besieged by its many enemies, Maya and I came here for family, and we left with new friends: Sam and Sergei.
And I also left with one sick souvenir: this Metallica T-shirt, bought in a shop off of Zion Square in Old City, Jerusalem, which says “Metallica” in motherfucking Hebrew. How badass is that?
