KOHIMA – We board “the best bus we could find” in Dimapur and take the long winding road up the mountain range towards the Kohima, the capital of Nagaland. This is a fascinating and beautiful part of North East India. It is here that British and Indian forces stopped the advancing Japanese army in 1944. We are heading up into the Naga Hills on the one side and the Chin Mountain Range on the other. The Chin is an extension of the Himalayas. The group’s spirits are up – finally we are out of all these airports and in the open country. Quite often the group will spontaneously break into song. Although I don’t know all the words, I recognize the religious songs, and it’s amazing to hear these Hebrew verses in the rain forest of Nagaland, North East India. Also, one of the participants says it’s good to be praying and singing when driving along a mad, winding, back-road where trucks, buses, cars and cabs all mingle because there are no lanes, and there is no order [it feels like a video game: every time our bus passes a truck I feel like we've won ten points and get to play on, until game over]. Continue reading →

DIMAPUR – Our group has now flown from Israel to Amman, from Amman to Delhi, from Delhi to Calcutta, and from Calcutta to Dimapur, the commercial capital of Nagaland in the North East.

I have to say that for a group of twenty middle aged and older religious folks I’m amazed at the energy and spirit of this group. Everyone is helping everyone else. Friendships have been formed and the atmosphere is really upbeat, despite the long haul out here and the delays. Continue reading →

Delhi airport has been overrun by paramilitary forces. Oh wait, no, these soldiers actually work here. I’m used to seeing civilians working at airports worldwide, with police and army units providing security. Well, at Indian airports, the soldiers do everything. There are soldiers printing out your boarding pass, other soldiers checking your boarding pass, still others ushering you from place to place, frisking you, soldiers at the scan machine, metal detector, and there was even an officer who offered to write down my name and address on the little tag you tie to your hand luggage. What beautiful handwriting for a colonel. I can only assume that the Indian government needs to find jobs for all these people, and what better outfit to run a logistical nightmare like a busy international airport than an army? This is also the only place in the world where I have seen military men wearing gold rings with pink stones on them.

Quite the same story at Calcutta’s airport, except that here, in addition to all the military and paramilitary [who can tell the difference], there are so many other uniformed employees mulling about that I get the impression they are just creating work for each other. There are about a dozen workers with walkie-talkies criss-crossing the floor of the departures hall at Calcutta airport. And at several moments, like fish in an aquarium swimming on their own and then colliding, violently, briefly, they remove their walkie-talkies from their mouths and argue with each other over who is actually moving these people and to where, until they are joined by a third walker-talker who has come to sort it all out. They are creating confusion for themselves to solve. “Job well done, let’s go for lunch,” I imagine them saying after a particularly busy day solving all this chaos.

Due to a maddening airport worker’s strike, we were delayed at Ben Gurion Airport for three hours before our flight to Amman, Jordan.

Some observations about Jordan:

For me it was the first time flying out of Amman, and seeing where else Royal Jordanian can take you in the Middle East was a tantalizing, yet ultimately disappointing thought. Like many Israelis I know, the thought of traveling to places like Oman, Muscat, Damascus and so many other places is an ingrained hope; maybe one day. Eyal says there is a sociology professor at Haifa University who came up with the theory that the reason so many young Israelis travel to India and Thailand after the army is that they’re in essence looking for the concept called ‘the East’ – with it’s exotic and mystical locations. And because ‘the East’ is so close to us – in Amman, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad – but yet, we cannot experience it in these places, we are forced to search for it further a field. Don’t know what I think of that theory yet.

It was also my first time flying an Arab airline, and hearing the captain speak Arabic first was interesting. While walking through the airport with our guide Eyal, I noticed how the Jordanian airport security warmed to him when he spoke Arabic to them. I think it’s really important that Israelis learn to speak Arabic. We live in an Arabic neighborhood for God’s, and Allah’s sakes, we should be able to talk to our neighbors one day when they agree to talk to us. Quite funny how Jordanian airport security men talked back to Eyal in Arabic even though he was wearing a kippa on his head.

What was quite funny was how the security guard at the metal detector frisked every man’s kippa and even tried to look under a few when the men on my expedition walked the detector.

The flight from Ben Gurion Airport in Lod to Queen Alia International Airport in Amman takes roughly 25 minutes. It takes longer to get on the plane, find your seat, place your carry-on luggage in the overhead compartment, watch the little security video and get an explanation from the air stewards about the emergency exits – than it does to fly there. Flying there basically entails taking off, gaining altitude, and then in an arc, beginning a descent. Up, over and down – and you’re there. And from Amman you can fly anywhere in the Middle East.

Picture by Israel Weiss

The Jordan Times was reporting the following stories:

The International Labor Organization reports that unemployment in the Arab World in 2006 stood at 11.8%, twice as much as in the rest of the world. If that’s true, and those numbers were not likely to have changed much in a year, then not only the Arab world has a big problem, because as we have seen, unemployment, discontent and radicalism in the Middle East is not confined to that region alone.

There is a campaign, launched in Jordan but spreading out in the Middle East, which would codify national laws here to make it easier to prosecute and punish people convicted of insulting Islam and the Prophet Muhammed. The campaign, called “Messenger of Allah Unites Us” aims to codify conventions [some lax, some strong] that would criminalize insults such as, according to many Muslims, the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammed’s turban as a bomb, which caused an international uproar two years ago. Once the convention is finalized it will be presented to the Jordanian Foreign Ministry, and then the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

On a tangential note, Petra is hosting the Fourth International Moderation in Islam conference.

There is violence in Jordan’s schools, so much so that the Education Ministry has established a hotline for citizens to report acts of violence.

There are 190 gas stations in Amman, the capital. Last week a fuel shortage was created when gas station owners refused to sell gas to people because the price had been dropping steadily for several weeks, and the owners were incurring losses. The gas station owners are putting pressure on the government to regulate changes in fuel prices and to steady it out, stagger it, and perhaps only have one gas price reduction per month, instead of just lowering the price at the pump whenever the price of oil on the markets drops. I’d love to see them try that in Israel – they would get crucified.