Just a quick note to let everyone know that we’ve arrived home. After getting stuck in Salt Lake City for a day–where we couldn’t get a flight to Medford–we rerouted to Reno, rented a car and drove the rest of the way.

Thank you all for joining us on our journey through the Middle East. I hope that this blog and the photos were able to provide you with a sense of place and events. Of course, now that we’re back, I’m realizing that there’s a lot that I’ve left out; like the night in Nablus when we awoke to the sound of tank engines and gunfire at the south end of the city. Perhaps that didn’t seem relevant at the time because we’d been there for several nights and there had been gunfire every night.

Getting on a flight out of Tel-Aviv on standby requires persistence, patience and athletic ability. The first I have. The second, no. And the third is waning as I slide down the backside of my 30s.

I only sustained minor injuries on the last-minute dash to the gate, but I’ll get to that in a bit.

The flight we needed to get on was scheduled to depart at 11:40 p.m. At 10:40, things were looking really good for the dozen of us who were hoping to get out of Tel-Aviv that night. One group we knew from Tuesday night’s failed mission.

All the regular passengers had boarded and they had told us that they would begin calling us by priority level and processing boarding passes. There were several people who had higher priority standby status than we did and after they were processed, it was a our turn.

It was 10:50 when they began processing our tickets and that’s when things started going to hell. First a late-arriving revenue customer arrived. There was a flurry of activity to get his baggage checked and tagged, get his boarding pass processed and get him to the gate.

They closed all their windows and began processing standby customers again. We were in the process of getting our boarding passes when another late passenger showed up. They informed him that they had closed the windows. He wouldn’t take no for an answer and began arguing with the attendant. Everything stopped and the moments ticked away.

Apparently, he was a Palestinian. He said he had been detained at a checkpoint for 3 hours. There were no checkpoints inside of Israel, so I assumed he was a West Bank Palestinian who had come from Ramallah through Qalandiya checkpoint. I was fairly certain that the Israelis did not allow West Bank Palestinians to fly out of Tel-Aviv.

He had papers, which he waived at the attendants while arguing. I’m sure they had heard his story before. The Israelis at the counter most likely had worked at checkpoints during their mandatory service in the Israeli military. There was no way this guy was getting on the flight. Meanwhile, precious seconds ticked by while they argued instead of finishing our boarding passes.

Eventually, two security guards led the Palestinian man away while he yelled and waived his papers in the air.

“You’ll need to run if you’re going to make it,” one of the counter attendants told us.

We took off along with another attendant who would help expedite our passage through the security checkpoint and passport control.

After passing through the security checkpoint, we took off at a full sprint down a long corridor that led to the passport control area.

The floor on the corridor leading from security to passport control is not designed for running. It was like trying to run on an ice rink. But we had no choice if we were going to make the gate.

Everything was going fine until Sophia dropped her book. It slid across the floor and out in front of me. Rather than stopping to pick the book up, I attempted to scoop it off the floor without breaking stride. This turned out to not be a good idea. I got the book, but my foot slipped and I quickly found myself sliding down the corridor while doing the splits.

People behind us were laughing at the sight of the big white guy with a backpack sliding down the corridor while holding a book and doing the splits. I would have been laughing too except that I was completely stressed out and the splits had been accompanied by a tearing sound. Unfortunately, the tearing sound I’d heard was not the crotch of my pants, but my actual crotch. I realized this when I got back up and tried to continue running. Pain shot through my leg like electrical shocks. I kept running. All I cared about was making the gate. We had to make this flight. Adrenaline masked the pain that I would get to encounter later.

We went through passport control where some guy tried to step in front of us because he was in a hurry. I was just about to pick him up and throw him across the airport when I realized that I wouldn’t make the flight for sure if I did that. Instead I pushed his passport out of the way at the window counter so that the passport control agent could continue with ours. He tried to push it back up under the window but I kept the path blocked with my hand and moved my body so that the passport control agent couldn’t see the guy nor hear his ramblings about his passport problem.

After getting our passports stamped with exit visas, we took off down the final leg to the gate.

This part was carpeted and I ran as fast as my injured leg would allow. My goal was to get to the gate and stall them until Kacey and the girls caught up.

While I ran the 400 meters to the gate, Kacey and the girls were picked up by an airport courtesy car.

We arrived at the gate at the same time.

I was bent over, sweating and ready to puke.

“Daddy, we rode on a cart!” Emma exclaimed.

“That’s…nice,” I said between breaths.

“Are you okay Daddy?”

“Yeah, Daddy’s just fine. Get on the plane.”

We boarded and they closed the airplane door right behind us.

I slugged back a handful of ibuprofen as the flight attendants made final preparations for takeoff. Pain continued shooting through my leg but I didn’t care. We made the flight and were finally getting the hell out of Tel-Aviv. And at the moment, that was all that mattered.

We’re at the Ben Gurion Airport, going through the same thing we did Tuesday. It’s pretty much the same, but we hope the ending will be different and we’ll get on tonights flight.

Meanwhile, a Palestinian family just got led away from the luggage inspection center behind us. We don’t know what for, presumably for something that was in one of their bags. The woman was carrying a baby, she was sobbing and hyperventilating as they led her and her husband away with all their baggage.

Yesterday’s flight looked bad and today looked better. So we spent the day at the beach playing in the Mediterranean and recovering from the late night we’d had. It was very pleasant even with the gunship helicopters and military transports that flew over the beach every five minutes or so. There was a lot of activity up and down the coast with helicopters and aircraft coming and going, presumably from Lebanon.

We left Jerusalem on Tuesday evening, which was the same day Condi was in town causing all sorts of traffic jams and mayhem.

There’s one Delta flight per day from Tel-Aviv to Atlanta that departs at 11:40 p.m. We’re flying on pass, which means we show up at the airport and hope there are open seats. There were none Tuesday night so we had to find a hotel in Tel-Aviv, which is about 20 minutes north of Ben Gurion Airport.

Tel-Aviv is a tourist/vacation town located on the Mediterranean. Summer time is when most Israelis are taking there vacations and all the hotels we called didn’t have any rooms available, except one: The Ami Hotel. By the time we had called hotels, rounded up our bags, got a cab and got to Tel-Aviv, it was 2:00 a.m.

When we arrived at the Ami Hotel it was difficult to discern if it was a crack house or a whore house. Maybe both. One thing was for sure: my family was not going to stay in this place. Things got even better when we realized we had no more sheckels (Israeli currency) for paying additional taxi fare to search for hotels up and down the main strip.

It was unclear whether our taxi driver was in a hurry or just a dick when he left me, my wife, two little girls and all our baggage in front of a crack/whore house, speeding off into the night without even giving me the change he owed me.

We went to a hotel across the street from the Ami. It was nicer than the Ami and the front desk guy wasn’t loaded. They didn’t have any rooms available and no, our children could not sit in the lobby while one of us walked up and down the main strip inquiring about room availability at the many hotels that lined the street. So at 2:30 a.m., I found myself standing on a street corner in Tel-Aviv with a pile of luggage and two very tired and cranky little girls while Kacey went across the main strip to check for room availability at the hotels there.

At one of the hotels, Kacey encountered an angel of a woman at the front desk who actually called other hotels to see if they had a room was available. She found one and we hauled our bags several blocks up the street to the Shalom Hotel. It was a meager hotel, but very nice and clean. It was 3 a.m. by the time we got checked in and to bed.

We’re at Ben Gurion Airport, hoping to get seats on the 11:40 p.m. flight to Atlanta. It’s not looking good at the moment, but we’ll give it a shot nonetheless. The worst thing that can happen is that our luggage will be put on a flight will be sent to Peru and we’ll stay the night in Tel Aviv then do this all over again tomorrow.

Meanwhile, it gives me time to sit in the food court where people keep coming up to me and talking to me in Hebrew. I’m not sure why this keeps happening to me. I’ve checked the top of my head to make sure somone didn’t slip a yarmulke up there as a practical joke. I just smile, say “shalom” then confess that I don’t speak Hebrew.

On Sunday, we got a handful of interviews at Hebrew University, but needed to talk to more people. So, we went to the Jewish Quarter of the Old City where Kacey spent yesterday afternoon interviewing Jewish shop owners and every day people she approached. Of course, some people didn’t want to be interviewed, but most were happy to talk about their life in Israel.

The overall all tone here is this: tired. Israelis are tired of constantly being at war. There are tired of having to defend themselves against attacks. They are tired of having to send their young people to war to defend Israel. They want peace. They want to go on with their lives without disruption and fear.

Opinions of how to achieve peace range greatly.

Some saw a two-state solution as the only hope for peace. Others saw no hope for peace; rather, it was an all-or-nothing deal. One side would win and one side would lose. And the losing side could not and would not be Israel.

One woman Kacey interviewed said that the situation wouldn’t end until all the Arabs left Israel.

“Where would they go?” Kacey asked.

“To live in one of the 22 other Arab countries out there.”

Based on our interviews with Palestinians, that’s not going to happen. Their home is here—not in Saudi Arabia, Syria or Egypt.

We had been told about a house in Ramla, a small town west of Jerusalem, that was called Open House. The house had been owned by a Palestinian family prior to the war in 1948 at which time they were driven out by Israeli forces along with thousands of other Palestinians who lost their homes.

Years later, the son of the Palestinian man who had built the house in 1936 returned to his home where he was greeted by a young Israeli Jewish girl named Dalia who gave them a tour of the house.

After Dalia’s parents died, she dedicated the house as a place of education and reconciliation. Today, a kindergarten of mixed Arab and Jewish children is run in the Open House.

[The history and moving story of Open House is told in The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan.]

Kacey had contacted the resident director, whose name was Ofer, and asked if she could come interview him.

Ofer was very open to being interviewed and told us that if we could come that evening there would be a houseful of people, both Arab and Jewish Israelis, that she could interview.

They were having a going away party that night for a group of Dutch people who had raised money to come and do some needed repairs on the house. They were leaving to return to Holland that night.

We caught an 8:00 p.m. bus to Ramla from the central bus station in Jerusalem. The journey took about 40 minutes. Most of the other passengers on the bus were young military personnel. At first, it’s a bit frightful to be around so many young people with automatic machine guns. But after a while, you get used to it and don’t really think about it much anymore. After a while, you just get used to seeing Israeli soldiers with machine guns all over the place and stop noticing it any longer. It just becomes the norm.

Open House is a meager brick home. The going away party for the Dutch group was out back on the patio. We sat and talked and ate while the girls played on the small playground equipment.

Kacey got several good interviews with people there before we had to go catch the return bus to Jerusalem.

A couple days later, she met with and interviewed Dalia at our hotel here in Jerusalem.

At dinner Monday evening, Isaac introduced us to a friend of his named Aryeh because he believed he could help us with our project.

Aryeh had been a journalist with the Jerusalem Post and knew all sorts of people, including very important people. Now Aryeh worked for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and was quickly eating dinner before having to go across the street to the King David Hotel for a meeting.

The head of the ADL was in town from New York and there would be a flurry of activity. The ADL is a Jewish organization that seeks to combat defamation of Jews. Specifically, according to the ADL Charter of October 1913, “[The ADL’s] ultimate purpose is to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens.”

Aryeh was a small energetic man who ate his pasta at warp speed. Between bites, he provided us with some ideas of where we could speak with Israeli Jews. He didn’t seem very interested in our project or perhaps he just became preoccupied with telling stories.

Once upon a time Aryeh had owned a blue and white Suzuki jeep he called “The General Lee”. He called it that because he had a sticker of the Confederate flag on the back and a plastic statue of General Lee mounted on the dashboard.

I thought it a bit odd for someone from the ADL to display such icons of American history. Aryeh was born to Irish parents who converted to Judaism. He grew up in Louisiana. Surely he knew what the Confederate flag and General Lee represented. Perhaps he was just mocking racist rednecks who still proudly waved the Confederate flag as a representation that African-Americans, as a lower race of people, should have remained slaves. If that were the case, however, I didn’t see the connection. It seemed to me that someone from the ADL shouldn’t be anywhere near condoning the symbolism of the Confederate flag nor drive a jeep that was christened “The General Lee”. If it was indeed some sort of mocking of such things, it was at best in the poorest of taste. At worst, he was truly celebrating what the South had stood for—the hypocrisy of which would be staggering.

Aryeh loved The General Lee and was very upset when it was stolen one day.

“I began calling all my contacts in the Palestinian Authority to see if they could find my jeep,” he said.

The jeep was finally tracked down in Hebron. Aryeh was informed that the jeep had already changed hands about a half dozen times and he would need to pay NIS 7,000 (about $1,500) to get it back.

“Of course, I had to get The General Lee back,” Aryeh said. “So I went to Hebron to buy it back.”

After many hours of coffee and tea and waiting for someone to bring The General Lee, it finally arrived.

“The flag had been torn off the back and the statue of General Lee busted off the dashboard,” Aryeh said. “I couldn’t believe it. Why would they do that? Only his boots remained.”

Isaac tried to console Aryeh that he could probably find another plastic statue of General Lee to mount on the dashboard of The General Lee.

“Maybe on eBay,” he said.

“I don’t know,” Aryeh said. “I got that one at a museum when I was a kid. I doubt it.”

Aryeh was done with his story, done with his pasta and needed to get over to the King David Hotel for the important meeting with the head of the ADL.

On Sunday morning, Kacey telephoned the public relations department at Hebrew University requesting permission to come on campus and interview students for her project. HU’s spokesperson granted the permission and we jumped in a cab to go across town to the campus.

We interviewed a dozen people at HU. Mostly students but some other people too, including the librarian.

The best interviews were a group of four young men with differing opinions of why things were the way they were. At one point, their discussion swung to Hamas and Hezbollah. One of the security guards, who I’d noticed loitering near us where we sat on the grass lawn, came over and spoke to one of the young men.

While the interviews carried on, I went over and told the security guard that we had permission from the public relations department to be on campus conducting interviews.

“It’s okay,” the student said. “I tell him we are open-minded campus and discuss politics openly. No problem.”

But apparently it was a problem.

After the student sat down with the rest of the group. I stayed with the security officer and talked some more. Apparently, it wasn’t okay to have open discussions about politics, especially regarding the Arabs.

“We have lots of Arabs here,” the security guard explained. “No political discussions like that about Hezbollah or Hamas. It could create big problem.”

“Okay, okay. It thing they are done now,” I said. “We were just talking to them about life here and, you know, the situation in Lebanon just came up.”

And how could it not have? Hezbollah rockets being fired into northern Israel where two dozen Israelis, mostly civilians, had been killed during the past two weeks was on everyone’s minds and permeated every discussion we had, especially with Israeli Jews.