Been There, Done That

They say that those who know, do it; those who don't, teach. A half year into this course, in which the accent is supposed to be practice before theory, I think I can agree with that. I did the academic thing first and only now am (supposedly) working for a license to kill, so I can tell the difference.

For one, the field is our classroom. They drag us out week after week to see for ourselves what happened, where it happened. Our instructors and guides are more often than not the last word, the ones who made the discoveries themselves, uncovered the past with their own two hands. They tell us not only what they found, but how the mysteries of the past unraveled before their eyes. The dilemmas, the doubts, the debate and the dumb luck that bore discoveries. A generation from now, future courses will only be able to read about this stuff.

Like this week. It started at a site literally next door, Gamla. It was a fortress city that fought the Romans down to the last man, woman and child – those who couldn't fight to the bitter end jumping over a cliff lest they be taken captive. It came up again a couple of days later with Dr. Moti Aviam, the archeologist that dug out the forensic evidence corroborating Josephus Flavius' testimony of the siege of Yodfat (Jotapata) which fell a few months previous to Gamla. (Moti's also a leading authority on ancient synagogues in the Galilee.) He noted that there's a pattern of behavior when the Jews faced defeat at the hands of the Romans – they preferred to die fighting, or to just die (In the case of the mass suicide at Masada.) rather than surrender to the enemy. "Jews never lose, they simply kill themselves before the enemy can win", he quipped wryly.

This led to a debate. Martyrdom, heroism, suicide, murder – ideas and ideals bounced around. And then Moti told us his story.

He was a young tank commander in October of 1973. His platoon was attached to a paratroop company holding positions on the Golan Heights. At midday on Yom Kippur their positions were overwhelmed by a massive Syrian surprise attack. Falling back to a fortified hilltop called Tel Saki, Moti was the first one wounded, taking a burst from an Uzi from one of his friends. ("On the firing range, they always had him flip it on automatic 'cause he couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, and then I get three solid hits, including one to the forehead.") They realized that they were going to be overrun by Syrians. "Our commander radioed for 'fire on our forces', artillery firing on our positions while we duck for cover and hopefully wiping out the attackers. One shell fell short, and one fell long and so ended our artillery support."

Piled almost one on top of the other in one of the bunkers, they heard the Syrians take the positions above. Wary of trying to flush out the survivors, the Syrians threw in hand grenades. "At this point, we decided that this would be a good time to surrender." One of them went up with a white flag, but when they heard shots they realized that their options were limited. The paratroop commander gave an order to pass out grenades, take out the safety pins and release them if the Syrians come down. They tried to stay as quiet as possible, hoping the Syrians would take them for dead. One of the wounded, deafened by the grenade blasts, didn't get the message. He moaned and didn't hear them telling him to be quiet lest they draw attention. Finally the commander ordered his comrades to kill him, but instead one of them unrolled cigarette paper and wrote with some charcoal, "Syrians above – be quiet." The guy quieted down. "He was deaf, but he could see."

Taking us back 2000 years to the Jewish rebels facing defeat, Moti said, "From my personal experience, it's a thin line between suicide and martyrdom. All I know is that lying there wounded and holding a live grenade, I wanted very much to live."

History profs, archeological finds or even Josephus' accounts can't put you there with the Jewish rebels with their backs to the wall the way Moti Aviam does. Even the stones cans speak when translated by someone that dug them out.

So speaking as one that has done both, a hands-on course for a certificate can mean more than an academic degree. I want it from the source, from those who have been there and done that. If they haven't, let them teach.

Against The Odds

First let me say that the first part of this entry is incredibly boring geology stuff, but I'm going somewhere with this, so bear with me. If you just can't take it, skip the next paragraph.

Geologists tell us that after creation, the land of Israel was a very peaceful place. This is because it was about 500 meters under water at the bottom of the sea. Moving tectonic plates under the sea floor crashed into a fig tree on what is now the sidewalk on Bashar Blvd. in downtown Damascus, and as a result of the collision the sea bed was pushed up much in the way the front end of a '72 Corvette piles up on a telephone pole. Until this time, fish and sea horses had been defecating and dying on the bottom of the sea and the debris had hardened into limestone and a kind of soft chalk stone half a kilometer or so deep. Unfortunately, the earth's crust was damaged when all this happened. The newly formed mainland split in two forming the Syrian-African Rift, and both halves started moving in opposite directions. Molten magma forced to the planet surface started erupting all over the place, covering the chalk and limestone with hundreds of meters of lava flows, volcanic debris and silica. Personally, I don't believe a word of this, but this is what geologists say and since I wasn't there at the time, I'm in no position to challenge them.

One person that could challenge the geologists is Marvin the Canaanite. One morning 5000 years ago he woke up, emerged from his Early Bronze Age house on the Golan Heights and was walking his goat when a wave of lava washed into the village, destroying his home and drowning his goat. We know this because the goat's bones were found next to the remains of Marvin's house.

Marvin left the area never to return. His descendants eventually immigrated to the U.S., certain that they had finally found a peaceful place where their quiet lives would never be disturbed by the forces of nature. Some of them live in New Orleans and others settled in the Pacific Northwest in a tranquil hamlet at the foot of Mount St. Helens. They were last heard of in 1980.

(Photo of Mt St. Helens, May 18, 1980)

Meanwhile a new bunch of people moved to the Golan in the Chalcholithic Period. They didn't actually live there – it was where they spent their vacations. The remains of their holiday cottages can be found about 50 meters to your right when you turn off the main road to Moshav Yonaton. You won't find graves at this spot – duh. Like, they were on vacation. Besides, as one of the Chalcholithic old timers used to say, "Bad enough I wasted my vacations here: I'll be danged if I let them bury me here." Apparently there wasn't a lot to do save doodle on the basalt rocks, which is how the place – Ras el Harbush ("Strange scribbling" in Arabic.) – got its name for the strange markings Chalcholiths made when they got bored.

(Travelers note: If your guide takes you to see Ras el Harbush, you can be pretty sure you've managed to piss off somebody. I asked Nir, our guide, why he decided to take us to Ras el Harbush. He shrugged. "Miron (Our course director) just said, 'Whatever you do, make sure to take them to Ras el Harbush.'")
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Now while we were on our way to the next historic site, we were wondering where the Chalcholiths buried their dead and noticed a lot of strange rock formations scattered all over. These are ancient burial sites. The Early Bronze Age people would stand up two big boulders on end and put a third one on top. They called this a "dolman". When they were in a hurry, they piled a bunch of rocks on the body (hopefully dead). This was called a "tumulus". Sometimes they just cleared away the stones to make a holiday village or something. This is called "a pile of rocks".
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Over the years erosion has carved gullies and ravines into the layers of lava and the soft chalk below. When this happens,the chalk underneath is washed away and the basalt rock above breaks off, leaving cliffs that drop off sharply into the wadis below. Sometimes narrow rock outcroppings remain where two wadis meet, with cliffs forming natural fortifications on three or more sides. One of these places was chosen as the site of a fortress town, first by the Seleucids and later by the Maccabees. It's called 'Gamla' because the narrow hump like hill the town was built on resembles a camel's hump (Gamal is camel in Hebrew.)

In 66 A.D. the Jews in the Galilee and Golan revolted against their Roman rulers. The good people of Gamla fortified the northern approach into town by reinforcing the exterior walls and filling in rooms of houses on the city limits. They were pretty happy with themselves, especially when the Roman governor showed up with a posse and tried to starve them out, and when this didn't work tried to take the town by force only to get his butt soundly kicked.
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Nir the guide was explaining this when someone pointed out that I was standing smack on top of a hornets' nest in a crack in the rocks. This gave me food for thought. My first thought was how glad I was that I wear long pants even on hot summer days, otherwise the hornets would have flown clean up my pant legs and stung me where the sun don't shine. The other thing that occurred to me was how more often than not something random happens on these field trips that symbolize the place we're visiting. Because the story of Gamla is how a small country town managed to stir up a hornets' nest.

When the Roman governor came back with mud on his face, the Romans applied that old adage that what you can't do with force, you can do with even more force. They showed up at Gamla with 3 legions, which if you count legionaries, archers, servants, cooks and camp followers amounts to about 40,000 to 50,000 men. This was about 4 Romans per each Gamlan; man, woman and child.

The Gamlans were never very bright, so they thought they could beat the odds against them. And at first it seemed rightly so. The Roman general Vespasian broke through the walls with a battering ram and the legionaries burst in, but for once typically poor Israeli city planning played to the defenders favor. The town was built on a steep slope, the city street in front of one row of houses being the roofs of the houses in the row below. Of course, the Gamlans had never built to code, so when hundreds of soldiers started racing down the street, the roofs collapsed under the weight. Vespasian barely managed to make an exit with his life.

In the end, substandard building practices were the Gamlans' undoing. One night a few legionnaires got bored with the siege and snuck up to the round tower that dominated the fortifications. They were fooling around and dislodged a few stones at the base of the tower and the whole dang thing came tumbling down! Like soldiers every where, the legionnaires' natural instinct was to not take responsibility for their tomfoolery, but just as they were making their getaway who should limp up but ol' Vespasian nursing a bum leg from the roof collapsing incident.

"What are you fools doin' wandering around in the dark? Why don't you come and help me figure out how to break into Gamla?", asked Vespasian.
"Well, as a matter of fact, we just got done pulling down the tower.", said Tumulus the legionnaire.
"Good save.", whispered Tumulus' friend Dolman.

Vespasian, never one to be taken in by his men, insisted on seein' it for himself. Sure enough, no tower! First thing the next morning Vespasian sent his son Titus into the city with some cavalry with orders: Do not ride on the roofs! Titus thought his dad was being a bit overprotective and that his order of the day was a bit odd, but nevertheless promised to not ride on the roof. In no time the Romans were kicking butt and the defenders were forced back to some rock cliffs at the top part of town. At this point the Gamlans didn't have many options. They could either try their luck with the Roman forces coming up through town, or with the force of gravity. It was about 50-50, but none of those who tried to fight off the legionnaires nor those that jumped over the cliff survived.

Today Gamla is the Golan's "lover's leap". Young star-crossed lover go there when their folks won't let them get married. Usually one glance over the edge of the cliff gives them second thoughts and they decide to just shack up together.

Our next stop was another fortress town in the southern part of the Golan called Sussita in Hebrew, or Hippos in Greek. (Both names mean "horse" in their respective languages. I noticed that they named cities after beasts of burden back then. I'm certain that if archeologists look hard enough they will find another town called "Hamor", Hebrew for "jackass".) Sussita was quite a bit better off than her poor cousin Gamla, probably due to the fertile farmland on the bluffs overlooking her and the narrow shore of the Sea of Galilee below. Remarkably, the farmland in this part of the Golan is almost free of rocks, despite the fact that it sits on a bed of basalt like the rest of the Golan. Nir the guide claims that this is due to the volcanic rock being dissolved by the elements over time. I think there might be another explanation. The farmers in the south were shrewd businessmen. They knew that further north there was always a good market for stones, what with them building dolmans and tumulus and chucking rocks at Gamla and all, so they would plow up their fields, let the Romans and Bronze Agers gather up the rocks for a modest fee a come out richer for it both ways. Just a thought……

What ever the case may be, Sussita fared better than Gamla, mainly because she didn't mess with the Romans. Having a Gentile majority probably had a lot to do with this. In fact, things were going so well for Sussita that they decided to make it the county seat and turn it into a full blown Roman city, starting by calling it Hippos and joining the 10 city league called the Decapolis. There was one little problem, namely that being on the top of a hill they didn't have a source of running water. Fortunately, the Romans were never ones to let Jews or the law of gravity get in their way. They built an aqueduct from a nearby spring, and then a watertight pipe system made up of pipes made of solid stone that transported water down the slope opposite the city gate and then up into the city with hydrostatic pressure. Hippos/Sussita was never very big, but it was an attractive city with water fountains and beautiful temples (later churches) complete with huge marble columns that some how were hauled up the mountain and then over the walls. Very impressive.

It occurred to me that the Romans were an arrogant bunch. They weren't to be stopped by anyone or anything, not even the forces of nature. A bit like Americans that a build major port city like New Orleans below sea level. I think there's a moral here. In the end, Nature won. In 749 a major earthquake leveled the city and its ostentatious building and cut its water supply. The Arabs who were masters of the land by then decided that it wasn't practical to rebuild Hippos/Sussita and it was abandoned never to be rebuilt. There's a lesson here for Americans: the Romans' technological achievements lasted only 700 years.

Food for thought....

The last chapter of Sussita's story was in 1948 when some kibbutznikim from Ein Gev took control of the hilltop, turning it into a forward outpost on the Syrian-Israeli border where both sides took potshots at each other until the Six Day War in 1967 when Israel conquered the Golan Heights.

Geologists tell us that one day the land of Israel will be once again as peaceful as it was a million or so years ago when it was under the sea. They say the Syrian-African Fault is moving and an ocean being born under the Sea of Galilee. If we are only patient, one day there will be peace between Israel and her neighbors because Israel will be on one side and the Syrians will be on the other shore and it won't make sense to fight. All we have to do is wait a million years or so.

So Mr. Obama is right after all: there is hope for peace in the Middle East.