Tag: Israel

  • Israel Diary – Day 6, Haram Esh-Sharif

    We were especially privileged on our trip to have with us some excellent guides and thanks to the scholarly contacts of one of them we had an invitation to visit the mosques which now sit atop the Temple mount in the old town in Jerusalem. The most famous is perhaps the Dome on the Rock…

  • Israel Diary – Day 5 Around Galilee

    Our long roundabout route to get to Tiberias did have the bonus of a lovely dinner and a comfortable night in the Scots Hotel. The hotel is not without its own controversy within the Church of Scotland. It is, unashamedly, up-market and represents a very significant investment on the part of the CofS. There are…

  • Day 4 – Masada and Qumran

    Day 4 saw us up bright and early – well, early, but probably not too bright. The reason for the early start was that we had a lot of ground to cover. We were travelling from Jerusalem to Tiberias on the Lake of Galilee, via Masada, Qumran and a quick dip in the Dead Sea.…

  • Day 3 – Yad Vashem

    [Note – I got out of sync. Hebron was actually day 2. What can I say? I was tired.] The visit to Hebron was a difficult one. Witnessing the effects of Israeli settlements on a Palestinian community was difficult. Seeing some of the ‘propaganda’ used to justify the existence of settlements was frustrating and caused…

  • Hiatus

    In case you’re wondering, the recent Israel trip didn’t stop at day 3. It simply transpired that processing everything we had seen and then putting together a condensed version of it for a blog post was just a little too ambitious to do on a daily basis. However, I do hope to get some more…

  • Israel Diary – Day 3, Hebron and Bethlehem

    A visit to Hebron was never going to be an easy one. It epitomises, in many respects, the key issues for Israel and Palestine. Hebron is a fair sized city, predominantly Palestinian, about 25 miles south of Jerusalem. It is one of the most densely populated in the west Bank and is divided into two…

  • Israel Diary – Day 1, Part 2

    After an afternoon catching up on some rest, a smaller, ‘intrepid’ group set out to walk down to the City of David and, from there, walk back up to the Old Town, through the Dung Gate, meet the rest of the group and then find a vantage point to view the gathering at the Western…

  • Israel Diary – First (proper) Day

    We arrived in Jerusalem at around 4.30 this morning and, after an all too brief catnap, were up and breakfasted at 8.oo am. I think it’s fair to say the the group looked tired, but all weariness was soon forgotten as we set off for a morning exploring the Old Town of Jerusalem within the…

  • Israel Diary – T minus One

    The title should, arguably, be T-2 given that we won’t actually be arriving in Israel until very early on Friday morning, but we do set off tomorrow and that’s what counts. So T-1 it is. I was looking up the places we’ll be staying and they have guest wi-fi, so the laptop will be coming…