Building the State

[av8rmike]

After breakfast on this, our last full day in Israel, we piled in the buses to head off to the Knesset, Israel's Parliament.  I don't think you can go into the actual building, so we just sat outside near the giant Menorah and talked, mostly about the early days of the country.  We didn't spend much time there because we had to drive off to Tel Aviv (about an hour away).  We stopped first at the Ayalon Institute, which is a still functioning kibbutz built in the pre-WWII days.  The difference is, this kibbutz was built over a clandestine munitions factory, cleverly hidden by bakery and laundry facilities.  It should have been more interesting, but there isn't a whole lot to see of the factory, and our guide wasn't very dynamic, as English was not her first language.  Still, she did her best.

We left Ayalon to continue into Independence Hall in Tel Aviv.  It's much less fancy than the one in Philadelphia; in fact you'd probably walk right past it without realizing what it was.  Inside is the large hall where David Ben-Gurion (Israel's first Prime Minister) and many others assembled and presented the new state's Declaration of Independence to the United Nations.  The room is preserved to look exactly as it did on May 14, 1948, with the two huge Israeli flags and the same ethnic Jewish paintings on the walls.  The actual Declaration is in a sealed display in an adjoining room.  We were treated to a dynamic talk by one of the employees (much more fluent in English than the one at Ayalon), followed by an actual recording of Ben-Gurion's proclamation and the playing of התקוה ("Hatikvah"), Israel's national anthem from that day in 1948.

After that emotional visit, the organizers decided we needed a break before Rabin Square, so they drove us to a popular street in Tel Aviv with lots of cafes and boutiques.  They gave us time to have lunch and shop, so I found a cafe with sidewalk seating and had a eggplant-feta sandwich.  And waited and waited for the meal, the check, them to take the check, etc.  I'd swear they thought I was invisible, or maybe it was just more European style, as opposed to the get-you-out American style.  By the time I left, I had about half an hour to do any shopping, but by then I'd realized that it was all trendy, high-fashion shops, not Old-World souvenir shops like in Jerusalem's Old City.  Several people I ran into on the way back echoed my feelings that they didn't want to do this kind of shopping either.  Someone else also pointed out that the area had a very Spanish/Barcelona feel to it.

As mentioned before, Rabin Square would be the next stop.  Rabin was Prime Minister in 1995, and attended a large peace rally here in November.  After speaking and singing a famous song called שיר לשלום ("Shir LaShalom," or Song of Peace), he tucked the words into his pocket and stepped off the platform.  Before he could get into his car, a right-wing Orthodox Jew unhappy with the peace process got close enough to assassinate Rabin.  At the square, there is a memorial, including markers showing exactly where on the ground Rabin and everyone were standing.  There are also reproductions of the memorials left by mourners, and a grisly enlargement of the actual paper Rabin was carrying, stained with his blood.  Words can hardly describe the emotion felt at that moment, but if I'd been alive during the Kennedy assassination, it'd probably be something like that.

Apparently the best remedy for emotional moments is shopping, because the organizers concluded we were so far behind schedule that we'd never make it back to the hotel for dinner.  They drove us to the mall at Harel and let us do shopping and eating there.  Most of us had just eaten, and I in particular didn't want to buy anything there, so I had to question the wisdom of the decision.  We got back to our hotel around 8, and were told to pack our checked bags for the flight, to save time the next morning.  Unfortunately the El Al people were very late and it took forever to get everyone screened.  Our "wrap-up" program, where we summarized our feelings from the week, didn't get started until very late.  Some people decided to stay up all night before our morning flight, but I decided to get at least some sleep.