Trip Into Mideast Past Reveals Uneasy Present

JERUSALEM —  The road from Cairo to Jerusalem spans a little more than 300 miles, slicing through the stark landscape of the Sinai Desert. For the traveler, it is not much longer than a weekend drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

But it can be a journey of discovery, particularly for a first-time visitor to the Middle East.

I made the trip from Egypt to Israel in an air-conditioned bus with about 30 other Americans on a recent tour of the “Wonders of Antiquity.” The 14-day trip promised close-up views of the Great Pyramids, the tombs of the Pharaohs in the Nile’s Valley of the Kings and, in Israel, a catalogue of the ancient and the religious.

It delivered on all of those.

But as is so often the case when one travels, it was the unexpected that has remained with me. For while I went to immerse myself in the past, what made just as strong an impression was the harsh reality of the present.

To be sure, there was the haunting beauty of shifting sand dunes, black-garbed Bedouins tending their flocks in 100-degree-plus temperatures, the occasional oasis thick with date palms, and a sight more common to home, a luxury resort, but plunked down on the Mediterranean shore.

There were ominous signs as well. Rusting remnants of recent wars were scattered everywhere. Egyptian soldiers armed with Chinese-made AK-47s manned checkpoints along the road. Large signs in Arabic and English warned foreigners not to stray into the desert.

At the Egyptian-Israeli border, the tension was palpable and the trip itself would end on a tragic note.

Several tour companies offer bus trips across the Sinai as part of their Middle East itineraries. Egypt also has daily bus service from Cairo to the Israeli border, an eight-hour trip that costs about $9 one way.

For the most part, however, the Sinai is lightly traveled, with most tourists prefering to fly between the two countries, partly to avoid hot spots along the border where Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been waging their intifada, or uprising, against the Israeli occupation.

Actually, I didn’t think much about the danger factor when I signed up for the tour. The bus trip across the Sinai seemed simply a leisurely, and perhaps less expensive, way to travel between Egypt and Israel.

The tour company issued no precautionary suggestions. And despite all I had read about the continuing conflict in the Middle East, I assured myself there was nothing to worry about.

Still, on the night before we left, my wife and I decided to draft a will--just in case.

Our journey began in a place that seemed light years from the quiet of the desert--the jammed and noisy streets of Cairo.

The city is more a municipal bazaar than a metropolis. There are 16 million people here (a million more are added every 10 months) and so little room that the poor build mud huts on the roofs of crumbling apartment buildings. Some live in crypts in ancient cemeteries. Everything seems to be falling apart.

Yet Cairo is strangely peaceful. Egyptians are friendly and outgoing; street crime is of little concern. I felt free to walk the narrow alleyways at night, bothered only by a couple of overzealous street merchants.

Since the signing of the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, U.S. money has flowed to Egypt and there have been attempts to rebuild Cairo. While there are modern hotels and some upscale neighborhoods, overall the results are hard to see. Many buildings are left half finished.

As the sounds of Cairo faded in the distance, our tour bus began its trek to the Sinai, trading sights of urban clutter for a succession of experimental farms and multistory chicken coops that government officials hope will feed the country’s exploding population. It was quiet amid the rolling hills that have been bleached almost colorless by the relentless sun.

Our first stop was Ismalia, a sleepy town of fragrant gardens and colonial mansions poised at the edge of the Suez Canal and the Sinai Peninsula beyond. Much of this town had been destroyed in the Egyptian-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. But it has been largely rebuilt and today is considered to be among the calmest and most scenic of the cities along the great canal.

That serenity was shattered about four months ago when an Israeli tour bus on its way across Sinai to Cairo was hijacked just outside the city limits. It was Egypt’s deadliest terrorist attack since the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty: Nine Israeli tourists were killed and 16 others were wounded.

As a result of that attack, the Egyptian government ordered military escorts for all tourist buses crossing the Sinai. Our group was told we were the first to be affected by the order.

The escort, however, was not reassuring. Our guard detail consisted of three Egyptian soldiers in a small pickup. At a crossing on the Suez Canal, our guards determined that all tour buses traveling that day should move as a convoy. So for more than an hour, we sat and waited for our fellow travelers to arrive.

Meanwhile, huge cargo and tanker ships made their way up the canal, dwarfing everything in sight. As each ship passed, a ferry carried commercial trucks across the narrow waterway.

Finally it was time for us to cross. Now there were half-a-dozen tour buses and an equal number of soldiers.

Our Greek tour director, Dimitri, seemed exasperated.

“How do you expect these soldiers who lost the Six-Day War to hold terrorists back?” he said with a sigh.

If anything, we seemed an easier target as our military escorts raced ahead, sometimes with sirens blaring, clearing the road of no one and occasionally leaving our ragtag convoy well out of sight.

After crossing the Suez into the Sinai Peninsula, we saw remnants of war littering nearly every sand dune: Tanks either destroyed by enemy shelling or broken down were left rusting in the hot sun, some with their turrets pointed toward Israel, others headed toward Cairo.

But there were signs of more peaceful times as well. Some Bedouins and village dwellers had torn metal chunks from the rusting hulks to build fences and repair roofs.

In El Arish, a lush oasis and the regional capital, wealthy Egyptians have built luxury vacation homes. The new construction, on a beach renowned throughout Egypt, is derided by those who miss the pristine desert wilderness but, nonetheless, stands as an indication of peacetime prosperity among a small minority of Egyptians.

We entered Israel at Rafah, a small, heavily armed outpost on the edge of the Gaza Strip, not far from the embattled Palestinian refugee camps. Security was tight.

Soldiers, armed with automatic weapons, patrolled both sides of the border, visibly anxious about even typical tourist behavior. At one point, Egyptian soldiers who found me photographing the barbed-wire security fences brusquely ordered me to back away.

Our passage through the Egyptian-Israeli border stations was long and frustrating.

To help speed customs and immigration checks, our tour director collected two Egyptian pounds, roughly 80 cents, from each tourist as a “gift” to the Egyptian inspectors, an apparently common practice among experienced travel guides in Egypt and other countries in the region. Our “gift” went unrewarded. Bags were opened. The lines were long.

On the Israeli side, the process was even slower. Israeli security agents, poorly disguised in sport slacks and polo shirts, tried to blend into the crowds. But their eyes gave them away as they nervously scanned for anything out of place.

Here we also received a lesson in Middle East gamesmanship. Hoping to exert pressure on Israel’s healthy tourist trade, most Arabic and African nations refuse to admit visitors whose passports carry an Israeli stamp. So Israel gives tourists a choice. Most in our group defiantly thumbed their noses at the threat and chose to have their passports stamped.

Over the border at last, we were greeted warmly by Nimrod, our Israeli tour guide: “Welcome to Israel. Welcome back to civilization.”

Indeed, everything here seemed in sharp contrast to Egypt. Huge tracts of desert land, barren as the Plateau of Giza just 15 years ago, were in full agricultural production. The kibbutzim , Israel’s experimental collective farms, had expanded into every imaginable enterprise, including tourist hotels and restaurants. New development was everywhere.

But all this has come at a cost.

With the country in a constant state of military alert, it was impossible to go anywhere without seeing young men and women in olive drab carrying their rifles on their backs. Even the bus drivers and guides carry guns under their seats.

It is a reality that Israel would rather not advertise. Although tour buses making the Sinai crossing once traveled the length of the Gaza Strip, our bus carefully skirted the most troublesome areas.

“We will not enter Gaza (city),” Nimrod declared as the bus headed to Jerusalem on a safer, inland road. “Let’s not talk about it.”

Over the next seven days, the tour took us close to the borders of Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The most abiding image, however, was of Jerusalem itself.

Here are the ruins of 5,000 years of history and religious lore. But I was once again struck by the present--how the conflict had made life here so unpredictable.

Only blocks from the city’s fashionable restaurants and shops is the West Bank.

Once the property of Jordan but under Israeli occupation since 1967, it is a huge tract of land that begins at the Jordan River and climbs the dry hills that abut the walls of the old city.

The border with the occupied territory is invisible. There is no barbed wire or border guards. But the sense of danger is real.

Near the end of the trip I stood atop the Mount of Olives at the western edge of the occupied territory to take in the view of the old city.

Shortly after we left, we were told that a group of tour buses parked on the same spot was stoned and several visitors taken to the hospital. Less than a mile away, Jewish settlers who make their homes in the West Bank attacked a group of Arabs on a major thoroughfare.

On the way to Ben Gurion Airport and our flight back to Los Angeles, I passed a place south of Tel Aviv where only 15 minutes later a young man dressed as an Israeli soldier would gun down seven Arabs without provocation.

The senseless incident touched off violent demonstrations by Palestinians and another round of repression by Israeli forces.

As we pulled into the airport, a burly Israeli soldier peered into the cab and motioned for us to stop. Almost as a reflex, the cabdriver leaned over and called out, “ boker tov “ (good morning).

Life goes on.