Israel: A Quirky Place

May 10, 2022

by: Peter Fast, National Director of Canada

From the pen of Peter Fast, national director of Canada and the future CEO of Bridges for Peace International, comes the second installment of an exciting new series entitled the Quirks of Israel. Join Peter on a journey through the wonderfully peculiar culture, traditions, heritage and daily life of this singular nation as he unpacks, introduces and celebrates the quirky aspects that make Israel so wonderfully unique.

The Land of Israel is a delightful mix of ancient and modern. For those of us from relatively young countries like the United States and Canada, the term “old” often refers to something from a few centuries ago. We look at remnants from the founding of Nova Scotia in 1749, the voyage of the Mayflower in 1620 or the birth of the United States of America in 1776 with a sense of awe and reference. However, these countries, as they stand today, are not old.

Israel is different. In fact, Israel fits nicely into the category labeled “ancient world” alongside China, Egypt and Greece. In the Promised Land, you’ll see remnants dating back more than 4,000 years. For instance, there’s a tree in Gush Etzion, a community just outside Jerusalem, that began growing when Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. The roots of the olive trees in what is speculated to be the Garden of Gethsemane are around 2,000 years old. Experts discovered 2,000-year-old dates and wheat at Masada near the Dead Sea, and when these were planted, the ancient seeds grew, yielding a crop. In 1947, they discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in the Judean Wilderness, a library of thousands of parchments, including entire books of the Bible, some of them dating back to two centuries before Jesus (Yeshua). Everywhere you look in Israel, you see ancient ruins, a past preserved and protected. A number of years ago, the Jerusalem municipality tried to dig a new water line and unearthed the original Pool of Siloam, where the kings of Judah were anointed and where the water ceremony during the Feast of Tabernacles took place.

Ancient Treasures Everywhere

Picture this: There’s a Jerusalem contractor ready to start on a routine job. He has the permits, the crew and the equipment. But as he starts digging, an unexpected discovery interrupts his work. He shakes his head in frustration as he sees his routine job become a lot more complex. You can almost hear him grumble: “Ugh, another ancient water cistern! Ugh, a pot full of ancient coins! Ugh, another ossuary with some guy’s bones in it! Whose bones? Joseph Caiaphas? Whatever! Now I have to call the Israel Antiquities Authority.”

And as this disheveled contractor watches the archaeologists jump up and down in excitement as they start mapping out the site, he can just imagine all the Bible scholars around the world oohing and aahing over his “discovery.” He can just picture all the seminary and Bible college students reading about the find and reaching for their Bibles as they try to track the discovery. In his mind’s eye, he sees the millions of interested Christians and Jews who will clasp their hands in relished amazement. There’s global fanfare and front-page articles featuring the latest discovery in Biblical Archaeology, Time Magazine or National Geographic. All this, when all the contractor wanted to do was install a sewage pipe in a Jerusalem neighborhood.

Onto the Contemporary

Alongside all the ancient, Israel also features the modern. Just over a century ago, Tel Aviv was nothing but sand dunes. Now it’s a sprawling metropolis, with nearly a million people calling the bright lights and skyscrapers home. A short way north is Herzliya, Israel’s “Silicone Valley,” the nation’s start-up hub featuring the latest high-tech and countless innovative businesses. A little bit further north is Haifa, another sprawling metropolis and home to Israel’s version of MIT, the Technion. Israel is the global leader in solar technology, home to more start-up companies than anywhere in the world except for the US, boasts the most educated population per capita and has made even its sea water drinkable using distillation technology. Talk about cutting edge!

A century ago, the Land of Israel was rife with malaria-ridden swamps. It was quite depopulated compared to the amount of space available and the capacity the land could have held at the time. One hundred years ago, some 600,000 people—Jews and Arabs—populated the Land in the odd city as well as hundreds of communities and villages, many of which were considered third world by today’s standards. Today, Israel’s population tops 9 million and counting, as Jews from around the world continue to return to their ancient homeland. New immigrants from more than 70 countries now call Israel home. It is a modern-day miracle, a land that literally responded to a returned people. Is God part of this? Of course He is!

During the modern aliyah (immigration to Israel) movement that started in the 1880s and brought in waves of Jewish immigrants in the years before World War II, the kibbutz and moshav movements were launched. These collective communities of farmers and pioneers who immigrated from Europe and North Africa drained the swamps, cultivated and tilled the land, and removed rocks and boulders, harnessing a land that had been neglected for centuries of Turkish occupation. Thomas Clay Lowdermilk, a top ecologist specializing in global famines in the 1930s, marveled at the ingenuity of the Jewish pioneers and their dedication. He noted its tremendous impact on the entire region, even drawing waves of Arab immigrants who sought work and a better quality of life. Even Winston Churchill gave it his rubber stamp of approval.

With the swamps drained and fertile soil restored, the land responded and blossomed into what can only be described today as a modern Garden of Eden. Israeli farmers are even growing fruit orchards and vineyards in the Negev Desert. Over the course of a century, the Jewish National Fund has planted over 250 million trees. It has changed the ecosystem, and now hundreds of thousands of birds have readjusted their migratory patterns to fly over the Land of Israel. Here they catch their breath before continuing over the Himalayas, as they had done before. The Land is flowing with milk and honey once again.

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