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Thursday 25 October 2012

Wilderness Then, Paradise Now

Yesterday we visited ‘Paradise’ while last week we went to one of the holiest – and highest - cities on earth.

If they show little else, both the lush, verdant nature reserve at Tel Dan and the tumble-down, mountaintop town of Tzfat prove a continuing Jewish presence in Israel - both well before and long since  modern history began to be recorded.

Further, as we enjoyed the shady forest paths and gushing streams of the Tel Dan archaeological site and the Hula Valley Bird Sanctuary, just as we had looked out over the massive ruins of the Crusader fortress in Tzfat, it was difficult to reconcile these still oases of calm with the brutal wars raging in nearby Lebanon and Syria, less than  an hour away by car. 

But returning home from Dan, it was harder still to learn that during the day 70 more rockets had been flung at the town of Sederot in southern Israel. Worse was knowing that those injured were foreign workers who should never have been involved in a conflict of which they had no part.

For the rest, I’ll let the pictures below tell the story:

msniw

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