It is a beautiful, starlit night. A full moon's luminescence flits across the surface of the desert like the searchlight of a submarine, bathing the sand in a cool, weak light. A soothing calm is in the air, and even the dust which powders the sandals and backpacks of the group has a soft, inviting quality to it, like fake snow in a mall Christmas display.
The group continues down the trail, not more than one week into our study abroad here in the Middle East. While we have done quite a bit together in Israel, nothing quite compares to this. The desert silence is irrigated by the low hum of excitement and even spiritual completion.
Perhaps it is the voice of the shechina, the ever-present spirit, itself - or just someone's cell phone vibrating in their bag. In any case, everyone knows that this night of bonding is special. After only a few weeks of being here in Israel, we all realize that sharing this experience will change our group forever.
We stop for a spell to listen to the words of our madricha, Noa. Youthful and energetic, idealistic and fiery, with a sense of humor as dry as the August desert in which she is speaking, Noa tells us of the Naboteans and their civilization.
Her breathless monologue whips around our imaginations like her light blonde hair which flails and bounces gently in its loose clip. Hardly any of us realized that the small group of candle-holding Israelis in the wadi below us were actually occupying a well built to hold water over 2,000 years ago. Things like that happen in Israel; nothing is more than 60 or so years old, then all of a sudden, everything is thousands of years old.
The group gasps as a shooting star streaks across the sky like an angel on fire. The stars watch emotionlessly as the group hums with excitement at viewing this astrological event. Noa continues her musings in this temple of nature, this palace of transcendentalism whose invitingness speaks to existence of the oversoul more than any writing by Thoreau or Emerson.
Suddenly a different bright light appears in the sky. It shoots across the heavens at high speed. More follow behind it. As the object comes closer, the green and red wing lights of an Israeli fighter jet are visible. Noa continues talking, but the roar of the jet engines sours the landscape like toxic waste being poured into a river. Propellers are next, spattering onto this macabre canvas an acidic, droning, vibrating sludge. It is a stark, crude disturbance on the perfect reality in which we had found ourselves just a few minutes before.
But fighter pilots don't look at the scenery; the Hezbollah Katyushas don't take pictures and buy postcards.
Of course, it all was just a disturbance. Had the group been in Lebanon, reaction to our civilian helplessness against the horrific roar of Middle East hegemony would have been more pronounced than the distracted turning of a few heads. But things have been like this for a few weeks now.
Only in Israel would the sound of a false fire alarm sounding mindlessly in a university hallway provoke questions about a sfira, a siren which warns of incoming rockets, from the students in a classroom. One morning, workers were dropping furniture from an apartment to the ground below with loud, pronounced thuds, and one girl thought to herself, "The rockets are this far south already?" Things have not been the same.
But as the group stands up and continues along the sands of the Negev, trod on by humans not so unlike us for thousands of years, perhaps the sameness, the recurrence, of conflict has been all too "the same."
Months back, I had listened to a Palestinian speak of building a corridor between the West Bank and Gaza through the land on which we were walking this night. The plan would have, of course, split Israel in two, meaning that Israel was most certainly opposed to it.
The Israeli-Arab conflict is a land fight. Of course, ideology and religion, politics and history all weave together like the intricate pattern on a yarmulke or hijab. But at its simplest, crudest state, this is a fight over land.
And as we head back to Be'er Sheva in our air-conditioned bus, the speckles of light across the empty desert are settlements conceived by the early Zionists to prove habitation of land.
But there are no lines in the sand, no Area A's, green lines or semi-autonomous regions - just desert.
The conflict has moved from lines on Ottoman maps to lines on British and French maps to lines on Arab and Jewish maps. But before the next bus is blown apart or the next tourist stabbed, those who have dedicated their lives - or deaths - to the conflict should take a look at the land over which they are fighting to appreciate it, admire it and maybe learn from it. Everyone fights over the land, but when did the land start to be valued less than the fight?
It is a beautiful, starlit night. A full moon's luminescence flits across the surface of the desert like the search light of a submarine, bathing the sand in a cool, weak light.
