“A Kiwi Grove in Israel”
by Michele Robertson
Acalanese High School, California
Over the summer I visited Israel for a month. In this piece, I describe standing in a kiwi grove at an army base. On one side of the orchard was Lebanon, the other side was Israel.
The kiwi trees were lined uniformly in neat rows, like a battalion of soldiers preparing to march. The small trees were spaced only a few feet apart from one another, allowing just a trickle of light to penetrate the shade from the dense leaves, cascading gentle rays along the dirt pathways. The ripened kiwis appeared ready to burst off their branches, which were curved and bent under their harvests’ weight.
Although these fruits entice the occasional passerby, they conceal from the eyes of a naïve tourist a conflict that stretches thousands of years back into the history of Israel and the Middle East.
Since my first day of Hebrew school in the third grade, a certain aura has surrounded the idea of traveling to Israel. As Jews, we read about it in our prayer books, we view its political missteps on the news, and each of us fantasize about the day when we will finally pay a visit to the Holy Land.
Over the summer, I found myself traveling to Israel with a group of ninety Jewish teens from the Bay Area. On this particularly sunny day in the Golan Heights, we found ourselves, not in a temple in Jerusalem or on a camel’s back in the Negev Desert, but in a kiwi grove. However, this orchard was unlike the kibbutzim, or communal farms, that we had visited over the past weeks because it stood not only as a bearer of fruit, but as a barrier between two treacherous war zones. As I faced the east, the Lebanese border stood to my left, and the Israel border lay to my right.
After months of researching the Israeli-Lebanese conflicts and bombings prior to my trip, this is what my studious efforts had come down to, standing in an orchard between the two enemies. In a sense, this kiwi grove summed up my entire trip to Israel.
The serenity of the kiwi trees amidst the violence of the Middle Eastern conflict was a striking image. When I was at this particular army base, the conflict that had erupted between the two countries in recent years seemed far off, despite the fact that I was standing on the front lines of the battle zone.
Three weeks after returning from Israel, newspapers erupted once again with the latest news from the country: an Israeli colonel, three Lebanese soldiers, and a Lebanese journalist had been killed in a skirmish at the same army base that I had stood weeks before. Gunfire flared when the Lebanese border patrol spied Israeli soldiers trimming a tree that stood in disputed border territory. The peaceful kiwi trees which filled me with such hope for the future were the very cause of the loss of five lives.
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Rudy Maxa and Allan Comport judged the RateYourStudyAbroad.com Fall 2010 Travel Writing & Photography Contest. Rudy Maxa is the host of PBS‘s RudyMaxa’s World, a former Washington Post reporter and the former host of NPR‘s The Savvy Traveler. Allan Comport is a professor of art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
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