Travelling through Israel was a reminder that it was still at war, there were so many different reminders and I’m going to illustrate some of it with just a few photos.
We travelled along the border on so many occasions, sometimes the border was the Dead Sea and you could see Jordan on the other side of the water, sometimes it was the other side of the barbed wire as in the photo above.
Sometimes we popped our heads into a room labelled shelter and found this. In Australia there are stairs outside leading to safety in the event of a fire but in Israel you’ve got ladders inside a carefully constructed room on each level, you get to shelter in that room in case of a bomb.
During our tour we were taken to the Golan Heights which was captured during the Six Day War in June 1967. If you search for Elie Cohn or Our Man In Damascus by Eli Ben-Hanan you can get more details than you wanted. Cohn was a spy for the Mossad and he lived in Damascus and managed to infiltrate to some fairly high level people. At one stage he was taken on a tour of the Syrian troops in their campsites and showing compassion for them sitting out in the open desert he suggested planting Eucalyptus trees for shelter and then suggested the Israelis bomb these trees. Cohn was eventually found out, tortured and then executed as a spy.
This is just to show you four different tanks sitting in the same campsite as the first photo with the Eucalypts.
This is an external bomb shelter and we saw many of them dotted around Israel, it took me some time to figure out what they were for.
Showing you the label on the door in the hotel, fairly specific.
You can see a little more in the video below. Just above the information you can see a white bit, that’s a playground for children. To the left and near the back there is another white bit, that’s the United Nations and behind that is the Syrian border. It’s only a couple of kms from where I’m standing and Israel is currently at war with Syria. I would not want to be in the UN area between the two countries.