The Dead Sea turns red
Tourists gathered around mosaic map of ancient Madaba in Jordan weren’t listening to guide’s explanations until he declared territory in State of Israel was 'Palestine'
Recently, there was a view of rare quality of the Dead Sea, the plains of Jericho, and Jerusalem from Mount Nebo.
Israeli tourists had crossed the border into Jordan less than 24 hours before, and they took the opportunity to try to outline the exact border between Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom.
They ignored the Jordanian tour guide and stubbornly asked the Israeli guide, “Where exactly is the border between us and them?”
The courtyard of St. George’s Church in Madaba, accustomed to large crowds, accommodated the Israelis, who stood in the shade of the tall cypress trees and heard about St. George, the Christian holy man from Lydda.
Salah, the Jordanian guide, disappeared for a moment, and upon his return declared, “There’s a German group in front of us. Just be quiet and try not to stand on the mosaic!”
Even the good visibility that day did not reveal the events that were about to occur, which were hiding in the heavy haze so common in the Middle East.
A short fuse of nationalist gunpowder
We entered the church, which was filled with the smell of incense and sweet candle tallow. Around an informal partition made of thin rope were two German tourists who were waiting for their Jordanian guide to speak.
As someone accustomed to the usual ceremony around the mosaic map at Madaba, the guide took his long stick, sighed demonstratively, and went over the rope, which stops, with imaginary force, the hundreds of curious eyes that covet Byzantine mosaics from the sixth century.
Salah asked the Israelis for quiet out of respect for his Jordanian friend, who was standing on a bare section in the middle of the mosaic, just above the Jordanian estuary to the Dead Sea. In monotonous mechanical German the friend told his group about the complicated mosaic made from two million small stones.
As long as the stick hovered over eastern Trans-Jordan, none of the Israelis appeared to be paying attention. After pointing with his stick to Wadi Arnon and Wadi Zered, the Jordanian jumped to the small concrete island in the middle of the map and landed lightly in the middle of western Trans-Jordan, without a passport or airport taxes.
His learned explanations in German were a very short fuse connected to a barrel of nationalist gunpowder of the worst kind.
He determinedly stuck the stick in Jerusalem and moved it crudely along its streets. Later he gave a dry description of the inheritance of the tribes of Dan and Zevulun, pointing out Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Gaza. Every few seconds he stopped the flow of German words and stressed that “Das ist Palästina” (“This is Palestine.”)
'Israel! Israel!'
David Greenspan, an American-born Jewish Zionist, stood in front of the map and was terrified of the stick that coveted the Land of Israel without regard for international agreements and the regional balance of forces.
When the Jordanian said, “Das ist Palästina” for the fifth time, David forgot his manners and came back with “Israel!” As the Jordanian’s stick conquered additional parts of the map, David raised his voice shouting, “Israel! Israel!”
The Germans were silent, embarrassed, and exchanged glances. The Israeli guide, thinking he would still manage to save the situation, said, “David, do me a favor! This isn’t the place to argue politics. We’re only guests.”
Salah also rushed to save the Palestinians’ honor. Standing in an angry, threatening position in front of David, he said, in English, “It’s Palestine, and always will be Palestine. It’s not Israel. It belongs to us, the Palestinians!”
Salah’s Israeli group felt uncomfortable at the sight of their Jordanian guide removing the thin veneer of pleasantness he had displayed until then. David, who was not prepared to give up the rights of the Jewish people on the map of Madaba, screamed, “It is Israel!”
The Jordanian had a sense of deja-vu, of seeing the Israeli army in Tulkarm and of growing up in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Amman, so he pushed David lightly in an attempt to move him away from the mosaic.
David lost his balance for a moment and held on to Salah’s jacket. Within seconds the verbal battle became an exchange of fists and pushing. The Israeli guide attempted in vain to separate the two, and the map of Madaba became a boxing ring.
The Dead Sea turns red
Salah was pushed away and fell onto one of the church’s pews, which fell back and took with it all the other pews. Salah rose to his feet, jumped onto David screaming, and pushed him with all his weight.
David’s legs got caught in the ropes protecting the mosaic. His hands sought something to hold onto before his head hit the floor made of small precious stones. And then his head learned that even a Byzantine mosaic floor from the sixth century hurts when it hits your head.
The meeting of David’s skull with the stone could be heard throughout the church. David screwed up his face in shock and pain. The pained face of Jesus on the church's ceiling looked down on the pained face of David. David’s head began to bleed, the thick blood flowing onto the colorful mosaic, penetrating the tiny cracks of the map of Madaba.
The flow of blood from David’s wounded head worsened. The Dead Sea turned red, and from there the red spread east and west, from Jerusalem to Mount Nebo, from the Negev to Nablus. The blood stain covered the rare mosaic.
Outside the church, a small commotion was taking place. The Jordanian Tourist Police sought information on the event and the sound of ambulances shattered the desert quiet, but in a short time the tourists disappeared to the schwarma restaurant or souvenir stores that preferred money to politics.
Within the church, the guards cleaned up the viscous blood stains from the mosaic. The blood cleaned the entire area of the Fertile Crescent, and the mosaic shone. The small, colorful stones gleamed with new, brilliant color.
The Israeli guide finished apologizing in Arabic to the church guards about the unpleasantness caused by one of the members of the group. When he exited to the light of the bright day, he thought that in fact, that was a perfect educational method for presenting the Israeli-Palestinian problem.
