This was no easy feat. We took off from Cyprus at midnight that night and landed at Tel-Aviv a little later. Immigration staff are generally not known for their friendliness and I think Israeli’s take the biscuit for their surely outlook. The first thing you need to do is ask them not to stamp your passport. If they do this will make getting into any Muslim nation a complete nightmare - from Malaysia or Indonesia to Pakistan and Afghanistan - which obviously we need to do. Being a journalist doesn’t help either so we all got sidelined to a special area and told to wait.
One American had only been held waiting there for 8 hours. Fairly quickly after checking Alex and myself out we get our passports back and are able to proceed. I head out to get the lugage whilst Alex stays waiting for Neville who has been taken away to be interviewed.
To cut a long story short, Neville is refused entry as he is Indian and needed a visa beforehand, his passport is stamped with ‘Entry Denied’ and he is kept in isolation until his flight left at 7.00am in the morning, only returning his passport when he was safely on the plane. When making small talk he did get one back by saying… ‘Plenty of Israeli’s come to India and we are very friendly to them’.
After twelve hours of much needed sleep we meet up with Hedley, Alex’s temporary Cameraman, in Jerusalen who takes us up to the Mount of Olives. From here you can see the old city, with Mosques, Temples, Churches… the building that hosted the ‘Last Supper’, Jesus’s Burial ground, Solomons tombs… so much history - the most fought after square kilometer in the world.
You can just about see the city wall and the Al-Aqsa Mosque where Mohammed ascended from…
and also the Garden of Gethsemane where Judas betrayed Jesus…
I have always imagined that all these places where much further away from each other but everything is in about a square mile.
If I get a chance I plan to go to the old city to have a quick look around, and possibly the Dead Sea too.
