Eilat vs Aqaba

This March I was in Israel for a wedding. We flew to Eilat, a holiday destination at the very south of Israel, on the Red Sea. Eilat is right near the border of Egypt and Jordan and you can see both countries right across a small stretch of water:

Here’s a photo I took of Eilat, sharpened to overcome the haze in the air:

 

Throughout my time there, I kept thinking about what inhabitants of each city would think of the other, looking across the bay. There are of course diplomatic relations between Jordan and Israel and you can cross back and forth so it’s a very different dynamic to people looking across the border between say Israel and Lebanon or Israel and Gaza.

The Gulf of Aqaba, common to both cities, has great scenery and allegedly some of the best diving spots in the world. Still, the difference is stark. Eilat’s skyline screams of the money that’s going into the Israeli economy because of the city. It’s a very popular tourist destination for Israelis but plenty of people fly from Europe too. Aqaba looks a lot less developed, although they are a major tourist destination and developing rapidly. The difference in tourists per year (2.3M vs 400,000)

It’s not exactly resorts next to slums but I do wonder about the disparity in such a short distance. Perhaps in Aqaba people might think of Eilat as symbolising the biggest excesses of development — if you are from Aqaba I’d appreciate your opinion. I do have an idea of what some Israelis think.

In high school, I was taught an interesting view of Judaism and Jewish history. Other civilisations are known for great structures — the view goes — like the pyramids or the Taj or the Registan. But not the Jewish civilisation. For 2000 years, it’s been scattered all over the world, producing no great works. This doesn’t mean that it’s somehow inferior; in fact it’s the opposite. The great structures produced by the Jewish civilisation are intellectual — the Talmud, the meaningful marking of time, scholarship and so on. So while other cultures are all about “superficial” things, the Jewish culture is about something more.

The times I’ve visited Israel though, I heard a different view expressed. Look how technologically marvellous Israel is — the view goes — having made the desert bloom. Our version of Silicon Valley is the envy of the world and we have immense technological capability. This is why Jewish civilisation is superior, because we are all about excellence. [The presumption is that this is in contrast to the Arabs — although this is often spelled out explicitly.]

These two views can be found side by side within Jewish thought. It’s the reverse of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. The Jews were superior for not having worldly might and now continue to be superior for having it. Either way, the Jews are Always SuperiorTM. I wonder how many Israelis look across the Gulf and see in the under-development of Aqaba evidence of some intrinsic inferiority of the Jordanian Arabs living on the other side. “What have they done with the land?”

This is the power of bigotry — any fact proves that you’re superior and the others are inferior. Even its negation.

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