The vegetation is much higher than we expected and hides many small and big rocks and boulders, which makes navigating through tough for me, though not for my jack-rabbit friends.
Above is my stock photo looking west over the Hula Valley towards Lebanon over the ridge. Two things to be noted here. Here in the far north, where Israel ends, from here to there is as wide as Israel is. Though the Golan Heights behind me were captured in the 1967 war to provide a buffer with Syria. In the early and mid-1940's many Kibbutzim were founded in anticipation of a future war to defend this territory, which happened in 1948. We stay at one of them: Kibbutz Kfar Szold. (See also below.)
The other thing to notice is that the Hula Valley is part of the Great Rift Valley which extends from northern Syria south through here, on to the Dead Sea, the Red Sea and deep into Africa. The Arabian plate, on which we sit, is moving north and pulling away from the African plate across the valley.
Tonight the 3 of us and Udo, a Kibbutz resident, are going out to dinner. (There's a picture of Udo somewhere in the 2008 blog. He's the one holding a Syrian artillery shell.) Our restaurant is a new one in the Kibbutz Ma'ayan Barukh, another kibbutz founded before the '48 war. Indeed it seems that, outside of the town of Kiryat Shmona, most people around here live on a kibbutz. And every one of those kibbutz is surrounded by a barbed-wire fence! Still.
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