"My, my, my, my slow descent..."

We leave the "Bedouin camp" to see the rest of the Negev Desert. There's hiking through sandstone canyons, sunrise atop the Masada, and a moment for quiet reflection on the rim of the Great Markesh. We crawl through intricate, impossibly narrow networks of tunnels the Jews (Vietcong-like) built to fight the Roman army in the 2nd century CE. And of course we go swimming in the Dead Sea. It's hard to describe how beautiful this all is.

A brief word about the Dead Sea, though. Life is so brief that I don't want to give the impression that I regret getting to swim there; I am a richer person for having experienced salinity 30 times that of Rehoboth Beach, DE. That said, no one can convince me that the Dead Sea, as tourist destination, is anything more than a sick Israeli hidden camera TV show. The "beach" is comprised of painfully sharp ridges of crystallized salt, which tear up your feet as you gingerly wade into the water. Some fell and their backs looked like they'd been whipped. If you make it waste deep without losing your balance, you then have to contend with the merciless sting of your calves, inner thighs, and anywhere else you might have the slightest chafing (thanks to the previous day's camel ride with the Bedouin). The women who recently shaved their legs reported unknowable agony. Then, finally, should a small wave or over-enthusiastic comrade splash even a drop of water on your face, prepare to be blinded for the next 4-6 hours. And all this is before the curative properties of the noxiously sulfurous hot springs.

But returning to the narrative: most nights, before drink, we did some sort of group activity, like games or a group discussion. The ones more expressly about Judaism or Jewish history I start to really like. I've always been really into history, I've always been really into genealogy... it makes sense. Plus, I learned at the Ghetto Fighters Museum (Mom and Dad, if you had taken us to museums with names like the Ghetto Fighters Museum when we were little, I would have been so much better behaved) that I look a little like Mordechai Anielewicz, an organizer in the Jewish Fighting Organization and 24-year-old martyr of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Other nights the activities appeal to me less. Like the evening where we watch a video that one of the Israeli soldiers in the special forces wanted to share of his commando unit. I'm expecting maybe some grainy home movies of soldiers hanging around on base, like the ones I've seen of Iraq. Instead, we first watch a sleekly produced, 7-minute advertisement (in English!?) for the unit, which tells the story of a young recruit's awesome first snatch squad operation nabbing a terrorist in a West Bank cafe. Then we watch another video, again well-edited, of an actual raid on a Nablus apartment. Upbeat European techno music pulses as commandos shout for a terrified woman and child to come out of the flat. There are blasts and gunshots. The last shot if from a hovering Israeli helicopter, smoke billowing from the apartment window, and the closing title informs us: "The mission was a success. The terrorist was killed." Perhaps 14 years of Quaker has just left me to soft for this sort of military pornography, 'cause I really don't know what to say. One of the softer-spoken girls on the trip, clearly similarly put off, raises her hand, "Why was the music so happy?" Make a note to talk to her later.

Around Day 6 I start to break down. Maybe it's the constant partying, the massive sleep deprivation, ethno-religious overload... Whenever we get back on the bus I can't seem to warm up if it's cool outside, and I can't cool down if it's warm. My back and shoulders start aching. We take a long drive from down south in the Negev up to the Galilee, going straight through the length of the West Bank on Highway 90 (a "settler highway") without so much as a mention, and I'm really struggling by the time we get there.

We spend the afternoon in the Golan Heights, annexed from Syria during the Six-Days War. We start on a hill just across the 1967 border, looking down into a valley where there are a number of old kibbutzes. From here the Syrians would shell and fire rockets at the kibbutzim, making life all but intolerable. Our guide grew up on a kibbutz here. He reads a victory poem from '67, that tells of a child and mother emerging from a bomb shelter (much like the converted bomb shelter/bar we will drink at this evening). "'Does this mean the rockets are gone?' he asks / 'Yes, my child,' with tears in her eyes." The ground is still littered with landmines, and the barbed wire fence only sometimes keeps the cattle from staying into the uncleared areas. It's cooler here, and that's when the shakes start.

A game where the Americans are made to break into three groups, and the Israeli soldiers read us scenarios. 1) A terrorist is firing rockets from a school. What should we do? (A: We tracked them with an unmanned aircraft until they came out, then killed them... No mention of cutting off power to 1.5 million residents in Gaza). 2) A woman comes to the Israeli border with no papers, like an undocumented Mexican at Juarez, claiming to be pregnant. What should we do? (A: Well, of course, we couldn't let her in. And then Israel got a lot of bad press when she had a child at the checkpoint). 3) A shepherd sees a group of Israeli commandos, and there's no way to detain him. If they left him go, he might go run and tell, thus compromising the mission. Do we kill him? (A: Jewish fighters faced such a situation in 1948. They let him go, and then 12 Jews were massacred).

The next day it's the Lebanese border. The group talks to a woman who refused to leave her family home when the war broke out in 2006, despite the hail of rockets. But I'm too weak to get off the bus, and the muscles in my back start to hurt from shaking so hard. Shlomo, our armed guard/medic (who, despite being an absolutely wonderful guy, is dubiously qualified for both his jobs) notes that my temperature has reached 39.9 C, which of course means nothing to me. I fall asleep collapse when we get back to the kibbutz for dinner, sleeping for the next 14 hours.

That night I'm back at the Western Wall. There's yelling and chasing, though I can't make out why exactly. I'm there, too, and for some reason everything is calmer right around me. At some point Shlomo comes in to check the fever, and I grow convinced I've been poisoned, that he's trying to kill me. This time I pray at the Wall, and unlike a week before, it feels right. It's the funniest thing how natural it feels. All of this starts to make sense, inexplicably clear sense. I hear more yelling, real this time, either the sound of incoming katyusha rockets or significant others back home being dropped. And then I'm standing on the white graves of the Mount of Olives, sweating and trembling violently.

When I wake the fever's broke, though vicious stomach cramps have taken its place. As we head to Tel Aviv I'm still pretty out of it, and despite trying I can't rouse myself for the last night of partying on the beach looking out over the Mediterranean. I've got nothing left. I make them take me to an Emergency Clinic while I still have 4 hours of Birthright medical insurance left, and wave goodbye, spent, when the bus leaves for the airport.