Descending east from Jerusalem into the Rift Valley, the landscape turns decidedly hostile, and that’s just the start of it.
The Number 1 freeway first arcs up from the Holy City’s eastern flank towards the Mount of Olives before cutting underneath the world heritage site to emerge in what quickly becomes another country, a different land.
Jerusalem’s ancient hills delineate one of the world’s sharper rain shadows.
Yet as discriminating as the rains are, they are egalitarian compared to the political economy – dictated by birth as Arab or Jew.
Ahead in the desert haze are the barely visible hills of Jordan. And running along the more fertile valley floor between is the border marked by the Jordan River and the Dead Sea.
This is the occupied West Bank, the putative Israeli-occupied Palestinian state as described by the 1967 war and contemplated in the 1993 Oslo Accord between the Israeli government and the PLO.
Some souls live up here. Dotted hither and thither as the highway snakes eastward are Jewish settlements, invariably holding commanding hill-top positions.
And lower down, perched awkwardly in the dry treeless gullies closer to the highway, there are Bedouins. Their ad hoc micro-settlements are untidy off-grid affairs. Illegal shanty towns of tin and tarps, marking out these itinerants as the most dispossessed of the 2.9 million Palestinians in the West Bank.
In one such community, just 20 minutes from First World Jerusalem, a mud-brick school clings to a hillside.
Its defiantly permanent adobe structures use solar panels for electricity, fake grass for play areas, and rely on donated equipment, most notably from Italy.
Read the full article by Mark Kenny at the Sydney Morning Herald.