I have just returned from a few days in Jerusalem and over the next week I shall doll up and dole out the journal I kept there. As my writing can be a little tough to read, I have transcribed my captions below on the left in brown and then added some further thoughts on the right.
Before you read it and are moved to write all sorts of inflamed comments, bear in mind that my POV is very subjective and distorted by the 70+ years my mother's family has spend in Israel and the on and off relationship I have had with that tortured little patch of sand.

My grandfather is 94 and fairly deaf. He probably doesn't hear the church bells at dusk or the muezzin's call at dawn or the distant gunfire during the night. Jerusalem's nightlife also consists of many sorts of wild things: crickets, birds, owls, lizards, all boasting and bellyaching past the crack of dawn.
When we lived in Israel, thirty years ago, only doctors had phones. Now every one has one tethered to them somewhere. I am told to speak English rather than Hebrew to the Palestinians. The young Arabs look like Israelis. The young Israelis look like Americans. The Americans all look soft and unprepared. The whole country is a lot more modernized and generic than I remember but it also has an undercurrent of paranoia and impatience that has replaced its former world weariness.

I have come here pretty reluctantly, cajoled by mother who comes twice a year to check on my grandfather. My last visit was twelve years ago, to attend my grandmother's funeral. I remember the gentle nudge of her ankle against my hand, its dead weight through her shroud as I bore her pall. Then we slid her body into a dusty hole on a hillside, planting her like the flowers she loved. I've not had much appetite to return but my mum has been increasingly insistent.
I have never liked this country much. I abhor its politics, its arrogance and its disproportionate impact on the global community. But my maternal ancestors were German and Polish jews, most of whom settled in this desert in the 1930s. The rest settled into the crematoria of Eastern Europe.
Only my grandparents took a different course: first studying medicine in Mussolini’s Rome, then fleeing to British India to purse my grandfather’s second cousin who owed him money. The cousin turned up in Africa a decade later, soon after my grandparents, mother and uncle were released from an internment camp on the Kashmiri border where they had spent seven years with other enemies of the Raj, communists, Nazi sympathizers and German nationals like themselves. Undeterred by the irony of being imprisoned by the enemies of their enemies, my grandparents set up a practice in India, then Pakistan, where they remained for thirty five years. When war broke out in the early 70s they joined us in Israel where war broke out again and we left for the USA.
My grandparents remained in Jerusalem, forced to fend without their accustomed servants, cooks, and gardeners, and shrinking with age.

Derekh Hevron is fairly deserted on Sabbath morning as I walk into town to do some drawing in the Old City. It is fairly hot already, about 90° and it is only 11 am. It is also a little daunting to be wandering mapless, but I hope I'll find my way back eventually.

Although I have been to Jerusalem many times as a child, a teenager and as a young adult, I've never been a tourist here. I also promised Patti that I would not take busses, which she is convinced are all rolling terrorist targets.
I wear my back pack; it is filled with my Grumbacher watercolors, a box of pens, my trusty Rapidoliner and a new journal, an Arches travel journal, 6x9.5" of 140 lb. cold press watercolor paper. I pick up scraps along the way to collage onto the covers of my book: cigarette packs, receipts, newspapers, maps, and other ephemera.