TEL GEZER

The ruins of biblical Gezer are being excavated just past the goat-skin tents of a number of Bedouin.

With a commanding view of the strategic highway to the coast, Gezer was fortified by King Solomon after it was given as a dowry for an Egyptian princess he married. Already excavated are the stone pillars of a Canaanite temple. Other finds, on display in the Rockefeller Museum, Jerusalem, include 5,000-year-old household utensils, bracelets, knife blades, glassware, limestone containers for cosmetics and other objects from the 15th century BCE.

Return to the main road pass Mishmar-Ayalon, and very soon, before you take the downward-winding road over the bridge, the Ayalon Valley opens up in one of the most dramatic vistas in Israel.

This was the biblical pass leading to the Judaean hills. It was the battleground where Joshua bade the sun to stand still (Joshua 10:12), and where Saul and David defeated the Philistines. Here Judah Maccabee defeated the Greeks to control the roads to Jerusalem.

The Crusaders and Saladin traversed this wide bowl and the allied armies grouped here for their march on Jerusalem during World War I.

In 1948 the British turned over the Latrun Police Station, ahead of you, to the Arab Legion. Repeated attacks by the Israelis, under Yitzhak Rabin, failed to dislodge them.

Another road to Jerusalem was built further south and out of sight of the Arab machine-gunners. To your left you see Highway No. 1 to Jerusalem.

At the end of the valley is Latrun.

Nearby, on the road to Kibbutz Nahshon, is Neve Shalom, a Jewish-Arab settlement inspired by a Dominican monk whose ideal is religious coexistence.