EXECUTIVE EDITOR BRANDON GEIST: PUTTING THE “UN” IN HOLY LAND (PART 1)

I just got back from a two-week trip to Israel, spent eating hummus, riding camels, and dodging suicide bombers. No, I kid: While I did eat a ridiculous amount of hummus, a flatulence-inducing spread made of mashed chickpeas—I didn’t engage in either of the other two activities. I drove past camels (and their Bedouin nomad herders) in the desert, but didn’t ride any; and as for suicide bombings, apparently the death-wishing, Jew-hating Islamic extremists have decided that strapping a bomb to themselves just isn’t terrifying enough and have taken instead to driving bulldozers at high speed through crowded streets, flipping over public buses, crushing cars, and injuring and killing innocent people, which is what happened last Thursday in Jerusalem, the city I was visiting on that very day. Fortunately, Israelis are total badasses and a random bystander—an off-duty soldier (but then, every Israeli has to serve in the military, so they’re pretty much all on- or off-duty soldiers)—grabbed the gun of a nearby police officer, climbed on top of the moving bulldozer, and shot the fucker driving the thing four times, killing him dead.

Speaking of badass, one of the main reasons I was in Israel was to visit, along with my wife Maya and her dad, Maya’s 90-year-old grandparents (whom neither she nor her father had seen in 13 years). And let’s face it, if you’re a Jew—meaning most of the world hates you—and you make it to that sort of age, you’re a fucking badass, no questions asked.




And if you make it to that sort of age and you’re still downing shots of cognac, as Maya’s grandmother proceeded to do each time we got together for a meal, you’re really, really fucking badass.





While in Israel, Maya’s dad stayed with his parents, while Maya and I split our time between her uncle’s place in Haifa and her cousin Zeev’s place in Tel Aviv. Zeev lives with her boyfriend Yoav, and they’re both super cool. And Yoav is super metal. I mean, so super metal that when he hangs out all day wearing an Overkill T-shirt, he comes home and makes himself comfortable by changing into a cut-off-sleeve Overkill T-shirt. So super metal that he has this tattooed on his right arm...

Zeev and Yoav’s apartment is in the center of Tel Aviv, Israel’s biggest city, and just a few blocks from the beach, which is awesomely pronounced in an Israeli accent as “bitch.” Like, “What a beautiful bitch. Let’s go swimming.” Even better, their place is just a few blocks from probably the best record store in Israel, the accurately if redundantly named Metal: the Metal Shop.

Inside, the store’s left wall features a mural with the cover art of Dio’s Holy Diver, Obituary’s Cause of Death, Sepultura’s Beneath the Remains, and Doro’s Warrior Soul, and the shop, as a whole, features a great selection of metal CDs, LPs, DVDs, and T-shirts. I picked up albums by three Israeli bands: folk-tinged black metallists Arafel, sludgy tech-thrashers Breorn, and Pantera-esque power-groove quartet Betzefer.

When not shopping for metal goods, going to the “bitch,” and eating hummus, Zeev, Yoav, Maya, and I piled into a rented car driven by yours truly—the Israelis are notoriously aggressive drivers, but I hail from motherfucking Brooklyn and can more than hold my own—and roared off through the desert to the Dead Sea, the saltiest body of water on Earth, located at the lowest point on the surface of the planet on dry land. There we visited the ruins of the clifftop fortress Masada, where in A.D. 73 Jewish rebels, besieged by troops of the Roman Empire, committed mass suicide rather than be captured. “Now you know why a bunch of Jews killed themselves,” explained Yoav as we sweated our asses off in the blistering sun up there. “It was just too hot.”

Then we floated in the bizarre, oily, hypersalinated water of the Dead Sea and coated ourselves in its famously curative black mud.





Yoav, Zeev, me, and Maya.



We might have looked pretty stupid, but we felt like Sepultura in the “Territory” music video.





Driving back to Tel Aviv, we passed an absolutely massive brush fire alongside the highway, patrolled by soldiers and ominous military vehicles. The flames and smoke towered hundreds of feet above us, and crisp, blackened trees lined the road.

We assumed that the conflagration had some natural cause or perhaps someone had unwisely tossed a cigarette from their car window or something, but when we got back to Zeev and Yoav’s place, they learned from the news that five Palestinian militants had crossed over into Israel from the West Bank that morning, intent on fucking shit up, and the Israeli army, in the process of trying to take the terrorists out, had set off a small missile and that had started the fire. Not a cigarette. A small fucking missile. (The would-be terrorists were later apprehended, having escaped being blown to bits.)

Another day, Yoav helped Maya and I track down some metal shows to go to while we were in Israel. Turned out the only two concerts going down during our trip fell on the same day: Friday, June 27. There was the “Battle for Jerusalem,” a black-metal show held in, uh, Jerusalem and featuring Arafel and Azamoth, among others. Then there was the “Summer Fury Metal Fest” in Haifa, featuring Israel’s answer to Lacuna Coil, Distorted, and melodic death metallers Prey for Nothing.

I really wanted to go to the show in Jerusalem—seeing a black-metal gig in the holiest of holy cities just sounded too awesome to be missed. But unfortunately, we didn’t have a place to stay there, and since the Israeli weekend falls on Friday and Saturday and corresponds with the Jewish day of Sabbath, called Shabbat, during which pretty much everything in the country shuts down—shops, offices, and, worst of all, public transportation—we didn’t have a good way of getting there and back. Basically, religion kept me from seeing the black-metal show in Jerusalem, which seems pretty fitting.




So Maya and I swung by “Summer Fury” instead, and it was a good time. The club was a dark, scuzzy shithole on the wrong side of town, and the maybe half-capacity crowd included a surprising number of young girls (and not just the reluctant tag-along girlfriend variety—I mean cute little metal chicks rocking Obituary T-shirts and shit) and a lot of drunken Russians. Metal chicks aside, maybe the best part of the show was hearing stage banter in Hebrew. The standout bands were definitely the prog-tastic Xenolith, who had kind of a Death-meets-Opeth thing going on, and Prey for Nothing (pictured below), whose skinny-ass, banshee-shrieking frontman Yotam “Defiler” Avni reminded me of the Wicked Witch of the West, especially when the green stagelights hit him. The band also had some pretty rad T-shirts for sale; on their back, the slogan “Violent times demand violent music.” And in a land where missiles start brush fires and bulldozers are used as weapons of hate, I have to agree.





(Read Part 2.)