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Prologue LosingTraction in the Hills of Jerusalem It is an early morning hour at the beginning of May 2010. I am riding on my mountain bicycle on a single track, a narrow mountain-­ biking trail, that cuts through the Halilim (in Hebrew, “Flutes”) dry riverbed. The days are getting warmer. In a few weeks, the scorching heat of summer will fall upon the hills and wadis (in Arabic,“valleys, dry riverbeds”) around Jerusalem,1 bringing with it the uniform yellows and browns of the long dry season, and a thin layer of white dust. But spring is still here, and for a few more precious days everything will still be green and colorful. The hill slopes on both sides of the trail are covered with green grass and patches of red buttercups. Here and there, a few violet-­ pink cyclamen still bloom. Yellow carpets of mustard flowers spread everywhere . The air is saturated with fresh and soft scents of blossoming flowers, wet soil, and lush grass. Underneath the grass and the flowers, I see long rows of very old agricultural terraces made of countless blocks of limestone put carefully and accurately on each other in perfect order. In many parts, though, the terraces are slowly crumbling, stones gradually falling off, as no one amends the weathering caused by the elements. Innumerable terraces like these cover much of the Jerusalem and Judean hills. As I flow down with the single track toward the bottom of the wadi, I think,“Who built these terraces and when? They look ancient. It was an amazingly complex work, of many generations, to collect, pile up, and maintain all these numerous stones on each other in such accuracy, a work of perfect craftsmanship.”I promise myself I’ll read about the history of the terraces in the 2 / The Politics of the Trail Judean hills, and recall that I made this promise several times before but haven’t found the time yet to explore the history of the landscape I pass through every day. This disturbs me. I find myself in recent years more and more yearning for the local landscape, for the real and authentic that I can feel with my senses; I crave the reachable, for what my eyes can see around me, for where my feet and the bike can take me.I need the things that I can sense and experience daily with my body: to breathe and smell the air of the hills, to feel the sun or the rain on my skin, to experience the terrain and the topography with my muscles. The physicality of mountain biking in these hills and wadis makes me feel I belong here, that I know the territory with my body. But I’m coming from the “international”—­ I teach and study international politics.I think,not for the first time,how abstract and remote the international remains, a mostly imaginative realm that most people do not, cannot, physically experience or explore as such.2 I wonder,“Could there be any international context to these terraces?” Immediately I realize how disciplined I am, literally. “I must let go a bit,” I think. I return my attention to the trail. Short almond trees, lush with green foliage , dot the terraces. Not too many weeks ago, the almonds were covered by a myriad of white flowers, blazing like ghosts in the night and glittering like snow during the day. The wind spread the sweet scent of the flowers throughout the wadi, making the hard climb on my way back home in the evenings a bit easier. Now, in this early May morning, on my way to the Mt. Scopus campus of the Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, I look around me and store in my memory—­ the cognitive, but also the physical—­ that of the muscles and the body—­ the coolness and beauty of spring.I will call upon these images and sensations in the coming long weeks of summer, cash them out to somewhat cool myself when working my way up in the hills in temperatures higher than 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit), even in the morning and the evening. Evergreen “Jerusalem pines,” planted in the millions in the Jerusalem hills by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) during the 1950s and 1960s, dominate large swaths of the terraced landscape. The terraces transform the slopes into what looks like a giant’s staircase.The staircases of terraces climb,on the wadi’s northern and southern slopes, to the...

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