Barreling towards the desert from Ramallah at 10p.m is not the traditional way that Jews commemorate their biblical freedom from bondage on Passover seder night. However, the full moon lighting over the Negev crater, Maktesh Ramon, and my hazy state of recovery from the previous night's festivities on my rooftop, celebrating my attorney's forty years of service to liberation, made the adventure irresistible.

Starting to burn out and crash at 8:00 p.m., after a post-festivity legal consultation with ‘Burney, my attorney and his partner Sabina, I got a text messaged by Mailyse, suggesting a road trip. Most of the ragtag bunch of Israelis from the party having shamelessly departed for their matzah ball soup and brisket hours before, my attorney and Sabina closed the case and left just as Mailyse arrived to divulge a strategy for marking 40 years of bitterness.

"It's a gorgeous night, How about we go to the coast near the Lebanon border." I said somewhat seriously. "I know some great caves around there."
But my eyes were already being pulled south on the Lonely Planet map of historic Palestinian hotspots, towards the desert. "It's a full moon and apparently Maktesh Ramon looks like the moon. Why don't we go there?" I suggested to Mailyse as Burney frantically searched for his passport. "Sure," she said not lifting an eyebrow.

Twenty-five minutes later we were passing though the Hizma settler checkpoint, hoping to avoid the hassles of Qalandia during a full West Bank closure. The army routinely imposes full checkpoint closures for Palestinians during Jewish holidays, overriding travel permits Palestinians may have, preventing them from West Bank travel and trips to Jerusalem or Israel alike.

So we took a dialectical approach to Passover's call of "next year in Jerusalem," forgoing the downtown in search of the road to Be'ersheva and the Negev. Naturally enough, Moses' mission combined itself with Murphy's Law and we got lost in the city center, only finding the right road after our music-producing laptops had run out of juice - there was no car stereo.

As we headed down the highway into sandy, rocky obis, North American Pesach traditions found a way of surfacing, as Burney began instructing Mailyse on the finer points of driving from his back seat. "We don't have to go anywhere, you guys don't have to be here and I can turn this car around," Mailyse replied to backseat Burney with restrained frustration.

The unlit roads were empty and after we passed Be'ersheva at 1am we could only make out the shadows of desert hills, military bases and the tents of numerous unrecognized Palestinian Bedouin villages. With Burney listening to an mp3 player and Mailyse focused on the road, I began thinking about the previous week's visit to a site near Rahat - one of Israel's seven recognized Bedouin villages - to see a play on the ancestral land of community leader Nouri Al-Ukbi.

The Hebrew production by Tel Aviv University theater students fused interview and testimony transcripts with satirical songs to tell the story of Al-Ukbi and his clan's displacement, depopulation and forced relocation just after Israel's creation. With a stage next to Al-Ukbi's tent, which has been knocked down by the army several times, the cast eschewed the exotifying approach of elaborate traditional Bedouin tribal dress, opting for western clothes with small Bedouin patterns signifying their character.

It was a powerful use of cultural familiarity and a debate between the stage and mostly Israeli audience that ensued. The actors had subverted the traditional Zionist narrative of blooming the desert, synching lyrics about eviction and conquest to old Israeli folk and military songs. But the struggle for historical narrative maintained the spotlight as during Al-Ukbi's post-performance speech about his experience and struggle with the state, he was interrupted and heckled by an elderly local kibbutz activist.

"How about the positive things Israel and the army have done for Bedouins," he shouted from behind Al-Ukbi, seemingly offended by the satirizing of Israel's founding mythology. "How about how I used to bring you water?" he added. "I didn't want you to bring water," Al-Ukbi shot back. "I wanted help to secure our rights to water infrastructure and get our own water."

We stopped for a brief walk and exploration of the desert around us, and my mind was pulled back to the immediate surroundings. Back on the road, I began noticing how different the unrecognized villages were from Rahat. After the play we had stayed in Rahat - the largest of the Israeli-recognized villages. Its civil infrastructure was comparable to Johannesburg's Soweto, but these villages didn't even compare.

More military bases approached and then receded and gradually, the distant floodlights of what turned out to be Nafha Prison loomed. One of the major detention centers for Palestinian involved in liberation activity, holding over 800 prisoners, we slowed to pass its guard towers as watchmen stared at our lone car. The barbed wire, multiple gates and watch towers resembled a miniature Guantanamo Bay facility.

Finally, deep in the quiet of the desert, we arrived at the lookout sight for Maktesh Ramon. Our only lighting came from the moon, stars and the occasional passing car. The cavern of rock and valleys below made it look as though deep rivers ran through the center of the crater. We walked along the cliffy ridges, Arak and smokes in hand and sat on a ridge overlooking the vast sky above and shadowy darkness below, at 3am we lit up.

Eight kilometers squared and hundreds of meters below, Mailyse suggested we climb down and explore, while Burney had the foresight to wait in the car. We angled our way down the cliffs trying to find a path, but anything that resembled a walkway turned out to be loose sand, resulting in several 15 second ass slides. About half way down the first steep part, I realized I had to pee and ended up climbing over two boulders along one of the gorge's steeper faces to simply find an unzipping spot. Peeing in a gorge is neither as easy nor as gratifying as aiming at a settlement, especially when the ridge is so steep that one needs to kneel in order to go. While I tried to make a quip to Mailyse about blooming the desert, the symbolism didn't have nearly the same poignancy as similar comments made during our first anarchist date.

We soon came to the conclusion that it was far too deep to descend by foot , and drove to a lower point in the crater. Getting out by the side of the road, we descended to the bottom of the valley, discovering that what looked like water was actually hard white stone, creating a moonwalk experience. We hoisted ourselves onto two big boulders in the crater's center and watched our smoke rings twirl into the sky around the uninterrupted deadening stillness of the desert night.

As the moon disappeared behind the ridge, we clambered out of the crater's base to catch the sun rising over it. The moon left a back shadow that shaded over everything, including our huddled silhouettes on the cliff's edge. Then in a matter of minutes, the desert's dark cloak was split by a bolt of orange, illuminating a vast pit of sand and rock and revealing the crater's natural colors. As our smoke burned slowly towards the sky, like an unattended dwindling campfire, the approaching daylight washed over us, and spread on to the expansive desert beyond.

On the long drive back we saw in full light the villages and military bases that were only shadows the night before. Both Burney and I had to stayed awake to make sure Mailyse didn't fall asleep, and our attention kept turning to the surrounding highway signs.

"Hey, the sign just said, don't veer off the road as both sides are army shooting ranges," Burney said. A minute later we saw another sign with the same message in Hebrew, Arabic and English, and then another and another. Starting to nod off in the front seat I reflected that while we may not have found the Passover message in the Israeli desert, we could at least be sure that the army was setting many bushes ablaze.