HaSela haAdom

The song tells the story of a young Israeli soldier who illegally crossed the Israeli-Jordanian border to visit Petra, and ends with the death of its hero.

Meir Har-Zion, often called a "mythological army hero", "fulfilled this oath" and travelled to Petra with his girlfriend, Rachel Savorai (also from Palmach), in 1953.

Dominik Peters described their trip: "They hitchhiked southwards in Israel, crossed the border, took four bottles of water, some juice, food for two nights and one day, as well as a compass, a map, and a loaded rifle with them [...] Once Meir Har-Zion and Rachel Savorai, the first kovshim ("conquerors") of the sandy and stony soil, returned safe and sound, three men and two women decided after a Palmach reunion to follow their example.

This first group who decided to reach Petra after Har-Zion and Savorai were Arik Meger, Miriam Monderer, Eitan Minz, Ya'acov Kleifeld, and Gila Ben-Akiva.

[1] Yigal Schwartz writes that in the 1950s "the Red Rock functioned as a magical place on the map of the Israeli national imagination, the product of an ancient civilisation, the secret of whose charm also lay, without a doubt, in the fact that it was a dangerous site".

HaSela HaAdom, inspired by Har-Zion and the Petra hiking by Israelis, was written by Haim Hefer, with music by Yochanan Zarai [he], and recorded by Arik Lavie in 1958.

[4][5] Songwriter Haim Hefer was himself a member of Palmach; he "created with his songs a soundtrack for the young state of Israel, 'the karaoke of the 1960s', a 'collective linguistic DNA'".

Among them is a book by Amos Oz, A Perfect Peace, written in 1982, that tells a story of young kibbutznik dissatisfied with his life, who leaves his wife and home and heads to Petra where "[t]here lay[s] the Land of Edom.

Another example is a short story by Ruth Almog, titled "Susim" ("Horses"), about a young man, Oscar, who made aliyah with his mother after surviving in the Holocaust.