Beauty and Apartheid in East Jerusalem

Two more Palestinian homes were demolished in East Jerusalem by the Israeli government today, leaving 18 people homeless. Earlier today Israeli bulldozers demolished another two-family home in the town of Isawiya in East Jerusalem. On Tuesday, a four-family home was bulldozed and its 30 residents made homeless. Meanwhile, Jewish-only settlements continue to expand on Palestinian land.

As many South Africans who’ve been here continue to attest, Apartheid wasn’t this bad.

In honor of the families made homeless over the past two days, I’m posting a story about a neighborhood in East Jerusalem called Al Bustan in Silwan, a Palestinian town southeast of the Jerusalem Old City. It’s part of occupied Arab East Jerusalem. The entire neighborhood of Al Bustan, housing over 1,000 people, is threatened with demolition by the Israeli government. Here’s a story of Israelis and Palestinians trying to prevent this by working together to clean and rehabilitate the town’s ancient aqueduct. It’s a simple but wrenchingly beautiful story. It brings me to tears every time.

Two of the homes demolished today were in Silwan.

Work Day, Al Bustan, Silwan

David Shulman
Taayush
July 2, 2005

Ankle-deep in the pungent, turbid water of Silwan, we stand in the old ruined aqueduct, hoes and pick-axes in our hands. It is 9:30 in the morning and already hot. We have come to clean the aqueduct and make it functional again. We scrape away at its muddy bed, filling buckets with sandy clay and rocks to be emptied out on the hill below, where a new terrace is being built by our Palestinian friends.

The task is Sisyphean; the Palestinian locals keep reassuring us that we will hit bottom after 15 centimetres or so, but as the day progresses the channel becomes deeper and deeper, with no bottom in sight. The water flows downhill from an ancient spring somewhere up-mountain — so we are told — a spring older than King David, who lived here in Silwan, older even than the Jebusites from whom he captured the city 3000 years ago. The Silwanis think the spring was here from the beginning of time.

In the old days, the aqueduct carried this clean spring-water in a carved stone channel just under the wall of heavy stones that lines the road; in this way water reached down into the village for drinking, washing, irrigation. At some point in the last years, the Jerusalem municipality blocked it at one end and built a large concrete cess-pool just below it. So now the water still emerging from the ancient spring mostly stands stagnant in the aqueduct, evaporating in the hot sun of the Jerusalem summer.

The people of al Bustan have long wanted to unblock the channel, to clean it and let water flow back toward their neighborhood; but they have been afraid to do this on their own, knowing very well that the police or the Border Guards would almost certainly intervene to prevent them. Only our presence here today, some 100 volunteers from [Israeli peace groups] Ta’ayush [Arab-Jewish partnership], Bat Shalom, Machsom Watch [Checkpoint Watch], and the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, has given them the freedom to put their ready plans into operation.

We are here, however, not just for the water and the terrace but mainly because of the [Jerusalem] Municipality’s plans to demolish 88 houses in al Bustan — in fact, to wipe out the neighborhood altogether, ostensibly in order to create an “archaeological park” in the heart of Silwan. In fact, the intention is very different and altogether transparent: al Bustan will fall victim to the latest attempt to Judaize east Jerusalem, pursuant to the settlers’ stated goal and the government’s clear policy of making the lives of Palestinian Jerusalemites as miserable as possible.

The sheer scale of the current attempt — some 1000 people will be rendered homeless — has sparked considerable protest as well as this collaborative venture between Israeli peace-groups and the local committee. We have come in the hope of drawing international attention to what Israel is planning, and thus of forcing the government to back down. We have come in solidarity with innocent victims. And we have come to work.

There is a lot of press, including a Korean TV journalist making a film about life in Israel-Palestine, a reporter from the Berliner Zeitung, and a Chinese crew; if they manage to get a few seconds on the evening news in China, possibly many millions will see this happy moment. Several video crews are filming continuously, and indeed the hillside looks, to my eyes, strikingly photogenic. There are teams of volunteers cleaning up the debris of decades — rusted spikes wrapped in barbed-wire, blocks of concrete, huge broken branches, and moldy piles of tin and plastic; others are breaking up the caked top-layer of soil just down from the aqueduct, readying it for the grassy terrace it will soon become; some are filling buckets with rocks and earth and pouring them out on the hill below to build up the emerging terrace.

The whole hillside is alive with color and movement; young men from the village, and some children, work side-by-side with the Israelis, and the site is changing rapidly, minute by minute, the long neglect over at last. Amnon, only recently recovered from a broken shoulder, is working heroically with his one uninjured arm, hoeing and raking and carrying buckets and branches and heavy stones.

I am not alone; three Sanskritists from our group at the Institute for Advanced Studies have joined me, along with R., my Tamilist friend and colleague from New Zealand; also P. — my closest friend in the world — is with us for the first time. Thirty years ago we were in the [Israeli] army together — an irrevocable bond. He is working — hard — on the Sabbath; he rode the bus down to the village with the rest of us; he is an observant Jew.

How does it feel, I ask him?

“Like Shabbat Bereshit,” he says — the Torah reading about the creation of the world.

From the start, the police are also with us, seeming, on the surface, rather benign — at first two blue jeeps, reinforced later by a detachment of Border Guards. They have promised that we would not be stopped on our way down into the village, and they do not appear to be unduly troubled by the notion of this work-day. It is not, after all, a demonstration. But around 11:00 a settler appears, dressed in his white Shabbat clothes, with conspicuous skull-cap and fringes and a well-fed belly. He looks scornfully at the Jews working beside Palestinian Arabs. He lives in a house seized from one of the Silwanis, overlooking this hillside.

He stops for a word with the police commander. It is not allowed, he claims — and, as usual, the settler calls the shots — to pour earth to make a terrace, or to plant a tree, or to repair a stone wall, without specific permits. We are intending to do all of the above, but now the officer informs us, bowing to the settler’s mysterious authority, that we can go on working so long as we refrain from these clearly criminal acts. They will stay here to make sure we keep within bounds.

The man working beside me says to me in Arabic: “He — the settler — is living in my house. He took my house.” He is, of course, enraged. “All the problems,” he says, “come from them; only from them. They won’t let us live. They won’t let us breathe.”

Another Silwani bursts out in a torrent of curses, and for a moment the rhythm of our hoes and buckets is rent by the pulsations of rage. The moment passes. We will wait a while before deciding about the tree.

Amiel has brought it, a huge mulberry, tut in Arabic and Hebrew; he and Ezra scoured the nurseries of Jerusalem looking for it, because this place was years ago known as “Tut Junction,” after a famous, ancient mulberry tree. That tree is gone, and we intend to replace it today, also to restore the street signs with the original names. Ezra, meanwhile, has been imprisoned by the army for visiting our friends in the south Hebron caves; tonight he will be brought before a Jerusalem court for an extension of his remand. They seem, this time, intent on punishing him. Nothing, truly nothing, threatens the army more than a man of peace.

From my position inside the aqueduct, I wonder out loud with P. at the hate that has risen up within me at the sight and sound of the arrogant settler. I can’t deny its existence. I can call up not even an iota of empathy, and I refuse to try to imagine his warped inner world. Hate, I say to P., is a part of us; like love. Better to acknowledge it.

Is that why you are here? he asks me. Is that why you act? Of course, he agrees, this settler is hateful: look at his swagger, look at the stolen house, look at the hate coursing through him. Who, after all, would try to stop a man from planting a tree in his own garden? But is that a reason to act?

No, I answer. I mostly seem to act from some other, obscure place. Maybe it is a need to be outside, away from my professor’s desk. Maybe it is a hunger for the intense connectedness of days like this, days of crossing the borders, one by one. Maybe it is love — for these people working beside me. Maybe, very likely, it is pure, uncontainable outrage at the immense injustice inflicted on them, day by day, and a refusal to let the Jews, or anyone else, perpetrate it without protest: being Jewish, so I thought, was mostly about just such a refusal. The prophets who lived here in Silwan, when David was king, sang mostly about that. If we had been alive in those days, I tell P., I would have been a ragged street urchin, mad with poetry, and you would have been one of those prophets. That is why you are here today.

Never before have I been so needed as a medic: there is a host of minor cuts and wounds which require cleaning and bandaging. I almost exhaust the medical supplies I brought with me; it is time to refresh my medic’s pouch. By now I am covered in mud and reeking of the stagnant water; will the stench ever leave my shoes, my jeans? I am also very thirsty, as the day wears on, an endless and relentless thirst no liquid can quench.

After lunch I climb with P. into the Roman antiquities farther up hill — a bath-house in the shadow of an overhanging cliff. Ta’ayush, P. says, reminds him of our days in the army; there is the same stark, unfamiliar eros of body and sun and smell, of the group living its life as a collective, of the simplicity of eating and working and using your hands.

Yes, I say — suddenly memory cascades back to Shomron and basic training, I can smell it again. But there we were slaves, and here we are free.

They ask us to climb up into the cemetery above the road for a few photos, for the Arabic newspaper Al Quds. Only men — women should not go into this space. We somewhat comically, artificially play at cleaning the grave-stones, mostly marked as children’s graves, for the sake of the picture. Why didn’t they photograph us working furiously downhill? Perhaps the sight of Israelis cleaning Muslim tombstones will have some power.

Pictures over, we go back to work. A little later someone climbs the tall electricity pole and ties a newly painted signpost on it, in Arabic and English, another fruit of today’s labors: maqbarat al atfal above, and below, an unconscious touch of poetry: “Children’s Symmetry.”

By now it is 3:00, the day begins to wane. Time to wind down: and time for the tree, come what may. Amiel carries it into the newly hoed plot. It is a splendid specimen, and within minutes it stands embedded in the soil, lightly tied to an iron stake; wrapped around the stake, covered in plastic, is a huge enlargement of an aerial photograph of the village, with a bright circle tracing the boundaries of this neighborhood threatened with extinction.. We pour buckets of water over the base of the tree, and a cheer goes up: “Silwan! Silwan!” People clap and sing and shout.

But now the police wake up, since we have at last broken the law. They march back and forth on the road, barking into their cell-phones. The Border Guards look restless, or agitated, as well, and for a few moments I wonder if at this final moment we will have to face a fracas, a police charge, or the arrest of some of our friends. In a way, I don’t much care. There is something about planting a tree that stands outside and beyond all other categories. It is always and ever auto-telic: its own intrinsic justification. I am glad we have planted this mulberry tree here, glad to have been part of it, glad also for the defiance. And now, as the policemen look on with anger, apparently hesitant to move, the Silwani spokesmen rise to speak through the loudspeaker to all of us who have worked here today.

“This is the day of Silwan,” says M., in Arabic, “a famous day, a day of peace. I thank you on behalf of the people of Silwan. You have come from all over, even from distant countries, to help us, who have been targeted by the Israeli authorities — one thousand men, women, and children from al Bustan. I thank you for the sake of peace. Let all people know. In Silwan we are not free. We want our liberty, we want our livelihood, we want an end to our agony. Make sure that the Israeli government knows, and the Jerusalem municipality knows: we will never give up our homes. Make sure for the sake of peace, the peace we all want.”

Again the cries: “Silwan! Silwan!” Mixed in with them is another shout, almost a rhyme: “Salaam!”

Now Khulood speaks for Ta’ayush in a swift, crystalline Arabic, every syllable a promise of human hope. “We are not afraid,” she says, “not afraid of the Border Guards or the Police or the soldiers, not afraid of anyone. We came here to stand beside you, and we will never abandon this struggle. Your struggle is ours.”

Someone suddenly thrusts the loudspeaker at me. I try to escape it, try to push it back at Amnon, at anyone, but they insist and I can see there is no choice. They want someone to say something in Hebrew, and it will have to be me. I have no idea what to say, but I press the button and start, without thinking.

“We had the honor, and the pleasure, of working here today as your guests. Thank you for inviting us. We loved this day, as we love and honor peace. We want you to know that we are with you and that we will never allow anyone to destroy your houses. We will come whenever you need us, whenever you invite us here, as your friends.”

I stop, the loudspeaker mercifully passes on to another, but one of the young Silwanis hurries over to me, takes my arm.

“You don’t need an invitation,” he says to me, speaking of all of us, his eyes full of light. “Silwan is your home.”

EXCERPT – Omar’s Story

Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 7, “Arafat’s Funeral.” It was the fall olive harvest season in 2004 and Yasser Arafat had just died. I was on holiday in Jayyous picking olives, happy for a brief escape from my journalistic duties, when a dear friend found me and told me some bad news.

Omar’s Story

I was harvesting with Qais’s family the next day when Ali found me.

“Ya Bam,” he said with a grave, apologetic look. “I would not ask you for this, but I think there is no other way. It’s OK if you don’t want to. Really, there will be no problem.”

This didn’t sound good at all. “What’s up?”

He sighed sorrowfully. “There is a farmer’s son from here in Jayyous named Omar. A few days ago, when Arafat died, some of the shebab [youth] were burning tires at the south gate of the Wall as a demonstration. Omar’s father was on the land, and Omar went to the gate to wait for him. When the soldiers came, the shebab started throwing stones at them. I don’t know if Omar was throwing stones or just waiting. Anyway, the soldiers came through the gate with their guns, and Omar ran away with the others, but a soldier shot him twice in the back.”

I could feel the blood drain from my face. “My God.”

“Yes, and then they took him away to a hospital in Israel. We called and found the hospital he is in. It is in Kfar Saba. He is OK, he is alive, but he has had many surgeries. When we call the hospital, they are very rude and won’t tell us anything more. His parents are going crazy. They want to visit him, but the hospital says they cannot get a permit to visit him unless they come to the hospital and take a paper that tells about his condition. So you see…”

“Yeah, there’s only one catch,” I said with measureless disgust. “Well, look, I can go to the hospital and get the paper.”

He sighed again. “Really, Bamila, I know this is a holiday for you, and we wouldn’t ask…”

“I know.”

I called Dan [an Israeli friend who lived in Kfar Saba] to see if he could pick me up in Jayyous and take me to Kfar Saba. I’d forgotten he had recently sold his car. He apologized and said he didn’t have time to borrow one, either. So I got up early the next morning and made my way through Ramallah down to the Qalandia checkpoint, crossed on foot, took a minibus to East Jerusalem, caught a cab to the Jerusalem Central Bus Station, and caught another bus back up north to Kfar Saba. It was a journey of more than a hundred miles and six hours to get to a place less than five miles from Jayyous. It would have taken ten minutes if Dan had picked me up on the settler road.

Finding the hospital in Kfar Saba took a bit of hunting, but once I found it, the task didn’t seem so daunting anymore. All I had to do was ask for a paper, say hey to the injured kid, and be on my way back to Jayyous in no time. It might even be one of those bridging-the-divide moments with the Israeli doctors, because what human being could fail to sympathize with a young man who’d been shot in the back, or a young American woman trying to help him? It was easy to be rude over the phone. In person, I was confident they would see us as human beings and treat us as such. By the time I walked through the front doors of the hospital, I was feeling almost cheerful.

I found a receptionist and said, “I have a friend from the West Bank who’s been injured and is being treated here. I need to get a paper that explains about his condition so his parents can come and visit.”

She looked uncomfortable, as if she feared I might be mildly crazy or criminal. “You’ll have to talk to someone in administration,” she said. “I don’t handle these things.”

She directed me to a small back office, where I found a dark-haired man in his forties and asked if he spoke English.

“Of course!” he said, widening his eyes as if the likes of me asking if he spoke English were the most preposterous indignity he’d suffered that day. I told him what I was here for.

He waved his hand dismissively and looked away. “We don’t give papers about West Bank people here. We’re not allowed. It’s like a secret that he’s here.”

I checked his voice for irony or humor and found none. “I’m sorry, what do you mean you don’t give papers about people being here? That’s why they sent me. I just need a paper that says he is here to give to the DCO [District Coordination Office] so we can get a permit for his parents to visit.”

He shook his head. “We don’t give out information like that. You have to call Dalia in Beit El. She’s in charge of these things, not me.”

Beit El was a settlement north of Ramallah between Al Bireh and Surda villages that stole and destroyed a great deal of land belonging to the villages. Palestinians sometimes had to go there to take care of administrative matters related to the occupation. I said, “If we could have done this from Beit El, I’m sure it would have been done already. But they sent me here physically to get a paper. All I need is a paper that says—”

He smiled mock-patiently, as if I were simple or slow, and interrupted me. “Listen very carefully. You aren’t the first person who has come here looking for information about these people, and you won’t be the last. We don’t give out papers. That’s it. Don’t ask anymore.”

I had a distinct feeling he was lying through his teeth. But what could I do?

“Can I visit him?” I asked weakly.

“What do I care?”

I left his office with my face flushed and my fists clenched. The way he’d said “these people” had sent hot chills down my spine. If I had eaten anything that day, I feel fairly confident I would have thrown it up.

At least I could visit the injured boy, so maybe the day wasn’t a total wash. I walked up to his floor, and the nurses pointed me down to the basement, where he was having a CT scan. I asked the receptionist at CT if she knew where I could find the boy I was looking for.

She looked at me blankly. “Maybe that’s him?” she said, pointing behind me.

I looked back. There was a good-looking blue-eyed young man with pale skin and curly brown hair in a gurney in the middle of the waiting room. He had an IV drip in his arm and seemed alert but tired. His eyes looked naturally sharp but dulled now, resigned to a casual bit of violence that would drastically affect the rest of his life—something simultaneously offhand and unthinkable. “Omar?” I asked.

He nodded, his expression alternating between wariness and polite confusion.

Suddenly I felt extremely shy. This wasn’t just a task about papers and permits. It was a human being who’d had something horrible done to him, and here he was. He wasn’t expecting anyone, least of all a foreign girl he didn’t know. I wasn’t sure what to say. I told him I was a friend of Ali’s in Jayyous. He nodded.

“Keef halek?” I asked. [How are you?]

He gave the traditional pleasantly noncommittal answer: “Hamdulillah.” [Thanks to God.]

My eyes widened. “W’Allah?” [Really?] How could he even say it?

He looked down at himself. “Zai shufik.” (As you see.) I wilted, wishing desperately that I didn’t have to see a typically polite and self-possessed young Arab with something typically horrific done to him in this devastatingly singular way. I reported on this kind of thing daily at my job. This was, in fact, mild compared to the things that made the news. Omar had survived, had no brain damage, was not in critical condition, and had not lost several limbs and/or family members. He was just in a hospital having surgeries and CT scans done far away from his family, not knowing how bad his prognosis was. This was nothing.

And yet it was overwhelming. So where did that leave all the other things I reported on, all the bloody and senseless things I didn’t have to see for myself?

I swallowed hard and asked who else he knew in Jayyous. He named some names. I asked how old he was, and he said twenty. I wanted to ask more, but I didn’t know the Arabic for words like ‘prognosis’ or ‘paralysis,’ and the small talk I knew seemed wildly inappropriate. He made the Middle Eastern hand gesture, palm up and fingers pinched together, that meant, “Wait a moment.” He indicated that the doctor would be out soon and could translate for us.

When the doctor came out, I introduced myself and asked if he spoke Arabic. He said yes. He looked like a Mizrahi Jew, thin and pale-skinned, possibly from Yemen.

“Would you mind translating a few things Omar might want me to tell his family?” I asked. “And can you explain to me about Omar’s condition?”

He looked at his watch. “I need to eat soon,” he said.

I smiled. “Yeah, me too.” It was late afternoon and I hadn’t eaten all day. I was trying to highlight our shared humanity and gently suggest that this injured, helpless, isolated boy’s terrible predicament was slightly more important than lunch. He didn’t smile back.

“Wait fifteen minutes,” he said and wheeled Omar into the CT scan room. Fifteen minutes later, two orderlies wheeled him back out. The doctor had escaped out another door.

My ears burning from the latest rebuff, I followed Omar and the orderlies up to his room, where I found a pretty young nurse named Sofya from Netanya. I asked her about his condition.

She said brightly, “Well, his kidney is damaged and his spine is broken, and he can move one leg a little, but the other not at all.”

“Will he ever walk again?”

She shrugged nonchalantly and said, “Mmm, I don’t think so, probably not.”

The room turned grey and looked sharper and further away as tears stung my eyes. For nothing he was in this state, no reason at all. Not just injured but paralyzed, handicapped, probably for life. And nobody cared.

I tried to keep my voice steady as I told the nurse what I was here for. She looked like she had no idea what I was talking about. I asked if I could use the phone to call Ali in Jayyous. She allowed it.

When I heard Ali’s baritone voice, clear and reasonable and familiar and friendly in this sea of obtuse hostility, thick hot tears fell. I explained everything to him and gave the phone to Sofya so he could tell her exactly what we needed.

Ali was one of the most kind, diplomatic, and cool-headed people I had ever met, and I could tell he was getting further with Sofya than I had. She said she would try her best, but she didn’t sound very hopeful. She tried to call Dalia in Beit El, but there was no answer.

Sofya shrugged. “Maybe you can come back tomorrow?”

It wasn’t clear how anything would be different tomorrow, and my desire to get back to Jayyous as soon as possible, among friends and olives and kindness, was so visceral it was painful. So I went on the trail of the paper again. After another hour of hunting and asking and negotiating, Sofya finally conceded that the paper could be issued here after all.

“But the doctor who does these things is busy today,” Sofya said apologetically. “Maybe she can do it tomorrow.”

“She can’t possibly do it today?”

“No, I’m sorry, she is receiving many children today, and she is the only one who can receive them. She is very busy.”

“How long does it take to make the paper?”

“I don’t know, about fifteen minutes.”

“She can’t spare fifteen minutes? It would help a lot of people so much.”

“I’m sorry.”

I’d learned an important lesson in Russia: If something important is at stake and hostile bureaucracy is standing in your way, you have to make it harder for them to ignore you than to fulfill your simple request. Otherwise they’ll blow you off every time.

“Look, can I just talk to her real quick?”

Sofya narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. Then she rolled her eyes and sighed. “Come with me.”

I followed her into a darkened office. The doctor was a tasteful-looking Russian blonde woman who sneered slightly when she saw me. She was alone in the room and looked rather bored. She wasn’t receiving any children. I tried to explain what I needed, but before I could finish my sentence, she was tearing a piece of paper off a pad and writing a few words in Hebrew about his condition. She affixed an official label and stamped it and handed it to me.

“Thank you so much. Is this is all I need?”

“Yes.”

I breathed a sigh of deep relief. Mission, it seemed, Accomplished.

A kind orderly helped me fax the paper to Dalia in Beit El, then Sofya gave me the phone to call Dalia and see if she got the fax. Dalia finally answered. She grudgingly admitted that she got the fax and everything was in order.

“So that’s it?” I asked. “Is that what you need to give his parents a permit?”

She paused, then said challengingly, “We don’t know how long he will be there.”

I couldn’t believe it. She was acting like this was some kind of game and she was still trying to win. “His spine is broken,” I said evenly. “He is not going anywhere.”

Another pause, then testily, “I can give you three days. OK?”

“Perfect. Thank you very much.”

Back in Omar’s room, Sofya gave me the phone again and allowed me to dial Omar’s parents in Jayyous. Omar was so weak he could barely handle the phone, but he talked to his family for the first time and told them about his condition.

I’d been on the other end of the phone several times, in the family’s home when they were talking to a relative in an Israeli jail or in some faraway hospital. People always tried to act as cheerful as possible so as not to upset each other. The mother didn’t want her son to think about how she’d been sick with crying. The son didn’t want his mother to know he’d been lonely, injured, ill, humiliated, terrified, starving.

After Omar hung up, he touched my arm and pulled his shirt up. The surgery scar was immense, from his heart down past his waistband. He put his shirt back down and indicated that he wanted me to move his legs. He pointed to a spot on one of his swollen legs, and I touched it. He shook his head, and tears welled slightly in his otherwise impassive young face. He couldn’t feel it.

It was time for me to go soon. Dan had agreed to pick me up and take me back to Jayyous in a borrowed van. I shook Omar’s hand and held it for a while as I met his pale blue eyes with mine. A strange and terrible peace descended on us. There was nothing to say. We were fundamentally no different from each other, yet he knew as well as I did that I would never have to come to terms with a misfortune anywhere near as incomprehensible as his. Something horrific might happen to me one day, but I probably wouldn’t be shot for no reason, and I certainly wouldn’t then be transferred to a foreign country and held captive by people whose indifference was somehow worse, more degrading, than cruelty.

I left the hospital in a daze. After walking a few steps in the fresh air, I ducked behind a column and sank to the ground and wept. On the weight of my tears was not just Omar but all the people like him whose stories would never be told and for whom help would never come.

When Dan arrived, I had no idea how to tell him how my day had gone. I mostly stayed quiet and felt terrible that I couldn’t bring myself to act happy to see him, or to express how grateful I was that he was taking me back to Jayyous. All I wanted, desperately, was to get back to the olive groves and to my friends in Jayyous who understood how I felt without words.

Dan and I had kept in touch over the phone, but I hadn’t seen him since he’d sold his car. Getting from Ramallah to Kfar Saba on public transportation was such an ordeal, and we were both so busy with work and life. Whenever I did see or talk to him, something horrible had usually just happened and I was depressed about it. I hated for him to always see me like this. I hated to bring this gloom into his life when I had no idea how to fix it. I felt isolated by my constant inability to explain or describe what I was going through. Even though Dan was sitting right next to me, I missed him.

As we entered the West Bank on a settler road, I caught sight of the thirty-foot concrete Wall that encircled Qalqilia. Forty thousand people in a cage at the dawn of the twenty-first century. “Look at that!” I exploded stupidly, rising out of my seat and banging my head on the roof of the van.

“I know,” Dan said numbly. “I can’t believe it. It’s like some movie about South Africa or something. And it’s happening right here.”

My Boss Decides to Run for President

Dr. Barghouthi called an emergency meeting a few days after the Eid holidays were over. I was annoyed because I already had my evening perfectly planned. I was going to Beit Sini (China House) on Main Street to get some Kung Pao chicken, then I was going to go home and curl up around some hot cocoa and watch Lara Croft: The Cradle of Life on MBC2 in my pajamas. I’d seen it in a theater in Moscow dubbed badly into Russian, and tonight I’d finally have a chance to find out how much of it I had understood. And for two restful, thoughtless, soft, warm hours, I could forget about everything else.

Except now I had to sit through this meeting that probably had nothing to do with me. I desperately hoped it wouldn’t go on too long.

We gathered around the big wooden table in the conference room. As soon as we were seated and quiet, Dr. Barghouthi dropped the bombshell:

“So, I have decided to run for President against Mahmoud Abbas.”

That perked me up, but I still didn’t see what it had to do with me. I was sure he could run for President even if I was at home eating Chinese take-out.

As I surreptitiously glanced at the clock on my cell phone (it was already after six, and the movie started at seven), I heard him say he’d need someone to volunteer to be his foreign press coordinator. Whoever that unlucky person was would have to stay in the office tonight and compile, organize, and prioritize the contact information for all the foreign correspondents in Israel/Palestine, which would take at least five or six hours. He or she would then represent Dr. Barghouthi to all the world’s press for the next two months, traveling, taking calls, helping organize press conferences, and writing press releases in addition to all the responsibilities of their usual job.

He said, “The election will be in early January, so we have less than two months to organize, consult with our constituencies, prepare offices, organize supporters, design and distribute campaign materials, and many other things. Time is of the essence.”

Suddenly I had a sinking feeling. No one was looking directly at me, but everyone knew the other foreigners in the office would be jetting off to England or Spain or Australia for the Christmas holidays. I would be the only native English speaker left.

Slowly, through my hazy, unhappy sense of duty, something else began to filter through my thick head: My boss was running for President. And I was being offered a front-row seat. Was I simple?

I took a deep breath and braced myself. “I can do it.”

For more information about my book, Fast Times in Palestine, see the About section.

Olives and Rabbis

Last Friday a friend told me she was going with the Rabbis for Human Rights, an Israeli organization, to a village called Sawya to help with the olive harvest. I invited myself along, eager to see Israelis and Palestinians interacting in such a positive way.

Sawya is a hilltop village located between Ramallah and Nablus. When the Oslo Accord maps were being drawn up in 1993, nearly all of Sawya’s land was designated Area C, which means Israel has total security and administrative control of it. Virtually every new home built outside the circle of Sawya’s built-up area in 1993 is slated for demolition by the Israeli government. Meanwhile, illegal Israeli settlements all around it continue to expand, and the people of Sawya find it increasingly difficult to access their land.

I caught a service taxi to the village on Friday morning and arrived just as two busloads of Israelis and Jewish Americans pulled up. Most of them were rabbinical students or members of an eco-kibbutz near Eilat. A tall, energetic rabbi in a t-shirt, baseball cap, and work jeans was the leader. He was an Israeli with an American accent and a full grey beard. He split everyone into two groups, and I joined the one heading to the olive harvest first.

My group must have been the eco-kibbutzniks, because they were all dressed like Stanford hippies. (One of them, it turned out, actually was a Stanford hippy. Small world.) The odd man out was a guy in his thirties with a neatly-clipped beard and a green t-shirt. When we were introducing ourselves, he said, “My name is Daniel, and I’m sorry to say that last time I was here, I was wearing green.” He meant he had been a soldier in the Israeli army.

Our Palestinian guide was an amiable man in his early forties named Abed, and he talked for a while about the work he did for women’s empowerment in Ramallah. He said women were slowly becoming more empowered in Palestinian society, and that a few mayors and several members of the Legislative Council were women. More and more women were also attending university. But they had a ways to go, especially in the more conservative towns and villages.

He had met his wife at one of his empowerment workshops, he said, but unfortunately she had an East Jerusalem ID, which meant that if she moved to any part of the West Bank behind the Wall, she would lose her ID along with many freedoms and privileges. As for Abed, he was strictly forbidden from living in East Jerusalem, and even to visit he had to get a permit. He has a daughter but rarely sees her.

He talked also about Sawya, its land, and the settlements. Pretty basic stuff, but it all seemed to be news to the kibbutzniks. The questions they asked made it clear they didn’t have even a basic grasp of the situation. It was good that they were there, but it had taken me a year before I felt I had a decent handle on the situation (condensed neatly for you in my book). I desperately wished I could do a Vulcan mind meld with these kids. Or give them each a copy of my book.

They were also missing out on the essence of the harvest. It was pleasant enough, but two hours with a bunch of internationals could hardly be called a real olive harvest experience.

We had a small picnic lunch on the hillside before we left, overlooking a small valley and another hill across the way. The settlement Rehelim was built on that hill. Abed told us about how many Palestinian olive trees the Israeli army cut down to build settlements, settler roads, and the Wall. “Or sometimes, like you see this junction here…” He pointed to a crossroads of settler roads in the valley. “You see there are olive trees all around this junction. If someone attacks a settler car at this junction, the Israeli army cuts down all the olive trees.”

Daniel, the ex-soldier, protested, “But that’s legitimate. That’s for security reasons.”

“Maybe,” I piped in matter-of-factly. “But the settlements aren’t legitimate. The settler roads steal Palestinian land as well. And if you cut off people’s ability to resist here, they might take it to Tel Aviv.”

As we were walking to meet the other group, I started chatting with Daniel. When he learned I lived in Ramallah, he asked, “Have you spent time in Israel, too?”

“Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of time in Israel.”

“Have you spent any time in the settlements?”

“Yes, I’ve spent time in settlements.”

“That’s good. It’s good not to dehumanize anyone. I mean, a lot of the settlers are just living there because it’s cheaper. You can get a much nicer house in a settlement for less money than you’d pay in Israel.”

My jaw tightened involuntarily as countless images of the devastation wrought by settlements flashed through my mind. “I’m sure it was very economical for many white people in South Africa to enjoy the privileges of Apartheid,” I said. “But this is no reason to allow such policies to continue.”

Tour of Oppression

We found the other group soon, and now it was their turn to harvest olives for two hours and our turn to go on a small tour of West Bank oppression. Our first stop was the Huwara Checkpoint south of Nablus, where the rabbi got out and told us a few basics about checkpoints and roadblocks and settlement policies.

He spoke about the work of Rabbis for Human Rights to help Palestinian farmers access their lands and the difficulties they faced. Palestinians were often denied access to their land, either because it was in Area C, near a settlement, near a settler road, near the Wall, on the other side of the Wall, or because settlers were causing problems in the area and Palestinians were barred from the area ‘for their own safety.’

Even when the Palestinians were given permission to access one of these ‘hot spots,’ the permissions were often revoked without warning or decreased from three days to one and a half without reason. The presence of Israelis and internationals was often the only thing that could convince soldiers either to protect Palestinians from settlers or to allow them as much access to their land as they were legally entitled to under Israel’s military authority (inadequate as it usually was).

Just as the Rabbis for Human Rights were congratulating themselves for their good work, he said, they began to realize that what they were doing was even more inadequate than they feared. They were only helping a relatively small percentage of Palestinians access their land, and only during the olive harvest itself. If farmers didn’t have access to the land for the rest of the year — to prune the trees, plow the land, and do other maintenance work — the olive yield was much smaller. The rabbis tried to incorporate this reality into their activism as well, but it was impossible to keep up with all the damage control that was needed.

He also talked about cases where settlers had stolen families’ entire days’ olive harvests at gunpoint, not because they wanted the olives but to deprive Palestinians of their livelihood. Much worse, sometimes they cut down or burned hundreds of trees at a time. Olive trees, with their ancient years and deep roots, were powerful symbols of Palestinian ties to the land. Settlers apparently hoped that by destroying these trees, they were solidifying their own claims to the land.

In Burin, a lovely village where I once enjoyed a huge dinner with a family who invited me in while I was on my way to Nablus, forty trees were just cut down by settlers in response to Israeli police evacuating three illegal structures in various West Bank outposts. In Al Mughayir, a Palestinian village northeast of Ramallah, which like Sawya is surrounded by Area C land, two hundred trees were cut down by settlers from an ‘outpost,’ a small ideological settlement satellite built in contravention even of Israeli law.

According to the The Economist, one man named Mr. Abu Awad, who lost 70 trees due to the settlers’ rampage in Al Mughayir, “lost income worth around $3,400 that he would have earned from this year’s harvest. But that is not all. ‘I planted these trees with my own hands 35 years ago,’ he says.”

I’ve heard families have heated arguments over the fate of a single tree. Each tree is like a member of the family, raised and cared for and climbed and combed over many lifetimes, an endlessly renewable source of dignified income and indispensable olives and oil. It is nearly impossible for Westerners to grasp what these trees mean to their owners. Losing 40 at once, or 70, or 650 in the case of one Jayyous farmer in 2005, is felt as a kind of massacre.

(For a small taste of the anguish of losing a grove, see this video.)

The rabbi mentioned that in recent years, the Israeli army has gotten better about protecting Palestinians from settlers and allowing them access to more land so they could harvest their olives with less harassment. This apparently isn’t saying very much.

The rabbi went on, “Whenever there’s talk of a settlement freeze, or a temporary outpost structure is demolished, the settlers often go on a rampage, destroying trees or private property or assaulting Palestinian farmers to make the Israeli government ‘think twice’ about doing it again. They call it ‘exacting a price.’”

This isn’t his opinion. According to Haaretz, “Extremist settlers often vandalize Palestinian property to protest Israel’s removal of small, illegal outposts in the West Bank—a tactic they call ‘the price tag.’”

According to The Economist, “Many of the settlers pursue a ‘price-tag policy,’ deliberately instigating violence and mayhem so that the Israeli military and political establishment is loth to take action, such as evacuating the 100-plus ‘illegal’ settlements [i.e., settler outposts, which are illegal even under Israeli law], for fear of further violence… Whenever there are signs of [peace] negotiation, [settlers] increase their attacks—among other things, on olive trees. They want to show who controls the land. Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Israeli government has plainly emboldened the settlers… When the ruling politicians seem to back the settlers, the Israeli soldiers feel less obliged to protect the Palestinian farmers.”

It was impossible for me to keep my mouth shut when the rabbi spoke as if settler vigilantism were some kind of inevitable force that Israel was totally helpless against.

“Don’t you think that if the Israeli army actually punished the settlers who did these things, they would stop immediately?” I said loudly enough that everyone could hear. “Imagine if they treated the settlers the same way they’d treat a Palestinian who assaulted a settler or damaged Israeli property.”

The rabbi winced and looked away. He knew as well as I did that it was a rhetorical question. “Unfortunately, there’s a double standard when it comes to enforcing laws here,” he said.

Just then an Israeli soldier approached our group. The rabbi asked him what the problem was. The conversation was in Hebrew, but the gist of it was that he didn’t have a permit to stand near a checkpoint and give a talk. We got back on our bus and headed back to Sawya.

While we were on the bus, someone asked the rabbi, “What do you say to people who say the Biblical covenant is still good, and thus it’s a religious imperative to redeem the Land of Israel for Jews?”

“A lot of people ask me that,” said the rabbi. “What I tell them is that even if the covenant is still good, in the hierarchy of values, human life is much more important than land. Thus if giving up land means saving human lives, it’s a moral imperative,” he said. “Some people don’t believe giving up the land will save lives,” he added parenthetically, “but that’s another story.”

Personally, I thought the question itself was ridiculous. Why on earth should anyone consult religious texts when it came to property rights? Especially when the actual owners had valid property deeds? To me, this question was exactly equivalent to, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”

My answer would be, “I couldn’t possibly care less, just get off my land.”

Alas, people with religious (pre)texts and guns—that’s the problem.

The rabbi gave another small speech when we met the other group at Sawya. At the end he sighed deeply and said, “Look, this work we do is not fun. It’s not nice to see what’s happening here and to think it’s our nation doing it. But it’s a moral duty for us to be here. Not only that, it’s also in our self-interest. Think about it. We won’t survive here very long if we don’t have neighbors who see us as human beings. I’ll give you an example. One time the army had captured a Palestinian kid, maybe twelve years old, and had tied him to their Jeep to use him as a human shield while they shot tear gas at some demonstrators. The kid was terrified. I was the only one stupid enough to walk through the tear gas and try to free the kid. The soldiers stopped me and beat me, but eventually the kid was released. Later he told his friends, ‘A tall man in a kippah saved me.’ A tall man in a kippah. He said this to his friends. How can his friends demonize someone in a kippah after that? It’s just one example, but these things can have ripple effects. Another time I was harvesting olives and talking with a man, and it turned out he was a member of Arafat’s presidential guard. Can you imagine? But here’s the thing. I could be wrong, but I think that after he saw the work we did, if there comes a time when he has to choose between violence and non-violence, I think he stands a better chance of choosing non-violence.”

Perhaps the rabbi was right. Either way, doing these good works is indispensable while the occupation is still in full force, stealing land, using children as human shields, and assaulting Palestinian farmers. But as long as the occupation goes on, these injustices will be happening in thousands of places where a rabbi doesn’t happen to be watching. As long as the occupation goes on, they’re only dealing with a few symptoms, not the disease.

The overwhelming majority of Palestinians already choose non-violence (and often get arrested, beaten, or shot for their trouble). But the trigger for violent resistance will always be there until the occupation is ended, with liberty and justice for all.

Sawya

Soon the volunteers left and I was the last person remaining. It was only two o’clock. I asked Abed if I could have a quick tour of the village before I headed back to Ramallah. He said sure, and we caught a ride up the hill to the village’s main street and went on a walk around town. It was a typical Palestinian hilltop village with old stone houses (and newer cinderblock additions), narrow winding roads, and spectacular views everywhere.

Across the valley to the east we could see half a dozen picturesque hilltops, nearly all with settlements or settler outposts on top of them. The main settlement was called Eli.

“All of these mountains belong to Sawya,” he said. “You see that hilltop there, the one with the new outpost on it? It belonged to my cousin, who passed away several years ago. It takes an hour and a half to walk there from here. For me, making the trip once is difficult. But my cousin, even when he was 65 years old, used to make the trip twice a day to work on his land and eat his meals in the fresh air.”

Sawya’s lost mountains. Nearly every hilltop in the frame has a settlement or outpost on it, including the one on the far left

I shook my head. “It’s hard to imagine what this land must mean to you.”

“It means everything to us,” he said passionately. “We have memories in every corner of this land.” He pointed to the north. “Rehelim settlement is there. A while ago we were given special permission to visit part of our land near that settlement that we hadn’t seen in twenty years. I was especially excited to see a spring that we used to go to with the purest water you can imagine. We had such good memories in all of this land, but especially there. And when we got there… I couldn’t believe it. It had been turned into a pond of sewage.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “It is a paradox. The settlers talk about ‘redeeming’ the land. How is it ‘redeeming’ the land when they treat it this way? What is even the purpose of taking land if you treat it this way?”

He pointed to the gently-sloping northern face of one of the hills. “And you see this area here? It has the best figs. Many fig and olive trees. But you can see, the Israelis built a ring road around the outpost on top of the hill, for ‘security.’ They do this for all the settlements and many outposts. The guards can use these roads to get anywhere in seconds. And then they build another, bigger ring road to protect the first road. If you cross any of these roads, if you even get near them, they will often come and question you, and maybe they arrest or shoot you. Many people will not go near this area anymore.”

Abed shook his head. “Our village is more than 500 years old. Their settlement is twenty years old. Ours hasn’t grown past our one hill in 500 years, but Eli took over all those hills in just twenty years.”

By now the sun was going down, and I had a choice to make: I could try to find a service taxi back to Ramallah or stay the night in Sawya and harvest olives for real the next day. Abed guessed what I was thinking. “If you want, I can try to find you a taxi,” he said. “Or you can stay with my sister.”

I didn’t have any plans in Ramallah the next day, and it had been a while since I harvested in a new village, so I accepted the invitation. We stopped to have tea and grapes on another relative’s porch on the highest point in Sawya to watch the sunset. The shadows of the blushing hills got longer and longer, and the villages and settlements all around began to glow as they turned their lights on for the night.

We walked back to his porch under a crescent moon and sat with his brother Ibrahim, a tall man with a thin face and friendly English. His wife was a lovely woman with a shy smile and eyes that looked like my grandmother’s when she was a young woman. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, but when her hijab slipped slightly, I saw streaks of premature white in her hair. Ibrahim’s adorable sons, aged 2, 6, and 8, ran around the whole time playing and laughing. The youngest, Yazid, looked exactly like his mother.

After we had chatted pleasantly for a while, I asked if Ibrahim had any other children. There was a strange silence. Then Abed said, “His oldest son, my nephew, was killed a few years ago. A settler ran over him with his car.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, aghast. “I have three nephews, and if anyone hurt them…” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

“It wasn’t an accident,” Abed said grimly. “And this is not my opinion. The settler admitted in court that he deliberately ran over the boy. He said it was revenge for his own son having been injured some time earlier by Palestinians who threw stones at his car.”

I paused for a moment, speechless. “Was the settler punished?” I asked, with a sinking feeling that I already knew the answer.

“He was given a one-year sentence, and his driver’s license was suspended for three years.”

“That’s it?” My outrage was unnaturally muted because I had heard so many stories like this before — a necessary kind of psychological scar tissue to keep the ulcers away. But even if the physiological manifestations of anger are attenuated, something deeper is injured whenever I hear a story like that.

“He only served six months in the end,” Abed said with the same hollow numbness.

“You know, this is our life,” said Ibrahim. “You can see us, we smile and joke and laugh and do what we can. But many of us are like an old tree. On the outside you see that it’s a tree, but on the inside, it’s black and hollow. Many Palestinians are totally destroyed as human beings.”

Talk gradually turned back to pleasanter things, because one can’t dwell on the worst of life all the time. The dark abyss is only touched on now and then and otherwise ignored in public and grieved in private. You can manage to forget it for hours at a time. But it’s always there.

The good is always there, too. The sun and the fields and children who are still alive.

We had fareeka (wheat soup) with baked chicken for dinner that night at Ibrahim’s house and watched movies in English on MBC2. Ibrahim had a relatively nice house because he had managed to get a permit to work in Tel Aviv. He spoke fluent Hebrew. Like Abed, he didn’t demonize Israelis. He just wished they would protect everyone equally under the law.

Sawya’s Olives

The next morning we got up early and headed to the groves. It was a delightful day. Ibrahim’s three adorable sons were there as well as Abed’s sister’s son and daughter. The son was a blue-eyed, cheerful pre-teen, the daughter a dark-eyed and clever young woman who followed me around and chatted with me all day. Abed told me proudly that they were both first in their class at school. Their father had died a few years earlier, and their mother was a teacher.

The kids

The moms

We talked and harvested and picnicked all day. Abed spent an hour asking the kids questions about history and geography, and they enthusiastically competed with each other to answer them. After a while he pawned the job off on me, despite my limited Arabic. The first question I asked was, “What’s the biggest country in the world?”

The eight-year-old said, “Algeria!”

Abed said, “No, not in the Arab world, in the whole world.”

“United States!” his blue-eyed cousin said.

“No.”

“China!” the dark-eyed niece said.

“No, not the largest population. The largest area.”

“Um… Um… Europe!” That was the six-year-old.

I laughed. “No. Give up? Ru…”

“Russia!” they all said in delighted unison.

I took some pictures of them, and they insisted on taking some pictures of me.

Me in a tree

Goofing around while the women work!

The funniest moment of the day came when I was trying to take a picture of Abed and his three nephews, but I couldn’t get them all to smile at the same time. Finally Abed said in English, “Say cheese!”

Yazid, usually a quiet child, yelled, “TEEEEEEZ!”

Everyone burst out laughing. (Teez is a bad word in Arabic. It’s an impolite way to say ‘buttocks.’) He didn’t understand why everyone was laughing. He was just happy to be the center of attention.

In a little over twenty-four hours, a new village had been colored in on my map with faces and friends, views and porches, children and stories. When it was time for me to leave, they made me promise to come back as soon as I could.

As I was walking toward the road to find a service taxi, the children gathered to smile and wave good-bye to me, an American, with boundless innocent, friendly good will. It struck me as something so fragile and unlikely in such a dire and unfair situation, I instinctively grabbed for my camera to try to capture it and remember the feeling it gave me, the feeling Palestine so often gives me that meanness and ugliness aren’t the natural state of man after all. But it was something too pure to capture in any way.

EXCERPT – Sangria’s

Chapter Four is entitled Ramallah — Palestine has its own beer? The beer was one of the many surprises that greeted me when I moved to Ramallah, sight unseen, in the summer of 2004.

In this chapter, the book is still in ‘travelogue’ mode. In case it’s not clear, my book is unique in that it’s ‘wedge-shaped.’ By this I mean that most books on the Middle East either start shallow and stay shallow, or start so deep most Americans get lost before they begin. Mine starts at zero and ramps the reader up to a wide-angle and sophisticated understanding of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

The book begins as a travelogue about my first bewildered trips to the Middle East, which anyone can follow. Once the reader has a good sense of the local flavor and the situation on the ground, I transition into narrative journalism while still keeping up the beauty, suspense, and humor that are so indigenous to this land. Extensive footnotes from respected sources generalize the specific stories told. The last four chapters are infused with political, social, moral, and legal analysis. An Epilogue in Washington, DC brings it all home.

Here’s a section from Chapter Four called “Sangria’s.” It was one of my first nights in Ramallah. Muzna is one of my coworkers, “in her late twenties, slim and regal, with expressive eyes and dark shoulder-length hair.” She’s still a good friend today.

Here’s the excerpt:

Sangria’s

One day after work, Muzna invited me and a couple of other coworkers to join her for drinks at a place called Sangria’s. We walked to Al Manara and turned right toward another traffic circle called Duwar al Saa’a, the Clock Circle. There had apparently been a clock in the circle at some point in time, but now there was only a white stone column rising from a fenced-in circle of shrubbery. A massive candy shop, shawerma stands, office buildings, and trees surrounded the unmarked monument. One of the buildings had a cartoonishly large pair of glasses on the side that advertised an eye clinic.

We turned right again and walked downhill on a street I’d never been down before. The view opened up to the hills, valleys, trees, and white stone houses on that end of town. We soon arrived at a row of elegant old buildings made of tawny hand-cut stone. The one we turned into was unmarked except for a small wooden sign that had ‘Sangria’s’ carved into it.

Inside, an empty foyer led to an outdoor corridor that opened onto the most enchanting beer garden I had ever seen, built on a grassy hillside and enclosed by stone walls overhung with flowering vines. The tables on the upper terraces were shaded by large canvas umbrellas, and the lower tables sat under leafy trees hung with strings of lights. A grass hut in the center served as a bar. Waiters were busy distributing olive oil candles to each table under a clear, darkening sky. The crowd was young and stylish, the women dressed in club clothes, with almost no headscarves in sight. It was the last thing I expected to see in Ramallah.

We found a table and I asked our waiter for Turkish coffee and a nargila [hookah]. Everyone else ordered a beer called Taybeh.

“Where’s the beer from?” I asked once the beers had arrived.

“From here,” Muzna said. “Taybeh is a Christian village not far from Ramallah. They have a brewery there.”

“Really?” I was surprised again. I had assumed it was foreign, or possibly Israeli. “Can I try yours?” She handed over her frosty longneck, and I took a sip. It was medium-bodied, refreshing, with just the right amount of hops.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s a good beer.” Muzna smiled.

Just then a goofy Happy Birthday song came on over the loudspeakers at ear-splitting volume in Egyptian-accented Arabic. Two waiters emerged carrying cakes with giant sparklers spewing fire out the top. The birthday party had ordered enough cake for everyone on the patio, and after the birthday girl made her wish and the sparklers burned themselves out, the waiters handed out pieces of it.

I happily accepted a plate, but when Muzna was offered one, she shook her head and said, “La, shukran.” (No, thanks.)

The waiter raised his eyebrows and asked chidingly, “Leish?” (Why?)

I laughed out loud. It was good to be back in the Arab world.

You can get Carlsberg or Heineken, too. Or Sex on the Beach or a Black Russian.

Where’s the Palestinian Gandhi?

I’ve been receiving feedback on this blog, most of it positive but some critical. The disappointing thing is that most of the critical feedback is so by-the-book. People don’t respond with arguments but with worn-out talking points, most of them carefully calibrated not to advance the debate but to obfuscate it. For example, if I say the route of the Wall is illegal, they say, “Doesn’t Israel have a right to defend itself?”

Of course. Anyone who is threatened has a right to defend himself. I never said Israel didn’t have a right to defend itself. I only said the route of the Wall through occupied territory that isolates private property from its owners was illegal. If Israel wants to build a Wall on its own land, it is more than welcome.

But there I spent two entire paragraphs on the defensive, explaining an obvious point. This is why these talking points are so effective. Whether wittingly or not, they support the status quo because they keep us away from debate about the real issues.

One of my favorite pro-occupation talking points is the line, “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?” There are several subtexts to this line. One is that the Palestinians apparently deserve whatever Israel dishes out to them until they produce a super-human peace activist like Gandhi or Martin Luther King. As if the British had every right to stay in India forever if Gandhi hadn’t appeared. As if segregation was OK right up until MLK found his platform.

Another subtext is that Palestinian culture isn’t capable of producing peace activists — that Palestinians are inherently more unreasonable and therefore culturally inferior to Israelis. Israel has plenty of peace activists, soldiers who refuse to serve in the Israeli army, and human rights organizations. All of them are vilified by the right-wing in Israel and ignored by the mainstream, but at least they exist and call for Palestinian human rights. Where’s the Palestinian brave enough to champion Israeli rights?

To understand why this line is nonsensical, first you have to understand that in the minds of Palestinians, this is not a conflict between equals, with equal moral claims, any more than the Apartheid struggle or the anti-segregation struggle were conflicts between equals with equal moral claims. Imagine an outraged Senator from Mississippi in 1962 saying, “We have plenty of white people working against segregation. Where’s the black man brave enough to speak up for Southern white rights?” It’s an absurdity.

The vast majority of Palestinians aren’t trying to take anyone else’s rights away (unless you consider it an Israeli ‘right’ to build illegal homes on Palestinian private property or collectively punish Palestinians in violation of international law). They’re struggling to have their most basic human rights respected.

[To quickly stave off another line of attack -- But haven't some Palestinians used violence? -- Of course some Palestinians have used violence. Anyone who reads the news can see that. There's no space here to go fully into all the details, but suffice to say for now, the violence isn't exactly a one-way street. Israel had already killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including about a hundred Palestinian children, by the time the first suicide bomber of the Second Intifada struck. I don't support suicide bombings on either moral or strategic grounds -- I think they're both horrifically immoral and strategically stupid -- but I also don't think they would happen if Palestinians weren't regularly treated worse than animals. If you read my book, Chapter 12, the section called "Dinner with a Suicide Bomber's Family," you'll understand what I mean. The section in Chapter 9 called "Suicide Bomber's Family Shunned" also demonstrates how support for Palestinian violence decreases dramatically when there's genuine hope of a halt to theft and violence by Israeli settlers and soldiers, even a temporary and limited one.]

Second, you have to look at reality. Palestinians engage in non-violent struggle against the occupation on a daily basis. From the weekly demonstrations against the Wall that steals land from villages like Bil’in, Na’lin, and Jayyous to the tireless work of Palestinians traveling all over the world to educate communities about the realities in Palestine, I’ve never seen a more politically-active population in my life. They have human rights organizations and NGOs covering every issue from prisoners to health care to water rights. They invite Israelis to march along side them in olive harvests, community works, and demonstrations. They write. They blog. They simply try to keep living under this insane situation while retaining their dignity, hospitality, and sense of humor.

Nearly everyone I bring to the West Bank and show them the situation, before they leave they end up saying in hushed tones, “You know, the only thing I’m really surprised about, given the unbelievable things they have to put up with, is that there’s not more Palestinian violence.” You truly have to see this situation to fully understand how bad it is.

And how are non-violent Palestinian activists treated by Israel? Are they held up as examples for Israelis and Palestinians both to follow? Covered extensively in the Israeli media as great hopes for peace and interviewed about their points of view? Invited to speak at Israeli universities?

Not so much. This Israeli press, like the American one, almost without fail, ignores them completely. The non-violent demonstrations at the Wall are met with tear gas fired by Israeli soldiers at least, lethal force at most. Half a dozen unarmed people have been killed and dozens injured (some paralyzed or left with brain damage) by Israeli soldiers at these protests. Dozens more have been arrested — pulled out of their homes in dead-of-night arrest raids by Israeli soldiers — and held without charge, or under absurd charges.

In one case, the Israeli army produced a photograph that ‘proved’ a certain leader of non-violent activities had been throwing stones at soldiers on such-and-such a date. His lawyers produced his passport. He had been out of the country on that date. Yet if it hadn’t been for this crucial (and lucky) piece of evidence, he might still be in jail today.

My friend Mohammad Othman from Jayyous, a tireless non-violent activist for the past ten years, is in Israeli jail right now, held in solitary confinement in miserable conditions with no charges whatsoever brought against him. He was seized about a month ago at the border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank (Israel controls this crossing) when he was returning home from an educational tour in Norway.

His sentence has already been extended three times, each time with no charge. He has been subjected to interrogations that have lasted entire days. I can tell you from first-hand experience, Israeli interrogations can be intensely psychologically traumatic, and I’m an American with the magic blue passport. Palestinians don’t have a fraction of the protections I have. A Palestinian prisoners’ rights organization reported, “During one of these sessions, an Israeli interrogator threatened to hurt Mohammad’s sister.”

Mohammad Othman

The same organization described his prison conditions as follows:

“Mohammad is currently held in solitary confinement in a small cell which measures only 2 square meters. The cell includes a mattress and a Turkish bathroom (hole in the floor). The cell does not contain a window, which means that there is no natural sunlight or fresh air. Upon his transfer to Kishon (Jalameh) detention centre, he was searched and taken to a doctor for a medical examination, as he got sick in Huwwara provisional detention centre due to poor conditions there. He was given clothes and slippers but was allowed to take clean underwear and socks from his own luggage. During the first days following his arrest, however, Mohammad suffered from especially hard detention conditions in Huwwara provisional centre, where bathrooms are located outside of the cell. Detainees are only allowed to use them freely during short recreation breaks (35 minutes), only three times a day. When the detainee wishes to use the toilet outside of these hours, he or she must call out for a guard and wait until one agrees to take the prisoner out.”

In response to this gross violation of Mohammad’s rights, his friends and supporters have created a worldwide campaign to secure Mohammad’s release. They’ve put together a blog, Free Mohammad Othman, with updates and suggestions for actions you can take. Also, an open letter to President Obama was written and signed by Noam Chomsky of MIT, Rashid Khalidi of Columbia, Sara Roy of Harvard, and many others:

Open Letter to President Obama

October 16, 2009

Dear President Obama:

Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us that “change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom.” President Obama, you promised us change and we believed in that promise. Now is your opportunity to show us you meant it.

We have frequently heard the question over the years, “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? Where are those working for justice through non-violence?” We must look no further than the jails and cemeteries to find Palestinian peace activists leading the fight against injustice. This is where we will find Mohammad Othman: locked in solitary confinement in a military prison, and held for nearly a month after his arrest without charge or trial. His initial detention has been extended three times thus far, and there remains the possibility of it being renewed indefinitely.

On September 22nd, 33-year-old Mohammad was arrested by Israeli soldiers while trying to reenter the West Bank after spending several days at a conference in Norway. For more than 10 years Mohammad has been an activist for Palestinian human rights. During that time, he has been a leader in the Palestinian grassroots movement against the Wall that has swallowed up his community’s lands and livelihoods.

Mohammad, in the spirit of great human rights defenders like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., has worked tirelessly over the years to bring his people’s voice to the world. He has embraced and advocated non violent means to effect change – a tactic that was instrumental in bringing about the end of apartheid in South Africa. Freedom from occupation, oppression and discrimination are human rights to which all people are entitled. Mohammad, and many others like him, have done nothing more than work to secure these most basic guarantees – to give his people a chance to live.

Unfortunately, what is happening to Mohammad is all too common. Palestinians working for justice are constantly threatened with arbitrary detention, bodily injury and torture, and even death. Imagine having to fear speaking the truth, knowing that by doing so you put your very freedom at stake, simply because you stand up for what is right and what is just. History has shown us that peaceful activists are often the target of such policies, if only because they pose the most severe threat to the status quo. It happened in South Africa, it happened in India, and it happened in the United States as well.

Mohammad is another casualty of this tactic. It is up to us, the international community, to defend him and all those who struggle for peace and justice. President Obama, if you are serious about forging peace, then we call on you to defend the right of Mohammad and all Palestinians to resist their oppression through non-violent activism. We implore you to pressure Israel for the immediate release of human rights advocate Mohammad Othman and all prisoners of conscience who are being held solely for their work towards justice and freedom.

Signed,

Noam Chomsky, Professor, MIT
Rashid Khalidi, Professor, Columbia University
George Bisharat, Professor of Law, University of California Hastings College of the Law
Huwaida Arraf, Lawyer and Founder of the International Solidarity Movement
Noura Erakat, Human Rights Attorney
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb
Rabbi Haim Beliak
Audun Lysbakken, Leader of Socialist Left Party’s group in Parliament, Deputy Leader of Socialist Left Party
Sara Roy, Senior Research Scholar, Harvard University
Eitan Bronstein, Israeli Activist
Ramzy Baroud, Writer and Editor
Keith Hammond, Scottish Committee for the Universities of Palestine
Remi Kanazi, Poet and Writer
Petter Eide, President of Norwegian People’s Aid
David Lloyd, University of Southern California
Jewish Voice for Peace
Birthright Unplugged
Jews Against the Occupation, New York City
Students Boycott Apartheid
American Jews for a Just Peace

You can sign on to the letter here.

EXCERPT – Olive Harvest

As promised, in honor of the fall olive harvest, I’m posting an excerpt from Chapter 2, when I harvested olives for the first time in October 2003.

Before you read, you might want to take a look at the about section to see what the entire book is about and how this section fits into the general scheme. You might also want to see the previous entry, which offers maps, pictures, and comics that briefly explain the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories.

If you’d like to keep up with the progress of the book, look up the “Fast Times in Palestine” Facebook group and join it.

To set the stage for this excerpt, in Chapter One I graduated from college, bartended and traveled for a while, and landed rather randomly in a village in the West Bank called Jayyous in the company of two men, a British Muslim named Yusif and a Canadian paramedic named Sebastian. During my first night in Jayyous, I was nervous to be in a place where I had no idea what was going on, but my fears were quickly dispelled by the kindness, hospitality, and sense of humor of the people I met. I was invited to stay the night with the mayor’s son’s family, and the next morning I joined them for the olive harvest.

Now for the excerpt:

The Wall

The next morning, we all got up early and headed out to the farmland west of Jayyous. It was late October and the olive harvest was in full swing. I tagged along to help out, hoping to earn my keep for once. My karmic balance sheet was getting embarrassingly overdrawn.

Jayyous was built on a hilltop, and the land below it gently undulated and gradually flattened out into the coastal plains of central Israel. The Mediterranean Sea was twenty kilometers west of us. We caravanned down the hill in donkey carts and tractors and on foot, excited for a long, fun day in the groves.

Our procession was stopped at the bottom of the hill by a 20-foot-high chain-link Fence* topped with razor wire. Two smoothly-paved access roads flanked the Fence, and the land on either side of the roads was blasted bare and layered with sand. The whole 200-foot-wide structure was bounded by trenches and six-foot pyramid-shaped piles of razor wire. It snaked around the Biblical hills like a contour line in jarring contrast to the ancient aesthetic. A bright red sign posted on it said in Hebrew, English, and Arabic: “MORTAL DANGER – MILITARY ZONE. Anyone who passes or damages the Fence ENDANGERS HIS LIFE.”

[ * In rural areas, the barrier is a fence, as described here. In urban areas, it is a concrete wall punctuated by sniper towers. In this book, ‘Wall’ and ‘Fence,’ when capitalized, refer to the barrier being built in the West Bank by Israel. Palestinians refer to the entire barrier as Al Jedar, ‘The Wall.’ Most Israelis refer to it as the Separation Barrier or Security Fence.]

I was shocked and a little frightened to be confronted by such an aggressive structure on a peaceful olive harvest morning. Everyone else patiently gathered around the locked gate and found places to sit and wait in the hot, dusty morning. I swallowed my fear and followed suit.

I noticed one of the donkey carts had ‘AGAINST TERRORISM’ scrawled in white paint across the back. I heard a boy point to the donkey cart and say something about simsim.

“Simsim?” I asked, and pointed toward the donkey cart. The boy hesitated, then nodded. “So simsim means ‘donkey’?” I envisioned myself learning Arabic one word at a time and slowly developing a native command, like Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves.

The boy looked at me blankly. One of his friends whispered something, and all the other boys burst into laughter. Seeing my bewildered look, Yusif whispered out of the corner of his mouth, “I think Simsim is the nickname of the boy in the cart.”

I looked at Simsim and winced apologetically. He smiled and shook his head.

I passed some time with another group of kids by drawing on the back of an old envelope. They wrote a little English for me, and I wrote a little Arabic. I spelled my name ‘Bamila’ since there was no ‘P’ in Arabic.

After a while I caught Yusif’s eye and said, “How much of Jayyous’s land is on the other side of that Fence?”

“Most of it. About seventy-five percent. Something like ten square kilometers.”

“Seventy-five percent?”

“Yeah, you can see. The Fence goes right up next to the village. There are places where it’s just a few meters from people’s houses.”

“Where’s the border between the West Bank and Israel?”

“About four kilometers that way.”

I squinted through the Fence in confusion. “Why would Israel build a Fence here instead of on the border?”

“They say they’re building it to stop suicide bombers. But hundreds of Palestinians cross the Green Line every day to work illegally in Israel. If a bomber wants to get through, he can. If he doesn’t, the next one will. If there’s a decrease in bombers, it’s not because of the Wall.”

“So why the Wall, and why this route?”

He sighed as if he had been through this many times. “Jayyous has some of the most fertile land in the West Bank. They’ve got something like fifteen thousand olive trees and 50,000 fruit and citrus trees. They grow mangoes, avocadoes, almonds, apricots. They’ve got more than a hundred greenhouses and six good water wells. Also, Jayyous sits near Israel’s narrowest point. There’s only twenty kilometers between the Green Line and the sea right here.”

My eyes narrowed. “So what, you’re saying Israel is trying to take Jayyous’s land?”

He shrugged. “It wouldn’t be the first time. Anyway, look, once we get through the Fence, there’s nothing stopping us from marching directly to Tel Aviv. You tell me what sense that makes.”

I couldn’t think of any. “How much land was destroyed to build the Wall?” I asked. “The scar looks enormous.”

“Yeah, it was a lot. About 2,500 olive trees were destroyed.”

“Did anybody get compensation?”

“No. Even when Israel offers compensation, no one takes it. It’s never anywhere near the value of what was lost, and it makes it look like a transaction instead of what it is. It would be an insult to accept that, and if you do, it’s considered treason.”

“Has anyone tried to climb over the Wall or tear it down?”

“Electronic sensors can call an army Jeep to investigate any possible breach in minutes. And they don’t hesitate to shoot people on sight.”

A chill went down my spine. It sounded so insane. There had to be more to this than he was telling me. I was glad I would see Dan in Israel at the end of the week.

“Are they going to let us through today?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

“What happens if they don’t?”

“As you see. We wait.”

View of Jayyous’ land from Jayyous. You can see the Wall along the bottom right and snaking toward the center. Nearly everything in the frame is Jayyous land isolated from its owners.

Olive Rain

Two hours later, around 10:30am, when the day was getting good and hot, an armored Jeep turned on its engines and kicked up dust as it powered up to the army access road next to the Fence and parked. It had apparently been sitting only two hundred yards away from us the entire time, hidden by a rise in the land. Two young Israeli soldiers with flak jackets and helmets and M-16 assault rifles got out and opened the gates. We passed single file while our documents were examined. Most of us seemed to get through.

The party that had been postponed at the gate resumed as we forgot all about the Fence and set about the day’s business. Rows of olive trees were evenly spaced on gently rolling hills and hemmed in beautifully by white stone retainer walls. Their leaves were green on one side and silvery on the other, and the olives faded from bright green to dark purple. A fine pale dust saturated the trees, muting the colors to sea foam green and deep lavender. When the wind rustled the trees, the leaves seemed to shimmer.

People began whacking at the trees with wooden sticks to knock the olives onto tarps spread out below. I watched until I thought I had an idea of what to do. After a while, though, I noticed Yusif looking at me funny and asked if I was doing something wrong.

“Well, you’re not supposed to whack it quite so… randomly. It takes some amount of finesse to be gentle to the trees and still get the olives.”

I paid closer attention and soon developed a halfway-decent olive whack.

I noticed a guy around twenty years old with a T-shirt over his head and his eyes peeking out of the collar to keep the sun off his face. Yusif said he was the mayor’s youngest son Mohammad. He was one of the most energetic and charismatic of the cheerful harvesters. He didn’t speak a word of English, so we could only say, “Marhaba!” (Hi!) whenever we ran into each other, but his enormous brown eyes exuded such intense and benevolent interest in everyone around him, I called him Mohammad the Charmer in my mind.

The fact that his lack of English skills was an exception drove home how impressive it was how many people in this tiny town spoke English as a second language. Jayyous was the same size as my home town, about 3,000 people. But in Stigler, Oklahoma, even the high school Spanish teacher didn’t really speak Spanish.

Welcome jugs of ice-cold water under the trees

I got thirsty after a while and went looking for water. Along the way I ran into Azhar, the mayor’s dark-eyed eleven-year-old daughter. Her name meant ‘flower’ in Arabic, and she was ethereally beautiful and unnervingly self-possessed — the type of girl who would have played the child princess in an 80’s fantasy movie. She was peeling a clementine (kalamentina in Arabic — a small, sweet orange). When she finished peeling it, she offered half to me.

“Shukran,” I thanked her in Arabic. She smiled.

Azhar’s half of the clementine was halfway to her mouth when Sebastian wandered by also looking for water. Instead of eating it, she offered it to him.

“Shukran,” he said.

I blinked in disbelief. Sebastian and I weren’t just strangers — we were foreigners who hadn’t even bothered to learn her language before visiting her country. She had every right in the world to be suspicious of us. Instead, she was giving us her food without a second thought. I couldn’t help but think I’d been an ogre as a child compared to her. I wouldn’t even give my little sister half of anything unless someone forced me to.

When I got tired of whacking at trees, I climbed up and combed olives from their shaded inner branches using a little hand-held plastic rake. Even the tallest trees didn’t stand much more than twenty feet high, but within each compact canopy was a vast and unique treasury of olives and leaves and sunlight and space. Olive branches had long been symbols for power, beauty, prestige, peace, and plenty, and it was easy to see why. Olives could be used for oil, pickling, lotion, soap, even fuel. Some of these trees were older than the Renaissance, and combing their willow-like branches felt like a sacrament. Wild herbs and brambles flourished at their feet, and the leaves shimmering softly over acres and acres seemed too diffusely beautiful for this world.

At one point I noticed a lizard high in a tree looking at me curiously. I picked it up and held it in my hand, and it shifted to a slightly paler hue — a chameleon! I jumped out of the tree to show it to Azhar. I moved a black olive toward the frightened animal’s open mouth to see if it would flick its long tongue out or turn black or something. Before I could find out, Azhar stilled my arm. She clucked her tongue, shook her head, and said gently, “Haraam.”

Yusif had told me haraam meant something forbidden by the laws of Islam, or any basically sinful or indecent thing. Harassing a helpless creature apparently qualified in Azhar’s mind. I nodded, tossed the olive away, and let the chameleon go on a white stone wall.

Once a tree was done, people would gather up the tarps, consolidate the fallen olives, twigs, and leaves into a pile, and remove the twigs until it was just olives and leaves. The prettiest green olives were put in buckets for pickling, and the rest would be bagged up, sorted from the leaves in town, and turned into olive oil in Jayyous’s Italian press. It was nice to sit down after standing for so long, and often we would get so deep into a conversation that we’d have the pile clean as a whistle and still be picking at specks and talking away. Eventually someone would come over with an empty grain sack, and we’d scoop them in and break it up and move on.

Always there was the soft, heavy patter of olives landing on the tarps all around, a rich olive rain. It was a pregnant sound that promised good things, not the least of which was this day, chatting and whacking and picking under a clear blue sky.

It was a welcome relief when breakfast was called. Hot and hungry, we gathered around a tarp family-style and drank bottles of rainwater from cisterns and ate bread and jam and hummus and pickled olives from past harvests, home-made falafel and crumbly white cheese and tomatoes and fresh yogurt and halaweh (a confection made from sesame paste).

Some of the younger kids, packs of nieces and nephews and cousins, ran around shrieking and laughing and throwing olives at each other. It reminded me of the golden days back in Stigler when my cousins and I used to climb trees and pick mulberries, gather eggs and shell peas, play by the creek and chase cows on my grandfather’s land.

As I was drinking my tea after the picnic, I happened to glance up at Jayyous perched on its hilltop. The white houses crowning the hill contrasted beautifully with the dark pine trees in the village, the shimmering olive groves surrounding it, and the powder-blue sky. I remembered seeing similar scenes in Renaissance paintings when I was a kid and wondering if places like that still existed. It struck me all of a sudden that this wasn’t merely an interesting conflict zone. In many ways, Jayyous was an enviable place to call home.

After several more hours of picking, a delightful late afternoon lunch, and a last batch of olives loaded into sacks and hauled onto a waiting truck, we headed toward home.

After the day’s gaiety, I wasn’t prepared for what awaited us. The Fence was closed and locked, as it had been that morning. No soldier was manning it. Once again, we had no choice but to put down our supplies, gather around the gate, and wait.

An old woman in a white headscarf glanced up at the most devastated of Jayyous’s once-productive hillsides. Her eyes followed the Fence and its clear-cut and bulldozed perimeter snaking its way around a huge area that used to be home and now meant a threat of death to any Palestinian who dared approach. Her eyes narrowed as she took in the piles of razor wire surrounding the structure, which were designed to corral not goats or sheep but human beings.

“Haraam!” she suddenly exploded and shook her fist at it. “Haraam!” Another old woman patted her on the shoulder. She deflated as quickly as her anger had arisen a moment earlier. She looked down feebly and shook her head.

The entire hillside on the right — which used to be someone’s olive grove — was dynamited, bulldozed, and stripped of trees for the Wall and its army access road

An hour later, it was time for the evening prayer, and there was still no sign of anyone to let us back home. The men laid a tarp down on a rocky ledge, formerly someone’s olive grove, now bulldozed flat. One man led the prayer while the others prayed in their jeans and dusty work shoes, silhouetted against a lovely setting sun. Another man went off by himself to pray next to a six-foot pile of razor wire. As I watched him pray solemnly, imprisoned and humiliated on his own land, I felt as if all the air had been kicked out of my chest.

When it was nearly dark, the soldiers finally arrived. The once-merry villagers lined up somberly, making sure to behave, while the young Israeli soldiers questioned them, checked their documents, and waved them uncaringly through. My shoulders bowed and my head ducked, and I felt a horrified weight of helpless sorrow on my heart. I felt like I couldn’t bear to watch this awful scene, to quietly accept it. But there was nothing I could do.

After a few moments, it dawned on me that I was wrong. There was something I could do, even if it was a very small thing. I leveled my head. I straightened my shoulders. If nothing else, I could at least try to face this situation with as much honesty and dignity as I could muster.

Suddenly I realized something else. I had always assumed, watching scenes like this on the news, that the people who bore such things must either not quite care about life as much as I did, or they must have some kind of supernatural coping mechanism I couldn’t begin to imagine. Because if anything like this happened to me, I expected I would utterly fall apart.

Now I felt ridiculous for imagining such a thing. Here I was, and here were unendurable things happening right in front of me to people who were no different from me at all. They were bearing the situation with dignity not because they didn’t care or because they were saints. They simply had no other options except being beaten down and miserable, which wouldn’t help anyone, or resisting. And this seemed to be a point in time where resistance was probably futile.

To my surprise, I felt energized by a clarity of purpose I’d never felt before. This particular aspect of the global situation was no longer a blank horror. It was merely an extremely difficult series of challenges whose basic units were human beings. Surely enough people of good will could find a way to resolve them. Either way, if the people of Jayyous could go through this every day and still go home and joke around on the porch — and if I apparently could, too, because what else was I going to do, sit around and mope? — I wondered what else I might be able to bear that I never imagined I could.

Of course, I had no idea then how bad things could get. If I had known, I would have cringed at my own naïveté. But I remember how strange and paradoxical it seemed that after witnessing something so awful, the world seemed less blindly terrifying, and how empowering it felt to realize I could go into the world and learn things for myself that no professor could teach — that most probably didn’t even know.

Maps of Israel, Palestine, the Wall, and Settlements

Before I start posting excerpts from my book, I wanted to put together a few maps that will make them (and the conflict in general) much more intelligible.

First, here’s a general map of the Middle East, with Israel circled in blue:

Second, a schematic map of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories — the West Bank and Gaza Strip:

Here’s a topographical map of Israel and the Palestinian territories. The West Bank occupies the central hills while Israel is made up of the Galilee in the north, the central coastal plains (except for the Gaza Strip), and the Negev Desert in the south:

Above is a close-up of the West Bank. Down the central spine of the West Bank are the Palestinian cities of Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron. To the northwest are Tulkarem and Qalqilia, and in the desert north of the Dead Sea, there’s Jericho, where it’s always summer.

For a high-definition .pdf version of this map, click here.

This map is a little tricky, but let me explain, because it’s very important. Under the Oslo Accords of 1993, the Palestinian territories were divided into three areas: Area A (17%) falls under the nominal security and civil control of the Palestinian Authority (PA), although the Israeli army reserves the right to enter at will. Area B (24%) falls under Israeli security control, with the PA responsible for some civil affairs. Area C (59%) falls under total Israeli civil and military control.

Area C contains virtually all Israeli settlements and settler roads, large buffer zones around them, most of the Jordan River valley, and all of the Dead Sea coast. Areas A and B are divided into many ‘islands’ separated from one another by Israeli-controlled Area C. According to the Oslo Accords of 1993, Area C was supposed to transition to Palestinian control within five years. Instead, the Israeli government continues to fill Area C with settlements and to restrict Palestinian access to it.

So this is a detailed map of the settlements and of Areas A, B, and C. Dark red patches are Palestinian cities and villages, orange and tan patches are Areas A and B, and the rest of the territory is Area C. Dark blue patches are Israeli settlements while teal and pale blue areas are settlement municipal boundaries and jurisdictional areas. (Hebron, with its green and brown areas, is its own special case and will be discussed in Chapter 10.) Source: B’Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories).

The settlements are usually built on hilltops (so they can keep an eye on everything in their area) near fertile land, aquifers, Palestinian population centers, and/or sites that are holy to all three major monotheistic religions. Control of water is particularly important, as the groundwater is being taken out of the Holy Land faster than it’s being replaced. Now Israel has control over virtually all of it — some of the largest settlements built deepest into the West Bank are built over major aquifers — and they often take water out of the West Bank and sell it back to the Palestinians at low volumes and inflated prices. Palestinians find it nearly impossible to get a permit from the Israelis to build much-needed wells on their own land.

Thus it is a common sight to see Palestinians rationing drinking water in the summer while settlers top off their swimming pools and water their lawns. The settlement enterprise is, among other things, an attempt to make Israeli control over West Bank water permanent.

Amnesty International recently published a report about Israel’s denial of basic water rights to Palestinians. Read the BBC’s summary of it here.

This is a picture of the Wall Israel is building. The black lines are sections of the Wall already finished as of February 2007 while the red lines are sections that are approved and/or under construction.

Whenever the Wall’s route deviates from the Green Line (the border between the West Bank and Israel), it is being built on occupied Palestinian land and is illegal according to international law. Its illegality was confirmed by the International Court of Justice in 2004. All the blue dots and splotches are settlements, and the white areas are settlement areas behind the Wall that are totally controlled by Israel. Most of these areas are Palestinian land, much of it Palestinian private property that was illegally expropriated for the settlements or for Israeli-only roads.

This map does not include the more than 600 internal checkpoints and roadblocks that further break up and isolate each part of the West Bank from the other — sometimes going so far as to make it impossible or illegal for people to leave their villages by car at all, forcing them to walk to a main road and try to find a taxi — but this gives you a small idea of what Palestinians go through.

Here’s a close-up of the Wall in the Qalqilia and Jayyous area. Jayyous is the village — the grey blotch — just under the yellow box that says “Nofei Zufin.” I have spent many happy days there. As you can perhaps make out, the Wall in this area isolates or destroys most of Jayyous’ land. All of Jayyous’ seven water wells were isolated by the Wall. A settlement called Zufin has already been built illegally by Israel on Jayyous’ land, and another settlement called Nofei Zufin is in the process of being built. Farmers find it increasingly impossible to get permission from Israel to work their land that falls on the other side of the Wall while settlements (the blue blotches and their light blue areas of planned expansion) continue to expand all over the West Bank. As you can see, the entire city of Qalqilia is surrounded by the Wall, which in this area is a 25-foot-tall concrete structure punctuated by sniper towers.

According to the UN Relief and Works Agency, “Jayyous and neighboring Falamyeh were well known for their intensively-irrigated agriculture which produced vegetables and citrus fruit, together with figs, apricots, loquats, mangoes and almonds. There are also thousands of olive trees… Four thousand trees were uprooted for the Barrier and 125 acres of land leveled. The Barrier isolates some 9,000 dunums [2,250 acres], representing between 75 to 90 percent of its fertile land. Also isolated are 120 greenhouses belonging to Jayyous and Falamyeh and six water wells. Jayyous now shares water with Azzun from a well located between the two villages, which covers less than 50 percent of its needs, with water rationed to two hours per day in summer.”

Above is a picture of the Wall around Qalqilia, from the inside. Note the sniper tower just above and to the right of the men in the cart. I should hasten to add, though it should be obvious, that Israel’s justification for all of this is ’security.’ But an article in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper stated on January 2, 2006, “The security fence is no longer mentioned as the major factor in preventing suicide bombings, mainly because the terrorists have found ways to bypass it. The fence does make it harder for them, but the flawed inspection procedures at its checkpoints, the gaps and uncompleted sections enable suicide bombers to enter Israel… The main reason for the sharp decline is the truce in the territories, the security service said… The fact that Hamas, in general, stopped engaging in terror activities changed the picture… Its focus on the political arena and the preparations for the Palestinian parliamentary elections have limited its active involvement in terror to a large extent.”

This was before the world refused to recognize the results of the democratic Palestinian elections in January 2006, with disastrous results. But the important point is, even the Israeli security services know in their hearts that there is no military solution to this conflict. You can’t ghettoize, arrest, shoot, and bomb Palestinians into submission forever. Any reasonable solution to this conflict has to be political.

Aside from this, if anyone looks at these maps and doesn’t believe that at least one purpose of the Wall is to grab as much Palestinian land with as few Palestinians on it as possible, please leave a comment and explain. I would be very interested to hear.

Above is a map of the Wall in East Jerusalem. This picture represents more pain and heartache than I can summarize in a paragraph, but I’ll explain as well as I can. The grey area is Israel (including Israeli West Jerusalem) while the white area is the occupied West Bank. The tan areas are Palestinian cities and villages (Ramallah in the north, Palestinian East Jerusalem in the middle, Bethlehem in the south). The purple areas are Israeli settlements, all built illegally on Palestinian land. Many of these are being expanded and new ones are being built. The red line is the planned route of the Wall.

Notice how the Wall weaves around to isolate as many Palestinian areas as possible from East Jerusalem while seizing as many settlements and as much land as possible. Bethlehem has been particularly devastated. Not only does the Wall surround it and isolate most its land, turning it into a ghetto, the Wall and settlements break the ancient link with its sister holy city Jerusalem. Notice also how many Palestinian communities are separated or cut off from each other — Shu’fat and Shu’fat Refugee Camp, Beit Hanina and Beit Hanina al Balad, East Jerusalem and Abu Dis, and on and on.

Above is the checkpoint near Qalandia village between Ramallah and Jerusalem. Most of my Palestinian friends in Ramallah can’t get permits from the Israeli army to cross this checkpoint and visit Jerusalem, even if they were born there or went to high school there. Foreigners can breeze straight through. I never get used to this.

Below are three pictures of the Wall in East Jerusalem.

A silent commentary on the historic crime of separating the cities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem:

Tom Toles put it well. (Note the small text in the bottom right hand):

If you’re wondering what any of this has to do with you as an American (if you’re an American), Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid in the world. We give them over $3 billion a year — that’s $10 million every single day — of our tax dollars. This is what they do with it. The US government has also vetoed dozens of UN resolutions condemning Israel’s violations of international law. Americans more than anyone else have the power to put pressure on Israel to change its policies.

Unfortunately, the Israel lobby is one of the most powerful in Washington while Palestinians have virtually no presence on Capitol Hill. Very few Senators and Representatives are willing to pay the political price of crossing the Israel lobby based on principle alone. Therefore it’s up to us to learn more about this situation and put pressure on our representatives to end America’s support of Israel’s illegal policies.

For more thorough historical and political context as well as human stories about life behind the Wall (including many wonderful and hilarious ones — despite it all, Palestinians are some of the most welcoming people in the world with a deep love of their land and appreciation for a good time), stay tuned for my book, forthcoming in 2010.

Beer Fest in Palestine

My book ends in 2007, but it’s a pity, because the fast times keep on coming.

On Saturday, October 3, I went to Taybeh’s annual Oktoberfest. Taybeh is a Christian village northeast of Ramallah, home of the Taybeh Brewery that produces Palestine’s beer, also called Taybeh. Legend has it that Salah al Din (Saladin), the Kurdish general who drove the Crusaders out of Palestine, visited Taybeh (Biblical Ephraim) and declared its people to be “Taybeen” (kind folks) due to their generosity and hospitality. The word Taybeh also means ‘delicious,’ which fits their golden, preservative-free beer perfectly.

One of countless stunning views from Taybeh, this one from the Christian cemetery

Taybeh, like most Palestinian villages, is made up of white stone houses, schools, businesses, and places of worship (churches rather than mosques in this case) built on top of a hill with stunning views of terraced hills and Biblical valleys all around. The picturesque ruins of a Byzantine church, capped by an ornate white stone cross, mark the center of the town, and nearby are the City Hall grounds, where a stage had been set up. Inside City Hall itself, local arts and crafts, colorful embroidery and olive oil soap, food and wine, honey and beer were being sold. I arrived too late to see a Japanese group give a martial arts demonstration on the main stage. The connection is that Taybeh has licensed its family recipe to producers in Japan and Belgium (though Belgium didn’t offer any martial arts demonstrations).

I went to the brewery first. I’d been drinking Taybeh beer for so many years, I was excited to take a pilgrimage to the source. I’m not sure what I expected exactly. Perhaps some picturesque cottage with golden skies and waterfalls of beer pouring carelessly from giant wooden casks. This is what’s on the label, anyway. Or at least a huge gift shop. It’s the global center of Taybeh beer! They even have this gratuitous but awesome slogan: “Drink Palestinian. Taste the Revolution.” Who wouldn’t want a T-shirt with this and their logo on it, especially knowing it came from mild-mannered Christian beer makers?

The brewery was located on a beautiful hilltop, a rather small factory with giant metal casks mixing and brewing and a small industrial-grade bottling machine. Even the sign that indicated you had reached the factory was rather amateurishly hand-painted on the wall. No wooden casks. But I guess the taste of the beer speaks for itself.

We were given a quick tour of the facilities and then invited to the gift shop, where we could buy beer, wine, olive oil, T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, and post cards. To my disappointment, they didn’t have any “Taste the Revolution” T-shirts. If anyone in Taybeh is reading this, I think they’d sell like hotcakes. You’ve got a great slogan. Milk it.

I went back to City Hall, which was crowded with Palestinians and foreigners from all over the Holy Land. I was particularly impressed by the number of Palestinian-Israelis (usually called ‘Arab-Israelis’ to downplay their Palestinian identity) who showed up from Jerusalem, Nazareth, Akka, and elsewhere. They’ve started coming to Nablus to shop on Saturdays, and they’re always in Ramallah on the weekends taking over our bars and dance clubs since we’re so damn hip. Whatever your political convictions, on the ground this place is turning more and more into one state.

Since it was explicitly a festival celebrating alcohol, it drew a self-selected crowd. There were a few women in hijab there to see the traditional singing and dancing, people-watch, and shop. But for the most part it was a super-concentrated subset of the most liberal and laid-back Palestinians, and the atmosphere was beautifully calm and happy. Eye candy stretched as far as the eye could see, with everyone dressed to see and be seen. It felt like the old days, when I used to walk around Ramallah and know just about everyone. It was such a friendly party atmosphere and such a good feeling.

After stocking up on Christmas presents and touring the Byzantine ruins, I ran into an old friend from Jayyous and his buddies, and we walked up to the stage, front and center, and danced for five hours to Palestinian hip hop, traditional Palestinian music (with drum riffs that practically shake your shoulders for you), German jazz/ska, and a Palestinian rock-rap band from Jerusalem called CultureSHOC whose sound was so unique, I don’t think the ‘rock-rap’ label does it justice (and whose lead singers were such a good-looking couple, it just didn’t seem fair).

Later I was at Zan bar in Ramallah with some friends, and the lead singers walked in and sat at the table next to us. I wanted to say hi but couldn’t figure out how to pull it off without seeming fan-ish. One the one hand, you don’t stand up on a stage if you don’t want to be known. On the other hand, sometimes you just want to enjoy your beers in peace.

Still, it’s another of the things I love so much about Palestine. It’s such a beautifully local scene, yet it has a strong international component. It’s a microcosm of intensely interesting life with global implications. You feel like you’re in a small town at the center of the world. There’s no place quite like it.

We caught a service taxi home to Ramallah late at night when the Beer Fest was over for the day. We agreed that we’d go back the next day for more, but we all woke up too hung over and exhausted. Oh well. Looking forward to Taybeh Oktoberfest 2010, inshallah…

My Roots

As for my book, I’m about to finish drafting Chapters 9-12, after which I’ll be in editing mode for the rest of 2009—my favorite thing. I can edit happily for hours without coming up for air. It’s just collecting notes, outlining, and drafting that’s like pulling teeth.

But guess what? My grandfather beat me to the punch! At age 82, he finished his first book, Stories from the Pen of Melvin Reavis, and my mother published it on Blurb.com. It’s a lot of hilarious stories and great pictures from his youth as a farmer’s son in eastern Oklahoma during the Depression. They didn’t have a car or electricity, but they had plenty of cows and creeks and cousins, and as I recall, that’s all it takes to make a childhood awesome. Check out the first few stories here.

Gaza Betrayed

There’s bad news, though, in Palestine. The Goldstone Report recently came out, a UN investigation by former South African judge Richard Goldstone (who happens to be Jewish), which detailed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza earlier this year. The Israeli army killed about 1,400 Gazans, most of them civilians, hundreds of them children, while Palestinians killed three Israeli civilians and six soldiers. (Four more Israeli soldiers were killed by ‘friendly fire.’) Due to the gross discrepancy between the death counts, the report focuses more on Israel’s crimes than on Hamas’, which the Israelis claim indicates a bias against Israel.

Really? How about next time, you kill only nine people, one-third of them civilians, instead of 1,400, two-thirds of them civilians. Then we’ll talk about equal coverage of crimes. And by the way, do you really want to hold yourself to no higher standard than Hamas?

Alleged crimes committed by the Israeli army include shooting people who were waving white flags, destroying factories, restaurants, museums, schools, UN buildings, power plants, and neighborhoods, denying medical treatment to dying women and children, and shooting deadly white phosphorus into civilian areas. The meta-crime is the idea of collectively punishing entire civilian populations, first with the blockade and mass imprisonments, then with shooting and blowing up people and their homes, schools, and businesses in shocking excess in order to ‘deter’ rocket fire.

As I wrote earlier regarding the Israeli assault on Lebanon in 2006, “Imagine if Northern Irish militants raided London and killed four British soldiers and captured two [or, in the case of Gaza, killed half a dozen civilians with home made rockets to retaliate for a deadly* and illegal blockade and several violations of a ceasefire], and in response Britain bombed Irish civilian areas and infrastructure from north to south including villages and cities, roads, bridges, ports, dairy farms, cell phone towers, homes, apartment buildings, and fleeing vehicles. Imagine if they flattened several suburbs in Dublin that were sympathetic to Sinn Fein. Imagine if, in the course of the attacks, Britain killed 1,200 Irish people, 90% of them civilians, one-third of them children. This is essentially what Israel is doing to Lebanon. It will be precisely as effective, and it is legal and moral to the same degree.”

The numbers are slightly different, but the overall thrust of what was done to Gaza is the same.

[* I say the blockade was deadly because aside from the workaday malnutrition due to the shut-down of the Gaza economy and blockade on humanitarian aid that stunts the growth of many children and sometimes results in death, scores of cancer patients and other sick people have died because the Israeli government refused to allow them to leave the Gaza Strip to seek medical treatment.]

You might ask, “But doesn’t Israel have a right to defend itself?” My answer is and has always been, “Of course.” But this is a red herring. The questions is not whether Israel has a right to defend itself — no one seriously disputes this. But imagine if your country drove thousands of people from their homes and concentrated them into a ghetto, and then imposed a hermetic seal on this ghetto so that even basic goods couldn’t get in or out. Imagine if a minority of these people decided to fight back using nefarious means such as targeting your civilians with home-made weapons that have a 0.5% kill rate (i.e., one in 200 finds its target). Would you be justified in storming into this ghetto and killing 100 random people, mostly civilians, for each of your people — civilian or soldier — killed in order to ‘deter’ the ghettoized people from fighting back? What about destroying their factories and further making a dignified life impossible for them?

This is especially ironic considering where the international laws forbidding collective punishment came from. Quoting Wikipedia (which happens to say it well this time):

“Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions collective punishments are a war crime. By collective punishment, the drafters of the Geneva Conventions had in mind the reprisal killings of World Wars I and World War II. In the First World War, Germans executed Belgian villagers in mass retribution for resistance activity. In World War II, Nazis carried out a form of collective punishment to suppress resistance. Entire villages or towns or districts were held responsible for any resistance activity that took place there. The conventions, to counter this, reiterated the principle of individual responsibility. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Commentary to the conventions states that parties to a conflict often would resort to ‘intimidatory measures to terrorize the population’ in hopes of preventing hostile acts, but such practices ’strike at guilty and innocent alike. They are opposed to all principles based on humanity and justice.’”

Does Israel really think such outrageous collective punishments will bring peace and security? Imagine what Gaza kids grow up seeing and thinking. Imagine watching your mother suffer and die because she can’t get basic medicine or because she was shot while waving a white flag. Given their situation (which is nearly impossible to understand fully if you don’t see it for yourself, though my book tries its best to explain, starting from the beginning), the miracle is that so few turn to violence. The only way the Holy Land can ever have peace is if all people are allowed their basic rights to life and liberty.

If you don’t believe the Israeli army is capable of deliberately targeting civilians, well, I’m guessing you haven’t spent more than a year working as a journalist and detailing the circumstances surrounding every Palestinian death every single morning. But to get an idea of the cheapness of Palestinian life in the eyes of some Israelis, see this article in Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which says among other things: “A T-shirt [made] for [Israeli] infantry snipers bears the inscription ‘Better use Durex,’ next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter’s T-shirt from the Givati Brigade’s Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, ‘1 shot, 2 kills.’”

Or you can read this article, where an Israeli soldier says his overriding impression of Gaza operations was ‘chaos’ and the ‘indiscriminate use of force.’ “Gaza was considered a playground for sharpshooters,” he explained.

This article was written in 2005. Indiscriminate force is nothing new in Gaza. It was just the scale of the slaughter in 2009 that caught the world’s attention. After ten years of being treated like fish in a barrel, Goldstone finally gave Gazans a voice. This is what’s being done to us. The world ought to know.

The UN Human Rights Council was going to vote to pass the Goldstone Report to the UN General Assembly for further action, potentially leading to sanctions or prosecution for war crimes at the International Criminal Court if Israel refused to undertake a credible investigation of their own actions. (So far Israel has refused this step. They did a perfunctory ‘investigation’ and found themselves innocent of all charges, as usual, but to say it didn’t meet international standards would be a laughable understatement.) It’s hard to overstate how important this step was to the millions of Palestinians and their supporters who have been working for justice based on international law for decades.

And what did the Palestinian Authority, led by Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas, do? Under intense pressure from the US, Abbas caved and supported a six-month delay of the vote, effectively thwarting and delegitimizing it. How can any other country stand up to the US and support justice for Palestinians when the Palestinian Authority itself won’t? Six months is plenty of time for Israel and it’s international team of lawyers to bury the thing entirely and the rest of the world to forget about it.

Why on earth would Abbas do this? Why would the Obama Administration demand it? Well, the Obama Administration needs a ‘peace process’ (and doesn’t need flak from the Israel lobby), and Netanyahu has threatened to withdraw from it if the Goldstone report gets a hearing. In order to keep good relations with the US, his European Union paymasters, and his Israeli prison wardens (who decide whether investments can come into the West Bank, many of which are incredibly lucrative for Abbas and his men), Abbas had no choice but to back down.

In the eyes of Palestinians, Abbas threw away his ace in the hole in return for… nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. Israel had been threatening not to release the necessary frequencies to allow a second telecom company to open in the West Bank. There’s only one Palestinian cell phone company now, Jawwal, and its only competition is a handful of Israeli companies, such as Orange and Cellcom, which operate in the West Bank on behalf of the settlers but aren’t shy to take advantage of the captive Palestinian market.

According to Jonathan Cook, a British journalist based in Nazareth: “The only existing Palestinian operator, Jawwal, a subsidiary of PalTel, has been blocked from building communications infrastructure in the so-called Area C of the West Bank, comprising 60 percent of the territory, which is designated under full Israeli control… Typically, Palestinians traveling outside the major population areas of the West Bank find a limited or non-existent Jawwal service and therefore have to rely on the Israeli companies. A World Bank report last year found that as much as 45 percent of the Palestinian mobile phone market may be in the hands of the Israeli companies. In violation of the Oslo accords, these firms do not pay taxes to the PA for their commercial activity, losing the Palestinian treasury revenues of up to $60 million a year.”

The new company, Qatari-owned Wataniya, could bring in investments worth $700 million, provide jobs for hundreds of Palestinians, and further enrich the upper echelons of the Palestinian Authority.

Shalom Kital, an aide to defence minister Ehud Barak, said Israel would not release the frequencies unless the PA dropped its efforts to prosecute Israeli soldiers and officers for their actions in Gaza. “It’s a condition,” said Kital. “We are saying to the Palestinians that if you want a normal life and are trying to embark on a new way, you must stop your incitement. We are helping the Palestinian economy but one thing we ask them is to stop with these embarrassing charges.”

Aside from a pittance of cellular bandwidth, what do the Palestinians expect in return for not ‘embarrassing’ Israel over the massive bloodshed in Gaza? Most expect nothing more than another charade of a ‘peace process’ in which settlements continue to expand, Palestinian leaders continue to bend over backwards, Israel continues to say it’s never enough, and two or three or ten years down the line, we’ll have more settlements, a more thoroughly entrapped and powerless Palestinian population, and no peace—like now, only worse. Some kind of violence will be inevitable, and a fair two-state solution will recede ever further on the horizon. That’s been the trend since at least 1993.

Here’s one Israeli commentator: “The chronic submissiveness is always explained by a desire to ‘make progress.’ But for the PLO and Fatah, progress is the very continued existence of the Palestinian Authority, which is now functioning more than ever before as a subcontractor for the [Israeli occupation].”

Or as a Palestinian commentator put it: “The PA serves Israel by facilitating the occupation—which is why Israel invented it in the first place [with the Oslo Accords], just as, historically speaking, colonial powers have always attempted to create or coerce local elites into helping them deal with the population at large. This approach is perhaps most gracefully summarized in Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education of 1835: ‘We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.’ Why would the PA want to bring to an end an arrangement from which it benefits? As the French scholar Regis Debray points out, the status quo provides the PA elites in Ramallah ‘with a living, status, dignity and a raison d’être.’”

And, particularly if the mobile phone contract story turns out to be true, some very decent scratch besides.

Palestinian supporters of Abbas’ decision (and they are few and far between) say the vote has only been delayed until March, and knowing this sword of Damocles is hanging over their heads might make both Netanyahu and the Hamas leadership more cooperative in the meantime. But there are lots of problems with this. First, you have to assume Netanyahu cares what the rest of the world thinks, or that global attention to and support for the Goldstone Report will remain the same until March. Second, you assume Abbas might actually defy his masters at that time.

Third, Hamas just released a video of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit showing he was alive and in good health. In exchange, Israel freed twenty female Palestinian prisoners. (Most Palestinian prisoners are either political prisoners or held without charge.)

So over in Gaza, Hamas captured a soldier and got prisoners released (and will likely get hundreds more released when they let Schalit go). In Ramallah, Abbas is groveling at the feet of Netanyahu and defying the will of his own people and the international human rights community in order to save a peace process that looks like it won’t go anywhere.

If Abbas hadn’t already lost the Palestinian street to Hamas, he’s doing a great job of it now.

(Incidentally, the most hilarious part of the whole debacle was Abbas’ reaction to the backlash on the Palestinian street against his decision to thwart the Goldstone report. He opened an investigation to find out what happened exactly and who was behind the decision to delay the vote. LOL! I’m totally going to do that next time I, for example, tell someone I’ll call them and then don’t call them. If they ask why I didn’t call, I’ll be like, “Oh, sorry, I’ll open an investigation to find out what happened and who was behind this serious breach of etiquette…”)

On the other other hand… Another Haaretz commentator thinks Netanyahu actually lost this last round in a big way, and that Obama fooled not only him, but the usual talking heads (on both sides) as well. He says Obama pushed the settlement freeze knowing Netanyahu would refuse, and set up the alternative as “urgent and unconditional permanent-status negotiations with the Palestinians on all issues, with active American shepherding”—something Netanyahu came into office trying his best to avoid. But now he’s embracing it since it seems like a victory for him to begin negotiations without preconditions (i.e., without ceasing to expand settlements). The Goldstone Report would have just muddied those waters.

It’s a tricky and tenuous argument, and again it assumes Netanyahu actually has an interest in negotiations based on international law, which he’s never given any indication he does, “given that his opening positions, on territory or Jerusalem for instance, fly in the face of U.S. and international consensus and previous Israeli precedents.”

But as one unnamed Jerusalem officials said, “U.S. assistance in curbing the effects of the Goldstone report will produce significant pressure on Israel by the Obama administration to move forward with the diplomatic process… After they [the U.S.] saved us from Goldstone, and our argument relied on the desire to advance peace, the Americans will want to see an Israeli move toward peace talks with the Palestinians.”

Hopefully by the end of the year, with the global economy (at least appearing to be) back on the rails and the increasingly manic US health care debate under control, we’ll start to see which direction we’re heading in here in the Middle East. Maybe Abbas and Obama are subtle geniuses, and the rest of us need to catch up. Or maybe it’s the same old khara.

We’ll find out fairly soon.

Protest

Whatever the case, we all felt sick about Abbas’ latest humiliating capitulation and especially distraught to think about the people of Gaza, who have already suffered so much, getting slapped in the face yet again by not only the world’s indifference, but the seeming indifference of their own President. People weren’t thrilled with Abbas in the first place, and now they’re becoming dangerously restive. The kindest of the demands I’m hearing are for him to resign. A demonstration was organized in Ramallah on Monday at noon to march on Al Manara (Ramallah’s central traffic circle) and protest the move.

I was a little nervous to go, because things aren’t like they used to be in 2005. Back then, you could march wherever you wanted and say whatever you wanted as long as you didn’t directly confront any Israeli soldiers, settlements, Walls, or army infrastructure. Well, that’s not really true—Israelis can invade whenever they want and arrest or beat or kill whomever they want. But you could say whatever you wanted amongst yourselves and protest in your own streets while the world ignored you, and the PA didn’t bother you.

Now the West Bank policemen are starting to get trained by the US. This may sound like a good thing, even a generous thing, until you remember that the Egyptian and Jordanian police are also trained by the US. And these aren’t exactly democratic regimes they’re protecting and propping up, and they have questionable human rights records to say the very least. Palestinians are wary that their country, which before sort of managed itself within its cage given that the Palestinian Authority never really had much authority, is being slowly turned into another dictatorial police state.

A European friend of mine who speaks fluent Arabic and has been here for years said the moment it really hit him what was happening was when his car was stopped by a Palestinian policeman in Al Manara. The policeman said, “Open your trunk.”

My friend laughed and said, “What is this, Qalandia?” Qalandia is the infamous checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem, where Israeli soldiers check every vehicle and every person passing through. He expected the policeman to laugh and look sheepish. Instead he looked him in the eye in a way that clearly said, “Don’t mess with me, kid.”

That was when it hit him. This wasn’t just one policeman playing Israeli soldier. This was getting serious. At best, it means a victory for the rule of law, which, as we all know, means very little without some mechanism to enforce it. But the question is: Whose rule of law? If the PA represents the will of the Palestinian people, fine. But more and more it seems not to be doing this at all. The Palestinian people tried to react in 2006 by electing Hamas—anyone but Fatah. But the world said, “Bad Palestinian people! Wrong vote! No democracy for you!” and still won’t talk with more than half of their elected representatives. Not to mention the fact that Abbas’ term as President ended more than a year ago, but elections have been postponed indefinitely since the schism between the West Bank and Gaza. So to further entrench an unrepresentative authority smells pretty rotten to the Palestinian people.

(There’s another hilarious story I want to tell right now about a spontaneous and humorous but very telling demonstration of disgust for Abbas including by people who draw their paychecks from the PA, but I’m censoring myself because I don’t want to get anyone in trouble. Five years ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice.)

Anyway, we marched on Al Manara, and the police stood on the sidelines and watched. Some people even waved to them. They are, after all, the friends and sons and brothers of the Palestinian people—just like all soldiers and all people, even the ones who commit human rights abuses. The demonstration walked around the block a few times and then congregated in Al Manara for a while. The Israelis ignored it. The international press ignored it. The police watched to make sure it didn’t get out of hand, and it didn’t. Gazans might get a momentary feeling of solidarity, but then it’s back to the smashed cinderblock grind.

The first picture above is a homeless family taking shelter in ruins in Gaza. I took the second picture of two friends of mine, a cameraman and a photographer—both Palestinian—filming each other. It’s kind of a metaphor of what goes on at these non-violent demonstrations. The only people who see them are the ones who already know.

Still, as useless as it was, it felt good to march with people who felt the same way about something important. And I ran into an old friend who has a new daughter, and I’m excited to visit him and his wife soon. And I went into Zeit ou Zaatar for lunch and had a fresh-baked musakhan sandwich and flirted with the cute waiters. So it wasn’t a totally terrible Monday.

Prisoners

There’s more bad news, though. A friend of mine, Mohammad Othman from Jayyous, was recently arrested on his way back to the West Bank from Norway. Israeli security nabbed him at the Allenby Bridge border crossing. His crime? We have no idea. He’s being held in ‘administrative detention,’ which means he’s in prison without charge or trial. His stay has already been extended while they gather evidence against him.

Um… aren’t you supposed to arrest people after you have evidence against them?

Anyway, it’s probably going to be a bogus process where they’ll tell another prisoner or collaborator that he can get out of jail, get a permit to work in Israel, or be given permission to take their sick mother to a hospital if he points a finger at Mohammad. Naturally, to protect the collaborator, this evidence will be top secret. Mohammad and his lawyer won’t be allowed to see it.

Who is Mohammad? One of the most active non-violent activists in the West Bank who works tirelessly to educate the world about the illegal theft and destruction of Palestinian life, land, and property by the Israeli army. For anyone who asks, “Where’s the Palestinian Gandhi?” (a back-handed way to blame the Palestinians for the entire situation, implicitly saying, “Israel wants peace but just doesn’t have a partner to make peace with”), well—here’s one. Among many. And how do the Israelis react? Mohammad is not the first, and he won’t be the last, non-violent activist to be arrested, beaten, seriously injured, or killed by Israel.

For Palestinians, activism is not a careless weekend activity like it is in California. They risk their lives and the further deterioration of their freedom if they dare speak up.

Mohammad was on his way home from an educational tour in Europe when he was arrested. Here’s more info. He’s a sweet guy with a great smile, a big heart, and brass… well, you get the idea. He doesn’t deserve this. He’s being held for days and days, interrogated repeatedly, and probably treated horribly. It makes my stomach hurt to think about it. People in the know predict he’ll be in jail for about six months and eventually released without charge. A little half-year vacation from educating the world about his people’s situation, courtesy of the Israeli army. I hope not. I hope he’s released soon.

Mohammad in Jayyous

Last we heard, he was being held in solitary confinement in filthy conditions, and his health was deteriorating.

Speaking of prisoners, there’s no change in the status of Rania and Sharif. He’s still in prison and she’s still completely without support other than what I can scrape together. I’m traveling to Tulkarem tomorrow to speak with the mayor and try to get insurance and a job or at least financial aid for her. It seems the only way you can get anything done is to know somebody who knows somebody. With the help of a German friend whose Palestinian friend is the best friend of a human rights advocate in the PA, we finally have a chance to get Rania the help she needs. (The PA, though it has its problem, also has amazing people who are doing their very best for the Palestinian people. Nothing’s ever perfectly black or white.)

I’m also taking her a trunk-load of baby clothes. I sent one email to the Ramallah email list asking if anyone had old baby clothes I could give to a friend in need, and within a week I had more than I knew what to do with. I could seriously start my own baby clothes store right now.

In the likely event we don’t find Rania a job or adequate financial aid, I’ll need to gather at least enough money to get her through the winter and the first three months of her baby daughter’s life. I’ll let you know what this turns out to be—probably on the order of $1,000. My PayPal account is pamolson02@yahoo.com. Small donations of ten or twenty dollars add up very quickly. Thanks so much for all your help so far.

Peace.

Prologue to Fast Times in Palestine

Fast Times in Palestine

Chapter 1: From the Midwest to the Middle East

Border Prologue

“Why you are coming to Israel?”

The wide, suspicious eyes of the young Israeli border guard were a rude shock after all the laid-back hospitality in Jordan.

“I’m just a tourist,” I said, probably too nonchalantly.

“What kind of tourist?”

“Well, I’m a Christian,” I said, starting to sweat and wishing I’d worn a cross like I’d been advised, “and I want to see the holy sites.”

“What holy sites?” His tone suggested he’d never heard of any ‘holy sites’ in Israel.

I stared for a moment. “You know,” I said carefully, as if one of us might be slightly insane, “like Jerusalem, the Sea of Galilee, Nazareth—”

He cut me off sharply: “Why Nazareth? What’s in Nazareth?”

It was just a random Biblical name as far as I was concerned. I didn’t know where it was or what it represented now. I was entering Israel on a whim with plans to stay for a few days. I had no notion that the world I was about to enter would consume the next six years of my life, determine the course of my career, and shake the foundations of my most cherished beliefs.

All I knew was that I had clearly picked the wrong answer.

“Because, I mean, that’s where Jesus was born and grew up and—”

“What? He was what?” The guard’s eyes darted around nervously, as if making sure he had back-up nearby.

“He…” What have I said now? “Oh, right! Sorry, obviously he wasn’t born there—”

“Where was he born?!”

“He was born in… uh…”

Christ. I’d sung about where Jesus was born every Sunday of my Bible Belt upbringing. But I’d just finished reading a Middle East guidebook, so all my associations were shifted, everything was a jumble in my head, a border guard with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder was breathing down my neck, and I couldn’t think.

Just start at the beginning, I told my fevered mind. There was a woman on a donkey, and they went to an inn, and everybody sings O Little Town of—

“Bethlehem!” I smiled and shrugged expansively, as if it were the most basic knowledge in the universe, trying desperately to look relaxed rather than relieved.

The guard finally calmed down. I just hoped he wouldn’t figure out the connection between me and the two men behind me. If he did, we could all be in trouble.

For a brief description and outline of the rest of the book, see the About section. If you’re interested in reading further, stay tuned…

If You’re New to my Blog…

I just posted eleven letters that I’ve been writing since January 2008, when I started writing a book called Fast Times in Palestine. Previously I was posting them on my main website, pamolson.org, but this new blog format should be clearer and more open to comments, subscription, and interaction.

For more info about me and the book, please see the About section. In brief, I’m writing about the year and a half I spent working as a journalist based in Ramallah. The book seeks to humanize and contextualize the less-well-know Palestinian perspective without falling into the trap of demonizing Israelis. It’s non-fiction, but it uses the devices that make novels so engaging — humor, suspense, narrative arc, and well-developed characters — in order to give it mass market appeal.

Personally, I hate finding a good new blog and then wading through the whole reverse-chronology thing. So here’s a table of contents for the first eleven blog posts. If you’re interested in my lastest stories from the Middle East (as opposed to the letters I wrote during the year and a half I spent writing full-time in Stigler, Oklahoma), feel free to skip to the eighth post, Cheeseburger in Paradise.

Enjoy!

1. Out of the Closet (Jan 2008) in which I come out and say it — I’m writing a book!

2. Upstairs Update (May 2008) in which I move to Oklahoma, sit in my big brother’s old room eight hours a day, and give this whole book thing a go
3. My Speech at OSSM Graduation (June 2008)
4. Blue Okies (Sep 2008)
5. California and 2009 (Jan 2009)
6. Video of my Palestine Talk at Google (Feb 2009)
7. Redbuds and Dogwoods (April 2009)
8. Cheeseburger in Paradise (June 2009) in which I move back to Ramallah to finish up the book while living in this city I love so much
9. Haifa, Nablus, Ramallah (July 2009) in which I visit an Israeli friend in Haifa and then begin my new life in the West Bank
10. Yoga, Concerts, Prison (August 2009) in which I’m hit once again by the insane cognitive dissonance of this place — so much fun and beauty, and so much pointless pain
11. Ramadan, Soccer, Canyon, Border (Sep 2009) in which I start a pick-up soccer club in Ramallah, rock climb in a Jordanian canyon river, and offer tips on how to navigate Israeli borders

Ramadan, Soccer, Canyon, Border

September 17, 2009

First, an update on Rania’s situation. Her husband is still in prison, but we got good news a while ago that he would be released in February, a few months earlier than originally thought. It will still be another five months of separation, including the month of December, when Rania’s daughter is due. With the help of many generous people in Palestine and abroad, I’ve managed to gather enough resources to keep her afloat up until the end of October and also get her birth expenses taken care of. To the people who helped, I can’t say enough, and I can’t thank you enough. But thank you, so much.

Rania has been trying hard to find a job, but as I said before, the nonsense in the New York Times about the booming West Bank economy is a Potemkin village of the top few percent doing very well and most other people stagnating while prices rise. At best, the occasional lifting of a few checkpoints has slowed down the decline in some sectors, but not by much, and rewarding Israel for this kind of ‘concession’ (the partial lifting of an illegal collective punishment) is like rewarding someone for stealing ‘only’ a house, but not the car in the driveway. (Never mind the Gaza Strip, which is almost entirely under an Israeli siege, with catastrophic 75% unemployment.)

For pregnant women who are recent graduates and have small children and husbands in prison, finding a job only gets harder. If she does manage to find a job, the problem is solved. If not, I may make another appeal for funds in late October.

Sharif has found a way to call Rania cheaply, and he talks to her a few times a week. The other day, Karim said “Baba” into the phone for the first time. Both parents were overcome with emotion. I can’t imagine how the family’s reunion is going to be.

The story I wrote about Rania’s plight was published on a blog called Mondoweiss. You can find it here. No need to read it if you already read her story in the last email, but you can forward or post it if you like.

Book Update

As for the book, I’ve been making good progress and plan to have the final four chapters drafted by the end of this month. Two more months of editing should get them in good shape, then I’ll use December to work on the Epilogue. Insha’Allah the book will be finished by the end of the year, as planned.

I also recently received a very nice rejection letter from one of the last major publishers my agent sent my manuscript to:

“I apologize for taking so long with FAST TIMES (a great title!). Pamela Olson has a real voice and an appealing honesty and passion. In the end, though, her mixture of the personal and the reportorial doesn’t seem quite right for us. I wonder if this would make more sense as a trade paperback geared toward younger readers? In any case, I appreciate getting another look at this talented writer.”

It was painful to receive, of course, but then again, this particular mainstream publisher belongs to a large conglomerate that’s ultimately owned by Rupert Murdoch, which would make publication with them a kind of catch-22. If it doesn’t make money, I’m not getting the message out. If I get the message out, I’m making money for Rupert Murdoch.

If I thought it was the best way to get the message out, I would probably be willing to pay for Murdoch’s latest gold-plated bidet, but I’m not convinced it’s the best way anyway. Many mainstream publishers have a nasty habit of buying ten or so books and only promoting the one that looks like it will have the most mass market appeal, leaving the rest to languish.

It will almost be a relief if the last big New York publisher rejects us. (My agent knows about twenty mainstream publishers well, all in New York — the hardest place in the world to talk about Palestine — and we’re about to reach the end of them.) In that case, my agent and I will respectfully take leave from each other, and I’ll begin to speak directly to the people who know and care most about the Holy Land. I have a huge list of contacts I haven’t used because I wanted to give my agent a chance to sell it first.

It will be nice to speak with people who actually know and care about the subject rather than people whose only concern is whether, how much, and how quickly it will make money in an industry that is notoriously spineless of late. (No pun intended.) Last time I checked the bestseller lists, they were topped with soft-core vampire porn and Tori Spelling’s latest memoir. As for nonfiction, far too much is written with the intent to, as a friend of mine put it, “impress a select group of people who already share the same viewpoints as yourself.”

Mine is a bit more sneaky. It intends to reach a large audience, entertain and educate in a way that’s both visceral and intellectual (through sustained and engaging stories integrated with serious research and analysis), and potentially change things. Books like this are rare, and most publishers these days don’t like to take political or financial risks. Twenty mostly complimentary rejections from mainstream New York publishers is better than par for the course for a first book, especially a controversial one that doesn’t fit any pre-defined categories.

We’ll see what happens when people who actually care about the subject begin to get involved. I’m excited for this next phase.

Ramadan Blues

Oh yes, and it’s Ramadan. I’m not fasting this time, and since most of my friends are either ajanib (foreigners) or Palestinians who aren’t fasting and/or whose families live elsewhere, the usual Ramallah Ramadan problem arises — you have to sneak around to find lunch, and then you don’t get invited to many Iftars (the huge home-cooked meal just after the sunset call to prayer that breaks the day’s fast). Worst of both worlds. At the eerie sunset hour when the streets empty and luscious smells emanate from every home, you can’t help but feel a bit wistful if you’re having your usual cheap and lazy meal.

One particularly gloomy Sunday evening, I thought I’d cheer myself up by singing the Lonely Ajnabi Ramallah Ramadan Blues

Walkin’ to the hisbah,
Qataef on the streets,
I step into a helweyat
to buy some Ramadan sweets.

The man, he charges plenty:
“Talatash,” he said.
I hand the money over,
wishin’ they was homemade sweets instead.

Walk home with my sack of veggies,
make hash browns and farmer’s salad.
Sit down in my empty living room
to compose this Ramadan ballad.

I think of all the families
sitting down to share Iftar.
It’s happenin’ all around me,
so near and yet so far.

“Allahu akbar,” the minaret calls,
floating like a dream.
“Maybe so,” I think to myself,
“but man, sometimes Ramadan ain’t so karim…”

Notes:
Ajnabi = foreigner
Hisbah = vegetable market
Qataef = special Ramadan sweet often sold by street vendors
Helweyat = sweet shop
Talatash = 13 shekels ($3.25)
Iftar = sunset breaking of the daily Ramadan fast
Karim = generous (a common Ramadan greeting is “Ramadan Karim!”)

It’s not all bad by any means. (This was written mostly for a laugh.) And I have been invited to a few nice Iftars. There’s also the Bab al Hara phenomenon — a Syrian mini-series that comes on every Ramadan about a Syrian village living under French occupation between the World Wars. It has comedy, drama, obvious political overtones, great costumes, and phenomenal architecture — a glimpse into the life and culture of those times. Life doesn’t just stop for Iftar every day. It also stops from 9-10 for the latest installment of Bab al Hara.

Ramallah Football Club

The other way I cheered myself up during Ramadan was by founding FC Ramallah, an informal pick-up soccer club that meets every Monday on the concrete court next to the Lutheran Anglican church just uphill from my house. It’s an even mix of Palestinians and foreigner, and we welcome all skill levels and play a good, scrappy, competitive-but-not-too-competitive game, just the way I like it.

Despite all the scrappiness and various skill levels (and concrete), there have been relatively few injuries, especially compared to street hockey. (The bridge of my nose, which was smashed with the blade of a hockey stick a few weeks ago, is healing nicely. My sunglasses were not so lucky.) People tend to have a good attitude and not clobber each other too much. It’s a good group. Some of them are even fasting! Playing soccer for the last hour and a half of the fast under the hot sun — hardcore.

A guy I met playing soccer — a medical student studying neurosurgery in Cairo and just in Ramallah for the Ramadan holidays — introduced me to a club where people play basketball most evenings. It’s mostly Palestinian guys (a good mix of Christians and Muslims), but there’s one skilled young Palestinian woman in a long ponytail and athletic shorts who’s treated as an equal and a sister. I was treated well as I played, too, even though my skills haven’t developed much beyond middle school.

Several Palestinian-American kids were also there who had moved to Ramallah for high school. They were like a different species from the Palestinian-Palestinians, more surly and sullen, talking more trash (in their unmistakable American accents, and more often in a mean rather than joking way) yet whining more about fouls, injecting totally unnecessary tension into the game. (Perhaps it was in part because they were mostly teenagers and the Palestinians were mostly in their twenties.) An unappealing mix of bluster, self-consciousness, and entitlement that the Palestinians did their best to cheerfully ignore.

I asked my friend about this. He smiled and said, “They are not members of the club. We just let them play because we are friendly.”

It occurred to me as I was writing this that his statement could be understood in a more general sense. I’m not a member of the club, either. I am not and will never be a Palestinian. But I’m glad they’re friendly enough to let me play.

I’ve also noticed something lately. Usually in Ramallah, when I spoke to a waiter or shopkeeper in Arabic, they smiled in appreciation for my effort and then politely switched to English. My favorite are the taxi drivers who say to me, in English, “Ah, you speak Arabic better than me!”

But in the past couple of months, many have started answering me in Arabic, as if not even noticing it might not be my first language. It’s a good feeling, but it’s also an indication that I’m officially entering the most annoying phase of learning any language: The phase where people begin to assume you’re fluent even though you’re not. If people know you’re struggling with a language, they’ll slow down, use simpler vocabulary, switch to English sometimes, etc.

But if people assume you’re fluent, and if you’ve been chatting for a few minutes without problems (if they happen to follow a track of topics that you have a well-developed vocabulary for), and then they use a word or phrase (or paragraph) you don’t understand or start talking too fast or slangy, it’s awkward (and humbling) to backtrack and say, “Actually, I don’t speak Arabic that well.” It makes me feel like a fraud, and they tend to look at me like I’m playing a trick or avoiding whatever subject they just brought up. If I simply keep saying, “Na’am?” (Sorry?) hoping they’ll slow down or use simpler vocabulary, some look at me like they’re not sure whether I’m slightly deaf or learning impaired.

After so much work to get to this level, suddenly instead of applauding your efforts to try to learn their language, people start to get frustrated you don’t know it well enough. It’s a badge of honor in a way, but such an annoying one. The worst part is, it’s a very big plateau. I was still on it (but much further along) by the time I stopped studying Russian. I’ll be “the person who isn’t fluent yet” for a long time before I become fluent (if I ever do), at which point my language skills will simply be taken for granted.

It’s not much of an incentive structure.

A Week in Jordan

Probably the thing that stressed me out most about Ramadan, though, was the fact that my visa renewal trip fell right in the middle of it. In order to stay legally in the lands occupied by Israel, I would have to go to Jordan, re-enter Israel, and try to convince the Israeli border guard to give me another three-month tourist visa. The borders have become more difficult in recent years, with many people who had no trouble getting in and out for years suddenly finding themselves rejected, and many travelers, especially Arab-Americans or foreigners who admit they’re heading to the West Bank, denied entry.

To top it off, the Israelis have started giving “PA-only” visas at the airport and at the Allenby border crossing to some unlucky travelers, which means you can only enter the West Bank, not Israel. My flight leaves from Israel, so this would be a problem for me.

Also, there was the little issue of the fact that I didn’t have a visa. If you recall, they stamped a separate paper at the airport and then took the paper.

In a strange way, this actually turned out to be a blessing. When the girl at the Jordan River crossing asked what I had been doing in Israel, and I said I was a tourist, she didn’t see my stamp telling her I’d been there three months — and she didn’t ask. I was through in five minutes and on my way south to Amman.

Because the major cost of the trip was traveling to and from Jordan, and Jordan’s a nice and relatively cheap country (if you play your cards right), and I needed a break from sitting in my apartment writing all day, I decided to make a little vacation out of it.

On my first night in Amman, as I was walking toward a restaurant for dinner, someone yelled at me from an SUV. It turned out to be three Israelis looking for advice about what to do in Amman. The two guys were wearing jalabiyas (long white traditional Bedouin robes) that they’d picked up in the desert somewhere for a dollar, and the girl was wearing a tank top and holding hands with one of the guys. They were doing so many things wrong at once, I didn’t know where to begin.

But they were guests in town, and I would be ashamed not to treat other guests in the Arab world as kindly as I had always been treated there. I invited them to dinner and quietly told them they shouldn’t be engaging in public displays of affection during Ramadan. They also shouldn’t be walking in downtown Amman in ragged jalabiyas or tank tops, but that couldn’t be helped at the moment. It wasn’t that anything bad was likely to happen to them. It was just incredibly insensitive.

We found a little restaurant down an alleyway that served baked chicken and rice, fried eggplant in a spicy sauce, okra, and salad. The owner welcomed us warmly, and I chatted with the Israelis for a while. It was going well until one asked me where I was coming from.

“Ramallah,” I said.

There were a few moments of silence as they attempted to wrap their heads around this. Finally one said, “Well, I guess there’s money in Ramallah, so it’s easier for people not to be fanatics.”

I opened my mouth to say, “The settlers have all kinds of money. What’s their excuse?” But I was on vacation and not in any mood for anger or arguing.

The other guy asked if there were any bars in Amman.

I said, “Sure, there are plenty of bars in West Amman.”

“Whoah,” he said. “I would love to see that. A bar in a Muslim country!”

I looked at him strangely. “There are bars in Ramallah.”

He shook his head slowly. “Israel is not a Muslim country.”

I blinked a few times. Did he really just say that? Was he really in downtown Amman holding hands with a girl in a tank top in public during Ramadan and telling me Ramallah was part of Israel?

When they invited me to go to West Amman with them, I respectfully declined.

I walked instead to my friend Fayez’s hotel. It was great to see him, and also to catch up with a British/Spanish friend from DC and a friend of a friend from Amman who’s an aspiring (and talented) writer. I hit up some couch surfers in town as well (including the couchsurf ambassador, Simon, a Christian Palestinian-Jordanian who invited me and some other ’surfers to his home for a huge feast of mahshi = stuffed squash and peppers in spicy yogurt sauce). I bought a cheap Jordanian SIM card, and pretty soon I had a mini-social life going on, calling and texting and inviting and being invited and running all over Amman in the ubiquitous cheap taxis ($3 gets you absolutely anywhere). I had to turn down at least one party just so I could get some sleep.

People were incredibly kind and welcoming, and I felt the way I’d felt the first time I came to Amman in 2003, experiencing it as something new and exciting and wholly itself. Amman has mostly been a stopping-off point for me for the past several years, a place I had to go to renew my visas. But now I was reminded — it’s a pretty cool city in its own right.

On Saturday I joined three couch surfer girls for a trip to Wadi Mujib, a steep canyon gorge carved into red-hued stone with a blue-green river running down the bottom of it. We hiked and climbed and splashed and swam our way up to a ninety-foot waterfall that was impassable without abseiling gear. There were huge boulders and rapids in the river, and there was rarely a bank on either side, just water and cliffs, so we were completely soaked. Some of the climbs were challenging, involving tricky leaps across raging rapids or sliding down a rock face to land on a submerged rock you could use to steady yourself for another leap. Some of the rapids and waterfalls were too dangerous and were blocked off with ropes.

The big waterfall at the end of our trek had a smaller side fall that you could get under and let it pound and massage your shoulders. Under the waterfall, in the peaceful pocket behind its crashing waters, some species of little fish would latch onto your legs in a kind of slimy tickle that I tried to withstand but couldn’t for long. Serious heebie jeebies.

Heading back to the trailhead was much more relaxing, floating with the current instead of fighting it, jumping from waterfalls and sliding down rapids, but our elbows and knees and butts were banged up pretty good by submerged stones. Good times.

I hadn’t eaten anything that day other than a small bag of Doritos and a mini-Snickers (this is the kind of thing lazy ajanib eat for lunch during Ramadan), so I was looking forward to the Iftar in Amman. Amman is a fantastic place to have Iftar, because you can find an excellent meal for 2 JD (Jordanian dinars), about $3 (a laughable notion in Ramallah, where a decent Iftar costs between $15 and $30). There’s a place called the Hashem Restaurant that only sells top-notch hummus, falafel, and fuul, along with bread, salad, and tea, for about 1.5 JD.

They’re always crowded, and I didn’t arrive until the crowd had already overflowed from the alley well into the street. I was told there was no room at the inn. I went to the Jerusalem Restaurant instead, but the harassed-looking host said they’d filled up long ago. I tried to find another alley restaurant that usually had space, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. So when the call to prayer sounded, I was alone and hungry in the twilit streets.

I started walking, hoping to find some place with food to sell. As I walked, I noticed I wasn’t alone after all. Shopkeepers had gathered in alleyways to break their fast together. A few men who sold cigarettes or knickknacks from little stalls on the street were arranging their items forlornly or ducking into a doorway to pray and eat a small meal alone. I said, “Sahtein,” to one group of men (‘Good health,’ the Middle Eastern version of Bon appetit), and they invited me to join them with a friendly wave, but I politely declined. There was already too little food for too many people at their table.

Eventually I found a shop open that was selling small, spicy falafel sandwiches with tomatoes and tahini. I bought one for a quarter of a dinar and a small cup of tamar hindi (date punch with rose water) for a tenth of a dinar. Tamar hindi is divine when done well, and this was the best I had ever tasted, sweetly exotic and ice cold. Walking down the street with my cheap prizes and a sense of lonely solidarity with the millions of Muslims who don’t always get a big, traditional Iftar every Ramadan night, either, and a renewed sense of humble gratitude for what I did have was, I think, nicer than a crowded table at the Jerusalem restaurant.

At eight, I was invited to the Jerusalem restaurant by a Christian Jordanian friend for mansaf (goat meat with rice and a special sour yogurt sauce), and I ended up feasting anyway.

Leaving Amman the next day was difficult. I’d just made all these new friends and gotten to know the city, and now, five days later, it was time to go.

I was heading four hours south to Aqaba, where the border was much more relaxed than the more direct route into the West Bank through the Allenby border crossing (which is where Arabs and activists tend to cross). I figured I’d spend a couple of days relaxing on the Gulf of Aqaba beaches and a night under the desert stars in Wadi Rum before heading back to the border.

I quickly realized, however, that I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the beaches or the desert properly because I was so anxious about the crossing into Israel. The usual sense of helplessness, the dread of all the things I could lose — my plans, my friends, my flatmates, my plane ticket, the olive harvest, Ramallah…

So after one day of swimming laps at the Royal Diving Club south of Aqaba, snorkeling a bit, having an over-priced fish dinner and watching Bab al Hara on a projector screen near the giant Arab Revolt flagpole, I made a run for the border.

Tips on Crossing Israeli Borders

Here are some tips on crossing Israeli borders, picked up from many difficult years of trial and error involving upwards of thirty border crossings.

1. Be white. In America we at least attempt to be discreet when it comes to racial profiling. In Israel, it is overt and unapologetic. If at all possible, be or at least look Caucasian.

2. Don’t have anything Araby-sounding in your name or your family. You may look white as a lily, but if your last name is Rashid, be prepared for a long wait (hopefully not more than an hour, especially if you have an American accent and don’t claim to be visiting the West Bank or Gaza). Even I often get asked, “What is your father’s name?” “Robert,” I answer. “What is your grandfather’s name?” “Melvin.” So far they haven’t asked me for my great-grandfather’s name, but if they ever do, I will reply, “Ibrahim Yusif Mohammad Abdul Aziz bin Laden… D’oh!”
3. Have a clean passport. Any evidence in your passport of travel to Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran… you get the idea. If you’ve been to a country that’s not friendly to Israel, they will not be friendly to you. They’ll probably let you through, but rarely in under an hour or four.
4. Dress nicely. Even if you’re white, have nothing Arab-ish in your name, and haven’t visited any Axis of Evil countries, if you look like a raggedy activist, you may get pulled aside.
5. Act confident. Don’t say “Shalom!” with a big friendly smile or look nervous. They respect people more if they are respectful but confident — if they treat the guards as equals (with guns). They’re less likely to pounce on you if you don’t look like a scared, grinning bunny rabbit. Remember, at the end of the day, they’re just kids, and you are an adult.
6. Act clueless. You don’t know any Arabs, you don’t know any Arabic, you don’t know it’s Ramadan, you don’t know how to dress in Arabic countries (I came to the Aqaba border with a preppy tank top under my shirt and pulled the shirt off as soon as I was out of eyeshot of Aqaba), you’re not sure what the West Bank is (if they ask), and there’s certainly no such thing as ‘East’ Jerusalem! Needless to say, don’t have any keffiyas or Hezbollah flags, or even a Ramallah Bravo Supermarket card, in your luggage.
7. Keep the internet clean. If you have a Facebook page with lots of Palestine links, change your privacy settings to maximum and change your picture to someone who’s clearly not you. If you have a website with Palestine stuff on it that can easily be changed, change it. Put someone else’s picture on it. Make the front page all about wildflowers. If you’ve written or published things in several places that can’t be easily changed — well, just hope they don’t Google you, as they have Googled several other people and rejected or questioned them based on what they found. (If you follow all the other steps, they probably won’t Google you.)
8. Lie like a bad rug. Especially if they have no easy way to verify what you’re saying. Sometimes honesty is the best policy, but this is usually not the case at Israeli borders. If you believe it is your right to be in Palestine, don’t make a stand at the border and demand your rights. There are times and places for this; the Israeli border is not one of them. They have all the power, they don’t understand or care about your opinions at all, and there’s no media. Just quietly slip in and go about your life. Otherwise you’re giving eighteen-year-old Russian girls a lot more power than they deserve or know how to handle.

   I always lie, and I advise other people to lie, but most people haven’t been through as many Israeli borders as I have and aren’t used to lying to authority figures. People tend to believe the Israelis have more knowledge and power than they actually do, which de facto allows them to have more knowledge and power than they actually do. Don’t fall for it.

   If the tourist lie won’t work for whatever reason, lie anyway. If you’re a journalist, a writer, a photographer, an activist, an artist teaching art classes at a refugee camp, a student studying the occupation or the Bedouin’s plight in Israel, or just coming in to help with the olive harvest, don’t let on. Find something more politically neutral. Volunteer medical worker or English teacher has usually worked for me as a back-up lie.

9. Keep it simple. Don’t have a big, elaborate story about what you’re doing or phone numbers of friends in Israel (they will call, and this puts your Israeli friends on the spot, and they may forget parts of your story or end up contradicting you, which does not help), and don’t sit there chattering about every hostel you’ll stay in from Eilat to Tiberias. Every new piece of information just gives them more to question you about, more threads to pick at, more chances for you to contradict yourself. You’re a tourist. You’ll stay in hostels in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and take day trips from there, whatever the other travelers say is the best. You’ll go home after ten days. (They’ll give you a three-month visa anyway if they think you’re a tourist — this is standard.) Whatever. Just keep it simple.
10. Keep your passport clean. If at all possible, avoid getting Israeli stamps in your passport. Always ask for the stamp on a separate sheet of paper. This may result in a few extra questions, but it’s better than the questions you’ll get at the next border when they see that you’ve already been staying in Israel for six months. The “tourist” lie won’t work then. (By the way, don’t ask me why they don’t have this in the computer, or do have it in the computer but only sometimes check. All I can say is, the tourist lie keeps working for me.) Have a politically neutral reason for not getting a stamp, such as an environmental conference in Beirut next year, a friend who’s doing business in Dubai, or an oil contract in the Sudan.

The Israeli border — so many chances to use your imagination!

(Don’t let any of this dissuade you from coming, though. In the end, they let almost everyone through, especially if you follow these steps, and even usually if you don’t. They just have a bizarre policy of trying to ‘persuade’ people not to come back by hassling and hanging the threat of deportation over everyone. But it’s manifestly worth it to see the Holy Land for yourself and you will, at least, be warmly welcomed on the Palestinian side. There are buses from the Old City of Jerusalem to Ramallah, Bethlehem, or Hebron for about two dollars, and from there you can get anywhere in the West Bank. Ahlan wa sahlan!)

Even armed with all this, I was a wreck by the time I got to the border. There’s always a chance they can throw you a curveball, catch you contradicting yourself, Google you or run your name in the computer, and end up ruining your day and/or your next three months anyway. So far these techniques have more or less worked for me, but my luck could run out any time.

I wore too much make-up, my preppy tank top, my hair down, my confidence (seemingly) high, and my skin white as a Cairene cloud. I had my story down, everything from my (nonexistent) job in DC to my (nonexistent) fabulous Turkish vacation as soon as I left Israel after ten days.

The only awkward question they asked was, “Why did you decide to travel alone?”

“That’s none of your business, darling,” I wanted to say.

“So I can more easily infiltrate your nuclear secrets,” was about the only answer I could think of that might have anything to do with Israeli national security, and even an idiotic terrorist in a tank top wouldn’t say that.

“Well, my husband recently died after a nasty divorce, so my children are estranged from me, and most of my friends abandoned me after they found out I had an inoperable brain tumor, so really this is the last trip of my life, and as you can see, I’m all alone. Do you know anyone in Israel who might be my friend?” I didn’t say that, either.

“It’s just easier to coordinate with one person,” I said.

Three month visa, on a separate paper. Booyah.

Pamela

P.S. While I was writing this, Rania called and said the family’s lawyer said Sharif would most likely be in prison until July instead of February, after all.

She’s devastated. The funds I’m providing her with (with help from many people) are enough for basics for her and Karim (and so far only enough to cover the next month), but not enough to send money to help Sharif, who’s practically starving in prison in miserable conditions, crowded in with criminals when he’s not stuck in an isolation cell six feet square. Right now Rania’s having a hard time seeing any light at the end of this tunnel.

At least Karim’s teeth are finally coming in. There art thou happy.

Yoga, Concerts, Prison

August 12, 2009

Sorry for the long radio silence. My life can be summed up like this: Clear skies, pretty sunsets, rooftop yoga two evenings a week (spectacular view of homes and trees, hills and sky, minarets and church towers, rolling our shoulders open toward the sky, and final relaxation as the stars come out), street hockey once a week, hanging out on my veranda with its view over the Al Masyoon neighborhood (my favorite part of Ramallah) while one of my flatmates plays the oud (lute), swimming occasionally, meeting up with every friend-of-a-friend who comes through Ramallah (keep ’em coming!), and writing, writing, writing.

Also a few random jaunts like my recent trip to a concert in Zebabdeh by a traditional Arabic ensemble called Yalalan. It’s a group of twelve musicians — oud, buzuq (like an oud but smaller, longer, and twangier), and violin players, three percussionists, and six singers — managed by my oud-playing flatmate. Their ages range from twelve to twenty-nine, the violinist is blind, and one of the percussionists is African-Palestinian (from the small African community in Jerusalem — people whose African ancestors, decades before the founding of Israel, stopped in Jerusalem on the way to Mecca and decided to stay). The oldest and the youngest, the black and the Arab, the blind and the seeing all talked and joked together as friends and equals, with more easy unity than I would expect from a similarly diverse group in America.

Zebabdeh is a hilltop Christian village south of Jenin, and its lovely city hall park looks out over fertile valleys and tawny hills. The group sang songs from all over the Middle East, and the audience clapped along. The mood from the concert spilled over to the bus ride home, where they continued to sing and play the drums. I felt a bit jealous, as I didn’t know the words to any of the songs, but it was fun enough being an audience of one.

As soon as one song would peter out or come to an end, someone would start another one, and everyone would join in. They didn’t run out of material during the entire two-hour ride from Jenin to Ramallah, although the tempo slowed considerably after we stopped off in Huwara (the village, not the checkpoint — how nice it will be one day when the names of villages become more associated with the villages themselves than with the checkpoints near them!) to have kunafa (a sweet, cheesy traditional Palestinian dessert). Afterwards I still felt hungry, so I grabbed a falafel, too. I composed a rhyme in my head to remember a new rule I subsequently became aware of:

Falafel before kunafa,
you’re cool as Mustafa.
Kunafa before falafel,
never felt more awful.

Remember that, kids.

The only time they stopped singing was when we neared a checkpoint. My flatmate would say, “Khalas, ya shebab, fi machsom.” (Quiet down, guys, there’s a checkpoint.) (Qudsis, or Jerusalemites, tend to use the Hebrew word for checkpoint — machsom — instead of the Arabic one — hajez.) He always had to say it several times before they finally consented to muffle themselves, and as soon as we passed each checkpoint, they would burst into song again about how brave and fearless Palestinians were — making fun of themselves and their powerlessness in these situations.

In my experience, soldiers hate it when Palestinians sing at checkpoints. It makes them feel threatened somehow — maybe morally threatened, maybe they don’t like the cognitive dissonance, maybe they assume they’re songs of nationalism or resistance — and there’s no telling what soldiers will do when they feel threatened. It’s pointless to provoke them, at least at the moment. Who knows, though. Maybe the Third Intifada will involve a lot of singing.

About a week before that, I visited Atara, a village north of Ramallah, to watch a friend practice soccer with his local team. You have to pass the Atara checkpoint to get to Atara village (and the rest of the northern West Bank). Lately the checkpoint has been mostly open, and for the first time I took the turn-off to Atara itself instead of taking the other road toward Nablus. I figured after visiting the checkpoint approximately five million times, it was about time I visited the eponymous village.

It was lovely in the style of most villages near Ramallah — elegant stone homes, winding lanes, leafy trees — and the view from the soccer field was breathtaking. Miles and miles of hills and space turning pale rose-colored as the sun sank and the almost-full moon rose over the twinkling villages.

The soccer team was quite good, especially their passing game. My friend was the striker, and his powerful kicks and headers had the poor goalie quaking in his cleats. The pitch was a good-quality sand field, a soft kind of sand like they have in rodeo arenas, and it had been paid for in part by USAID. (Occasionally we get something right in the Middle East!)

Violence remains practically nonexistent in Ramallah. A few weeks ago I heard several loud bangs and thought, “Here we go again…” But it turned out to be fireworks. It was tawjihi time — the annual high school graduation exams — and kids who do well and have enough cash often celebrate with parties and fireworks. Even after tawjihi time, it’s normal to see fireworks several nights a week over the Al Masyoon valley for weddings and other events. As if Ramallah could get any prettier.

But as easy as it would be for me to enjoy life here and forget about the occupation, it’s still there, seeping into every mood and cutting the rug out from under you whenever you start feeling good again. Fatah policemen, trained by an American CIA school in Jordan, have been fanning out into a few towns, supposedly improving the rule of law but often targeting Hamas, making it look like an overtly political extension of the Israeli army — a subcontractor for the occupation. If no serious political movement occurs in conjunction with this ‘security’ improvement, Fatah will look even more like quislings. Easing a checkpoint here and there isn’t going to make a single Palestinian forget that the essence of the occupation is still growing.

Aside from workaday settlement expansion, there were recently a spate of brutal evictions in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. The Israeli government kicked almost sixty Palestinians, mostly children, out of their homes and immediately handed the homes over to Jewish settlers. Many of the family members are now sleeping on mattresses across the street from their former homes, which are protected on behalf of the settlers by a heavy Israeli police presence.

The most ridiculous part is their reasoning for kicking the Palestinians out. The settlers claim they have a document proving the land once belonged to Jews. First of all, by most credible accounts, the documents appear to be forgeries. Second — are they serious? Do they really want to set a precedent where documents proving previous ownership by a certain religion or ethnicity means anyone from that religion or ethnicity can evict anyone who lives there now? Wouldn’t it then follow that Palestinians having documentation of previous ownership should get their land back, too? In that case, virtually all of Israel would be handed back to Palestinian refugees. (And God help us if any Canaanites, Hittites, or Jebusites turn up… or Romans, or Babylonians, or…)

Another case in point is my friend Rania’s situation. Six years ago, during my first trip to the West Bank, I met a Palestinian woman named Rania who aspired to a college education. She was from a small village and her family wasn’t supportive, but she found jobs with international NGOs, saved enough to pay for one semester of college, and enrolled herself, knowing that would probably be all she could manage unless a miracle happened.

When I learned about her efforts to educate herself, I made an appeal to several friends and professional contacts to help her finish her second semester, and then her third. After four years, she graduated with a degree in social work and psychological counseling. In the meantime she met and married a man named Sharif and moved to the Palestinian city of Tulkarem. By the time I arrived in Ramallah this summer, they had a one-year-old son named Karim and a daughter on the way. Rania and Sharif were in the process of building their new home a little at a time whenever they could save some money.

Sharif is one of the genuinely nicest guys I’ve ever met. He supported Rania through the final semesters of her education, he loves his son Karim (Sharif’s mother died while giving birth to him, so the idea of an intact family is novel and wonderful for him), and he changes diapers and helps with the cooking and cleaning. He has a great sense of humor and a disarming smile. He’s had a difficult life, and so has Rania, but things were finally looking up for them. They both adore Karim (trust me, he’s impossible not to adore), and Rania is ecstatic about having a daughter and giving her every kind of love and support she wished she’d had growing up.

A month ago, there was loud banging on their door around 1:00 am. Frightened, Rania asked who it was. They said they were Israeli soldiers. Rania knew they were there to arrest Sharif, though neither of them knew why. This is standard operating procedure for Israeli army arrest operations — entering homes in the dead of night when people are at their most psychologically and physically vulnerable. She had no choice but to open the door, knowing it would be blown up or knocked down if she refused. They asked if her husband was home. She said no. They asked if they could come in and make sure. Again, she had no choice but to allow them.

When they found Sharif hiding in the bedroom, they gave a loud order, and twenty more armed soldiers stormed in. They beat Sharif in front of his wife and son, called Rania a lying sharmouta (whore) while holding a gun to her head, and took Sharif away. He’s been charged with car theft in Israel, an absurd charge. He’s never been to Israel, though he had recently been given a permit to work in Israel. Rania said to me, “It is very difficult for a Palestinian to get a permit to work in Israel. Why would they give him a permit if they thought he was stealing cars?”

An Israeli friend of mine guesses it might be to pad their statistics on cracking down on car theft, or they might be trying to recruit him as a spy — offering to let him go if he will inform on his neighbors or extended family members. This is one of the most devastating tactics an occupier has for tearing the fabric of a society apart, sowing suspicion and division between neighbors and family members. How can a man be forced to choose between lying about his neighbors and family members, or spending a year away from his wife, son, and soon new daughter, knowing that without his support, they may not have enough to live on? He may be in prison himself because another man chose to falsely inform on him rather than pay this terrible price.

I visited Rania in her brother-in-law’s home in Tulkarem as soon as I learned about the situation. She can’t stay in her own home because she’s too scared to be alone. She can’t sleep because every time she closes her eyes she sees Israeli soldiers. Every time she hears a car outside she thinks it’s an Israeli army Jeep.

Because she and her husband have been putting most of their savings into their new home, she was left with only about a month’s budget when her husband was taken. She has been trying hard to get a job, but unemployment is bad in the West Bank even for people who don’t have a small child and aren’t five months pregnant.

She’s spent much of the past month crying. She says the worst is when Karim walks to the front door (where he’s used to seeing his father burst in and scoop him up and hug him after work) and says, “Baba?” (Daddy?) He doesn’t seem to be scarred by the violence he witnessed. His first birthday happened to be the day I visited Rania (Sharif had planned a nice party and to buy him a little car he could scoot around in)—he’s too young to understand what’s going on. He’s actually one of the happiest toddlers I’ve ever spent time with. But when he asks several times a day where his Baba is, Rania says quietly, “Baba fi sijin, habibi.” (Daddy’s in prison, sweetie.) It’s a hard thing to witness.

‘Prison,’ by the way, doesn’t carry the same stigma in Palestine as it does in America, given that most Palestinians in Israeli jails are held not because they are criminals but as a form of collective punishment, as political prisoners, as bargaining chips (sometimes Israel agrees to release a few hundred prisoners in exchange for some Palestinian concession or as a ‘gesture of goodwill,’ which makes them look generous to the Americans and the international community, most of whom don’t understand the true nature of the situation), or to recruit spies. The statistic that ‘only’ 10% of the 11,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel are held in administrative detention (imprisoned without charge or trial) is misleading. Many are in prison simply for belonging to the wrong political party. Rania’s husband was charged, but the charge is bogus, the Israeli court system for Palestinian prisoners does not meet international standards, and many Palestinians can’t afford the exorbitant lawyer fees.

It’s not a stigma — it’s just a massive violation of basic human rights.

During my visit, Rania kept asking me Job-like questions I couldn’t answer.

“Why does this happen to me? I am a good girl, I always do right. I love my husband and my child. Why do they do this? What right do they have to take my husband? Why do they have human rights in other places, but not in Palestine? How can I raise my children if I am alone? How can we have any security if soldiers can take my husband away any time they want, for no reason? I don’t hate the Jewish, but it makes it very hard for me to respect them when they do this. He is a good man, never any guns, no bad thing to anyone. He has had a hard life, but always he does his best. Why do they take him? If we do right and always bad things happen, maybe if we do wrong, something good will happen. I don’t know, I can’t imagine why the life is like this. What do you think?”

What can I say? “In my current understanding, they do this because they feel insecure (to an often delusional and self-fulfilling degree and/or as a post-rationalization for brute grabs of power and resources), and they have power and you don’t. They want to make life difficult for Palestinians so they will submit to Israel ’s dictates or leave. This is called power politics, or ‘Realism’ in American foreign policy circles.”

Does she really want a lecture on realpolitik?

“In my current understanding, you don’t have control over anything in this life but your own behavior. Behave with as much integrity as you can, and try to make peace with the things you don’t control. Unfortunately, you happen to have the short end of the stick when it comes to the things you don’t control.”

Of course I can’t say something like this to a frightened young mother. Not sure what else to say, I told her the story of Job (apparently it’s not in the Quran, unlike many Bible stories) and told her to take care of herself and her kids and be kind to her husband, that things would work out somehow, and in the end some good may even come of it (even though of course no one can guarantee any of this). It’s very strange for me to be in this position. I never imagined I would be trying to comfort a Muslim friend with Bible stories. I think more than anything it did her good just to be able to talk for hours about her fears and feelings. It’s ironic that she’s the one trained in psychological counseling. Part of me wanted to laugh and say, “Physician, heal thyself!” But it’s always different when it’s your own problem and not someone else’s. Just one more of the millions of stories of what the occupation means for the civilian population of the West Bank and Gaza.

Aside from the post-traumatic stress, she has some hard economic realities to deal with in the medium-term. If, as the family’s lawyer seems to think, her husband will be in prison for about a year, and if Rania doesn’t manage to find a job soon, she will be ten months without any way to support herself. Normally she would ask her family or her husband’s family for help, but most of them are either barely scraping by themselves (Israel has built the Wall around her family’s village, and it has isolated most of its land from its owners, forcing many to move out, find work in Israel or the settlements, or become charity cases), also in prison, abroad, or dead. It’s a miracle there is any sense of society left in Palestine, much less one as strong as it is.

I and some friends have pitched in enough to keep her going for another month and a half, and she has a couple of possible leads on jobs. If she didn’t have a university degree, she would be in an even bigger mess. As it is, the strangled economy due to the Wall and closures and the loss of her husband for a year due to the occupation nearly destroyed her young family, and might yet if she doesn’t find a job and I can’t gather enough money to keep her afloat through the birth of her daughter and the many months of separation from her husband.

I will help her out as much as I can, and if anyone would like to PayPal me $5 or $10 or $20 to supplement the effort, it would be very much appreciated. My PayPal account is pamolson02 @ yahoo . com. Needless to say, 100% of whatever you give will go directly to her.

Thanks so much.