Chapter One — From the Midwest to the Middle East

Below is Chapter One of Fast Times in Palestine. The purpose of the book is to ramp average Americans up to a sophisticated understanding of the Israel/Palestine conflict in a way that is enjoyable and accessible to all.

It starts out as an easy-to-read travel/adventure narrative to get people acclimated to the Middle East before we start throwing in the heavier stuff. Each chapter builds on the knowledge gained in the previous chapters so that you end up with exponentially growing knowledge, like this:

Yes, I used to be a physics major

By the last page, you’ll have greater knowledge and understanding than many so-called experts in Washington.

The book was named a Top 10 Travel Book of 2013 by Publishers Weekly and a Best Travel Book of Spring by National Geographic.

Enjoy.

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CHAPTER ONE

From the Midwest to the Middle East
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“Why are you 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.

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

“Why Nazareth? What’s in Nazareth?” he cut me off sharply.

It was just a random Biblical name as far as I was concerned. I didn’t know it was an Arab town in Israel, or what that meant. I certainly didn’t know that the outcome of this, the first of what would be many Israeli interrogations, would change the course of my life forever.

But I had clearly picked the wrong answer.

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

“What? He was what?”

“He was… 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 morning growing up in small-town Oklahoma. 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.

Degree of Freedom

This wasn’t where I expected to end up at age twenty-three — jobless, planless, and lying through my teeth to Israeli border security. I’d graduated a year earlier, in 2002, with a physics degree from Stanford only to realize I had no interest in spending any more young years in a basement lab doing problem sets. Several friends were heading to Wall Street, but I had even less interest in finance than in physics. The things I enjoyed most during college — travel, writing, languages, politics, sports — didn’t sound like serious career options for a math-and-science type like me.

Beyond that was only a massive mental block, an abyss of vague fear and paralysis. And I had no idea why.

Feeling lost and ashamed, I took a job at a local pub near the Stanford campus because it had the best dollars-to-stress ratio of any job I could think of, and the popular image of bartenders was almost sexy enough to make up for the savage beating my ego was taking.

Once I was settled in with the job, I joined a Jujitsu club — one of those things I had always wanted to do but never had time. I noticed a purple belt named Michel who had powerful shoulders, light olive skin, and slate blue eyes. He asked me out after practice one evening. He didn’t have to ask twice.

He mentioned over dinner that he was from Lebanon, a country I knew so little about, I couldn’t think of any intelligent questions to ask. I decided to start small. When he dropped me off at the end of the night, I asked him how to say ‘Thank you’ in Arabic.

“Shukran,” he said.

I repeated the strange word, tasting it in my mouth.

He bowed his head slightly in an utterly charming way and said, “No problem. Any time.”

We only had three months together before he moved out of state for graduate school, but they were three very good months. He talked incessantly about his native Beirut and its picturesque beaches, forested mountains, world-class food, and gorgeous women, which surprised me. I’d always hazily pictured the Middle East as a vast desert full of cave-dwelling, Kalashnikov-wielding, misogynistic, bearded maniacs, and I figured anyone without an armored convoy and a PhD in Middle Eastern studies should probably stay out of it.

But Michel made Lebanon sound fabulous, and when he talked with his Lebanese friends and I couldn’t understand, it drove me crazy. So I borrowed a friend’s primer and started studying Arabic.

As the weeks passed, I began to notice a curious thing: I was pretty happy most of the time. I spent forty hours a week at a fantastic pub, and the rest of my time was wide open to enjoy friends and books, sandwiches and sunsets. I knew I’d been vaguely unhappy most of my life, but I never realized the extent of it until the fog gradually lifted and left me in an unfamiliar landscape so bright it almost hurt my eyes.

My ears burned, though, whenever I asked my patrons at the pub, in all seriousness, if they wanted fries with that. All this happiness and free time flew in the face of my deeply-ingrained rural middle-class upbringing. Whenever I started hyperventilating about it, I took a deep breath and reminded myself that God and society could take care of themselves for a year or two whether or not I was staring at Excel spreadsheets all day. After that, if nothing better came along, I could always dust myself off, buy an Ann Taylor suit on credit, and put together a quasi-fictitious résumé like everyone else.

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One afternoon in March of 2003, I found a copy of The Wave, a San Francisco magazine, left behind at the pub. The Iraq War had just begun, so it was full of articles about the Arab world. I flipped it open to a satirical piece about spending Spring Break in the Middle East. It listed the major countries of the region (including Lebanon), their most impressive tourist attractions, and why the people of each country wanted to kill us.

I knew it was supposed to be a joke, but it bothered me. Curious, I biked to the Stanford Bookstore and picked up a guidebook called Lonely Planet: From Istanbul to Cairo on a Shoestring, expecting to see nothing but dire travel warnings. To my astonishment, it recommended the route as one of the most romantic, historically rich, and friendly in the world, and no more dangerous than Brazil or Thailand.

A month later, a friend in France named Olivier wrote to me and said he had three weeks of vacation coming up in September, and why didn’t we meet up somewhere? I had some money saved by now and was planning on using it to travel. So I said sure, sent him an off-hand list of half a dozen Mediterranean countries, and told him to pick one, imagining a lush late summer of Greek and Italian islands.

A week later he wrote back: “What do you think about Egypt?”

My heart sank into my toes. I didn’t even remember putting Egypt on the list. But I had given him his choice, and the Middle East was cheaper than Greece, which meant I could travel longer. Plus it bothered me that I didn’t know enough to have an informed opinion on the Iraq War. My political science classes had been full of disconnected anecdotes and competing theories that left me unsure what to believe. The post-9/11 newspapers and magazines hadn’t been much help, either. Here was a chance to bypass all that and have a look for myself.

It was nice, anyway, to think my Arabic studying suddenly had a purpose.

The Sinai

As my plane landed in Cairo in early September, it was clear that reading a guidebook hadn’t remotely prepared me for the Middle East. My knowledge of the culture was almost nil, my Arabic skills were pitiful, and I felt ridiculous in my cargo shorts, ponytail, and bare, sunburned face. All the other women wore stylish, diaphanous headscarves and subtle, lovely make-up, and if the aim of that get-up was to make them less attractive, it had failed miserably. When one of the more exquisite women — all luminous skin, full rose lips, and steady eyes — caught me looking at her and smiled kindly at me, I ducked my head like a frightened child.

Just then two boisterous college-age Egyptian guys came up to me and asked, “Where you from?”

“Uh, America,” I said, too taken aback to wonder whether it was wise to reveal my nationality on my first day in the Arab world when my country was at war with an Arab state.

“Ah, America!” They seemed delighted by the revelation. “First time in Egypt?”

“Yes.”

“Welcome to Egypt!” They smiled and bounced away toward passport control.

The Sinai

As Olivier and I traveled from the Pyramids in the north to Luxor in the south, no one mentioned the Iraq war. All thought of politics was lost in the dusty, sweaty shuffle of catching buses, finding restaurants, haggling over prices, and visiting tombs and museums.

When our cultural duty was finally done, we headed to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, a remote triangle of mountainous desert wedged between the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aqaba, for some rest and relaxation. Our first stop was Dahab, a backpacker’s resort on the gulf coast whose main pedestrian drag ran along the water. Past the flat, shallow reef tables was a drop-off populated by living corals and psychedelic tropical fish, then the sapphire sea filling a mile-deep crack in the earth. The jagged gold-brown Sinai Mountains rose behind Dahab to the west, and twenty miles east across the gulf sat the hazy, sandy mountains of Saudi Arabia.

Dahab

We settled in at a $3-a-night camp and stretched out on brightly-colored cushions in a Bedouin-style sitting area next to the sea. I put a Dire Straits tape on the camp’s sound system, ordered a strawberry milkshake, watched the little aquamarine waves breaking against the reefs, and finally felt like I was on vacation.

After three days, Olivier had to leave and catch his plane to Paris. I was planning on following my guidebook’s itinerary through Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey over the next two or three months. But I was in no mood to pick up and be a tourist again any time soon.

I bade Olivier adieu and ordered another hookah.

This is from a later trip I took to Dahab in 2005. I'm the one in the wetsuit, getting ready for a dive in the Blue Hole north of Dahab.

A few days later, I gathered enough steam to walk two hours north to a tiny Bedouin village, a loose collection of grass huts and a few dozen camels tethered to a flat spit of desert between the mountains and the sea. There was no electricity in the village; the only illumination came from the sun, the moon, the stars, and candles. I hadn’t made any plans or reservations, but I was soon invited to have dinner and sleep on a foam mattress in one of the grass huts, for a nominal fee.

The next morning I hiked further north to a turquoise lagoon, where I met an Estonian free-diver named Dan. His hair was salty and sun-bleached and he wore a silver hoop earring, a wooden bead necklace, and a wry, dimpled smile. I snorkeled in the coral gardens near the surface while he, with his weight belt, wetsuit, and carefully-trained breath-holding ability, dove deep into the blue depths.

When the shadows of the Sinai mountains were getting long, Dan and I moseyed back to the Bedouin village and found a spacious octagonal thatched shelter with a gas stove that served as a hotel and restaurant. We sat on cushions in the candlelight and talked for hours while our host prepared a dinner of fish and rice and vegetables and Bedouin flatbread.

I felt more at ease than I had in months, and I soon felt like I’d known Dan for years. Our host, who called himself Abraham, wore the traditional white Egyptian tunic and a thin white scarf fashioned into a loose turban around his head. He served us food by candlelight and told us tales about Egypt and Israel dropping bombs on the Sinai, about treasures hidden in caves by fleeing Bedouins, and about smuggling hash on boats and camels. His manner of speech was bemused and ponderous, and he always had a clever, ironic expression on his face. He told us the names of the seasonal winds and said he liked octopus season best because “it’s no bones, just good, white meat.”

The next morning I walked back to Abraham’s place for some tea before I departed. Then I completely failed to depart. Dan and I floated lazily among the bright yellow butterfly fish, iridescent parrotfish, and flashy lionfish, waited three hours for breakfast while the sun climbed, snorkeled again, waited three hours for dinner while the sun descended, and passed out contentedly on our cushions. The next day we did the same.

At night we went swimming at the camp’s sandy beach under a new moon and got a surprise when we found that our moving hands and feet stirred up trails of bright pinpoints of light in the water. We laughed in wonder, and Dan said, “It’s like a fairy tale.” Abraham later told us they were billions and billions of bioluminescent plankton, but we felt like we were swimming in swirling fields of sparkling water stars.

The beauty of the world filled our senses completely. Every day the sun hurtled across a flawless sky, then the galaxy floated by like a majestically slow comet. The sea always shone deep blue against the Mars-like Saudi landscape. The coral gardens were incomprehensible miracles, hovering explosions of form and color below the water’s surface. There was no sense of time, just an endlessly marvelous present. For the first time I understood the meaning of the phrase, “My cup runneth over.”

Mars-like Saudi mountains across the Gulf

Sadly, Dan was due to leave the Sinai after four days. As we were parting, he took me aside and said, “There’s something I haven’t told you. I’m not really Estonian. I grew up in Siberia, and a few years ago I moved to Israel. I’m an Israeli citizen now.” He fiddled with a strap on his backpack. “Sorry for not telling you earlier. It’s just easier not to say you’re Israeli around here. But if you plan on visiting Israel, my house is your house any time.”

“Well, don’t worry,” I said. “Your nationality makes no difference to me. And I’d really love to visit you in Israel. The problem is, if I get an Israeli visa stamp in my passport, they won’t let me in to Syria or Lebanon. And I have to go through Syria to get to Turkey.”

“I understand,” he said. “But let me know if you change your mind.”

Eye of the Storm

I caught the next ferry to Jordan and spent a week hiking the southern Jordanian deserts. Along the way, through some process of cultural osmosis, I began to learn how to greet people in the local ways, how to spot a petty scam artist, what the local prices ought to be, and how to cut down on mild harassment from unmarried young men — namely by covering my knees and shoulders and wearing a fake wedding ring.

When I made my way up north to the capital, Amman, I liked it immediately. The best view of the city was from the hilltop ruins of the Roman Citadel at sunset when the sky glowed pink and purple, the boxy white houses on the city’s seventeen hills glowed sand-colored, and the minarets glowed with green neon amid wheeling flocks of pigeons while the call to prayer echoed in stereo.

The Citadel at sunset

A small part of the expansive view from the Citadel

Wheeling pigeons (under the flag)

Night draws near

I took the advice of an Irish backpacker I’d met in southern Jordan and stayed at the Al Sarayya Hotel despite its astronomical price of 14 Jordanian Dinars ($20) per night. It was in the old downtown area where hospitality was still a way of life. I almost felt bad talking with shopkeepers and waiters there, because some refused to charge me for food and services after we’d chatted long enough to feel like friends.

The manager of my hotel was a droll and charming man named Fayez who’d been trained as an electrical engineer. He was an intelligent, clean-cut chain-smoker, tall and thin and distinguished-looking, the kind of guy you’d expect to see patiently explaining something obscure but important on CNN. I sat in his office with other guests, and he offered everyone sweet Arabic coffees, on the house.

Someone asked about the stuffed white wolf on one of his filing cabinets. Fayez explained that a reporter had nicked it from one of Saddam’s palaces. He left it in Fayez’s office and made him promise not to sell it.

“But I don’t know,” Fayez mused sardonically. “Probably I could get a few thousands for him on eBay. What do you think?”

My scalp began to prickle in an odd and unnerving way. This was war loot. And it wasn’t from a historical event that could safely be categorized as something done in other times by other people. This was here and now, and it was my country that had done the invading.

Jordan, sandwiched between Iraq and Israel, is a jumping-off point for journalists on their way to Baghdad and Jerusalem, and the Al Sarayya was a favorite among independent journalists, filmmakers, and foreign aid workers. Every evening they congregated in Fayez’s office to share their stories over bottomless cups of sweet, strong tea and Arabic coffee. I joined them and listened, slack-jawed and silent.

A Swedish woman told us that an Iraqi waiter in Baghdad had once started talking excitedly to an Iraqi-born Swede she was traveling with. The rest of the Swedes were impatient and wanted service, but the Iraqi-born Swede told them to wait. The waiter was telling him that his sister and her family had been on a minibus a few days earlier, and the bus had stopped for an American soldier at a checkpoint. The soldier waved them through, but then a woman reached for a baby bottle. The soldier emptied his ammunition clip into the bus, killing six people. Apparently he had thought she was reaching for a grenade.

As their stories went on and on like this, my palms began sweating and my heart beat faster, I was almost shaking. Strangely, it wasn’t the stories themselves that upset me the most. It was the prickling realization of how thoroughly I had been misled by my own press and government. They’d made the war sound so clean and under control, abstract and far away. Here, it sounded like nothing short of a blood-soaked catastrophe.

Then again, maybe these ‘independent journalists’ were lying or exaggerating, trying to impress each other and tourists like me with their big talk. There was only one way to find out.

My head began buzzing as I realized what was possible. It was nice enough drinking tea with Bedouins and gazing at the stone monuments of bygone eras. But here was a chance to witness history as it was being made.

I asked about expeditions to Baghdad the next day and was offered a ride in a shared taxi for $200. I wasn’t sure what I would do once I got there. I figured I could meet people like I had in Cairo, Dahab, and Amman, and things would work out somehow.

In the evening, I told two journalists about my plan and asked if it sounded wise.

“Are you a reporter?” one asked.

“No.”

“Foreign aid worker?”

“No.”

They narrowed their eyes. “Then why do you want to go?”

I shrugged. “Just to see.”

They looked at me like they couldn’t tell whether I was a maniac or an idiot. Then they made it vividly clear that the violence in Baghdad was far too random and gruesome for tourists.

I chafed at their patronizing tones. But I wasn’t suicidal. I grudgingly took their advice.

The next evening Fayez invited me to dinner along with two men, Yusif and Sebastian, who were on vacation from their work in the West Bank of the Palestinian territories.

Sebastian was a young, slim Canadian paramedic with close-cropped brown hair. Yusif was a skinny, white, blond British Muslim who had the aristocratic aura of a wandering ascetic. His face was drawn tight with laugh lines, his teeth were crooked, and his age was impossible to guess. There was something childlike, almost impish about him, yet he irresistibly commanded respect and attention. His words seemed to come from a deep well of spiritual confidence that was either brilliant or insane, yet he was humble and friendly. I’d never met anyone remotely like him.

They were on their way to Petra, the ancient Nabatean city carved into the living rock of a spectacular canyon in southern Jordan. Its most famous landmark was a matchless monument called Al Khazneh, which serves as the final resting place of the Holy Grail in the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The massive, shimmering, rose-hued tomb, exquisitely ornamented and symmetrical, is accessible only through a mile-long crack in a mountain.

Sebastian found me the next day and invited me to join them. I hesitated. I’d already gone to Petra a week earlier. Going again would cut into my dwindling time and funds. But I had just been invited to one of the most magical places on earth in the company of one of the most intriguing people I had ever met. I didn’t hesitate long.

Along the way, Yusif mentioned that he had trained in survival in the Sudan from age 14 to 22. He claimed to have met Osama bin Laden there many years ago. He’d also lived in a cave in southern Spain for several years. Now he was on the town council of a Palestinian village called Jayyous. He spoke fluent Arabic, and Sebastian and I once watched him silence an entire busload of Jordanians with a sing-song recitation of the Quran.

Both men talked compulsively about their experiences in Palestine. Yusif was sometimes off-hand, almost clinical as he told his stories. Other times he was wide-eyed, like a kid describing a crime so outrageous, he feared no one would believe him.

Their stories, like the stories of the journalists earlier, were impossible to take at face value. But I had learned in Fayez’s office that the American government gave Israel more than $3 billion every year, making it the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the world. If their stories were true, it seemed like something I should know. If I called their bluff and things weren’t really so bad, I could hang out with Dan in Israel and then move on and forget about it.

I hated the thought of missing out on Syria and Lebanon if my passport got stamped by Israel. But here was a chance to learn things for myself, experientially, that there was no other way to learn. The West Bank didn’t sound nearly as dangerous as the free-for-all in Baghdad, and I had just made friends with two ready-made tour-guides. I knew I’d never forgive myself if I passed all that up for the sake of being a tourist.

As we were heading back to Amman, I asked Yusif and Sebastian if I could go with them when they went back to the West Bank.

“You’re welcome to join us,” Sebastian said. “But you might get turned back at the Israeli border if the guards suspect you plan on visiting the West Bank. It’s better not to mention anything about that.”

“And it’s probably best if we pretend we don’t know each other,” Yusif said in his clipped patrician accent. “The interrogations will be much simpler that way.”

So, green and wide-eyed, I wandered into the Holy Land, an empty vessel.

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You can view the book’s website here and Amazon page here.

The book’s Table of Contents has links to many more excerpts, including all of Chapters 2 and 3.

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