Monday, January 26
I am back in Madison. We returned last Sunday 1/18; it's been busy catching up after a week away.
On Friday before we left, Cisco and I went to Ramallah to have lunch with my friend Raja and his wife Penny, and their friend Vera. Raja is an attorney and author, and has written a number of books. The most recent was a chronicle of his experience when Ramallah was under siege in the spring of 2002. Cisco and I took the bus from Jerusalem to the Qalandia checkpoint, walked down the road to get in line at the checkpoint, and eventually got through. On the other side there are vendors selling various goods at makeshift stands. There was a little boy who couldn't have been more than 6 years old selling gum from a box he was carrying. Cisco and I each bought a pack of strawberry. We walked on and found a group taxi to Ramallah.
We got to Ramallah and walked to Al-Bardouni, the restaurant where we were to meet Raja. It was a nice place, with a very pleasant atmosphere and, as we were about to find out, excellent food. Raja, Penny and Vera joined us and we had lunch, great food and conversation to match. Vera is an art history teacher at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah. Penny is also at Bir Zeit, researching in Women's Studies and other topics. Penny is originally from Quincy, IL, just a couple hours west of my home town of Joliet, IL - it's a small world.
It was very good to see Raja again. I first met him at the ADC conference in June 2002. I had recognized him from the picture in the jacket of his book "Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine", which I had just read. I asked if he would mind if I joined him at his lunch table; the seat next to him was vacant. We talked over lunch and afterward for a while, and then again the next day. This Saturday in Ramallah was the first time I had seen him since then. We had corresponded by e-mail since our first meeting, and I also felt like I had gotten to know him through reading his books. Funny how you can feel like you know someone better when you've read their writings, particularly when those writings are autobiographical. It occurred to me that Raja hadn't had the same experience, and probably didn't feel he knew me as well as I felt I knew him. Nevertheless, he was like an old friend. Raja is a thoughtful and intense man, someone who, despite only knowing him personally for a relatively short time, I feel I can trust completely. A man of the utmost integrity.
After lunch we started back to Jerusalem. At the checkpoint the soldier was not the usual 18- to 22-year-old with a Eastern European or Ethiopian accent. This guy was in his mid- to late-40's with a graying beard and an American accent - east coast to be exact. Cisco and I approached together and handed him our passports. "Where are you from in the States?" he asked in a matter-of fact, even slightly friendly manner. 'Madison, Wisconsin. Where are you from in the States?' I asked him back. "New York." he answered. "What did you come to Ramallah for?" he asked. 'To visit friends.' "What are their names?" Without thinking, I said 'Raja Shehadeh.' No sooner had the words left my mouth than I felt a terrible feeling that I had somehow betrayed my friend. Unlike any of the dozens of checkpoint experience before, we had actually been having something of a conversation, and I didn't really think about guarding my words carefully until after the question was asked and answered. "Where does he live?" the soldier asked, now business-like and more aggressive. "I have no idea, we met at a restaurant." He examined our passports more closely. "You were born here?" he asked me. Obviously, my Arabic middle name once again drew attention and the soldier made an assumption, despite the fact that US passports list a person's place of birth right on the same page as the name and picture. 'No, I was born in Joliet, IL, as it says on my passport right there.' "Oh, I see. Where are you staying?" 'In Jerusalem.' He looked over the passports a little more than handed them back. "You can go."
We got back to the hotel in Jerusalem. On Friday nights they have a lute player in the restaurant, which we took advantage of while we enjoyed our dinner.
On Saturday we went to Nablus. Antar drove us there. We waited in line at the Hawarra checkpoint for almost an hour, and watched as the man in front of us had his entire car and its contents searched by several soldiers who pointed their M-16's at him on numerous occasions. When our turn came, the soldiers would not let Antar and his van pass. So Cisco and I went through the checkpoint on foot, and Antar was kind enough to wait for us. We found a taxi on the other side, and asked the driver to take us to Nablus. Nablus had been under siege for twelve days straight, which ended just two days ago. A photojournalist we had met at the hotel had been there yesterday (Friday) and shown us his photos of, among other things, a man who had been shot by Israeli soldiers, bound with plastic cuffs, put in a jeep and held there while an ambulance was kept at a distance at gun point. The man was returning from the funeral of his 5-month-old son who had been sick and had just died. He was in the funeral procession returning from the burial and for some reason the Israelis shot him. The photos were unforgettable.
When we got to Nablus there were no soldiers around. I asked the driver to take us to the Old City where the home demolitions had just occurred. I wanted to see them myself. He became our tour guide, taking us to several demolished homes and buildings in the Old City of Nablus and the areas outside. We saw homes and a school that dated back hundreds to over a thousand years old. Some were from Roman times, some more recently from Ottoman times. I thought about the world outcry that resulted from the Taliban's destruction of Buddhist statues in Afghanistan a few years back. It was totally justified, of course - no sane person would ever defend such a despicable act. Yet most Americans didn't even know about Israel's destruction of these buildings of antiquity. The news media simply ignored it - it was of course in the Jerusalem Times (a Palestinian weekly paper) and other Arabic news media - but it was either not covered by the US media or relegated to a obscure footnote somewhere.
More powerful to witness than the archaeological travesty in Nablus was the human tragedy there. In the rubble of one demolished ancient home I saw (and photographed) a child's shoe, blanket, teddy bear and a doll's severed arm. There was a prayer rug, a mangled sofa and matching chair, and pieces of a VCR in the rubble. Then I saw three finger paintings laying on the ground in the rubble, a little crumpled and folded but the colors were still bright. I immediately thought on my young daughter, Emily, who loves to paint and draw, and whose special pictures we hang in the house. These were probably a child's special pictures once. Now there were the fallen remnants of a family's life, along with all their other shattered possessions we were walking on and around. One of the men walking around handed me what was left of an exploded tank shell. It was split in two, I could see the two mangled halves of what was a torpedo-shaped projectile, still attached at the base. The camouflage paint was still visible in some areas where it wasn't charred. I cut my finger on a jagged edge - everyone in Nablus should be so lucky as to only sustain such a minor injury as a result of Israeli tank shells.
We moved on to another house - the Abdel-Hadi mansion, which was demolished in April 2002 and then partially destroyed again last week. I saw a room where new construction had been completed since the April 2002 attacks, and then damaged in this most recent one. I spoke with Mr. Abdel-Hadi, who told me the story of how he and others were made to leave the building so the soldiers could use it as a base of operations and set up sniper positions. When the Israelis rounded up everyone in the building, Mr. Abdel-Hadi was the first one they got. They took him with them door-to-door. Mr. Abdel-Hadi was made to stand in front of them with an M-16 in his back; they used him as a human shield.
We walked over to a school that had been shelled by Israeli tanks at close range. As with many buildings I saw, there was dense pockmarks from heavy machine gun fire all over the walls. I met the headmistress and her class - about 25 little students between 4 and 7 years old. They were very friendly, as was everyone I met in Nablus. The kids were in a makeshift classroom below the school. The stone wall had been blown out so they had erected a temporary wooden wall to keep out the cold and rain. Men were already busy rebuilding the school upstairs.
Then our taxi driver, 'Alaa, took us to his friend's house in the Old City whose building had been partially destroyed. At first it appeared they had been "lucky"; their neighbors house had taken worse damage. 'Alaa knocked on the door and a woman and a young man greeted us. They were very friendly and invited us in. There were two more young men inside - these were her three sons. We all introduced ourselves, and we sat in their living room and talked. A young woman, the wife of one of the sons, brought in mint tea. I explained that we were interested in learning about and seeing what had happened in Nablus. The woman shared with us her family's experience. There were seven flats in the building, housing seven families. When the Israeli soldiers came nine days earlier, they came into their building and cleared everyone out. Again, they used one of the sons as a human shield as they went from door to door in the building.
Along with the six people we were sitting with, an additional three people from another family were brought into the room we were sitting in. In all, nine people were closed into this 10'x10' room with a couch, two chairs and TV. These nine people were kept in this room for four and a half days, while 20 Israeli soldiers took over the rest of the building and used it as a base of operations for those days. They showed me where snipers took up positions in the stairwell leading up to their front door. The rest of the residents of the building were simply evicted and made to find nearby friends of family to take them in. Fortunately, all of them reached safety; it is dangerous to be wandering around when the Israeli army have moved in, taken up positions and started with the demolitions and machine gun fire. For our friends, they found themselves prisoners in their own homes, having to ask Israeli soldiers permission to leave their own family room and walk down their hall to use their own bathroom. The one son and his wife took Cisco and me to their room and showed us the damaged roof, which had been hit by a tank shell just before the soldiers had come and taken over the building.
After we had been there for a while, another young man joined us. He was a friend of the family, and a Palestinian police officer. Just like the policemen I met in Qalqilya, this man had only a day-glow vest to identify him as a policeman. No gun, no weapon of any kind was allowed - just the vest. He was a nice fellow. He was diabetic and had to take insulin shots. When he took his first sip of tea, he realized it was quite sweet and wasn't able to drink it. A few minutes later our young hostess brought him a fresh glass of tea without sugar. He told us about a friend who had been killed three months ago. During the twelve-day siege that had just ended, six Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army, and 50 more were injured. Of the dead, three were children.
The hospitality this family had shown us was remarkable given what they had just been through, yet it was typical of what we had experienced everywhere in Palestine.
We left the Old City and took a circuitous route back out of Nablus, so we could see other sites on the way. We saw the old British prison that had been converted to a city building. It the mid-section was a huge pile of rubble; it had been bombed by F-16s. We saw Yasser Arafat's Nablus residence. It was literally flattened, also the result of an F-16 attack. We passed couple of buildings in the downtown commercial area that had also been hit by F-16s and tank shells. Many downtown buildings had taken heavy machine gun and had countless pockmarks to show for it.
We stopped at Joseph's Tomb, a site of archaeological and religious significance. It also had military significance; the Israelis bombed it over a year ago (the dome and outside walls were damaged) and then they had later used it as a base of operations. Aside from the destruction, they had left a spray-painted Star of David on the ancient stone wall. This spray-painted souvenir was left by the Israelis on many walls in Nablus.
We saw a few archaeological sites - Jacob's Well and the convent there, an ancient church and a mosque (I don't recall the names) and then we went on to Hawarra.
Once we got through the checkpoint, we looked for Antar where we had left him parked. There were no vehicles at all on that side of the road. We looked over to the other side of the road and saw him there, and walked over. He told us that soldiers came over to where he had been waiting and made everyone clear out. There was no apparent reason, but they ordered everyone away, waving their M-16's around. There were two vehicle that were unattended; the drivers had went for an errand, or a walk or something. The soldiers shot tires out of each one of these vehicles, presumably as some kind of a lesson to the drivers. When they returned, each of them would find one of their tires in shreds. These weren't flats that could be patched; an M-16 bullet shot at close range into a tire complete destroys the tire and possibly the wheel.
On the way back we saw over and over the familiar site of Palestinian roads off to the side with trenches and large piles of rubble in the middle of them. The Israelis dug trenches in the road, collected the broken concrete and earth and bulldozed the pile into the road, creating a double barrier of trench and rubble blockade and cutting off commerce, family contact, or any freedom of movement for that matter.
I got pictures of these blocked roads, as well as the destruction and havoc described above. For my own part, they're etched in my mind; the pictures really are for others to see. I don't think you can understand what life is like in Palestine without seeing it with your own eyes or - a distant second - through someone else's camera.
From Nablus we asked Antar to drop us off at Qalandia checkpoint. We went into Ramallah to have dinner with another friend, Sam Bahour. Sam's from Ohio, American-born of Palestinian parents. After a successful business career in the US, he is building businesses in Ramallah, helping to create jobs, living there with his family.
After dinner we went back to Jerusalem. We were sitting with some new friends in the restaurant and Jennifer came in. She was back from Gaza, and we were planning to leave for Tel Aviv in several hours to catch an early flight.
Tel Aviv was a real experience. Outside the airport we were stopped by soldiers, our passports checked, our driver's ID checked, and the car emptied. On examining of my passport, a soldier asked the familiar question about my name. How is this pronounced? What is the origin? I was singled out to bring my luggage into the station and have it all searched. I was frisked and put through the metal detector. I was asked about my trip, the usual questions. On entering the airport, the same thing happened a second time. On entering the check-in area, it happened for a third time. Only this time, in addition to taking all my luggage apart again (opening dirty laundry, tearing open wrapped gifts, looking at papers and books in my brief case), they also took my camera. I was afraid they would try to erase all the pictures I had taken of checkpoints, home demolitions, settlements, etc. They had several different people interrogate me (just like when I arrived at the airport a week earlier), and one guy went off to the side, about 15 feet away, and started fiddling with the digital camera, looking in the view window and pushing buttons. All the resentment of these interrogations came to a head. I figured I had an American passport and my taxes paid these guys' salaries, and I was getting tired of taking their attitude. I started to get irate, and spoke up to the security man taking my luggage apart in front of me. I pointed to the man playing with my camera. 'What is he doing to my camera? He is looking at my pictures. Those are my personal pictures, my private property. I want my camera back and I want it right now.' He was a bit taken aback, he walked over to the guy playing with me camera, talked to him for a few seconds and took the camera. He walked back and handed it to me. "I'm sorry sir, he was not looking at your pictures, he just was checking to make sure the zoom worked." I looked to make sure my pictures had not been erased. They were all there, along with a new picture of the security man's feet. The one who was playing with the camera had accidentally photographed his own feet.
I have honestly never in my life felt so unwelcome as I did in Tel Aviv. Jennifer was perhaps more angry than I was, and felt sorry that I had been subjected to such scrutiny and even rudeness, while she went through without a hitch. It certainly wasn't her fault. She speculated that in both cases, our names and apparent ethnicities were the determining factor in how we were treated. Given the fact that the same differential treatment played out every time we encountered checkpoints or airport security, it seemed hard to deny. I've been to many places, and nothing I have experienced is even close to Israel in terms of a police state. A few hours later we boarded the plane and flew home.