Road Rage

My friend Bassem works down the hall from me, and shows up to work every day in his slick Bassem style: bicep-hugging t-shirts and a black leather jacket. Today Bassem was running around in a dowdy winter parka, looking quite unlike his polished self. Why? Because his leather jacket was a smoldering pile of ashes in the gutted skeleton of his organization’s van.





Daaaaaaang is right. The van was having problems yesterday, so Bassem pulled over, opened the hood, and then watched as the van transformed into a fireball within minutes. Of course he hadn’t bothered to bring his wallet, his cell phone, his passport or his leather jacket for a quick peek under the hood, so all his stuff melted into the pile of ashy rubble that now sits seven inches deep on the floor of the van.

In other traffic reports of recent days, Khaled and Richard, two of my co-workers, have been caught in the quagmire of checkpoints lately. It being the tail end of olive harvest, Richard and Khaled were heading back from the olive press with several gallons of olive oil in the back of the truck. At the checkpoint, though, the Israeli soldiers on duty wouldn’t let them through. This hadn’t been a problem on the previous trip to the press, when I (a white girl) was sitting shotgun. But with the absence of an international face, things are rarely so easy. Richard is from Jerusalem and Khaled from Bethany, a distance of about four miles between the two. But because Khaled is a West Banker, he was told to go through the checkpoint for West Bankers, while Richard could go through the checkpoint for Jerusalemites. If, for some random and likely reason, one of them was denied entry back into Jerusalem, they wouldn’t be able to get in touch with the other, as the two checkpoints are several miles apart. Richard ended up borrowing a car from a friend in the neighborhood, and Khaled took the truck and the oil home for the night, driving it to the office the next morning.

A week after that nuisance, Richard was once again returning (alone this time) from the press with the last crop of oil. Because he’s a Jerusalemite he shouldn’t have any problems accessing Jerusalem from the West Bank, but seeing the olive oil in the back of the truck, the soldiers this time demanded import forms. Here’s one of the infuriating things about living here: The line between Jerusalem and the West Bank is not an international border. If it were, the West Bank might be an independent Palestinian state. Israel treats the Green Line (the West Bank-Israel boundary) as a border when it comes to Palestinians trying to get to get to Jerusalem. But Israel doesn't treat it as a border when the governement builds settlements in the West Bank and underhandedly offers Israeli citizens cheap housing, omitting the fact that the homes are built on Palestinian land. Now they're asking for import forms, but if Israel were to acknowledge that this boundary is indeed an international border, they would no longer have a defense to their occupation of the West Bank. As the rhetoric goes, there is no occupation because the West Bank and Israel are all Israel. How can you occupy your own country? It makes me crazy.

The gears are starting to turn for the latest squeeze in Israel’s stranglehold on the Palestinian’s right to movement. Starting in January, West Bankers are not allowed to travel in yellow-plated cars, which is any car registered in Jerusalem or Israel. This means my boss cannot drive his West Bank employees to a meeting. This means my friend’s co-worker, a Jerusalemite married to a man from Ramallah, cannot travel with her husband in their Jerusalem-registered car. If they are caught riding together they will both be fined, and the car will be confiscated. A 30-minute wait at a checkpoint or having to carry your ID card everywhere or having to apply for travel permits to enter Jerusalem may seem like just a nuisance when viewed as a single event. But when you add together all of these blockades and papers and stupid stupid rules, you end up with the most depressing commute you can imagine, not to mention a lot of humiliation. And if your husband is from the next town over or your checkpoint guard decides to ask for ridiculous documents, or your car spontaneously combusts and your ID card goes up in a fuel-fed blaze, you’re just that much more screwed.

For Christmas this year, consider asking your loved ones for a copy of Jimmy Carter’s new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.


A brief excerpt:

“The overriding problem is that, for more than a quarter century, the actions of some Israeli leaders have been in direct conflict with the official policies of the United States, the international community, and their own negotiated agreements. Regardless of whether Palestinians had no formalized government, one headed by Yasir Arafat or Mahmoud Abbas, or one with Abbas as president and Hamas controlling the parliament and cabinet, Israel’s continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land. In order to perpetuate the occupation, Israeli forces have deprived their unwilling subjects of basic human rights. No objective person could personally observe existing conditions in the West Bank and dispute these statements.”

Preach it, Jimmy! This website (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6543594) has a longer excerpt and a good interview with President Carter.

Palestine, Unionized

The shops of East Jerusalem have been closed the past week, a sign of solidarity with the Gazans who have been under the fire of Israeli shelling. These downtown strikes have been a regular trend since Israel rolled its tanks into Gaza over the summer. An attack on civilians, and East Jerusalemites close down their felafel stands and coffee grinderies. The U.S. election results last week sent the big story over here to the inside pages of the papers: nineteen Gazans, mostly women and children, were killed when an Israeli missile hit an apartment building. That was the event that spurred this most recent strike of East Jerusalem shopkeepers.

Initially, and to some extent still, I feel frustration when these strikes take place. While it’s all well and good to show solidarity and passive resistance, on a practical level these strikes just hurt the Palestinians more. Families still need to buy bread and milk and baby formula, and with the Arab shops shut tight, the business simply crosses to the affluent Israeli half of town. Why not keep the small trickle of money in the Palestinian economy, which needs as much help as it can get?

Two weekends ago I attended a flamenco concert in Bethlehem. It was a full house when I arrived ten minutes late, and I and some friends I saw on the way in sifted throughout the audience into the few empty chairs. About an hour into the show a Palestinian man ran onto the stage and began shouting in Arabic at the audience. When he broke the microphone stand in half and the Spanish dance troupe ran off the stage I figured it wasn’t a planned intermission. When a swarm of men carrying semi-automatic rifles stormed into the hall I figured it was time to find a translator.

“Three men were killed by the Israelis in Bethlehem yesterday,” explained a man next to me. “He says it is a shame we are here celebrating when people are dead. If we don’t all leave there will be violence.” The audience was already up and pushing towards the exit while armed and unarmed men shoved and fought and babies cried among the chaos. I found my friends and we snaked our way through the panicked crowd and made it outside where we headed towards the checkpoint that would let us out of Bethlehem.

In some ways admirable and in some ways incredibly sad and useless, there is something in the society that will not allow for people to forget their fellow Palestinians. In a place where the killing, arrest or harassment of family, friends and neighbors is so frequent an occurrence, any measure of escapism seems like it could only help such a traumatized population. But some part of the culture insists that if others are suffering, one cannot forget that. Solidarity is a strong part of the resistance movement. As an American, I see money not going into a devastated economy and people not allowed to forget tragedy for an evening. To the Palestinians, this is a way to unify their people. Solidarity transcends the checkpoints, travel restrictions, and the Separation Wall that are breaking Palestine into an archipelago of unconnected and starving islands.



The Muslims and Jews are fighting, the Muslims and Muslims are fighting, so of course the Jews need to fight each other as well. The ultra-Orthodox Jews living in the neighborhood of Mea’a Shearim were rioting all of last week in protest of a gay pride parade scheduled for last Friday. There weren’t any gay rights activists in the vicinity during the week, but in protest, trash was spewed across the streets, electrical power boxes were destroyed, and cars were upturned and set aflame by angry ultra-Orthodox. In the end, the parade converted to a rally on a locked-down college campus because of all the death threats from various Orthodox Jews. Twenty-two thousand Israeli police were on duty last Friday to control any outbreaks of violence. From our vantage point on the Mount, we could see smoke billowing from the direction of Mea’a Shearim nearly every night, another SUV set ablaze.

A photo of a calmer, but no less bizarre evening:


Last Supper on the Mount of Olives. Millennia late, two disciples short.

Olive is the New Black

‘Tis the season, and between now and the end of November we have to harvest olives from the 800 trees on our property. I started my harvesting career Monday when 60-some teenage girls came with their school to help pick for the day. Karin and I were in charge, and for about two hours we had a hard working crew. It was around 10 a.m. when we wondered if we should hydrate the free labor.
“I don’t want to distract them,” said Karin.
“But they’re probably thirsty,” I said. So we brought out the juice and that was it. From that point on almost nothing got done. The girls started eating their lunch, wandered off through the grove, sat under trees and talked and chased each other with olive rakes through the rows of trees. The one thing they didn’t do much of was pick olives, but they were nice girls nonetheless, and big fans of the camera:






The hospital and office staff was out later in the week for a more thorough and labor-intensive day.





Clever trick: to filter the leaves and dirt from the olives, they throw platefuls of leaf/olive/dirt mix down a long net. The olives are the heaviest, so they end up at the end of the net, with the debris dropping earlier on.



And it wouldn’t be Palestine if it didn’t involve music, nargila, and massive amounts of meat. The afterparty:

Town and Country

Monday was Yom Kippur, the day when West Jerusalem and the rest of Israel stops in its tracks in atonement. That means no cars are driven, except in cases of emergency. While this is supposed to be the case every Shabbat, they put out roadblocks on Yom Kippur to see that it’s actually followed. The big rocks in the road and the little rocks thrown by orthodox children keep the streets empty for 24 hours. So after work Karin and Phil and I walked down the Mount of Olives, up out of the Kidron Valley, past the Old City and Arab East Jerusalem and into Israeli West Jerusalem. We and a handful of others who were out to observe the emptiness played in the traffic-less streets and took pictures of what is normally the busiest part of town.


Ain’t nothin’ here.


Cute Israeli kids cruising down Jaffa Road.

Phil wanted a photo of himself lying in the middle of the street. As he was getting up a guy on roller blades skated over. “Hey, do that again! I’ll jump over you!”

Coooooool!!!

“Someone told me someone was doing cartwheels over here,” he said after multiple jumps over a supine Phil. That was me. The “worth mentioning” notch on the scale of interest is brought down a few pegs on Yom Kippur, I guess. He was a nice guy, Canadian, living in Jerusalem for a while and working at AOL. He had spent the whole day ‘blading round the empty streets of the city.

Karin, Phil and I then wandered to the Old City, hoping something would be open there. It wasn’t. (Everyone was inside breaking the fast.) Then we wandered back to West Jerusalem as a few of the shops started to unlock their doors. Then we wandered back to the Old City where people were emerging from iftar and filling the streets again.



Was it Burger King that had that mascot with a moon crescent for a head? He was always wearing a tux and playing a piano? Anyone?



Yesterday Karin and I got to go along with Sri, who works with the Mennonites here, to a village northwest of Hebron. There is a needlework co-op in the town that provides employment opportunities to the women of the village. This is Souad showing us the products made by the local women.

“Hayda isimha [this is called] eleven F!” she said, pulling a table runner out of the closet.
“Hayda isimha twenty-two D. Twenty-two D, see?” she said, pointing at a cross-stitched camel. She proceeded to tell us the names of each of the patterns. Fourteen C, seven B, we saw them all.


Here is Souad convincing Karin to marry her son, a successful (and handsome!) lawyer in Ramallah. Go for it, girl!

The Palestinian hills on the way back:


The checkpoint hold-up on the way back:



Chances are I’ll have a 2.5-week blogging hiatus after this entry. When I post again I will likely have
a) exited and re-entered Israel,
b) re-entered and exited the United States,
c) been strip-searched (again) by the friendly employees at Ben Gurion Airport, and
d) a second brother in law.

CAN. NOT. WAIT.

Ramadan Mubarak!

Ramadan, I’ve found, is a party. My exposure to the month was always classmates who couldn’t eat during the day and had a food-free room to escape to during lunch hour at school. I’d always equated Ramadan with Lent, a period of fasting and sacrifice. But while it is that, it’s also a festive time. Family comes in from out of town, and once the cannon is shot off at sundown each day, people don’t just break the fast, they celebrate. After iftar, their evening meal, the streets of East Jerusalem come alive, starting around 10 p.m. and lasting well into the night. This from a city that usually shuts down at six. Special breads and stuffed pancakes I’ve never seen in bakeries are blooming out of every street stall in East Jerusalem. You’re normally an ice cream shop? Now you sell bread. You’re normally vending shoes on the sidewalk? Now you’ve got bread alongside your glittered high-heels. The streets are filled with flat breads and crispy crusted challah loaves and sesame-d lemon-shaped breads that everyone buys but no one can eat until dusk. Except me, that is.

Here are the pancake men working overtime an hour or so before the start of Ramadan. You eat these like a Hot Pocket, stuffed with sweet cheese or spiced nuts.



The boy on the left said Karin and I could take his picture, then chased after us, saying we couldn’t tell his dad and making a throat-cutting motion with his hand. You’re nine years old, you’re smoking, and it’s Ramadan. Yeah, you would get in trouble.



The pediatric department at the hospital is being renovated. The staff is calling the ward Bint al Jabal, after the town in southern Lebanon that the Israeli air force destroyed.



This here is Naji, one of the guards who works the main gate below my apartment:

Along with being a nice guy, Naji was also the person holding my name on a piece of cardboard outside customs when I first arrived in Israel. I tried talking to him in Arabic on that first car ride from the airport to Jerusalem. When I drove with him to Jericho last week, the conversation went a little more easily. We were making a delivery of blankets and health kits to a boarding school in Jericho, and after arriving were invited in to the principal’s office for the requisite cup of Arabic coffee. We did the small talk, exchanged the delivery forms, and Naji checked his watch every couple of minutes.
“We should get back soon,” he said (twice), and we said our goodbyes.
Pulling out of the school’s parking lot, Naji turns onto the road in the opposite direction of Jerusalem. “Let’s go to my grandma’s!” he said.

Most of his family lives in Jericho, and Naji was practically out the door before he parked the van in the front yard. We were bustled inside and pushed onto the gold-velour slipcovered couches while his aunt fed us tea and water and fruit and honeyed dates. Naji’s grandfather counted prayer beads and spoke in simple Arabic to me, and Naji’s good-looking mulleted cousin sat with us when he wasn’t taking one of several cell phone calls in the other room. Naji translated the large portion of conversation I couldn’t follow.
“Now you can speak English, but in school when you studied you couldn’t speak any English!” his aunt teased.

Naji’s English is not bad and he’s fluent in Hebrew—both languages he taught himself while he was in prison during his teen years. Pretty much every Palestinian man you speak to over here has spent some amount of time in prison. A large portion were there for throwing a rock or being accused of throwing a rock at an Israeli tank or a soldier.
“Here it’s not a big thing to go to prison, because it’s everyone,” said Naji.

One last pic, waiting at the checkpoint to get out of Jericho. The vanful of cute kids ahead of us waved at me and then started making faces until Naji shook his finger at them.

Tripod

I’m writing this morning with a dry and scratchy throat and a pressurized sinus cavity. A couple from the Lutheran Church here is on home leave for a month, and I’m watching their sweet apartment and their manic-depressive three-legged cat while they’re out of town. So I put up with some allergies and in exchange get to live in downtown East Jerusalem with a double bed and a DVD player to play with.

M&M, my charge for these few weeks, has mastered the amputee thing quite well. He needs to get a good burst of momentum at the start of a movement in order to keep himself going without the help of a fourth leg. So you open a door, and this fur bomb comes shooting towards you. The marble floors plus his fur makes it difficult for him to stop, though, so he just crashes into door jambs or his water bowl or my legs. He’s also a biter and a scratcher. In short, the sympathy wears off quickly, especially when you’re mopping up his food and water that he’s sent flying for the third time in a day. He gets lots of points for coping skills, but not many for likeability.

M&M in repose.


M&M in action. (Notice the stump.)

This past weekend was the Taybeh Octoberfest Beer Festival, something you don’t pass up on if you’re in the area. “It’s a fun thing to do,” said my boss a few weeks ago. “And fun things don’t happen much over here.” Yes, it’s not common to find a Palestinian village where everyone is happy and most are slightly drunk, but once a year Taybeh, the only 100% Christian village in the West Bank, steps up to the task.

On Saturday we packed a car full of people (with room for the many cases of Taybeh that we brought home) and drove into the beautiful West Bank countryside and the intense late-summer heat to a town known for its Christians and its beer. The community center was swarming with most every international in the Jerusalem area, along with tapped kegs of Taybeh and various Palestinian vendors from area, selling Palestinian needlepoint, peace dove oil lamps and home-grown honey. (You can’t actually eat the comb, I learned…) A few school groups of debka dancers performed on the outside stage, preceded by a less-choreographed performance by one of the drunker locals grooving to the Arabic pop karaoke taking place next to one of the beer stands.

Shake what your momma gave you.




Taybeh Beer Factory



“Load ‘er up!”



There was a recent picnic for the hospital staff. They’re serious about meat-eating here.

Roman Holiday

Woah there.

That’s not the Middle East.

No, I left behind the desert and went to Italy for a week. Besides a lot of pasta, a lot of gelato and a lot of walking, there aren’t loads of details, just pictures. Here are some from Rome:

Romulus and Remus and their she-wolf Momma


This Bernini bust of Medusa is considered not his best work. But they’re fixing her up anyways.


I always thought this was in Greece. Turns out it’s not.


The Marcus Aurelius statue in the Capitoline Museum. That’s my travel pal, Phil, gawking.


Typical Rome.


Typical gelateria.


The Colloseum.


Trevi Fountain.


“What is that smell?”


The Appian Way was the road leading out of ancient Rome, along which wealthy Romans built their mausoleums.


Here’s me trying to recreate one of those 17th century paintings where aristocrats would dress up as peasants and pose in pastoral settings, reading, playing cards, or being awoken by rosy-cheeked shepherd boys. You know, how peasants lived.

Some from Vatican City, which sort of counts as its own country, seeing as they have their own postal service:


Cherubambino.


Nothing wrong with a little holy wine. Me, with the wine-in-a-box you can buy at the Vatican cafeteria, and Bacchus, in the Vatican Museum.


The popes have been hoarding art for centuries now, and just pack the halls full.


Catholic kitsch? You’re in the right place.


Vatican City by night, over the Tiber River.

A Moroccan man was running the hostel where we stayed in Florence. When I heard him counting out my change in Arabic I started talking to him a bit. (I'm relieved to find I can communicate with dialects other than Jerusalem's.) “I knew you were Arab!” he said triumphantly. “I could tell from your eyes!” Here are a couple from Florence:



Here's a security guard locking up Lorenzo Ghiberti's doors to the Florence Baptistry.




The Arno River, which flows through E.M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View. A recommended read.

And finally:

Weird, right? The uncanny resemblance between this Velasquez portrait in the Vatican Museum and former Backstreet Boy Kevin Richardson.