The Nightmare Before Christmas

Part of my job is to organize the distribution of humanitarian supplies: quilts, health kits, clothing, etc. The lucky children of Aboud village were recipients this past December, and the village council sent us a CD of photos to show all the joy and cheer that was spread at the Christmas party.



Fortunately for these kiddies, Father Christmas comes but once a year.

Gas Gets in Your Eyes

Remember a few blogs back, when I mentioned a change in Israeli policy, which would ban West Bankers from riding in yellow-plated Israeli cars? On our street this week, a taxi driver from the neighborhood was pulled over and arrested by the Israeli police when it was found that his passengers were West Bankers. He was beaten to death in police custody that night. Groups have gathered in mourning and in anger since then, and the Israeli Defense Forces have responded by firing more stun grenades and tear gas canisters, the noises of which have become as frequent and familiar as the call to prayer in this part of the city.


This photo is from two weeks ago, when there was unrest in the city over the excavations near the Temple Mount. For those of you in the know, the yellow awning on the left is the fruit and veg stand.

Prague Spring

My volunteer visa has expired which meant that 1) I had to go on vacation, and 2) I’ve reached my one-year mark in Jerusalem. It’s been a quick-moving one, this past year, and I’m not quite ready to leave, end of contract or no, so I’ll be staying on as a local hire for the next couple months, doing everything I haven’t fit into the past twelve.

Back to my vacation: Karin, Krista and I, in an effort to align our three-month tourist visas, went to Prague for a scant week. The decision was made based on a complex mathematical formula which included the price of airline tickets, the price of hostel rooms, and the quantity of goulash available for consumption. Prague won hands down.
I get bored regaling travel stories, so this blog (or shall I say blague?) will be mainly photos.






Chocolate! Beer! Communists! The best that Prague has to offer.


Krista and I got haircuts at a swanky salon. For 18 hours I looked like a French hair model, and then I just looked scruffy again.

And one of my favorite parts of the city: the multilayered billboards:





We took a day trip to Terezin, a concentration camp a 90-minute drive out of the city. Terezin was a holding camp, rather than an extermination camp, during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Hundreds of thousands of Jews and Czech resisters were held here before being moved on to Auschwitz and other death camps. Thousands still died in the fortress-turned-camp, though, and the walk through the bunk rooms can make you stomach-sick. Perhaps the most disturbing part was that in 1944, two Red Cross delegates and a third friend came to tour the camp to check on the conditions. Why it was okay to have a concentration camp, as long as the conditions were humane, is baffling and sick, but this was the case. Terezin is infamous for the hoax pulled off by the Nazis on this visit. Having advanced notice, they sent the large majority of prisoners off to extermination camps in order to hide the fact that there was over-crowding. Bathrooms were installed at the last minute, long lines of sinks and mirrors were ordered for the “barbershop”, children sat in a very temporary school room, being taught by a teacher for the few hours the Red Cross representatives were in the camp.

These short-lived “humane” conditions and a flowerbed here and there was enough for the Red Cross to give a favorable report of the camp.

Boys Will Be Boys

The soldiers stopping our shared taxi at West Bank checkpoints this weekend were barely past puberty, it seemed. Dwarfed by their huge guns and still acne-prone, these eighteen- and nineteen-year-old “men” leafed through our stack of Palestinian IDs and international passports and determined whether to wave us past the roadblocks or to order everyone out of the van for a round of questioning.

“They’re so young!” exclaimed Christian, a German man working as an accompanier in the Territories, as we stopped at our third checkpoint of the trip, one manned by what looked like a junior varsity basketball team.

A few weeks back, when my sister Karin was visiting, we spent an afternoon in Bethlehem’s Ayda Refugee Camp, where a friend was staying with her charming host family. We drank tea in the living room, taking pictures of and feeding snacks to Rueida, their rambunctious and oh-so-cute three-year-old.


The living room’s wall of windows looked out on what used to be a stunning view of Rachel’s Tomb. Now it faces the snaking cement of the Separation Wall and a watchtower with slit windows.


It was from the small windows of this watchtower that the family’s nephew was shot a few months back. Twelve-years-old and playing on the balcony with a toy gun, this boy was apparently perceived as a security threat by a soldier sitting 100 yards away in this tower. This soldier had a few things to think about before firing the shot: are handguns readily accessible to Palestinians? No. If this is a real handgun, would this twelve-year-old have the aim to get a bullet through one of these Pez-dispenser windows? Probably not. Is he surrounded by several young children? Yes. Sitting in a well-protected tower you would think a soldier would take the time to ask these questions before firing a shot to a crowded balcony of children. But the shot was fired, the nephew got a bullet in his leg (but survived), and the children of the camp now stay off their balconies and duck as they pass by windows in their homes.

“They’re so young” is so true. True of both the Palestinian kids who are traumatized by this Occupation and the soldiers who are given the job of carrying it out.



The boys of Ayda Camp.

JERU!!!! Karin style. Holler.

Karin will be your guest blogger for the day.

Through my travels around the Holy Land, I have pretty much done it all. In 15 days. So here are some things that you should make sure you get around to in your trip to the Holy Land. The order is the recommended sequence of events.
1. Meet a Timbuk2-toting, liberal-bashing, myspace.com-commenting boy on the sherut on your ride from the airport.
2. Visit Neve Shalom Peace Village. This place is the largest source of hope I saw in all of Israel/Palestine.
3. Do some yoga at the Y. No yoga pants? No problem! Pair some painting capris with leg warmers!
4. Go on a day trip with a van-full of kids from one of your prospective colleges. And make sure they sing you all of the songs that one simply must know before attending.
5. Scrabble in the Judean Desert. Just make it happen.
6. Go to the Turkish Baths in Ramallah (Yallah, yallah, lets go to Ramallah!). Make sure you drink water, because it is possible to blackout in the sauna. Apparently.
7. Visit Vered Haglil, a bit north of Tiberias. Try the hot chocolate cake. I kind of liked it.
8. Aroma Café (supposedly branching out to NYC, so watch out!) and hook yourself up with some of the almond croissants while chilling with a health code-breaking cat.
Fat cat lookin’ at the camera.
9. Bike the circumference of the Sea of Galilee in its entirety. It’s even better if you do it on a Lil’Honey kiddie bike, like my bike pro sister, Margit.
10. Visit Ayda refugee camp in Bethlehem, and let yourself be shown around by some teenage boys. I highly recommend the recently released convicts as tour guides; they will move parked cars, if not mountains, to make sure you enjoy your stay.
Two thumbs up for convicted tour guides.


To see what Karin thought about the rest of Israel/Palestine, check out the Karin Rates the Holy Land photo set. Thumbs up and down, she rates it like it is.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/margit/sets/72157594487958372/

Christmas Comes But Thrice a Year

This past weekend was Eastern Orthodox Christmas, about two weeks after the Christmas of the Western Church and about two weeks prior to the Christmas of the Armenian Orthodox Church. People don’t agree on much over here. Having already celebrated “real” Christmas, I and the Browns and their out-of-town friends went down to Bethlehem to participate in the spectacle of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch coming to town. Vying with aggressive news cameramen and the religiously zealous who actually deserved to be there, I threw elbows, ran along with the mob and got pressed flat against the walls of Nativity Church trying to get photos of the Patriarch who I wouldn’t have been able to pick out of a lineup. (Unless he was in the lineup wearing his Greek Orthodox Patriarch garb. That would tip me off.)


Karin and I, caught in the mob. (That’s me and my camera reflected in her lens.)


The one with the scepter? He’s kind of a big deal.


Sebi jostling with the media. He took the above photo of the Patriarch.


“I want to say hi to my mom…” Interview with Al Jazeerah.


Inside Nativity Church, waiting for the Patriarch’s message. (He’s on the far right under the gilt canopy.)

Christmas 2006-07: Two down,

one to go.


On time for the first Christmas, I got a free tree, courtesy of the Israeli government. I still don't understand why, but it turned out real cute.


Also, it snowed. This happens rarely, and snow like this hasn't been seen in Jerusalem in six years, they say.







Our friend Ian, the most charming Scottish minister you could hope to meet, is in town for a few weeks, and we took advantage of his head full of poems to have a Poetry and Noodle Night at my apartment. Sixteen people crammed in for Japanese-inspired sesame noodles and a few hours of recitations and readings. You know you’ve crossed from collegehood into adulthood when you apartment, the morning after a party, is littered with pages of poetry and candles burnt down to the tin husks.

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.