More Middle East: The West Bank

I’d been hearing Rod talk about “Pali” (Palestine) for months, and so when he suggested I come visit during his time there this summer, it didn’t take much leg-pulling to get me to book tickets for a nine-day trip.

My flights were in and out of Tel Aviv. On the front end, I was received by Rod and Sam (our friend in Morocco, also visiting), plus Hammad and Indra (Rod’s friends from Georgetown and co-founders of Inspire Dreams) and Paul and Steph (summer volunteers). We spent the afternoon at a beach on the Mediterranean, and the Palestinian conflict could have been taking place on the moon for all that it felt present.

That evening, Rod’s uncle and his family invited the whole group of us over for Shabbat dinner. Hammad and I joked that we would spend the meal as a tag-team, relieving the pressure of our respective situations as a Palestinian-American and as Rod’s girlfriend. As it turned out, there was no reason for anxiety. Rod’s family was gracious and lively; linguistic barriers were quickly transcended by food, laughter and dancing. I didn’t feel (overly) scrutinized, and the prevailing attitude toward Hammad seemed to be curiosity. As his cousin remarked later, she had never met a Palestinian before, despite her two requisite years in the Israeli military.

After partaking in a bit of the vibrant Tel Aviv nightlife and several hours of humidity-induced restlessness at a local hostel, we set off for the West Bank. Rod’s preferred route consists of a servees (van-like taxi) ride from Tel Aviv to the old city of Jerusalem, walking through the Arab quarters to the Damascus Gate and catching another servees to the checkpoint outside Bethlehem. It was an uneventful journey apart from a “flying checkpoint” wherein two Israelis sucking on popsicles in an armored vehicle pulled over our van and boarded it to check everyone’s ID.

The standing checkpoint was also a snap. As Rod pointed out, the Israelis don’t care who’s entering the West Bank; it’s on the way out of it that the procedure can take hours. All we did was flash the navy blue American passport (more and more I appreciate the power of that thing) and walk through a couple hallways and turnstiles to cross through the infamous Israeli West Bank barrier – and into what I can only describe as a cage. The long passageway to enter Israel, in which people must sometimes wait for hours on end, is concrete wall on one side and metal bars and wire on the other. Concrete underfoot and a partial metal roof overhead. I don’t see how you could feel anything but trapped and animal-like walking inside it.

The wall, 10% of which is an imposing concrete barrier with the rest of it comprised of trenches and wire fencing, is an incredibly controversial construction. Israelis say it's necessary for national security, while opponents of it point out that it encroaches on West Bank land and hinders Palestinian access to services like education and health care.

We emerged onto the outskirts of Bethlehem and were collected by Hammad, Indra and Paul who had traveled ahead of us and picked up a rental car. These first five minutes on the road contained probably the three most impactful moments that I experienced during the whole trip. Seeing the checkpoint in person had been disturbing, but it was more or less what I expected. My first glimpse of a settlement, however, caught me completely off guard.

I suppose I didn’t have a particularly fixed image in my head of what a settlement entailed. It had something to do with my connotations with the word – settlement, settlers, pioneers, covered wagons, tents, tenacity, roughing it. These vague ideas were a far cry from the massive fortress-like structure presiding atop the hill across a valley. Although settlements range in size and substance and can be as small as a several hundred-person farming community, this first one seemed like something out of Star Wars, like a tightly laid-out citadel of fierce block-shaped buildings that had been planted into the strategic high point.

As we drove past the entrance to another settlement some ten minutes later, I picked up on a different quality, something that was almost suburban America: neat rows of palm trees lining the entry road, small squares of grass, a flowered roundabout. The houses – what I could see of them from behind the encircling wall – were replicas of their neighbors in drabness, blockiness and a certain challenging solidity.

We didn’t go inside. For all the time Rod and Hammad have spent in the West Bank, they’ve never been inside one. Access to them is highly restricted. In fact, my second big eye-opener was finding out that there are two separate road systems that run throughout the West Bank, one for the white license plates of Palestinians and one for the yellow-plated Israelis.

It’s not just that the separate roadways lend credence to some people’s designation of the situation as “apartheid,” it’s that the presence of the settlements and their special roads often force Palestinians to take long, winding routes to what should be nearby destinations. The travel time from Hammad’s hometown of Deir Debwan to the city of Ramallah, for example, should be some eight minutes. Instead, because of blocked roads, it takes closer to thirty-eight.

The land area of the West Bank is a little more than a fifth the size of Vermont, while its population of 2.5 million is almost five times that of Vermont's.

Apparently transportation used to be even more frustrating a couple years back, after the second intifada in 2000. There were more blockades and more checkpoints, some of them only traversable on foot, effectively preventing large-scale trade in and out of certain cities. Clamping down on movement and then loosening up on it is an effective form of controlling discontentment within the West Bank: Palestinians are so relieved for the increased freedom that they forget how many limitations remain in place.

For instance, driving from Bethlehem to Ramallah, we passed a checkpoint that the boys told me is normally a formality. The Israeli soldiers just wave people through. Not that day. Our traffic flow was fine but the cars moving the other direction, from Ramallah to Bethlehem, were at a complete standstill, backed up for a mile. Even though it was the soldiers who were holding them up for hours without notification, the drivers’ frustration couldn’t be directed at them, so the handful of honking horns and waved fists that we saw were aimed at other Palestinians. Mostly, though, the line-up felt subdued, people sitting quietly in the heat awaiting permission to continue on their journeys.

As we made our way past the traffic and descended into a valley, I was struck again by my third revelation: the West Bank is a place. It sounds silly, I know, but the truth is that until crossing through that first checkpoint, the West Bank existed as an idea only, or as a symbol, a pair of words that connoted conflict, perhaps, or injustice or Islam or terrorism. But it’s a place: it is scrubby and sun-bleached and contains more ups and downs than a roller coaster. It has cities like Hebron, Nablus, Jericho and Ramallah, and it has small towns and people who live in all of them. I don’t think this realization of a place’s place-ness is something unique to the West Bank – indeed it’s part of the reason why we travel – but I do suspect that the West Bank is more susceptible to idea-ness because of its prominent place in the news and because its name stands for something beyond a small strip of rocky hills. Well, it was good to see the hills.

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Rod, Hammad and Indra founded the Inspire Dreams organization during their final years at Georgetown with the help of a Projects for Peace grant. The idea was to run weeklong summer day camps for refugee children in several of the refugee camps around the West Bank (not Gaza, the other Palestinian territory, into which only diplomats, aid workers and journalists are allowed). These children constituted a largely neglected population because of the “scary” reputation of the impoverished refugee camps. Not only would Camp I Have a Dream reach out to them directly, its structure would also encourage other NGOs and local entities to get involved by bringing them in to run workshops on everything from basketball to photography to acting. The overall aim was to stimulate the kids to “have a dream,” to raise their thinking and their goals beyond the limitations imposed by their circumstances.

Palestinian refugees are those Palestinians who fled homes located in what is now the state of Israel during and after the 1948 war. A 2008 count put their number at over 4.5 million, living in nineteen camps in the West Bank, eight in Gaza and even more in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.

Since 2007, the boys have been back to Palestine several times, running the program in four refugee camps with some thirty or forty children in each session. This summer they even brought six of their own volunteer interns. While I was there, Camp I Have a Dream was in its last session, at the Jalazon camp near Ramallah.

I was able to help out for a couple days, mainly entertaining my group by introducing them to funny Moroccan Arabic words like waxaa, mezyaan, zween and bizzef. The participants run around the ages of eleven or twelve, and I was not surprised to find that my overwhelming impression of them was that they were just kids, like any other kids: shy, by turn, or loud and obnoxious, fidgety, picky, stubborn. A handful were astoundingly creative and poised.

Dismaying was the ideology-infused atmosphere. The boys have strived to make it clear to the local community centers and volunteers they work with that Camp I Have a Dream is not about promoting the Palestinian cause but rather working with the children as children. During the Jalazon session, however, several local women were on hand to observe the activities, and occasionally they would jump in to help kids with questions posed to them, pounding out sharp grievances against the Israelis and enumerating the Palestinian plights. At the end of one day, the center directors insisted on taking a group photo in front of a monument to Yassar Arafat.

And the kids themselves had clearly absorbed the rhetoric: the name they came up with for our team, for example, was “hobe al-ard,” or “love of the land,” and some of the team songs suggested were protest songs or chants. Catchwords like “freedom” and “homeland" were thrown around with enthusiasm, but it's difficult to believe that these eleven year-olds truly understood the goals they were nominally espousing. With all due respect to the oppression faced by Palestinians, I have to say that this kind of ideological brainwashing makes me sick.

Furthermore, on a practical level, I think I agree with Rod in questioning the productivity of the particular Palestinian narrative of victimhood and helplessness. Foreign policy expert that he is, Rod doesn’t believe that “woe is me” will ultimately bring about any kind of Palestinian autonomy, either from players within the conflict or from the international community. The odds may be incredibly stacked against them, even more so when we take into account the Israeli political maneuverings that seek to undermine Palestinian leadership and legitimacy, but Rod insists that they must make an effort to build up their own state rather than floundering in ideology, in-fighting, corruption and mismanagement.

While I can’t speak to the political side of things, it does seem intuitive that raising children to consider themselves powerless victims, forever blaming an external enemy for their problems (no matter how much that may truly be the case), constitutes an unhealthy practice for both the individual child and the community writ large. I don’t mean to suggest that they should forget their circumstances but only that they be combated from a more positive, can-do, life-giving mindset. Three cheers to Inspire Dreams for striving to cultivate just such an attitude among these refugee children.

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In the afternoons and once the Jalazon camp wrapped up, there was time to explore other cities and sites in the West Bank…

Ramallah: Although its population is less than 30,000, Ramallah is the liberal cultural capital of the territory with a nightlife scene vibrant enough to warrant a New York Times travel article on it. Apparently some travelers to the West Bank who only visit Ramallah leave wondering the Palestinian fuss is all about, when it should be obvious that the bars, clubs and restaurants are what my friend Alma describes as a “persistent attempt at normalcy amid totally surreal conditions.” Conversely, Rod made the point that many bleeding-heart activists who come to town don’t engage with the lively social scene but see only tribulation. There’s a balance to be struck here.

Taybeh Brewery: A group of us took an afternoon trip to this brewery in a small Christian town also called Taybeh. Advertising itself as the producer of the finest beer in the Middle East and of the only Palestinian beer (no great surprise there), the company was founded in the 1990s under the premise that political independence must have a foundation in economic independence. The beer is made with all-natural ingredients and: it’s delicious.

The Mount of Temptation: Located just outside the city of Jericho (the lowest inhabited place on earth) is a gondola (the lowest on earth) that will take you to up to a Greek Orthodox monastery built into the side of a mountain believed to be the site of Jesus’ fast of forty days and nights and his subsequent resistance of the devil’s efforts to tempt him away from God. Paul, Rod and I enjoyed the heat and the view with a small group of Asian tourists.

Hebron: Second only to the city of Nablus in size (population: over 160,000) and conservativeness (no woman left unscarved), Hebron is probably best known for the fierceness of tensions between its Palestinian population and the several hundred Jewish settlers occupying a section of the old city. Walking down a market street toward the settlement, wire mesh appears overhead, cluttered with trash thrown onto by the settlers, who also sometimes hurl more damaging substances like eggs and acid. The street becomes progressively vacated and more and more shops are barred-up with big padlocks. Samir, a Palestinian American friend of the Inspire Dreams volunteers, pointed out to Steph, Hannah and I where he had witnessed Israeli soldiers force the closure of several shops two days prior; another volunteer had caught the accompanying beating of resisting Palestinians on camera. The shuttered area is supposed to serve as a buffer zone between the Palestinians and the settlers.

At the end of the street is the Ibrahimi Mosque, also known as the Cave of the Patriarchs. Revered as the second holiest site in Judaism and similarly meaningful to Muslims, this building and series of subterranean caverns is said to house the tombs of three Biblical couples: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and Leah. In 1994, a radical Israeli settler named Baruch Goldstein entered the mosque with an assault rifle and killed twenty-nine Muslims at prayer, injuring 125 others. The ensuing riots resulted in the deaths of twenty-six more Palestinians and nine Israelis. Security is tighter these days, although foreigners are normally allowed into the Muslim side of the mosque, where apparently the bullet holes from the attack are still evident. (We couldn’t go inside because Ramadan had just begun.)

Bethlehem: One of the smaller West Bank cities (population around 25,000), Bethlehem sits just across the wall from Jerusalem and was built up with the hopes of becoming a destination for a range of travelers and pilgrims. The second intifada and subsequent security crackdown put something of a damper on this goal, but it’s still probably the most accessible and visited site in the West Bank. The main attraction is the Church of the Nativity, built over the spot where Mary is believed to have given birth to Jesus. Spilling almost into downtown is the Dheisheh refugee camp, where Inspire Dreams has cooperated for several years with a local community center.

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I’m not going to offer any general thoughts or conclusions because I just arrived back in Morocco two days ago and am still processing everything. What I’ve written about here is an account of my particular trip and some of my very initial reactions to what I saw and experienced. Don’t take anything I’ve said as gospel. On the contrary, ponder it, question it, research it further. Remember that what the West Bank stands for is an incredibly complicated issue that only becomes more complicated the more you know about it. But remember, too, that the West Bank is a place, with real valleys and real roads and real people: refugees, hipsters, politicians, settlers, aid workers and, of course, the occasional traveler passing through for a week or two.