Tag: +972

The Long Road to Bethlehem Part Four

by adminin Middle East, Palestine, Writing

+972, December 19, 2015

“I’m leaving.” I tell people in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. The words sound unexpected and foreign in every language, as though someone else is speaking them. While I’ve resigned from my post at the university and someone has already been hired to teach my fall classes, I haven’t given my landlady a firm answer as to whether or not I’m vacating the apartment, never mind a last-day-here-date. Nor have I begun to dismantle a houseful of stuff, the accumulations of a life.

My place looks like I’ll stay there forever. But tomorrow I’ll head to the US for a month; first to an artists’ residency in Vermont, then I’ll head to New York City, where Mohammad will join me. There, he’ll meet my family and we’ll attend my aunt’s wedding. After that, he’ll head to Florida to start his new life there. I’ll return to the West Bank as I’m scheduled to teach a two-week class at the end of the summer. We will spend July and August apart.

It’s our last afternoon together in Bethlehem. Our impulse is to pass the time in the garden, picking mish mish baladi (a local variety of apricot), sipping tea, and taking in the view. But we decide to pay a visit to the streets, alleys, and buildings that witnessed our courtship.

We head out, passing an old, large house like the one I live in. The limestone is the color of sand, the arched windows are framed by glistening white stone. We pass the French school—a stately building of rose-tinted stone surrounded by a blue gate—and we duck into an alley that cuts through the Christian quarter. It’s a residential area; there’s laundry hanging, the sounds of knives on cutting boards, the smell of food, voices, doors ajar reveal porches lined with potted plants.

On a white arch, red, spray-painted graffiti reminds the passerby: Palestine. I’m puzzled—everyone in this area is local and the word is written in Arabic. Why would someone in this neighborhood need to proclaim this Palestine to other Palestinians? Or was it something more personal, the artist’s way of asserting to himself or herself that Palestine persists?

We cross the plaza adjacent to the Church of Nativity and pass the tourist shops with their bright scarves flapping in the wind. As we climb the stairs next to the souq, we pass several gold stores. The moment we notice the jewelry, it’s obvious to both of us that my engagement ring should come from Bethlehem.

We go into one store and find a ring we like but decide to keep looking. In the second shop, we find an unusual ring—the edges are wavy rather than straight. We’ve never seen anything like it. I try the ring on my right hand—where I’ll wear it when we’re engaged as is the custom in Palestine. I move it to my left, as we will when we get married. It fits both hands perfectly. I head home alone while Mohammad haggles and pays.

When he joins me at the apartment, he’s holding a small plastic bag. I can see the outline of a box inside.

“I can’t give it to you today,” Mohammad says, adding that he wants to surprise me. But I know from previous conversations that he’s conflicted about getting engaged without his parents’ knowledge and blessing. This is especially true while we’re in the West Bank. I’m reminded, yet again, of how impossible a shared life would be here, that if we want to be together, we have no choice but to leave.

In the earliest hours of the morning, a driver from East Jerusalem arrives. “Omar,” as I’ll call him, already knows my ID situation and he knows how to avoid soldiers. He greets me on the street in Arabic; with the windows rolled down, we’re careful to stay in the language until we’re out of Area A. Once we’re on a settler road, we switch to Hebrew because it’s the easiest way for us to have a conversation. We chat all the way to Ben-Gurion Airport about everything—his family which includes a wife and four children, the situation in East Jerusalem, his thoughts about the Jews, the difficulties Mohammad and I have faced.

Omar is certain that if we really want to make it work, we can. He’s sure that, once we’re married, Mohammad’s parents will come around.

“If we get married,” I correct him.

***

Just a few days before Mohammad is supposed to leave for America, three Israeli teenagers—Eyal Yifrach, Naftali Fraenkel, and Gilad Shaar—disappear in the West Bank. The army focuses its efforts in Hebron and the surrounding villages; Hebroni men below the age of 50 are not allowed to exit the West Bank. Although he lives in Ramallah, Mohammad was born in one of those villages of Hebron; its name is written in Hebrew on his ID card. There’s no hiding where he comes from. Will he be able to cross Allenby Bridge into Jordan? Will he make it to my aunt’s wedding? Will he meet my parents? If he can’t get out of the West Bank, we wonder, how long will he be stuck there?

***

Two days before his flight, Mohammad decides to try his luck at the bridge. He gets through.

And then it’s the evening of his arrival; his plane will land in just a few hours. I don’t know what to do with myself in the meantime, so I dress up like I’m going to a party. I put on a one-shouldered black and white striped dress. I have a painful hairline fracture in my left foot and the top of my foot is swelling a bit but I wince and cram it into a black high heel. I slide into the other shoe, apply make-up, and pull my hair up. Some jewelry, perfume, a swipe of lipstick and I head to the subway.

As I ride the train to JFK airport, a couple of young black women board and sit across from me. One points at me and says to her friend, “Ooooo, look at princess, all dressed up. Don’t she look good?” They fall into each other, laughing. When they catch their breath, they continue to taunt me.

I grew up in the Deep South so this sort of thing isn’t new to me. And, as a public school kid, I saw enough white on white and white on black and black on black violence to know that the girls are looking for a reaction, that they’re trying to provoke me.

I avoid eye contact but settle into to my seat. I feign nonchalance—I lean back, cross my legs, and examine my nails. I play with the silver bangles on my right arm, counting them, rearranging them. When I realize my fidgeting makes me look nervous, I stop, pull a collection of Hebrew short stories out of my purse, and do my best to concentrate on the words on the page.

Still, the taunting gets to me, in part because I resent the assumptions behind it. But I can’t tell these girls that I grew up in a neighborhood that probably wasn’t so different from theirs; I can’t tell them about the free lunch days; I can’t tell them how we qualified for food stamps but my mom was too proud to take them; I can’t tell them that I was the only “white girl” on the bus to elementary school and that the black kids reminded me of that every day. “White girl, white girl,” they said when I boarded. I can’t tell them that those children never bothered to ask my name, nor did they ask themselves how it was that we lived on the same side of town and rode the same bus. Nor did they ask why when we all went through the lunch line together I—like them—didn’t have to pay.

I can’t tell these girls that I’m going to meet my partner at the airport because we aren’t afforded the right of living together in what’s supposed to be our land. I can’t tell them that we’re moving to America hoping to avoid exactly the kind of thing that’s happening on the train right now.

I’m angry and disappointed. Even though Mohammad hasn’t even arrived yet, I want to protect him from these type of encounters. I wonder if—with his rosy view of the U.S. in general and of New York City, in particular—he’ll be even more disappointed than I am when something like this happens again. And it’s inevitable that it will.

Still, I keep my mouth shut. I remind myself where these girls are coming from and how, despite the poverty I experienced as a child, my light skin has afforded me some privilege. I understand that they feel voiceless and that it’s easier to pick on a white girl alone on a train than it is to tackle the enormous and deep inequalities that are part of the fabric of American life. So I sit and take it until they leave.

***

I have Mohammad’s flight number memorized. When I get to JFK, I find it on the arrivals board—on time—and head to the customs gate. There’s a crowd milling about. I ask an Asian woman with glasses if she’s waiting on the flight coming from Heathrow, which is where Mohammad had his layover. She is.

“Have any passengers come out?”

“No, not yet.”

I find a place to stand. My left foot throbs. I clench my teeth against the pain. I make a fist and dig my nails into the palm of my hand. I will not take these shoes off. I will look perfect when he steps into the terminal. We will have our happy ending.

I edge closer to the frosted, sliding glass doors. I find myself in the middle of the aisle, step aside, only to realize I’m right in front of someone. I excuse myself, move closer to the doors. Put my purse down between my feet. Pick it up, put it back on my arm. Move again, repeat, like some bizarre sort of square dance sans partner.

The frosted doors slide open and, the passengers begin to trickle out. Their faces hopeful, they scan the waiting crowd. That flash of recognition, a smile, a wave. Their gait speeds up, they rush towards their loved ones.

The crowd thickens as the passengers meet their families and friends. It thins as they move on to collect their luggage. Soon, it’s just a handful of people left, waiting. The doors are shut again. Where’s Mohammad? I worry that maybe there was something wrong with his visa. Or maybe he’s being questioned. No, this isn’t Israel. But sometimes the U.S. doesn’t seem so different.

Or maybe I’m at the wrong gate.

I ask a black woman with short hair if this, indeed, is the flight from Heathrow. “I sure hope so,” she laughs.

A moment later, she’s waving at a man striding towards her. They hug and off they go, his carry-on rolling behind him.

There’s just a few of us left at the gate.

Maybe Mohammad fell asleep during his layover and missed the flight, I think.

The doors slide open and a man in a bright blue uniform comes out. Homeland Security. I brace myself, certain he’s going to come tell me that they’ve detained Mohammad. Instead, he turns and opens a door at the end of the hall. I see people inside. It looks like some sort of waiting room. Is Mohammad in there?

The glass doors part and another Homeland Security official emerges. He heads down the hall and into the same room. I try to get a peek but can’t.

And then the glass doors part again and it’s Mohammad. He dons a wool sports coat—I know without asking him that he wore it so he could save space in his luggage—a white linen button down shirt, jeans, and leather shoes. He’s got only one bag and a backpack with him. He puts them down and we hug.

“Hayati,” my life, he says as we hold each other.

***

It’s the morning after Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian in Ramallah, just meters from Mohammad’s old office. We’re headed to Coney Island for the day and, in a bid to keep our expenses down, are filling his backpack with snacks and bottles of tap water. I unzip a pocket only to find the ring from Bethlehem. Not wanting to blow the surprise, I don’t say anything about my discovery. I continue stocking the backpack.

When we get to Coney Island, we start at the aquarium. Inside, it’s cool, dark, and quiet—save for a school group that weaves through the place, puncturing the silence like a radio suddenly turned up to full volume. We linger at each tank, watching fish flit against endless turquoise waters, admiring electric-fluorescent skins and glimmering scales that seem to change colors as their wearer curves around rocks. I forget about Brooklyn, Israel, Palestine—the world—as I follow the fishes’ meanderings.

When we step outside, the day is hot, the sky cloudless and bright. The light is painful to our eyes, which have adjusted to the aquarium’s dim lighting. We squint.

Mohammad’s phone rings. It’s his brother calling from the West Bank—not the brother I’ll meet soon, in Florida, but one I’ve never met. When Mohammad answers, the phone disconnects. It rings again. And, again, Mohammad picks up only to hear nothing on the other end.

Mohammad tells me he’s worried something has happened—why else would his brother keep calling and calling like this? He sits on the nearest bench, clutching the phone in his hand, staring down at it. He tries to ring his brother but gets a busy signal.

This goes on for nearly half an hour until they finally manage to connect. Mohammad’s voice is full of relief when his brother answers. He smiles and laughs when he realizes everything is fine. He tells his family that New York is good and talks about his trip. But he’s careful to do so only in first person singular. “I.” There’s no “we” or “us.” There’s no Mya in any sentence. No mention of the fact that he’s met my aunt and her fiancé, my favorite cousin, my grandfather, that in a few days he’ll meet my parents.

If there’s a real emergency in Palestine at some point and Mohammad has to go home, I wonder, will he quietly omit me then, too? Will I stay alone in the States—maybe with children—so he can head back free of his unacceptable Jewish wife? And what if he has to stay in the West Bank for whatever reason? What will happen to me?

Intellectually, I understand his situation. Still, I can’t bear sitting there, listening to him talking about his solo trip to New York City. Listening to him talk to the family I’ve never met, who don’t know that he’s bought a ring and that we’ll soon be engaged.

I mime that I’m going to the bathroom. When I lock myself in a stall, I stand, focusing on my breathing. I try to stifle the voice in my head that’s telling me I’m a fool to have quit my job when I’m not even sure that he has, indeed, told his family about me at all. I try not to wonder why I’m following him to Florida, a place that holds few opportunities for me in a country I have no desire to live in.

Later that day, Mohammad proposes to me. We’re on the Ferris wheel, suspended in the sky, Coney Island tiny and insignificant below. My heart should be floating, too. But the unmovable earth awaits us.

***

The day Mohammad flies to Florida, the three Israeli teenagers who disappeared in June are laid to rest. Late that night, Jewish settlers kidnap Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a 16-year-old boy from East Jerusalem and drive him to the woods. They take him to the forest adjacent to Kiryat Yovel. There, between the trees where Mohammad and I took our first picture together, the Israeli men commit a murder beyond brutal. They force the boy to drink gasoline. They soak his thin body in the liquid and set him alight while he’s still alive. His last breaths were full of ash.

Now East Jerusalem is burning on the muted TVs at the gate at JFK, where I await my flight to Tel Aviv. Palestinians are clashing with Israeli forces. The scene flashing before me is unfolding on streets I’ve driven and walked, roads I’ll be on again in just a matter of hours as I take public transportation from Ben-Gurion Airport to Jerusalem and then to Bethlehem.

I realize Mohammad will not be coming to spend every weekend with me this summer. I’ll be alone, the West Bank simmering around me.

***

An American-Israeli friend stayed in my apartment and took care of my cat while I was in the States. He’d been contemplating a move to Bethlehem; my place was his trial run.

I arrive home to find that he’s already left.

He emails me, explaining that the situation has been very tense. Israeli forces have been raiding houses in Beit Sahour—which is just down the road from my apartment. And my friend almost got nabbed by soldiers when he took the bus in to Jerusalem recently.

He’s had enough and went back the previous day.

I’ve always felt safe in Bethlehem but, when I go to bed that night—with Israeli tanks and troops amassing on the Gaza border and Hamas firing rockets into the south—I think about something a Palestinian friend said to me in December, during the Christmas party Mohammad and I hosted. I’d had a little too much to drink and found myself, more than once in the evening, slipping into Hebrew. The friend, a close friend of Mohammad’s, realized I must have an Israeli ID and pulled me aside.

“I’m scared for you,” he said, in Arabic. He emphasized that he, personally, had no problem with me living in Bethlehem. He knows me, he knows my politics, he loves me and he loves me and Mohammad together.

“But there are people who don’t think like me,” he continued. “And if they find out that you’re here, alone—I’m scared for you.”

Six months later, as something stirs in the garden, I remember his words. I think of the family of settlers who were killed in Itamar in 2011. I recall the student who waited for me after class one day. “So, I heard you’re Jewish,” she began. “I really admire you for teaching here. You’re so brave. Anyone could bring a gun to campus and shoot you.”

I tell myself that there’s no one in the garden. It’s just the wind, I think, reminding myself that I’m not a settler. And I curse myself for thinking like a racist, paranoid Israeli, for being so self-centered and so self-important as to lie in bed thinking anyone would care that I—one person, a harmless woman who works at a Palestinian university and rents from a Palestinian landlady and is not occupying anyone’s home—am here and that they would be so bothered as to do something about it.

Outside leaves skitter across the garden’s stone path.

Or are those footsteps, someone walking through the leaves?

I try to think things through. The house is nestled into the side of a hill, on an old olive terrace. It’s at least a ten foot drop to the orchard below and then another huge leg-breaking-jump down to the road. So for someone to get into the garden, they’d have to scale not one but two stone walls. I’m completely safe.

The leaves rustle again. I think of the three settlers who disappeared (but you’re not a settler! I remind myself again) and I think of Abu Khdeir. Most Israelis wouldn’t kill a Palestinian. And most Palestinians wouldn’t kill me. But both sides have their extremists and these are tense times.

My mind fills then with angles—the various trajectories a bullet could take if it was fired into my bedroom from different positions.

I remind myself that my bedroom is on the other side of the enclosed porch that also has bars on the window. It would be quite a shot, aiming through the bars of one window towards another barred window.

Still, I can’t sleep.

I slide out of bed and, staying below the window, edge towards the armoire. I remove some blankets and I make a nest on the floor in the “blind spot” between the bed and the bureau, where no bullets could possibly reach.

The sun rouses me in the morning. As I wake and remember why I’m on the floor, I feel ashamed. I fold the blankets and put them back in the bureau. I make the bed and look at the room, which is full of light. It’s like last night never happened.

I make some Nescafe, grab an ice pack and a towel for my still-fractured foot, and take a seat in the garden. My cat joins me. It’s a beautiful summer day. I tell myself that everything is fine, that everything will be just fine.

Asylum seekers mourn lynched Eritrean man

by adminin African refugees, Israel, Writing

+972 Magazine, October 23, 2015

Hundreds of Eritreans and Sudanese nationals gathered in south Tel Aviv’s Levinsky Park Wednesday evening to mourn Habtom Zerhum, the asylum seeker who was shot and severely beaten Sunday night during a terrorist attack in the Beer Sheva bus station.

They lit candles and wept.

Desale Tesfay, 35, from Eritrea, explained to +972 that the gathering also served as a moment for members of the community to come together and talk and support one another.

Mourners expressed shock and anger at the accidental killing of the innocent man, who was mistaken for a terrorist and shot by a security guard. Some, like Tesfay, also criticized the Israeli government, calling on it to formulate a meaningful policy to help asylum seekers.

Speaking quietly during a moment of silence, Tesfay reflected on Zerhum’s life and violent death.

“He’s a human being who ran from [Eritrea] because there’s no democracy there,” Tesfay explained. “He was a young man who didn’t do anything wrong, he went to renew his visa and look what happened to him.”

Tesfay left Eritrea in 2008 after he was forcibly conscripted to the Eritrean army for eight years, for very little pay and with no end in sight. “It’s a dictatorship, that’s why we left. If it was a democracy, we wouldn’t be fleeing.”

When asked if Israel is also a democracy, Tesfay laughed long and hard.

“Yes, there’s democracy here, as they say, for their people [the Jews]. But for the refugees?”

Tesfay, a father of two, points out that his children cannot receive Israeli citizenship even though they were both born here. His visa stipulates that he does not have permission to work. And, when Tesfay arrived in 2008, he spent six months in Saharonim prison, without trial.

He added that while he has not been summoned to Holot, the desert detention facility where Israel sends asylum seekers, he feels like he is “still in prison.”

“It’s like the government put a long string here,” he said, pointing to his ankle. “I go to work, I come home and [otherwise] I don’t move.”

“Now, today, we are supposed to go to jail again,” he said, referring to Holot. “It’s not how things should be. We don’t deserve jail. What did we do? We requested [protection] as refugees.”

Tesfay said he does not fear for his personal safety after what happened to Zerhum. But because he has no rights in Israel, he added, he feels he must accept whatever happens to him “quietly… even if someone comes to kill me.”

Next to us, the mourners began to wail again.

The lynching of Habtom Zarhum: A history of incitment

by adminin African refugees, Writing

+972 Magazine, October 20, 2015

An Eritrean asylum seeker was mistaken for a Palestinian during ashooting attack at the Be’er Sheva bus station Sunday night. Habtom Zarhum, 29, was shot by a security guard who thought he was a terrorist and then – as the asylum seeker lay bleeding on the ground – civilians kicked him, cursed and spat on him. A bystander bashed his head in with a bench.

In a video that circulated on social media Sunday night, one man is seen holding a chair over Zarhum. It is not clear whether he was trying to harm the asylum seeker or protect him.

The video also shows a small number of policemen and civilians trying to stop the mob from further harming Zarhum. But their efforts were unsuccessful. At one point a man walks through the loose ring they’d formed around Zarhum, who was writhing in pain, and casually kicks his head like a soccer ball as he passes the already bloody and battered asylum seeker.

When medical personnel arrived, a crowd that was chanting “Death to Arabs” tried to prevent them from reaching Zarhum. The medics first treated the wounded Jewish Israelis. The asylum seeker was reportedly the last to receive help.

Zarhum later died of his injuries. Police on Tuesday said they were waiting to charge anybody in the death until an autopsy clarified whether the gunshot or the beatings caused his death.

Israeli media quickly labeled the incident a “lynch.” Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s top-selling daily newspaper, ran a photograph of Zarhum lying in his own blood and trying to protect his head, on the front page of Monday’s paper with the caption “A terrible mistake.” The article inside the paper was titled: “Just because of his skin color.”

Members of Israel’s African asylum seeker community expressed sadness and shock. Asylum seekers who are currently imprisoned in the Holot detention facility — where they are held for no specific crime and without trial for 12 months — held a vigil yesterday in Zarhum’s memory.

Dawit Demoz is a 29-year-old asylum seeker from Eritrea who has been in Israel since 2009. He criticized the security guard who shot Zarhum for using racial profiling, “You don’t just shoot [because of] the way [someone] looks. [Zarhum] didn’t do anything, he was trying to escape like everyone else… he was just trying to run away from the terrorist.”

Activists, asylum seekers and refugee advocates Israel were quick to point to the incitement directed toward African asylum seekers — by politicians, state institutions and the media — as necessary context for the killing in Be’er Sheva. “You leave a horrible situation [in Eritrea or Sudan] and when you come here and call yourself an asylum seeker, [the government and media] call you an infiltrator,” Demoz explained, referring to the term the Israeli government and media use to refer to African asylum seekers, a term rights groups have long decried as derogatory and inflammatory.

In death, however, Israeli media has taken to calling Zarhum an asylum seeker, “the Eritreat,” and in some cases, even a refugee. Police, strangely, began referring to him as a “foreign subject.”

Rotem Ilan, head of the migration department at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, echoed the same sentiment. “You can see the difference between how the media talks about asylum seekers every day and how they talk about them when they die. Suddenly, they don’t use the word infiltrator,” she said, “suddenly he’s a human being.”

The lesson Ilan hopes that Israel will take from this incident, she continued, is “to treat people as human beings while they’re still alive.”

Some 45,000 African asylum seekers, most of whom are from Eritrea and Sudan, are currently in Israel. Authorities systematically reject or ignore almost requests for refugee status by African applicants. Israel has granted refugee status to only four Eritreans and no Sudanese nationals. In the European Union, by comparison, Eritrean asylum seekers’ applications for refugee status receive a positive answer 84 percent of the time.

At the height of their migration to Israel, there were 60,000 asylum seekers but numbers have waned as a result of an official policy to “make their lives miserable” and encourage those who are here to leave. Numerous Israeli officials have called African asylum seekers a demographic threat.

While Israel cannot deport Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers directly back to their countries of origin — because it would blatantly violate the principle of non-refoulement — most of the asylum seekers who live here do not receive work visas. With no legal way to survive, they work low-paying black market jobs where they face exploitation.

Israel has also tweaked its 1954 Prevention of Infiltration law, which was initially created to stop Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes, broadening the legislation to imprison African asylum seekers. The Israeli High Court of Justice rejected the legislation that authorized indefinite detention twice as unconstitutional, and upheld a third version while limiting the administrative detention of asylum seekers to one year.

Some activists, like Ilan, are pointing a finger at politicians for fomenting the conditions of xenophobia and vigilante violence that led to Zarhum’s death.

In the wake of stabbing attacks carried about Palestinians from East Jerusalem and the West Bank, politicians and state officials — including Knesset Member Yair Lapid, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, and the Jerusalem District Police Commander Moshe Edri — have encouraged Jewish Israelis to arm themselves and to “shoot to kill,” as Lapid put it. Last week, human rights groups issued a public letter expressing their concern about such statements.

ACRI, where Ilan works, sent an additional letter to the country’s attorney general warning of the consequences of such dangerous rhetoric.

“In such a tense time the leader’s job is to calm things down not to add fuel to the fire,” Ilan reflected. “In our letter we said that the end result of this current atmosphere and [politicians’] careless [remarks] is that innocent people will be hurt. This is what we saw yesterday.”

Unfortunately, this is far from the first time asylum seekers have experienced violence at the hands of Jewish Israelis. For years, the community has dealt with near-constant, low-level violenceaccentuated by more serious attacks. Things boiled over in 2012, when a small race riot broke out in south Tel Aviv after Knesset Member Miri Regev, who is part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, called African asylum seekers a “cancer in our body.”

When asked whether or not he feels safe in light of yesterday’s events, Demoz sighed and answered, “I don’t know what I’m feeling really. It’s hard for me to answer this question.”

*While the Israeli media has identified Zarhum as Haftom Zarhum, he has been identified by the African Refugee Development Center as Habtom Zerhom.

 

Which is the ‘right’ side of the Green Line these days?

by adminin Israel, Palestine, Writing

+972 Magazine, October 12, 2015

Thursday morning: I wake up and check the news this morning to see what happened last night and then head to the doctor’s in north Tel Aviv. I’m 24 weeks pregnant — yes, with a Jewish-Palestinian baby. My physician in Florida, where we live now, has advised me to keep up with my medical care in Israel even though I’ll only be here for six weeks to freshen up my research for the book I’ve just sold.

I’m a few minutes late to my appointment . When the doctor’s door opens, the woman who is scheduled after me steps right on in. She shuts the door in my face. I check the list next to the door and announce the time of my appointment aloud.

“So, it’s your turn,” the other women who are waiting say. They urge me to knock and assert myself.

I knock and the patient who just entered opens the door. “I’m sorry,” I begin, “but I had the 8:40 appointment.”

She shrugs, smiles. “But you were late.” And the door slams shut in my face again.

“Israelim,” Israelis, one of the women smirks.

When the door opens again and the patient emerges, I’m quick to make my way into the doctor’s office. We talk for a few minutes about what tests I’ve already had in the States, their results, and how I’m feeling. At my American doctor’s insistence, I’ve brought my medical records with me. I offer them to the doctor. He says they’re not necessary and then he sends me on my way to get checked for gestational diabetes.

As I’m leaving, there’s a commotion in the lobby. A Filipino man has followed an elderly Israeli couple into the building.

“They hit my car!” he shouts in English.

No one responds.

“You hit my car!” he tries again to the couple.

The clerk — a Palestinian citizen of the state I spoke to on my way in — goes about his business. Another elderly couple puzzles over a piece of paper.

“You hit my car and you’re angry with me?” his voice indignant.

I step onto the sidewalk just as the Filipino man is heading towards parallel parking.

“Look,” he says, pointing. “I was there, they pulled in and hit me, and then they got out, didn’t apologize, and yelled at me.”

“Israelim,” I say.

“Look at how much room they took!” he continues, pointing to the couples’ vehicle, which was, indeed, taking up two spaces. “And they hit me!”

The worst part, he tells me again, is that when they got out of their car, they started shouting at and blaming him rather than apologizing.

I think of Israelis’ reactions to the events of this week — their inability to reflect on what has brought Palestinians to this point. I think of Israelis’ unwillingness to understand the stabbings as violent responses to the violent occupation that began in 1948 for some and 1967 for others, depending on who you ask.

I think of what’s happening, specifically, in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, where Israel has taken most of the land and resources and is constantly expropriating more. Where there isn’t enough land and houses for normal population growth, where Palestinians are forced to build “illegally” because the Israeli government refuses to grant them the necessary permits. Where one might have to then pay for the demolition of their own home.

Where the economy has been crushed by the occupation; where there is no freedom of movement; where the lack of freedom of movement further suffocates the economy, feeding only the sense of desperation.

Where there is no hope. No hope for anything — a decent job, a good income, a normal life. Where there is little trust in the PA or politicians or negotiations that wrought the current reality, Oslo, or the negotiations that are resurrected from time to time just maintain an unbearable status quo.

I think of the place my former students live, the place where they left home every morning for school, uncertain that they would make it through the checkpoints and arrive, let alone on time. The place where a student might find that a friend hasn’t made it — maybe his classmate has been taken to administrative detention. Or maybe he has been shot. Who knows? One’s fate is just as uncertain as the roads in the territories.

The stabbings are screams of frustration, rage, despair, hopelessness. They’re the screams of people who are lost, who have no leadership and see nothing on the horizon. I think of the Israelis’ inabilities to hear these screams; I think of how they hear no one’s voices but their own.

Next to me, the Filipino man is still going on about his car.

He’s looking for consolation, which he won’t get from the elderly couple. I simply repeat back to him what he’s already said to me. “Israelis don’t take responsibility for their actions,” I say. “Instead, they get angry and blame others.”

He shakes his head and cradles his face in his hands as he stands on the sidewalk, looking at the damage done to his vehicle.

Later that day, when I arrive back at the city center, I notice a pile of old hand-painted tiles on the sidewalk near my apartment. They’ve been placed there, neatly stacked one on top of the other, by the Palestinian workers doing the renovation in the building next to mine.

I pick a tile up, brush the dust off, and examine it. I contemplate taking it back to Florida to join the other pre-state tiles I collected in both Tel Aviv and Bethlehem — souvenirs from a time when things were different, from a time when the land wasn’t divided. Remnants from a time when there was still such a thing as Palestinian Jews.

One of the workers joins me on the sidewalk. “Something interesting to you here, miss?” he asks.

“These,” I say. “Are they garbage?”

“Yes, that’s why they’re here.”

As we’re talking, another stabbing is taking place. This time, it’s in Tel Aviv.

“It’s a pity,” I say, “to throw these things away.”

“Death,” he says. “That’s what’s really a pity.”

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The long road to Bethlehem: part three

by adminin Israel, Palestine, Writing

+972 Magazine, July 27, 2015

The New Year comes and passes. It’s January 2014 and I’ve been living in the territories for almost a year. But rather than becoming more comfortable in my new surroundings and feeling like my usual curious and adventurous self—I am the woman, after all, who has traveled some 20 countries, mostly alone—I find myself turning inwards. I prefer to stay in Bethlehem, close to home.

This is not me.

The occupation and the checkpoints, particularly the flying checkpoints, have something to do with the change: on my way back to Bethlehem from Ramallah one afternoon, a flying checkpoint pops up near Jabaa’. As the soldiers take the IDs of everyone in the service taxi, I don’t know what to do—do I give them my American passport or my Israeli teudat zehut?

In theory, I could be headed from Qalandia—which is technically part of East Jerusalem—to Hizme, which is in Area B. I’m legal here, I tell myself. Or am I? I try to picture myself on the map that shows the zones: A, B, C.

Where is Jabaa’?

Where am I?

Who am I supposed to be right now?

It happens again as I’m driving back to Bethlehem from Jerusalem one afternoon. I’m on the little, rolling two-lane road that takes me to Beit Jala. Usually, I glide by the small army base on the edge of Beit Jala and from there, it’s a short drive to Bethlehem and I’m home. But today: when I bank the hill, I see soldiers standing in the middle of the road—a road I’ve never seen them on—checking IDs as Palestinians drive into Beit Jala. But why? If checkpoints are about security, then why would they be scrutinizing Palestinians headed into a Palestinian area? Are they looking for someone? Are they making sure that no Jewish Israelis are headed into Area A? Are they enforcing segregation?

Whatever the army’s doing there, I panic, slam on my brakes, and make a U-turn in the middle of the road, just meters from a soldier. As I speed away and he grows smaller in my rearview mirror, I realize the stupidity of what I’ve just done. I realize how suspicious it must have looked.

I also realize that I’m not sure how I’m going to get home. If there’s a flying checkpoint outside of Beit Jala, surely things will be tight at Checkpoint 300, too. There’s one more way in—a settler’s checkpoint that leads to a road that eventually splits and takes me to Beit Sahour, which neighbors Bethlehem.

But what if there are soldiers at that fork in the road, too?

I call Mohammad and ask him what I should do.

“Go back to Jerusalem, have a coffee, and try again.”

“What if the soldiers are still there?”

“They won’t be—they won’t stay forever. By the time you get back, they’ll be gone.”

Intellectually, I know that this is true. I’ve seen flying checkpoints many times before and I’ve seen them disappear as quickly as they appear. But something inside of me has changed and I find myself less able to use my head and reason through things. All I know is what I feel and I feel like the soldiers are everywhere.

Indeed, they showed up at a neighbor’s house recently—even though we live deep in Area A—asking about another neighbor’s rifle. Not only do they seem to be everywhere, they seem to know everything, even what people have in their private homes.

No, under occupation, even homes aren’t private.

I feel like the soldiers will never go away, they’ll stand there on the road between Jerusalem and Beit Jala forever and that’s the route I always take, that’s my “safe” road, and now they’re there and I’ll never get home.

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The long road to Bethlehem: part two

by adminin Palestine, Writing

+972 Magazine, April 26, 2015

I was sold on the apartment. But my landlady wasn’t sold on me yet.

We went upstairs and sat in her salon. Once a porch, it had been closed in with glass windows and offered a view of the hills surrounding Bethlehem. It was one of the few vistas that wasn’t ruined by the occupation. There was no wall, no checkpoints, no military bases, no settlements.

As my landlady took her seat across from me, she handed me a small, wrapped hard candy. She apologized for not offering me coffee. I realized how much she needed to rent the first floor out.

“You aren’t the first to come see the place,” she began, adding that she’d turned the last applicant down because she suspected that he was a Jew. Under no circumstances would she rent to a Jew.

She looked at me, her gaze shifting from one of my eyes to the other, as though she was trying to read what was behind them. I understood that she was waiting for some sort of a reaction. I smiled.

“Happiness is more important than money,” she continued, explaining that it was important to her to find the right person for the apartment. The house was special to her—not only because she’d grown up in it but also because it had witnessed so much of Bethlehem’s history.

The cornerstone was laid in 1808 when someone built a tiny, stand-alone room next to the well. Several other one-room houses followed, making a half-moon around the well, creating an open-air courtyard. In the early 1900s, the cluster of rooms was turned into one large home. The courtyard was closed and the second story was built. New floors were laid with the hand-painted tiles common to the Levant—a reminder of the years when trains connected Beirut and Damascus to Jerusalem and Jaffa.

But those days didn’t last. The Middle East was carved up, including Palestine. During the Nakba, my landlady’s family left Jaffa empty-handed: her father lost his business; they lost their money, home, and belongings. Christians, they fled to Bethlehem where they had roots and family. A few years later, in the early 1950s, they moved into the first floor of this house, a once-wealthy family of seven crammed into two bedrooms.

But the place emptied as her brothers left to find work abroad—the West Bank’s economy wasn’t great and it only got worse under the occupation. Thanks in large part to the remittances her brothers sent back to Palestine, her family scraped together enough money to buy the whole house. Eventually, my landlady followed in the previous owners’ footsteps, moving upstairs and renting out the space beneath her. In the beginning, many of her tenants were students who came from other Palestinian cities and villages to attend Bethlehem University. But as the occupation deepened—a process that was facilitated by the Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority—the economy all but ground to a halt and Palestinian tenants were increasingly unreliable.

During the hard days of the Second Intifada, when Bethlehem was under siege, the first floor was full of stranded students who couldn’t pay rent. After that, my landlady decided only to rent to ajanib, foreigners. She began to rattle off the list of recent tenants, telling me their names, their jobs, where they’d come from, and why they’d left Palestine. Most of her renters had had cushy NGO gigs. I didn’t tell my landlady that I wasn’t collecting a foreigner’s income; that my wage was set by the PA’s scale and that I was making the same as a Palestinian professor would. Another reason to leave Jerusalem—I couldn’t afford it on a West Bank salary.

“I must ask you,” she said. “What is your religion?”

“I don’t see how that’s really relevant.”

“What is your religion?” she insisted.

“I’m secular,” I said.

“Because, me, I’m Catholic.”

“That’s nice.”

“And I’m from Palestine,” she continued. “Where are you from?”

“America,” I said.

“No one’s really from America—” she began.

“—except the Native Americans,” I interrupted. “You know, the Indians.”

“But, clearly, you’re not Indian,” she smiled. “So where did your people come from?”

“My people?” Since I was young, I’d always answered such questions by saying “I’m Jewish.” Clearly, I couldn’t say that now. I unwrapped the candy, put it in my mouth, and smoothed the wrapper out on my knee. I imagined the square before me as a map; I mentally traced the circuitous route my Sephardic and Ashkenazi ancestors made.

I realized she was waiting for an answer. But all the countries my people had passed through seemed loaded. As I went through the list in my head, I became more and more convinced that naming any of them would reveal my Jewish background.

“My people—oh, you know, they’re from here and there. Everywhere, really. I’m very mixed.”

She glanced at the wrapper on my knee. I crumpled it up, used my fingers to push it into the palm of my hand.

“Part of my family came from Italy,” I said. “Guarnieri.” Though I was usually annoyed by it, in that moment I was glad for this remnant of my first marriage—an Italian last name. Different from the one my Italian ancestors on my mother’s side had carried, but Italian nonetheless.

“Now I have a question for you,” I said. “My husband will be spending part of the week with me. Is that okay?”

Some Palestinian landlords forbid female renters from having men over—it was best to check in advance. My partner and I had also decided to say that we were married as few people date openly in Palestine.

“Is he really your husband?” my landlady asked. “Or your boyfriend?”

“Well, we’re planning to get married,” I answered, mentally adding to the end of the sentence: if his family will approve.

“So he’s your boyfriend.”

“Yes,” I said, in Arabic.

“How many boyfriends do you have?”

Both the feminist and the old-fashioned lady who live uncomfortably together inside of me balked at the question. But I knew that I had to answer it. “Just one,” I said.

“Some of these foreign women have a different man coming over every day,” my landlady said, shaking her head. “I can’t have that here. The neighbors will talk. But if it’s just one boyfriend—and your relationship is serious—ahlan wa sahlan.”

Welcome. I’d passed the interview. The place was mine if I wanted it and provided I would stay for at least a year. Could I promise her that? How long had I been here? What was my visa situation?

I told my landlady that I’d just signed a two-year contract at the university and that I wasn’t too concerned about the bureaucratic issues.

“The Jews don’t like foreigners, you know. Four, five years and no more visa,” she wiped one palm with the other. “You’re done.”

I nodded.

“How long have you been in Palestine?”

“Over six years,” I answered, wishing I were a better liar, rushing to add that I’d been working as a journalist.

That seemed to satisfy her curiosity. But, in the months that followed, she would put things together. And later, during the 2014 war—after we’d lived in the same house for almost a year, after a visitor mistook us for mother and daughter, remarking on our similar features and frame and coloring, and after we’d felt our shared home shake when rockets hit the earth—my landlady would come into my apartment and ask: “You’re Jewish?”

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The Long Road to Bethlehem: Part One

by adminin Palestine, Writing

+972 Magazine, March 28, 2015

It wasn’t the soaring arches or the elegant windows, with their curved caps. It wasn’t that the first room of the house was built in 1808. It wasn’t the jasmine that, like a woman letting down her hair, released its heavy perfume at night. It wasn’t the olive, loquat, lemon, almond, and apricot trees that filled the garden. Nor was it that the fruit from that garden seemed sweeter here in Bethlehem than it was in Jerusalem.

The apartment’s biggest selling point, in my landlady’s opinion?

The well.

She showed it to me the first time I saw the place, before I’d decided to rent the apartment. The well was hidden behind a curtain in the kitchen. She pushed the fabric back, revealing a deep recess in the wall. Inside the nook stood a pump and, on the floor, a large stone with a wrought iron handle. My landlady, who was in her seventies, gave the handle a tug. The rock lifted. There was a clunk as she placed it on the kitchen floor.

My landlady got on her knees and peered into the hole, a spot of night surrounded by chiseled white.

“See?” she tapped my calf, signaling that I should get on the floor, too. I obliged her.

I peered into the well. I didn’t see anything. But I could smell the collected rainwater below us.

My landlady put her hands on my back and pushed herself up. As she brushed the dirt off her knees, she explained to me that, if I were to take the apartment, we would share the well. And while our neighbors’ taps would run dry—as they always do here, eventually—we would never go without.

I remembered a long, waterless weekend I’d spent in Bethlehem in 2010. An American friend who lived and worked there had invited me to come celebrate his birthday. I was living in Tel Aviv then and had only been to Bethlehem once before, to work on an article for The National. The photographer who’d been assigned to the story also had Israeli citizenship. Unlike me, however, he had a car. That day, we’d left the Bethlehem area via the settler checkpoint outside the tunnels—a checkpoint we should have breezed through as two Jews riding in a yellow-plated vehicle. But the female soldier stopped us and asked for my ID. Nervous about the fact that I’d been in Bethlehem, which is off-limits to Jews who hold Israeli IDs, I gave the solider my American passport. She rifled through it looking for my visa. When she didn’t find it, she rolled her eyes at me, sighed, and asked me in Hebrew, “Where is your identity card?”

The photographer and I talked our way out of trouble. But I was rattled by the experience and feared that I’d be arrested the next time I was caught. Still, when my American friend asked me to come out to the West Bank for his birthday, I said yes. I told myself that I didn’t need to think too far ahead—I’d worry about leaving when it was time to leave.

When I got there, I found my friend’s house filthy; his kitchen sink overflowing with dirty dishes. “The water’s out,” he explained. He showed me how we could flush the toilet and brush our teeth using the water he’d saved in plastic bottles ahead of time. I would learn later that other friends keep buckets in their showers to collect the grey water. Because this is what you do in the West Bank, where you’re always waiting for the taps to go dry, where the Jewish settlements you can see from your window or that you pass on the road—the nice, neat, clean settlements that are locked away behind fences and surrounded by security—have green lawns and full swimming pools.

Despite the water shortage, what was supposed to be an overnight trip to Bethlehem turned into three nights of sleeping on my friend’s couch. Every time I thought about leaving, I remembered my confrontation with the female soldier. There are checkpoints on every side of Bethlehem: how could I get out of here without getting caught? And this time I was without a car: wouldn’t it be even more difficult on public transportation? Because I’d be coming out of a Palestinian area, I’d be on a Palestinian bus. And while settlers’ buses just roll through the checkpoints, Palestinian buses are always stopped, passengers IDs are always checked.

I couldn’t figure it out, and I dreaded the soldiers, so I just stayed. And stayed. I joked with my American friend that it would be easier for me to go to Jordan and take a flight from Amman to Tel Aviv than it would be to just take the bus home.

Finally, on the fourth day, I realized that I couldn’t just wait out the occupation. The checkpoints and soldiers weren’t going to disappear. And I needed to take a shower. I had to get back to Tel Aviv somehow.

When I left my friend’s apartment that day, I had no idea how I’d get home. Nor did I know that Bethlehem would soon be my home; that I’d end up moving here less than three years later, into a house—a house with a well—owned by refugees from Jaffa.

 

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Are “supporters” being hired to attend Glenn Beck rally?

by adminin Writing

flags1+972 Magazine, August 17, 2011

The uber-conservative Christian Zionist commentator Glenn Beck has arrived in Israel. He will hold his “Restoring Courage” rally in Jerusalem on August 24.

So it seems like a mighty odd coincidence that a few weeks ago, I found this ad on Janglo:

On August 24 2011 there is a huge international event being held in Jerusalem where people are coming to stand with Israel.

At the event there are flags from every country and we are looking for people to be the ambassador for their country….

Continue reading “Are “supporters” being hired to attend Glenn Beck rally?”

Demoting Arabic: the Knesset finally tells the truth

by adminin Politics, Writing

dsc05565+972 Magazine, August 6, 2011

The Israeli Knesset is on a roll. First, it passes the anti-boycott bill. Now, it’s considering changing the status of Arabic from the state’s second official language into the language of the state’s second class citizens.

I’ll say now what I felt about the anti-boycott law: the Knesset should pass the legislation so the world will understand what it’s really dealing with.

Arabic might have been the second official language all these years but few Jewish Israelis speak it.

NGOs have had to wage legal battles to get Arabic on the street signs funded and posted by the state. For example, when Adalah filed a petition in 1998 regarding the use of Arabic on national road signs, over 80% of those signs “were posted solely in Hebrew and English; Arabic appeared, if at all, only on signs posted near Arab localities.”

Continue reading “Demoting Arabic: the Knesset finally tells the truth”

The housing struggle you haven’t heard about: Kfar Shalem

by adminin Miscellaneous, Writing

dsc03696+972 Magazine, July 28, 2011

It was news when tens of thousands of Israelis took to the streets in protest over housing prices. So where was the media in February when dozens of Israelis—facing not unaffordable apartments but eviction and homelessness at the state’s hands—managed to shut down several busy roads using nothing more than their bodies?

Both the tent camps and the winter demonstration are the result of the state favoring the interests of an elite oligarchy and settlements over those of citizens who live inside the Green Line. But the latter, smaller protest took place in Kfar Shalem, where housing issues have deep historical roots.

Now an economically depressed neighborhood of South Tel Aviv, Kfar Shalem was once a Palestinian village, Salame. Jewish forces ran the Arab residents out in early 1948, months before Israel was established and (what some refer to as) the War of Independence began.

Continue reading “The housing struggle you haven’t heard about: Kfar Shalem”