Dispatch from the Holy Land (Part 2)

In the service taxi on the way from the Hawarra checkpoint to Ramallah, I sat next to a well-dressed Palestinian man named Sami. Sami, who is from Nablus, works in a television station in Ramallah, creating visuals. We struck up a conversation after he informed me, in perfect English, that the service taxi would be an extra 5 shekels per person, due to its having waited at the checkpoint.

Sami’s family lives in the old city of Nablus, not too far from the site of the bulldozed house where Barnaby and Greg’s attempted kidnapping took place. He told me that he had watched as the IDF bulldozed the house while the family, hiding from mortar attack, was still in the basement. He told me that he would have rather died in his own house than spent three days blindfolded and handcuffed in the Hawarra detention camp during the Second Intifada. And with a tone of utter certainty and calm, he told me that he had “no doubt the Third Intifada is coming.”

In that one statement, Sami perfectly summed up the problem. It is a sentiment that permeates every conversation I had; it is an overwhelming sense of resignation, of futility, of desperation. On both sides.

When I would ask an Israeli what were the hopes for peace, they would usually tell me that “we want peace but they do not.” And when I put the same question to an Arab, I would get the same response. Not one person expressed optimism, few used the word hope. When I left Israel, I felt the same way.

It’s hard to search for a resolution to a situation where everyone is at fault and no one is to blame: The IDF and the Israeli government consistently take actions that undermine the peace process. The Palestinian Authority is unable to provide law and order in its own strongholds. Hamas and other organizations ensure that Palestine remains a war zone, propped up by money and aid from foreign governments. The West, though especially the U.S. and Britain are responsible for a post-colonial Middle East that was doomed from the very first slicing up of the region; yet no Western country has made a long-term commitment to a peace process (Oslo came at the end of the Clinton Presidency, the Road Map was virtually abandoned, and now Annapolis comes with less then a year and half left in the Bush presidency).
The other problem is that no one has articulated what peace would actually look like. One thing that is clear is that current visions of peace are often incompatible. While Hamas refuses to recognize Israel, Settlers seek to surreptitiously expand Israel’s future borders (based on the belief that any future UN agreement will draw borders based on the “facts on the ground,” i.e. the number of Jews in any area).

I would like to end this post an “up-note,” but I just don’t know what that would be. I do believe that one day there will be peace in Israel/Palestine; I just don’t know what that peace will look like or how long it will last for. For thousands of years, people have been fighting over this land; this conflict is written on every stone and every olive grove.

Dispatch from the Holy Land (Part 1)

Two Kilometers from Nablus, on the road to Ramallah, stands three, 100 meter long lines of concrete blocks running up to the Hawarra Checkpoint. Named after the detention camp set up there by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) during the Second Intifada, the checkpoint is more reminiscent of a cattle coral than any boarder crossing I’ve ever seen.

As you approach the checkpoint (on foot unless you have yellow, Israeli plates), you are funneled into a line where the IDF checks documents and searches bags. Standing in a 10 minute long line in front of a Palestinian couple who looked as if they were at least in their 70’s, I reached in my pocket and flashed the blue and gold of my U.S. passport. The Israeli soldier motioned for me to come forward. I told him I had been in Nablus to see the Church of Joseph’s Well. He waved me through.

In fact, I had been in Nablus at the invitation of an American I had met on Arab Bus 18 to Ramallah. Beau, a former marketing major and brewer from Rochester, has been teaching English in Nablus since mid-October with Project Hope. The only other non-Palestinian on the bus to Ramallah, we had ended up sitting next to each other, and when I told him I was heading to Ramallah to walk around and get a feel for the city, he encouraged me to come with him to Nablus. It took me about 20 minutes to work up the nerve to say yes.

Nablus is a city about an hour from Ramallah by service (ser-vees) taxi, although its actually only 30 kilometers. Once famous as a major producer of olive oil soap and the home of the Samaritans (a sect of Jews who intermarried with Gentiles about two-and-a-half thousand years ago), Nablus is now better known as one of the worst hit cities of the Second Intifada. It is a city that, until recently, has been outside the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA), run by competing “Brigades” of “Martyrs” or “Freedom-Fighters.”

As we walked through the Old City—which is the base for these Brigades—the posters of martyrs and Brigade flags were a potent reminder of just where we were. Beau had given me an official NGO-looking vest to put on and had instructed me not to take pictures, lest I capture the ire of someone wanted by the IDF. After Beau pointed out the place where a predator drone took out a wanted suspect and two men who were with him in early October, we passed the site of a bombed-out soap factory, destroyed to make room for tanks during the Second Intifada (many soap factories were destroyed or closed with concrete as part of the IDF’s economic warfare during the Intifada). Up the road a bit was the place where a house had been bulldozed with the family inside.

Beau didn’t actually take me up there. Which leads me to a funny (kind of) storey. On our way into the Old City, we ran in to a friend of Beau’s, Barnaby—a Canadian with visa problems, running a tour company. Barnaby and his friend Greg, who will be studying at AUC next semester, were held, hands and legs spread, against the wall opposite the bulldozed house for about twenty minutes by a member of one the Brigades. When he went to go get either his gun or his buddies (they are not sure which) a few of the other Palestinians in the square helped smuggle Barnaby and Greg out of the Old City. Later, while sitting in Nablus’s hotel, having a drink, the commander of PA forces in Nablus came in to let them know that the man was “insane,” had been beaten unconscious, and taken to a mental institution in Bethlehem. The man then took Barnaby and Greg back through the Old City—a bit like getting back on the bike.

(That’s enough for one post. I promise another one very soon.)

Edit:
For an update on the situation check out thisBBC article about and IDF incursion into Nablus.

Cultures, Seperated by Metal Detectors

Well finals are rapidly approaching, evidenced by the onslaught of midterms and papers over the past few weeks (yes, in Egypt, midterms are given roughly three weeks behind schedule). And obviously a lot has transpired since my last post.

Perhaps one of the most interesting and informative experiences I’ve had in that time was provided by the American media. A few weeks ago, my friends and I went to see The Kingdom at the Nile City Towers Mall. The mall is a towering behemoth of a building, sprouting two brand new condominium towers capped by gold-lit penthouses. The inside ranges from a Starbucks (coming soon) to stores selling Fendi and Prada bags. In a word, the mall is un-Cairo. To top it all off the theatre featured stadium seating and veritable who’s-who of the Cairo upper class. The other striking feature of the cinema wwas posters for Knocked Up (state censors are going to have a field day with that, I will be surprised if the Egyptian version runs longer than 20 minutes).

But once the movie started, my friends and I became noticeably upset. Beyond the fact that the movie’s depiction of a suicide-bombing operation was fairly graphic, the accuracy with which the movie portrayed the fundamental misunderstandings between these two cultures (the American and the Arabo-Muslim) is astounding.

Studying here, these cultural miscommunications have been something I’ve had to think about a lot, and seeing them on screen, with such violent, and in many ways realistic, repercussions was obviously upsetting. While no one in the theatre did so when we were there, other friends have told me that people cheered at the movie’s depiction of the attack on the World Trade Center. The biggest reaction that I noticed from the Egyptians watching the movie were “tsks” (Egyptian for “you shouldn’t do that,” among other things) during the beheading scene towards the end of the movie. Needless to say, the intermission half way through was a much needed reprieve from the onslaught of upsetting events.

As far as censorship goes, I only noticed one scene which appeared to be missing, probably something sexual, right before the meeting with the reporter in the bar.

While the movie itself was upsetting enough walking out of the mall, past metal detectors and baggage scanners, barricades and men in uniform, I couldn’t help but be reminded of just what is possible when the extremes of these two cultures collide. I’m not talking about a clash of civilizations, if anything the problem is their compatibility.

There are two Cairos, one which has been built on the fertile soil of imported materialism, and the other which is built on desert sands. And it is the fact of these two Cairos, which one passes between daily, that makes the trucks of armed men, the police officers on every corner and the metal detectors that divide inside from outside meaningful.