I’ve settled into life in a new Palestine. In a very small way, I’m starting to have a vertical understanding of Palestine. When I revisit places I know how it’s changed, how it once was, and I generally have an opinion about the change.
When I arrived in Palestine in July 2004 Israel had started construction of the wall, but paused momentarily while the Hague determined the legality of the wall. About two-weeks into my visit the international court decided the wall violated international humanitarian rights and Israel needed to dismantle what it had built and stop all plans for future construction. The only judge on the international court who supported Israel was American. Israel took a moment to acknowledge the international court’s decision and then continued construction of the wall. But perhaps this was all in the American spirit; when the Supreme Court ruled against putting American Indians on reservations Andrew Jackson said, “The court has made its decision, now let’s see the court enforce it.” Then put all of the Indians on reservations.
In July 2004 there were only a few sections of the wall up in Ramallah, but parts of the road leading into Ramallah had already been torn up and section of the wall lay waiting. I left before any of the new sections were constructed. In Bethlehem I never saw any part of the wall constructed.
Just yesterday I returned to Ramallah for the first time since my last summer to visit my friend Tariq. Dave had come with me to visit some people he knew, and we were joking about aid workers as our taxi approached Ramallah. It all looked very familiar to me until we got within about a mile of Ramallah. Where a year before sections of the wall lay alongside the road awaiting installation, there was now a fifteen-foot concrete barrier running down the middle of the road splitting the road in half. At Kalendia, the checkpoint separating Ramallah from Jerusalem, they torn up a traffic circle and a parking lot where taxis used to wait to take people into Jerusalem.
Apparently the Israelis are redoing the Kalendia checkpoint, trying out a new system, so they’re building a new facility to the side of the current checkpoint. The site of the checkpoint used to be a thirty-foot high mesa. The Israelis leveled the mesa, added a new section of wall, and started construction of their new checkpoint.
When you walked through the checkpoint into Ramallah, you used to walk down a little road filled with vendors selling everything from bread and candy to undershirts and pet birds. Now the checkpoint empties into a narrow walk way surrounded by chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire. Cars used to pass through a road to the left of the walkway, but that’s now completely torn up and walled off. There’s still a few vendors where the walkway empties into the taxi and bus station, but not nearly as many as there were before.
In July 2004 almost every night around sunset kids would come to Kalendia to throw a rocks and firecrackers at the soldiers. The soldiers would fire rubber bullets and the occasional live round at the kids. Occasionally a rubber bullet would blow out a kid’s knee. It’s virtually impossible for the children to reach the soldiers now, so Kalendia is a quiet place these days. I guess it only took a couple miles of 18-foot high concrete barriers, digging up some roads, re-routing traffic, removing street vendors, and leveling a mesa to get rid of a couple kids throwing stones. Inside Ramallah hasn’t noticeably changed. It’s just like any other city you’d find in the Levant: street markets, low buildings, trash in the streets, and a little bit of traffic.
It was great seeing my friend Tariq again. I’d lost his e-mail when I returned to the states and apparently he’d sent several e-mails to me at the wrong address, so he assumed he’d never see me again. When he saw me we did kissing thing, which I’m still not quite comfortable with. Normally when you see a friend you do two kissed on either side of the check, but when it’s give each other four kisses. So I got for kisses from Tariq.
He’s doing quite well for himself these days. I first met him when he was just a regular employee in an internet café. In the last year he managed to save up enough money to buy his own internet café, so now he’s running his own business. He also got an offer to come to America for a year to set up a computer network at a college in California. In the meantime he broke up with his girlfriend, a Palestinian living in Sweden, started dating a girl in Ramallah, realized she was crazy, and spent two months breaking up with her. Now he swears that he’s done with dating, but unlike America this does not necessarily mean he’s accepted a life of solitude. In a year or so, he’ll get engaged to a girl knows through various family connections, and a year after that they’ll get married. He thinks/hopes that this one isn’t crazy. Tariq is about 2 months older than me.
Life in Bethlehem is, in a word: slow. Like I mentioned in my last e-mail it’s like I’m living in the suburbs. Except for a few restaurants and convenient stores the town shuts down after 6 or 7 in the evening. There’s usually only one room lit in each house or apartment and you can see the TV glowing inside.
It can be a little depressing talking to a lot of the business owners around here. The last intifada crushed tourism in Bethlehem. According to several shopkeepers I’ve spoken with anywhere from fifty to one-hundred tour buses used to come into Bethlehem everyday. Now there’s about ten a day. Every street has several souvenior shops, some of them have managed to stay open others have shut down indefinitely. In the ones that are still open, the owner is usually slumped over the counter drinking tea or Turkish coffee from a plastic cup staring at nothing in particular or occasionally reading a newspaper. On the brighter side of things, they’re always extremely happy to chat with you about anything, so I makes for a nice way to practice Arabic.
Speaking of tourism, this reminds me of my current project. I’m working on an article about political tourism in Palestine. More or less the Palestinian resistance has ended. Occasionally there’s a bombing like the one several days ago in Hadera, but they’re generally small, ineffective, and incur more violence from the Israelis than they’re worth. In the past when the Israelis made incursions into Gaza and the West Bank to make an arrest often times they’d get into shootouts. Now most people go quietly. This has left Palestine in a nebulous mixture of conflict, peace, and oppression.
Enter Johnny backpacker, the activist with a heart of gold who arrived in this world too late for the 60’s counter culture. Johnny backpacker cares deeply about the Palestinian people and their plight and believes that where thousands of failed before, he will bring peace to the Middle East. So, he arrives with his digital camera, oodles of optimism and self-righteous anger. But the problem is that Johnny backpacker doesn’t know the Middle East well enough to find and see all the suffering by himself. And such are born alternative tourism groups.
Throughout Palestine people have started offering what they call “alternative tours” where a guide takes you on a tour of Palestine’s hotspots. You’ll see settlements, refugee camps, religious sites, checkpoints, and suffering. The goal of most of these tours is to show people the “truth.” Instead of just going on your average tour where you’d see all the famous historic/religious sites, these tours attempt to show you the political realities within Palestine. While I can agree with a political tour in theory, I have some ethical issues about the people who take them. They pay money to see people suffering and believe that they are changing the world.
On Thursday I went with a tour group to Hebron, a place I know reasonably well. One woman actually took a picture of herself smiling in front of a checkpoint that blocks people from the Mosque where Abraham is buried. They’re also fond of gathering around the wall and singing songs like “We shall overcome,” and the Americans like to believe their the first ones to make cracks at Israeli soldiers like, “My taxes pay your salary!” After a week they believe that they’re authorities on the situation here, and they return to their home countries to tell others of the suffering they’ve seen. Most of them will never tour anything within Israel.
In a way, I think that any foreigner in Israel or Palestine, myself included, is nothing more than a filthy war tourist. In the grand scheme of things, I’m not really contributing anything to Palestine. I take pictures of the wall and other political things within Palestine and share them with friends. I spend far more time in Palestine than in Israel. But I don’t think “I feel anyone’s pain” or that holding hands in front of the wall and singing changes anything. I’m afraid that these alternative tours are a form of misguided activism. I’m going to check out a few more tours and meet with some more activists before I pound the whole article out, but I’ll share it with you when I’m done. I’m looking forward to writing it.
In other news Dave and I finally moved into our apartment. We’d been living in the Sheperd Hotel in Bethlehem together since I arrived. The room had only one king size bed, and well, lets just say that neither Dave or I wanted to sleep on the floor. One night Dave and I had been reading in bed for a while and then we decided to watch the news before going to sleep. So, we’re laying in this king size bed together, watching and periodically discussing the news when I realize that were just a couple of wedding bands and some tangled sheets away from marriage.
Now the marriage has ended and Dave and I sleep in separate rooms at the apartment. However, should Dave find himself frightened by a nightmare or missing the good old days, he could sleep in the extra twin bed in my room, which has a twin bed on each side of the room. We like to call it the “Bert and Ernie room.” Other than that the apartment is quite nice, far from the dank and stinking shit hole I shared with that Egyptian in Cairo.
Today I had my first Arabic lesson, which I’m still a little uncertain about. The teacher seems good, but she’s only teaching me Palestinian dialect, which is quiet different from Egyptian or classical. The book we use is entirely transliterated and she insists on me using this weird Roman alphabet. It’s kind of like watching your favorite movie dubbed into another language, it’s shocking and a little confusing at first, but after a while you can figure out what’s going on.
Especially considering that she’s working with me one on one, I was a little disappointed that she didn’t ask me why I want to take Arabic lessons and what I want to take from them. Considering that I’m only going to be here for another month and a half I can’t say that I care all that much about learning the Palestinian dialect, especially as it means learning a whole new alphabet (since there are sounds in Arabic that aren’t in English a lot of the letter have strange markings so you’ll know it’s a long vowel or another letter not present in English). Also, the classes are far from cheap and I have to pay about $20 a lesson, which means I can only afford to take one lesson a week. I figure next week I’ll have a heart to heart with her and let her know my concerns. Hopefully she’ll be able to accommodate me, otherwise I think I’ll just continue practicing speaking with people on the street.
When I arrived in Palestine in July 2004 Israel had started construction of the wall, but paused momentarily while the Hague determined the legality of the wall. About two-weeks into my visit the international court decided the wall violated international humanitarian rights and Israel needed to dismantle what it had built and stop all plans for future construction. The only judge on the international court who supported Israel was American. Israel took a moment to acknowledge the international court’s decision and then continued construction of the wall. But perhaps this was all in the American spirit; when the Supreme Court ruled against putting American Indians on reservations Andrew Jackson said, “The court has made its decision, now let’s see the court enforce it.” Then put all of the Indians on reservations.
In July 2004 there were only a few sections of the wall up in Ramallah, but parts of the road leading into Ramallah had already been torn up and section of the wall lay waiting. I left before any of the new sections were constructed. In Bethlehem I never saw any part of the wall constructed.
Just yesterday I returned to Ramallah for the first time since my last summer to visit my friend Tariq. Dave had come with me to visit some people he knew, and we were joking about aid workers as our taxi approached Ramallah. It all looked very familiar to me until we got within about a mile of Ramallah. Where a year before sections of the wall lay alongside the road awaiting installation, there was now a fifteen-foot concrete barrier running down the middle of the road splitting the road in half. At Kalendia, the checkpoint separating Ramallah from Jerusalem, they torn up a traffic circle and a parking lot where taxis used to wait to take people into Jerusalem.
Apparently the Israelis are redoing the Kalendia checkpoint, trying out a new system, so they’re building a new facility to the side of the current checkpoint. The site of the checkpoint used to be a thirty-foot high mesa. The Israelis leveled the mesa, added a new section of wall, and started construction of their new checkpoint.
When you walked through the checkpoint into Ramallah, you used to walk down a little road filled with vendors selling everything from bread and candy to undershirts and pet birds. Now the checkpoint empties into a narrow walk way surrounded by chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire. Cars used to pass through a road to the left of the walkway, but that’s now completely torn up and walled off. There’s still a few vendors where the walkway empties into the taxi and bus station, but not nearly as many as there were before.
In July 2004 almost every night around sunset kids would come to Kalendia to throw a rocks and firecrackers at the soldiers. The soldiers would fire rubber bullets and the occasional live round at the kids. Occasionally a rubber bullet would blow out a kid’s knee. It’s virtually impossible for the children to reach the soldiers now, so Kalendia is a quiet place these days. I guess it only took a couple miles of 18-foot high concrete barriers, digging up some roads, re-routing traffic, removing street vendors, and leveling a mesa to get rid of a couple kids throwing stones. Inside Ramallah hasn’t noticeably changed. It’s just like any other city you’d find in the Levant: street markets, low buildings, trash in the streets, and a little bit of traffic.
It was great seeing my friend Tariq again. I’d lost his e-mail when I returned to the states and apparently he’d sent several e-mails to me at the wrong address, so he assumed he’d never see me again. When he saw me we did kissing thing, which I’m still not quite comfortable with. Normally when you see a friend you do two kissed on either side of the check, but when it’s give each other four kisses. So I got for kisses from Tariq.
He’s doing quite well for himself these days. I first met him when he was just a regular employee in an internet café. In the last year he managed to save up enough money to buy his own internet café, so now he’s running his own business. He also got an offer to come to America for a year to set up a computer network at a college in California. In the meantime he broke up with his girlfriend, a Palestinian living in Sweden, started dating a girl in Ramallah, realized she was crazy, and spent two months breaking up with her. Now he swears that he’s done with dating, but unlike America this does not necessarily mean he’s accepted a life of solitude. In a year or so, he’ll get engaged to a girl knows through various family connections, and a year after that they’ll get married. He thinks/hopes that this one isn’t crazy. Tariq is about 2 months older than me.
Life in Bethlehem is, in a word: slow. Like I mentioned in my last e-mail it’s like I’m living in the suburbs. Except for a few restaurants and convenient stores the town shuts down after 6 or 7 in the evening. There’s usually only one room lit in each house or apartment and you can see the TV glowing inside.
It can be a little depressing talking to a lot of the business owners around here. The last intifada crushed tourism in Bethlehem. According to several shopkeepers I’ve spoken with anywhere from fifty to one-hundred tour buses used to come into Bethlehem everyday. Now there’s about ten a day. Every street has several souvenior shops, some of them have managed to stay open others have shut down indefinitely. In the ones that are still open, the owner is usually slumped over the counter drinking tea or Turkish coffee from a plastic cup staring at nothing in particular or occasionally reading a newspaper. On the brighter side of things, they’re always extremely happy to chat with you about anything, so I makes for a nice way to practice Arabic.
Speaking of tourism, this reminds me of my current project. I’m working on an article about political tourism in Palestine. More or less the Palestinian resistance has ended. Occasionally there’s a bombing like the one several days ago in Hadera, but they’re generally small, ineffective, and incur more violence from the Israelis than they’re worth. In the past when the Israelis made incursions into Gaza and the West Bank to make an arrest often times they’d get into shootouts. Now most people go quietly. This has left Palestine in a nebulous mixture of conflict, peace, and oppression.
Enter Johnny backpacker, the activist with a heart of gold who arrived in this world too late for the 60’s counter culture. Johnny backpacker cares deeply about the Palestinian people and their plight and believes that where thousands of failed before, he will bring peace to the Middle East. So, he arrives with his digital camera, oodles of optimism and self-righteous anger. But the problem is that Johnny backpacker doesn’t know the Middle East well enough to find and see all the suffering by himself. And such are born alternative tourism groups.
Throughout Palestine people have started offering what they call “alternative tours” where a guide takes you on a tour of Palestine’s hotspots. You’ll see settlements, refugee camps, religious sites, checkpoints, and suffering. The goal of most of these tours is to show people the “truth.” Instead of just going on your average tour where you’d see all the famous historic/religious sites, these tours attempt to show you the political realities within Palestine. While I can agree with a political tour in theory, I have some ethical issues about the people who take them. They pay money to see people suffering and believe that they are changing the world.
On Thursday I went with a tour group to Hebron, a place I know reasonably well. One woman actually took a picture of herself smiling in front of a checkpoint that blocks people from the Mosque where Abraham is buried. They’re also fond of gathering around the wall and singing songs like “We shall overcome,” and the Americans like to believe their the first ones to make cracks at Israeli soldiers like, “My taxes pay your salary!” After a week they believe that they’re authorities on the situation here, and they return to their home countries to tell others of the suffering they’ve seen. Most of them will never tour anything within Israel.
In a way, I think that any foreigner in Israel or Palestine, myself included, is nothing more than a filthy war tourist. In the grand scheme of things, I’m not really contributing anything to Palestine. I take pictures of the wall and other political things within Palestine and share them with friends. I spend far more time in Palestine than in Israel. But I don’t think “I feel anyone’s pain” or that holding hands in front of the wall and singing changes anything. I’m afraid that these alternative tours are a form of misguided activism. I’m going to check out a few more tours and meet with some more activists before I pound the whole article out, but I’ll share it with you when I’m done. I’m looking forward to writing it.
In other news Dave and I finally moved into our apartment. We’d been living in the Sheperd Hotel in Bethlehem together since I arrived. The room had only one king size bed, and well, lets just say that neither Dave or I wanted to sleep on the floor. One night Dave and I had been reading in bed for a while and then we decided to watch the news before going to sleep. So, we’re laying in this king size bed together, watching and periodically discussing the news when I realize that were just a couple of wedding bands and some tangled sheets away from marriage.
Now the marriage has ended and Dave and I sleep in separate rooms at the apartment. However, should Dave find himself frightened by a nightmare or missing the good old days, he could sleep in the extra twin bed in my room, which has a twin bed on each side of the room. We like to call it the “Bert and Ernie room.” Other than that the apartment is quite nice, far from the dank and stinking shit hole I shared with that Egyptian in Cairo.
Today I had my first Arabic lesson, which I’m still a little uncertain about. The teacher seems good, but she’s only teaching me Palestinian dialect, which is quiet different from Egyptian or classical. The book we use is entirely transliterated and she insists on me using this weird Roman alphabet. It’s kind of like watching your favorite movie dubbed into another language, it’s shocking and a little confusing at first, but after a while you can figure out what’s going on.
Especially considering that she’s working with me one on one, I was a little disappointed that she didn’t ask me why I want to take Arabic lessons and what I want to take from them. Considering that I’m only going to be here for another month and a half I can’t say that I care all that much about learning the Palestinian dialect, especially as it means learning a whole new alphabet (since there are sounds in Arabic that aren’t in English a lot of the letter have strange markings so you’ll know it’s a long vowel or another letter not present in English). Also, the classes are far from cheap and I have to pay about $20 a lesson, which means I can only afford to take one lesson a week. I figure next week I’ll have a heart to heart with her and let her know my concerns. Hopefully she’ll be able to accommodate me, otherwise I think I’ll just continue practicing speaking with people on the street.
posted by Tom | 5:08 PM
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