Postcards from Palestine: The Wall
The 5am call from the mosque woke us up but we managed to go back to sleep for a few more hours, sleeping off the four bottles of wine we guzzled the night before at restaurant called Hosh al-Yasmeen in the neighboring village of Beit Jala, overlooking the rolling hills of Bethlehem. As M and I turned up there last night, taking glamour shots of each other in front of the sunset, we heard familiar Irish squeals and saw Delores and Saoirse waving frantically down the road. The rest was a drunken blur, and when we finally got back to the hotel we laid in our twin beds, side by side, and laughed until we cried.
Waking up a tad hungover for the second day in a row, I was just so grateful I didn’t have to go back to Hebron. Even though the day ended on a high note and we had some beautiful times with Amer, Layla and hilarious little Haifa, it was a bleak day. I assumed that the worst was over and that all that lay in front of us was purely tourist stuff. (In case you didn’t take Mr. Palmer’s 9th grade English class at Altamont in Birmingham AL circa late 90’s, this is called foreshadowing).
M took us to a favorite breakfast spot where I downed two iced coffees in a row, another favorite found treat — sweet coffee slushies, like Frappucinos but without that distinctly American chemical taste. And then we were off to the Walled Off Hotel, a temporary hotel and exhibition that the graffiti artist who goes by Banksy erected a few months ago. Billed as “the worst view in the world,” it is situated a few feet away from a heavily graffitied part of the wall separating Bethlehem from Jerusalem on the other side.
From what I understood and had heard from conversations with American Jews, the justification for a wall is due to the times over the past few decades that Palestinians have committed horrible acts of terrorism against Israelis. These acts are mostly condensed into periods called the first and second intifada (or infitadas, as I mistakenly continued calling them throughout my time there, M having to remind me that we weren’t talking about omelettes). People generally think of Palestinian suicide bombers when discussing the intifadas of the late 80s and early 2000s, but it was a little more complicated than that.
The first intifada escalated in response to an IDF truck killing four Palestinians. It was a two-fold strategy of resistance and civil disobedience, consisting of general strikes, boycotts, graffiti, barricading, and widespread throwing of stones and Molotov cocktails. As with any resistance, everyone participating does not fit the same demographic or category. Some of the more violent actions were orchestrations of the extremist group Hamas.
In total, during the first intifada, almost 700 Palestinians and about 160 Israelis were killed. Fifty three of the Palestinians killed were under 17 years old. It is estimated that 7% of all Palestinian children under the age of 18 at that time suffered injuries from shootings, beatings or tear gas.
The second intifada, which lasted from 2000–2005, was more violent. After a deliberately provocative visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem by Ariel Sharon in 2000, Palestinians demonstrated, throwing stones at police. This resulted in tear gas, rubber bullets and the beginnings of a refreshed desire for revenge. Palestinians engaged in suicide bombings and gunfire; Israelis retaliated with air attacks, war tanks and returned gunfire. In total 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis lost their lives. And then, in 2006, Hamas was democratically elected, refuting the power of the Palestinian Authority, which as I’ve mentioned is widely considered by Palestinians to be an extension of the Israeli government.
A dear friend in NYC who was with me the dark night that Trump got elected, who texted me at midnight on November 8th 2016 with the prescient words, “maybe this will foment the liberal revolution,” who is aligned with me on every other social and political cause that matters today, is also a Zionist. The day I was leaving for Palestine he texted me these parting words — “please know that we would tear down that wall tomorrow if we could be certain that they would stop killing us.”
The numbers don’t add up.
The parallels with Trump’s threats of a wall, which were unfolding as we spoke, were shocking. How can my liberal, likeminded friend be so clear in his disavowal of fear tactics employed by Trump and his cronies to convince people that immigrants were dangerous, heathens, rapists? How can he agree that erecting a wall between Mexico and America is an act of white nationalism, and yet be so morally certain that the wall between Palestine and Israel is justified?
I said all of this out loud to M, as I did with most of my internal dialogue on this trip and always, and he replied, “Progressive except for Palestine, baby. ‘PEP.’ ‘I don’t believe in God but I believe he ordained Israel to the Jews.’”
This, as I understood it, was the essence of Zionism. The belief that God, whether you had a relationship with him outside of this pact or not, wanted Israel to belong to the Jews and only to the Jews. And so any threat to that contract is going against God’s will, and anything against God’s will should be fought.
And, more importantly, anyone who doubts that this contract between Israel and the Jews is God’s will, is essentially doubting the right of Jews to exist. Not doubting the right of a solely Jewish state to exist at the expense of other humans, but the right of Jews to exist at all. If you doubt that Israel has an uncontested right to this land, you don’t want Jews to live. If you doubt, you’re vilified as an anti-semite. I was familiar with this line of thinking but would encounter it frequently and with fervor upon my return.
The wall was the ultimate symbol of the occupation and of Israel’s feelings of entitlement to this land. The graffiti plastered in layers on the wall was funny, sad, brutal and fabulous. As you might imagine, you too could pay to rent a spray can and leave your mark on the wall! (which would be painted over the next day to make room for more occupation tourists, a designation which, I supposed, included me).
The lobby of the Walled Off Hotel was a Banksy gallery with some of his most famous prints, many of which were originally tagged on the Palestinian border wall.
And in the back was a tight, dense four room museum that clearly, tactfully explained the history and current reality of the occupation. There were about ten other museum goers perusing alongside us, including a couple with two young kids we had seen at the Beit Shala restaurant the night before.
M had done such an accurate and impeccable job of giving me the historical information and answering all of my endless questions that nothing in the museum was new to me, but it was enormously helpful to reinforce what I now knew, to see it in pictures and infographics, timelines and Banksy’s artistic interpretations. I imagine that there are plenty of people who visit the museum who are in the region to see Israel, and hopped over the border to Bethlehem to say they saw Palestine too. Maybe this experience opened their eyes. I was so grateful this place existed and hoped it wasn’t actually temporary as claimed.
We had a fancy cocktail in velvet chairs facing windows overlooking the wall and then took a leisurely stroll along it, passing more Banksy gift shops geared towards English speaking tourists. The graffiti tapered off as the wall bent towards the right, encasing the Aida Refugee Camp.
The concept of an “internal” refugee camps confused me. We were in Palestine, not Israel, so why were there Palestinian people living as refugees in their own land? M explained that it was created in 1950 by Palestinians who had been forced out of their homes, mostly in Jerusalem and Hebron, and had nowhere else to go, no money, no family, no other options. Because of the way the land was divided up after the Oslo Accords, the majority of residents don’t have the legal documentation to work in Israel and the unemployment rate is 43%. There are 19 refugee camps like this one in the West Bank.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has a presence there and on their website they describe the residents’ vulnerability due to “regular incursions by Israeli Security Forces (ISF), clashes involving camp residents, many of whom are children, and an increasing number of injuries as a result of excessive force by the ISF.” The only access to health care the refugees have is at an UNRWA facility a mile away.
The camp, now home to over 4,000 refugees, looked like an apocalyptic version of projects you might find in New York — the ground was dusty and unpaved, the buildings were much lower and they were almost all falling apart. We passed by barefooted kids my sons age — no older than five — playing on a tattered mattress in the ground floor of an abandoned building, surrounded by piles of rock and trash. We passed by an old man slumped over in a wheelchair, alone on the street, making low moaning sounds. Amidst the broken windows there were laundry lines hanging and tattered Palestinian flags waving, walls with graffiti of Yassar Arafat’s face or phrases in Arabic that we couldn’t read. We saw one swastika, one of two I saw during my time in Palestine.
As we were walking out a lanky teenage boy came skipping up to us and asked in English what our names were. We told him and he looked at M and said, “Oohhh Michael Jackson!” (Maybe because of the similarity of M’s name to Michael, we surmised). He wanted M’s number and M obliged, but never heard from him again.
The street outside of Aida, which is bordered by the wall and thus bordered by soldiers at all times, was littered with tear gas canisters and the burnt remains of tires. And yet there were stabs at western-ism, even feet away from this humanitarian crisis — a restaurant called “Horn Burger” that looked like a slightly wrong spin off of an Outback Steakhouse. As we were moseying down the street we passed by a group of people boarding a bus and heard shouts of “M, M!” Three of M’s students from the English Literature class he taught at Bethlehem University were grinning and waving. Palestine was starting to feel like the smallest occupied territory in the world.
We made our way back to the old city and stopped in a church that claims to house the original birth place of Jesus. “So this is like, the manger?” I asked M. “I suppose?” We tried listening in on a tour but couldn’t follow the details, especially given our limited knowledge of the situation, so we headed to a restaurant before retrieving our bags and getting back on the bus to Ramallah. The café was on the second floor of an art gallery, overlooking a touristy street filled with gift shops and ice cream shops and a never ending stream of Asian and Western tourists.
The instant we walked in a young beautiful couple started pointing at us and laughing. Because apparently you can’t go more than an hour without running into friends here, they turned out to be two of M’s besties who we had tried to meet up with the night before — Maia and Daniel. Maia, a journalist who recently accepted a position with the BBC, was working on her laptop and drinking a Corona while Daniel ate lunch. We ordered wine even though we said we wouldn’t drink until dinner tonight at Nehal’s house, and Maia told us about the piece she was working on. The piece was focused on Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian activist who slapped a solider after her 15 year old cousin was shot in the head at close range with a rubber-coated steel bullet at a protest against settlements being built near their village. She was arrested days later and given eight months in prison, after accepting a plea bargain. She is widely seen as a symbol of the Palestinian resistance, and by many Israelis as a “terrorist sympathizer.” Maia told us about the challenges she faced working at the BBC on such a sensitive and personal story.
Three wines later, we were in the backseat of a servise returning to Ramallah. In front of us sat two Palestinian women, around our age, dressed in western clothes. When M spoke to the driver in perfect Arabic they turned to us, shocked, and asked him in English how he learned their language. He explained he had been here for five years, was teaching and writing, but they, like most people looked skeptical.
“They think I’m a spy,” he whispered, but I had already guessed as much.
M’s best friend Nehal, who owned the Attic with her partner, was the first female owner of a bar in the West Bank. She graciously offered to host a dinner party to celebrate my visit. The apartment she shared with her partner and Attic co-owner Amjad was cozy and the spread was elaborate. Most of M’s posse was there, including Bashar and Delores, and I was again filled with happiness knowing that M was surrounded by such kind and smart people who adored him, as I did, as everyone who was lucky enough to get close to him did. M had a way of making everyone around him comfortable — there was never small talk, or inauthentic conversation, and somehow he had managed that continuity in this other language, in this other land.
As Vicki Palefsky says, “no matter where you go, there you are.”
Postcards from Palestine is a travelogue in nine chapters.
