“How are you? Do you have a weapon?”: Dispatches from Israel/Palestine

By Liv Leader

The evening air brings a surprising chill to Jerusalem, and makes me wish I hadn’t sent all my warm clothes back to America. The days have been hot, as I’ve marched from religious west Jerusalem to the central and eastern parts of the city. This is my fourth night here and my body is beginning to adjust to the heat, the stress, and the chaos of this fragmented city. Divisions exist between religious and secular, natives and new immigrants, Jews and Arabs, white Jews and black Jews, and the rich and poor. (If you’re ever here you should visit the Museum on the Seam, which seeks to address these divisions through art.)

While the Zionist narrative strives for the ingathering of the Diaspora, I have no desire to change my role as an outsider peering in. I have assumed my role as wanderer of the streets and silent breaker of taboos. I’ve been staying in a mostly orthodox Jewish neighborhood in a basement flat with a friend who recently immigrated to Israel. The buildings here are mostly three stories tall, and have been built in the typical Israeli fashion of the 1950s. The hard plaster walls have taken the sandy color that dominates this city, and the small apartment is strictly utilitarian. The windows are generally open and the sounds of children playing, Israeli pop music, men praying, and cats fighting drifts into the small flat. In the past I’ve generally felt unwelcome in orthodox communities, but people here have been surprisingly friendly. The Hasidic man who sells groceries from the corner store actually made small talk with me as I bought yogurt and orange juice earlier this week. He asked me how I was, and in my nervous Hebrew I told him I was okay. He just replied, “Baruch ha-shem.” While this old man in his black kippah and long beard probably praises God throughout the day, it struck me that a Hasidic man had never looked me in the eyes, and praised God that the secular also exists.

I’m not at ease in the religious parts of Israeli Jerusalem. In past visits I’ve been mildly attracted to the strange phenomenon of this intensely religious area, but this personal interest has passed. While the religious schools, stores, and institutes feel completely alien to me – I’ve found surprising warmth from the people. When I was a student here four years ago, my fellow foreign students had a stereotype about Israelis. In our eyes the way to describe the attitude of the typical Israeli was to rush past someone, push them out of your way, and as an afterthought say “excuse me.” We all thought this was terribly funny and accurate, and now it seems out of place. Every time I walk down the street in this neighborhood people start talking to me or asking me directions, and I constantly have to explain that I don’t speak Hebrew.

Tuesday morning I had an appointment with the admissions office at Birzeit University, which is near Ramallah in the West Bank. I left the flat at 7:15 so that I could finish my hour-long walk to East (Palestinian) Jerusalem before the sun becomes too intense. Since I don’t know the side streets in this part of the city, my daily trek follows the main roads, which are also the bus routes. The traffic is fairly heavy with cars, some motorcycles, a few brave bicyclists, and the buses. In spite of the fact that buses have been a favored target for suicide bombers, and that no attacks have occurred in Israel since the Yassin and Rantisi assassinations, Israelis ride them daily. Children, young, old, religious, secular, soldiers all clamor onto the buses as people do in every city in the world. When I told my Israeli friend I was surprised by this she simply said, “People have to get around.” Of course she’s right, life must go on in spite of its dangers.

Security is high in the city; almost every bus stop or bus has a good looking, young security guard scanning the crowd. Occasionally these security guards – who I’ve been told are privately hired by the bus company – will stop and ask you a random question. “How are you? Do you have a weapon?” My friend thinks that half the time these guards are calculating your response, while the other half they are just trying to talk to women. But since I’ve promised my parents I will avoid riding the buses, I mostly watch them pass me by from the sidewalk.

This conflict has undoubtedly created strange morning commutes for everyone living in the region. The Israeli who doesn’t drive to work takes a death-defying ride on public transportation; while the Palestinian, delayed at checkpoints, can only hope the soldiers will not suddenly close the road before she reaches her destination. I have no complaints about my “commute,” but I imagine that my route – from the heart of Israeli Jerusalem to the center of Palestinian Jerusalem – is not common. On my walk Tuesday morning, feeling a little self-conscious about speaking Arabic in an Israeli area, I made arrangements for my friend Ziad to drive me to the Ramallah checkpoint in his Taxi.

I met Ziad four years ago when he was working at the hotel I stayed in during my studies in Jerusalem. We’re about the same age, and while I was studying identity-based conflict, he was working nights in the hotel restaurant and studying business administration at a local university. Despite the fact that I couldn’t speak any Arabic and his English was very minimal we became friends. He invited me to his house inside the old city to meet his family. The day I went to his home we walked through the old city from Damascus gate through the Muslim quarter to Jaffa gate. Across from David’s Tower, we walked through a small doorway into a courtyard of ancient apartments. This little enclave of Palestinian homes was hidden from the tourist infested plaza outside. I was a vegetarian at the time and I remember attempting to casually avoid the chicken liver his mother cooked. I didn’t succeed, and I politely ate the liver with my hummus and pita. After we ate Ziad showed me the small apartment and shuffled through his Arabic music collection to see which singers I knew. He showed me his desk where he drank strong coffee and chain-smoked all night to help him study after going to school in the day, and working all evening.

For the last year Ziad has driven a Mercedes taxi around East Jerusalem. He says he likes the job, and owning the car, but wishes the economy would improve and allow him to utilize his degree in business. When we met outside the hotel where he used to work, I saw another friend, Bashir, who is a cartographer by profession, but works the night shift at the hotel to pay the bills. Inside the hotel, the lovely receptionist recognized me, and she happily kissed my cheeks.

The fifteen-minute ride to the Kalandia checkpoint was fairly awkward. When the weight of the conflict hangs so heavily in the air it can be a little difficult to know what to talk about. Ziad appeared void of emotion. He kept his eyes on the road and the silence was filled with the words of the Qur’an that flowed from his radio. We drove on a new settler highway, with the Palestinian town of Beit Hanina on our left, and Israeli settlement Pisgat Ze’ev on our right. I tried to be cheerful as we drove, but I was feeling nervous about the checkpoint and negotiating my way around the West Bank, and I didn’t really know what to say to Ziad. Two years ago I felt the same way when I crossed the green line into the Occupied Territories. Even though I’ve spent enough time here to have a good geographical and cultural sense of the region, the barrage of media images of gun-toting Hamas members parading around makes me nervous. Most Jewish Israelis won’t go into the territories, and are often shocked when they learn that I go there.

Ziad explained that if he drove me through the checkpoint he would end up spending two hours convincing the soldiers to let him and his car back onto the Israeli side. He dropped me off, didn’t charge me for the ride, and told me to call him when I wanted to come back to Jerusalem. I fell in line with the surprisingly few Palestinians crossing into the checkpoint. We walked on the side of the road past an old woman and a child begging (a rare sight amongst Palestinians) and an old man in a wheel chair sitting on the path to the checkpoint. The soldiers apparently weren’t too concerned with those of us entering the West Bank and we all walked straight past the checkpoint. On the other side a group of shared taxis waited to take passengers to Ramallah and Birzeit. I climbed into the minivan, with other young students, and we set off to the university. Aside from being briefly stopped by another makeshift checkpoint, our ride was uneventful.

The town of Birzeit is a few miles north of Ramallah – the political and economic center of the West Bank. The university is perched on a hill, surrounded by a mountainous landscape terraced with olive trees. I don’t know what “bir” means, but “zeit” is olive in Arabic. The university has about 5,000 students, and a small Palestine and Arabic studies program for international students.

When I arrived at the university I pounced upon two young women from my taxi and asked them where the international office was. I explained that I was in Palestine to study Arabic, but they insisted that I speak to them in English – which was flawless. Nadine studies psychology and Amira is in the engineering department, and since neither of them knew where the international office was they decided to give me a mini-tour of their campus. After a few wrong turns they employed the help of another young man, who knew where the international office was, and all three walked me to my destination.

My interview at the university went well, although the Arabic teacher determined that I would definitely be placed in level one when I was hoping for level two.

It’s Wednesday afternoon, and having slept 10 hours last night, I’m trying to wrap up this letter. It’s overwhelming to be here, and much has changed in the past two years. The most obvious effects of the intifada are the empty stores and closed businesses. The old Sbarro pizza restaurant in West Jerusalem is closed, as is the nearby Dunkin Donuts and other western chains. Rumor has it that even Starbucks couldn’t make it. Walking through the center of West Jerusalem, stores and cafes I used to visit are gone, along with the crowds of tourists. Salah Eddin street in East Jerusalem was filled with school children, and while the stores were open, the clothing shops were quiet. Only the cell phone store where I bought a local sim card seemed to be doing well. The tourist shops in the old city were completely empty, despondent looking shopkeepers sat outside their stores trying to convince me that they sold exactly what I was looking for. I tried to visit a shopkeeper friend, who has a store near the Western Wall, but his shop was gone and the nearby shopkeepers didn’t know what happened to Samir’s jewelry shop. I drank tea with a nearby shopkeeper and his son, and when I asked them how much business they did in a week they just gave me an exasperated look. In the hour I visited with them, a few tourists and Israelis came in, but I didn’t see anyone buy anything.

The top four headlines in today’s edition of Haaretz all discuss the latest events in Gaza. Five settlers and six soldiers dead in Gaza since Sharon lost his referendum vote nine days ago – no mention of how many Palestinians were killed in the same period. With more and more politicians arguing for the withdrawal, analysts argue that Israeli willingness to send their children to protect Gazan settlements will only diminish. As Amos Harel writes today, the situation is a reminiscent of Lebanon.

Liv Leader is a journalist working in Israel and the Palestinian Territories.