A Stranger on My Own Land

It was a very long plane ride. Seven hours from the U.S. to Frankfurt, spending a few hours at the airport, then changing to another plane bound for Tel Aviv.Though Palestine is my homeland, I haven't been back for 5 years. The last time I visited, in 1999, was at the height of the Oslo "Peace Process". Everyone there was optimistic, hopeful that a decades-old conflict will come to an end so they can get to enjoy normal lives for once, like the rest of humanity.Many emigrants had returned, and Ramallah, thought to be a de facto capital of the future Palestinian state, was booming.This time I didn't really know what to expect. The high point of peace had lasted only briefly, with the region slipping back into a violent conflict, erroneously labeled "Intifada", after Sharon's offensive entry into the Aqsa mosque. Over the last three and a half years, I have seen countless violent and horrendous images on TV. On CNN, I have been able to follow for several hours the gory aftermath of the occasional suicide bomb in Tel Aviv. On BBC and later, al-Jazeera, I have been able to follow the never-ending stream of horrific Israeli attacks on Gaza and the West Bank, against my own people, friends, and family. My heart would jump every time I heard there was an attack on Ramallah, picking up the phone immediately to call my parents and check on their safety. My heart would jump too when I hear of a suicide bomb in Jerusalem, because then I know that a "reprisal" Israeli raid will likely follow. One time I heard Israeli Apache helicopters were bombing some Palestine Authority office in Ramallah, about 100 yards from my parents' house. I called home. My aged mother answered the phone. My dad was outside working, and she was alone. The electricity to the whole city was knocked down by the bombing, and my mom couldn't reach any candles from her wheelchair. I could hear the sounds of the bombing from the telephone.Traveling with me, and not knowing what to expect either, was my wife of 4 years. She is neither a Palestinian nor an Arab, and has never been to the Middle East before. I longed to take her to visit my home country. Since the present Intifada erupted, various reasons forced us to keep postponing the trip. Despite my reassurances, she of course worried for her safety. My own secret fear, however, was her getting a negative first impression of my country when she saw all this destruction and danger. I somehow imagined we would arrive to a Ramallah in ruins—with TV images of Arafat's bombed-out compound or the Jenin refugee camp imprinted in my consciousness. At first, we kept postponing the trip, one year to the next, hoping that the situation would improve.Instead, things kept getting worse. Every year became worse than the one before. After the massacre of Jenin and the siege of the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem, Sharon's government started building a wall, to keep Palestinians enclosed within their cities-turned-prisons. I have seen many images of that wall. It looked very tall, medieval, and threatening. Being somewhat claustrophobic, I dreaded having to come face-to-face with it. What will my reaction be? Yet with events spiraling towards the worst, we finally decided there is no point in waiting any further. "Let's go visit Ramallah before Ramallah itself disappears from the map".Though I have settled in the U.S. for the last 15 years, I am a Palestinian, a Christian Arab born in Jerusalem in the early 1970s, under Israeli occupation. My parents originally came from the Arab cities of Yafa and Ramleh, now almost absorbed by sprawling Tel Aviv. They both had to leave their homes under fire in April 1948, when the armed Jewish terrorist groups Irgun and Hagannah attacked their cities. Most Arab families at that time were unarmed and city defenses were laughable, courtesy of the policies of a 30 year old British occupation. With their families, my parents fled for their lives and settled in Ramallah, becoming two out of over 800,000 Palestinian refugees who were evicted under similar circumstances. The following month, the Zionists declared a Jewish state they called "Israel". Much later, in 1967, Israel invaded its Arab neighbors and took control of the West Bank, completing its control of Palestine, and thus my parents fell under occupation again. Though I was born in Jerusalem, my residence was in Ramallah, and the Israelis made a point to rub that on me, by giving me a special orange ID card as opposed to the blue-color ID for residents of Jerusalem, a city the Israelis consider their capital.An orange Israeli ID, identifying a Palestinian resident of the West Bank. Anyone caught not carrying his ID is subject to beating, imprisonments, and or fines. "Religion: Christian" says one line on this "yellow Star of David" of modern-day Israel.You see everything in Israel is color-coded and segregated: different colored-Ids; different-colored license plates; "Arab rooms" in the airport where we get the 4-hour interrogation/strip-search special while Jewish travelers walk through security in minutes; and special foreigner border points across the Jordan river so tourists will not see the day-long torture sessions ordinary Palestinians have to twice endure every time they need to travel abroad through Jordan.Israelis apparently take pride in their discrimination, proudly informing us at the embassy that my wife is likely to get her Israeli visa application denied "for the reason that she is married to a Palestinian". How is my wife to visit my birthplace when ethnicity of spouse is a visa requirement? Besides, why would my wife care to visit that war-torn place in the first place were she not married to me? To get her visa, my wife returned to the embassy alone, posing as a tourist staying in Jerusalem and wearing a big cross. This time they gave it to her.What made the trip much more terrifying is the Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin just days before our scheduled departure. After long deliberations, hours of watching the al-Jazeera news, and many phone calls home, we had decided to risk it and go. The newspapers served on the plane were not very reassuring, quoting threats from Hamas and suggesting they might retaliate by attacking Tel Aviv airport. What worried us even more, however, was Israel's planned response if Hamas took the bait and retaliated.The flight became really uncomfortable as we switched planes to Tel Aviv. Suddenly, I was one of the few Arabs on a flight packed with Jewish passengers. Everyone had a strange look on their faces, as if they were suspiciously eyeing us, our neighbors looking around at us so frequently. An old man sitting next to us, flying by himself, looked sympathetic enough. Twice he asked us to borrow a pen to fill out his paperwork, and twice we loaned him ours with a smile. After we landed in Tel Aviv, while we were waiting for the door to open, he attempted to strike a conversation. "First time to Israel?" I made the idiotic mistake of saying "no" and little by little he gleaned just enough to figure out I'm Palestinian. He was the first one to exit the plane, and I was right behind him. At the bottom of the steps, a number of airport security guards were waiting. With a nod, this old man said a word to the security guard, and the next thing I know, the guard jumps in front of me, blocking my way. For the next 15 minutes, we were interrogated right there on the taxiway, not even allowed to board the bus to the terminal, while everyone else looked on as they disembarked.

Finally at the terminal, the "place of birth" on my American passport, and the seemingly innocent question of "How's your Hebrew", were enough to identify us and lead us into the infamous "Arab Room", now reduced to a small corner of the airport. Despite our being married for 4 years, and despite all that she learned about Palestine, and the conflict during that time, my wife simply could not believe the way they treated us at Tel Aviv airport. At first she thought they were taking their time checking our passports. Quickly though, she couldn't help notice how empty the airport was, and how many of the border girls working there were hanging around chatting and doing nothing, while we were told to wait. After a tiring 20-hour trip, we were made to wait 3.5 hours, with no access to food, before finally being escorted out of the airport, and into an Israeli taxicab that was instructed not to let us get off anywhere except inside the West Bank. He dropped us off at a remote checkpoint close to the airport, but one hour away from Ramallah, in the dark of night, and we immediately had the sinking feeling of stepping into a prison.

From that checkpoint at the edge of the West Bank where the Israeli airport taxi dropped us off, the way to Ramallah winded through dark valleys on the western slopes of the West Bank, through many new Israeli colonies (the so-called "settlements").We took a Palestinian taxi to Ramallah, the same one that was sent to pick us up from the airport but was prohibited from doing that and told to follow us. The driver was worried about going back along that way, in between the colonies. Though the colonies were lit with bright lights, they wore a gloomy face and appeared very quiet and sleepy as everyone hid inside their houses. Each colony was surrounded by barbed wire, enclosing a large swath of land (forcibly taken from neighboring Arab villages). The entrance to each colony was further, guarded by armored personnel carriers or tanks. It was clear that those Israeli colonists, while appearing tough in public, lived in great fear.A while afterwards, we finally reached an older (and not as well-paved) road connecting Arab villages. At the intersection stood an empty Israeli guard tower which, in the gloom of night, looked more like a haunted Transylvanian castle. "This is the checkpoint where a Palestinian sniper killed ten [Israeli] soldiers. They closed it down now." On our first night in Palestine, it felt so eerie.Fortunately, the older road entered the Palestinian village of Bir Zeit, home of the famous Bir Zeit university and home to several-thousand-year-old olive presses. Finally I encountered familiar ground. Unlike the road connecting Israeli colonies which skirts the edges of habitation, this road went right through the ancient village, and though the street lights were not as bright, the village people were out on the streets, their shops open, children playing, and loud music blazing from outdoor restaurants. The whole town was alive, and fear was not in the air that night. Though the driver was afraid someone would attack us because his car had an Israeli license plate, nothing of that sort happened.After those long 24 continuous hours of travel and lack of sleep, our first night back home was very depressing. The first thing that greeted us walking into my parents’ house was a large bullet-hole in the door, left as a souvenir by Israeli soldiers who were searching houses during the incursion of April 2002. Though the caretaker back then offered them the keys, explaining that the owner of the house was on travel, the soldiers insisted on shooting at the door. The shot was far from the lock. Instead, it penetrated two layers of door, one of them supposedly "bullet-proof", then exploded into many fragments, traces of which could be seen on the opposite wall of the living room. The central fragment went through the wall, through the back then the front of a wooden closet on the other side, and all the way out the window on the other side of the house, breaking the glass.The firing of this "dum-dum" bullet was clearly not about opening the door. It was not a warning shot. It was rather about showing us who’s boss—who can shoot through many doors, walls, and rooms. Luckily my parents were away at that time, or else they might have thought to answer the door.Despite this harrowing introduction, the rest of our stay was relatively calm and uneventful (thank God). The long-awaited Hamas retaliation did not come, nor did we see any of the clashes normally on TV. Personally, I had vivid images imprinted in my mind of the first Intifada which I experienced before leaving for the U.S. in the late 1980s. Back then we would see confrontations between Israeli soldiers and stone throwing "Shabab" ("guys") almost daily in downtown Ramallah. Often the soldiers would use live bullets and it would get deadly. Often, too, the soldiers would beat everyone they could catch in the neighborhood after these confrontations, two of my own brothers having been beaten simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now however, in 2004, we did not witness such incidents first hand. In fact, we could hardly see any Israeli soldiers in downtown Ramallah. They mostly preferred to hang out at well-defended checkpoints on the outskirts where they can control us from afar without risking their lives.That is not to say things were always that quiet. Everyone in Ramallah spoke in horrified tones about "The Incursion", when in 2002, Israeli soldiers knocked down Arafat’s compound, put the whole city under curfew, searched every single house (stealing jewelry and money in the process), and terrorized everyone. It was a very difficult time for people there. Most of the public buildings in the city were destroyed. What we saw on our trip was the result of two years of rapid reconstruction. Everyone also told us how Ramallah was actually one of the quieter places in the West Bank and Gaza. Other places, especially Gaza, Nablus, Jenin, and the refugee camps, are not so fortunate.For example, just in the second day of our stay, I was watching CNN on satellite, when they announced that a 12-year-old Palestinian boy was killed in "a refugee camp in the West Bank", and that was that. Not mentioning the name of the child, as usual, this time CNN did not even bother to mention the location of that incident. "Some refugee camp," as if ‘who cares?’. I listened again. We really wanted to know if this refugee camp is in the vicinity of Ramallah—vital information we needed in order to decide whether it was safe to go out that day. Giving up on CNN, our only deliverance was from al-Jazeera, which not only identified the place as the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, but also gave the horrid details of the incident, how the poor boy was playing on his balcony when the Israeli bullet did its deed.On another dimension, the calm and quiet we experienced during our stay was very deceptive. Like I said before, it was quiet only because the occupying soldiers chose not to enter the city center. Had they wished to reassert their authority at any time, they could enter Ramallah unopposed. The Palestinian Authority police, reinstated in Ramallah just a month before our visit, are forbidden from carrying guns. People don’t even obey their orders directing traffic. The Israelis therefore go into Palestinians cities occasionally to arrest resistance leaders and people they dislike. Yet most of the time, they choose to stay just outside our cities because that is a cheaper way of controlling us. Rather than send large reinforcements of soldiers into potential inner city combat situations, their strategy is to just build a massive wall to contain us into small enclaves, leaving only small detachments of soldiers at the gates. It is a cheaper solution only because the U.S. government is complicit in providing U.S. taxpayer money to finance that medieval wall.The result of these policies can be described in one word: "suffocation". Rather than oppressing Palestinians using bullets and violence like they have done in the past, the Israeli oppression nowadays takes on a more institutional and administrative form. Downtown Ramallah is only a few square miles in area. One can drive from end to end, checkpoint to checkpoint, in a matter of minutes, but without a permit from the Israeli jailers, one cannot leave those confines. The feeling is really suffocating. Such travel restrictions stifle what’s left of the Palestinian economy and add to the already enormous unemployment.Even more significantly, Palestinians, now confined to their respective cities, do not even get to see their oppressors. There is no one to blame, no one to hate—at least no one in sight. Palestinian children can protest and demonstrate all they want, but no one is listening. While we were there, Israel was busy building its Apartheid Wall in several villages right at the western outskirts of Ramallah, despite pretenses by the Israeli High Court of "orders" to halt construction. These villages were deep inside West Bank territory, on Arab village lands, usually separating the villagers from the majority of their lands and water wells. I watched on TV how the Israeli soldiers violently evicted the villagers from their land and quelled their small protestations. Handfuls of international and even Israeli volunteers were defending the villagers. The funny thing is that here I am—a Palestinian watching his neighbors oppressed, right in front of satellite TV, and I cannot even go there to help them protest because of the Israeli checkpoints separating us.

Talking about the wall, I was at first excited when I heard in the USA that the Israeli High Court issued a decision to halt construction. "At least there’s some justice" I naively thought. Upon seeing things with my own eyes, however, I learned the fine print. First the Israeli High Court ordered a halt of "construction", but not a halt of "preparations"—a seemingly benign term that in the Israeli lexicon included such things as expropriating land from villages, demolishing Palestinian homes standing in the way of the wall, digging ditches and minefields, and bringing concrete blocks and laying them in place but on their side. The second fine print is that such and such an order is issued regarding the wall in such and such a village, Abu Dis for instance. So while "construction" halts in Abu Dis, it continues full speed ahead everywhere else. Hundreds of miles of wall are planned for the West Bank, and Israel’s "High" Court battles them inch by inch. (High on what, I wonder?) This system of "justice" seems to me more like a way to extort enormous amounts of money in court fees from all the poor villagers whose land was taken, a sly way of making the victims finance their oppressors.Once the wall is completed, it will be an even more absurd situation. People in the Palestinian prison-enclaves will be left to rot without a visible culprit on the scene, while Israelis go about their daily business unconcerned and can "forget" about the Palestinian nuisances in their backyards. Thus the occupied becomes invisible to the occupier, the occupier invisible to the occupied!For more, see http://www.triptopalestine.com/ Slideshow has 1000s of photos!

My first shock upon crossing the border into Palestine is the brand new concrete bridge under which actually flowed not a drop of water. In my childhood, we crossed many times over a tattered old wooden bridge, which was actually built over a deep, gushing river.Now the river is sucked dry by Israel’s extensive industrialization and unnatural population growth, such as their recent import of "one million Russians" in the 1990s to put pressure on Palestinians. The Jordan valley and eastern West Bank slopes, needless to say, were as barren as ever. True, I am visiting in September before the first rain of the season, but never before in my life have I seen that area in such a dehydrated state. The water table must be depleted beyond recognition, as the hundreds of West Bank colonies compete with other Israelis in sucking the water dry from the West Bank aquifers. Somehow this parched scene reminded me of this full-page advertisement I once saw in 1988 in the Jerusalem Post, signed by Israel’s Water Ministry, to the effect that Israel must not withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza, not because of security reasons, but because the "Territories" have the biggest water resources available. As proof of Israel’s dire need for water, its government proceeded throughout the 1990s to import those aforementioned one million Russians to a land with a total population of less than eight million. I do not think I quite yet grasp Israeli logic!Another area of Israeli logic that baffles me is their concept of "security". For years I have heard and read of former Israeli prime minister Netanyahu’s hackneyed arguments for why should Israel keep the West Bank. Very simply, according to Mr. Yahoo, the West Bank has a longer border with Israel than with Jordan. By keeping it, Israel would have a shorter border to defend and therefore would be more secure. So far so good (notwithstanding his total ignorance for the basic human rights of 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation). Fast-forward to 2005. The next thing that catches my eye as I get closer to Ramallah is the miles, and miles, and miles of Wall. As the mushrooming Israeli colonies grab more Palestinian land, miles of Walls are imposed to separate the Palestinians owners from their own land. Very often the wall is built right at the edge of the last house in a Palestinian town or village, snaking all or almost all the way around it, leaving little or no connection to the next village.... Much more and lots of photos on http://www.triptopalestine.com/