It happened around mid-November. I wasn't feeling ready to go back to the US as planned, during winter break. I wanted generally to tour Europe but was in a bit of a rut and didn't have the ideas or energy to put something together for December. And I got a call from my friend Sarah Beller: "I'm going to Israel. Wanna come?"
We talked it over and eventually I got on board.
The trip had 3 components.
1) Arrival, shabbat, and general hanging out with friends who were in Jerusalem for the year;
2) Visits to Palestine / the West Bank;
3) a visit to an enviro-kibbutz in the south.
I added on some scuba diving for myself during the last part of the trip, and on December 28th Sarah and I met in the Tel Aviv airport and made our way via sherut (shared taxi) to J'lem.
In the sherut we met someone who knew a friend of ours and had been involved in our e-mail conversation about travelling to the West Bank. It was going to be the first of one of many random "small world" run ins that happened, more or less on a daily basis, in the small world that is anglo-Jerusalem.
Stage 1: Jerusalem.
Mood: Joyful and Festive.
Rating: Awesome.
Looking back on the trip, I think one of the really amazing parts was getting to reconnect with friends and friendships in various degrees of development, ranging from people who I already had a strong relationship with, to people that I had shared community with but hadn't really gotten to really spend time one-on-one with, to friends-of-friends that I hadn't yet met, and all the stages in-between. This Jewish, justicey, post-denominational post-geographical overly-educated add-your-own-adjective seemingly-ever-outward-stretching community that I have found myself a part of over the last few years seems to consistently succeed in popping out great new people. Outside of it I find it rare to quickly connect to people -- inside, it seems to happen all the time. It felt great to be surrounded by people at once interested in making the world a better place, and also in living spiritually and emotionally rich lives enjoying what good the world and its inhabitants have to offer. It became evident to me that as much as I needed to cocoon for a bit in Belgium, having this community and these people in my life is important to me.
So, there was the usual bounty of Shabbes meals and walks, great food and song, and generally doing J'lem from the living room, ordinary street, and park perspective, rather than the tourist track.
Post-shabbes I hit the tourist track and took a walk to the old city. I visited "the wall", meaning the western wall, the holiest site for Jews, and found it to be disturbingly a) touristy, b) dominated by one particular and self-proclaimed-authentic form of Judaism, c) why are we holding a site or a physical object as holy? Isn't that a little bit against the whole Judeo-radical-monotheism revolution? d) meaningful in spite of, or perhaps because of all these conflicting issues condensed into a single physical experience of who-I-am / what-I-am-a-part-of. Its strange, but encountering that sort of fragmentation and conflict within something that is supposedly me, my culture, my people, in my name, etc. can be just as powerful an experience as encountering abundant perfection in the same realm; just to encounter that realm of selfness-in-world in any state is a step towards the more intense, especially when I'm so used to playing the stranger-in-a-strange-land.
There was a lot of tension between what the site suggested my identity to be and who I felt like; what this site suggested the world should be like and how I felt it should be. A custodial worker passed before me sweeping notes, people's handwritten prayers for their deepest hopes, into his waste-bin en masse to be incinerated or dropped in a landfill somewhere far away. The holy collides with the mundane and the profane. In Israel there's not enough space to keep them separate anymore.
Afterwards I met a Berkeley grad who was working consulting in Bahrain and we took a walk together through the shuk in the Muslim quarter that eventually placed us on a walk atop the wall that surrounded the old city, overlooking the beauty and chaos below. Once atop the wall I admitted that I had been a bit nervous walking around below, and he admitted that he felt the same -- he could just see the headlines: "American tourists shot by Israeli soldiers". I found this enlightening -- we were of two minds here. Of course it makes sense to be afraid of the 18 year olds with the machine guns. But to me, they weren't personally threatening. Aesthetically unpleasing, even politically problematic, but certainly not threatening. Heck, sometimes when I felt like I might be wandering into the wrong part of town, seeing the IDF uniform was a relief. They probably went to school with one of my friends' cousins. I could speak Hebrew with them. I could use the right code words. I could pass for "one-of-us" in their eyes. There's safety in that identity. But that same identity that made me feel relatively ok with the soldiers while my companion felt threatened, created the opposite effect for both of us on the streets of the Muslim shuk. I didn't know the callsigns there, and though my identity wasn't visually apparent, if revealed it might cast me in a poor light, regardless of my own personal political views. He was a Christian tourist -- relatively innocuous in that setting.
Israel is a place where identity and all of the hooplah surrounding it suddenly take on a whole new importance. Your religion, your nationality, your culture, and your politics all have big impacts on who you can relate to, where you can go, what you can do, how safe you feel, how people treat you, etc. And the degree to which you can pass or present ambiguously very much affect your experience in day to day life. I felt that over the course of the trip, whether for safety's sake or just for comfort / pleasantness' sake, I had to stay very mindful of how I presented and what I revealed about myself. The times when I could pass for having a good / acceptable identity, my privilege became very present and real for me. The times when I couldn't were hard, frustrating, and sometimes even frightening. More on this in stage 2.
One highlight of the Jerusalem component of the trip was playing carillon at the YMCA building right outside the old city. I took two cohorts of about 5-6 friends up, one on Monday, one on Tuesday. We did about half an hour of playing on the small and somewhat dilapidated, but still pretty-sounding instrument there, then a climb up to the top of the tower to catch the end of the sunset and sing some nigunnim to the old city.
Others highlights: Ringing in the secular new year a la renewal Judaism, seeing cats walking the streets, being surrounded by Jerusalem stone and plants living and growing all around, clear sunny skies, temperate weather conditions, taking in the sights of the various shuks (marketplaces), and of course, eating real falafel and hommous.
Most small-world experience: Besides the daily run-ins on the street, there was one contra dance where my friend Ilana showed up by surprise, and then one of my dance partners ended up also being the host of a New Year's party that I later attended.
Stage 2: Palestine.
Mood: Sometimes heavy, sometimes joyful, always stretching and growing.
Rating: Awesome.
I am standing out on a dark and empty street. The air is filled with the sound of the adhan, the day's final call prayer. It pours forth loudly, overwhelmingly from each and every tower of the many surrounding mosques, each at a different tempo and pitch, overlapping, mingling and clashing like turbulent waves from adjoining seas. It is my first time ever hearing this sound in person. I find it simultaneously alien, terrifying, and beautiful. And, to my amusement, familiar in the most surprising of ways. Every day I listen to the bells of Mechelen compete with each other and fill the soundscape in this very same fashion. I breathe in this sound and take pride in my achievement of coming out here, of braving the unknown, while at the same time making sure I stay within a 5-second dash to the protective front door of my host's house.
OK. I admit it. I was nervous. Who wouldn't be? I knew so little of what I might find on the other side of "the wall" (now meaning the "security barrier" that Israel has erected between itself and the Palestinian population, both groups loosely defined), and the little I did know suggested grave danger. My only clue that this impression might be incorrect was that many of my friends regularly went across. A couple even ran an organization called Encounter Tours that took Jews with no experience in the area into the West Bank.
The plan was to go over with Encounter Tours for the day -- then Sarah and I would stayed the night with a local host, Abed (a colleague of Sarah's boyfriend who runs an arts program in the Aida refugee camp) while the rest of our group headed back to Israel proper.
Some words about safety, so that I can leave it behind. My friends made sure I was well-informed and well-prepared. I never had to be away from a professional or local who had taken on the obligation to keep me safe. I had a lot of input from people living in Israel. I had cash and emergency phone numbers under the insole of my shoe, a practice donated from a friend and one I intend to keep. What's safety in these situations? 20,000 Christian tourists pass right through Bethlehem without a hitch.
Our group of 9 set off early from Jerusalem. We took cabs to the checkpoint. Our driver asked us to have our money ready so he could drive off as quickly as possible and not risk having his car stoned. I'm pretty sure nobody throws stones right outside the checkpoint, but we found this to be telling about the attitudes on the ground. We crossed the checkpoint by foot and got into our tour van on the other side, and our day began.
We met with the deputy mayor of Bethlehem and principal of a Christian-Palestinian school. We saw the landscape, the various segments of the wall, the Jewish settlements atop the hills, and the protected roads and tunnels that cut across the countryside to connect them to Jerusalem. We saw the countryside too, full of beautiful terraced hills and olive trees. We met with the director of a non-violent resistance program over a lunch of delicious Palestinian foods, most of which we had encountered as delicious Israeli foods earlier in the week. We saw the churches and all the important sites of Christianity. We visited the Aida refugee camp and met with Abed.
And then Sarah and I waved goodbye to our the rest of the Encounter tour, goodbye to the sense of security that came with having an experienced friend in charge, goodbye to the safe and easy way to a bed in the midst of Jerusalem. We took a brief walking tour of the camp with Abed. We met a lot of children along the way, and got to see the general layout. As night fell, we hopped into his car and drove to his house in Beit-Sahour, about 10 minutes away.
Sarah took a nap before dinner and I managed to convince Abed to let me help with the cooking. The dinner was delicious. Abed had worked as a chef in Paris while he was getting his degree over there.
We talked a lot over the cooking, and afterwards too, over the dinner. And even after dinner, we lingered at the table for a while, listening to Abed and drinking sage tea made with sage from his former village in Israel; and eating Belgian chocolates that I had brought over as an attempt to somehow thank him for the kindness and hospitality he'd shown us.
The next day we toured the refugee camp again, toured the facilities of Al-Rowad, the arts camp, and had a good long talk with Husam Jubran, who had started the non-violent activism program that we encountered the day before. We looked, talked, and explored, then left in the early afternoon so that we could make it to the checkpoint before sundown, and make it through before the evening rush. The plan had been to have Abed put us in a taxi, but by this point Sarah and I both decided that we wanted to make our way to the checkpoint by foot. This was probably the scariest part of the whole experience. It was our first time being alone, without a guide, without a local host who was a respected member of the community to protect us. I was walking with two dual and very different impressions in my mind -- mindful both of my recent experiences of hospitality and kindness, and also the sorts of dangers that I'd been taught to expect over there. I clung to 'Marhaba', the basic arabic greeting. Its funny how the little things make all the difference, but the fact that its normal to greet strangers on the street in Palestine made things feel so much safer. It let me set a friendly tone with every passerby -- it let me hear their voice and see their eyes, and in some sense, know who I was dealing with. We did the 10-15 minute walk to the checkpoint together. We walked along the wall, the security barrier and studied the impressive array of art and graffiti that covered its surface. I don't know how much of it is locally done -- I understand that a lot of international artists have used the wall to provide visual statements of solidarity. Very little of it was violent, but a lot spoke of pain and outrage, and also faith that better days were to come. Most of it was very beautiful. We arrived at the checkpoint, made our way through the various tunnels and fences, barriers, gates, and metal detectors, and emerged into Israel proper.
Since the exit is also the entrance, the final act of our crossing was to make our way through a thick and long line of Palestinian workers waiting to get through and go back home. They squeezed against the fences on either side of the path to make a narrow corridor for us. It felt pretty horrible, getting waved through as soon as the blue of our passports showed, walking through as casual tourists while these people waited and waited, having what should be a 15 minute commute transformed into a long daily ordeal. I felt so unjustly privileged , so apologetic, but what do you do, what do you say? We walked through in silence.
This story has been a hollow shell consisting of only the most basic chronology. I've said nothing about the content of my conversations; the sights, the moods, the feel of life on the other side; my impressions; my reflections; my conclusions, if any. And I've needed to avoid all of that to keep myself out of the mire of personal political content that I'm still working on putting into words. Hopefully this can be a separate blog post in the future.
What I can say is that this trip was a very powerful experience for me. It was a poignant crossing of that metaphysical boundary between self and other, made very physical by the elaborate checkpoint and imposing concrete walls stretching forth as far as the eye can see. To meet with people over there and understand their lives, to eat with them, cook with them, wrestle with them (metaphorically), and most of all, listen to them, was at times challenging and trying, but also in some strange way easier than I might imagine, filled with a certain calmness, even spiritual uplift of finding self-in-other; I was entering and facing incredible conflict and contradiction, struggle, guilt, responsibility, and confusion, but that reality was still easier than fearing that reality from a place of avoidance. Because of this feeling, Sarah and I both found this experience, which was admittedly difficult and saddening at times, to be liberating and even joyful.
I will also say this. Having stood on the East side of the wall, my personal relationship to the situation has been transformed. I don't think you can really understand it before you've stood there. Regardless of your politics, regardless of your conclusions: I don't know how much you can understand if you haven't seen what Palestinians see on a daily basis; if you haven't heard their voices, their narratives, their experiences. Even if you choose not to validate these narratives and opinions, they are a part of the situation. If you don't understand them, you can't understand the views, choices, and actions that go along with them. I'm not being naive about this. I know that there are other members of the Palestinian population who have very different outlooks and agendas than the ones I spoke with. I know that I didn't get a full sample of what's over there. But I can get a basic sense of what the more extreme groups are like from afar. You don't see the ordinary lives and what they entail until you're there.
The sad part is that standing on the East side of the wall, and the transformative perspective that it provides, is something that is legally off-limits for every person that has a say in who governs Israel and, by extension, what life will look like in the West Bank. If you are an Israeli citizen, you are not permitted to go to the places we went to that day. Officially this is for the safety of the Israeli populace, and my sense is that's not wholly inaccurate; Israelis citizens would not get a warm welcome over there. Whether or not that's the entire story, the consequence is that the people who have the most influence over the state of things in the West Bank don't even know what life looks like over there.
Returning to Israel proper, seeing all the buses and ads and hustle and bustle of modern urban life, made me feel that daily life in the West Bank probably doesn't even enter too many people's consciousness, so long as there are no bombings, rockets, kidnappings, or attacks. The wall has helped to reduce those a lot, but its also added another layer onto the hardships of ordinary life for the sorts of Palestinians that I met with. When I was there, it had been several days after the birth of Husam's son and he still couldn't get to his wife's house to see him. You can say all you want about security and protective measures. When you're a decent guy with your newborn son on the other side an uncrossable wall, its harder to see it that way.
The next day we woke up early again and made our way to Hebron with the group Shovrim Shtika, Breaking the Silence. It was created by Israeli soliders who served in Hebron to share their stories about the situation there, and their roles and experiences while serving. My guide was one such soldier. Here's a video of him talking about his first mission -- to fire a grenades via machine-gun at an abandoned building in the midst of a busy downtown area, as a response to shots fired at the Jewish settlement. Sounds nice in theory -- a non-lethal but noticeable response. Let's hear what he has to say:
Eventually the response firings weren't enough. The military switched to pre-emptive firings. When that wasn't enough, they switched to shock and awe -- armoured vehicles driving down the streets, blowing up cars. All of this still got the same headline back home "Israeli troops return fire to the source of fire".
The part of Hebron that was the most shocking to me though wasn't the day-to-day military aspects. It was the settlers, the brutality with which they behaved. All I can say is that Hebron flips on its head any stereotypes or ideas I used to have about 'us', 'them', 'good guys', 'bad guys', guilt or innocence. Its hard to watch footage of settlers throwing rocks at Palestinian schoolchildren or raiding a clinic and destroying medical equipment, always with soldiers standing by to protect the settlers. Its hard to look at Jewish symbols, symbols that are supposed to represent me, spray-painted on closed and abandoned Palestinian shops as tools of intimidation and hatred. Did somebody recast the play while I wasn't looking? The settlers seem dedicated to using fear and destruction to make life as hellish as possible for the local Palestinians, and with an army wrapped around their finger, its not that hard for them. Nobody stops them. No matter how outrageous their actions, the army has no mandate and the police have long been threatened and intimidated to the point silence and acquiescence. We can go on about Israel and its moral codes, its democratic institutions, the rule of law, etc. as long as we want. Its hollow so long as Hebron continues like this.
I guess at some point you need to put that away. Not for good. Not entirely. Just to set it down for a moment -- even outrage cannot be sustained for ever. And so we gathered once again for Shabbes in Jerusalem, to decompress, to process, and to remember the good in life as well.
It was really hard to watch things happen that morally disgust you... and not have any response. Not have any action to run to, no heroic act to save the day. Change is slower than that, and travel is much, much faster than that. So I move ahead. For now.
Stage 3: Eilat and Kibbutz Ketura; Southern Israel
Mood: Vacation-like, with adventure, relaxation, and recharging
Rating: Awesome.
I caught an 8am bus South and arrived in Eilat just in time to catch the last refresher dive of the day at Manta Dive center. We had 3 days, 2 nights in the South and I needed to make the most of my time there. The deal was as follows: if I do well on the refresher dive, I could go ahead with normal diving. If I fail, I'd have to take a refresher course and spend the majority of my time there in a swimming pool.
Since I was the only refresh person, I ended up getting a private dive in the process. My instructor ran me through the basics of gear set up and underwater safety procedures and protocols. I had done some review beforehand and I remembered a whole bunch of it... but not all of it. Thank goodness for refresher requirements! We went under and did some basic emergency simulations, then explored the dive site for a bit. I passed with flying colors and signed up for the morning and afternoon dives the next day.
Meanwhile, Sarah had taken a later bus south and had set herself up with a friend at Kibbutz Keturah, home of the Arava Institute, a center for environmental studies which (amongst other things) brings together Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian students to learn about and work on the environmental issues (and associated resource management conflicts) of the region.
Yossi, one of her hosts, was in Eilat for the evening and could drive me to Ketura for the night, then take me back in for my morning dive. Sweet! I met up with Yossi (+ 5 kids, ages 4-12), helped entertain the kids for a bit and then slept the whole ride home. It had been a long day!
Arriving at Ketura, I felt a bit jealous of Sarah. Tired from several days of early wake-ups, still carrying unprocessed burdens from Hebron, I wanted also to have the space to sleep in and take it slow. I decided that I would dive the next day but skip day 3 of diving and just relax on the Kibbutz.
That night I found out that the plans had changed. Yossi's Dr's appointment got canceled and I lost my ride to Eilat. Lots of scrambling over the course of a few hours got me in a hitched ride to Eilat, just in time to MISS my 9am morning dive at Manta. But, Manta, I learned, wasn't the only game in town. It was one of those brilliant moments where things fall apart and rebuild themselves into something much, much better. I booked myself onto 10am morning dive at Dolphin Reef.
They don't call it dolphin reef for nothing.
My guide and I knelt on the sea floor 6 meters below sea level and watched the dolphins playing around us. One swam right across my my field of view, about 5 feet away. She was definitely looking at me. Probably because I had a weird mask on my face and a big piece of rubber in my mouth.
Once again I lucked out and was the only diver there for the day. I have a private guided dive for the price of a public one. My guide was great. We both were all about taking it slow and enjoying the sights, and we established that before going down in the water. That made it much easier to stay on the same page underwater with minimal sign-language communication. He also did this really cool thing where he took out his regulator and got a little fish to swim into his mouth and pick at his teeth for food. These fish generally form a symbiotic relationship with bigger fish. The bigger fish promise not to eat them, and in return the little guys eat all the food particles in the big guys' teeth. Occasionally a big fish will get hungry and eat his dentist. Then the rest of the little ones go on strike and the big fish's mouth rots away from bacterial infection. Well anyway, apparently they're branching out into humans dental services too now. I wonder if its covered by my insurance?
I got to spend a couple of hours on the premises of dolphin reef (which is a full fledged attraction for non-diving tourists as well) before the afternoon dive at Manta. I sat on the beach. I ordered lunch (they bring it right to your beach-chair) and got a hot pot of chai to ensure that I could stay out in beach clothes. It was borderline, but this was as close as I'd get to summer and I meant to make the most of it.
The afternoon dive (once again at Manta) had some great sights, in some sense cooler than the dolphins (amazingly dense schools of fish, intense and beautiful coral formations up close), but was also a bit less fun in terms of pacing; "OK, we're going to try to cover the first leg really quickly so that we can get to the interesting stuff, so just stay close and keep up, and oh, and we'll want a lot of bottom time to really see it all, so try not to breathe too much." Very beautiful sights, but a bit less relaxed than the morning dive.
I caught a bus to Ketura and was done with the shlepping, with the logistics, with the connections and schedules and everything. I could wake up as late as I wanted, spend the day wandering the kibbutz, and then walk out the front gate and take a sunset bus to Jerusalem.
And that's basically what I did. I also got to talk to some Arava students at lunch; hike up a little desert mountain with some steep drop-offs on either side (wasn't quite prepared for that); and run into Zvi Bellin, a friend from DC who also happened to randomly be at Kibbutz Ketura the same day I was. Apparently I was still in the small-world zone.
Epilogue:
The bus ride to Jerusalem was stuffy, overcrowded (ie sitting on the floor in the aisle), and long. We made it back and had some final meetings and goodbyes in Jerusalem; I spent a good few hours shopping and bargaining in the Muslim shuk in the old city, and paid a final visit to the western wall (Anna made the point that in spite of all the crazy surrounding the wall, its a place thats witnessed generations of people coming and pouring out their hearts, in the same exact location... and that regardless of its relationship to history, theres some meaning in that on its own. So I wanted to take another look). The Chabad dude moved towards me as I entered, asking if I was Jewish. "Nope", I said. I was in no mood to deal with him. I think that's the first time that I've ever actively denied my Judaism, and it just so happened to be at the holiest of all Jewish sites. I felt pretty OK about it.
The airport was a mess of lines and unending security checks. In a final hat-tip to the identity politics I was leaving behind, I was asked a lengthy series of questions on my religious identity, observances, and practices by the security agent. How do you explain trans-denominational post-halakhic havurah-style Judaism to the security agent who's asking you what synagogue you belong to in the US?
Sarah and I took our pictures with the frightfully serious looking busts of David Ben-Gurion, whose parents loved the airport so much they named their son after it. And then we were in the air.
Situation and Self:
Israel showed me other-within-self. Palestine, self-within other. Israel showed me the level of fragmentation within "my people". Palestine, long touted as alien and dangerous, showed me the way things change when you alter your notion of who is self and who is other -- who is the diverse assortment of individuals acting with varied interests and goals... and who is the monolith.
Its a land of invisible lines and boundaries that define who you are, and so many of them pass right by my doorstep. Now that I've stepped out my door to meet the people on either side, those lines have cracked apart. The divisions don't make sense when the important things fall on both sides of the line.
For all the lines in Israel, there doesn't seem to be one for the people that I agree with, respect, or enjoy. There doesn't seem to be a line out there that follows moral contours. There doesn't seem to be a line between those who honour the divine in others and those who trample it. All these 'us's and 'them's have become alien to me. They're not my choice, they don't work, and I just don't see the sense anymore. I think that's what I meant when I told the Chabad guy I wasn't Jewish. Not under your lines, not on your terms.
What's sad is that this is all happening in a place that's supposed to be holy. Mundane and profane are spread in the name of holiness. Who can pull them apart? I watch as the old stone wall releases its prayers, watch them swept away with a broom and a dustbin. One line stands firm: I am a part of this. I can't cordon myself off from this one.
See the rest of the photos: http://www.flickr.com/gp/59706944@N00/16p344
