Leila was whisked off to where she caught her non-air-conditioned, crowded bus for Palestinians while I boarded a spacious, air-conditioned bus reserved for non-Palestinians. We also had to enter from different gates; Palestinians were left to struggle with their bags while non-Palestinians had porters. It all seemed rather surreal as I stood in the blazing sun, people being pushed, bags spilling helter-skelter, children crying. My bag was sent off to be x-rayed and I was ushered into the relative coolness of a huge barn-like structure to go through metal detectors.

Where was Leila? How would we ever find each other again in this confusion? I tried calling her on my cell phone but was told the Israelis blocked all calls; I wouldn’t be able to make contact with Leila until I exited from the other side of the building.

We lined up, foreigners on one side, Palestinians on the other, and went one by one through an Israeli operated security gate. All borders into Palestine are strictly controlled by Israel.

Repeatedly setting off one of the metal detectors, an elderly man was required to strip down to his underwear in plain view of all. I had met him earlier and found him to be an eloquent, well-read man with great dignity. He was deeply humiliated by the time he exited the security check. He was a Palestinian with American citizenship traveling on an American passport. Just having an American passport does not guarantee polite treatment.

At the passport control, IDF soldiers milled about with machine guns slung over their shoulders. Palestinians were lined up in the hundreds on the right side of the building. Once again, I was directed to a less crowded area for non-Palestinians. At the window, I asked a uniformed woman not to stamp my passport. They do this upon request. As I explained, I live in an Arab country and travel to many other countries in the region not only for work, but also to visit my daughter. I told her I would not be allowed to enter several Arab countries if they saw an Israeli stamp in my passport. Offended, she told me to go back and wait while she processed my passport. I sat down next to two young men who told me they had been waiting for two hours already. They were Arab-Americans, born and raised in the US. They told me it was no big deal. It always happened to them. Their patience was admirable.

I watched the sea of Palestinians waiting in line after line, more pouring into the building. Complete strangers talked happily to one another, discussing where they were going, how long it had been since their last visit, all joining together in the commonality of a difficult situation. Jokes, food and water were shared as they waited to get up to the passport control, not knowing what would happen, how they would be treated or even if they would get through. They had a look of patient determination. They would continue to return, no matter how badly they were treated; they were returning to their homeland. Even if it meant having to get a visa to return home, even if it meant getting humiliated, they would persevere. Some were turned back for no apparent reason. Yet how dignified they behaved; no shouting, no complaining, no protests. These were not terrorists or radical “Islamo-Facists.” These were every day men and women struggling against a military occupation of their homeland to maintain a respectable life, no different from any of us.

I was kept two hours, interrogated several times by different soldiers, asked a multitude of questions: Where are you going? Which cities are you visiting? Who are you staying with? What’s your friend’s ID number? Who’s her father? Why are you visiting? What do you do in Jordan? Who’s your husband? Where was he born? What does he do? Why are you traveling alone? Do you have a Jordanian passport? The list goes on. I was treated as a suspect rather than welcomed as a tourist. All I wanted was to see Palestine and say a few prayers for my mom. But I was being made to feel guilty for wanting to go there. However, I decided if the Palestinians could be patient after all they’ve been through, then I could certainly endure this little inconvenience.

My passport was finally slapped down on the counter, but I was told to wait… again. Wait for what? Just wait, I was told.

So…I waited.

I flipped through my passport and there it was, bold as day: the Israeli stamp. I had specifically asked them not to stamp my passport! Because of that stamp, I wasn’t going to be able to visit my daughter and grandson nor would I be able to attend any more work-related conferences in the United Arab Emirates.

I went right back to the booth and slammed my passport down on the counter, angry she had not respected my simple request. Other Americans were also shouting at her and other inspectors for exactly the same reason. One man, who worked in Kuwait, would not be able to return to his job because of that stamp. The Passport Inspector swore at us in Hebrew and we returned the favor in Arabic and English. One American stepped into our verbal firing range and quietly advised us to notify our nearest US embassy. They were used to this problem and would issue us two-year temporary passports. These, he assured us, could be used for traveling in the Arab countries. He knew because the same thing had happened to him a couple of years earlier

I went back to “wait” as instructed. Leila had already passed through the passport control and had collected her bag from the pile of bags thrown in the center of the building. Once people are cleared through passport control, they have to forage for their bags. After another half hour of waiting for nothing, I asked a soldier if there was anything stamped in my passport that said I had to wait longer. He thumbed through it and said no, I could get my bag. So… why had I been instructed to “wait?”

I joined another long line, had my passport checked again, then fumbled through the mountain of bags before joining Leila. She told me she had permission from one of the Israelis for me to ride with her on the Palestinian bus instead of the non-Palestinian bus. I was so happy we could be together I didn’t even ask why I needed a special clearance to ride with the Palestinians.

Once on the hot, crowded bus, we went through several Israeli checkpoints. Machine-gun-wielding IDF soldiers entered the bus, checked our passports and glared suspiciously at each one of us. They would look at everyone’s passports, except mine. Every time I offered it, the soldier would shake his head and smile, like we were in on something together. It all made me feel so awkward.

In between checkpoints, everyone talked excitedly about going home, sang songs and laughed. They were also very pleased for me when they heard it was my first time to Palestine, telling me of all the places I had to go see, places they would never be allowed to visit simply because they were Palestinian.

But once IDF soldiers boarded, the silence was deafening.

When we were finally allowed to enter Jericho, I could hear a collective sigh of relief from everyone on the bus…they were home again…at last.

It had taken me three hours to get to a point that in pre-1967 days used to be a half hour drive.

It was in Jericho that the walls of my own ignorance began to tumble down.

A Yank in Palestine: Day Two

Leila and I slept our first night in Jericho at a friend’s home. Her home had been robbed, the window stolen amongst other things. Desperate people do desperate things unfortunately. So instead of staying in what I saw as a potentially dangerous environment (Leila is much braver than I am), we called one of our friends who was also in Jericho for the night and begged for sanctuary. He welcomed us graciously into his beautiful home without question, making sure that we were comfortable and well looked after. The next morning, I woke up to brilliant sunshine, birds singing (nothing like the Palestinian Bulbul! What a treat!) and a glorious mountain of rugged, red stone shining through my window. What a magnificent sight! Carved deeply into the mountain is an ancient monastery well over one thousand years old overlooking the entire city of Jericho and all just outside our friend’s backyard. After a swim and a fabulous breakfast (our friend spoiled us royally), I said good-bye to Leila as I began my journey to Ramallah, the continuation of my pilgrimage to Palestine.

Piled into a Land Rover, three of us (me, my friend and his driver) began our trek over one of the most hazardous roads I have ever been on. To me, it was like driving on the edge of a cliff in the Grand Canyon…but with terribly pot-holed roads. I learned that this road was the only way Palestinians were allowed to take in order to travel between Jericho and Ramallah. All roads, even those in the middle of Palestine, are controlled by Israel; we had no choice except to take the dangerous, winding road. I was told that many die on the road and I could easily see why. It was terrifically narrow and very badly paved, making the journey not only a harrowing one but almost as rough as an off-road trip. I tried not to think about what would happen if two large vehicles were going in opposite directions. Snaking through the steep mountains, going higher and higher, I took one look down and gasped.

My friend laughed. “I do this all the time. Don’t worry. We haven’t had an accident… yet.”

That ‘yet’ concerned me.

My friend urged his driver to move more rapidly along the winding road. He explained it was even more dangerous to remain on the road for too long of a time because the Israelis would often lead air strikes against Palestinians taking the road, claiming the people they had killed were suspected terrorists. I, too, urged the driver to step on the gas. It seemed that either way, we were going to die, so we might as well risk doing a Thelma and Louise dive over the edge instead of facing a possible Israeli attack. So much for territorial sanctity.

“This road is called the ‘Curb’, explained my friend, “because we can’t really call it a road as you can see. We call it the ‘Curb’ because we are not allowed to take a real highway, like the Israelis. We balance on the curb, hoping we don’t fall off. It’s the only road the Israeli’s allow us to use. Their roads are super highways (which I was to discover later when I went to ‘the other side’), and we are not allowed to even pave or widen these roads. If they okay the work, it can be done. All rests on their whims, really. Everything is under their control.” With the jagged mountain on one side and the sheer drops on the other, I also hoped we would not fall off. I asked how people could manage to negotiate the road at night, but all he did was shrug and say, “No one likes to travel at night along the ‘Curb’.”

I understood why. It was bad enough during the day.

Once we had made it through the hazardous mountain stretch, we started entering some rolling hills which had what appeared to be settlements peppered across the barren land, all of which were deserted. Blackened structures, most of which were riddled with bullets, many leveled to the ground, but not a soul in sight. Not a tree or bush. All had been cut and burned. I asked my friend what had happened.

“When we regained parts of Palestine, the Israelis made sure that all the areas in between these cities were empty wastelands. That meant they had to ‘cleanse’ the area of people and their livestock. They forced everyone out by killing their livestock, torching their homes and finishing everything off with a few bulldozers, as you can see.”

“What happened if anyone refused to leave?” In my own silly way, I thought they might have been moved somewhere else.

“They killed the ones who refused to leave, right in front of their families,” he sighed. I was horrified by the sheer inhumanity of these acts. Hadn’t the Israelis learned from their own history? What is the point of all those Holocaust Museums? Yes, remember so it doesn’t happen again. But more importantly, don’t become the heartless monster your ancestors once feared.

Such is the so-called democracy of Israel.

Do unto others whatever you want… because you can.

“But where did the survivors go? Where are they now?” My naïve, idealistic American sense of justice and compassion left me confused and angered by the devastation I was witnessing.

“They found other places. We Palestinians are a resilient people. We have learned how to deal with being dust in the wind,” he said proudly.

For miles and miles, all I could see was settlement after settlement after settlement, all of which had been ruthlessly destroyed.

Dust in the wind.

We traveled the rest of the way to Ramallah in troubled silence.

Day Three; Jerusalem

I woke up early the next morning in Ramallah, excited to start another adventure: My trek to Jerusalem. I was not only feeling happy about keeping my promise to my late mom, but I was also quite emotional about going to where my husband had been born.

While I waited for my driver to arrive, I watched the morning traffic outside my friend’s home: People making their way to work; moms taking their children to get school uniforms and supplies; just normal people getting on with their daily activities. It was hard for me to believe that just a few nights before my arrival, an Israeli “task force” had illegally entered the city to “eradicate” a “suspected terrorist”.

Looking down the block, I could see the building where the current Palestinian government resides, the exact same place where the late President Yasser Arafat had been kept under siege for several months by the Israeli army. My friend told me how during that time, Israeli soldiers had broken into his home to search for guns. Many people I met there had had similar and often worse treatment. Another man told me how soldiers had shat on his furniture, refusing to use the toilets, breaking his valuables and beating him up in front of his wife. When he told the soldiers even his dogs behaved better than they did, they harassed him and his wife some more, poking them both ruthlessly with bayonets. Watching all the normality taking place on the streets that morning made it hard for me to believe I was standing within meters of where so much violence had occurred not that long ago.

When my driver arrived, he told me he could only take me as far as Calendia, the crossing point between Ramallah and Jerusalem. A driver from Israel would meet me there to take me the rest of the way. Something else I could not understand: Why could an Israeli driver from Jerusalem have the right to enter Ramallah without trouble, while people from Ramallah had to go through strict Israeli security to get across to Jerusalem? Another mystery in a complicated land.

As we got closer to Calendia, I started to see the huge fortress-like walls that Israel had built to keep out “terrorists”. Quite frankly, I was left speechless. So imposing, so sinister were those structures that I wondered how anyone could live so closely to that kind of “in your face” aggression. On top of the high cement walls were rolls and rolls of barbed wire. At regular intervals were guard-turrets with machine guns trained on us as we approached.

Then I saw the graffiti that Palestinians had put on their side of the wall: A silhouette of a little girl on her tip-toes, reaching for balloons flying up over the wall; A “Stop the Wall” with a funny face character; but one short sentence said it all…”Build Bridges, not Walls”. Not once did I see anything that expressed anger or bitterness, only wishes for the wall to come down.

Once we reached Calendia, I saw hundreds of people lined up trying to cross through the passport control. Many were trying to visit their families and others were trying to get to work in Jerusalem. My driver told me people line up before sunrise to make sure they can get through in time either to get to work or before the gates close… all to get to a place that is literally less than ten minutes drive away.

Being a foreigner meant I wouldn’t have to go through any such indignities. Only Arabs, especially Palestinians, must have permission to pass. I could not help but feel terribly awkward with my special privilege.

In the parking lot just meters away from the streams of people, I was escorted into another taxi, but it was decidedly different from the one in which I had just arrived. Not only was it a newer, flashier Mercedes, but it also had Israeli plates and Hebrew written boldly on each side. I felt a bit conspicuous but no one seemed to notice as we zoomed around the checkpoints without even being stopped. We sailed within minutes into Jerusalem without my ever having to show my passport while all the Palestinians I had seen were going to be kept for hours at the border… if they managed to get through.

My new driver’s name was David. With his Ray-Ban glasses, shaved head and strong build, he could easily have passed for Vin Diesel’s younger brother. He made his way expertly through the traffic jams, pointing out closed streets along the way that were for “Jews Only”. I saw many Orthodox Jews on those streets as well as others dressed like gypsies who David referred to as ‘fanatics’.

David, I learned, is a Palestinian Moslem with Israeli nationality. He was born in Jerusalem but married a young woman from the part of Palestine that Israel had taken in 1948. Since his wife had been born there, she had Israeli nationality; David was able to take Israeli nationality through her after they got married. He told me his friends continued to give him a bad time for having Israeli nationality, but he wasn’t bothered. He just shrugged and said, “Business is business”. He had taught himself Hebrew when he was a child so that he could communicate with Jewish people from all walks of life… soldiers, taxi drivers, businesspeople, tourists, everyone. He told me his Jewish clientele trust him more because they think he is a Jew. David’s ability to be what people think he is meant he was never asked for his papers wherever we went. No one could tell he was an Arab either by the way he looked or by the way he spoke; and because of this, I nicknamed him the ‘Chameleon’.

I’d asked David why he hadn’t learnt Hebrew in school and as an educator I was shocked when he told me that Jewish and non-Jewish children were segregated in the schools and taught different syllabi. His children and wife, products of the modern Israeli education, could not speak Hebrew.

We drove through Jerusalem but carried on to Bethlehem. We took a super highway, which was lined on both sides by the enormous walls of the Separation Barrier I had seen in Ramallah… but there was no graffiti at all on the Israeli side.

We passed into the city without having to cross any borders; again I was surprised because Bethlehem is in Palestine. However, having the ‘Chameleon’ for my driver, meant we could go anywhere without problem. The streets were pretty empty in Bethlehem and I learned later from a guide there that Israeli guides don’t encourage people to go there. I could see that many of the shops were closed, proof that the income from tourism was dying.

Entering the Church of the Nativity was an amazing experience. I am not religious in a traditional sense, but I was feeling quite overwhelmed as I made my way down those ancient steps, deep into the bowels of the earth to where Jesus had been born. All of us together, Christian and Moslem families, all praying side by side. You see, in Islam, Mary is revered as having given birth to the Prophet Jesus, so Moslems also regard her as holy. The whole experience made me realize how much we have in common.

After spending some time in the church (where bullet holes and burned areas could still be seen from previous battles between the Israelis and the Palestinians), David took me to a shop where I bought a few mementos and drank a special wine offered during Easter. Such friendly, hospitable people, no different form anyone else in any other part of the world.

Then on to Jerusalem! Such a magical city! I could feel its energy pumping into my veins as we got closer to the Old City. We first went to the Mount of Olives, which overlooks all of Jerusalem. I visited three churches there: the Church of All Nations (where Christ said his last prayer), The Russian Church of Maria Magdalena and the Cry of the Master Church (where Christ cried over Jerusalem. My guide said he wished Christ could do that now for them). He explained the history of the olive trees, how they had been destroyed so many times, yet because their roots were strong and so deeply entrenched in the land, the trees had always grown back, stronger than ever, bearing fruit until today. I cried as I walked slowly around those primordial trees, some of them still blackened from age-old flames, their thick trunks crooked and gnarled with time. I realized how very much those trees and the Palestinians have in common.

On my way out, I ran into the two young men I had met at the Allenby Bridge. They told me they had finally been allowed to enter Israel after four hours of waiting and several interrogations. When they saw the look of sympathy on my face, they just smiled; they were used to it.

David then took me to the Old City where we entered through the Damascus Gate, the Arab sector. Trash was piling up on the street outside and the area looked a bit run down. He told me that the Jewish sector was much better taken care of, even though all citizens of Israel pay the same taxes. We walked down the cobble-stoned streets, enjoying the aromas of exotic perfumes and spices as we passed store after store. I noticed I was the only foreign tourist there and David explained that the Israeli guides warn their groups against buying from the Arab sector, saying it is full of thieves, pick-pockets and purse-stealers. All I saw were friendly faces of shopkeepers and happy children riding their bikes.

We came to an area blocked off by security gates guarded by unfriendly-looking soldiers; David told me that was the Jewish sector. I could see how much more modern it looked, and that it was full of tour groups. I told David I preferred not to go there; too many machine-gun toting soldiers wandering around for my liking.

He took me to a place where we could see the Dome of the Rock, the mosque where Moses is said to have risen to Heaven. While enjoying the view, I overheard an Israeli guide telling his group how many Israelis had been killed by Palestinians on the very site where they were standing. Not one to keep my mouth shut, I asked him if he was also telling his group how many Palestinians had been killed by the Israelis? Had he taken them to Deir Yassin, just a few kilometers away, where everyone in the village had been slaughtered and then their homes bulldozed to wipe away any trace of their existence? I turned to the group and told them to remember there are always several sides to each story. Nothing is ever black and white. David hurried me off before I really got going, telling me it wasn’t worth the trouble; people came to Jerusalem to see what they wanted to see, and hear what they wanted to hear.

By the time we reached the Holy Sepulcher, I had cooled down. It was there that I was able to fulfill my promise to my mom by burning enough candles to light the entire city. At that time, several masses were being conducted simultaneously in various languages in the six different churches inside. With the smell of incense, the reverence of the people and the chanting of prayers echoing off those ancient walls, I left quite overwhelmed with the spirituality of the moment.

David then took me to a tourist store, which is located in an ancient cave where we savored our glasses of mint tea. I talked to the co-owners, both Palestinians, one Moslem, one Christian, who told me how tourists, before paying, ask them if they are Jewish. Although the men sell all sorts of Christian, Moslem and Jewish merchandise (“Business is business”), they told me they would never lie about their religions just to make a sale. Once they learn the men are not Jewish, they often refuse to buy and leave the store. The men told me their experiences are not isolated; it happens all the time to their friends as well.

As the sun began to set over Jerusalem, David and I started to make our way back to the parking lot outside of Ramallah where my previous driver was waiting. However, before reaching Calendia, we were stopped at one of the impromptu check points that spring up wherever soldiers wish to put them. David smiled, put his window down and spoke in perfect Hebrew, charming the soldier out of her scowl and suspicions, leaving her laughing as she waved us through, never once asking for our identification papers.

As I left Jerusalem behind me, I understood why so many people love it. My biggest regret was not being able to share that day with my husband, who, in his own way, is also an olive tree.

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