Barely Keeping Up

I guess the good bloggers have to travel with a laptop or do a lot fewer things each day, because obviously between our busy schedule and the erratic time in Internet cafes, I am falling ever further behind in describing this trip. Just to pick up from my last unfinished post, which began to tell what I did on Sunday (and this is Thursday night, so you can see my problem), I met up with the unnamed Israeli woman activist (let's call her W) at 2 p.m. at the Damascus Gate (remember "12 gates to the city"? I'm not sure if Jerusalem really does have 12, but there are a number that allow you to enter the walls around the "Old City" from the modern parts of town, and they make convenient meeting places), and we took a bus to Azaria, or Bethany as it's known in non-Arabic, a city just over the line from East Jerusalem into the West Bank. Our original goal was to meet a young Palestinian woman journalism student who was interested in perhaps coming to study in the U.S. at Mt. Holyoke for a year, but for various reasons she could not make it to our meeting place, which was at the apartment of Suzana Zorko-Arar and her family. But Suzana turned out to be one of the most extraordinary people I've met on this trip, so the afternoon was well worthwhile. She's a woman in her mid-late 40's, with four children (Wahid, 19, Nadia, 16, Omar, 13, and Salma, 7), who grew up in Croatia, studied linguistics, and met her husband, a Palestinian, while in school, married, and came to live with him in Palestine. She is an amazing grassroots activist, who has organized a summer camp that is attended by both Israeli and Palestinian children, a circus that has traveled all over the West Bank performing, and a women's embroidery cooperative that produces beautiful embroidered handbags and pillows which she is currently trying to market abroad. She's also set up classes to teach people English and computer skills. She met us at the bus stop and took us on a walking tour around Azaria, particularly to see the wall, which suddenly slices into town in the middle of a commercial street at one end, preceded by a field of rubble where the Israeli military tore down buildings to do the wall construction, and is visible at the other end of town not far off down a hill, with one of the huge settlements (perhaps Maale Adumim?) "sheltered" behind it. As we were looking at the wall in town, which is covered with interesting graffiti from many international visitors, and taking photographs of one another posed in front of it, an Israeli military jeep drove up and parked right next to us, and a soldier -- rifle, as usual, slung across his chest -- got out and asked us what we were doing. "Just taking photographs," Suzana said calmly. He started to ask further questions, but she was having none of it -- "just ignore him," she said to us, which is what we did, and eventually he drove away. Suzana pointed out that East Jerusalem lay just beyond the wall, and used to be a five minute trip from Azaria -- but now, because you have to go all round about to get there, is a twenty minute bus trip. That is, of course, for those that have permits to go -- most people in the West Bank are not allowed to enter Jerusalem. Cut off like this from the city that is their natural source for jobs, shopping, social life, many people are unemployed and feel caged in -- a story repeated everywhere we went in the West Bank.

After the wall, we went shopping for lunch food -- pastries and fruit -- and walked up to her apartment to meet the family. Her husband (I'm embarassed to say I've forgotten his name) turned out to be a vegan (I don't know why I found this so unlikely, but I did) and he and W., who is a vegetarian, got into a long food discussion while Suzana and I talked about her work and her ideas. She is very cynical about all the Palestinian political parties and politicians -- Fatah and Hamas alike -- and believes in working totally outside the political structure, person-to-person. What she is most eager for is to establish more ties with people from the international community, both one-to-one and through sister city type connections, which has been happening with Great Britain in particular recently. She's a woman of enormous energy and vision -- as I said to some of my travel colleagues, until I met her I had Fannie Lou Hamer as the highest star in my pantheon of heroines, but Suzana is definitely now right up there with her. I want very much to build further connections with her in the future.

We also had a lovely meal of tea and cakes and fruit, and Suzana's husband, who is an amateur herbalist, gave me a gift of sage, wormwood, and melissa that he had gathered and grown. The time I spent with them was so enjoyable it was hard to tear myself away, but I finally had to go to rejoin my colleagues in Jerusalem. When the bus stopped at the checkpoint going into Jerusalem, a soldier came on board (as is standard) to check everyone's papers. When he came to where W. and I were sitting, I showed him my passport, and then W. started to search through her bag, looking into its various compartments, and not coming up with anything. I immediately realized that she was feigning searching for her passport because she couldn't actually show him her papers (because it is illegal for her to travel to the West Bank), and I didn't know what to do -- whether to say she was with me, or vouch for her in some way. But I remembered the advice that Hannah and Dunya, our guides in our original visit to the West Bank, had given us about what to do in uncomfortable situations: remember that the people with us had dealt with such situations many times before, and we had not, and the best thing to do was to keep quiet and follow their lead. So I did. Finally W. said to the soldier, "I must have left my passport in Jerusalem," and he asked her, "What nationality are you?" "American," she said, and -- after a moment -- he said "Okay," and moved on to the next seat. After the soldier had gotten off and our bus had started up again, I apologized to W. for keeping silent, saying maybe I should have vouched for her, but she said that I had done just the right thing. "What if he hadn't believed you?" I asked, and she said, casually, "I would probably have been arrested," but indicated that it was no big deal, it had happened to her many times before. The entire experience threw me right back to my time in Mississippi in 1966 -- where people were having constantly to dodge arrest, and being an "outlaw" seemed the only honorable thing to be. So, another day in Israel-Palestine.

A Vegan in the West Bank

Five minutes left until the Internet cafe closes, and about a month's worth of impressions to communicate from days of our trip that have been jam-packed with meetings, adventures, dinners, ideas, debates, and questions. I'll start with the most recent thing, which was going into the West Bank this afternoon with an Israeli woman activist whom I won't name (she's been arrested numerous times and served time in jail; I'm probably being paranoid to think naming her here would make any difference, but just in case. . . .). Well, alas, the cafe is closing -- the drama will have to hold until tomorrow.

Around the Corner from Arafat's Old Digs

Yes, here I am in an Internet cafe in Ramallah, not far from where Arafat used to be holed up, surrounded by Israeli soldiers. So many sights, conversations, impressions, reactions in the last few days as we came from Jerusalem through the checkpoint to Bethlehem, Hebron, and now Ramallah that I'm not even sure where to begin. Perhaps I'll start on the light side by saying that one of the co-leaders of our west bank tour, Dunya (I can't remember her last name), is a Hampshire College grad, and last night one of my former students (a 2005 graduate), Ryvka Bar-Zohar, who is living in Ramallah for the summer while she studies Arabic at Beir Zeit U., joined us for supper in a lovely park restaurant in Ramallah, so there are the 3 of us, eating our humus and felafel, and discussing Div III's. And Ryvka is even smoking a hookah! Do you think Div III's have ever been discussed before in the West Bank?

Perhaps the strongest impression on me so far has been made by our tour of Hebron, led by a very articulate Palestinian former news cameraman and journalist named Hishon Charabati (maybe not exactly right; I don't have my notes with me); we saw how Hebron, a gorgeous old stone city, has been chopped up in ridiculous little parts, with barbed wire and locked barricades, by Israeli settlers, who move into certain places and then bring along with them a huge "security" apparatus: special roads, protective barriers, checkpoints, military patrols. Palestinians can't go into these places, so they have to live in their city like in a checkboard, taking weird detour routes around these Israeli enclaves. But nothing is simple -- the reason the very first Israeli settlers were able to move into Hebron, back in the late 1970's, is that in 1929, there was an Arab massacre of pre-Israeli Zionist settlers in the city, and their former houses, which were kept empty all those years (I don't know why), were the ones the new Israeli settlers moved into. This is far from an original observations, but the whole thing is unbelievably complex: each layer with twenty more layers underneath it, like peeling back the sheets of filo dough in a pastry, equally sticky, though certainly not equally sweet!

The other strong impression I have had is of some of the amazing people -- particularly, though by no means exclusively, women -- who are working on this conflict: smart, dedicated, amazingly competent and thoughtful under impossible circumstances. I'll only mention two: Allegra Pacheco, an originally American, Israeli, now Palestinian human rights lawyer who gave us an incredible talk despite being 8 and 7/8 months pregnant (she looked like she'd have to leave the room to give birth), and Zizette Something (I can't remember her last name), a legal advisor to the Palestinian Fatah negotiating team, also 5 months pregnant and brilliant. They made me feel like quite a shlump, but also incredibly proud and happy that there are such people in the world. Google their names for more; my internet time in over. Love to all, Stephanie

It's Getting Hotter

This trip started in a pretty gemutlich (?) kind of way, with a family bar mitzvah and trips to the beach, but it's been heating up since then. Weather-wise, of course -- it's definitely hot. But also in terms of the content -- starting with a trip to the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, interesting and somewhat moving, but rapidly escalating with a lunch with Teddy Katz from Gush Shalom, who spoke fervently about the wrongs of Israeli government and society for a l o n g time, then moving on to quite amazing meetings with several different groups working on different kinds of Jewish-Arab cooperation and/or dialogue: several women, Arab and Jewish, from an organization called Galilead in Sachnin (an Israeli city with a large Arab population on the way to Haifa), another meting at the Haifa Women's Center with a group of women and one man who worked in various Haifa social service and social change agencies that try to bridge the economic and psychological inequalities between Ashkenazi Jews, recent immigrant Jews (especially from the former Soviet Union) and Israeli Arabs in Haifa, a walking tour of Haifa, and finally a long walk and supper in Akka (an ancient port city that goes back many thousands of years into the long ago BCE's) with an Arab woman and an Israeli man who have been doing Arab-Israeli dialogue work. All of this, of course, needs much more description, but for now -- with a precious few minutes of Internet time and a need to get to sleep so we can set off tomorrow at 7 am for our trip to the West Bank, that will have to do. There were some lighter moments, of course, like when we sang "In Your Easter Bonnet" in the bus, but the story behind that, too, will have to wait. Love to all, Stephanie

Yes -- or should I say, "ken" -- I'm in Israel! I arrived yesterday afternoon, about 3 p.m., and was met by my student/friend Noam Bahat, an Israeli who started at Hampshire last fall, and is back in Israel for the summer, staying with his family in their small community, Nirit, about 20 minutes outside of Tel Aviv. As it turned out, I arrived on the very same day his younger twin brothers, Asaf and Yotan, were having their bar mitzvah party -- although they do not turn 13 for another few months, the family decided to have it now before Noam goes back to the U.S. for school. So, after a quick shower and change of clothes to wash the grime from a night and day on an airplane, I ended up in the middle of a party of about 100 people. It was on the deck of their house, which is up on a hill overlooking a vista toward the West Bank -- very lovely, with bright pink flowers and vines on a trellis, they had set tables with candles all over the deck and backyard for the party. Given my extremely limited Hebrew, I wasn't able to join conversations much (you can only say "ken" and "lo" so often before you start sounding like an idiot), but everyone spoke at least a little English, and Noam's aunt and uncle Naomi and Natan especially took me under their wing, and she did lots of translating for me into my ear. They were lovely; they live on a kibbutz way down in the south, which they immediately invited me and my group to visit, although I don't know if we'll be able to make it there. Next time, perhaps. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the party, even as a mostly silent spectator; Noam's sister had made a slideshow of the twins' growing up which was shown to everyone and gave me a glimpse of his family at all stages. His parents are also very friendly and kind -- it's an extremely homey way to start my trip!


Today after hanging out over breakfast, Noam and I took a walk up a hill near their house, where we saw lots of the cactus known as "sabras" growing (this is what the term "sabra" comes from; I never knew that) and other desert-like plants; also visited an orchard that is tended by a Palestinian farmer where almond trees, pomegranite trees, olive trees and one other -- now I can't remember which -- grow. That was very beautiful. From the top of the hill, you can see out over the green line to the West Bank, complete with a view of the separation wall and of various settlements that are spreading out there, as well as, if you turn your head slightly, of Arab villages. It made me aware of how close and constant is the presence here of this "other land" -- very different from living in the U.S., where it's all "us" right up to the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean (I guess maybe people in Texas and Arizona feel this way about Mexico). Noam and I had an interesting discussion about what it means to be "Jewish" if you are not a religious Jew, but I'll have to report on that another time -- now other members of the family are arriving and it's time for aruhattshurayim (my no doubt weird transliteration of how you say lunch in Hebrew). L'hitra ot!

Beginnings

Maybe it's that I'm creeping up on 60 (this September!). Or, more likely, that I'm just about to leave for a trip to Israel and Palestine (tomorrow!). Or that I'm tired of being left out of this brave new world of egotistical rantings in which everyone can be an instant author and sage. Anyhow, now I, too, have a BLOG! So look here, world, for the latest news from my travels and the most recent insights from my brain. I can definitely see how this could become an addiction. After all, what's more interesting than me???