foiled and frustrated

“I just don’t know how you’re not angry all the time” I said.

“I am angry all the time,” was her response. But she really isn’t angry. She’s actually incredibly sweet and upbeat and charming.

I was so upset that I wanted to break down and cry. I wanted to be anywhere else. I felt so naïve for thinking we could do it at all. I was afraid that she would hold herself responsible that I was upset, or feel that she was keeping me from going to something I wanted to see. But it wasn’t the films I cared about. The Canadian peacemakers’ films became irrelevant. This was a matter of feeling the occupation, of feeling foiled by it.

Of feeling for a few moments of my life the anger and frustration and helplessness that Palestinians put up with daily.

We’d planned to go to Bethlehem to the Alternative Information Center for a movie screening. Shams has a green ID; she is allowed to be in Bethlehem but not Jerusalem. The car our friends were going to drive us in has Israeli plates. Israeli plates can go through Jerusalem, but what I didn’t know before was that they can’t go on Wadi Nar, the alternative route to Bethlehem that avoids Jerusalem. I had assumed Israeli plates would have some kind of Israeli immunity, an ability to go anywhere. But in fact the occupation strives to keep Israelis away from Palestinians—not just vice versa. Creating and enforcing divisions and hatred between people requires active effort from the government. God forbid Israelis see that Palestinians are people, god forbid they know what their government does.

What kind of system prevents two 19 year old girls from going to a screening of documentaries about cooperation and peace because although they are by all legality and technicality allowed in Bethlehem, one is not allowed on the road to get there?