With Peace, Until Next Time

Lately everything has felt like a movie. Personal situations seemed on their way to resolution. The semester was ending. I said goodbye to each of my friends one by one. The peace conference was coming up. Violence might have been building; or it might not have been. Is there going to be a third intifada after Annapolis? was the question on the tip of everyone’s tongue. The PA put sidewalks barriers up around the Manara and tried to regulate traffic flow. Maybe if the streets were clean in Ramallah, and the pedestrians sidewalk-bound, the world would believe that the PA can control society’s extremists. Meanwhile, I forgot my passport for the first time the night of Annapolis when we drove Rosi to the airport on settler-only Highway 443, and the soldiers didn’t notice we’d only given them four passports for a car of five. I put my communist-colored kaffiyehs and poster of George Habash in a box and mailed it home with my Palestinian olive oil and subversive books. The “Today in Palestine” daily email digest started arriving in my spam box instead of my inbox, as though anticipating my departure.

I was working on crossing items off the list I’d been carrying around for four months. One was to meet David Shulman, Ta’Ayush activist, professor at Hebrew University, and author of Dark Hope, the book that likely inspired my blog—though I was too shy to say so. I visited him at his house in West Jerusalem- a beautiful house of a bohemian style that made me nostalgic for Vermont. I hadn’t seen décor so appealing and familiar since I left the States. I’d been in many living rooms full of pink furniture, fake flowers, and god’s name stitched in sequins on the walls. But I felt like a traitor for liking his house, and in my thoughts his house came to represent Israeli society. I feel comfortable in it because it is American, and that in itself is a problem. What is a Jew from Iowa, who speaks English in his home, doing living his American life in Palestine? He’s trying to destroy the occupation from the inside out. But is he part of the problem, or isn’t he? I’ve been told by ISM that coordinators in Nablus refuse to work with Israeli activists, as though they are existentially too problematic. Usually this reluctance frustrates me to no end, but sometimes I can empathize with it.

I was walking in the direction of the old city. “Take a right out of the house,” David had told me, “and then just follow whichever streets down until you see the wall of the old city. You’ll recognize the wall, right? Just ask for ha-ir ha-atikah if you can’t find it.” “Thanks, I can probably handle it,” I joked, remembering how I used to be fluent in Hebrew, and I headed out. I was wandering at a leisurely pace when the building to my right stopped me in my tracks. I’ve been there a million times, I muttered out loud. Green gates opened to an arena of stairs that my body remembered sitting on. I didn’t know what the building was, and I didn’t know why I’d been there. I stood and stared for a few minutes, searching unsuccessfully for memories, and kept walking.

Moments later, my phone beeped. The text message read: “Reports of violence at Birzeit- true or not?” it was from a friend at Ma’an News. I called him and asked what he’d heard. “The university’s been closed until further notice,” he said. “It has something to do with fighting between the student president of Fatah and the student president of PFLP.” I called a friend of mine for more information. He gave me a long detailed story that was half fact half speculation half rumor half fiction.

It all began over the celebration of Palestinian Independence Day, November 15^th, a day considered a joke at best, an insult at worst. Yet a day we had off from school nonetheless. A Palestinian girl had told me earlier, “Fatah wanted all of the celebrations for itself, and PFLP tried to get involved, and there was a fight.” A few people were taken to the hospital. PFLP was rumored to have been “looking for revenge.” They went after the head of Fatah in Birzeit village. They may have stabbed him; they may have tortured him with argileh coal. Or he may have been smoking argileh, and fell on his own coal when he was stabbed. The next school day, that very Tuesday morning, Fatah was armed, I heard. There may have been shooting on campus.

I was walking streets of the West Jerusalem neighborhood I last walked as a Modern Orthodox 11-year-old, talking on the phone with my Palestinian friends about factions fighting in Birzeit. Past and present were trying to synthesize. It was all, of course, connected.

They say that history is circular, and on that day I felt it. I’d attended Jewish day school in Jerusalem for 9 months, years ago. Recently I spent three months in Ramallah, breathing occupation and anti-Zionism every moment. Seeing my old neighborhood again was a final reminder from life. Don’t think you can get away with a simplistic view of things, it was telling me. Don’t for a minute think you’re getting let off that easy.

I had begun to believe that Israel doesn’t really exist, or that it exists only as an imperialist occupation. Force them out like the French were forced out of Africa, or the British out of India, I thought. I talked to fellow Birzeit students about how all the world had to do was recognize that Israel was no different. But Israel is not the occupying arm of another country; it has nowhere to go home to. It is a strange modern culture that I may dislike, but its existence can’t be denied, no matter how much I wish we could take it all back.

I also experienced circularity in showing the friend of a friend around Palestine for two days. She’d been studying in ’48 since the summer and was thrilled to visit. She wasn’t a Zionist, but she didn’t yet know exactly why not. Being in the West Bank confirmed all the suspicions she’d had all summer while being fed propaganda, she told me. I dragged her to Hebron the day she arrived after an impromptu Occupation 101 with OCHA maps, and the next day we went to Tulkarem and visited a friend and his family. She was in love with Palestine from her first glimpse of Ramallah; she was horrified by the militarization, by the eerie feel of Hebron, by the highway signs with the Arabic blacked out. And she was charmed by the Palestinian cab driver who offered us a free ride to my apartment because we spoke a little Arabic, and by the friend’s family who served us delicious food as soon as we arrived and tried to persuade us to spend the night. We watched the sunset from their roof sipping sweet cardamom coffee. The rest of the evening, she had a dreamy look on her face, and I remembered my own enlightenment and my own enchantment.