Marhaba, Mar Saba. Tuesday 11/27—Tent of Nations, Bethlehem, and Mar Saba Monastery
On my day off I go on an adventure to the Mar Saba Monastery in the mountains towards the Jordan Valley to the east. There are many such monasteries carved into desert cliffsides throughout the region. Mid-morning, I make a sloppy peanut butter & jam inside some pita for later and head up through the main farm. I say hi to Meladeh and Daher on the way–Daher reminds me to not get ripped off by a taxi driver, and Meladeh gives me some spinach pastries for the road. Now I’m a veteran at taking the sheruts–I get one to pull over for me within 5 minutes like a champ. The driver’s not going directly to Bab-z-Qaq, but he drops me off near where a bunch of taxis hang out. The first one I meet asks a higher price than what Daher told me, the next one is satisfactory. His name is Amin, and he agrees to wait for an hour while I’m there, after calling to presumably check with his boss what the rate should be. We take off towards the monastery east into the desert hills. It’s not that far. With some traffic coming out of Bethlehem and speed bumps every couple hundred meters (placed for good reason) on the winding roads, it takes about a half hour. Amin doesn’t speak too much English, but we talk a bit, bonding over bashing Trump as we pass his mural on the Wall. The desert hills are beautiful as always, and in the distance I see the mountains of Jordan across the valley again. Many Palestinians and Bedouin walk along the side of the road, sometimes with donkeys and horses, causing Amin some annoyance. When kids see that there’s a white foreigner in the car as we pass, they grin and wave. He pauses every now and then at forks to double-check with locals that he’s going the right way. Soon I see the tops of the monastery’s towers appear further down.
Amin parks and I get out. I can’t see the whole structure from the side yet. I walk around a path above the valley, and descended steep steps down to a stream and a bridge. There are a couple Bedouin tents and shacks around the site, some with herds of sheep and goats. A man with his donkey laden with cargo casually passes by me on the steps. After the little bridge there are steps going up the other side, and I make the climb to get a spectacular view of the whole structure, towers and walls clinging to the cliffside like lichen on a tree trunk. I sit and admire it for a few minutes, eating my PB&J. I then climb back up the other side and approach the entrance to get a look inside. There are some workers milling around, making some deliveries from cars and pickup trucks. A couple of the monks converse with them just inside the entrance. They look like Rasputin, with their black robes, big black beards, and tall hats. One of them talks to me a bit. He goes by Theoctitus, after one of the main disciples of the original Saint Sabbas (Mar Saba), probably a self-chosen name. The monastery was founded over 1,500 years ago, and is Eastern Orthodox; Theoctitus himself is from Greece, where he first began the process of becoming a monk. The remains of Mar Saba are still there, though I unfortunately can’t get in to see them. He tells me that most of the monastery is only open to visitors in the morning now. They used to let visitors in more in the afternoon, but then they had less time for their praying and studying. Theoctitus shrugs his shoulders and arms, in a “what-are-you-gonna-do” kind of way. I am able to look down into a courtyard though from our balcony. One monk paces around drumming a large block of wood–Theoctitus tells me that’s usually a call to prayer. Another monk waters plants and feeds and pets a cat. That one struck me in particular–even monks like their cute animals. I thank Theoctitus for his time, and let him get back to God. The brief glimpse I have into the monks’ life makes their experience more real. Plenty of people live in isolated rural areas around the world, but these guys really do choose to live so secluded and devoted their whole lives, in addition to foregoing so many pleasures, all for faith. That’s dedication.
I walk around a bit more and get back to Amin and the taxi. On the way back he sees me taking pictures of the hills and offers to stop, though I tell him he can keep going. He also offers to make a stop for coffee once we’re in Bethlehem. I try to tip him at the end, though he waves it away. I still have a couple hours before sunset, and go up towards the old city to check out the small Bethlehem Museum I heard about. It’s in an old Palestinian family’s house dating from the early Rivera (Ribera); the family now lives in Chile. They have a lot of artifacts showing Palestinian life going back to the 19th century, showing how life changed in the 20th century with gradual westernization, especially during the British period after World War I. The gift shop sells many crafts through Sunbula, the fair trade group we met with based in Jerusalem on the delegation, where I pick up a purse for my mom’s birthday. I swiftly head into a sherut headed towards al-Khalil. This driver is even more confused about me getting off at Kilo 17, but another guy who speaks more English in the cab helps us sort it out. I walk past the settlement and Nahallin again and and greet Daher and Rachel from France, who I only got to briefly meet the day before. Rachel is cool–as I get to know her over dinner, she tells me about some of her traveling. She’s spending the better part of a year with her own project going around to different places where there’s been recent or ongoing conflict and persecution, learning about how people nonviolently resist, and how people from different sides come together in reconciliation after conflicts.
The brothers reunited. Wednesday 11/28 to Saturday 12/8—Tent of Nations
The last couple weeks go fast. I do more work with Rachel during the couple days she stays, a lot of planting fava and other beans, and she leaves Thursday afternoon, though she comes back for a brief visit the last week to interview Daoud more about the Tent of Nations, and his overall experience living under occupation. I get to know Daoud more too. He was just in the DC area meeting with people and organizations who help support the farm’s mission with publicity and funds, including Eyewitness Palestine. We prune a lot of trees over the next week. I had known that pruning was a thing before, but I hadn’t realized just how vital a process it is. He tells me how it’s extremely important so that the tree can breathe and not be weighed down by extra branches, and so that the rest of it can grow. That way the wind can blow through it and not push against the mass of all the leaves and branches. “It’s like giving the tree a haircut,” I observe. Daoud chuckles at that way of putting it. He mostly works on almond and olive trees (each olive tree only has to really get pruned every few years, but the almond tree must be every season, as they grow much faster). I’m amazed how much he has to shave off them–at some points almost half of the tree that was there before is on the ground once he’s through with it. It’s a more precise art, one he’s practiced since his father taught him, and even still he isn’t always 100 percent sure of which move is the exact right one to make. I don’t do much of the pruning myself–I mostly help collect the cut pieces off the ground. Vicky eats the leaves off the olive branches, and what’s left gets used for firewood. I then turn the soil around the liberated trees so their roots can get better rain and air flow.
I also clean a couple of the caves, mostly just heavy-duty sweeping, including the Chapel Cave, which has some Christian objects from when their father, Bishara, was a preacher. I help out Meladeh a couple times in the kitchen preparing lunch for groups of visitors, mostly by helping chop up veggies, as her arm and shoulder is feeling its 80 years of us. I also join the assembly lines of her, Daoud, and me scrubbing and rinsing the dozens of dishes and silverware sets from guests. Meladeh’s English is limited, though her favorite phrase is “eat, eat.” Sometimes when we don’t understand each other we look at each other blankly for a couple seconds, then start laughing. She is a refugee from Jaffa, born there in the late 1930s, and of course hasn’t been able to go back since 1948; I, with no direct ancestors from the land (at least since the Romans kicked out the Jews 2,000 years ago), could get Israeli citizenship and move there in a heartbeat if I wanted to.
The last week some pine tree saplings arrive in a truck. Daher and I unload them, and the driver then helps us toss a bunch of junk and scrap metal into the back of the now-empty truck. The next day I begin to dig holes and plant the pine trees by the boundary with a neighboring farm down near my cave, a meter apart. I’m a little surprised that they’re pine trees, as I know they’re not native to the religion and can be bad for the soiI; the JNF is infamous for planting them in forests, often on the ruins of Palestinian villages from the Nakba. I had one such tree planted in my name when I had my bar mitzvah at 13. Daoud affirms this, but adds that farmers still strategically put them in some places. In this case, as they grow bigger they’ll help shield many of the crops in the valley from gusts of wind and the debris and dust that come with them. I still get to do plenty of work with Daher too. We repair the wood frame of a new small greenhouse together too, stringing up recycled plastic bottles as the walls, where he plans on planting tomatoes. We create a couple different makeshift dens for the three dogs so they’re separated around the farm and don’t fight each other over their food. Daher also has me start taking Vicky out from her enclosure and tying her to trees during the day so she can have more space and graze. She snaps and me a couple times when I take her back in, but we make peace by the time my last day comes around, and Daher has me ride her back to her haunt.
The pigeon coop also has to be renovated. For the most part they’ve been either sleeping outside or in a cave for Vicky while she sleeps outside, but as winter approaches Vicky will need that cave for herself and the pigeons will need a more permanent place. Daher and I set about cleaning it, patching up the fences and sheet metal roof, and adding buckets for them to nest in on and off for a couple days. Once it’s ready, Daoud and I close up Vicky’s cave at night and go in to catch the pigeons to bring them to their new home. Daoud dons heavy gloves and catches the pigeons as they flutter around, pinning them against the wall without hurting them too bad, then dropping them in the big sack I’m holding. Soon I’ve got almost a dozen pigeons flapping about in the bag. We haul them over and let them loose in their coop. I ask Daoud too what the pigeons are for on the farm, and he elaborates on what Daher said when I first arrived–they’re really just a symbol of peace. The Nassers put in all this effort, despite how desperate their situation is at the top of this hill, in time and resources feeding the birds, building them a home, cleaning up after them. The pigeons don’t give any eggs or profit (very occasionally they eat some); Daoud says they just like seeing the birds fly freely around them, here in the midst of all the settlements and walls. And here I was just thinking of them as flapping, feathery, feces-dropping pests when I was a 4-year-old kid living in Brooklyn.
I get to talk more with Daoud as we work that last week. He says that he doesn’t want all Jews to leave Palestine–besides the several generations now born within Israel, there are thousands of kids who have been born and grown up in the surrounding settlements as well. Gush Etzion is practically a city. Echoing many other Palestinians I met in the delegation a month ago, he and his family just want to not live under military rule, to not have their land and their life’s work on it threatened. It would be easier to leave, as so many others have, including some of his own friends and siblings and their kids, and the Nassers especially would get a tempting sum of money for it not even for leaving Palestine–just for moving off the into Bethlehem farm. But Daoud says he feels how those who have left, while he doesn’t blame them, have definitely lost something of their identity in giving up, especially if they were working the land. He doesn’t even believe that they will necessarily win in the end, that the Israelis might finally move in for the kill and take the rest of their land in Area C by force, but that they still have to keep working. He says that working the land is an outlet for the daily negative feelings that manifest every day.
The last few days there are some pretty heavy storms, to the pleasure of all of us, with wild winds around the hilltops. When we know the rains are coming, I sweep the paths leading into the cisterns beforehand so that the drains don’t get clogged with leaves and dirt. I’ve never seen Daher so happy, and he’s always happy. We both watch a downpour from the kitchen shouting “Alhamdu’allah,” “Mashe’allah” (Arabic phrases for “thank God,” regardless if you’re Muslim, Christian, or even Jewish for that matter). After the storms have subsided, we spend much of Friday and Saturday going around and collecting the water from the cisterns for the wells; the cisterns themselves do not hold much of the water. We use a pump and hoses to such the water out of the cisterns into a giant tank attached to the tractor which Daher drives around while I ride on top the tank, and we empty then tank into the well. After one last day’s hard work on Saturday, we start to say goodbye, but I’ll be joining them in church in Bethlehem tomorrow on my way out. Daher gives me some wine and dried herbs to take. I head back down to my cave once more to pack up and clean with that Arabic radio cranked up. It turns out there’s a group of 5 volunteers coming a couple days after I leave to hold the fort down in winter for a full 2 months; I’ll just miss them. But overall I’ve enjoyed my little Thoreau-like existence in this cave on this holy hillside, my hobbit-hole, with some company here and there.
Slouching from Bethlehem: the familiar and the unfamiliar. Sunday 12/9–Tent of Nations, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv
I wake up early to finish tidying the place for the next volunteers. I feed the two little chickens and take a look around my garden one last time, pleased to see nature doing its work with the green onions shooting up from the ground, then head up with my full backpack and an armful of empty pots. I then hurriedly feed the rest of the animals, in my nice clothes for church, and water the greenhouse lettuce. Of course Sumoud the noisy cat shows up once more right as I finish up, so I feed him and leave my keys in the kitchen. A couple of the dogs, including the faithful Labras, follow me to the gate, and we bid each other goodbye. I make my way over the roadblock and to the highway to catch a sherut; of course it takes a half hour before an empty one comes by. The Lutheran church is halfway up the old city hill towards Manger Square. I sneak in the back and grab a seat with the Nassers. The main hall isn’t that big, though still charming. A man accompanies some of the prayers and songs with a guitar. While most of the mass is in Arabic, the pastor speaks alternatively in English for foreigners in between. Daoud tells me that while most Palestinian Christians are one of the eastern sects, Lutheranism established its presence with German missionaries in the 19th century. There is also a guest from India, a Christian minister, who gives a short talk about the discrimination facing Christians there, many of whom are of the Dalit class (the untouchable caste), in addition to other minorities under the Hindu nationalist government in his country.
Afterwards there is a little Christmas community market in the building. Daher insists on getting me some snacks over my protests that I’ll buy them. I get to meet some more of their family–some brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, and Daoud’s wife Jihan, who does work teaching computer literacy to women in the community around Nahallin. We all thank each other with a back-and-forth of shukrans. It is emotional, but I know that I’ll be back one day. Daher walks with me in the direction of Manger Square before he splits into a side street for some Christmas shopping. I stop by Manger Square one last time. Bethlehem is in full X-Mas mode now–not many snowmen and reindeer, but the giant tree is fully decked out. I then use WiFi to get directions through Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to my cousin Gerry and back down to Bab-z-Qaq one more time, slouching under my backpack, past the sheruts and the chorus of “al-Khalil! al-Khalil?” and hop on the bus bound for Damascus Gate in Jerusalem. I get out when the bus stops at the Tunnels checkpoint, not sure exactly what my status is as a tourist–it turns out that only Arabs have to get out to present their ID to the soldiers, foreigners can just stay on the bus. I quickly buy some knafeh from a genial older Palestinian man in the Old City–still great, though definitely not as good as the ambrosia in Nablus.
After a half hour of wandering around trying to make sense of the winding streets’ names, I find the right one and find myself walking through the more modern streets of western Jerusalem. I pass the towering offices of the JNF and Jerusalem Post. Back to the Israeli side. I had a lot of feelings running through my heart and mind from that time through the whole next week of visiting my Israeli family. I will not share all of it publicly here. I made a point of not talking about politics and human rights with most of my family, as I really didn’t know them that well and was seeing some of them for the first time in over ten years, and was being hosted by them; I did not see it as being worth it, except a little bit with my cousin Gerry who is comparatively liberal when it comes to the state’s treatment of Palestinians. I do not feel any sort of unproductive guilt at travelling freely within Israel after my time in the West Bank and on the farm; my fellow delegates and I had flown in to Israel on our first day, and we’d entered again to meet Ruchama, see Jaffa, and meet with the Bedouins of al-Araqib. I just feel the same general outrage at constant injustice of Israel keeping one group of people caged by settlements and laws and military zones and walls, while others like me travel freely as we please.
What was once familiar to me, Israel, has now become unfamiliar, and what was once unfamiliar, Palestine, has now become familiar. It feels almost like I am seeing Israel for the first time. Most of the times I came before I was younger than 10 years old, and the last time I was 16, and was presented with a very packaged, sanitized version of the land and society. I still have those memories, but accessing them is like trying to play a videotape on a DVD player. Or if I did have a VHS player for the tape I would be watching the memories, but with distorted sound and quality, and subtitles in a language I didn’t understand except for maybe a couple words. The myth of Israel and Zionism that I grew up with from when I could first remember my summer vacations, the flags and maps in my synagogue, has already been dead for me for some time, since about 2013. All it took was genuinely listening to and seeing enough accounts of Palestinians’ experience with that state, with that ideology, hard as it was at first. But I am far from being the first to be disillusioned with the myth–there was Ruchama Marton, a soldier in Egypt back in 1956, who then witnessed oppression and neglect in the late 1980s. There were the kids who eagerly enlisted upon coming of age, only to find themselves ordered to clear a family out of their house before demolition, to bulldoze their groves of trees, or to keep a woman going into labor at a checkpoint, who then came together in groups like Breaking the Silence. There were the Israelis like Inbar and Khaled who refused to serve from the start because of this, and were outcast and even jailed. And there were the Yemenite Jews marginalized by the Ashkenazi-dominated society in the 1950s after getting off the plane seeking the promise of opportunity, their women forcibly sterilized.
And for thousands–millions–more, there never was a myth in the first place. There was no myth for the family from Lifta. There was no myth for the farmer’s wife from Jericho who couldn’t access her water from the sources her family had used for generations. There was no myth for the Gazan fisherman who was shot when he sailed too far from the shore. There was no myth for the farmer from al-Walaja who had his land seized and cut off by a wall and now crosses the border every morning to work in construction in an Israeli city. There was no myth for Sheikh Aziz of al-Araqib. There was no myth for the shopkeeper in Hebron who lost all his customers behind layers of checkpoints and closed streets. There was no myth for the Yasin family of Asira Shamaliya. There was no myth for Murad and the people of Dheisheh refugee camp. There was no myth for Iyad Burnat, who watched his trees uprooted over the years, separating him from friends, family, and markets. There was no myth for Ahed Tamimi, her family, and the people of Nabi Saleh. There was no myth for the Nasser family, for Meladeh when she fled Jaffa, for Bishara the preacher.
I am just visiting the grave of the myth now, of an -ism I grew up with. Of course “no country is perfect,” the apologists tell us. Yes, I have now seen enough, that the state of Israel is no better or worse than the others born through conquest, and raised on a diet of exclusion and exploitation. Look around from your mounted tomb, Theodor Herzl–is this not what you wanted, for us to be “like all the other nations?” I of course have no illusion that he cares what I think, or that Netanyahu or even liberal heroes Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid care.
I get on a bus at the main Jerusalem station. A few green-clad soldiers in transit are among the passengers. The bus pulls into Tel Aviv early evening. Jaffa is just to the south. From the bus stop it’s just a 20 minutes’ walk to Gerry’s–he’s waiting outside and we hug. I haven’t seen him since he visited the US around when I started college. Gerry is my dad’s first cousin–my second once removed, born in Israel to my dad’s uncle, who had moved from the US. I made it for the last night of Hanukkah–we say the prayers over the candles, and I graciously accept a jelly doughnut and some dinner from him and Iris, his girlfriend. We catch up briefly before they head out to a meet some friends. I take one of the best showers I’ve had in a while before getting to sleep.
Family reunion. Monday 12/10 to Saturday 12/15–Tel Aviv, Yeruham, Bnei Netzarim
Th next morning I go to visit my grandparents’ graves. Before heading to work Gerry gives me advice on finding my way to and around the cemetery, printing a very helpful map. I get to the suburb of Holon by bus early afternoon and find my way to the block of graves just fine, but finding which grave is actually theirs proves more difficult. I search for a while before going to ask a guy at the desk in the cemetery’s main building–he shows me that the map lists their row and which number they are. I go back and still can’t figure out which one after almost an hour, searching for the Hebrew letters for “Seligman” (my grandma’s maiden name) and “Berman.” I take a break for lunch at a pizza spot outside the cemetery around the corner and return, nourished and determined. I remember hearing the receptionist say “Zeligman…” and look at the sheet again. It does say Zelig in Hebrew, not Selig–I’ve been looking for the Hebrew letter for “S,” when I should have been looking for the “Z” letter. I finally find the graves for the Zelig family. There’s Meir Zelig, my great-grandfather, my grandmother Lillian Seligman’s father, and his wife Miriam. They were buried in the US where they lived and died, but their family later moved their remains here. There are some other Zeligmans/Seligmans, including Harold and Hascal, my grandma’s brothers. And of course there’s the grave for Libby (Seligman) Berman and David Berman, my grandpa. They too were born in the states, and moved here around 1970. I’d seen my grandpa’s grave before when I was a kid, but I hadn’t seen my grandma’s before. I take some time there and put stones on their graves.
I hop back on the bus to Gerry’s, where I make some WhatsApp calls to my aunt Adele and my cousin Matan, her son, to make plans for the rest of the week (I will be using pseudonyms for my cousins’ names, due to personal/privacy reasons related to all the political stuff on here). Gerry comes back, and he takes me for a walk around some of Tel Aviv and we catch up more, and I have dinner with him and Iris. Tuesday, Gerry drops me off at a bus that will take me to Yeruham, a town in the northern desert where my my cousin Matan lives. I thank Gerry once more, and take the couple hours’ ride to Yeruham. The bus passes Beersheba, and many Bedouin camps pop up a little way’s off the highway. Somewhere nearby is al-Araqib. Matan meets me on the street by the bus stop, and we embrace. We haven’t seen each other since my parents and I came for his older sister’s wedding, when I was just 9 or 10. His house is around the corner, and I get to meet his wife Vered and their 2-year-old-daughter. They have their own small art studio for things like pottery and mosaics, where Vered runs some classes in addition to working in an elementary school, and Matan does all sorts of work around town through the local community center–woodworking and projects like community gardens, and he also tutors college students in Beersheba. My cousin Rivka and her husband Alon also join us from their nearby village for a quick visit, along with their four young kids. Over the next couple days Matan and I bond, and I get to see some of his work as he shows me around the town, as well some of the desert hills through which he impressively drives stick. I also get to try my hand at the pottery wheels in their studio. We also stop by a nearby ruins site where some believe Ishmael sent Hagar away in the Bible; Yeruham rises very abruptly in the middle of the desert hills, having only been built starting in the 1950s. It has since grown to about 10,000 people. It would be charming if it weren’t for the fact that the Bedouin villages in the surrounding areas routinely get denied access to basic services and have their buildings demolished.
Aunt Adele, my dad’s sister, joins us on Thursday. She moved to Israel around the same time my grandparents did. We last saw each other at my bar mitzvah. We catch up, and I help Matan and Vered get dinner ready before we’re joined at night by Rivka and Alon, along with my cousin Leah and her husband Assaf. It really is great being with my aunt and all three of my cousins together for the first time in years. Aunt Adele and I ride back with Leah and Assaf to their village about an hour west, and I say goodbye to Rivka, and thank Matan and Vered for their hospitality. It’s dark when we arrive, so Friday morning I wake up and get to see more of where I’ve arrived. Leah and her family live in Bnei Netzarim, a small moshav community, similar to a kibbutz. Only about 600 people live in the whole place. Most of the surrounding area is farmland, and we’re just a few miles from the border with Egypt. It would be charming if it weren’t for the fact that the people of the Gaza Strip are in an open-air prison just less than 10 miles north.
I also get to know my cousin’s four kids, of whom Daniel, 12, is the oldest, soon to have his bar mitzvah. We get close over the next two days even though he doesn’t know much English yet, playing a lot of chess and backgammon. Backgammon involves more chance, but he gives me a good challenge in chess; another few years and he’ll be formidable. The Sabbath arrives Friday night, and it’s quite a relief to turn off my phone for the next day through sunset on Saturday (all my family here is Orthodox). We eat well and respectfully talk more about the differences between Orthodox and Reform Judaism. I go with Assaf and Daniel to the town’s synagogue Friday night, Saturday morning, and Saturday evening (Leah usually is busy with the younger kids). For the most part the services and prayers are like what I’ve experienced with the other couple Orthodox congregations I’ve been to in the US, except of course the rabbi and service leaders speak Hebrew in between prayers instead of English. Assaf is very helpful in pointing out which page we’re on in the prayer book, as the Orthodox move through the program much more rapidly than Reform do. In the afternoon I go to the park with my family, and work up a sweat playing soccer with Daniel and the others. I can’t help but think to myself throughout the day of rest that while it’s Palestinians who are the main victims of the state of Israel, one of Zionism’s many other sins is that this smart, compassionate, innocent boy could, in six years, be drafted into the IDF and ordered to arrest a child at gunpoint in the middle of the night, shoot tear gas at protestors, or to demolish a family’s home.
A quick disclaimer is in order that my juxtaposing the comfort of Yeruham and B’nei Netzarim with the nearby suffering of Bedouins and Palestinians is not meant as a personal slight against my family that was born here–it is another dig at the Israeli system overall which I feel necessary to mention as part of my experience. We all have a nice last dinner together after havdalah (the end of Shabbat ritual), Daniel and I squeeze in one more game of chess, and I go pack up before calling it an early night. I’m able to hitch a ride the next morning at 6:30 with Assaf and a friend of his who drives to Beersheba for work. The whole house is up with the kids getting ready for school, so I get to say thank you to Leah and goodbye to everyone else once more before throwing my backpack in the car and jumping in.
The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan welcomes you. Sunday 12/16 and Monday 12/17–Moshav, Eilat, Aqaba
I thank Assaf’s friend, and say goodbye to Assaf at Beersheba as he heads to work and I get on a bus that’ll take me down to Eilat. It’s a beautiful 3-hour ride through the desert mountains and valleys of the Naqab desert. Soon enough the buildings of Eilat and the Red Sea appear. Aqaba is literally just a mile away over the Jordanian border. I grab some lunch and plan my crossing. It will just be a quick taxi ride to the border, then I have to grab another one once I’m across. I couldn’t find cheap hostels with availability last night, so I set up a Couchsurfing account online for the first time, which I had heard about from budget traveler guru Matt Kepnes. It really sounds too good to be true–people open up their homes and let travelers sleep on their couch or even an extra bed for free. The idea is that you pay it forward by hosting other couchsurfers yourself. You can also see reviews for the hosts or surfers left by others on the website to make sure they’re legit and not sketchy. I’ll be staying with Mahmuod and Anas in Aqaba–they have over 50 glowing reviews on the site. I finally get around to dropping off a bunch of postcards for some family and friends at the post office (they probably won’t get them at this point until after I’m back in the US, oh well) and take a cab to the border.
Being white and having a somewhat Jewish last name on my passport, I have little trouble leaving through the Israeli side. The woman behind the window doesn’t ask me too many questions, just the basics about what I was doing in the country–I obviously just tell her I was sightseeing & visiting family, not that I met with enemies of the state Omar Barghouti, Ruchama Marton, and the Tamimi family, or worked on a Palestinian farm. I have to pay an exit fee (as is the case entering and exiting through many countries’ borders), and I withdraw some cash in Jordanian dinars to pay for their visa. While the shekels (used by Palestinians as well) are worth less than a third of a dollar, these bad boys are worth 1.5 US dollars. I pass some duty-free shops and under the shiny arch thanking me for visiting Israel. It’s then a few hundred feet between some fences to the Jordanian border. Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty in the 1980s, and since then the Jordanian and Israeli militaries have closely cooperated with each other around the West Bank’s borders.
I approach the arch welcoming me to Jordan. A couple of the letters on the signs are falling off, or have peeling paint, and the flaccid flags are dirty and tattered. When I try walking around the duty-free shop, I’m turned away and told by a guard that I have to go through the shop. It’s mostly a lot of booze and cigars. The shopkeeper is disappointed a I walk through and don’t buy anything–who needs all those handles when I’ve got some Tent of Nations wine? I start going through security, putting my backpack on the belt through the scanner, but the full-body metal detector isn’t working. A uniformed guy casually looks through my bag and asks me what I have besides clothes–books, a camera. He tells me he has a drone with a camera on it back home. “Oh,” I reply shortly. He wants me to pull out the books and I fish around for them for a couple minutes, and when I can’t get them out he asks if they’re in any language besides English, to which I say no, and he just lets me go on. I don’t really see any next steps after, so I keep walking and am stopped by a guard chatting with others; I had almost gone through without getting my passport checked, even though I didn’t see any place for it. The guard tells me to go back to window 10. There’s a little office, but no one at the desk–until I look into a dark side room and see a couple beds where one guy is chilling on his phone. He directs me to window 13 across the road. Window 13 is shut. I go to an office further back, Window 8, and the guy there tells me to go to Window 13. Some other people entering join me in going back to Window 13–the door is now open, and the man behind it in civilian clothes opens the window and processes us. He’s got earbuds from his phone in one of his ears. He stamps my passport and fills out a sheet for my entry, and then I go back to the exit where the guard lets me through after seeing I’ve been stamped. I didn’t have to pay anything, though–did I just cross into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan for free? As I find out later, Aqaba is part of an economic free trade zone, and you don’t have to pay for an entry fee when entering the border there–you do have to pay though at all other crossings. Sweet deal.
There’s a sign listing average taxi prices for getting to the city, to the valley of Wadi Rum, to the airport, and to Petra. I immediately see why they have this–I’m accosted by a man with a small fleet of taxis and drivers, offering me a ride to the city for 15 instead of the average 11. I simply tell him I’ll pay 11, and he yields with little further resistance. By no means are most Arabs you meet just guys trying to swindle and scam you, as some stereotypes would have you believe–as I find soon enough meeting my incredibly generous hosts that night. A man from a nearby coffee stand starts approaching me–“My friend, come, you must have some coffee, you are tired–” but I’m already getting into my taxi. My driver is a Muhammed. He doesn’t speak much English, so I show him the WhatsApp message in Arabic that Mahmuod sent me with his address in Arabic. We zip down the highway flanked by palm trees, and after driving through some side streets are there in 10 minutes, a little past 4 PM as the sun begins to set.
Mahmuod and Anas live towards the top of a charming unassuming stone apartment building across from an Islamic school. Mahmuod is a few years younger than me and he actually works at a nearby farm. Anas is a few years older, originally from Amman, and does engineering. They really have something magical going on here–they’ve had over a hundred guests come through since they started hosting in August, when Anas started to have more time after finishing school (he has his graduation book for around for people to sign, and points out with amusement how Arabs have signed it starting from the right-hand side of the book, while people who speak European languages have signed it starting from the left-hand side). On some nights they have as many as a dozen people staying on extra mattresses, the couch, and even in a couple bunk beds they’ve got. That first night I meet a couple in their 30s from Romania, a Slovenian family with some amazingly behaved kids, and Gottfried, a very well-traveled older German man. We all talk about our travel experiences, especially the most recent ones around the Middle East. When we get to the topic of crossing the border into the state of Israel from Jordan, the Romanian guy mentions how the official questioned him about his relationship to Israel. “What do you mean, like a sexual relationship?” he had riskily retorted. Fortunately he still had gotten in, despite his manners. It seems that many travelers coming through here use Aqaba as a stopping point on their ways to and from Petra to the north and the desert valley of Wadi Musa to the east.
Anas shows some of us around the nearest main street, Palestine Street, and its many markets. It’s a good spot, further away from the more touristy parts of town. It’s also nice to hear the call to prayer from the minarets again. We grab some food, including a giant bag of pita bread from the local baker, and all go back to cook up some food together, and I make some of that stovetop popcorn I perfected in my cave on the farm for everyone. I also share the Tent of Nations wine Daher gave me. Mahmuod and Anas are okay with guests having alcohol in their Muslim household, but they do ask us to cut off the bottoms of some plastic cups and use those as glasses, so we don’t get any alcohol in the cups they use themselves. Anas also brings out some fantastic apple shisha for people to smoke, but he and Mahmuod also use a separate mouthpiece on the hookah, since the rest of us have alcohol on our lips from the wine. It’s a pretty good system.
The next morning the Romanians and Slovenians depart, and an Italian guy named Roberto arrives. Gottfried and I realize that we’re both planning to go to Petra, and we begin to make plans to go tomorrow. He already went briefly a couple days ago on the way down from Amman, but wants to go back to explore more. He stays at the apartment with his tablet to do some planning for his travels after Jordan, so I get ready to explore Aqaba by myself. Gottfried lends me his swim shorts so I can take a dip in the Red Sea. Rob also wants to go into the city, so I wait for him as takes a shower and grooms his already immaculately landscaped mustache and goatee in the mirror. We walk together, and I consult a map I downloaded showing most of the city’s historical attractions about a forty minute walk down by the water. I entertain myself listening to Rob complain very expressively about some of the hostels he was staying in up in Amman, shamelessly fulfilling some the image of Italians and their hand gestures. At some point he says he’s trying to get to the city center, while I’m going down by the water, so I look at the map and point him in the direction of what I think is the city center. I walk a little further and get to the coast, where I soon realize that this is the city center, even though it’s on the water—I accidentally sent my Italian friend in the wrong direction. Hopefully he’ll find his way.
I walk through the ruins of Ayla, the ancient predecessor to Aqaba. It was the first Muslim city in the region, with building starting almost 1,400 years ago. The archaeological site is squeezed right between some fancy hotels. I continue down where the main shops and restaurants are by the beach and grab a solid shawarma wrap and munch on it while taking in the sight of the Red Sea. Some stray cats lurk a few feet away. Eilat is visible just a mile away across the water. The area is pretty relaxed and not extremely touristy, though some boats pass by blasting American pop and house music. I then head a bit further down to what I most want to see—the fort that Lawrence of Arabia and Auda Abu Tayi captured by surprise from the Ottoman Turks a hundred years ago in World War I. The flag of the Arab revolt still flies high above it. I unfortunately can’t get in as they’re doing renovations on it, but it’s not actually all that big, and I can see into some of the courtyard from the hill just above the fort. I head back to the beach and hang out in the relieving warm water of the Red Sea. Here there are more tourists swimming, a lot of them older Europeans, and more modestly dressed Jordanians with their families. I make a quick stop at the grand Sharif Hussein bin Ali Mosque, dedicated to the first leader of modern Jordan, before heading back to Anas and Mahmuod’s in the evening.
Rob eventually found his way to the city center after I misdirected him; he accepts my apology. A few more new guests have arrived—a couple from near Buenos Aires who I get to practice some Spanish with, and a couple from Germany, Mert and Judith. I get to show Mert and Judith around the markets this time—I’ve become a local in my 24 hours here. We bring back more food, and help Anas cook up a great dinner with some type of Arabic meatballs and a spinach sauce in rice, and we arrange it all on a big platter and eat from it with the pita, and smoke some more shisha. Gottfried and I plan to leave tomorrow afternoon for Petra. I thank Anas and Mahmuod for everything one more time, as they’ll be out before I wake up. Thankfully I fall asleep pretty easily; Rob is quite a snorer.
Motasem. Tuesday 12/18—Aqaba and Wadi Musa (Petra)
The next day I get some breakfast together and pack up my scattered belongings. I was thinking of taking one of the small buses that goes to Petra, but Gottfried says that we’ll hitchhike. He’s done it before in several countries (including across the US back in the ‘70s), and he’s done it in Jordan too. He says that it’s safe here as long as you’re with someone else, and oftentimes you’ll find other travelers with rented cars. He seems to know what he’s doing, so I go along with him for the ride. We say goodbye to the Hotel Anas & Mahmuod, and grab some falafel at a little nearby spot for lunch. Mid-afternoon, the young eager American and the elder silver-haired German march up Palestine Street towards the highway. Every few minutes a taxi driver sees us with backpacks and stops to offer us a ride. One guy follows us slowly along the sidewalk, calling to us through the window that we can’t just walk to Petra. We get increasingly aggressive in turning them away. We get a little lost finding the right highway, which Gottfried found on Google Maps, and I ask a man to confirm which way it is, and he gives us some lefts and rights to follow. He offers to take us travelers to his home for tea and to meet his family, though we tell him we’ve got to be on our way. He’s Palestinian, from Nablus originally, and he recommends I get some knafeh at Habibeh’s when I get to Amman. We thank him again and continue.
The highway soon appears, and the glorious mountains rise behind it. There aren’t many buildings this far out of the city, just a hospital and a college campus further down. We walk across to the northbound lanes, park ourselves on the side, and stick out our thumbs. We wave away at least twenty taxis that pull up in the next half hour. A couple regular cars pull up and ask us where they can take us—when we say Petra, they say that they don’t think this is a direct highway; they would have to drop us off at a town to the east of Petra. We thank them and continue to wait for someone who’s on their way through Petra directly. A couple taxi drivers tell us that we won’t get there without them, and we assume they’re just trying to make some money. One very committed taxi driver with pretty good English pulls up and argues with us on and off for almost ten minutes, insisting that this isn’t the right road. He goes silent for a little bit, then starts up again. At one point a couple police officers decide to pull up and randomly check our passports. Satisfied, they leave. The steadfast driver stays. Eventually we pull out Gottfried’s tablet and look at the map of the highway we’re on again, near the hospital and college. I start swiping up with my hand to see where it leads…and of course the locals are right, and we’re wrong: this highway goes through a town further east of Petra, but the highway that does go directly to Petra is almost an hour’s walk away, further on the outskirts of Aqaba. We apologize to the driver for our stubbornness. He tells us he can drive us back into the city to see if one of the minibuses hasn’t left yet (they only depart when they fill up, not on a fixed schedule), even though it’s later in the afternoon. We give him a few dinars and he drives us to the small bus station.
He checks with one of the guys who works at the station—the last minibus has already left. I can’t go to Petra tomorrow, as I wouldn’t have time to actually see it before going to Amman’ I have to get there tonight. Gottfried would probably have just stayed in Aqaba one more night before trying again tomorrow morning, but he feels bad about me having to pay for the taxi now by myself, as he had mixed up which highway we should be hitchhiking from. The driver offers us a reasonable price, 40 dinars in total. Knowing that the taxis charge 5 or 10 dinar for just getting around places within Aqaba alone, he’s right, the 1.75 hour journey should probably be more like 60 or 70 dinar. And so Herr Gottfried and I do what backpackers are never supposed to do—we take a long distance private taxi, instead of a bus or train. I get in the front seat, Gottfried gets in the back, and we’re off as the sun begins to set. The drivers tells us that his boss wanted him to charge us 50, but he said no. I get to having a real conversation with one of these Arab taxi drivers for the first time. His name is Motasem, I’d say he’s about 30. He’s originally from a small city northeast of Amman, and hopes to return there one day. He also of course hopes to be able to make a pilgrimage to Mecca with his family; he hasn’t been able to yet. He’s recently married and has a baby son, and shows us his picture. We go through a little police checkpoint a little ways out of the city, where they check his license and registration. He offers me a cigarette; I accept one and we roll the windows down. Motasem worked in a hotel before he started driving cabs, but he quit when his boss wanted him to do personal errands for him; he told his boss he was there to serve the guests, not the boss. A true embodiment of sumoud. He also talks about some of his trysts with hotel guests (“This is before married,” he makes sure to clarify when talking about each affair), including one with a Russian dentist who offered to pay for him to move back there with her. “It would have been too cold,” says Motasem. We also talk a bit about Arabic music, like Fairouz and Umm Kulthum. Most of the stuff he’s playing on the radio is Iraqi.
We roll in to Wadi Musa, the town next to the site of Petra, and Motasem asks a couple people for directions to our hostel, the Rafiki. Gottfried and I get out and thank him once more. While I still will try to use taxis only when necessary, it was nice getting to know one of the drivers as a human just trying to make a living. We check in and go split a very satisfying pizza down the street. It’s colder here than in Aqaba, more like when I was around Bethlehem last week. We eat it back at the hostel and share more travel stories, though Gottfried of course has way more. He’s worked as a guide for week-long hiking and camping trips around parts of Europe and East Asia for much of his life. After dinner I take a little walk to the entrance of the Petra site where there’s a bar carved into the side of a cliff. It’s neat but a bit gimmicky with multicolored lighting, and there’s a woman with some accompaniment just singing pop songs in English, like “My Heart will Go On.” Back at the hostel Gottfried and I plan to wake up earlier in the morning to beat some of the crowds at Petra, and we get to bed in our separate rooms.
The Red City. Wednesday 12/19—Wadi Musa (Petra), Amman
We have a light breakfast before heading out, and I pack a bagged lunch. I leave my main backpack behind the reception desk so I can pick it up late afternoon before going to Amman. We make the walk down some steep hills to the site’s entrance. Now we can actually look around and see the hills and valleys of Wadi Musa. We get our tickets, and I use the desk’s phone to book a bus to Amman later. Gottfried and I walk past some sandy rock monoliths before getting to al-Siq, the main canyon that leads to the ancient city. There are a lot of Bedouin Arabs with horses, donkeys, and camels giving tourists rides to the canyon. They’re even more aggressive than the taxi drivers, though no less human I’m sure than Motasem. “Heeeyyy, Indiana Jones!” one of them greets me when he sees me with my cowboy hat on, making a pistol with his fingers. I smile but politely decline paying for a ride (part of The Last Crusade was apparently filmed in Petra, fun fact).
Gottfried and I walk through al-Siq, a passage with towering rock walls smoothed by water over the years. We can see the remains of the city’s rainwater harvesting system of stone gutters along the walls, and reconstructed stone dams to control nearby rivers. Most of the time there are a lot of other tourists stomping around, but a couple times we find ourselves alone between the cliffs, and take in the silence. While there are not horses and camels allowed to give rides on this path, there are some small donkey-drawn carriages ferrying older and less able tourists. What the pictures don’t show you are the guys who shuffle around scooping up the donkeys’ dung off the ground. Eventually the stone floor of al-Siq turns to sand, and we approach the breathtaking view of the canyon opening into the famous Treasury, al-Khazneh, probably the most famous sight in the city, with its windows and pillars carved right into the face of a giant cliff. It’s probably one of the most surreal things I’ve ever seen, right up there with Mar Saba monastery was, but hey, it doesn’t have to be a competition. The site only continues to impress as we keep walking. We pass a bunch of cavernous tombs of wealthy Nabateans carved into more cliffs, and many more smaller caves pockmarking another cliff face, some of the stone more red than brown in the sun.
Since Gottfried has already been once before, he wants to explore some of the more out-of-the-way parts of the site, so we agree to go our separate ways as I continue through the main ruins, and I say farewell to Gottfried the German globetrotter. I keep taking in the city and learn more about it. Petra became a prominent trade city under the Nabatean Arabs a little over 2,000 years ago. The city declined under the Romans and Byzantines as trade became more focused on sea routes, and an earthquake in 363 damaged many structures including the water system. By the Middle Ages, the city was mostly abandoned. While many of the buildings that stood alone are ruined, most of the buildings carved into the cliffs have miraculously stayed intact, many of them again tombs. Some of the other buildings I see are the amphitheater, the ruins of some massive temples dedicated to various pagan gods, and the foundation of a church from the Byzantine period. At one point I stand on one hill in the middle of the main part of the city, and just gaze around at the whole landscape, with the ruined walls and columns of the temples, the old canals and cisterns, the few stubborn trees here and there, the herds of tourists and Bedouins with their animals milling about, the towering tombs carved into the cliffs in the distance, and realize just how small most of the buildings are compared to the even higher brown and red cliffs and mountains rising around them, contrasting with the bright blue sky. I really can’t explain the divine mixture of the human-made and natural beauty of the whole scene any better than that.
I check the time—I’ve got a couple hours left to hike up to Ad Deir, the monastery, before I have to run back to catch the bus to Amman. I cross a wide bridge across one of the old canals and follow the map over some sand to a rock path that starts to climb up into the mountains. There are more Bedouins pressuring tourists to pay for a camel or donkey ride. There are also clusters of tents all over where they sell souvenirs and refreshments. Some of these enterprising Bedouins are children; the authorities who run the whole attraction have put up several signs telling tourists to not encourage child labor on site. You can also tell that some of the animals are absolutely overworked, and there are signs as well telling visitors to report any instances of animal abuse to park workers at the entrance facility. I’d imagine that traditionally, the Bedouin take great care of their animals, but probably are pressured to overwork them here to make more money. Anyway, the walk twisting through the cliffs up to Ad Deir takes almost an hour, but it offers some great sights along the way, and it’s completely worth it to see the isolated monastery carved into the cliff, surrounded by nothing but mountain peaks and yawning valleys. There’s an assembly of handmade “Best View in the World” signs pointing to some of the peaks just opposite the monastery, and they’re right. I can see more mountains stretching into the distance and disappearing in mist and clouds, as well as some of the Jordan Valley opening down into Palestine just to the west.
After taking in the scene, I go back to the path and gallop back down the mountain, encouraging other hikers that they’re almost there. I run back past the ruined temples and cliff tombs once more, just walking in some of the sandier parts. It’s about 3 PM, and I have to get to the bus at 3:30 before it leaves at 4. I run back through al-Siq and back to the entrance building, where they direct me up a hill to the bus stop. I tell them that I booked a seat in the morning. They didn’t end up with my name, but I’m still able to get a ticket and a seat. I put my sweater and hat on my seat, but I’ve still got the get my backpack from the hostel, and I bolt out and start running in its direction. It’s about 3:40. As I’m jogging up the hill, I realize that I’m just not going to make it up and back in time before the bus leaves at 4. Thankfully the gods of Petra answer my prayers and a driver in a pickup truck stops and offers me a ride for a couple dinars, even though it’s not a taxi. I hop in and tell him I’ll give him five dinars in total if he then gets me back to the bus by 4 after I get my backpack. His name is Ziad. I run up into the Rafiki, grab the backpack from the storage room, run back to the truck, tossing my bag into the back. Ziad then pulls off the most impressive stick-shift driving I’ve ever seen, roaring up and down the roller-coaster hills of Wadi Musa to the bus stop in about 2 minutes. I jump out, grab my backpack, and shout “Shukran, Ziad!” as I run back towards the bus. The ticket guy and driver give me a weird look.
A few minutes later the bus takes off, and I’m treated to a view of the desert sunset over Wadi Musa. A couple hours later we pull into Amman and stop at a pretty busy-looking place in the city. I tell the ticket collector (he came on the ride) that I’m looking for al-Hussein Street, he tells me that it’s near here, so I get out with a couple other people, though most stay on board. I can instantly hear a chorus of “Taxi? Taxi?” as the doors open. I push my way through the gaggle of drivers and connect to a nearby WiFi to find Al-Hussein Street. Turns out it’s still a couple miles further down, I got off too early. I walk to the main street and soon see a couple minibuses like the ones in Bethlehem driving in the direction I’m going in, though these are white not yellow. As we get closer to downtown, I ask one of them about al-Hussein Street, and a woman with pretty good English directs me. I thank them, and confirming her directions with Google Maps I get to the street in less than ten minutes. I eventually find the Farah Hotel, with a poorly lit sign in the darkness on a street under construction next to an empty parking lot. The whole thing looks kinda sketchy, but the hostel is alright once I get inside and check in. With the confusing border crossing into Aqaba, the failed hitchhiking attempt with Gottfried, the last-minute escape from Petra with Ziad, and finding my way through Amman to the hostel, it’s been quite a week, but absolutely worth it. I’m here now, and ready to get on the plane tomorrow night, after getting a quick taste of Amman of course.
Solstice in the sky. Thursday 12/20 to Saturday 12/22—Amman, Istanbul, Boston, Providence, New York, Mahwah
The next day I do some sightseeing around Amman. After getting a bit confused with some of the sign-less streets, I head up to city’s old fortress, the Citadel. It’s atop a giant hill rising in middle of the city, so I get a nice panorama of the whole place. People have lived at the site for over 3,000 years. There’s a ruined Roman temple to Hercules, a Byzantine church, and an Umayyad Arab palace, the last two pretty well-preserved. I also check out the old Roman amphitheater, and see some exhibits they have of traditional tools and dress in Arab and Bedouin culture, including some Palestinian dresses from al-Khalil, Nablus, Haifa, and Jerusalem. On my way back to the hostel through the rain late afternoon I grab some knafeh from Habibeh’s Sweets, the place recommended to me by that guy who gave Gottfried and I directions on our way out of Aqaba. This stuff is just about on par with the knafeh from Nablus. I also stumble across a little place called the Duke’s Diwan, one of the oldest houses left in the city center. Amidst an Amman undergoing rapid development, the house is now preserved as a small event venue and tea room (diwan) open for anyone who walks in. I’m served some tea heated over a fire stove to enjoy with my knafeh.
I contacted a host on Couchsurfing, Ali, a couple days ago asking about staying tonight, but I then realized that my flight leaves early tomorrow morning, a little past 5 AM, so I told him that it’d just make more sense for me to get to the airport earlier and catch some shuteye there. But Ali insists that I come by his place in the evening for dinner before my trip, and to rest up there before heading to the airport at midnight. Not wanting to refuse his hospitality, I pick up my backpack from the hostel and hop on a bus going up King Hussein Street, and luckily the bus seems to be heading towards the university that Ali lives near. Some of the people near the front invite me to sit down and relax. About 15 minutes later my stop comes up and I make to give the stoic driver half a dinar, but he cracks a smile at me and quickly waves away the money, seeing that I’m a foreigner trying to figure out my way around the city. As I approach Ali’s building through the dark and rain he calls down from his window to check that it’s me and comes to let me in. I also meet Yulin, a Couchsurfing guest who’s actually staying the night. Ali’s made a great chicken stew with rice, exactly what I need for my long night ahead of getting through the airport to my layover in Istanbul, and I give him some knafeh I brought from Habibeh’s. We all hang out for a couple hours, comparing our own travel experiences. Yulin is from China and has been in Europe through a volunteer-travel exchange kind of program. Ali is a pharmacy student, and fills me in a bit on current events in Jordan, telling me about the union-led protests earlier in the year against the government over IMF-backed austerity.
As it approaches 11, Ali gives me advice for getting to the airport shuttle. I thank him again and go down to get a quick taxi ride to the airport shuttle. I’m a couple dinars short on the shuttle fare, but one guy, Osama, sees me in my predicament and helps me out. He lives in Vancouver; I shove some US dollars into his hands that he can maybe use if he ever pops across the border into Washington. We talk on the ride over to the airport; he does social work back in Canada, and was just visiting some family in Jordan. We say goodbye at the airport as we head to different terminals, I get through security, and get to my gate to wait for a couple hours. I put my hat over my eyes and get some light sleep.
I wake up later around 4:30 AM to the sound of some instruments being plucked and tuned. “The hell…?” I say to myself groggily. I sit up and see a troupe of some East Asian musicians, with a small crowd collecting around them expectantly. In a minute, they start to play some absolutely amazing kind of folk music, with occasional time-keeping from a severe-looking woman who must be their kind of conductor. Dozens of people now gather round, and everyone whips out their phones to record it. After the first song, ten other members of the troupe without instruments get into a formation. Then the dancing starts. They leap, twirl, spin, jive, do jigs with their feet, wave their arms through the air all in as perfect synchronization as human beings can achieve, all to the tempo of the lively percussion and string music filling up the terminal like a radiant campfire in a large cavern. We all forget that we’re exhausted in an airport before dawn, forget the rest of whatever is stressing and troubling each of us. I actually start crying from joy a little bit, and show the tears leaking down my face to the players’ conductor after they’re done. She looks at me like I’m nuts, but I don’t care. Physically tired after bouncing around Palestine, Israel, and up through Jordan for the past week, and emotionally tired from all the despair and injustice I saw in Palestine (and I only saw a few weeks of it, while those who are from there have lived through it their whole lives), it’s just nice to be among a bunch of people from different corners of the world in transit brought together in a circle appreciating the same spontaneous wonderful spectacle to our eyes and ears. Unfortunately, the couple videos I got of them were lost in the South African Phone Incident a month later, and I haven’t been able to find anything out about the performers online. But I still have the vivid memory for myself.
The time comes to board; they finish playing and the audience claps one more time. I can see everyone’s face is brighter as we march down the bridge to the plane. I also hear some of the performers speaking to each other in what sounds like some kind of Eastern European-sounding language, like Russian; perhaps they’re from somewhere in northern China, or Siberia, or central Asia. We land in Istanbul again as the sun rises. I have about a six hour layover—unfortunately not enough time to go into the city and squeeze in some sightseeing. I hang out in the airport and occasionally walk among the decadence of the airport’s duty-free shops, shoving free samples of different Turkish delight flavors into my mouth. I then get on the flight back to Boston. I befriend the guy next to me, Nair, who was just visiting his girlfriend in Romania, and we share some glasses of araq across the Atlantic Ocean together. Upon arriving in Boston Friday night, I grab a bus to Providence to stay with my friend Ben; most of my friends in Boston are out of town for the holidays. Ben and I hang out in Providence a bit the next day before I get another bus to New York. I pass a couple pigeons crossing into Port Authority, and think about them differently after my time taking care of the flock on the Nassers’ farm. I take the Shortline back to Mahwah and hike up the hill to my parents’ house. My parents have already gone to sleep, so I do the same and see them the next morning.
Final thoughts
It is worse than I could have imagined. A small part of me had been been hoping that somehow it wasn’t that bad, that I could go back to the easier time of loving Israel, just like I could go back to the simpler time when I loved the United States of America in elementary school and found comfort in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, before I learned that not everyone benefited from the republic, as I had been fortunate to. That I could go back to the kind of nationalism that took pride in a country that defended the Jewish people across the world after centuries of being persecuted, that kept the Promised Land and its milk and honey safe for us. Nationalism as casually reassuring as the fact of the sun setting every night and rising every morning. As in most situations of systemic injustice, words like “tragedy,” “human rights violations,” “apartheid,” “persecution” fail to sum up what Palestinians’ experience at the hands of the state of Israel and its military every day. I do not need to go back and recount the horrible things my fellow delegates and I learned about.
It is also better than I could have imagined. After seeing how much It was incredible to see the Palestinian farmers, the students, the families, the workers, the artists and craftsmen, the refugees, the researchers working every day to free themselves–with some Israelis alongside them–even as they see things get worse each year, not as passive victims or as terrorists but resisting through existing, not letting themselves be defined by violence. And it was more incredible to see how Palestinians do it with such good spirits and positive attitudes, more than just the kind you get from a self-help book. They all still smile and laugh and dance and sing and cook and love and thank God for what they do still have. Along with thousands of others, the Nassers get up every morning six days a week to work their land, even as the state of Israel tightens the noose around them, and one morning a week they go to praise God and relish their day of rest with their community.
In my month in Palestine I saw more than most foreigners do, but what I witnessed and how I wrote about it here by no means covers everything. Every neighborhood and village have their own experiences, every individual Palestinian in the land and in the diaspora around the world has their own story. I say again, as I did before the trip, that saying the situation is complex doesn’t negate that the constant injustice Palestinians and Bedouins face day in and day out, and acknowledging this constant injustice doesn’t negate that it’s still complex. It is not for me to say if there is “hope” for the land and its peoples or not–I am not from there. There is no one single Palestinian experience and united opinion; no entire society has that. Some of them are more hopeful, with more citizens and voters around the world becoming aware and supporting the boycott to pressure the state of Israel, while some of them do not believe they will win any freedom and access to land back, with the Israeli and other right-wing chauvinist governments becoming closer to each other across the Middle East, western countries, and the rest of the world. But they all still try.
As I relayed, Palestinians are specifically asking for solidarity from abroad. All the ones we spoke with said they know they are not the only people in the world undergoing being persecuted and callously neglected, that all their struggles matter. But the leaders of the United States and other countries are handing a lot of weapons, money, and diplomatic support in particular to the governments of Israel as well as Egypt and Jordan, and as voters and taxpayers we can make a difference. We can push organizations, schools, and religious communities we’re a part of to boycott companies that play a part in the crimes of occupying, dividing, and seizing land & resources from Palestinian communities. We can hold politicians more accountable on foreign policy and military aid to the Israeli army. And when able, we can give support to Palestinian activists on the ground like the ones my group met with–see the links that I shared in earlier posts for those organizations.
So thank you to Eyewitness Palestine, to the Friends of Tent of Nations, to the people who donated for my spot on the delegation, to everyone we met with, and of course to the Nasser family for helping make my experience what it was. I tried to strike the right balance between talking about my personal experience as an outsider witnessing without making it all about myself, while still focusing on the people I met and their stories. And congratulations to you if you’ve read or at least skimmed this far–the rest of the adventures I’ll be making over the next year will hopefully be a little less depressing and easier to read about. I will not be on another type of delegation that comprehensively looks into the mass injustice of a military occupation, but I am sure to still at least encounter some human suffering and strife in passing. Some of it will be more out in the open, some more hidden, but it will be everywhere in some way, and should I see it I’ll include it in my observations, showing the world as it is, warts and all. At the end of the day, aside from all of the shit with Israel it was just great starting this year off in this small but grand part of the Middle East, meeting people and seeing a bit of the long history and culture, and starting to learn about farming with Daher and Daoud. Next stop, South Africa.
Foreign Fields 