Three Months in Palestine

Farewell

2005-12-15T06:16:00.000-08:00

I'm leaving Palestine on Saturday to return to America. The other day, I met for the last time with a group of high school senior girls from the village of Kharbatha Beni Hareth.

Once a week, I taught them a little English and they taught me a lot about Palestinian culture and village life. During the period of the class, one of my students announced proudly that she had just become engaged to her cousin, Mohammad, who was the brother of another student. I congratulated her. She said she would marry in the summer and still hoped to attend college. They all, in fact, would like to attend college, but to do so they must score well on the end-of-high school exam administered in the summer. The English portion of the exam counts for one-quarter of the overall grade, so their voluntary attendance at my class was important to them.

The last class, they surprised me with a "lunch," which was more like a feast. They each brought a dish: maqlouba, mousakhen, pizza, salad ... Will you remember us in five years, one of them asked me. Yes, I promised. I will.

Arafat's grave

2005-12-15T05:56:00.000-08:00

I've been living in Ramallah for more than three months and I didn't visit the city's most popular -- perhaps only -- tourist attraction until last week: Arafat's grave. Two American friends were visiting, which was reason enough for us all to go to the gravesite, which is something of a pilgrimage destination for Palestinians from the West Bank and abroad. It is open from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m. and attracts 2,000 visitors a day, according to the guards outside.

The founder of the Palestinian nationalist movement and its standard bearer for nearly a half-century is still referred to as "the leader" by the Palestinian guards outside the compound where he lived, worked and is buried. The moqata, as it is known, has been mostly patched and rebuilt since Israeli tanks and soldiers famously kept Arafat under seige on and off for the last four years of his life. His tombstone is draped with a Palestinian flag and encased in a large glass box. Four men from one of the many branches of the national police that Arafat created stand watch over the site.

Nearby is a hole, freshly dug, which is the beginnings of a mausoleum and memorial to the former president of the Palestinian National Authority and chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. One of the guards told us that he will remain in Ramallah only temporarily, until the political situation will permit him to be buried in Jerusalem, according to his wishes. Insha'allah, I replied. If God wills it.

Orange season

2005-12-13T07:25:00.000-08:00

Every fruit has its season, but in Palestine, where virtually no fruit or vegetable is imported, the seasons are more noticable. You'll be hard-pressed to find citrus in the market in the summer. And you won't find cantelope or figs in the winter. Right now, the oranges and clementines from Jericho are for sale all over Ramallah. If you just want one or two or three, this vendor will give them to you for free.

Weather maps

2005-12-13T07:07:00.000-08:00

Weather maps in newspapers in America and in most of the world are just that: weather maps. In the Middle East, they are political maps. “The Jerusalem Post,” a right-wing English-language Israeli paper, publishes a daily map on the back page of the front section titled, “Weather in Israel,” which shows no political boundaries for the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, or the Golan Heights, all considered occupied territories according to the United Nations. Most maps published outside of Israel clearly show such boundaries. The map in the Jerusalem Post shows the temperature highs and lows for 12 Israeli cities, including the largest Israeli settlement, called Ariel, which is located in the West Bank. It does not print the name or location of any Palestinian cities within “Israel.”

“Haaretz,” a left-leaning Israeli paper, which prints an English-language edition, shows a wider map of the region, with temperatures in Israeli cities, including Ariel, as well as two Palestinian cities, Gaza and Nablus, and two Jordanian cities, Amman and Aqaba. It avoids defining political boundaries within Israel by not showing any political boundaries at all.

The mainstream Jordanian newspaper, “Al-Ghad,” shows the weather in Jordan and the West Bank. It draws political boundaries more than 37 years old, showing the West Bank as part of Jordan. It indicates the names of the countries surrounding Jordan, with the exception of Israel. The Jordanian government has officially recognized the state of Israel, but the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest site in Islam, which is located in Jerusalem and for 19 years was under Jordanian control, is still printed on Jordanian currency. More than half of Jordanians are of Palestinian origin, and many object to the government’s relations with Israel.

Palestinian newspapers, for their part, include no weather maps at all. Al-Quds, the oldest Palestinian newspaper, whose name, Al Quds, means The Holy,” which is what Arabs call Jerusalem. It lists the weather in cities like New York, Tokyo and Amsterdam, far from Israel and Palestine and the Middle East all together.

Sheperds and their flock

2005-12-07T08:21:00.000-08:00

Two boys lead their sheep down my street the other day. The photo was taken from my porch.

105

2005-12-07T08:15:00.000-08:00

I met another 105-year-old. Abu Khalil has lived in the Christian-Muslim village of Aboud his whole life. He comes from the Christian side.

Have you heard the latest news?

2005-12-06T05:41:00.000-08:00

I climbed aboard a yellow Ford van in the parking lot outside Birzeit University to head back to Ramallah and struck up a conversation with the driver. He spoke English quite well – he had lived in Chicago, Las Vegas and San Diego – but I insisted on speaking Arabic. The conversation turned, as it almost always does, to what am I doing here learning Arabic.

I’m a journalist, I told him.

Oh, have you heard the latest news?

No, I said.

There was a bomb in Netanya. Half an hour ago.

Five Israelis were killed yesterday in a suicide bombing outside a shopping mall in the coastal city of Netanya. Word of such incidents spreads as quickly in Palestine as it does in Israel. People in both societies tune in to hourly radio news updates as if their religion prescribed it. The official reaction from both Palestinians and Israelis has become cliché. The Palestinian leadership condemned the bombing and the Israelis said it was proof the Palestinians have done nothing to “dismantle the infrastructure of terror.”

The everyday Palestinian reaction is more complicated and wide-ranging, but few will condemn the bombing as their leadership does, and fewer still would agree with the Israelis: that Palestinians are responsible for stopping Palestinians from blowing themselves up in Israel. This weekend, I discussed the very subject with two Palestinian professors who hold Ph.D.s from American universities.

Give me a country with recognized international borders, a constitution, an army and police, and I will be responsible for the actions of my people, one told me. Without this, Palestinian leadership, the argument goes, lacks a popular mandate to crack down on a movement to resist an occupation that is universally loathed.

As far as Palestinians are concerned, the occupation and all that it entails – restriction of movement, “administrative detention,” a euphemism for imprisonment without official charges, jailhouse torture, house demolitions, land confiscation and the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians, antiseptically referred to as “collateral damage” in the language of the occupier – is cause enough to lead someone to blow themselves up in Israel.

Reasonable Palestinians do not support the killing of innocent civilians inside Israel, but they also offer no apologies. I sat down with Abu Imad in his little grocery yesterday evening and we drank tea and talked about the day's events after watching the news bulletin on Al-Jazeera. There was much to discuss: the Saddam Hussein trial in Iraq and the suicide bombing in Netanya. The Israeli defense minister promised retaliation, the news report said.

One side hits the other, Abu Imad said, and the other feels he must hit back. And it continues like this.

He concluded, however, by blaming the other, invoking a familiar Palestinian refrain: You see, Sharon doesn’t want peace. I imagined the idle talk in the groceries on the other side returned the blame: You see, they might say, the bombing is proof the Palestinians don't want peace.

Fall sunset over Ramallah

2005-12-04T05:41:00.000-08:00

The sun sets now at 4:40. I know, even if I don't step outside to see the last of it slip beyond the horizon because I hear the mosques, in a sort of fugue, calling the faithful to the maghreb prayer. My house is on the side of a hill, and so I hear the call to prayer from Beitouniya, across the valley, as well as up the hill, from the old city of Ramallah.

Of oil and olives and soap

2005-12-04T05:27:00.000-08:00

Most families in Salfit not only pickle their own olives and cook with home-grown olive oil, but they make soap from oil left over from the previous season, a process which takes two days. They pour the soap into large molds and then slice it into squares as it cools. The oil in the soap is considered good for the skin. I visited Salfit and came home with a jar of home-pickled green olives, and a block of soap.

Olive oil is sold in Palestine by the tanakeh, on the right, which holds between 15 and 17 kilograms of oil. This year, because the season was light, a tanakeh fetches 70 Jordanian dinars, or about $100 -- twice to three times the normal price. Folks not only eat olive oil with bread and thyme for breakfast, and use it with salads and a variety of other dishes, some drink half a coffee cup of extra virgin every morning. According to tradition, oil strengthens the body and keeps the heart healthy.

Jifit

2005-12-04T05:17:00.000-08:00

After olives are pressed, olive growers share in the waste byproduct, the crushed pits, called jifit, which is used for fertilizer in the olive groves, as well as for fuel to cook bread or heat the home during the winter.

Khamees al-Hamad, 72, stands next to a pile of jifit at an olive press which he partially owns in the village of Salfit, south of Nablus.

Directions

2005-12-04T05:13:00.000-08:00

It was the first time, and it may have been the last: a Palestinian asked me for directions. The other day, as I was walking home in the dark and a van pulled up beside me. The driver rolled down the window and started as most conversations start here: “As-salam alaykum,” reaching his hand through the open window to shake mine. He was either desperately lost, or actually thought I was a Palestinian. In either case, he continued. I caught enough to realize he was asking for directions, but wasn’t sure where he wanted to go. I answered that I was a foreigner – “Ana ajnabee” – but that I would try to help. I pointed to the next thoroughfare and explained that it led to Beitouniya, a neighboring village to the west. That seemed to make them happy, and they thanked me and bid me farewell. I was stunned, but pleased. It was perhaps some small benchmark of my knowledge of Arabic, and of Ramallah.

11-9

2005-11-29T06:25:00.000-08:00

I left the West Bank for Jordan this weekend in order to renew my Israeli visa. The trip from Ramallah across the Allenby Bridge (in Jordan it is called the King Hussein Bridge) took four and a half hours on two taxis, one bus and a private car. (I made the return trip in five hours on two shared taxis and two buses.) The route from Ramallah used to pass more directly through Jersusalem; now, because Palestinian vehicles -- and most Palestinians -- are barred from enterring Jersualem, the route winds along narrow lanes of crumbling pavement through a dozen West Bank villages before dropping into the folds of the desert mountains that rise above the Jordan River. I was all the happier to trade the traffic of Jerusalem for bumpy roads and spectacular scenery.

I stayed two nights in Amman with my friend, Jon. We drove past the three hotels that were bombed earlier this month; all have been repaired and are reopened. But, while traces of the bombings have been neatly erased, life in Amman is changed.

At every restaurant, bar and hotel we visited, we were greeted outside by a guard or two or three, who checked us with a hand-held wand of the sort that is ubiquitous at airport security checks in the United States. Big hotels have installed walk-through metal detectors far from the actual entrances. On Saturday, we drove to the eastern desert to visit Byzantine and Ummayid ruins, and we were questioned twice at police road blocks. We may have been stopped because we were driving a rental car, but other cars were stopped as well.

All of this is new, Jon told me, since the bombings. To me, the heightened security made Jordan feel like Israel.

Thanksgiving in Palestine

2005-11-29T06:11:00.000-08:00

The leaves weren’t turning and there was no football on tv, but it was Thanksgiving nonetheless, and so we celebrated. Some American friends of mine organized a Thanksgiving potluck last Thursday night. The hosts provided two turkeys, heads included – freshly slaughtered by a butcher in the downtown Ramallah market, and cooked in a wood-fired brick oven at a bakery. (Apparently, folks here bring large birds, sheep and goats to bakeries for baking.) It was delicious.

I brought garlic mashed potatoes, made from a four-kilo sack of potatoes; others contributed canned cranberries (the can was the last on the grocery store shelf and appeared as if it had been there for years), Middle Eastern stuffing, green beans, couscous salad, green salad, mushrooms, sweet potatoes and apple pie. Beverages included Palestinian beer, Israeli wine and Ramallah Araq, the anise-derived liquor common throughout the Arab World. About 35 people took part – mostly Europeans and Palestinians assisting in their first Thanksgiving – and ate almost everything.

A lifetime

2005-11-23T07:33:00.000-08:00

I met a woman the other day who said she was 104 years old. She lives alone in a one-room stone house in a village called Khirbet Abu Falah, in the Palestinian highlands north of Ramallah. The house, with its distinctive Ottoman-style vaulted ceiling, is older than she is.

She is hard of hearing and spoke in a peasant dialect so distinctive that even my Palestinian friends had trouble understanding her. She didn’t say much anyway.

I imagined all that she has seen in her lifetime. When she was born, at the turn of the last century, there were no political borders from Jerusalem to Damascus to Baghdad to Istanbul. The population of the region that was to become Palestine, and later Israel and the Palestinian territories, was 600,000, of which 87 percent were Arab Muslims, 10 percent were Arab Christians and 3 percent were Jews, both immigrants from Europe and indigenous Sephardic Jews.

Nearly a decade after her birth, in 1909, Tel Aviv was founded as the first Jewish city in the Middle East. She was approaching adulthood, when in 1917, British forces occupied Jerusalem and began a 31-year occupation.

In middle age, in 1948, British troops left Palestine, Jewish residents declared independence as Israel and war erupted. Seventy-eight percent of Palestine was conquered by the new state of Israel. Three-quarters of a million Palestinians, or 90 percent of those living in the Jewish state, became refugees. Israeli bulldozers destroyed more than 400 Palestinian villages, after their occupants fled or were forced from their homes.

Her village, however, was spared. It became part of a new political region known as the West Bank, annexed by Jordan.

Nineteen years later, she was in her late 60s when Israel invaded Jordan (as well as Syria and Egypt) and occupied the rest of historic Palestine, including her village. She later survived one Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation, in the late 1980s, and so far has survived the second, which began in 2000.

Protest as performance

2005-11-19T04:44:00.000-08:00

Every Friday, a motley collection of several dozen Europeans, who call themselves “political tourists,” Palestinians and Israeli leftists gather to protest near bulldozers that are working to construct the barrier that Palestinians fear will become the border between Israel and a future Palestinian state. The barrier cuts inside the 1948-cease fire line that delineated Israel from the West Bank. It separates thousands of acres of Palestinian agricultural land, as well as some Palestinian villages, from the rest of the West Bank.

The protest yesterday passed mostly peacefully, which may have been a disappointment to both sides. Since I have arrived in Ramallah, Palestinian newspapers have run front-page photos from the weekly protest showing demonstrators being beaten and kicked by Israeli soldiers and border police. On Friday, about 50 protestors chanted “the wall must fall,” in Arabic and Hebrew. About as many soldiers and border police stood by uneasily, some twitching their index fingers next to the triggers on their M-16s. At first the demonstrators sat and chanted, but when that didn’t elicit much response from the soldiers, they stood and tried to march toward the barrier – which in this spot, was already completed.

The most excitement came when soldiers engaged in a shoving match with protesters, pushing them down a rocky slope. One Israeli man with long curly hair was detained briefly and then released. Then, Palestinian boys threw stones toward the soldiers. They were more than 100 yards away, but the soldiers pursued them anyway, launching tear gas, playing a game-and-cat and mouse in a nearby olive grove. This continued for hours, long after the protest ended. It all seemed well-rehearsed. Some older Palestinians sat on a farmer’s stone wall under a shade tree, watching the spectacle unfold from a distance, cheering on the boys, as if watching some reenactment of a Civil War battle.

The weekly protest takes place in Bilaeen, which stands to lose half of its agricultural land to the Israeli side of the barrier. The protestors argue that the barrier here has less to do with security concerns than with the planned expansion of three nearby Jewish settlements, considered illegal by the United Nations because they are built on occupied land. The barrier itself was ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice in the Hague. None of that has stopped construction of the wall. And so, the protests likely will continue.

Double yoke

2005-11-19T04:39:00.000-08:00

In America, people favor the white to the yoke. But, I have always preferred the yoke. So, too, do Palestinians. My grocer, Fayaq, sells double-yoke eggs for just a fraction more than the price of regular eggs. It seems like a good deal to me. I’ve never seen double-yoke eggs before, but Fayaq speaks of them as if they are quite normal. “They’re twins,” he tells me. I’m not sure how he knows which eggs are double-yokes, but he does. I buy a half-carton of double-yoke eggs – or 15 eggs – for 12 shekels. That’s 30 yokes for less than $3.

Independence Day

2005-11-19T04:27:00.000-08:00

Palestinians celebrated Independence Day last Tuesday. On November 15, 1988, the Palestinian National Council met in exile in Algiers and declared independence. Every year, on Nov. 15, Palestinian ministries close, along with schools, banks and universities. But, of course, despite the declaration, there is no independent Palestine, so there is no official celebration, and for most Palestinians, it is a day to rest at home or go shopping.

At Birzeit University, on the day after Independence Day, students wore traditional black-and-white checkered headdresses in honor of Yasser Arafat, the founder and leader of the Palestinian national cause until his death last year, a few days before Independence Day.

On the poster above, it is written, “Farewell, Abu Amar.” Abu Amar was Arafat’s nom de guerre.

Apartheid?

2005-11-13T07:16:00.000-08:00

Palestinians often invoke the former South African system of Apartheid when describing Israeli policies in the West Bank. Palestinians refer to the concrete wall and metal fence that Israel is constructing through the Palestinian territory as “the Apartheid Wall.” Most Israelis, of course, reject such a parallel, and call the barrier a “security fence.”

I took this picture at the northern entrance to Bethlehem. The wall encloses the city and its refugee camps on two sides. Palestinians residing in Bethlehem are forbidden to cross to the other side.

Olive harvest

2005-11-13T06:53:00.000-08:00

The stone villages of the Palestinian highlands sprawl across hillsides and mountain tops, surrounded by terraced olive groves planted too far ago for anyone to say exactly which came first: the Palestinians or their olives. Some trees are so old – their knobby trunks meters in diameter – that that they are called “Romaneeyeh,” or Roman because the people believe they date to Roman or Byzantine times.

Until a generation ago, the olive harvest was the lifeblood of the rural Palestinian economy. Olives are still harvested by the people who live amongst them, even if they collect them on weekends and days off from their city jobs. Most of the olives are pressed into oil and sold locally. The olive harvest began in many areas after the end of Ramadan, earlier this month, and will continue for another week or so.

A family I have come to know through my research invited me to join them last Friday harvesting olives on their land near the village of Mazara al-Nobani, about an hour’s drive north of Ramallah. I climbed into a pickup truck with three men, three women and six children – all from the same family – and we headed out to the olive trees. On ladders and with small rakes, we picked about 15 trees clean, filling most of three large sacks, each one worth $100 in olive oil.

Mazara al-Nobani is luckier than some. All of its olive trees have been spared Israeli demolition. Since 2000, half a million Palestinian olive trees have been uprooted by Israeli bulldozers, according to the Palestinian Agriculture Ministry. Israel sites security concerns; Palestinians say it’s an effort to drive them from their land.

Cold nights

2005-11-09T07:08:00.000-08:00

The temperature now dips into the 40s at night, but fortunately my landlord has provided me with a big gas heater with wheels. I'm still on my first gas tank, which costs 40 shekels, or about $9, to fill. Unfortunately, it's not recommended to keep it on while sleeping. The other morning, I could see my breath in the bathroom.

Muddy shoes

2005-11-09T06:36:00.000-08:00

Dress shoes do not wear well in the West Bank, especially during the rainy season. Tuesday morning, I was headed to Ramallah from Jerusalem and traffic came to a standstill, so we set off on foot through a trash-strewn patch of mud. Just as I had stomped out clods of mud, I negotiated the Qalandia crossing, which is an obstacle course of mud puddles, sidewalk vendors and beggars. Israel does not allow busses and service taxis to pass through Qalandia, so every day thousands of Palestinians cross on foot. Women’s heels and men’s dress shoes often emerge daubed in mud, sometimes pant legs are splattered.

But where the crossing lacks in comfort, it makes up for in security: a long passageway is encased in high wire fencing and coils of razor wire, monitored by Israeli soldiers wearing bullet proof vests, Kevlar helmets and carrying standard-issue M16s, sometimes aiming them at the travelers as they hand over their passports to be checked.

Waiting for Christ

2005-11-09T05:56:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, the Haram Al-Shareef, or the Noble Sanctuary, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, was opened to tourists for the first time in nearly five years. It is Islam’s third holiest site, after Mecca and Medina. It includes Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, which was built on the site the Prophet Mohammad is said to have ascended to heaven. They date to the 7th and 8th centuries. It is open to tourists five mornings a week for about three hours. I visited for the first time last Sunday.

During one Friday prayer this Ramadan, 150,000 Palestinians attended services. Some who live in the West Bank received special permission to do so. The mosques have been the target of Christian and Jewish extremists since Israel occupied the site in 1967. In 1969, an Australian messianic tourist set fire to Al-Aqsa mosque; in 1980, Israeli police accused the radical Jewish group, Meir Kahane, of planting explosives near the Al-Aqsa mosque.

Some Jewish extremists want to replace the Muslim shrines with a temple. According to Jewish tradition, the area was the site of two Israelite temples (archeologists have found evidence of the second one, but not the first).

In Jewish belief, the messiah will enter Jerusalem through the Golden Gate, which stands along the eastern wall of the Noble Sanctuary. According to Christian tradition, Jesus enterred Jerusalem through the Golden Gate on the Sunday before his crucifixon. The Ottoman ruler Souleyman sealed the gate in stone in the 16th century to prevent Christ from enterring the city.

When I climbed atop the Golden Gate, which is made of stone, not gold, I was met with a group of a dozen or so middle-aged Americans praying for the return of Christ. One women with bleached blond hair (not a common sight in Jerusalem) prayed aloud in an American southern accent. A man was videotaping her. Another man offered short rejoinders: “Oh, Lord, we are ready for you.” Two others stood with their backs to the wall, closed their eyes and held their palms to the stone.

An American in Nablus

2005-11-09T05:31:00.000-08:00

Ahmad Yaish says he used to boast to his family and friends in the West Bank about American values of freedom and democracy after he moved back to Nablus, where he was born and raised. Those who remember his words then tell him that he was brainwashed. America is very unpopular here for its support of Israel and, like in most of the rest of the world, for its war in Iraq. Now, Ahmad says he hides the fact that he holds an American passport. He disagrees with American politics but he hopes to return. He is secretly planning to move his family there so that his two boys, ages 14 and 11, can have more opportunities and come of age far from the violence that has plagued this city.

My friend, Emily, and I met Ahmad by chance last Friday in Nablus. He invited us to his home for lunch and to meet his family. His wife prepared kabob stuffed in fresh pita pockets. There was ground lamb meat, chunks of steak and chicken, liver, roasted tomatoes and onions, and lamb testicles. (The latter is Ahmad’s favorite; it tasted like tofu to me.) We were also served homemade french fries, the traditional chopped cucumber and tomato salad, hummous, tahina and baqdoonsiyeh. After lunch, we drank tea and ate mamool, a sugar cookie stuffed with date jam (ajweeyeh) or crushed pistachios (fustu’ halabi), a tradition at the Eid al-Fitr, the three-day end-of-Ramadan holiday, which began on Thursday.

During his last year of high school, Ahmad said he asked his English teacher where he could go in America for college. It had to be inexpensive or his father wouldn’t approve. So his teacher drew a big circle in the middle of a map of the United States and said that here, inside the circle, was the cheapest. Ahmad started at Oklahoma State University and graduated from the University of Nebraska. He wants to move his family to the Midwest, which he calls the real America. He moved back to Palestine in the early 1990s because he says he was tricked into believing that peace was in the works. (Thousands of Palestinian-Americans returned to their homeland during the 1990s; many have moved back to the United States.)

Ahmad manufactures and sells gold jewelry. He is the rare Palestinian who has business partners in Tel Aviv and travels frequently to the Gulf and to Europe. He has read the Old Testament and books on Jewish history in an effort to understand the Israelis. “I want to know what it is they want,” he told us. “I still don’t know.” Despite his American passport, he is unable to travel to Israeli cities and cannot fly in or out of Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv simply because he is Palestinian. Italy, he says, used to be three hours away. Now, the journey requires a series of taxi rides to the Jordanian border, crossing through Israeli customs and immigration checks, which can take hours, and then a taxi to Amman and a flight from there. It took him one year, he says, to obtain permission from Israeli authorities to travel to the American consulate in East Jerusalem, part of the occupied West Bank which is now off-limits to most Palestinians.

Next summer, Ahmad plans to take his family on a one-month vacation of America, which he says will include a visit to his old haunts in Omaha, as well as Florida and a drive from Los Angeles to Lake Tahoe. If they like it, he will move them there and leave Palestine behind, perhaps for good.

Abu Soufian

2005-10-25T01:05:00.000-07:00

Last night, Abu Soufian invited me to iftar. I see him most evenings, when I am visiting with Abu Imad in his small grocery. At the end of the daily Ramadan fast, Abu Soufian arrives beleaguered at Abu Imad’s store, his white apron and blue jumpsuit smudged with pancake batter, and orders three pita sandwiches and five bottles of grape juice. He and his sons eat them to break the fast, as they are closing their shop. They spend the day churning out pancakes, which are called qatief, a traditional Ramadan desert.

Abu Soufian, whose family came to Ramallah from Hebron during the British mandate, lives in an old house across from Abu Imad’s grocery in the predominantly Christian Old City. His extended family gathers each night for Ramadan. I sat in one room with Abu Soufian and two of his sons, and the women sat in another room. One of his daughters served us. We ate maqlouba (rice, cauliflower, eggplant) with tender chunks of lamb – Abu Soufian instructed me to eat with my hands – with yogurt and vegetable noodle soup. We drank carob juice, a traditional Ramadan drink in Palestine, sold in recycled plastic two-liter plastic Pepsi bottles at stands all over town. Then, the women joined us and we drank Arabic coffee without sugar, then Arabic coffee with sugar. Then, the qatief. For 40 years, Abu Soufian has been making qatief in the same small shop, open only during the month of Ramadan. (During the rest of the year, he operates a restaurant in nearby Beitouniya.) He calls himself the king of qatief. I was anxious to try it.

His daughter prepared three varieties of qatief. The pancakes were folded in half, some filled with sweet cheese, some with walnuts (from California) and some with cream. The outside was sticky and sweet. I ate two of each. We talked politics – every conversation here turns to politics – and languages and American culture: Americans’ love for big cars that consume a lot of gasoline and the completely foreign concept of Americans leaving home when they are 18 to live on their own. When I told Abu Soufian that American women also leave home when they are 18, he responded: “haram!” which means forbidden by Islam. His son invited me to his engagement party, next month, and gave me a ride home.

Martyrs

2005-10-24T03:47:00.000-07:00

When a Palestinian is killed in this conflict – an innocent bystander, a gunman or a suicide bomber – Palestinians automatically refer to the deceased as a martyr. In Arabic, a martyr is called “shaheed,” or witness. The verb, “to be martyred,” is “istashahed,” which means to call upon as a witness. Martyrs are immediately memorialized on posters, produced by one of the political factions. If the deceased is a fighter, he is often pictured with an automatic rifle in one hand and sometimes a Quran in the other. His image is often superimposed in front of the Dome of the Rock, which represents both religious and nationalist claims to Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital. The posters are plastered on walls and metal shutters of shops in the business district of the town where the martyr resided.

The second Palestinian uprising, which began five years ago, has claimed the lives of more than 3,000 Palestinians and nearly 1,000 Israelis. The daily death toll has decreased dramatically in the past two years or so, although people continue to be killed on both sides. (Yesterday, for example, two Palestinians were killed and three Israeli soldiers injured.) One sign that the uprising, or intifada, may be over, or at least waning, are the faded and torn martyr posters in cities and villages across the West Bank. In Salfit, a town of 14,000 between Nablus and Ramallah, about 25 residents were killed by Israeli troops since the beginning of the uprising, most in the first three years. The remains of their paper cenotaphs are everywhere, but they are tattered and washed out by the sun, or peeled off and gone altogether.

Iftar

2005-10-24T03:28:00.000-07:00

As a non-Muslim living in the Muslim world, I never really felt left out until Ramadan this year. I figure it’s kind of like being Jewish or Muslim in the United States during Christmas. I certainly don’t envy the fasting part of the holy month – from sunrise to sundown, Muslims refrain from eating, drinking and smoking – but I am jealous of the big dinners that everyone hurries home to eat at sunset. I’m reminded of this everyday, as shops close and the streets empty in the late afternoon. Luckily, I’ve been invited to two iftar dinners in Muslim homes, and another at a restaurant.

On Saturday, I went with three colleagues to our Arabic professor’s home in Salfit, an hour north of Ramallah. It’s situated in a valley surrounded by terraced olive groves (and one of the largest Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Ariel). Sameer gave us a tour of the city and then we listened to his 78-year-old mother recount, in her distinctive peasant dialect, memories of the British occupation in the 1930s and 40s. He lives with his wife and four children in a house that is built above the house of one of his brothers. Other family members live in adjacent houses, which is a typical arrangement in Palestine and elsewhere in the Arab World.

At 5 p.m., we sat around the dining table and listened for the call to prayer, as steam rose from the food, heaped in two large serving trays in the center of the table, and from chicken noodle soup, sitting in bowls before us. Through the open door, we heard, “Allah Akbar!” from the nearest mosque, which was permission to eat. First, following a tradition attributed to the prophet Mohammad, we each ate a dried date. Then, the soup. Then, a traditional Palestinian dish called maqloubah, which means “upside down.” The name has something to do with the way the dish is prepared, which I’ve never quite understood, but I’ve had it before and it’s one of my favorites: Sticky rice with chicken, cauliflower and eggplant, all cooked together. We also ate kofta, which is similar to meat balls, with baked tomatoes. And a salad of diced cucumber, tomato and lettuce. And yogurt on the side. The nice thing about Ramadan is that it’s completely acceptable to eat obscene amounts of food. (Some Muslims actually gain weight during Ramadan.) So, I helped myself to three servings of maqlouba and two servings of kofta.

Just as we were finishing, Sameer’s oldest son, Mohammad, returned from university classes at Al-Najah University in Nablus. Luckily, there was some food left for him. The 15-mile trip took three hours, which has been typical the past week, Mohammad told us. Israeli soldiers stopped all traffic on the only road leading south from Nablus. They took all the identification cards of the passengers in the van in which he was riding and held them for more than two hours. After sundown, they returned the ID cards and reopened the road to traffic. Palestinians say Israelis set up blockades late in the day during the month of Ramadan merely to delay Palestinians’ return home to their families. Israelis say Palestinians take advantage of Ramadan to smuggle weapons through the West Bank. (I encountered one such checkpoint returning to Ramallah from Birzeit late one afternoon last week.)

After dinner, we moved to the living room and ate more dried dates, drank Arabic coffee and finished with kanafeh, the sweet goat cheese desert. (I told myself that I really need to fit kanafeh into my daily routine. It is too good not to eat on a regular basis.) Then, we toured the town again, visited various friends and relatives of Sameer, and despite more rounds of coffee, we all became very sleepy, not unlike the effects of a Thanksgiving dinner in America.

Right of way

2005-10-24T03:18:00.000-07:00

If there were a prize for drivers' etiquette in the Arab World, Palestinians would run away with first place. In Iraq, drivers almost never stop at intersections (to be fair, when I was there the traffic lights didn’t work). In Egypt, drivers do not slow down for pedestrians; they will only honk as they are about to run you over. In Jordan, they might slow down slightly, but they certainly won’t stop.

In Palestine, cars will brake or even stop in a busy street to yield for pedestrians. Even so, they rarely honk. I asked Sameer, my colloquial Arabic professor, why.

“I’ll tell you why,” he said, “because of the Israeli occupation.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Israelis taught us how to drive.”

During the Israeli military and civil occupation of all Palestinian areas, between 1967 and 1994 (the Oslo peace accords established Palestinian civil authority over most Palestinian towns and cities, which began in the mid-1990s) Israel imposed stiff fines for traffic violations. This retrained Palestinians how to drive, Sameer said, and now politeness on the road has become something of a tradition.

Wearing seatbelts, however, hasn’t yet caught on. About the only time Palestinians seem to wear seatbelts is when they drive on roads built for Jewish settlers, but often shared with Palestinians. They are patrolled by Israeli police.

Ana ismee Bob

2005-10-19T07:28:00.000-07:00

In the Arab World, my name is hard to pronounce. I say Bob and Arabs hear something else.

“Ana ismee Bob.” (My name is Bob.)

Pause.

Baba?

No not baba. (Baba means daddy and al-baba means the Pope.) Bob.

Pop?

No, Bob.

Arabic doesn’t have the “p” sound, so the “p” and the “b” often sound the same to Arabs. When I say Bob, the response is often, “Pop? Pop music?” No, not pop music. Bob.

I used to say it’s short for Robert, which usually only adds to the confusion. “How can Bob be short for Robert? Robert starts with an R,” they tell me. I never have a good answer other than it just is.

Sometimes I spell it in Arabic, if they ask, and they sometimes do, but if you pronounce it as it is spelled in Arabic, you get “boob” (which often elicits a few chuckles from my English-speaking friends). I could spell it Bab, which might be closer to Bob than Boob, but Bab means door in Arabic and it might be strange to be named Door.

Keeping warm

2005-10-18T07:24:00.000-07:00

The elevation of Ramallah is nearly 3,000 feet above sea level, and in the winter, it does get cold. Its piney hills are often dusted with snow by December or January. The weather is already starting to turn.

The heating system in my house, like in most Palestinian homes, is a small space heater. Last night, it was cold. I fired it up for the first time and it works surprisingly well. I will just have to carry it from room to room to keep warm. Or maybe wear heavier clothes. Why didn't I pack reading gloves?

Palestine or Israel?

2005-10-18T07:17:00.000-07:00

Every Monday afternoon, I teach a class at the al-Am’ari Refugee Camp, one of three camps in Ramallah. The official camp population is 7,500 people, living on 23 acres. The camp residents trace their family lineage to one of 40 Palestinian villages, partly or completely destroyed by Israel following the 1948 war.

My class is for 10th graders and it’s purely voluntary, although I suspect that some of the students’ parents force them to attend to keep them out of the house. There are about 12 girls and two boys. Similar to 10th graders the world over, some are quiet and raise their hands and wait to speak until called upon, and others do not. One girl, who has difficulty sitting in the same chair for more than a few minutes, would probably be labeled with attention deficit disorder in America; however, I don’t think there is a term for it in Arabic yet.

Yesterday, we read a passage from their school textbook, which is called English for Palestine, published last year and part of a new curriculum devised by the Palestinian Ministry of Education, one of the quasi-governmental institutions created in the Palestinian territories according to the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords. The reading told the life story of Mahmoud Darwish, who is by far the most recognized Palestinian literary figure. Darwish lived for 21 years in Israel – from 1949 to 1970 – but the passage did not include the word Israel. (Darwish now lives in Ramallah, after spending much of his adult life in Europe.) It twice mentioned “Israelis,” but never called the land Israel. Curious, I flipped through the book and found a world map on the inside front cover. According to the map, the country that is bordered by Lebanon and Syria to the north, Jordan to the east and Egypt to the south is called Palestine. Most of the world, of course, calls it Israel.

Sunday night sunset

2005-10-18T07:12:00.000-07:00

eating kanafeh

2005-10-12T07:41:00.000-07:00

During the Palestinian revolt against British colonial rule in the 1930s, Nablus earned the name, “Mountain of Fire,” for its fierce resistance. It retained that moniker through Jordanian rule and Israeli occupation. In this decade, Israel dubbed the city “capital of terrorism.” Today, despite a cooling of the conflict – most Palestinians and Israelis consider the second Palestinian uprising to have ended – Nablus is surrounded by Israeli military checkpoints. Men in their 20s and 30s who reside in Nablus and its three refugee camps are not allowed to leave.

Last Saturday, my friend, Jon, visiting from Amman, and I set off for the Mountain of Fire. Our taxi stopped at the Hawar checkpoint outside Nablus because taxis and service vans are not allowed to enter the city from the outside. We crossed the kilometer or so on foot, as most all Palestinians must do to pick up another taxi on the other side.

The three soldiers manning the point asked us why we wanted to go to Nablus. To eat kanafeh, I told them. They looked confused and so Jon repeated the answer. What do you mean, kanafeh, one of them asked. We explained.

Kanafeh is a pastry made of sweeted goat cheese and filo dough, drizzled with syrup, a desert delicacy in the Arab countries of the Eastern Mediterranean. Nablus is widely considered among Arabs as home of the best kanafeh. In Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, kanafeh is often referred to as kanafeh Nabulsi (meaning, of Nablus). Israeli cuisine has adopted many Arab staples such as hummous and shwarma. Falafel is considered Israel’s national food. But, kanafeh hasn’t made it onto the Israeli desert menu.

The soldiers checked our passports and waved us through. We picked up another taxi and headed for the city center. Nablus was founded by the Roman emperor Titus in 72 AD, making it modern compared with surrounding villages. It was one of the most prosperous cities in the region during the Ottoman period, which earned it the nickname, “little Damascus.” We explored the city’s sprawling old city, a stone maze of archways and alleys. It reminded us of Aleppo’s old city, in Syria. Some of the centuries-old buildings were still in ruins from Israel’s 2002 siege of the city and numerous plaques commemorated “martyrs” who were killed in the fighting.

We found “al-Aqsa” sweets, behind the Great Mosque and bought a half-kilo – an assortment of the four types of kanafeh made there. We returned to a restaurant where we had eaten lunch upstairs – away from the gaze of passersby fasting during Ramadan – and consumed the kanafeh. It was the best that I’ve tasted, and among the best deserts I can remember eating.

“Finest in the Middle East”

2005-10-12T07:29:00.000-07:00

In the Christian village of Taybeh, reached by a narrow, crumbling strip of pavement through some of the highest hills in the West Bank, Nadim Khoury has been brewing beer since 1995. Appropriately named, Taybeh, it’s a favorite of ex-pats in Ramallah and East Jerusalem.

Jon and I stopped into the brewery unannounced last weekend and Nadim gave us a tour and tall glasses of free beer. Taybeh comes in dark, light and regular. Its slogan, “Finest in the Middle East” is not an exaggeration: it’s far better than the local beers of Israel, Egypt and Lebanon. (I haven’t tried Syrian beer.) The Palestinian uprising, which began in 2000, drastically cut production because Israelis, who had accounted for over half of sales, stopped drinking Taybeh. But, Taybeh is now brewed under license in Germany and Britain, and Nadim plans to export the first bottles to the United States next year. He said he was forced to make new labels before it could sold in the U.S., changing the location of the brewery from "Taybeh, Palestine" to "Taybeh, West Bank". He will start in Boston, a beer-friendly town, where his two daughters attend college.

Last month, Nadim’s brewery was narrowly spared by an angry mob from a neighboring Muslim village, he told us. A Christian man from Taybeh was accused of having an affair with a Muslim woman from the neighboring village. The woman’s family poisoned her to death, following the Arab custom, “honor killing,” and then, along with others from the village, descended on Taybeh and burned about a dozen houses before arriving at the front door of Nadim’s brewery. (The incident was covered in Israeli media.) He and his wife stood between the mob and the brewery, and called the police, who dispersed the crowd. On our way out of town, we saw several of the torched houses, their roofs charred and stone around the broken windows blackened by soot.

Are you fasting?

2005-10-05T02:52:00.000-07:00

Monday night, the Islamic authorities declared that Ramadan was to begin on Tuesday. I knew by the gunfire. It started about sundown and continued sporadically through the evening. Some of it near, some far. A boy was also running through the street, singing, “Allah-u-Akbar!” For further confirmation, I saw on Abu Dhabi television the greeting “Ramadan Kareem” in Arabic before the commercial breaks.

I noticed as I left the Internet café in Ramallah at 5 p.m. on Tuesday that I was the only customer left. The street outside was nearly empty. Shopkeepers were closing the metal shutters on the outside of their stores. Palestinians were in their homes, preparing to break their fast. On my way home, following my usual route through the Old City, I came across what appeared to be a frenzied pancake-making operation. It was Abu Soufian churning out hundreds of pancakes, called qataaeef, which is pronounced “ataaeef,” “kataaeef,” “chataaeef” or “gataaeef,” depending on where you’re from in the West Bank. You would hear all four in Ramallah, since it’s a sort of Palestinian melting pot. People were buying bundles of them by the kilo. I learned that it’s a traditional desert for the iftar, the meal which ends the daily Ramadan fast. Iftar means, literally, breaking the fast.

A block away, I stopped by Fayeq Zabaneh’s very small grocery and deli, where I occasionally stop and have tea with Fayeq, who is about 60 years old, never seems to have many customers and enjoys the company. (I met him when I stopped in his store the first week I was here to have a look around. He sold very little that I was interested in buying, but he was exceedingly nice and complimentary of my Arabic, so I had to buy something and settled on some Palestinian pasta for two shekels.)

Just a moment after I said “marhaba” to Fayeq, Abu Soufian, who is probably about Fayeq’s age, stepped into the store and grabbed five colas from the fridge. The call to prayer had just started. He screwed off the top of one, opened his mouth and poured the sugary goodness down his throat until it was gone. He wiped his mouth with his shirt sleeve. I couldn’t remember the word for fasting – I won’t forget it now – and so I asked Abu Soufian if he was Muslim. (Many of the shopkeepers in the Old City are Christian.) He said yes. “Since 7 this morning I haven’t eaten or drunk anything. I’m tired,” he said in Arabic. “Now you may eat, thanks be to God,” I responded. He ordered a sandwich from Fayeq’s little deli and left.

Fayeq then told me in a firm voice as he was slicing Abu Soufian’s deli meat to never ask someone if they are Muslim. “We are all the same,” he told me. “We are all Palestinians.” Fayeq is Greek Orthodox Christian. I’m still trying to understand the dynamic between Christians and Muslims here. Christians are a small minority and try to get along with Muslims partly by not emphasizing their religious differences, which are especially apparent during Ramadan. Fayeq instructed me to ask, instead, “Are you fasting?” “Inta saayam?”

Hebron

2005-10-03T05:15:00.000-07:00

In some parts of the West Bank, it is can be difficult to grasp the effects of Israeli occupation. In Ramallah, for example, city services run efficiently, children play in the streets and the downtown sidewalks are choked with shoppers every day but Friday, the Muslim day of rest. Hebron is different. Very different.

I had visited Hebron twice in 2001 and 2002 during my time as a correspondent in Jerusalem. But, I never visited the Old City. On Sunday, I visited Hebron with eight other students in the Birzeit Palestine and Arabic Studies Program – two Americans, two Germans, a Peruvian, a Brazilian, a Canadian and a Brit.

Hebron is situated about 30 miles to the south of Jerusalem. It was first settled by Canaanites about 3000 BC, making it, along with Jericho, one of the oldest cities in the world. According to Islamic tradition, it is where Adam and Eve lived after being driven from the Garden of Eden. It is also the burial site of four biblical couples, including Abraham, the father of the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and his wife, Sarah. These burial tombs make it a holy city to all three religions. In Arabic, Hebron is called “Ibrahim al-Khalil al-Rahman,” which means, “Abraham, the Friend of the Merciful.” “The Merciful” is one of the 99 names of God in the Quran.

Today, Hebron has a population of 150,000 Palestinians, making it the largest city in the West Bank after East Jerusalem. It is also home to 500 Jewish settlers, who are protected by 4,000 Israeli troops. Israel controls 20 percent of the city, where the settlers, considered among the most ultra-nationalist and militant of the more than 300,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, live amid roughly 40,000 Palestinians. Many Palestinians in this part of the city have been driven away; most of the settlers live on the upper floors of former Palestinian homes. The settlers so frequently throw rocks and garbage from their upper windows upon the city’s market in the Old City that Palestinians erected a metal screen over the market to protect shoppers. During our visit, we saw the rocks, along with all sorts of household trash resting on the screen, as well as Israeli flags flying from the upper windows of the homes. Most Palestinian shops have closed in the area controlled by the Israelis. We saw some settlers carrying automatic weapons which were larger than the standard issue M-16 rifles the Israeli soldiers carry.
In 1994, an American-born physician and Jewish settler named Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Muslim worshippers as they were prostrated in prayer in the Haram al-Ibrahim, or Tomb of the Patriarchs, killing 29 men and boys and wounding nearly 200. As a result, the Israeli government divided the sanctuary into two sections, one for Muslims and one for Jews. Jews have access to the tomb of Abraham and Muslims do not. As Christians – in truth three of us were Muslim, but lied to the Israeli soldiers – we were able to visit both sides. It is a massive structure, whose outer walls were constructed by Herod, and includes several minarets, domes, mosques and a synagogue. During out visit, there were about 30 Muslims preparing for the noon prayer and about equally as many Jews praying and studying the Torah on the other side. They could see each other, if they wanted to, through two windows covered by heavy metal grills.

English lessons

2005-10-03T05:10:00.000-07:00

I taught my first English class to Arabic students last Wednesday. I think it went well, although I suppose I’ll find out how well by how many students show up next week.

I met a man at the Goethe Institute – a German cultural center – in Ramallah a few weeks ago who said he was looking for a native English speaker to volunteer to teach classes in a village a half hour outside of Ramallah. Sure, I told him. I’ve got a bit of free time in the afternoons, and I figured it would be a good chance to see a part of Palestinian culture that is not apparent in cosmopolitan Ramallah.

My class is a group of 15 high school senior girls. Kharbatha Beni Hareth is a conservative Muslim village, like most in Palestine, and so the boys and girls attend separate schools. There is to be no mixing after school, either. The girls all wore head scarves and long, black gowns. The only visible skin are their hands and faces. They pray five times a day. Otherwise, they giggled, all talked at once, competed for attention and acted pretty much like high school girls anywhere.

We started at 1:30 reviewing their English lesson from school to help prepare for their test the next day. We continued until almost 4 p.m. They were concerned about finishing before the next call to prayer. One suggested that we could all pray together. Are you Muslim, she asked me. No, I’m Christian. The Muslims like the Christians, but the Christians don’t like the Muslims, she said. That’s not true, I told her. Well, in Bethlehem, the Christians don’t like the Muslims, another said. Well, I don’t know about Bethlehem and besides I’m not Palestinian, I’m American. Is it true that Americans hate the Arabs, another asked. That’s not true, either, I said, and then steered us back to the English lesson.

Once we were done, and as the girls were heading out, one of them asked me if I could call her brother, Mohammad, to tell him that the girls had all been in an English class, as a sort of excused absence from being out after school. My cell phone didn’t have reception in the village, so it wasn’t possible. One girl explained that they normally go home directly after school, and that they are expected to help harvest their families’ olive trees. The harvest began last week in Kharbatha Beni Hareth.

Autumn

2005-10-03T05:05:00.000-07:00

The first cool front came through last week. Here’s what it looked like from my porch, at sunset.

The army is here

2005-09-26T08:02:00.000-07:00

As I was stepping into the shower this morning, I heard the crackle of heavy machine gun fire. It was louder than the gunfire that I often hear at night, which usually comes from Palestinian AK-47s, fired off to celebrate weddings, or just for the hell of it, I imagine. This was louder, and closer. After living here for a while, they say, you learn to distinguish between Israeli and Palestinian gunfire. Israeli gunfire is usually louder and faster. This was loud and fast.

But, the water was hot and I decided to step in the shower anyway. By the time I was out, I heard loud whistles and boys yelling in Arabic outside my windows. The Israeli army was in the neighborhood.

Two olive green-colored trucks were parked about four blocks away, clearly visible across a small valley from my house. A group of about 20 school boys, maybe in the fifth or sixth grade, had gathered in the street outside my house. They were wearing their uniforms, dark blue pants and light blue collared shirts, many of them carrying stones in their hands.

Throwing rocks at Israeli tanks is a rite of passage for Palestinian schoolboys. The practice began in the late 1980s, during the first intifada, which was a popular uprising which won Palestinians international sympathy for images of stone throwers confronting heavily armed soldiers and tanks.

The latest intifada, which began in 2000 and by most accounts has ended, was fought by Palestinian militants and suicide bombers, who accomplished the reverse for Palestinians’ image. Boys too young to carry guns, however, still throw rocks.

There’s a UN-adminstered elementary school up the street. These boys apparently had run out of class at the sound of gunfire.

I asked an older boy what happened. He said he didn’t know. Only that “al-jaysh” – or the army – had arrived. There is only one army here.

An Israeli military jeep and an armored vehicle were parked outside an apartment building. I had read that Israel had arrested a few hundred suspected militants two days ago in the West Bank, and imagined they were doing the same.

There was no more gunfire, the army trucks drove away – I couldn’t tell if they had carried away anyone or not – and the boys dropped their stones and walked back to school.

Messages on the wall

2005-09-26T07:39:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, I visited Qalqilya, a Palestinian town of 42,000, which abuts the so-called green line, the historic boundary between the West Bank and Israel. It is a half-hour drive from downtown Tel Aviv. Qalqilya has become one of the rallying points for those who oppose the Israeli-built separation wall. The anti-wall protestors, Palestinians and international activists, have since moved on. The wall is finished there. It encloses the city on three sides, leaving just two ways in and out.

The Israelis built the wall to stop suicide bombers from entering Israel. The wall, however, snakes its way along the West Bank, annexing thousands of acres of Palestinian land. Qaliqilya lost farm land. But most of its economy depended on Palestinian laborers working in Israel, and Israelis visiting to shop and eat. Both have ceased since the wall was constructed two years ago. So accustomed are locals to Israeli visitors that a boy riding a bike called out to us, “Shalom, Shalom,” mistakening us for Israelis. That would never happen in Ramallah. Most children there have never heard shalom uttered before.

Now, the wall in Qalqilya, which rises roughly 20 feet, has become a tableau for pro-Palestinian graffiti artists visiting from Europe and the Americas.

Please note: the web site is not currently allowing me to post photos. I will do so later.

The crossing

2005-09-26T07:20:00.000-07:00

I traveled to Jerusalem on Saturday for lunch with a friend who was visiting from Iraq. Just 15 miles separates downtown Ramallah from Jerusalem’s Old City. The trip took one hour. The crossing resembles an international border. Someday it may be.

Starting in 2002, the Israelis began building a permanent checkpoint in Kalandia, a West Bank town just south of Ramallah. Then, they build the wall, which recently was linked to the crossing. The Palestinian area to the south of the checkpoint is now considered greater Jerusalem. Since 1967, Israel has been building a ring of Jewish settlements in Arab areas to the north, east and south of the city in the hopes of bolstering a Jewish majority.

My journey included two service taxi vans and a walk along a fenced gravel walkway, through a metal detector and passport check, controlled by Israeli soldiers. Only Palestinians who carry a Jerusalem ID card, identifying them as residents of Jerusalem, may cross. All other Palestinians must obtain special permission from Israel, which is rarely granted.

Jerusalem, of course, holds special significance to Palestinians, Christians and Muslims alike, as the spiritual center of Palestine. It also is envisioned, perhaps quixotically given recent facts on the ground, as the future capital of a Palestinian state.

For five years, Israel has barred Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza from traveling to Jerusalem. Merely visiting is a dream, much less staking a Palestinian flag there. This absence pushes Jerusalem of the mundane and everyday to the recesses of Palestinian memory and infuses Jerusalem the symbol with yet more power. On the service taxi from Birzeit the other day a Palestinian university student asked me if I had been to Jerusalem. "Yes," I said, without much thought. "Oh," he said, "it is so beautiful, isn’t it?" It’s just another city, I thought, and I much rather prefer Ramallah. But, that wasn’t the correct answer. "Oh, yes," I said. "It is. Very beautiful."

The view from Ramallah

2005-09-19T08:56:00.000-07:00

I bought a digital camera the other day in Ramallah. The camera store looked like any you'd find in the States: lots of digital cameras behind display cases, big photo processing machines behind the counter, that plastic camera store smell. The main difference is that even in a camera store, with prices marked on each item for sale, one bargains for the final price.

A Palestinian guy named Ibrahim, who I know from the university, accompanied me on my buying excursion and helped me bargain. We knocked off 200 sheqels from the sticker price -- that's about $44 -- plus got a 128 MB memory card for free. I bought last year's little shiny Canon 3.2 mega pixel camera that's shaped like a pack of cigarettes. I wanted something I could fit in my pocket. All together, it came to $265, which is more than I would have paid in the States, but I had to have a camera, and my other one is broken, sitting in a friend's apartment in Amman.

Here are some photos, then. The first, Ramallah at sunset. Second, my home. Following, the view looking west, near my house. Then, my street, looking from my house. Finally, the central square of Ramallah, Al-Manara, which means lighthouse, although, if there was ever a lighthouse (I was told it was actually an early street-lighting tower), it's since been replaced by a rather unattractive metalic sculpture.

Abu Nidal and the wall

2005-09-19T08:23:00.000-07:00

I met a stubborn Palestinian yesterday. His name is Abu Nidal and he is a farmer. Stubbornness is a trait that Palestinians celebrate in poetry and song. Abu Nidal is the embodiment of the Palestinian who will not, no matter the hardship, be pushed from his land.

He lives in a virtual prison. His house, which once stood on the edge of fertile West Bank farm land, is now hemmed in by a Jewish settlement on one side and a 20-foot high concrete wall on the other side. In order to enter or exit his roughly half-acre of lot, which includes a chicken coop, he must pass through two gates.

After some outcry from international groups and from within Israel, the Israeli army furnished Abu Nidal and his wife a key to one of the gates. The other gate is opened and closed at the whim of Israeli soldiers. A sign on that gate warns “mortal danger” in three languages to all who pass.

The Israelis call it a security barrier and the Palestinians call it the Apartheid wall. The wall, which started construction in 2002, does not follow the historic boundary of the West Bank; instead it carves out wide swaths of Palestinian farm land, homes, even entire villages, isolating Palestinians, such as Abu Nidal, from the rest of the Palestinian territory.

The wall arrived to Abu Nidal’s doorstep two years ago. Since then, he has been something of a cause celebre of international and Israeli peace groups. He credits the attention with saving his home from demolition. The government offered him a blank check to leave, but he says no amount of money – or the rocks his next door neighbors, Jewish settlers, hurl at his home – will convince him to leave his land. He lives there with his wife and four children, all of whom must pass through the gates to get to and from school. On some days, the children must wait as long as an hour to pass, he said.

He and his wife make sure that one of them is always at home, out of fear that the Israelis would take advantage of their absence and demolish it. Abu Nidal’s grandfather was killed in the 1948 war by Jewish forces while he was defending his village, nearby Qufr Qassem, which is now in Israel, and Abu Nidal’s father fled to the West Bank and became a refugee. Abu Nidal was born in the West Bank. He built his house 34 years ago.

I was traveling on a tour arranged by the Palestine and Arabic Studies Program at Birzeit. We tried to get a glimpse of the wall construction in the nearby village of Beir Ballout, but were stopped by three Israeli security contractors -- Arabs of Bedouin origin with Israeli citizenship -- carrying automatic weapons. We only saw the bulldozers moving on a ridgeline. In the wall's path was a Palestinian goat herder who refused to leave his home. His house, made of tin and wooden pallets, was not as sturdy as Abu Nidal's. He was out with his goats when we came calling.

The burger's return

2005-09-14T10:02:00.000-07:00

I learned the verb for “to vomit” in Arabic today. “Istafaragh,” which comes from the root, to void or to empty. A more colloquial way of saying it is “raj’a,” which means to return. That’s what I was doing after the Mac Chain burger – or maybe its special sauce? – didn’t agree with me. I’m only now eating again. I haven’t been that sick since 1998, when I ate a bad BLT at my grandmother’s retirement community. Then, I ended up in the hospital. This time, a stash of Cipro has saved me.

My appetite returned this afternoon when I shared with a friend one of my favorite Levantine dishes: a large plate of fettah b’il lehmeh in a tiny restaurant in Ramallah’s Old City. Fettah is hummous and bits of bread soaked in warm water, covered with chick peas, and parsley. The lehmeh is fried bits of lamb meat, which is generously sprinkled on top. Sliced tomato, onion and pickles on the side.

Our cook and waiter was Mazen, whose brother lives in Houston. Mazen said Houston is home to thousands of Palestinians originally from Ramallah. He would like go too, once he finishes his undergraduate degree at Birzeit – provided he obtains a visa.

The mall

2005-09-11T09:13:00.000-07:00

Curiosity, and a bare pantry, finally got the best of me. I decided to go to Palestine’s only shopping mall. The Plaza Shopping Center is known among locals as “blaza mol.” I took a shared taxi to the mall from downtown for 35 cents. My first stop was the food court. Among the three options, Mac Chain Burgers seemed the most promising. I ordered a double cheese burger meal, which came without cheese, but the burger patties were surprisingly good. The restaurant’s slogan is “Best Burgers in Palestine.” I haven’t found burgers anywhere else, so that could be true. There were a few clothing stores near the food court; the only multi-national store was Benetton, which is French? I haven’t seen any U.S. companies here.

The anchor store of the mall is the Bravo Supermarket. I was hopeful that I might find pesto there, but did not. Instead, I bought two jars of American-made tomato-based pasta sauce. They sold Kroger-brand “pizza sauce” and “pasta sauce” there, as they do all over Palestine. It is not repackaged with Hebrew labeling, as most American brands are here; instead it’s imported directly by a Palestinian company, which slaps on a small white label in Arabic next to the Kroger label.

The store was large by Palestinian standards, but still smaller than an American supermarket. It included a deli with plenty of meats and cheeses and an assortment of local olives. I bought green olives and black olives. The cereal aisle was almost as extensive as an American store. My medium-sized box of Cheerios was $4. You pay more here than in Israel for most food imported from the United States or Europe, or for products such as milk made in Israel because Israel charges additional taxes to Palestinian importers.

Return to Ramallah

2005-09-10T07:58:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Ramallah on Aug. 30. My first stop was the office of Abu Amjad, or Abed Hajj al-Kiswani, who manages and rents houses and apartments. A friend stayed in a basement apartment attached to his house last summer. Abed, as he asks me to call him, took me to his home and showed me the basement apartment as well as a small house, both for $500 a month, including utilities. He showed me a couple others that were more expensive, and simply too big. Rents in Ramallah are very high, compared to Cairo, Amman or Damascus. I chose the little house for $500 a month, which is above a French engineering office. Outside the house is a large rooftop deck, with extraordinary views to the west. Everyday, I see a spectacular sunset. On clear mornings and nights, I can Tel Aviv. Abed says in more peaceful times, he could drive to Tel Aviv in 50 minutes from Ramallah. Now, he’s not allowed to enter Israel or Palestinian areas of Jerusalem, even with his American passport.

The home is well-furnished and I’ve got about everything I’ll need, except heat. I’m going to need a heater once it gets colder in a month or so. The weather is still dry and hot during the day, but is already cooling off at night. I’ve got a satellite dish, which receives lots of channels in languages I can’t understand, including Russian and Chinese. I mostly switch between BBC World, Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabeeya. I’m lucky to understand half of what I hear on the latter two, but they have excellent programming and it’s good practice.

I’m here to study Arabic at Birzeit University, which is the most prestigious four-year university in the Palestinian territories. It’s situated outside the village of Birzeit, a 15-minute drive north of Ramallah. The campus buildings are all made of native stone, arranged on a rocky hill top, with views of Palestinian villages in valleys and on hillsides, and one Jewish settlement, distinctive for its red-tile roofs. The building where I have classes was recently constructed and, aside from Arabic classes for non-native speakers, it is dedicated to women’s studies. It was donated by the Kingdom of Bahrain.

There are 7,000 students at Birzeit and no dormitories. Almost all commute from elsewhere, mostly from surrounding villages, or Ramallah, which is the defacto administrative capital of the Palestinian territories. My commute to school takes a half hour, but doesn’t seem that long. It takes me through the center of Ramallah, where I walk a couple blocks between service taxis. It costs a total of $1.25. The service taxis are yellow-painted Ford vans which hold between 7 and 10 people and run so frequently I rarely wait more than a minute for one to leave. I enjoy taking public transportation in foreign countries as a glimpse into the daily life of ordinary people. In the past several years, the Israeli military has frequently set up a temporary checkpoint on the road from Ramallah to Birzeit, which can make the commute hours long. They’ve only done so once since I’ve been here, and it wasn’t when I was on the route.

My first class, Third-year Modern Standard Arabic, was Thursday and I’m pleased with the structure of the course and the professor. His name is Moussa Khoury and he received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. We’ll be reading authentic texts, including contemporary Palestinian poetry, which I’m really looking forward to. I’m also taking second-year Palestinian Colloquial Arabic. My first colloquial class was today. Dr. Khoury introduced the class structure and spoke with each of us to gauge our conversation levels, but a different professor will teach the course. I'm at a higher level than the other students, since I took a course this past year at Texas on the Levantine dialect, which includes Palestine, and I spent the summer in Jordan, where spoken Arabic is very similar to the West Bank. There are only four students in the class, which is great. It's the smallest Arabic class I've ever taken.

Since I’ve been in Ramallah, I haven’t seen the Israeli military at all. They are not currently occupying the center of the city, but control the flow of people and goods to and from Jerusalem, as well as between cities in the West Bank. Ramallah, like most places in the West Bank, isn’t far from Jewish settlements, built on confiscated Palestinian land and considered illegal by international law. They continue to be expanded, despite longstanding, repeated objections from the U.S. government, the United Nations and the European Union. They are considered a provocation by Palestinians. The Jewish settler who killed four Palestinian laborers last month lives in a settlement between Ramallah and Nablus, about 30 miles to the north.

The last time I was in Ramallah was in the spring of 2002, during the Israeli military siege of West Bank cities, in response to a wave of suicide bombings in Israel. Buildings were destroyed, cultural centers ransacked and cars flattened by tanks. The city was under a strict curfew. Today, it appears to be thriving. Several upscale restaurants have since opened, the center of the city bustles with people shopping for clothes and electronics. It is the economic capital of the Palestinian territories and is burgeoning with Palestinian migrants looking for work. Some of the prosperity comes from wealth accumulated in the West, particularly America. Almost everyday, I hear a conversation on the street between Palestinians in American English. Many people here have American passports and travel frequently between the two.

Abed, my landlord, told me five of his seven children live in America. His sister lives there. His parents live in Chicago, after spending 13 years in Sweden. I met a grocer yesterday who used to live in Houston, then the U.S. Virgin Islands, but returned so that his children would spend their adolescence in Arab society, away from temptations of drugs. My dry cleaner’s brother has been living in Chicago for 30 years. His son’s name is Bob.

Maybe partially because of the connection between Palestine and America, Palestinians here have been extremely friendly and helpful to me. I have encountered very gracious Arab hospitality elsewhere – Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt – but Palestinians have struck me as overly helpful at times. Abed purchased a very nice table and four chairs for my house, and tells me that I can call him at any time of the day or night if I need him for anything. Every time I come to his house, I am given coffee or tea, and often food. I still haven’t paid my first month’s rent because I’m waiting for my first fellowship check at the University of Texas to be deposited into my account, and he won’t let me apologize – as if he’s embarrassed that I feel the need to apologize. You will pay when you can pay, he says. I was with an American friend the other night in Ramallah and we were asking for directions to a coffee shop. A man gave directions, and five minutes after we set off, he was running after us to tell us he had made a mistake and corrected himself. As I walk down the street, I receive waves and hellos, in English and Arabic, as a white visitor might receive in small town America. This good will comes despite the fact that my government provides Israel the attack helicopters, bulldozers and other military hardware that are used against Palestinian people.

I’m about a 10-minute walk to the Old City of Ramallah – a several block area of fruit and vegetable stalls, groceries, churches and a mosque – where the buildings are made of large stone blocks and date mostly to the Ottoman era. It’s another 10 minutes to the modern downtown. The city and surrounding area is home to maybe a couple hundred thousand people, almost all of whom are originally from somewhere else in the West Bank or what is now Israel. There are a couple refugee camps in Ramallah, but almost everyone here are refugees, the children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren of refugees from 1948, when Israel was founded, or from 1967, when Israel began its occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The city today is overwhelmingly Muslim, but it was originally a Christian village and it retains a certain Christian identity. The peal of church bells is never far from ear shot, and many groceries and restaurants sell beer, wine and liquor. There are also Christian-affiliated private schools. Many of the old stone homes have crosses carved in the keystone above the door.

Ramallah is also the least socially conservative place in the Palestinian territories, and, aside from Beirut, the least socially conservative place I’ve visited in the Arab world. Probably less than half of women wear the hijab, or head scarf. I’ve only seen one woman wearing the niqab, the face veil. It’s a far cry from Gaza, the stronghold of Hamas, the Islamist social movement and militant group. Christians here are concerned that if Gazans are allowed to travel to the West Bank, Hamas will shut down the drinking establishments in Ramallah.

I met yesterday with a Palestinian human rights lawyer, as I start my thesis research, who is not hopeful that the current lull in violence will lead to a peace process. Since dismantling Jewish settlements in Gaza and three settlements in the northern West Bank, the Israeli government has approved expansion plans for at least one West Bank settlement, and continues to expand the largest settlement, near Jerusalem. It also continues to build the separation wall, which is constructed inside the West Bank and isolates Palestinian villages and hinders the agricultural economy. Israel also continues to build permanent checkpoints that slow, or at worst, restrict Palestinian travel within the West Bank. I will be traveling through some of these checkpoints during my stay here.