Leila

Leila is Arabic for night. Particularly during Ramadan--the lunar month of fasting from sunrise to sunset--at night the Palestinian landscape undergoes a transformation of sorts.

To clear a common misconception: this is not the desert. There are deserts to the south (the Judean Desert, the Negev, the Sinai); there are deserts to the east (the Jordan Desert and the Southern Desert); but technically, most of Israel/Palestine--particularly the coastal and highland areas--is a "Mediterranean" climate. This means hot, dry summers and cool winters, with most of the precipitation coming during the winter months. Los Angeles has a Mediterranean climate.

There's plenty of greenery mixed in with the reddish-brown dirt on the hillsides--olive trees and other herbaceous shrubs that are used to long, dry summers. The days can get hot; if you've been looking at the weather applet off to the right, you'll note that the daily high temperature is in the high-80s to mid-90s--but as "they" say, it's a dry heat: the humidity is typically low in the daytime. Ram'allah is in the hill country, about 2900 ft above sea level, less than 40 miles east of the coast. The proximity to a large body of water moderates the regional climate--that is, it stays cooler in the day (and summer) and warmer at night (and winter) around here than it would if the sea weren't so close. Also, every 1000 feet of elevation corresponds to a 2 degree (Farenheit) temperature decrease--so it's cooler up on the hilltop than down in the valley.

So that gives you a sense of the physical geography of the area. What does this mean--and what does it have to do with the night? Most of the nights I've been here, a couple hours after sunset as the temperatures drop and prevailing winds off the Mediterranean push moist air inland, a thick blanket of fog rolls east. As the moist air is forced upward by the hills, it cools and the fog thickens. The hills and valleys are breezy most days and nights, and so standing on the roof of the guest house, several nights now I've watched the fog roll in and over Ram'allah... only to push further east, towards Jericho (of course, Jericho is in the lowlands around the Dead Sea, so it's warmer there, and it's likely the fog dissipates in the warmer air on the other side of the hills). Some thin tendrils of fog linger in the valleys, though, shadowy and cool until the morning sun climbs high enough to burn the shreds away.

If you time it right, then, you can witness this cool, damp blanket being dragged eastward, and watch the lights of Ram'allah change from pinpricks of brightness to fuzzy technicolor orbs.

And last night after the fog rolled through, the crescent moon fell slowly into the sea; from the apartment building just across the street, some Ramadan revelers played Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World several times, loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear and enjoy.

Looking northwest from the roof of the guest house, towards the "suburb" of At-Tireh, with the old Byzantine church, At-Tira mosque and the UNRWA (United Nations Relief Works Agency) compound making the fog glow.

Saba'h, Shabbat, Sabbath

The three monotheisms might converge on belief in the same God, but they don't agree on which day to set aside for worship. The seventh day of the Islamic week is Friday; most businesses are closed for the day--certainly after noon--although some will open in the evening to entice weekend shoppers. The Jewish sabbath starts at sundown on Friday and runs until sunset Saturday--trying to get anywhere on a Friday night in Jerusalem is tricky, because the Israeli buses don't run again until Saturday evening, and so your best bet is to find a Palestinian taxi driver who won't gouge you too much. In Christian areas, Sunday is the day of worship. While this doesn't effect too many shops, and travel not at all, it does produce some headaches.

As a result, it's hard to get anything done in Palestine from Friday to Sunday. The NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and municipal offices I'm trying to work with basically all have 4-day work weeks. Throw Ramadan into this tangled mess of religious observance, and it gets harder to get any work done--Muslims get up before dawn to have breakfast, and then often go back to bed to sleep part of the day away, and things s l o w d o w n q u i t e a b i t . . .

So while I'm waiting for my contacts to get back to me, I've been walking around town, taking pictures of stuff. There are lots of buildings and projects with signs on them, attributing the construction, addition, or renovation to some international donor. It is in this context that USAID is marketing its projects quite heavily--as you can see below.


First off, a "typical" street view just east of the center of Ram'allah. This is looking west along An-Nahda Street. The radio station you see advertised on the billboard runs programming partially funded by USAID.

This is facing the other direction from the previous shot--looking east. In the distance, you can see another billboard advertising a USAID program.

A bit closer, you can see it's the same program from the billboard I photographed earlier, over to the northeast near where I'm living--it's advertising USAID-funded programs to train health care workers.

A bit further east, towards the wealthier part of town, this billboard advertises another program. The caption reads:
Step by step
We rebuild and develop
Empowering more than 2000 youth leaders
From the American people (United States Agency for International Development)


There are two interesting things about this particular advertisement. First, the word for "empowering" (or "empowerment") is tamkeen--which is also the name of a specific aid project that aims to inculcate Arabs to Western norms of secular, civil society--through programs like coloring books for children, radio and television programs with strong women characters, education, etc. Second, this billboard seems to indicate that "empowering young leaders" has something to do with the media. In case you were wondering, the Tamkeen project is one of the "fall-back" programs in my research (meaning, it's big and widespread and ongoing, and is a bit too big for me to take on at the moment--but if I can't get any traction on my main project, this is what I'll dig into).

Ramadan is here

Ramadan started today. A few people in the guest house had thought it started Friday, and for much of the morning/afternoon on Friday, it felt like Ramadan--certainly, the volume and length of the broadcasts from the local mosques seemed to indicate that it was, in fact, Ramadan. Instead of the one- or two-minute call to prayer, a couple mosques put their entire Friday noon services on the loudspeaker.

I stayed around the guest house most of the day, checking e-mail and constantly looking at my cell phone, as one of my research contacts had said she'd get in touch with me yesterday. In the late afternoon, a couple of the Bir Zeit students wanted to go into town, and in particular wanted to go to the store where I got my fan on Thursday. This same store was doing a brisk pre-Ramadan business, selling multicolored strings of lights, extension cords, etc.--pretty much anything you'd need to create a festive Ramadan light display. The Bir Zeit students wanted to make their own Ramadan display up on the roof of the guest house.

So I walked with them to the center of town and took them to the store--which, by the way, was closed because it was Friday afternoon. Main Street was very quiet, and most of the stores and restaurants were closed. This was surprising--only because I was expecting all the stores and restaurants to be closed: after all, I had been told that Ramadan had started. So as we were walking along past open restaurants, I was speculating to myself about the religion of the owner, the secular-ness of Ram'allahn society, etc. It was only when we got to the closed electric appliance store that we found out that no, Ramadan hadn't started yet.

So the Lonely Planet (it's so lonely) guide book was right, and the internet was wrong (one web site said that Ramadan starts on the 22nd for North America, but a day earlier in Asia due to different moonrise times). It wasn't so surprising that there were some restaurants and shops open yesterday afternoon--it was just a Friday afternoon. Sure enough, as afternoon faded into evening, more shops and restaurants opened, and the downtown area came to life.

As we were walking back, the street filled with police cars--no sirens, but flashing blue lights. A dozen or so Palestinian police were cordoning off the street from traffic, and some very-professional looking individuals in midnight blue uniforms got out of a black SUV and started scanning the street. We ducked into a bookstore for a minute, and when we came out, three of the guys in dark blue were escorting down the street a middle-aged man with glasses and a tailored suit. He passed a few feet away from me and I got a good luck at him, but his face didn't ring a bell. There was a merchant sitting outside his shop, watching the whole display of police and political power.

I nodded my head in the direction of the VIP, and asked ma' huwa? (Who is he?)

The shopkeeper shrugged and said ma'b 'araf... rajul kabeer? (I don't know... an important man?)

rajul kabeer indeed

Zombie attack imminent!

So I get up, am eating breakfast and drinking my morning tea while watching BBC Middle East, and there's a scroll across the bottom of the screen about how if zombies existed, scientists say they'd destroy civilization unless there was a rapid and aggressive response. I figure that it's a joke, or someone accidentally cut & pasted something, but so I could cover my bases when blogging about it, I go to the BBC online to double-check... and yep, there it is.

I'm doing my research on the wrong subject, apparently.

Ironically, modeling the spread of infectious diseases is a sub-field of geography called (appropriately enough) medical geography. It's an important area of study, very generously-funded (in other words, geographers can make a lot of money doing work in this field), and now I'm questioning my own research goals.

I could be researching zombies.

OK, to apply all this to Ram'allah, near the construction zone on Main St., there are several little kids who sell passersby packs of gum--think the smallest packs of Wrigley's Spearmint, but the trademark-violating Palestinian equivalent--for 2 shekels. Well, my second day in Ram'allah, I met two of these kids, and one of them is named Yusuf--which is the Arabic equivalent of my name (and, if you don't know the story behind the URL for this blog, iss-mee is Arabic "my name is"). Yusuf and his buddy gave me the hard-sell, but I didn't buy. I put them off with a strategic use of bukra--saying I'd buy a pack tomorrow.

Well, the next day I walked through the same area and Yusuf and his buddies found me again, and when I initially refused to buy, Yusuf protested that I had promised yesterday that I'd buy today.

So what does any of this have to do with zombies or medical geography? Well, Yusuf's friend Mu'awi asked where I was from, and when I said America, he asked me if I had...something. I didn't recognize the word, so I asked him to repeat it a couple times: it sounded like infalu'enseh. I still didn't get it until he put his hands over his face and pretended to cough. Influenza. Yeah, the H1N1 panic is worldwide, and associated with the U.S. Interesting, because in America we tend to think of pandemic disease as originating from elsewhere and intruding on our borders.

That's all I have for now. I hit a dead-end with the one NGO I was counting on for access to some project sites, and my options are narrowing--I'm waiting for replies to some e-mails I've sent, and depending on those results, I have to do some cold-calling of contacts people gave me.

I can't imagine what all this would be like without the internet and cell phones. Maybe it would be a lot more like what I'd prefer: I could just go somewhere and talk to people there, rather than having to go through multiple levels of bureaucratic barriers and electronic communication.

Useful phrases

'induka khareeTeh ram'allah? Do you have a map of Ram'allah?

sishtarayu mobile phone; wayn dukan mobile? I will be buying a mobile phone--where is the mobile store?

la, uhibb batla ma'ee kabeer. No, I would like the big bottle of water.

mahaaratuka al-lughat ul-inklizieh akbar min mahaaratee al-lughat ul-arabieh. Your English is better than my Arabic.


I remembered that I'm a geographer, and we use maps--so I found a bookstore and bought a map of Ram'allah. Unfortunately, the road I'm looking for isn't on the map.

I broke down and bought a cell phone for use over here. It was more than I wanted (my grant) to spend, but I have to face reality that phone calls get more responses than e-mails.

After not being able to find the NGO office I'm looking for, I stopped at maTa'm meester beetsa (Mr. Pizza's Restaurant) for... well, even though the pizza looked good, it was way too much food for me to eat in one sitting, and I didn't want to carry a pizza box 2 miles back to the guest house, so I got a hamburger instead. It wasn't all that bad, and the guy working the counter came out and started talking with me in English--turns out he lived in Florida and Chicago. As he was talking to me, a friend of his walked up, his hands filthy with dirt and grease, and he started complaining (in English) about having a flat tire. Not only did I get lunch, but the (restaurant) guy gave me his business card and offered to help me with my work.

Some photos of Ram'allah:

This is a ~120-degree panorama from the roof of the guesthouse, looking west-southwest right after sunset. I stitched four photos together to get the panorama, and messed up one of the joins (laptop monitor is too small to see one issue until it was too late). The center of Ram'allah is off to the east-southeast, so almost directly left from this view.

This billboard is about 100 yards from the guest house. This side says:
Step by step
We rebuild and we develop
Training 12,000 health service providers
From the American people (United States Agency for International Development)


This side says:
Step by step
We rebuild and we develop
Build and repair more than 6100 classrooms
From the American people (United States Agency for International Development)

There's another one of these billboards over on the other side of town, over by a school with USAID logos all over it--the school has an astroturf soccer field, too.

Ram'allah: under construction

Walking around Ram'allah has been interesting from a number of perspectives. First, to give you a brief narrative snapshot of Ram'allah, it's a city of about 60,000 people roughly 20 kilometers north of Jerusalem, and is the de facto center of Palestinian politics and international aid efforts. The Palestinian National Authority is headquartered here, and Yassir Arafat lived here when he was President of the PA. All that said, it's still a pretty small town, and in many ways is a bit of an idiosyncratic provincial backwater--30% of the population is Christian, although the city has a long history, that history is basically based on Ram'allah being a stop on the way from Jerusalem to other places (Nablus, Jenin, Damascus, etc.) that are bigger and/or more famous.

All that said, it's an interesting place. It's very hilly, and so walking just about any distance means going up/downhill as much as 150 meters. The hills that aren't full of big, expensive houses or spiffy apartment buildings are terraced olive-tree groves, and in the morning a chilly fog rolls up out of the valleys and is burned off by 8am or so. All in all, it's a pretty peaceful place.

Except that everyone is busy, and one word exemplifies the place: construction. I got a little lost my first day walking around, because the street that I should've been walking on was so torn up (they're re-trenching sewer lines) I thought it wasn't even a street. There are high-rise office & apartment buildings being built, and though there is plenty of the type of trash you expect to see accumulating around a developing-world countryside, there is a lot of construction rubble, too (i.e., cinder blocks, chunks of re-bar, tile, etc.). Right now I hear a little yap-dog down the street barking its little yap-dog head off (this is a Christian area), and then in the distance I hear bulldozers, dump trucks, and jackhammers. Last night, after sunset, I heard someone using a masonry saw down the street.

The people of Ram'allah strike a stark contrast to those people in other places I've been to; here, everyone is either shopping (in the center of town), making something, or going somewhere. In Damascus, there were lots of people just hanging out--as if they were waiting for something to do. In Jerusalem, it was similar, except the waiting was "waiting for tourists." In Istanbul, people were scheming and scamming and going places--but everything had already been built. Amman was full of people who seemed to have nothing to do, too. I could go on, but instead of belaboring the point, I'll just sum up by saying: Ram'allah is moving, and its people are industrious.

A couple other observations about the place: one, you can't go very far without passing a Palestinian government office, a UN compound, or some international aid organization project--Ram'allah is certainly the nexus of Palestinian development. Two, security is pretty tight. At major intersections, and every couple hundred yards near the center of town, is a soldier in camouflage and beret, holding an AK-47 at the ready. The soldiers are friendly, though. When I was out this morning, a few struck up a conversation with me, and seemed most impressed that the population of Chicago was about the size of the population of all of the West Bank.

More later, but for now I'll share a few leftover pictures from the other side of the wall:

P.S. my internet connection here at the guest house is woefully slow, so I'm using a different format for the pictures that results in a smaller file--at the cost of lower image quality. If you like any of the pictures and want better reproductions, let me know and when I get back I can get you full-resolution copies.


One last photo of the Dome of the Rock, at night.


Early morning in the Garden of Gethsemane. This is one of the 2000+ year-old olive trees.

Lots of flowers & flowering vines in the Garden. Took a quick shot of these viney flowers, and spiffed up the shot using the Viveza plug-in for Photoshop.

16 NIS ($5) gets you a ticket to walk all around the Old City of Jerusalem on top of the city walls. This was the view on the South Ramparts walk near sunset; south of the Old City is the Franciscan Monastery, and at sunset it made a very pretty sight. This is a 3-photo HDR composite of the scene.

A little further along the South Ramparts, there's an unobstructed view of the terrain to the south. Bethlehem (Bayt Laham) is just a few miles south of Jerusalem--that's it on the hilltop in the background of this shot.

Here's a zoom/crop of that prior photo, focused tightly on the hilltop & Bethlehem. You can see the security barrier (aka "Apartheid Wall") snaking over the landscape. The Israelis built the wall in this area because of the continued building & expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank.

The South Ramparts wall-walk ends right next to the Western Wall plaza, and so I cut through there on my way back to the Mount of Olives. As I've mentioned previously, when Israel captured the Old City in the Six Days' War in 1967, there were apartment buildings standing here. The Palestinian residents of those homes were evicted and the buildings bulldozed to make the plaza. On this evening, there was some sort of IDF induction ceremony being held, with a bunch of new recruits standing at attention.

The officer in charge--the woman near the center of the frame--was pacing back and forth, giving some sort of lecture in Hebrew. The guy to the left of center was translating into English for the non-Hebrew speakers in the crowd. It was some rambling speech about how much of an honor it was to hold the ceremony here, and how important this place was to Israelis. It made me wonder what Palestinian Muslims--whose homes had been bulldozed on this very spot, just 50 yards or so from the Haram ash-Sharif and one of the holiest places in Islam--might think about the military ceremony being held there.

If this is Saturday, this must be Ram'allah

Made it. Taxi driver on the Ram'allah side of the checkpoint hadn't a clue of where to go, despite my map and having a phone number for this place (his phone couldn't make the connection).

So I once again experienced the hospitality element of Arab/Muslim culture. The taxi driver stopped a dozen times, asking random passersby for help/directions, and people went out of their way to help. Not just because ooh, look! an American! but because a person needed help--and even taxi drivers are considered people. At one point, the driver stops a guy walking along the street, and he can't help, but he knows of someone maybe who can, and this first guy didn't leave until the next person was able to help--until some stranger from another country got the right directions for where he wanted to go.

At one point, the driver asked a group of three guys if they knew the directions, and they conferred among themselves for a minute, and then replied along the lines of, "Sorry, we don't know this area very well, as we're from Lebanon. But if you go up the street to that grocery store, maybe they know."

Maybe I'm belaboring the point, but I just don't see this type of thing happening in the U.S.

By the way, the taxi driver turned out to be a money-grubbing jerk (note: if you ever ask a taxi driver how much the ride cost, and he simply says "you pay me what you think is fair," that's code for "I want to gouge you, but make you feel like you deserve it"), but the accomodations here at the guest house are very nice.

Enough of that; it's lunch time and I need felafel.

Hot Dog and a Pepsi

So, I'm leaving Jerusalem and going to Ram'allah tomorrow, so I can stop playing tourist and start playing researcher. Ram'allah is about 12-15 miles north of Jerusalem, but the bigger issue is the Qalandia checkpoint: following the 2000 Al Aqsa intifadeh--a Palestinian protest/insurrection movement spurred by Ariel Sharon's assertion of Israeli rule over the Temple Mount--and subsequent suicide bombings in Israel, the Israeli government decided to seal off the Palestinian population in the West Bank by building a wall/fence around it. There's a lot more to it than that, but I'm going to leave it at that for the moment because my point is trying to get through this barrier--which, depending on where you are, is fence, 24-ft tall concrete wall, and/or border crossings with tighter security than you find at the airport--is a pain. Not so much for me, but for whomever is transporting me.

I've arranged for one cab to drop me off at the Qalandia checkpoint, then I walk across, and will pick up another cab (hopefully) to take me the rest of the way to Ram'allah--or, specifically, to the Episcopal Technological and Vocational Training Center guest house, where I'll be staying for the next five weeks.

How does this have anything to do with the title of this post? Well, after talking with Mary, I decided to go on a quick shopping trip in the "New City" area of Jerusalem--the part of town on the exact opposite side of the Old City from where the Mount of Olives (and my hotel) is located. And rather than tromp through the Old City crowds and congested, convoluted streets, I walked around the Old City, to an outdoor shopping mall I had seen a few days back. That trip was a total bust; the only places open on a Friday afternoon (post-noon is the Muslim sabbath, while sunset on Friday marks the beginning of the Jewish sabbath) were restaurants and one art gallery. So I turned around and headed back, only to find a hot dog stand. The guy running it had what I like to call a "desperation ponytail," so naturally I assumed he was an immigrant from America. He wasn't, and so he didn't understand (nor had the ingredients to make) a "Chicago style" hot dog. But that didn't matter much--it's not every day that you get to have a hot dog in Jerusalem on the sabbath, and so I very much enjoyed my hot dog & pepsi.

Today: hot dogs in Jerusalem. Tomorrow: felafel in Ram'allah.

Inshallah

The Muzzein Belched

I think the muzzeins of different mosques sometimes try to out-muzzein each other. The other morning, one mosque belted out the pre-dawn call to prayer at 4am. Then every mosque in the area did the call for prayer at 4:30. Then, the first mosque--the one right outside my window, of course--did another call at 5am. I dunno--maybe no one came to the first two calls? I think there have been at least three different muzzeins doing the call to prayer at the mosque nearest me (the Mosque of the Ascension), and one of them definitely sounds like an older guy: his voice sometimes squeaks, and he sometimes clears his throat into the mike. But one of the younger-sounding ones was doing the afternoon call to prayer, and in the middle of it--between "God is Greatest" and "There is no god but God," he belched. Not very loudly, and not a long belch--but loud enough that everyone within earshot heard it.

Keeping on the religious topic, I visited places holy to the three great monotheistic religions. The Western Wall (aka the 'Wailing Wall') of the Second Temple, the holiest place for Jews--though technically, the Temple Mount itself is holier... but Jews are forbidden to go there. Or so I thought, as when I visited the Temple Mount, there were some IDF soldiers up there. The books I have read on the subject have misinformed me.

As I just noted, I went up to the Temple Mount--or, to Muslims, the Haram ash-Sharif (the 'Noble Sanctuary')--site of the Al Aqsa Mosque (mentioned in the Qur'an), and the Dome of the Rock. The Rock in the Dome is believed by Jews to be the stone upon which Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son to prove his dedication to God. To Muslims, Abraham was in Arabia for this event, and the Rock in the Dome is instead the point from which Muhammad ascended to heaven. All in all, a pretty holy place--the site of the Second Temple of the Jews, and the third-holiest site in Islam.

But wait--there's more holiness! On the way to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, I stopped at the Garden of Gethsemane, which according to Christian tradition, is where Jesus spent the last night before his crucifixion. There are olive trees in the Garden, several of which have been scientifically dated to be more than 2000 years old. I took pictures of them (and will post them later). Is that enough holiness for you? Because there's more!

I also went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher--the church built (by the Emperor Constantine's mother) on Golgatha (where Christ was crucified), and containing the crypt where Jesus was interred.

I had some very tasty Armenian food for lunch, too.

I mentioned yesterday that I'd post more about politics, but I spent way too much time working on some of these photos for posting, and so you're just going to have to wait for more political ranting.

The pictures are in reverse-order of how I should've loaded them, and I'm not going to mess with moving stuff, as the last time I tried that, the blog crashed.


First up, the rotunda inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. This isn't a HDR composite--just a regular shot with very little post-processing. I love my IS lens: I hand-held a 1/5 second exposure and it's sharp as a tack.

Next, a hallway in the back of the church. This is a HDR composite of two images--the third was too long of an exposure for even the image stabilizer to keep steady (2.5 seconds). Honestly, I don't think it needs the third.

This is in the front-ish of the church, near the shrine to the left of the entrance. This frescoe is from the Byzantine era. In the right of the frame, you can see the people lining up to go into the shrine. I got berated by a priest for wearing a hat inside; I guess it's OK to wear a hat if you're standing in line for the shrine? This is another 2-shot HDR composite.

This is looking back towards the entrance. This is a 3-shot HDR composite, which results in "ghosting" of multiple images of the same person as they move through the three exposures.

This shot is in basically the same location, but rotated 180 degrees--so this is the view directly behind where I was standing in the last shot. It's a 3-exposure composite HDR image, but the light streaks were not added--it was pretty smoky inside, due to all the votives and tapers that were burning. This is one of my favorite images from the trip so far, if I do say so myself.

This is "extreme close-up" detail on the Dome of the Rock, so you can see all the calligraphy and tile work. The larger image is below.

The entire image of the Dome of the Rock. This is a single exposure--not HDR--but I did some considerable tweaking (correcting the perspective, saturating the blue sky) to make the image more vivid--the light was pretty harsh when I took the picture. If you look closely, you can see the moon right next to the dome (if the dome was a clock face, look at about 2:00).

Again, the order on these pictures is all messed up: this is some stained glass from inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

I had forgotten to post this one earlier: this is a view of the Old City at night. You can see the Dome of the Rock on the right, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque just left-of-center. This is another HDR composite of three photos, shot on a tripod from the Mount of Olives, near where I was staying.

"the lost post"

Well, isn't this odd? I found this post sitting in the "saved" area, where it must've went went Blogpost crashed. I'll post it, not because it's anything novel, but just so it looks like I'm posting more often. It's a little bit different than the other political rant I posted.

I've fallen a bit behind, partly due to having walked about 30 miles over the past two days, partly due to having shot almost 300 photos over the past two days, but mainly because my Firefox browser is acting up and wasn't letting me do much of anything online. So I've switched back to Evil Empire™ Internet Explorer, and I think that this will work until I figure out what Firefox was doing wrong and how to fix it.

It's too bad, really, because I was fired up to do a big political post based on some casual observations I made yesterday. Well, the rage has cooled, but I still want to relate the glimpses of Palestinian life under Israeli rule that I saw yesterday:

In the bustling David St. Market in the Old City, a Palestinian merchant was getting hassled by two IDF soldiers and an Israeli police officer; from what I gleaned from the conversation and the gesticulation, the merchant had left stuff (probably trash?) out in front of his shuttered store when he went to afternoon prayers. When he came back, the Israelis--armed with automatic weapons and dressed in body armor, by the way--made sure he knew the price for violating the law.

• Later, in a nearby and similar market area, another trio of armed Israelis (two IDF, backing up a Israeli police commander) were hassling another Palestinian merchant because the scarves he had hanging out in front of his stall were dangling too low--a tall man would have to duck his head to avoid the scarves brushing against his hair.


• Earlier in the day, I took a bus tour of greater Jerusalem. On the bus, you get a pair of headphones you can plug in to get a pre-recorded narration (in your choice of eight languages) of all the sights the bus passes on its route. Time and time again, the narrator mentioned where brave Israeli soldiers "took" locations in combat--never mentioning that they "took" these locations from the Palestinians who owned the land--or where ruthless Arabs (Jordanians, most typically) mercilessly slaughtered innocent Jews/Israelis. There's that saying about how history is written by conquerors; it's not just history--it's tour guide narration, too. Palestinians do not exist on that tour; they were the previous occupants, who somehow left no forwarding address. I was half-tempted to switch to the Arabic language version, in hopes that the Palestinians would exist there, but listening to the English narrative was like watching faceplant videos on Youtube: you're horrified by it, but you can't stop.


• Later on, I was walking through another market area, and in a bigger stall that looked like some sort of tailored-goods store, an altercation had started up between several IDF soldiers and one of the merchants. Again, the IDF soldiers are armed, and an older guy--some sort of officer--had intervened and things weren't looking very promising for the merchant. I have no clue what was going on, or why, but for the third time in the day, I wondered what it would be like to scrape by as a lower-class merchant at the whim of guys with guns who can cause you all sorts of problems if they don't like the way you dispose of your trash, or how you display your merchandise, etc.


• Finally, I was walking back to the hotel past the Damascus Gate--which is the entrance to the Old City that butts up against Arab East Jerusalem. There is a taxi stand there, and then a whole bunch of signs that I interpret as "no parking" or "no stopping" signs, and as I was walking past, a Palestinian teenager runs up and yells to another guy in front of me (all I caught was "yulla! yulla!" = "go! go!"). The guy runs to a cab--parked in what must be the no parking area--and fires up the engine to make a quick getaway... too late. A pickup truck with three Israeli police screeched to a stop, boxing in the cab. The Palestinian driver tried to sneak past the truck, whereupon one of the Israeli police jumped out and angrily started shouting and pointing at the Palestinian, one hand on his gun. The incident ended with the cops pulling the guy out of his cab and writing up some sort of documentation--a ticket, or a court summons, or something. Like the tailor incident, I surreptitiously took some pictures, but another touristy-looking guy wasn't so circumspect--he was blatantly photographing the whole incident. The cops didn't seem to care.

So there you have it; in a day when I wasn't looking for evidence of the grinding oppression that Palestinians experience on a day-to-day basis, I had it thrown in front of me, several times. The Israelis have the guns, and the power, and if they don't like something a Palestinian is doing, they intervene. And they don't care who sees it.

If you have any questions why I do what I do, hopefully this post will be something of an answer.
And so you have something to look at after reading all that politically-charged observation, here are some pretty (and a couple not-so-pretty) pictures:


(well, blogspot has a pretty awkward way of adding & moving around pictures in posts, and I just lost one of the ones I had posted. I'm not going to mess with trying to fix it now, so here's the rest)

I call this one "This is not your land"--this was the police intervention on the illegal parking

This is the Western Wall plaza. All the cleared ground in this area was, before the 1967 Six-Days War, a Palestinian neighborhood. That neighborhood was bulldozed to make the plaza. I'm sure the Palestinians got over it--hey, Israel even built a nice, wooden ramp so all the non-Muslims who want to visit the Temple Mount can do so!


The order of these pictures got messed up, as I wanted this picture to be before the previous one. Anyway, this is a HDR-composite photo of the Western Wall. The people look ghostly not because they're ghosts, but because I put three exposures together in order to get the dramatic sky and saturated color tones.

The entrance to the David St. Market, just east of the Jaffa Gate into the Old City.

Zion Gate, on the southeast side of the city. The only post-processing I did on this picture was to correct some perspective distortion--I did nothing to the woman sitting; she was stock-still long enough so that her image is razor-sharp, while the woman walking past is merely a blur. Pretty cool of her to model like that for me.

Monday (alternatively, "This Land is Not Your Land")

OK, blogspot is a pain in the neck for posting pictures, and when I tried to publish my last post, it lost the whole thing--pictures, text, and all. This annoyed me greatly, because I had spent a good amount of time writing up that post.

So I'm going to compose stuff offline, and then try to upload it later. If it doesn't work, I'll just go back to the livejournal blog I used in Damascus three years ago.

Here's my attempt at the post that blogspot vaporized.


Time is flying by, and I'm not getting stuff posted as quickly as I'd like. Of course, having taken over 300 photos so far is slowing me down--spending a few minutes editing each picture takes some time. But in someways, this is a good thing. After walking around on Monday, I saw somethings that got me really riled up, and had I posted to this blog right away, it probably would've come across as an angry political rant.

Instead, I've had some time to cool down, and reflect. So this won't be as emotionally-charged as it could have been. But to the point--Monday I took a long tour around Jerusalem. I saw lots of ancient buildings, religious landmarks, and Palestinians being routinely abused in a casual, careless way by Israelis. A few 'narrative' snapshots, followed by some photographic ones:

In the morning, I took a bus tour around Jerusalem. You get on the bus for the two-hour loop around the city, and they give you a pair of headphones you can plug in, to listen to a pre-recorded narration of the various points of interest--in your choice of eight different languages. The thing that struck me most about the narration was the complete erasure of Palestinians from the landscape. The narration at various points discussed cooperation and peace between Christians, Jews, and Muslims, but never once did it mention Palestinians. Landmarks were noted as places captured by valiant IDF soldiers, or places where Arabs (or Jordanians) committed some murderous crime against peace-loving Jews/Israelis. A plot of land outside the Old City, purchased by a Jewish immigrant during the British Mandate period, was mentioned as the first site of Jewish residence outside of the Old City--but it was never mentioned that the Jew had purchased the land from its Palestinian owner. Over and over again, the presence of Palestinians was elided. The narrative established Jews/Israelis as heroic conquerors or liberators or entrepreneurs, and enemy Arab/Jordanian forces as the bad guys. But Palestinians? They didn't exist. I was tempted to switch to the Arabic version of the narration to hear how that represented things. The bus tour was very unfulfilling. There's that old saying about how history is written by the conquerors... I guess tour bus narration is the same way.

After the bus tour, I was walking through the David St. Market in the Old City, and I saw a Palestinian merchant being accosted by a trio of Israelis. Two of the Israelis were IDF soldiers, with automatic weapons and body armor; the third was an Israeli police commander--also with an automatic weapon and body armor. I wasn't entirely sure of what the dispute was, but it seemed that when the Palestinian had left for afternoon prayers, he had left something--trash, I'm guessing--outside his shuttered stall, and this apparently warranted the intervention by three heavily-armed Israelis to set this shopkeeper right.

Later, I saw this same trio outside another Palestinian merchant's stall--they were giving him a hard time because some of the scarves he had hanging up outside his store were low enough that a tall man might brush his head against the scarves as he walked past. Apparently, hanging your merchandise a few inches too low merits an angry berating from armed Israelis.

Then in a suq in another part of the Old City, I walked past an escalating argument between a Palestinian merchant (running some sort of clothing/tailor shop) and some IDF soldiers. Whatever the dispute was, an IDF officer had just gotten there as I was passing, and was intervening--on the soldiers' behalf, of course. I surreptitiously snapped a picture of the scene.

As my day was winding down and I was tiring out, I headed back to my hotel, going the long way around the city walls, through East Jerusalem. The Damascus Gate leads from the Old City to East Jerusalem (the Palestinian area of the metropolitan area), and outside the Gate is a taxi stand. As you progress east from the taxi stand, there are signs along the road that are either "no parking" or "no taxi idling" type of signs, and as I was walking along one of these areas, there were plenty of taxis pulled up alongside the roadside, looking for fares. Suddenly a teenager yells something in Arabic--all I caught was "yalla! yalla!" ("go! go!")--and a young Palestinian guy goes running past me and jumps into one of the parked cabs, quickly starting it up and trying to drive away. A white pickup truck with three Israeli police screeches up and boxes in the taxi. The driver tried to sneak the taxi past the truck, but an Israeli cop jumps out of the pickup and starts pointing and yelling at the driver, and then puts his hand on the pistol on his hip. The incident ended with the cops pulling the taxi driver out of the cab and taking him off to the side to write up some paperwork--a ticket, or a court summons. Again, I took some surreptitious pictures, but at the same time, there was an older tourist with a digital camera, brazenly taking pictures of the whole incident from just a few feet away. The Israeli cops didn't seem to care. They got their man: the parking ticket was issued and order was restored to East Jerusalem.

So I didn't go looking for it, but I got a very clear picture of what life can be like for Palestinians in Israel. The Israelis have the power and the guns, and I saw several exercises in authority that seemed quite arbitrary and petty. From the merchants whose zoning infractions were addressed by rifle-wielding soldiers, to the taxi driver who was nearly pulled from his cab at gunpoint for a parking ticket, to the erasure of Palestinian presence from narratives about Jerusalem's environs, it was pretty disturbing.

Sadly, the political realities stayed in my face the next day--which I'll post about tomorrow. Right now I've got to try to get this to work on blogspot. Pictures & captions below.

The Russian Orthodox church on the slopes of the Mount of Olives. This is a HDR (high dyanmic range) composite of three separate exposures.

From An American Geographer...

This is the inside of the Zion Gate on the south side of the Old City. The only post-production manipulation was my (partially successful) attempt to straighten out the perspective issues from shooting wide-angle--the woman in the foreground was sitting very still, so that the 1/15th-second exposure left her really sharp and distinct, while the woman walking through the arch was blurred. Kinda cool, eh?

From An American Geographer...

Looking east from the Jaffa Gate, into the David St. Market. No post-processing other than some minor contrast/brightness tweaks

From An American Geographer...

The Western Wall. Another HDR composite of three exposures, to bring out the details in the sky and the colors in the wall. The "ghosting" produced by compositing three images with moving people is intentional. Before Israel took this part of Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Days' War, this entire area was Palestinian apartment buildings. The Israelis bulldozed the apartments to make the plaza.

From An American Geographer...

Another view of the Western Wall and the plaza. The golden dome in the background is the top of the Dome of the Rock--the third holiest site in Islam--and the wooden walkway is the Bab al-Maghariba, the entrance for non-Muslims to access the Temple Mount / Haram ash-Sharif.

From An American Geographer...

"This is Not Your Land" (part one). The IDF soldiers were arguing with the Palestinian merchant, and more IDF were coming to back them up in the argument. I snapped this picture from the hip, not wanting to draw attention to myself and make anything worse.

From An American Geographer...

"This is Not Your Land" (part two). Another quick shot of Palestinians at the mercy of the Israelis with guns. I didn't need to be so circumspect--another guy was openly taking pictures and the Israeli police didn't seem to care at all.

From An American Geographer...

P.S. Let me know if the pictures don't come through. I did something weird, and am hoping it works.

More to come...

I took a lot of pictures today, and will be uploading some of the interesting ones... but I'm going to have to re-install Firefox on my laptop, as there's something wrong with the installation I have now. Be patient.

I was going to post a picture to spice things up a bit, but for some reason (probably the aforementioned browser issues), I can't.

Weird

So I'm not sure, when you go to my issmeeyusuf.blogspot.com page, it only shows you the first post I made. I'll work on fixing it when I have more time & energy & posts.

OK, maybe it was just my browser cache needing to be cleared. That's probably a sign I should get some sleep.

Day One

I've arrived in Israel. I've been catching up on my sleep--I typically am not able to sleep much on flights--and haven't done anything exciting yet. I've noticed some interesting sights, but have yet to use my camera a lot:

• Waiting for the bus from the airport to Jerusalem was a young Orthodox couple; the husband was dressed in dark khakis and a white button-down shirt, with his fringes hanging out and his kibbe on his head, he looked like a younger version of Joel Wainwright (well, the picture of Joel without the beard). The guy had some massive holes in the soles of his shoes, but his cell phone was quite spiffy.
• On the road down the Mount of Olives this morning, I noted pilgrims from Italy, Portugal, Spain, Canada, Korea, and India. Mobs and mobs of tourists, stomping down the road, crowding into the religious sites, haggling with the local Palestinians for souvenirs. One group couldn't read the English (or Hebrew) sign on the arch to the Jewish cemetery, and stomped in there to take unobstructed pictures of the Temple Mount.
• At nearly the top of the Mount of Olives, there is a block of apartments that looks relatively new. Certainly less than 30 years old. Before those apartment buildings was there, you could stand at the top of the Mount of Olives and look down on all of the Old City, including the Temple Mount. Now, if you stand at the top of the Mount of Olives, you get a marvelous view of these apartment buildings, one with a massive Israeli flag fluttering from the top of a 30-foot pole attached to the top of the building.

Many thanks to Michael Ewers, by the way, who just by hanging out with me in Damascus taught me some useful Arabic that I would've otherwise not picked up. I even avoided telling the desk clerk at the hotel that I had a "machine" instead of a "reservation."

I did take a couple photos today, and with one shot did some tricky photo manipulation. The picture below is a HDR composite of three separate exposures, tone-mapped and then manipulated in Photoshop to mimic the appearance of Fuji Velvia film. Turned out pretty good for a spontaneous shot that was fiddled around with in post-production. I need to figure out blogger a bit more so I can do fancier stuff with my photo-posting (right, Cheryl? I aspire to your level of blog-art).

Leaving on a jet plane... or not.

Well, leave it to US Airways to throw a monkey wrench into my plans. My flight departing Columbus was delayed so much that I had no chance of getting any flight to Israel.

So, tomorrow is the new date of departure.