Checkpoint? Checkmate.

This trip is winding down, and as Friday starts the weekend--and I leave on Sunday--there's pretty much no research I can get done from this point on. So my plan was to go to Jerusalem one last time and do some leftover tourist stuff, maybe buy a souvenir or two, and make arrangements for my departure Sunday (long story short, because cabs from this side of the border aren't allowed over the border, I have to get an Israeli-tagged cab to pick me up and take me to Jerusalem on Sunday).

As I walked to the center of Ram'allah this morning, I noticed that the butcher was very busy--this is the last Friday of Ramadan, and Sunday marks the end of Ramadan. People will celebrate Eid with a feast.

When I got to the bus depot, I noted that there were none of the bigger buses that normally run all over the West Bank--just the little yellow minivans ("service taxis," or sherut) that aren't allowed across the border. After some asking around, I found out the Qalandia checkpoint was closed. The Israelis weren't allowing any vehicles through, and only had one gate open. Typically on Fridays the Qalandia checkpoint is mobbed--even moreso during Ramadan--as Palestinians go to the Haram ash-Sharif to pray on the Muslim sabbath. But today, apparently because it's the last Friday of Ramadan, the Israelis felt like being more difficult than usual.

I knew the checkpoint would be busy--that was part of the point for me going today: I was going to take pictures of the checkpoint and all the human cattle being funneled through the ritual humiliation. But I didn't see any point in going to the checkpoint and not being able to cross into Jerusalem and do all the things that I wanted/needed to do.

I'm going to have to re-think my plans for Sunday, as I was originally thinking of starting the journey to the airport at about 5 pm, an hour and a half before sundown and the end of Ramadan (and the beginning of Eid). It might be a long trip.

But fear not, I have pictures!

Last weekend four of us from the guest house took a road-trip through Israel, going to the Dead Sea, the Negev Desert, and then ending up in Tel Aviv. We put about 800 (~500 miles) kilometers on the rental car over three days, and had we gone for a fourth day, we would've gone up to the Galilee and ended up covering about 90% of Israel. It's not a big country.

We started out at Masada, climbing up the "snake path" up the eastern side of the hill before dawn. It's a pretty brutal climb: ~400 meters up, and quite steep. It was rough, too, because for a number of reasons I won't go into here, I only got about 2 hours of sleep the night before, in the driver's seat of our car. So I didn't take a lot of pictures during the climb, and the ones I took didn't turn out all that great. But to be honest, the whole "watch the sunrise over the Dead Sea from the top of Masada" is overrated.

So instead, feast your eyes on this gorgeous Ram'allah sunset, as seen from the top of the guest house:

Like the Herodion, Masada was built by Herod the Great. Also like the Herodion, I was underwhelmed by Masada, and I didn't take a whole lot of pictures. Here's a local bird. Interesting, in that it's been banded (twice)--look at its feet.

Here's another bird at Masada, right after sunrise.

EXTREME CLOSE-UP!!!

After hiking up Masada, we needed to cool off a bit. The Dead Sea region sits below sea level, and that makes it a lot hotter than Ram'allah, and it's more humid, too. North of Masada, there's a nature reserve centered on some springs, called Ein Gedi. Ein Gedi has waterfalls and swimming pools, and sounded like just the place to relax and recuperate from a rough night and tough pre-dawn hike/climb. We got there pretty early, and shortly after entering the park, saw some ibex on a cliff.
There were also a bunch of these rodents hanging out all over the place--mainly in the cool shadows and near where some of the irrigation hoses were leaking water onto the ground. They're about 2-3 times the size of a guinea pig, and were rather unafraid of us--as long as we didn't get too close.

We got to a waterfall-fed pool, and for some reason I didn't get a good picture of the pool. It was gorgeous, though. Cool & refreshing, and for a good hour or so, we had it all to ourselves. Well, us and the dragonflies (who, I'm guessing, were responsible for the complete lack of mosquitoes around the water).

Sadly, we had to leave Ein Gedi earlier than I would've liked, because several buses pulled up and vomited out a couple hundred tourists; our idyllic little oasis became mobbed, and the rest of the park turned into a massive human traffic-jam--and the jam included several Israelis who were carrying rifles. Not in uniform or anything, and not military-issue weapons (they were bolt-action carbines).

So we went south, into the Negev, and ended up at Makhtesh Ramon--the huge crater from a meteorite impact tens of millions of years ago. Again, this was relatively underwhelming, as it's billed as a cross between the moon and the Grand Canyon. Wadi Rum is less than a hundred miles east of here, and it's a much more spectacular site. We stayed the night in a Bedouin camp in the crater, and that was nice enough--especially with all the stars that were visible. I took this shot the next morning, from the eastern rim of the crater.

Two of us went on to Tel Aviv/Jaffa from here, and I took some photos of Jaffa and the Mediterranean, but I haven't had time to Photoshop them, yet. Rather than Jaffa pictures, then, I'll close this post with a shot from Ram'allah the other day. You can make your own joke.

The Judean Desert

I went to Bethlehem on a day trip, and have yet to post some of the pictures I took. To put these in context, after passing through the checkpoint, it's about 2-3 miles to Manger Square. I skipped past Manger Square and went for a hike southeast, into the Judean Desert, headed for the Herodion--an ancient hilltop fortress built by Herod the Great about 2000 years ago. The Herodion is about 8 miles outside of Bethlehem, and as it was a nice morning (and I needed the exercise), I decided the hike would be fun... as well as saving me 200 shekels for a taxi to take me there & back.

I'll narrate the trip a little more through photos, but for some reason I decided to post them a bit out of sequence--like I said, I went to Manger Square after the Herodion, but the Church of the Nativity pictures are first up:

This is a 3-shot HDR composite of the inside of the Church of the Nativity. It was very busy, very crowded with tourists. Lots of Italians. On the wall in the upper left, and under the trapdoors in the floor on the lower left, are original mosaics dating back to Byzantine times, when the church was first built.

It wasn't just Italians. Poles & Germans, too. We're lucky World War I didn't break out. Anyway, this is the grotto under the nave--the place where Jesus was born. The tourists were crowding the grotto, touching the stone, taking lots of pictures, and then this old Orthodox priest (you can see the black knit cap on his head just next to the blue banner) came down and started berating people for pushing and shoving and hogging the grotto.

Hiking to the Herodion means going through Bethlehem's eastern "suburb," Beit Sahour--where I got a big bottle of lemonade that was quite refreshing. Beit Sahour isn't very big, and you leave it with the Shepherd's Field to your left (and Har Homa looming over the Shepherd's Field), and pretty quickly, you're in the desert. The light was lousy, and, hey, it's a desert--so I didn't take any pictures for a couple miles, until I got to the highway. A little ways down the highway was this secondary road, leading to a Palestinian town. The sign indicates that this is part of the area where the Palestinian National Authority has sole authority and jurisdiction, and it's illegal for Israelis to enter. Illegal under Israeli law, that is--which is ironic, because traditional notions of sovereignty hinge on the territorial extent of a state's law. In other words, this is recognized as Palestinian territory (even by Israel), and yet Israel law is still active in this territory. Yet another example of political geography. Does that make your head hurt? So I followed this road, instead of the highway, to the Herodion.

Here's a panoramic view of the area (three photos stitched together). The greenhouses had a sign--a business for growing/selling flowers. Moments after I took this panorama, a car pulled up and the driver offered me a ride. He only spoke colloquial Arabic, so our conversation was stilted, and I've forgotten what he said the name of this village was. He took me about 4 miles, the rest of the way to the Herodion, and didn't expect anything in return. His name was Ibrahim.


Oops, I cheated a little. Ibrahim dropped me off at the Herodion, so this shot is actually one I took on the walk back. That big mound is the Herodion. I was hiking back along the main highway; the road I was walking on (and which Ibrahim drove me on) went up the lower hill, through the trees you can see on the right side.

Climbing up the Herodion, what did I see... but an Israeli military installation. Not very big, but with a tank and three APCs (armored personnel carriers), a couple watch towers, and lots of concertina wire, this little outpost looks down on the Palestinian valley directly east of Bethlehem. You can see Bethlehem in this picture, in the distance right above the tank's turret and gun. Nice of the Israelis to keep watch over Bethlehem like that, isn't it?

I climbed to the top of the mound. The Herodion is actually an Israeli National Park--all the more interesting, because it's not in Israel! 27 NIS (~$7.50) admission, not a penny of which goes back to the Palestinian communities that surround the place. I spun in a circle and took a bunch of photos, and here is a panoramic composite of three shots. There's a glitch in one stitch, and if you look closely at the roads, you'll see it. Anyway, this vista looks north from the Herodion. The curving road at the bottom of the shot is the one Ibrahim drove me on; the straight road about halfway up is the highway I hiked back on. The Dead Sea is off about 90 degrees to the right: you can't see the Sea from here, but you can see the haziness from the heat & humidity around it.

The top of the Herodion is actually quite boring--and that's saying something, coming from a guy who loves ancient history. The Herodion is very much like Masada in form and history--it was a hill-top fort, and it was held by the Maccabeans during the revolt against the Romans. The Romans eventually won, of course, and destroyed the fort. So there are ruins up there, but not a whole lot to look at. There are cisterns under the surface, though, and during the revolt, the Jews enlarged the cisterns and carved new tunnels and exits, in order to harass the besieging Romans. I went down there--lots of steep steps and low ceilings, but nice & cool--and took some pictures.

Here is an "emergency exit," but in ancient times, this was a secret hillside entrance used by the Jews to launch surprise attacks on the Romans. This is another three-exposure HDR composite.

The tunnels/cisterns were closed off just past this point, so I started hiking back to Bethlehem. I took the main road, with the intent of stopping a taxi or sherut (a minivan shared taxi) and riding back to town--it was just after noon, I was tired, and I felt like hiking 10 miles across the desert was good enough.

Not a single one stopped. And along the way, I stepped on a crumbling rock and took a spill, cutting my left hand and bruising up my left knee. The rest of the hike was uneventful--though I stopped and had a tasty lunch in Beit Sahour. The nice thing about the Bethlehem area is that Christian restaurants serve lunch during Ramadan. And I needed a good lunch after hiking 18 miles through the desert.

Behind the counter of the bar in this restaurant was a framed photo of Rachel Corrie, an American peace activist who was run over by an Israeli bulldozer that was demolishing Palestinian homes in Gaza in 2003. Two important bits to take away from this observation: first, the occupation of Palestine and Palestinian anger/resistance to the occupation isn't a simply a Jew vs. Muslim thing; there are a lot of Christian Palestinians who suffer the same indignities that Muslims do. Second, Israel evacuated all the Jewish settlers from Gaza in August of 2005, 2 1/2 years after Rachel Corrie was killed. The IDF bulldozed all the Israeli settlements, rather than let Palestinians move into the homes.

Stranglehold

No, this isn't about the Ted Nugent song. This is a bit of a political rant--a long-simmering one. I'll try not to be too incoherent in my anger, though.

If you don't know about the wall around Palestine, the map to the right can give you a glimpse of the problem. This is actually an interesting problematic from a cartographic and geographic standpoint, because as you can see in the map's title, this one is four and a half years old. There are very few decent maps being made (that doesn't mean there aren't many maps, it just means that there are very few decent maps out there. I've seen some horrid examples of cartography relating to the West Bank, but that's a story for another post), but you can see on this map some of the results of fencing off a population of 2.5 million people. In urban areas, the wall is 8-meter high slabs of concrete, with pillboxes every couple hundred meters, and often festooned with concertina wire, like garland on a Christmas tree--but not nearly so festive.

Aside from the problematic route, the visual affront that is the wall, and the specially-built roads that Israelis get to use to bypass the wall, the wall is where the Israeli border becomes more than a location: it is a social institution, and crossing the border is a ritualistic humiliation, a negotiation involving bored Israeli teenagers armed with automatic weapons and complete authority over anyone who wishes to pass.

OK, enough preaching against the "Security Barrier" in general, and time for some talk about specifics.

Among other places in the West Bank, Bethlehem is being slowly strangled by the wall. I posted pictures of Har Homa, the (illegal)* settlement built on a hilltop opposite Bethlehem, one of the several settlements where "natural expansion" is non-negotiable--the Israeli government insists that settlements like Har Homa should be allowed to expand further into Palestinian land.

I haven't been brash enough (yet) to take pictures at the checkpoints, and the wall itself is so visually disgusting that I can't bring myself to photograph it, either. But my experiences at the checkpoints have been so infuriating that I've been tempted--and I'll be taking a short trip to Jerusalem before I leave, so I'll probably see about taking pictures then.

If it weren't for a sizable Christian minority in Bethlehem, and all the Christian significance of the city, Bethlehem would likely be dead, choked by the wall and Israeli settlements. If you're up for a hike across a hill or two, you can walk from the Old City of Jerusalem to the Old City of Bethlehem (including Manger Square) in an afternoon. Previously, I've posted a picture of the (modern) wall around Bethlehem, as seen from the (ancient) wall around the Old City of Jerusalem. Go look at it. But if it weren't for hordes and hordes of tourists visiting the city, there'd be no life there. Encircled by the wall and ever-expanding settlements, the place would die off.

But there is a booming tourist trade (and from what I've learned, about 99.7% of Italian citizens are right at this moment visiting various religious sites around Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The 0.3% who are left are working in Italy's tourism industry, probably), and so Bethlehem survives. Other places in the West Bank aren't so lucky. I'll be visiting a couple of these places over the next few days.

Now, I've posted before about Ram'allah's economy and the construction boom. Don't be fooled into thinking that all is well, and that the wall is simply an ugly scar on the land. Ram'allah is the center of Palestinian politics, the headquarters for most international aid organizations, and since the 2000 Al Aqsa Intifadeh, the center of the Palestinian economy (the northern city of Nablus had been the economic center, but in 2003 the city's economy was effectively strangled to death). There's no shortage of stuff to buy in Ram'allah--that's the real trick to the border/wall: you can get in, but you can't get out.

Outside of the economic effects, the stranglehold takes on a personal significance each and every time one tries to cross into Israel--and sadly, trying to go from one part of the West Bank (e.g., Ram'allah) to another part (e.g., Bethlehem) often means going through a border checkpoint, transiting Jerusalem. Here's how traveling from Ram'allah to Jerusalem works:

I hop on bus #18 and pay 6.5 NIS (~$1.75) for the trip. The bus drives about 6 miles to get to the Qalandia checkpoint. At the checkpoint, all passengers have to get off, and the bus driver takes the empty bus through security. The passengers have to walk across the road, through a parking lot, and into what resembles a cross between an amusement park line-maze and a cattle chute--galvanized steel tubing encases us in a long tunnel until we reach a turnstile. Once through the turnstile, there are eight different "gates" to choose from. There is no indication of which gates are staffed, or who can go through where--there are some gates where they don't have the x-ray machine running, so anyone passing through that gate cannot have any bags, luggage, or packages. So the human cattle queue up, and wait for the green light above another galvanized-steel turnstile, so they can push through, put their possessions on the x-ray belt, walk through a metal detector, and then be berated by the IDF soldier behind a 1.5" thick plexiglas window.

Palestinians need to have identity cards indicating they're Israeli residents, or permission slips allowing them to temporarily visit the other side of the border. Foreign nationals need their passports, showing their current Israeli visas.

And this is a problem. Israeli stamps in a passport make a traveler persona non grata in Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon--these countries won't admit any traveler who has visited Israel (or the Palestinian Territories). Most European/North American passengers who arrive at Ben Gurion airport can opt to not have their passport stamped--the immigration officers simply stamp a piece of paper (that you keep with your passport) so you don't suffer the stigma of the stamp. This has become such a common request that the immigration agents default to stamping the piece of paper. When I arrived at Ben Gurion--and this experience is a common one, I'm told--after I was processed through immigration and went to pick up my baggage, another immigration agent took the slip of paper from me and ripped it up.

So, according to my passport, I have never been to Israel. According to my passport, this research trip does not exist at all. For anyone who knows me, and knows how much I want to achieve my goal of filling up my passport with visas & stamps, you know that I would probably trade being blacklisted from Syria for the next five years (until I get a new passport) for another page of my passport filled. But no, I've got nothing in my passport to show for this trip. Of course, I'm in all the Israeli computers as having entered.

That doesn't do a lot of good, though. The IDF soldiers who work in the bullet- and bomb-proof bubbles at the checkpoint are all young--about the age of most of my students. If you didn't know, Israel has mandatory conscription--very few Israeli citizens are exempt from active service in the IDF, and even upon discharge from active duty, Israeli citizens have mandatory reserve service that lasts decades. So the young soldiers--most of whom I'm sure would rather be somewhere else, doing anything other than sitting in a glass-and-steel cage for hours at a time--hold complete control over (and responsibility for) the transit of thousands of people a day over a border that doesn't really even exist. I've experienced border guards who were obviously bored, but mostly they're sullen and hostile. I've been shouted at in Hebrew by a woman who looked like the daughter of an East German shot-putter, queried like I was a simpleton by a woman who looked like she was lounging on the beach as recently as that morning, and studiously ignored by a pudgy guy who was more intent on humiliating the Palestinian who was in line in front of me.

The common thread to all my troubles, of course, is the lack of any documentation in my passport that I'd ever entered Israel. "Feesa?" they keep asking me. I tell them, "No, I'm an American. I don't need a visa to enter Israel." "Stamp?" they reply. I tell them, "At Ben Gurion, they stamp a piece of paper." "Feesa?" is the moronic reply, "Where is paper?" I sigh, put on my best aww, shucks, I'm just a stupid American smile, and explain how they tear up the papers rather than give them to people. The East German shot-putter yelled at me in response. The beach bimbo chattered to her co-worker for a couple minutes--not about me, though, because she was sharing a text message on her cell phone.

The first time I negotiated the checkpoint, they called in to some immigration hotline and read off my passport number to verify that I hadn't snuck into the Territories for the nefarious purpose of sneaking into Israel. The beach bimbo took my passport and quizzed me on its contents: "What is your name?" Oh, please. Can't you see that the picture is me? And I have my Ohio State business card in the passport, too, so they can see I'm just a harmless academic. Where are you coming from? Where am I coming from? Ram'allah (I point behind me). No, where are you coming from? Where are you from? Originally? Oh, well, Ohio is where I started. She looked at me dubiously, then eventually decided her cell phone was more interesting. I looked at my passport as I left, and realized that she was looking at the place where it was issued--Illinois.

Once approved, I go through yet another turnstile, then out another cattle chute, to a parking lot on the other side of the checkpoint, where I can re-board the bus (or board another one, if it took too long to get through the checkpoint), and ride the remaining 8-10 miles to the Palestinian bus depot on the north side of the Old City, in East Jerusalem. It's a humiliating, frustrating, frightening experience... for a foreign national whose government hands over multiple billions of dollars of no-strings-attached aid a year to their staunchest ally outside of the tea-swillers in Ye Olde Englande. Now imagine what it's like to not have that carte blanche, to be restricted in your movements--to be subjected to a much more degrading process whenever you want to go pray at the holy site just a few miles from where you live, whenever you want to visit family or friends who live in East Jerusalem, whenever you need to purchase a good or service that isn't readily available in your hometown, etc.

The trucks rumble through the border unmolested, carrying Israeli goods for sale in the West Bank. Not too many Palestinian goods travel the other direction, because everything gets minutely inspected. There might be a bomb in that truckload of tomatoes. Those handicrafts might be concealing weapons. That van might be smuggling someone into Israel.

I'm getting negative and cynical, and this post has taken on a life of its own, well beyond the things I wanted to talk about. But you can't get away from that wall. You can't not notice it, be aware of it, be fearful and anxious about trying to get through it. And why is it there? To screen off Palestinians from land that was once theirs, from the settlements that are growing and metastasizing like melanomas on the face of the West Bank.

An ironic addition: this past weekend, I went on a road trip that included visits to Masada, the Dead Sea, the Negev Desert, and the Mediterranean. When we rented the car in Jerusalem, I wanted to double-check, as I was aware that most agencies prohibited renters from taking cars into the Territories. When I asked about this, I was answered with a confused look from the rental agent. The Territories didn't exist in her "geographic imagination." Of course you can't cross the border checkpoints with the car, but as long as you stay on Israeli roads, you never cross a border; there are bypass roads threading all through the West Bank, that are off-limits to Palestinians. So as long as we stuck the bypass highways, we could drive through the West Bank and down to the Dead Sea.

We went around, on principle.

I was going to post pictures from Bethlehem, but I'll have to do a separate picture-post for that. This one's already too long. And then photos from Masada, etc.

Oh, and a link to a blog post by a British doctor who visited Nablus a couple years back and had to deal with the ritualized humiliation of the border.

Bits and Pieces

A week ago I went to Bethlehem for the day, and I still have to post more about that trip, but I keep picking up little things here and there that I need to share. Random, unconnected stuff. So here some of it is, in no particular order:

• The billboard near me--the one with the USAID feel-good advertisements on each side--has changed. Both sides are advertisements for a furniture store. I won't post (or take) a picture of the new signs, but it's interesting that the USAID signs are gone.
• On a related note, I went to Birzeit University the other day, and on the drive (it's a good five miles one-way from the center of town) there and back, noticed that the European Union has a bunch of billboards advertising its humanitarian aid projects. They might need to take a lesson from the Americans, though: one EU sign shows a blond kid drinking from a water fountain, the other shows a guy with a big straw hat hoeing a field; both signs have--in English--short slogans about humanitarian aid. Earth to EU: who are you marketing your programs to?
• The other day when I was walking through the center of Ram'allah, I heard a very loud conversation being pumped out of speakers somewhere. Though it was in Arabic and they were talking very fast, it was some sort of radio show (like whatever "morning zoo" type radio programs you hear on American radio), and the host was talking to several different people. It got louder as I made my way around the al-Manara circle that marks the center of Ram'allah, and then suddenly I was in the middle of a crowd, and right next to me is a guy with a microphone, talking to a young woman--and her voice was the one I was hearing on the speakers. It's weird to be walking through the center of a town in a foreign country, and stumble into a remote broadcast for a radio station.
• The New York Times posted some photos taken near here on Friday. Go here and look at pictures #7 and #8. #7 is a brilliant photo, one that I wish I had taken; #8 isn't bad, but the caption is a bit wrong. Qalandia is nowhere near the Old City; yes, those are people waiting to get through the checkpoint to get to the Old City (and the Haram ash-Sharif), but it's a 10-15 minute bus ride from the checkpoint to the Old City.
• On another audio/visual note, I can take video with my Canon DSLR, but even after converting & shrinking the files, for some reason I'm unable to get the video to upload to YouTube. Solution: I e-mailed the file to Mary and let her post it. So if you want to see/hear video of the evening call to prayer in Ram'allah, click here (it's a ~4 MB file, so if you're on dial-up, be patient while it downloads). The coolest thing about posting the video to YouTube is that there are a whole bunch of other videos of Ram'allah, shot by other people, that are all linked to mine--so you can see a lot of Ram'allah with just a few clicks.
• Yesterday was another Strange Saturday at the guest house. I heard some loud music out in the hall, and I took a look to see who was playing their stereo/TV so loud. I saw 20+ Palestinian kids (mostly 10-14 years old, I'd guess--some of the girls were wearing headscarves, too) in the hallway, with violins, violas, cellos, etc., and a couple adults--one conducting, another playing an oud, doing some sort of concert or orchestra practice. There were a bunch of parents proudly looking on, applauding when the songs were over. It was good music, and interesting, but the crowd was blocking access to the kitchen, and I was hungry (it was also before sunset, and I didn't feel like walking all the way to one of the Christian restaurants), so I went to the Subermarket and got some stuff to snack on. When I left the building, I noticed all the cars parked in front of the guest house--many were very nice, and several had Israeli license plates. Pretty interesting that on a Saturday evening, Muslim and Christian kids from both sides of the Palestine/Israel border would converge upon a hallway at the Evangelical Technical and Vocational Training Center to play orchestra music.
• I mentioned Christian restaurants. You can't tell just by looking at them--I guess I could ask around. Though honestly, even many Muslim owned/operated restaurants wouldn't have any problems if an obvious foreigner/non-Muslim wanted to eat before sunset--but the one I've been to actually makes a decent pizza.
• My difficulties finding people/places continues: I went to Birzeit to talk to the former director of their Center for Development Studies, and it was a pretty frustrating experience. He told me his office was Room 110. Nope. Eventually, after not finding him anywhere on the first floor, or anywhere near the office of the department he teaches in (Economics), a woman--I think she was a maintenance-type person--helped me look. She asked me where I was from, and told me she had lived in Kansas City for a year and a half. We eventually found the right office: Room 208.

That's all for now. I had more little sniglets to post, but the rest are escaping my memory now. Tonight I'm going to walk to a hill south of the downtown area, where I've seen a lit-up ferris wheel at night. If I find it, I'm going to take some pictures.

Al Amari

I've fallen a bit behind on keeping this blog up-to-date. I wish I could say that's because I've been so swamped with interviews and observations, but the reality is that I've been hitting a lot of brick walls, research-wise. I've uncovered a lot of very interesting, compelling, and relevant stuff, but I'm finding it very hard to find anyone who will actually follow-through and talk to me. Americans and Palestinians alike, all seem to be avoiding me. Later, I'll post some ruminations on this aspect of my field work, but for now I think I'll just share this:

On Saturday, several of us from the guest house (there are a bunch of Birzeit University students living here, including some Americans, Europeans, and an Aussie who are studying Arabic) went to the center of town to meet up with the director of an NGO (non-governmental organization) that teaches English to Palestinian kids in the Al-Amari refugee camp. The Birzeit students are here for three months or more, and so wanted to volunteer. I was tagging along to volunteer and/or observe and/or make another contact in the NGO community; schooling in the camps is by and large left to the United Nations.

So we got to the designated meeting place, and after 15 minutes or so of waiting, we called to find out why the director hadn't met us. Well, it was Ramadan, and because this woman hadn't heard back from Birzeit that anyone would be volunteering, she had canceled everything. The Birzeit students are going to wait until after Ramadan and try again—during Ramadan, they do the English lessons in the morning, and that's when Birzeit has its classes.

But some of us (well, me and anyone who felt like following) weren't deterred. I had never been to an honest-to-goodness refugee camp, and so I decided to walk down to the camp to take a look around. To give you a very, very brief background, these are "camps" in only a very loose sense. Most of the refugee camps in Palestine go back to the 1948 War of Independence (called an nakba, "The Catastrophe," by Palestinians), when Palestinians fled the fighting in the North and West and took refuge in safer areas. The camps around Ram'allah are populated by Palestinians who lived in/near Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. The camps aren't collections of tents; for 60 years now, Palestinians have been building houses out of whatever materials they can get, and there is some very basic infrastructure (electricity, running water) that has developed over the years. Ultimately, the camps have the look of run-down, low-income areas. Some (rabid pro-Israelis) have a problem calling the residents of these areas "refugees," as the United Nations has an entire arm of the organization dedicated to providing services to the refugees (the United Nations Relief Works Agency, or UNRWA), and there is some semblance of infrastructure present. But the bottom line is that these camps aren’t recognized as legal residences, and the homes and shops are built on land that someone else owns.

I could write a lot more about the camps, but this was supposed to be a brief narrative. So I’ll get back to that.

Having walked around most of Ram’allah, relying on my geographer’s acute recall of the map back in my room, and periodically consulting my trusty keychain compass, I was able to navigate the 1.5 kilometers or so from the city center to the Al Amari camp. And, as promised, it was distinguished by two things: the generally run-down and low-income look of the area, and the UNRWA buildings. We—an American undergrad, a British Cambridge grad, two Germans, and me—walked through the camp, which was pretty quiet. The locals we passed treated us pretty much like all the other Palestinians we’ve met—a nod and a smile, a quick greeting, sometimes a curious stare—until we hit the “main street” cutting east/west through the camp. An older gentleman—probably in his 70s, wearing a kuffiyeh—greeted us, and started up a conversation with the American undergrad and the Briton. This Palestinian asked where they were from. Upon hearing “America,” the gentleman didn’t have any problem; but when the British woman told him where she was from, he got a little animated.

“This… Palestine is my land. Jews came and took from me! Britain… Balfour let them!”

He was referring to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, wherein the British “government view[ed] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The British were in charge of the Mandate of Palestine, and so this was widely seen as the opening of the gates for European Jewish immigration to the region, the fulfillment of the Zionist dream. Of course, most everyone forgets the rest of the Declaration: “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

It was rather ironic to me, though; the guy gave a pass to America, despite widespread Arab/Muslim resentment of unflinching U.S. support for Israel (not to mention well over a hundred billion dollars in U.S. aid), but he blamed the British for starting the whole chain of events that led to him living in a refugee camp for the past 61 years. Of course, he wasn’t blaming a 22 year-old British woman for a government policy enacted 82 years ago, and he certainly wasn’t hostile. But it just goes to show that there are deep histories and long memories in the Israel/Palestine dispute, and no simple answers.

Enough narrative! Time for pictures:

Shortly after sunset the first weekend of Ramadan, looking west-southwest from the roof of the guest house. You can just make out the Israeli city of Rehovot as a line of lights on the horizon below the center of the frame. Less than 10 miles beyond Rehovot is the Mediterranean.

Hey, remember this billboard from Ram'allah? They've got 'em in Bethlehem, too. This one is on top of an apartment building, just north of the old city.

Another one of the USAID billboards, attached to a building housing, among other things, a bank. About ~500 meters beyond this building is the old city of Bethlehem and Manger Square.

A bit further on, looking back northeast. This billboard is attached to a building that has an honest-to-goodness parking garage (first one I've seen in Palestine).

After leaving Bethlehem to the southeast, looking back towards the old city & Manger Square. This trio of billboards not only trumpets USAID success in training health care workers, but also advertises a radio station(?) and ice cream. I'm guessing on the center billboard, because it says something like "we had for two years the wide 5:00 capacity with...[something I can't figure out]." So it seems to be advertising a TV/radio station having the biggest evening audience for two years. Michael, help?

Leaving Bethlehem behind, going southwest along a highway, I hiked through the Judean Desert (more in a subsequent post). I turned off the highway to follow this road, which had this very fascinating marker denoting an area of Palestinian sovereignty. I find it fascinating that it's against Israeli law for Israelis to go somewhere that (by definition) isn't in Israel. If you ever wonder what political geography is, it's stuff like this...

...And it's also stuff like this. This is the Har Homa settlement, which houses 15-17,000 Israelis on land seized from Palestinians during the 1967 Six-Day War. I have more photos that show more detail that I'll post later, but in the far right side of the frame you can see the construction cranes that are adding onto the settlement. This is part of the "natural growth" of settlements (despite them being illegally-located on Palestinian land in the first place) that the Israeli government refuses to stop. Har Homa, and settlements like it, are the big reason for the Security Barrier, and these settlements are choking off Palestinian communities like Bethlehem. Oh, I should probably mention this photo was taken from the east end of Bethlehem, and the low ground in the frame is the famed "Shepherd's Valley," where according to the Bible, the angels proclaimed the birth of Jesus to shepherds tending their flocks. The settlement, with its multiple schools, shopping centers, and medical clinics, is considered by Israel to be part of Jerusalem.
And that refusal to stop settlement expansion in order to accommodate "natural growth" of the community? Yeah, that concept gets really sticky when you note how nationalist/religious Israelis want to out-breed Palestinians: