Dateline Ramallah: Walled City

The first place I go in Ramallah is the Nike store. Distinguishable from the neighboring boutiques by the clean, white swoosh mounted on reflective black stone, it's just one more middle-class stop in a city with more of them than anywhere in the West Bank. I can't tell if my companion registers this as a sign of progress or mild treason. All I catch at is a sense of delighted absurdity in the McWorld finally coming to Palestine.

I met Nicoletta while visiting Rabbis for Human Rights with my Shapiro Family Fellowship class. She's in Israel on a program with a different bias than mine, and 9 of the kids she came with are in Ramallah. One, a tall white dude with a lean aspect and intensely intelligent and warlike eyes (I really can't say enough about his eyes. They're deep, searching, mad, baleful, burning, Moroccan nomad eyes), is sporting a kefiyah on the corner where we meet them.

On the way back to the swank white Bauhaus tower where our hosts make their home, we pass a gated driveway and look in. I'm told there were kittens here–but now they're gone. Steve, with the baleful eyes and thin-lipped smile, makes a joke about some IDF soldiers coming there and eating them. "They thought they were Palestinian kittens," he punchlines.

I laugh, thinking about the lame pigeon that the guard on our Birthright trip refused to put out of its misery, joking in a kinder way, "It's a Palestinian pigeon." And my cousins in Beitar, a settlement south of Jerusalem, saying after the bulldozer attack on Yafo Street, "They're animals," in a tone not meant to be funny.

Back at the apartment, a coworker of one of the girls comes over with an overflowing tray of rice and chicken. It's a meal for us ten and ten over that. It's a beautiful gesture and we thank and eat profusely. The rice is good but the chicken's a bit dry.

The chef, Mohammed, takes us to the lushest hookah bar I've ever seen. It's a terraced circle around a fountain pulsing with a dozen intersecting water streams, with a moon bounce in the garden corner. A veritable garden of delights. An attendant comes around every few minutes with a pile of fractured coals and tends the pipes. Tangy black forest cake accompanies our drinks. Thick grounds of Arabic coffee dribble down the sides of my overturned mug until Nicoletta says she can see something in the way I drained it, the thumbprint of my fate contained in some lost saliva.

We drink and talk love and politics and sleep a few hours in the cool West Bank night. The imam wakes me at 4 and again at 5, screaming doomsday Arabic for 15 minutes at a time. Something I loved in Bosnia for its solemn far-country beauty is corrupted by his tone, and I think about the damage I would do to that loudspeaker if I were a punk kid growing up nearby. Do they even have those kinds of rebels over here?

I'm leaving, back on a bus to the checkpoint and Jerusalem. Nicoletta tells me to stay on the bus, only Palestinians under 45 have to get off at the checkpoint. They can't do anything, only maybe hassle me if they discover I'm Jewish and suspect my loyalties. They made her get off the bus, thinking she was Arab, before she flashed her diplomatic passport and told them she was daughter to the Bulgarian ambassador to the US.

I stay on the bus and nothing happens. The beautiful black Israeli checking my passport smiles at me and I smile at her, or maybe it's the other way around. And we pass out of that walled city, burned with peace signs and flags and slogans on one side and none on the other.

In Jerusalem, the bus lets me off outside the old city walls. I wander in anyway. Where else can you find a cheap falafel in this part of the city?

Dateline Jerusalem: Unholy City

(logo from a rad, rad club)

It's been one week since I arrived independently in Jerusalem, and I've gone on a naked run, heard a few Holocaust jokes and a serious suggestion to nuke the Kotel "so that all the compulsively religious will be forced to think rationally about their faith." So now I'm wondering: is it something about me that seeks out blasphemers, or have I stumbled into a hotbed of rebellion?

One of my aims in traveling is to give myself to a place, never say no to anything. I thought this philosophy would lead me on a skullcapped, sunburned desert wander, but it hasn't. Instead, I've come into a shade and darkness of nightlife and belief.

I've come upon deep, indissoluble questions here, that concern my new friends with an immediacy I've never considered and an urgency I've never felt. Like: what does it mean to be a Jew? My first Israeli friend is a gay girl from Tel Aviv who I tried to pick up. It didn't work out to my plan. But now she has become some kind of great friend, the kind I like to have with me at all times, especially during the in between times of a strange pilgrimage like this. I tried to convince her to join me in Jerusalem, and she said, "No, I hate it there!" I asked her why. She said, with a sensitivity I hadn't considered, "They think they're more Jewish than me."

In history, the wandering Jew practices dissent by maintaining his identity in a foreign place. But what form does this iconoclasm take in the land of the Jews? And it occurs to me that this is the most powerful thing in our tradition, dissent and nonconformity and, as Mort Saul says, acting as the conscience of the world. So, when the brilliant atheist whose couch I'm crashing on suggests a moment of memorial day silence among the secular Jews here when the Shabbat air raid siren goes off (Memorial Day being the only other time, besides for air raids, that the siren blasts), I listen.

But what will happen to us secular Jews in a world without anti-Semitism and our fathers' religion?–which, admittedly, is only and maybe not even a future possibility. Will we lose the powerful culture of Spinoza, Kafka and Lou Reed? Is a world without boundaries preferable, a world with more possibilities than just for or against? Should we install malfunctioning nuclear cores at the Kotel, Mecca and all of the major televangelism studios, and build the whole thing up from the quarks?

It's an experiment I'd like to try if there were more than one world.

Dateline Jerusalem: Hospitals

I first realized the hospital's proximity after the shit happened on Yafo St. The dead Arab didn't need any transfusions but the passengers in the bus he overturned with his front-end loader might have, and the sirens passed close by.

The girl I'm staying with flicked on the television, her eyes wide, and I looked at her in a clinical way. In truth I was excited too, in a way that I rarely get for news back home. The terror here is a community event, so alive and raw, so "it could be me" that you can't look away. I got a text immediately after: "Are you ok? Hope you're not on Yafo St." I got a few more calls later on. I was ok, I told them, but wow, how close.

Later, at night, I found myself walking on the shoulder of a steep mountain road toward another hospital. I foolishly hadn't brought out a map, and was less and less sure of my direction. But I kept walking toward the hospital, the university behind it, the two monumental landmarks that would help me find my bed in the dense Jerusalem fog.

At the hospital gates, I asked directions to the university campus. The guard loosely waved a hand to the right and said, "Just follow the road." A half-hour later I asked him again, having just completed a loop, in which every direction giver had told me, in more or less English, to keep going. But this is not the interesting part. I asked the man to elaborate, a bit worried. He told me:

"Ok, you go through the shopping center to the second floor. Then you walk across the air bridge to the hospital, not the emergency room, but to the right. You go through turning doors to the elevator bank to -1. Then you keep turning right, right, right, you will see it."

I thanked the man again and got to the meat of my Kafkaesque journey.

1:30 AM: When I got to the main entrance of the hospital, the security guard seemed to know what I was talking about. I bought a Coke and walked past the smokers, through the turning doors, inside. I found the elevator and took it down. The exit sign glowed further down the hall.

The hall was crowded with pallets, and my hustler's sense distracted me. I began to look them over for value. It gave me some comfort to see there wasn't anything that stood out, that this was a moderately safe space for the immoral public to access.

I walked down the hall to the exit door, and found it locked. A wave of tiredness hit me. I walked to the nearby stairwell, another exit sign. I followed exit signs through immaculate white halls. I said, "Hello," and got no reply. Everyone who was going to leave had left already.

There's no feeling like being lost in a hospital in a strange place. I thought back to Bosnia, to Sanela peeing blood and the nurse smoking in the emergency room, to the late night taxi to the properly-equipped hospital in Zenica, still pock-marked with mortars fired ten years earlier. The fluorescent hallways in that hospital flickered like the fever scenes in Jacob's Ladder, and I was glad the lights were calm and white this time around.

I followed the exit signs, conscious of the way back. In the end I found the exit, at least from that white-painted and sterile hell, and ran into a doctor with time on his hands. He showed me the university. It was a closed wing of a few classrooms. I was in the wrong hospital, searching out the wrong university. The landmarks I'd charted had turned out to be too common.

In the end, I took a 36 shekel taxi back to the place, and soon forgot my ordeal over tea and some late-night internet surfing. The experience wasn't so harrowing. But for just a little while I made it off the path, I traveled so far I wasn't sure I was ever coming back.