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?