Other Voices - More Messages from palestine

Gabrielle Sellers is a 25 year old American woman who, in May, 2003 decided to accept a job with an NGO in Ramallah, Palestine. This began what has become something of an incredible journey: She had never been to the Middle East before, and spoke no Arabic. “Nonetheless, I came here in July and began my work . . . and my new life.” She writes. “I came here in the midst of a failed hudna, which gave me a sense of what Israel-Palestine is like in "peaceful" times. Now, even in Ramallah, the Manhattan of the West Bank, things are slowly starting to disintegrate. I continue my work as a Program Manager/Grantwriter at a Palestinian NGO, but more and more I feel my true job here is to tell the world the story that is being written around me each day. And so each week, I write a short essay about some element of life here or something that has taken place. I love my life here, and so I write under a pseudonym, to protect the happiness that I have found in spite of an often saddening reality. I am not a reporter, an activist, or a politician. I am just a woman who needed to see the reality here for herself.”

I don’t understand, I tell a friend: in this process of getting ready to go to Palestine, I have been both labeled a Zionist, and asked if I was Anti-Semitic. He smiles a broad smile; now you understand Israel.

I see a picture of an Arab man, framed with his hands thrown up as if caught in dance, his mouth open, a golden mosque and a square of blue sky framed behind him. A party, I think. A procession. The third time I see the picture, I see the blood stains on his clothes, and realize that what I had mistaken for an open smile is a grimace, his open arms a plea.

I am at a training for those of us going to work in war zones. A student from the Balkans eyes me with suspicion, comments on my small silver cross, and talks about how one cannot have an idea of what it is like in a war zone until it becomes your life. I do not feel rebuffed, but compassionate, accepting of her challenges. At the end, haltingly, she speaks of how if war had not reached her land, her life, she would not go. And as she raises her brilliant eyes to mine I see what I least expected: respect.

My mother heralded my return from Nicaragua as a return to normalcy, to safety. Five weeks later I was standing on Pier 11, baptized with the ash and dust of so many dead. Safety is perhaps another contradiction.

The responses are more or less the same: a pause, and then eyes shift from my face, or widen, or close. Swallowing hard, most form only, “Oh.” I meet one person’s blue gaze when I tell him I do not speak Arabic, and have never been to the Middle East. He finally looks down with a half-smile that holds all of the limitations, contradictions, and uncertainties of this decision. I do not shy away from the shock and fear; I open myself up to the criticism by not filling the silences with protestations of skill or righteous fervor. They are right: I do not, cannot know. But soon, I will.

Sometime I am overwhelmed with the contradictions of this decision, with my own inadequacy for this challenge, and I laugh out of complete incomprehension for where I could even begin to start to prepare myself. Religious faith is a funny thing, and as much as anything I feel as if now my Christianity asks that I trust in my God and so myself. Moses had a speech impediment. Jonah ran away from God’s command. Job again and again railed against God for his suffering. And before He died, Jesus prayed, “Abba, Father, if it is possible, take this cup from me. Yet not as I will, but as You will.” We are not always called to serve from strength. Sometimes instead it is from a place inside of us of weakness and humility. When I laugh it is to acknowledge that there is no way I could do this on my own, and to thank God that I do not have to.

For months I read Israeli and Palestinian papers with fear in my heart that I would find suicide bombings that could have taken friends from me. For weeks I read the same papers with equal fear that I would find new crackdowns, curfews, demolitions, occupations. The best news was a slow news day in which the papers actually had space to talk about tax reforms, strikes, or other domestic issues. Now, in a few weeks, I read, despite myself, with interest and hope. Perhaps it’s just another failed peace process, I say, but at least for this moment there is a peace process. I do not hope naively for security or peace, but am taken aback by the magnitude of possibility.

I write to you with great joy in my heart: after many long months of mostly silence, I feel as if I am rediscovering words—as if all of the stories waiting to be told are smooth stones that slip through my fingers onto the page. These chances to talk to you all are very precious to me, and I thank you for humoring me.

I am currently participating in a program called CONTACT. It is a program for conflict transformation across cultures, and we who gather here have come to Vermont to learn what it means to be peacebuilders. Kenyans, Palestinians, North Americans, Rwandans, Bosnians, Sri Lankans and so many more—about sixty in all. All bring their stories of pain, and hope. Some speak of genocide and use not the impersonal terms that most of us read in the newspapers but of their own mothers, children, neighbors. We come together and study what is done by our governments in our names, and what is done by us to undo the hurt and wrongs done by our own people. How to transform poverty, violence, and discrimination into a world of acceptance and compassion of which we can all be proud.

In the past two weeks I have found spaces in myself of intolerance and pain that I did not know existed, and explored the ways in which they affect my life. There is no hierarchy of pain in our circle: my deep regret for what my country does is as validated as that of the Tibetan refugee from India who had not been able to speak to his family at home in eight years. I have too many stories to tell: every day I see some new and precious glimpse of the best of Humanity that I will take out and breathe in when I need to heal in Palestine.

Too many stories to tell you all, but a couple I must share, for from them I learn much about my upcoming work. My roommate, Reem Jafari, is from Bethlehem. Reem grew up under occupation, and speaks of her life in the camps and friends in prison the way I speak of my time at Wofford or my mother’s home. While I looked forward for months with only anticipation to participating in this program, her life was the uncertainty of visas that could be granted or denied on a whim, borders that could be closed, transports that could fill. But she approaches life here with a delight that warms me from within, and seeks to understand Judaism and Israelis with a wisdom and dedication that belies her years. She is twenty-one, and in so many ways my teacher.

In the mornings I read American and Israeli papers, and the few bits and pieces of Palestinian news that I can find in English. Reem reads al-Jazeera and translates for me. Her family occasionally calls from Bethlehem. Somehow their truth is never what we read in any of the newspapers. We talk in the early morning and late into the night about politics, families, love, friends, work—the familiar spaces of new friends seeking common ground. At times it is possible for me to forget how different our life experiences have been. Then something will remind me and I am filled not with shame or guilt for having forgotten, but respect and friendship for this wise and warm person whom I am proud to call my friend.

Reem says to me one day, “I hear Westerners here who have visited Palestine say that we are defeated, powerless. But we are NOT defeated. How can they say that when so many of us still struggle, still hope? We will not be defeated.”

I look at her, uncertain. What do I know of hopelessness and powerlessness? “You are right,” I say to her. “It is easy for us coming in sometimes to only see the sadness, the pain. But I see no defeat in you. I see joy and love. I see your passion and commitment to your people. My promise to you is that when I write I will write about the suffering because it is a story that should be told. But I will not forget to write about the joy I find in Palestine, because people must know that, too.” She smiles and our eyes meet. “There is joy,” she says. I nod.

Later, I am talking to a friend who worked with the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine. He tells of going, with four other volunteers, to break a roadblock. Tall and long as the valley it fills, the four begin their work with shovels and pickaxes. They have tried and failed to get a bulldozer. But they go, he tells me, and decide to keep going back until they have finished. Four people in a country not their own, chipping away at the packed dirt and rocks in the hot sun. Palestinians walk past and he fights his own frustration when most do not stop to help. He says he saw defeat in them then. They dig for hours until at last a bulldozer comes, as if their bizarre rain dance had brought a downpour of help. The road is open. He tells me that he heard that later in the nearby villages people talked aloud wondering why they had not defied the army and taken the road block down, and that he was as glad at that as when he saw them using the newly cleared road. I can taste his story like grit and sweat in my mouth—the bitter tang of frustration and sense of fruitlessness that I had so many times in Nicaragua. Who, I wonder, is defeated? They that find ways to make lives amid road blocks and rubble, or we who get frustrated and lose hope so easily amid our high ideals and good intentions?

I do not have the courage or strength that I see in my friends who have gone from the West to work in Palestine, and I know that I will need your support, my dear friends. Please, hold me in your hearts and remind me of why I am going.

I tell Reem that one of our Jewish colleagues will be singing Shalom-Salaam the following day. I ask her if she ever sang it during the Oslo years. She smiles: of course. It was the peace song. She sighs. “There is one word of Arabic in the whole song. This is what the Israelis call equality. Dialogue.” I am struck dumb as I realize that she is right—so many levels of repression that I cannot understand. I am fearful to tell my Jewish friend what she has said—I think that he will be upset. But when I reluctantly do he quickly rattles off how it could be sung in Arabic just as easily, and I feel in myself how quick I am to protect and shelter when it is the truth that could set us all free. When the time comes the three of us sing it together. Muslim. Jew. Christian. Our three voices blend and others join. There is clapping, harmony. I am struck as the sound rises that I cannot hear my voice. But I know that it is there, a fiber in the thick rope of song that our group has made.

Dear friends, some of you have asked if you can share these stories with your friends and colleagues. I hope that you will do with them as you like, although it feels odd giving permission since I do not really feel it is mine to grant. But as my friend Zelda says, the stories like this that we hear can be stones thrown into the water that can make ever-greater ripples in the world, if we let them.

Greetings from Ramallah! A world away from what I have known, but not, maybe, in any way that I could have predicted or even explained to you here. I will try and see how it goes.

To set everyone’s mind firmly at rest for me, I have never felt so safe in my life. This is not the alien sensation of walking on the streets of El Viejo, or even the hostile politeness of New York City. I feel as I would feel walking down the street in small town USA, although Ramallah is a city of 80,000. There are no tanks in Ramallah, and the soldiers are not the constant presence here that they are in some parts of Palestine. No, don’t worry: I am not being silly and walking around by myself after dark or anything.

You might laugh, but several Palestinian American women have told me that they would never raise their children in America. It is too dangerous, they say.

This first week here has been consumed with children. Playing with Sandra’s (my boss’s) children, or Fidah’s, the woman I am staying with for the first couple of weeks. I am surrounded by children, who make wonderful playmates and do not care that my silly ingleezi brain does not understand Arabic. Sandra’s two children, Nader and Nora, especially seem content that I can make up splendid games (the easy kind, with no words), listen to their prattle (though I understand little of it), and do not make trying grown-up like demands on their time. For my part, since I do not understand their words, I am struck by the simple ballet of each gesture, tone of voice, sudden smile or tear. The first day I met her Nora, about two, very solemnly and urgently told me a story. I looked at Sandra when she had finished, asking her to translate. She said, without missing a beat, that her daughter was telling me of the time, in April, when the soldiers were at the end of the street, and how for two days the noise of their guns and tanks terrified her. I swallowed the lump that rose to my throat thinking of this cherub child with her curls and chubby cheeks alongside tanks and soldiers. I wondered if this early brush with war would be her earliest memory, and breathed a prayer that it would fall into the mist of babyhood.

When Sandra and another co-worker, Maggie, came to pick me up in East Jerusalem, we came through the DOC checkpoint—a special checkpoint for international workers and diplomats. Sandra and I were fine, but the soldier noticed that Maggie’s USAID identification card had a scanned picture. Maggie told him that her organization scanned all of their pictures and sent them via email to have the cards made. He told her it was a fake, although she protested that why would she use a fake ID to get INTO Ramallah? For this offense all three of us waited for an hour in the sun while he waited for a call from his superior. As I found myself getting hotter and more uncomfortable, I thought about these soldier-boys (no more than perhaps nineteen or twenty). If I were asked to spend days standing on a baking-hot road speaking with people who treated me with at best disdain, would I be more likely to come to hate the distant specter of the Israeli government who had asked me to serve, or the immediacy of angry Palestinians? It is so much more difficult to resent those we know than those we do not. Maggie told another story about being at a checkpoint: the soldier who was looking at her card heard a rap song on her radio, and gestured for her to turn up the song. He stood there and danced in the street, even running off for a moment and returning with his gun so that he could use it for a prop in his dance. She told the story with a bitter humor, recalling the humiliation of watching cars piling up behind her while the soldier made her wait. Did he know, I wondered? Did he even realize how embarrassing it would be for her to know that others thought that she had been responsible for lengthening their wait? Could it have been an act of childish pleasure, or even a misguided attempt to reach out? I do not, cannot know, but I am struck by the magnitude of this simple act.

You all have asked lots of questions about my work. As I assured everyone before I came, it is very boring. I will be working on grant proposals and monitoring and evaluation reports, mainly. Plus sitting in on some management trainings (strategic planning and such), and teaching a class in conversational English. MA’AN is also looking to revamp its monitoring and evaluation system, and today Sami offered that job to me if I would like to use it for my SIT Capstone project. So far the job is going very well: it is a relief after having paid through the teeth for an SIT education to see what an advantage it truly is. I was not only able to jump right into work, but also have been able to provide some training materials that Sandra and Sami seem to think will prove invaluable. My first two deadlines were on a Land Rights proposal to build the capacity of village committees that are working on various actions to protest the Separation/Apartheid Wall between Israel and the Territories. Enshallah, we will be training the committees in project management, and helping them to zone land where the Israeli government says the ownership is questionable. If the committees can prove that the farmers actually own this land, then legally they must compensate them. In this world where I feel often like Alice gone down the rabbit hole, I wonder if the zoning will mean anything, but we do what we can. In a few months’ time I will be involved with doing the final evaluation of a huge community rehabilitation project in the Salfeet District. The project has built community centers and schools, equipped classrooms, and has built a road to connect the nine villages in the project to the town of Salfeet. The District is cut in half by an access road for the Israeli settlement of Ariel, and so these nine communities (south of the road) are virtually cut off from all social services. Because there are so many settlements in the district, there is a high Israeli Occupation/Defense Force presence in the area. One note: as I talk about my work, I frequently find that the language is problematic, for instance, what the Israeli army call “defense” the Palestinians see as “occupation.” To be fair to both sides, I have used the terms of both sides here, and will continue to do so.

I remember in Nicaragua how we used to roll our eyes and sigh at the NGO workers for the large aid organizations in Managua. The foreigners often didn’t even know the language, and many times even the nationals were shocked to come to our campo projects and see the reality. Imagine, we said, Nicaraguans who have never been into the deeply impoverished rural areas. If I let it happen that way, this could be my reality. Sandra seems a little surprised by my repeated questions about how to go to visit our projects or how to see the northern part of the territories, but to me it would be such a terrible waste to come so far and not truly experience the reality of life for most Palestinians. Sami, the Executive Director, agrees with me, and has agreed to look for ways to get me into the field.

My friends, so much to say. I write and write here until I feel cleaned out inside, and then study my Arabic so that I can have more words to describe everything here. My first few days here I hit hard against Arabic like smooth marble upon which I despaired at ever getting the slightest toehold. Now I can feel my brain starting to carve chinks of meaning, and when I listen I can catch one word in ten. Shweyh-shweyh: slowly, slowly.

I am going to a wedding this weekend—Fidah’s cousin. It is a great honor to be invited, and I am pleased. Then on Sunday I will be moving into my new place with my roommate, Arij, who is from Bethlehem like my dear Reem. I will keep you all updated with my numbers.

Thanks to you all for your thoughts and prayers. I cannot respond to them all, but they mean so much for me. As you said, Sebastiaan, in this part of the world it is good to have prayers to Allah, Yahweh, and the Christian Trinity. I will probably need all three.

Salaam alekum, my friends, peace be with you. I struggled with what to call this email for the longest time, and finally settled on the above. Because what I want to convey here is that in spite of the closures, the curfews, the occupation that coats everything in our lives here with film like black soot, this place has a beautiful eloquence like nothing I have ever known.

For everything in this life that is good, there is a period of congratulations. For daughters graduated, sons engaged. People come to the house to share the good fortune of what has come to pass. For everything that is sad—loss of work, illness, death—there is a similar period of condolence. These sadnesses are open and shared, accompanied with “il-ham-dil-allah.” The first time I heard this I thought I was confused. Didn’t that mean thank God, I asked? Of course, Fidah answered me. It is when we are grieving that we most need to believe that God has a plan for us.

It was with a shock the other day that I realized that the sight of women in their hagebs and abeyas walking in the street like wrapped roses was no longer strange to my eyes.

This past weekend, I went to a wedding. The ceremony is done in private, but the wedding is a two-day festival. The first night, the bride and groom write each other’s initials in their hands with henna. At the henna, the groom also gives the bride gold jewelry: necklaces, bracelets, rings, earrings. The grandmothers of the pair dance, and members of the family call out blessings or sing the praises of the bride and her family: her beauty is unsurpassed, her father is a generous man, her grandfather was prosperous. The family dance and dance, while the couple sit and watch on a special throne. As only women or close family are allowed to enter, even if the bride usually veils, she can wear her hair down and can uncover her arms. Or she may choose to wear a traditional dress called a thob (rhymes with “robe”). The second ceremony is more like a party, where the bride wears a Western-style white wedding dress. If any man enters, there is a special wedding hood to cover her arms and hair.

I did not come to appreciate being a woman here until the wedding. I had been told what to expect, and for the first few hours, was dazzled by the spectacle of the henna. As I came to my senses a bit I realized that there were no men present over the age of ten except for the bride’s brother, not even her father. The gaiety of the event, the heady intoxication of dance and song, was a women’s creation. I watched the bride flick her arms and hips delicately as she danced—not for here the potent sexuality of Nicaraguan dance. She had that quiet, simple confidence that women have when they know they are the most beautiful woman in the room. It was a moment I will never forget: that moment when I realized that being a woman, which usually restricts me from speaking freely with whomever I choose, walking in the evenings, or wearing what I like, had been what had allowed me to see and experience the henna. For the first time, maybe, I understood the benefits that come with the restrictions of womanhood here.

The next day after a quiet lunch with her husband before the actual ceremony, I watched the bride go back to her room where her face crumpled like the leftover decorations of the night before at the thought that in a few short hours she would go from her father’s home to her husband’s. She caught my eye and smiled a watery smile. “I must be happy,” she said in her scant English, batting away both her tears and her sadness. Our eyes held for a moment before she busied herself. “It is a big change,” I said carefully, wanting to hold her and cry together for something called childhood that we all must lose somewhere along the way. When she raised her head again, the frightened girl was gone, replaced by the woman eyes of the night before. I do not know if she heard me, or understood.

On the way to the wedding we had to pass two roadblocks and a checkpoint. I was startled by the impact that that first destroyed road had on me. I watched the women, men, and even small children climbing well-worn paths over piles of rubble. Saw where deep gashes had been made in the pavement. This road went to the villages around Ramallah. I do not know for myself, but I was told that there are no routes out of the territories along this road for 100 kilometers. What there ARE in those kilometers are Palestinian villages with friends and families now separated by impassable roads. When I ask people how far away their village is they always give two answers: “Well, it used to be fifteen minutes away. But now it is an hour.” I am sorry my friends, but I truly question what the possible rationale for such destruction can be except to break the spirit of the Palestinian people.

At the checkpoint the guard opened the bus door next to me. I turned to face him so that I could see if he wanted to see my passport. He motioned for me to hand it do him, and when I showed an American passport, asked me a question in Hebrew. I shook my head in incomprehension, but my fellow passengers brayed laughter and called, “Ingleezi, ingleezi.” He handed back my documents and shut the door hard, and Fidah said something hardly in Arabic to the people on the bus. Another soldier came, an older one with his hand tense on his machine gun. He surveyed us all for a long minute, then moved away with his body speaking both power and contempt. As we moved forward, Fidah said with as much kindness as she could muster, “NEVER look at them. They’ll think you’re being defiant. Never offer them your documents—they’ll tap you if they want them.” I asked her what she had said to the others. “I told them that you were new, but that they should know better; their laughter brought the second soldier.” She sighed and closed her eyes. “You just never know what they will do.” I was overwhelmed that something as simple as watching someone so that I could comply could have brought on so much grief; reminded once again that I do not yet know the rules by which I must play.

I also experienced my first curfew the other day. In the middle of the day I dimly heard a voice over a loudspeaker from outside. Then I heard Sandra’s sharp breath and three people burst into our office to crane their heads out the window. What are they saying, I asked? Curfew, she said shortly, gathering her papers in one hand and closing her laptop with the other. Cell phones and land lines jangled as people called in and out telling family and friends. The office was empty in minutes. What happened, I asked? They found a missing Jewish settler dead in Betuina, I was told. I knew the name only because it was the suburb where I lived. What does the Israeli army do during curfew, I asked. Do they investigate? What do they gain by closing everything? Sandra is always careful not to bias me. “Look for yourself tonight. You’ll be in Betuina. See if you see any soldiers do anything.” I did not. The next day everything was open and life resumed as normal. The grapevine here says that it wasn’t the missing settler at all, but an Arab petty criminal. I do not know for sure, but we have received neither condemnations nor apologies. Our collective punishment for a hastily assumed crime.

Yesterday I was walking to the bus stop with one of my co-workers, Wahbeh. My house is just off the road to Jerusalem, where he lived. Did he like Jerusalem, I asked? “Of course!” he said. “Jerusalem is . . . Jerusalem is everything.” I heard your voices: “Jerusalem is the broken heart of the world.” “It’s the clitoris of the world, made to give pleasure.” “Jerusalem is like a single white candle in the dark.” “I’ve gone into Jerusalem withdrawal.” No wonder so many lay claim to it, and will not let it go. Who would want to lose their “everything”?

Reem takes me to Dehesheh camp in Bethlehem. We walk through narrow, crowded streets mellow with the evening light. The air is thick with the sounds of traffic, birds, and children. I am stopped short before a wall of Arabic graffiti by the sight of something familiar. I pause. A Star of David. A swastika. A new concrete post only partially obscures the equals sign. “It says—” Reem begins. “I know what it says,” I say, my throat dry. I run my fingers over the rough surface of the concrete, willing my touch to erase the pain of this image.

I am walking through the streets of Bethlehem with my roommate, Arij. She shows me the barricades and barbed wire surrounding Rachel’s tomb. What would the ever-patient, maternal Rachel say if she saw her grave today? We stop again nearby at the Paradise Hotel. I hear Arij tell me of the bombings and gun fights that scarred this burned and sealed building with its cadre of old men swapping stories before it. A crater in the stone wall is cool and surprisingly smooth to my touch.

The apostle Thomas said that he would not believe in the resurrection until he put his own hand in Jesus’s side. My friends, I have touched Palestine’s wounds, run my hand over Israel’s tears. And if ever I did, I do not doubt any longer the pain of both people.

The streets by Reem’s house are newly paved. Is it so easy, then, to cover up the damage from the tanks? I can write a proposal to build a road, a school, a community center. I cannot write into existence a new past, or a new future. Only the Palestinians and Israelis themselves can do that. Reem’s sister Riham asks me, “What would you do? What would you do if they took your home?” Nothing in my life has prepared me to answer her . . .

I wrote this in Arij’s comfortable bedroom, my back turned to the window’s framed view of an Israeli settlement. When I wrote of Riham, I could not write any more but gave myself over to tears. I cried until I couldn’t cry any more—for Nora telling me of the soldiers at the end of her street, for the posters of killed/martyred children that I pass on the way to work, for the look of disgust on the faces of Israeli soldiers when I tell them where I live. I cried until I felt empty, clean. “How was Bethlehem?” Sandra asked on Saturday morning at work. I hesitated, “Intense,” I said, perhaps wanting a little sympathy for my tears. “Did anything happen?” she asked. No. Yes. Everything and nothing at all. An average day in Palestine that left my American sureties as full of holes as the Paradise Hotel. With her question I saw the empty luxury of my tears: who was I to cry for Palestine, for Israel, for the pain of others when I had lost no one, suffered nothing? What good did my tears of compassion do? Compassion sometimes is not enough. A potent reminder not to forget what actions I can take.

At work that morning I read an email from a Jordanian friend, where she reminded me gently not to see only destruction and pain. You are so right, my dear. What I need to say is that as much as this place might affect ME, I see only hope in the resilience and perseverance in Palestine. The people here have not only refused to give up their right to their land: they have refused to give up their normalcy. What ever happens, people here shrug their shoulders, laugh, and move on. Not without bitterness, not without hoping, enshallah, that one day this long dark journey will be behind us. But without compromise. Once I saw a woman walk over a roadblock, then stand for nearly half-an-hour at a checkpoint while the guard changed. Afterwards she said nothing about injustice or humiliation. She worried aloud that she had dust on her shoes.

I am washing dishes in my kitchen sink when I hear something cracking in the distance. At first it does not register as anything much, but then I remember where I am. I go out to the living room where Arij and two of our neighbors are watching television. “What’s happening outside?” I ask in a voice I hope is casual. “Is it fireworks for the Tawjihi (school exams) or is it . . . ?” Arij and the others do not look up or listen to the sounds. “Fireworks,” all three say with authority. Whether they are authorities in telling the difference between fireworks and gunfire, or at denial I do not know. I go back to my dishes. It dawns on me that it doesn’t matter—that it matter so little I laugh out loud at my soapy plates. Standing here, in my kitchen, what would I do differently if those noises in the distance were guns? Would I not stack my plates, lock my doors, and pray that I and mine would be safe through the night all the same? What would change for me, except that my safe house would become a prison I was frightened to leave? What a funny thing it is to learn that the truth does not always set us free—that sometimes it can fence us in. The truth is not as big a luxury as my tears, maybe, but neither does it always do that much good. The exams are finished, but some nights there are still fireworks in the distance. My dishes dry in the rack, and there is dust on my shoes.

I went to Jerusalem my first Sunday here. “You’ll feel odd being out of Palestine,” a friend warns me before I leave. “Coming in, I expected more of a difference,” I say carelessly. Fidah looks at me, her eyes filled with something I cannot name. “This time, you’ll see it,” she says at length. She was wrong; this whole beautiful, broken land was still too new for me to see the subtleties. But now, coming out of Ramallah to go to Bethlehem, Jerusalem leapt at me in pavement and new paint and neatly landscaped trees that assailed me with their newness and order. Ramallah, as a friend says, is the Manhattan of Palestine. But still in small ways a world apart from life across the Green Line.

My apologies for a long-ish message: I had thought to split this in half, but as I read it I think I want you to get the full force of it, for that is how it all happened.

I spent this weekend with my friend Tarek in the village of Yanun. As we drove from Aqraba, the nearest town, we looked out over the Jordan Valley and I was certain that a breath of wind would tip our rattling car over the edge of the earth.

I knew nothing about Yanun before Tarek’s invitation—he had been twice before. As we bumped through olive groves and past cornfields he filled me in on the history. The village had once had more than 200 people. Fifty-four remained. Now the valley in which it nestled wore atop the surrounding hills a circlet of Israeli settlements whose members sometimes came down to steal the sheep or shot farmers bringing in harvest—a crown of thorns never far from the thoughts of the people of Yanun. Most sad to me is that many attacks happened on Shabbos. Tarek told me that the previous Friday a man had been shot while trying to protect his family’s sheep. We would meet him during our time there.

Soon enough I heard Adnan’s story. It started out much as I had expected: a call in the night that some men were stealing sheep. Adnan responding. A struggle, a shot that ricocheted off a rock and flung over two dozen pieces of metal into Adnan’s leg that cannot be removed without further damaging the tissue. Then Adnan’s story took a turn I did not understand: the settlers left, and he went to the doctor. I felt as if surely I must have missed something. When Adnan finished, one of the others asked what the settler who had shot him had done afterwards. He just stood there, Adnan said. He dropped his gun and stood there. He did not seem to see anything surprising about this apparent display of remorse.

As we drove into Yanun on Friday afternoon, Tarek, passably fluent in five languages, including Arabic, called over his shoulder, “Do you speak French? There are a lot of French volunteers in Yanun now.” Minutes later I was inside the International House, surrounded by French peace activists. A few spoke Spanish, and struggled along as I do in Arabic. Spanish, French, and Arabic made a sticky paste that clung to the roof of my mouth. It was Saturday before I could spit it out and answer properly in any of them.

There is magic in words. I have shared with you all the lack of a common language with which to talk about the conflict: on the right tongue, “defense” rolls off as “occupation;” “dialogue” becomes “betrayal.” But this was white magic we were making: Arabic turns Spanish house into a glass: “casa.” “Hello” shifts from a greeting into a just-as-generic “sweet” or “nice.” Confronted with these linguistic witcheries, missing still the nuances of an Arabic ear, I cast my own spells: twice my lazy tongue turned a little boy into a camel.

Tarek and I have a long discussion about language. Is it just a collection of sounds, as Tarek posits, or does it have some higher impact on the mind? Is it possible to have different personalities in different languages? We come to no definite conclusion, but as I watch as the hearts and houses of Yanun open to Tarek—listen to the stories his comprehension allows us to hear in full—I think, yes. There IS magic in words.

Sunday we went to a pool that a local farmer had carved out of the rocky ground. We sat and ate fresh figs in the shade, and as a kitten that had made my acquaintance rummaged happily over my reclining frame I thought surely that we had stumbled into Eden. On the walk back over the hills we found less bountiful surprises: an empty shell casing, half a missile. In this Eden even the youngest children are confronted with these fruits of knowledge of good and evil.

Last Thursday I went walking in West Jerusalem for the first time with my friend Seth. He took me into a shop and showed me Hebrew calligraphy. He explained to me the care that goes in to the making of each mezuzah, how each letter must be perfect down to the clefs that grace the top of each letter just so, or the piece must be discarded. So much care and time must go into these blessings that grace every doorway, into fulfilling God’s commands. I watch women here carefully arranging their hagebs and donning their abeyas, see men and women carefully washing themselves to pray. As we internationals sat in the belly of Yanun wondering if this Shabbos would bring conflict with the settlers in the hills—as we hear of a suicide bombing in a settlement in Hebron—some here name this care “insincerity.” But as I witness here the power of the connection between men and God—the willingness of people to strive for a better world—my conjurer’s tongue names it “Hope.”

On our way home we decided to stop off to see the settlement of Ariel—one of the largest settlements in the Territories. We stood dustily by the side of the road until a large truck stopped for us. We spoke impersonally in English until Tarek finally worked up the nerve to ask the driver if he was Arab. I cannot describe the feeling of relief that came with his laugh of affirmation. All of us relaxed into the ease of our familiar selves, shedding all pretense.

Ariel was a blur to me, at first. My initial impression was to be struck by the solidity of it all: the caravans, the well-built houses, the neatly painted lines on the street. It was very much THERE, and we wondered aloud how it would be possible to come to any sort of agreement about this enormous suburb and its feeder roads in the middle of Palestine. Tarek asked a few people why they chose to live there, and none of their answers held even a trace of politics. It was quiet, they said. And inexpensive, subsidized by the Israeli government. I didn’t know where to go in the face of such contradiction, whether to feel frustrated by the ignorance and remarkable determination not to see the impact of Ariel, or anger at the government that had chosen to provide affordable housing for its people over the Green Line. Add to confusion of Ariel a Palestinian man who was doing construction there. Why do you work to build a settlement, Tarek asked? “I have six children,” the man replied without hesitation. Who would dare to call his attempt at survival treachery?

We rest for a bit beside the Ariel swimming pool. A cluster of children walks by, and suddenly I have a vision of them, barreling in from outside: “MOM! It’s hot. Can we go to the pool?!” Their faces upturned, begging; their mother secure in the knowledge that there are many soldiers to ensure their safety. I am filled with a sudden anger at WHOEVER has turned this innocent request—the daily life of a child here in Ariel—into a political statement.

We end up in the Ariel Holocaust museum that Tarek’s friend Paul had wanted to find—two rooms only, but the old curator and his wife welcome us in graciously. The old man says to me with a sad smile, “It is in Hebrew. I hope you understand what you see.” I ask him of his life: how long had he been in Israel? When had he come to Ariel? He tells me proudly that he had come here as a settler in 1946, with his brother, the only family he had left after Treblenka. He had lived near the coast until eleven years ago, when he sought out the quiet of Ariel after retirement due to poor health. Was it my first time in Israel, he asks? At my nod, his smile widens, “Every time here is the first time.” I feel my chest constrict as I walk around, staring into faces long gone to dust; the sorrow, the pain. My mind flails around to find the firm foundation of my outrage through seeking to compare these grainy photos to modern-day Palestine, but I cannot. The curator is suddenly behind us: “Do you know what you are seeing?” he asks, gesturing to a grisly photo. “Yes . . . I think so,” Paul says. “Do you know what this is?” the old man asks again, more insistently. All four of us gaze at the cart piled high with corpses. I sense in Paul the same resistance I feel in myself to name this horror aloud. “It’s . . . dead . . . bodies,” he finally says. The man slowly speaks of the ghettos and I fight a childish urge to plug my fingers in my ears—too much, the voice inside my head screams as silently as the grimacing mouths of the photos. Too much.

My apologies to those of you who are looking for the neat way I will weave this sick old man and his museum into the rest of this letter. But I have no way to tie this up neatly with string and give it to you. This time, I just needed to share.

There was a stir in the office today, a rumor that rustled among us as softly as a breath of wind on a hot day: Qalandia, the main checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem, might be dismantled. We talked about it casually, without excitement. Nobody voiced strong opinions, or dared to think that it might be true. Several people in our office do not have Jerusalem IDs, which means that they are not allowed entry into the city. One woman, Rania, whose sister married a man from East Jerusalem, has not been able to see her sister’s new home. We asked Wahbeh, who comes from Jerusalem each day, is it true? He shook his head, ever so slightly self-important to be the center of attention. No. Nobody’s taking down Qalandia. The little flicker of hope dies as swiftly as it came.

I met Tarek and Paul for lunch in Ramallah, and asked if anything had been different at Qalandia when they had come through later in the day. Still hoping, I guess. Paul responded by asking me what they were doing, why had they taken down the metal awnings?

Was it true then? Was it possible? Excited at the thought of what this could mean, I told my co-workers. It’s true, I said. They’re taking down the awnings. Qalandia is coming down. People spoke with the same careless tones as before, but the quick glances and slight flush in their cheeks betrayed their feelings.

The next day I went through Qalandia on my way to check the progress of some youth clubs in East Jerusalem. The awnings were down. But leaning every which way like a giant’s game of pickup sticks were the newer, stronger awnings. Qalandia was not being taken down, it was being renovated. My co-workers joke about how the Israeli army hired a decorator who’s making changes. I laugh, too, but still I am a little sad.

The first word of Arabic I learned was “Enshallah,” probably because I heard it the most. It means “God willing.” It pops up in a variety of situations. “See you at work tomorrow.” “Enshallah.” “Is your sister-in-law pregnant?” “Enshallah.” “Do you think you will be able to go to visit your family in Jenin?” “Enshallah.” All of life’s joys and sorrows, encapsulated into one expression of faith. I wish we had something in English that was comparable. Even though my God is not the same as theirs, I have come to use this word, too, to send my hopes and plans heavenward.

I received word from Yanun, the village that I wrote you all about last week. One of the internationals, the coordinator, Miriam, had been arrested, taken to the police station, and released. In her absence, a group of settlers came down from the hill, entered the International House, and counted how many people were there. Then they left. I do not know what this means, but the feeling of threat and intimidation echoes down the line. I remember the hills that seem to protect, but at the same time hold Yanun in a vise. I rang off and sat staring out my window, my heart beating out a rackety rhythm: i was there, i was there, i was there. But for chance or luck, any day for reasons I may not know, that could be me. How does one describe the chill of coincidence, the involvement through association? How callous it feels to know that every day so much worse happens here, and yet I sit at my desk and continue to churn out my proposals, oblivious. Like everyone, I have my blinders.

Sandra is gone at a meeting when I get the phone call about Yanun. When she comes back I tell her, getting surprisingly choked, what has happened. Probably I am seeking sympathy. She nods. A pause. Then she tells me about her meeting. News, I think, we are exchanging news. The flotsam and jetsam of the day, nothing special, or particularly exciting. I suddenly feel very alone.

At lunch I find my friend Wahib, who is from near Nablus, not far from Yanun. Carefully, blinking back tears, I tell him what has happened, that Miriam has been arrested. I am sure he takes in my tears, the slump of my shoulders. He says, “It is the life here. I never know if today I might be arrested.” His words are like a slap in the face, shutting the door of my empathy with an echoing slam. It is only later that I see the buried wisdom, and feel his kindness: don’t borrow another’s sorrow. Your own might find you soon enough. Enjoy what you have today.

I asked some friends who speak some English, what is the word in Arabic for hope? Hope they repeat in accented English, their faces blank. I try to explain: it is what you feel when you want tomorrow to be better than today. They smile and nod. Enshallah. Sort of, I say. But what do you call that feeling that God WILL be willing? They shake their heads, confused. What do you mean? Of course some tomorrow will be better than today. Maybe first it will be worse, maybe not. But in God’s time things will always get better.

Perhaps, I suddenly think, this is the difference in their hope and mine. My hope grew accustomed to skimming lightly over well-paved roads and traveling freely without restriction. It blares out cheerful messages in giant neon letters, and I faithfully change the bulbs. The Palestinian hope is so unwavering that it is almost an afterthought, carried close to the chest like verses from the Qu'ran. It is the solid rock out of which they build their houses, carefully quarried, precisely cut and set. It goes slowly, carefully, and it does not ask for too much too quickly. It is a hope that knows what it means to be disappointed, and so digs itself deep into the rocky soil of Palestine so that it will not be uprooted easily. As I feel the ebb and flow of my own feelings here, I have a lot of admiration for this hope that cannot be shaken or defeated, enshallah.

I was thinking of you all today as I walked downtown in Ramallah. I was thinking of you all reading my messages, and that maybe you wondered what about this place captivates me, keeps me whole. So often the things that make it onto paper are the things that tug at my sleeve and demand my attention like needy children, but I do not want to neglect the moments of joy that fill and sustain me. The messages you send me telling me to be strong are very welcome, but at the same time, they make me realize that I have not painted for you the total picture of life here.

So many of my joys here are the joys of accomplishment, the astonishing joy of an infant who has learned to cross some boundary that previously held it back. The joy of standing in my newly clean apartment, having figured out what of the bizarre looking creams and jars and bottles will work for floor, counter, carpet. The joy of watching Arij nod approvingly at a meal I have cooked—of knowing that for that moment I have become something roughly like what people expect me to be. The joy of the Arabic words that sometimes slip off my tongue easily instead of needing to be coaxed like the sulky boys that play in the stairwell of my office building. The joy of finding out how easy it is to make friends without the burden of needing to vacuum up the words that litter the spaces between us.

Then there are the unexpected moments. Perhaps I am walking under a full moon so clean and clear in the sky that it looks as if it was washed and polished for the occasion. Perhaps I am walking through the market, for once not feeling heavy laden with my extra weight of English words and laptop computer, and delight in the simple pleasure of ripe peaches and fresh beans. Perhaps the city-smell of Ramallah that breathes through my window is replaced by a fresh breeze of basil, fruit, or jasmine. Perhaps it is just the moment when suddenly I remember that I am in Palestine, and that this is my life. I do not know whether the joy comes from the remembering, or from the fact that sometimes I am able to forget.

I have a deep well of joy that has burst upon me unexpectedly, wonderfully. To make ends meet, I am teaching intermediate English conversation through my NGO. I stand in front of my class of eight the first day, unsure how to fill this new space of “teacher” that had been made for me. I stumble over explaining simple grammar rules, and struggle to keep my face calm and smiling. In planning I had set aside the last hour of each class for a discussion, and had found some short articles about the conflict that I reasoned would be easy enough to discuss. I had steeled myself for a few awkward classes before we began to feel comfortable together.

My students speak quietly, although sometimes in their excitement their words tumble over each other and grow animated. We ask each other questions with no answers, and even I understand in a new way the important-sounding English word “rhetorical.” They show a face of Palestine that is neither angry nor defeated. They are intelligent, compassionate, well-reasoned. I listen to their discussions and find myself taking notes not so that I can correct their prepositions, but so I do not lose their clear articulations—the truth they cull from what they know of English. What would turn someone to become a suicide bomber? “I am not saying that it is wrong, I am not saying that it is right. I just don’t know. But what I do know is that now is not the time, not when the world is looking for peace.” Why do Palestinians have such a difficult time convincing the world of their reality? “We have focused our media on the inside of Palestine, while Israel focuses on the outside. For that, our story is not told.” Which is worse, checkpoints or the denied right of return? “The checkpoints bother us every day, and make us forget about the main issues. We think the checkpoints are the most important, when really it is our right to our country.” Some who are loud experts when we practice grammar now speak in measured, quiet tones. Others who are usually bashful forget to be self-conscious. I am mesmerized by the eloquence they seem to pull down from the air.

The heated talk dies away and when they look at me with quiet expectation I realize that our time is over. I remember myself and frown in a hopefully teacher-ish way. I tell them that they have done well, remind them of their homework, and silently smile my goodbyes as they leave. I am younger than many of them, but our roles hold us in our places. There is no space for the teacher to tell them how she has become, for that hour, their student.

Friends: a few hours after I finished writing this piece, a suicide bombing ripped through a bus, a community, and a tenuous peace process. As I send it we are already feeling the repercussions in Ramallah--I cannot imagine what is happening in other parts of the territories today. Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers. Thankfully everyone I know on both sides is safe, and I will write more next week about a very surreal night last night. Ironically, this tragedy corresponded with some wonderful new personal opportunities that I will share

I have a houseguest this week: a French woman called Caroline who has come to Palestine to study the impact of the conflict on Palestine’s children. From the first night she came she sits at our vast dining table with Rorschach tests and diagnostic manuals spread out, translating from French to English and Arabic. I am interested in her work, and so I go with her on my day off. We go to a school where three children sit quietly, patiently, waiting for us. Their eyes are large on us, and their mothers somehow seem to envelop them with protection even though they are not touching. With the help of a local doctor, Caroline explains her tests to all. The first little girl, six years old, and her mother come into the room. The girl’s hair is brushed and braided; her clothes are neat. Caroline asks the first question of her mother: where are you from, and what is your story? We hear about life in Balata Refugee Camp, near Nablus. Of the tanks, the guns, the violence. The house that was burned, this girl, the youngest daughter, trapped inside. When her mother nods to her, the girl lifts her blouse. Her trunk is covered with an intricate cross-hatching of scars and leathery bruises that belie her smooth child’s face.

There are too many stories to tell, too many scars to describe. Caroline tells me that in one family she visited, only one of the seven children did not have some physical mark from the occupation. People know that we foreigners write, and so often forgo Arab modesty to show bullet holes, shrapnel trapped under the skin, or other signs of a hard life. But there are other scars, less willingly revealed, scars that begin deeper. But they show, just the same. The World Bank says that in two years the Palestinian economy can be where it was before the Intifada. But how many generations will it take before these terrible memories are forgotten? Scar tissue does not grow, cannot be regenerated by the body. How many times will be people—the body of Palestine—have to die before it can be whole again?

It is difficult for me not to forgo my carefully balanced empathy for selfish pity for the children of this conflict. Nader, age 4, watches the super hero on TV, her arms chopping villains swiftly. Mama, he says, turning to Sandra, can she make the soldiers leave Deir Dibuwan so that we can go and visit Granny again?

I am walking in West Jerusalem the day after the bombing in Tel Aviv, walking near the busy Zion Square. There is an edgy quality to the street, or to me, that was not there on my earlier visits. And so I jump when a woman lunges out of the crowd and grabs the arm of a startled teenage girl near me. She shakes her with the sudden fury of fright. “Why here?” she asks, choked with anger, tears streaming down her face. “Don’t you know better than to be here?”

Sandra tells me of a conference she went to on Palestine’s children. A man talks approvingly about how intelligent Palestine’s children are. How resilient they are. A girl of about seven sitting next to her fidgets in her seat, but appears to listen intently. When it comes time for questions, the girl timidly raises her hand. When called on, she walks to the front of the room. She addresses the roomful of adults: “It’s nice that you all say that we are so smart, and so strong. But I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to have to be like a grown-up when I am a little girl. I want to be a child, and be able to act like a child. You made the world this way, so can’t you change it so I can just be a kid?”

My friend Wahib was born in Kuwait. He left when he was eleven, during the Gulf War, and he family went to Beit Foriq, near Nablus. He looks out the window, the sun playing on his handsome face. “We went to sleep in Kuwait, and woke up in Iraq,” he says. We talk of his sister’s upcoming wedding, where he will be the only brother attending. He has sisters in Kuwait, and brother each in Jordan, Toronto, and Chicago. I think of watching the Gulf War on television, of reading about the economic impact of the Palestinian occupation in American newspapers. This, I realize, is the bit of the story I never knew. A family uprooted and grafted onto the trunks of five nations.

But not all of the scars I see (or hear) come from the conflict—I do not want just to paint a rosy picture of Palestinian culture. Like everywhere, like America, there are social problems here, too. I heard recently the story of a woman whom I will call Khajedah. I had met her by chance, and we have become friends. She tells me her story slowly in an empty café, her hands shredding paper napkins into a pile. I ask her if I can share her story, so that people hear that there are cultural problems that have nothing to do with the occupation. She nodded first timidly, and then strongly: “People need to see what life is like for women here.” I admire her bravery.

Khajedah is twenty-two and comes from the north, from Tulkarem. Her father owned several trucks, and shipped supplies and produce, and her family was well off. From the time she was probably about two until she was four, an older cousin of fifteen “played” with her. Her earliest memories are of being touched sexually by him, but she does not think she remembers all of what he did as she was too young. He left to find work in Ramallah when she was four, and is now a happily married man with children of his own. Her family did not know what had happened—she was too young to understand, let alone tell. When she was ten years old her father called to her and her two sisters. He took a large knife, and held it up for his daughters to see. “You see this?” he asked. “If you let a man touch you and make you not a virgin, I will take this knife and kill you.” Khajedah had never heard the term “virgin” before, but began to remember her cousin, and became convinced that she was not a virgin. She was frightened to tell her family, because of her father’s threat. For five years she lived with her secret. “On the outside, I was a happy girl, but on the inside I often thought to kill myself.” She was terrified at the thought of getting married, because then people would find out that she was not “pure.” She wore men’s clothes and acted unfeminine, and worried her mother because she would not learn to cook or clean properly. But she did well in school and had many friends, and so her family just thought that she was different. Finally she could not keep her secret any longer, and told her father about her cousin. She asked him to take her to the doctor so that he could “inspect” her to see if she was still a virgin. When the doctor told her that she was, she cried she was so happy. “Now,” she concludes, “I know that I can be married, can be happy. But even if my body is normal, my mind has been shaped by those years. I was so scared always that I forgot to love, and now I don’t think I know how.”

My friends, I am sorry to tell you these things, all of them so terrible. But how else can I explain this place where real life—visiting family, riding a bus, falling in love—becomes courage? Or perhaps, these simple acts of courage have become daily life . . .

I am sitting in Reem’s home in Bethlehem, where I have come for a weekend visit to help her prepare to travel to America to study. I look up from a late-night dinner to see confusion on the television. People walking, cars strewn every which way. I heard “New York” and felt my heart in my throat. America. My friends. My family.

It is an odd sensation watching events unfolding in your home from half a world away. You are frustrated, scared, and realize how lonely you truly are so far from home as you watch familiar places fill the television screen. Had I not been so firmly ensconced in the bosom of Reem’s loving family, I should have felt very alone indeed. I watched the same pictures for half an hour before I reluctantly decided I could learn nothing new and went to bed. I tossed and turned for some time, remembering another time, another television, another moment of disconnect. I was sitting and talking with Sandra in her home when a new brief came on television. The American President George Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon were speaking. We watched the two men carefully dance around the issue of the Apartheid Wall/Separation Fence. I was filled with a rage as I look at these two well-groomed men who will probably never see the Palestinian communities affected by the decisions that they will make. They spoke of the need for security, the need to fight terrorism. Bush sounded like as echo of himself as he assured the world once again that Sharon is a man of peace. Sandra was quick to point out that before he was a “Man of Peace” the international community knew him as the “Butcher of Beruit.” Bush said that the Wall/Fence is a difficult issue in such calm, general terms that it seemed an anathema to realize within myself the destruction and suffering it is causing a few hundred miles from where I live . . . All this spun in my brain as I lay awake. I fall asleep in Reem’s home feeling dizzily off balance, as if my life had shifted and left me unsure of how I had come to be where I was.

Sandra and Waleed and I are waiting together to hear whether they have gotten the financial aid they need to study in America. The excitement to know, to hope, to plan is palpable. Waleed tells me that there has been a bombing, and I turn to the television to see the twisted wreck of a Jerusalem bus, Orthodox Jews being led or carried away, a paramedic pounding on the chest of prone man. The pictures cycle endlessly, perhaps one minute of tape that we watch for thirty. Eighteen dead, the television tells me. A hundred wounded. As one of the shots races past my eyes for the tenth time I have to fight a wave of nausea. I have stood on that corner, looking in the window of that shop.

I begin the phone calls. Where were you? You’re okay? Take care of yourself, habibti . . . The rules of etiquette have no guidance that tells me how to console a friend whose husband was close by—no way to allay her fears. I speak with Reem, who is worried about whether she will be able to get in to Jerusalem the next day for her visa interview. The mundane mixes with the grotesque to form a potent cocktail. When my attention returns to the screen, I see we are no longer watching the bus. It has been replaced by somber music. The children I watch being carried off now are Palestinian, and the bombs and guns I see are in the hands of Israeli soldiers. No reenactments: this is every bit as true as the news footage from Jerusalem. Scenes of Israeli violence, set to music and beautifully edited. “This is . . .” I begin uncertainly. “A reminder of the occupation. Like a commercial, almost,” comes the answer. I excuse myself and manage to firmly close the bathroom door behind me before I am violently and repeatedly sick. Tears stream from my eyes at this horrible, terrible war which drives the young to kill themselves, the religious to endorse violence, and both sides to craftily remind their people of the worst offenses of the other in times when there might be room for sympathy.

An hour later we hear the good news that Sandra and Waleed have received full scholarships to study. I hug them with happiness on their behalf that is tainted by the bitter tang of vomit that has not yet left the back of my throat.

The next day I am still so happy on their behalf that I cannot contain it, but I am disgusted with myself for being able to smile while tragedy knocks on so many doors near me. I am not yet used to the way personal happiness can intrude on a grim political reality; it still disturbs me.

Now, a few days later, the news has begun to trickle in. Over the weekend I visited friends in the village of Jifna. Two days and eighteen lives after my visit, my friend cannot come in to work because the Surda checkpoint, taken down perhaps three weeks ago, has been rebuilt. People walk through our office with anxious questions or sad news: do you know anyone in lower Ramallah? There are soldiers there . . . Have you heard that Ramallah is sealed? Do you have family in Nablus? When we read that observant Jews and Western tourists have been let into the Al-Asqa mosque, my Muslim colleagues take a sharp breath and look away as if to keep from showing their pain and anger. The phones are busy: friends and relatives call each other in an intricate web of information sharing.

About one in the afternoon we get the first calls that there will be a direct incursion into Ramallah. One of the international NGOs has told its American and Canadian staff to leave the city. We begin to pack and leave when we hear it was a false alarm. I swallow my pride and ask my co-workers what I need to do to prepare for an incursion. I dutifully write a list. Buy water, canned goods, bread. Make sure you have an extra card for your mobile. Take home some work. Don’t go out until you have checked to see if anyone is on the street—take your cues from others. I have the same dizzy feeling as in Bethlehem when it hits me exactly what I am preparing for. Our work is interrupted three or four times with warnings, false alarms, bad news. We stir to action and then settle down like flocks of startled birds. It is hard to concentrate on our work.

After work I stop at a grocery store. The shop owners are jocular and joking: this will be a good day for them, at least. As I wait to pay I furtively check out the other shoppers. Bread. Canned corn. Boxes of cereal. A mobile card. There are few deviations, as if we were looking for the same clues in an enormous scavenger hunt. I remember a friend who was living in Israel during the Iraq war telling of walking through the streets with his gas mask and creating a sealed room in his apartment, of seeing classes of Israeli school children clutching their small masks on a field trip. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you . . .

There has been a shift here that I cannot quite put my finger on. Or perhaps this was the way things always were, but I did not notice. Certainly, there are fewer people on the street due to the checkpoints and closures. But happiness seems to have a frenzied, chaotic quality, as if none of us are sure how long it will last. Friends seem to speak more about their families’ involvement in the resistance/aggression, with a mixture of pride and reluctance. Our ears seem to perk up at what might be tanks or army jeeps announcing curfew. I watch my co-workers come silently into my office and stand at the large picture window, one after another. I do not know what they are looking for, and do not want to ask. Instead I watch their faces scanning the panorama of downtown Ramallah. As they turn away, they often catch me watching them. Their smiles are sheepish, but their eyes are still remote, as if gazing at a future I cannot see.

I burst into the accountant’s office and move quickly to the window, my eyes scanning the parking lot. The woman smiles at me and asks, “What is it?” Her smile fades at the single Arabic word that rolls of my tongue without prompting or thought: “Jesh.”

I remember the first time I heard the word. I was telling a friend who had just returned from Jenin that I was soon to leave for Ramallah, and that I spoke no Arabic. He handsome face twisted into a puckish grin. “There’s one word you’ll learn soon enough,” he said, “Jesh.” I smiled and shook my head, thinking of the first words I learned in Spanish. Apple, perhaps, or chair, or hello. His smile did not fade, but his eyes were flat: “Soldier.”

From another window I watch the Israeli jeeps surround the building. Four, then five. I stop counting. Later we find out that the first wave of soldiers came in a plain truck and sealed the building before anyone was aware they were here. They have come to take militants, we are told. It is the second anniversary of the death of Abu Ali Mustafa, leader of the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), and demonstrations are planned for Dowar Minara, a couple of blocks from my office. From the same window where we all so often watch Ramallah pass by, I can see only the jeep that seals one end of our street, and a small knot of anxious people gathering to watch. One girl screams and tries to run past the soldiers. Her friends restrain her and she cries and tears at her hair. There is no way to leave our office, and I feel strangely vulnerable listening to the sounds of the soldiers whom I cannot see.

I collect my thoughts and begin mechanically moving around my workspace, making mental notes. Leave nothing important. Pack up my computer. Do not leave any business cards or other things that could connect me to this organization. Destroy all copies of my emails to the US. I survey everything standing packed and ready, my purse with passport near at hand in case the soldiers come to our office. For a few minutes I stand idly, walking from window to window. Finally I rouse myself and go back to my work. Some of my co-workers wander through our office as I had been doing, others continue in their work. I am grateful for something that occupies my hands if not my mind. It is hard to concentrate with the pounding of a door downstairs being broken in the background. I realize how fragile this life I have made is, how quickly I could lose what I have worked to build here. One wrong step, one chance meeting, and I could be asked to leave. I realize anew how much I long to stay here.

I think of my mother, and wonder what she will see on American television. There is a good chance that she will see nothing, but I cannot take the chance that she will worry. I write here a brief email that even to me sounds cold and inadequate: “There are Israeli soldiers in my office building. I do not know what is happening right now, but I will email as soon as I can—it might be tomorrow. You can call me on my cell tonight. Try not to worry, and know that I am with people that I can take my cues from. I figure it’s better this way than you seeing my building on the news.” I hit the send button and the screen blinks my message is replaced by advertisements and magazine links. Voices from another world: “Show cleavage on the first date?” “10 cool words to know.” “How to hold off those post-wedding pounds.” I almost laugh, but am afraid it would turn to tears.

I return to my typing. I tell myself I am doing well, I am continuing with my work, staying calm. But over the next hour and a half as I listen to muffled shouts and dull blasts, my eyes begin to burn, my back to ach, my stomach craps into a dull knot. When I stand, my weak legs almost give way. So much for calm . . .

The noise eases into a queer silence, and the jeeps roll away as quickly as they have come. I take a deep breath and stand on my rubbery legs, forcing myself to go downstairs to see what has happened to our training center, two floors down. I pass by the karate school half a floor beneath our office, and am rounding the corner to our training center when the thundering of so many footsteps makes me freeze. Have the soldiers come back? The voices rise only just faster than the running bodies: Where is my brother? Where is my son, my daughter? Where is Qais, Reema, Muhammad? One young man runs past me and throws himself on his brother, and the two embrace and cry without shame. One father finds his son and dashes his hand and his leaking eyes: thank God, thank God, my son. The girl whom I had watched tear at her hair finds the young man she sought, and clings to him. I stand against the wall and feel tears prick my own eyes as I watch the reunions. People thunder down the stairs, anxious to leave, and I continue down stairs. The door of our training center remains securely locked, a single leaf tucked into the crease. I take it and worry it nervously between fingers anxious for something to hold. I do not know where it has come from or why it is here—a bit like how I feel myself at that displaced moment.

It is almost time to go, and my co-workers for the most part are not overly eager to stay for the last thirty minutes. I sit and finish my work, as if to prove that steady fingers typing away can compensate for a rapidly beating heart. I can feel the energy that had kept me going ebbing away. On my way out the door, I stop by the Director General’s office. “Masalaama, Sami. Good-bye.”

I hesitated. “Yes, of course I was.” He smiles, and my exhaustion makes me sharp. “I haven’t lost everything as many times as you have.” He has been twice arrested, and MA’AN’s offices have been ransacked.

I walk wearily out of the building, and survey the street. To my naïve eyes it first looks as if thousands of gophers have left little burrows on the street. A second later I realize the piles of dirt and dust are pulverized stones that have been thrown at the soldiers. I walk along the main street to catch my share-taxi, picking my way carefully through broken glass, stones, bottles, dirt. Street sweepers are already at work cleaning up the mess. In the morning I know that the worst of this will be a memory.

My body aches to reach home where I can rest, can sink into sleep and shut out the image of the brothers’ fear, the girl’s desperate embrace, the father’s tears. I reach home and sit for a minute on my couch, but my mind will not rest. It turns not to the fearful faces in my building, but to the dust that needs to be wiped, the stairs that need to be swept, the floor that needs to be mopped. Perhaps this is courage, I think, or perseverance. I sigh and rouse myself to do my chores. Not so much wanting to make a statement, or be brave, but wanting to be able to say that when the world beyond your door was spinning out of control, at least the floor was clean.

That night my neighbor Ahmad tells me that Mars is at its closest point in sixty thousand years. As we walk to see it, I tell him about what had happened that day—events he must have known from the news, but still hears patiently. I tell him of how afraid that by caprice or whim I will have to leave my life here, how vulnerable I felt as Israeli soldiers searched my building yards from where my English class was held. He listens quietly.

I hesitate, and then, with the full force of my day behind me, I throw the stone off into the night. It does not go as far as the echo of Ahamd’s laughter, but still, inside I feel that some wall in me has been broken. It is hard to tell what it kept in, or out.

“Waleed,” I say into the static-y mobile line, “don’t worry about picking me up with my bags tomorrow. Wahib has offered to help me, so he will come and get me in MA’AN’s car.” I speak quickly, and sure enough, the line goes dead as Waleed responds.

I walk back to the table where I sit with some friends, pleased that I have found a way to move my things to Waleed and Sandra’s house, my new home, without bothering them. I have agreed with them that I will housesit during the nine months that they are completing their Masters’ in America. I have spent the past several weeks going over details of their program with them, packing, and cleaning their house. Their house is the bottom floor of a three-story building, and all of the other houses are filled with the Waleed’s brothers and their families.

An hour later, Waleed calls back. When I answer his voice comes cold and hard down the line: “Didn’t we tell you no men in the house?!”

“Wahib? He knows not to come in. He—he’s just helping me with my things. He will drop me off and leave.”

“No, he won’t. Don’t you understand?!” Waleed’s voice was angry, and he passes me to Sandra. I am stunned. I make apologies and say sincerely that I never meant to make problems for my friends. I will do what they ask. Sandra sounds strained and tired, and I ring off feeling guilty, sad, and frustrated by all of the rules that still make no sense to me.

Sandra and Waleed never explained the rules of living in their home all at once. The reason for many of these rules had nothing to do with them, but rather with Waleed’s extended family that lives in the floors above. As I am living in their house, I am considered by the neighbors and gossips as a part of their family, and my actions could reflect badly on them. The rules were things like not staying out past nine thirty at night, telling Waleed’s mother where I was going and how long I would be, letting them know when I would be away, and, most importantly, no men in the house. It was the last rule that I had apparently taken too liberally. As these rules were explained to me in bits and pieces I sometimes baulked slightly, but what could I do? After all, they are my friends and only want what is best for me . . .

And now, I had come dangerously close to breaking the cardinal rule. My stomach twists into knots of misunderstanding and frustration as I enjoyed the cool night with friends. The next day as I stood in my kitchen murdering lemons for lemonade, I squeezed angry rhythms. It wasn’t fair. Why should I have to comply to these rules when they weren’t my family? Waleed shouldn’t have yelled at me because I didn’t know. My mind worried the rules and curfews that had been given to me like a sore tooth.

I decided not to move with Sandra and Waleed that day. Then I decided that I should. I moved all of my bags outside, then decided that I shouldn’t leave with them until we had spoken about all of this, and moved them back inside. When Waleed comes he honks his the horn, and I, unsure of how to politely insist on talking with him, quietly load up the car. Waleed notices almost immediately that I do not meet his eye, and asks what was wrong. “I had hoped that we could talk about last night,” I say as sweetly and distantly as I could, still smarting under his rebukes. He tries to find my eyes in the mirror as I slip on dark glasses and turn out the window.

As we clean the kitchen later Sandra says abruptly, “So do you want to talk about last night now?” I pour out everything that I had said earlier to my lemons. They have every right to set any rules they want in their house, but Waleed was wrong to yell. I was trying, but the rules were difficult for me, and they needed to respect that. I didn’t want to give up my freedom to live in their home. I was a grown woman, several thousand miles away from my family. If they trusted me, why couldn’t Waleed’s family? I knew I was being a bit ridiculous, but I couldn’t help myself.

Sandra listened sympathetically. “Meg, we do like you, and respect you. We wouldn’t have asked you to live in our home if we didn’t. But this is how things are here. You are always saying that you don’t like it when internationals come here and expect to be able to live by their own cultural rules. Well then, this is our life. These are our rules. It’s not easy, but if this is what you want, here it is. It is not a matter of trust: we trust you, but if you break these rules when you live here, it is not just about you anymore.”

She perhaps would have said more, but I walk out, blinded by hot tears. I go into the veranda and lean against the cool stone wall, and cry as if my tears could wash away all of the confusion and frustration I am feeling. My mother calls an hour later and I tell her through my tears, “Mom, when I am in America, I am always the one telling people that we need to respect people coming from other cultures. Now I am here and I am telling myself that I need to respect being in another culture. When is it time for someone to respect that I am different, too?” Much as I am comforted by her gentle encouragement and mental hugs, it hurts to be reminded that the only arms to hug me here are my own.

Finally Waleed finds me, and brings me back to the kitchen table to talk. I tell him what I had told Sandra. I couldn’t give up my independence, couldn’t curb that part of me that wanted something elusive called freedom. He tries to console me: “But Meg, everyone says that you are such a nice girl, and that you don’t act like a foreigner. Everyone says that you do such a good job to fit in.”

Waleed’s words do not comfort me. My confusion blossoms into the strange dizzy feeling that hits me sometimes here. What was I smothering in myself as I was struggling to stay within the boundaries of Palestinian society? What did I have to lose on a personal level to avoid idle gossip? Was I hiding more than my calves and collarbones with my conservative clothes? Who was this woman that I was becoming, and was she really someone I wanted to be? I see Waleed’s genuine sadness and desire to make me feel better, and feel guilty to be causing him distress. “Hallas, finished,” he says gently.

“I hope,” I tell him, through my tears “That you never know what it feels like to wonder if “fitting in” means losing yourself. I hope you never know how painful that is.”

Eventually Waleed’s clumsy attempts to make me feel better urge me to dry my tears and move on. He eagerly suggests a drive, and I wearily agree. As we drive away, he said something in Arabic to Sandra, and she translated, “It is not just you. All women here feel limited, constrained.” I laugh from the surprise, laugh to stop the tears that threatened to come again. “Waleed, somehow that doesn’t make me feel better.”

He shrugs his shoulders. “It is the life, Meg.” It is the life, I silently agree, watching the night streets illuminated by the glow of shops. The minarets glow with their strange neon green lights. I move the conversation on to the safer topics of their upcoming trip to America, school, and work. The children cuddle up to me and doze. As we pull up in front of the house, Waleed turns and looks at me. “Meg?”

Home. I think of all of the times I had told my college friends I was going “home” to my family, and then, days later, told my family that I was going “home” to college. My mother once asked if her new house was “home” yet, and I answered that home was where she was. Home is where your heart is. Home is the place where people understand you. Make yourself at home. My home is your home. Feel at home. I sigh, gather a sleeping Nader into my arms, and go inside.

The next day, my friend Wahib notices that I am quiet and sad. After work we go to sit and talk. He opens with, “I am so worried about you,” and I feel as guilty as I did about Waleed’s anxiety. I pour out my heart to him. I want to fit in, I don’t want to be disrespectful, but sometimes I don’t know myself. “Of course you do,” he says, “you’re Meg.” I rush to fix the mistake before I realize that he understands perfectly, and is teasing me. “Meg, you are a good woman. You have worked hard here to be kind and respect our culture. People see that. Not everyone is like Waleed’s family. If we were, I would not be here with you now.” I look up at him, startled that he would admit this. Usually he ignores any cultural embarrassment in our friendship. “You know it’s true. But we are in a public place, and we both know that we are doing nothing wrong. Waleed’s family is conservative, but you will learn from that, too.”

“But do you see how confusing it is? Wahib, everything that I was ever taught to be of what it means to be a “good” woman—to be independent, self-reliant, strong, friendly, kind to strangers—are the very things that make me a very terrible Palestinian woman. I—” my voice cracked. “I can’t live without my independence. I can’t live in a cage, feeling like I have a family of people watching me to see what mistakes I make—”

“Not terrible,” he says, gently. “Different.” He smiles. “I would not be friends with a terrible woman. You are a good woman, anywhere.” I nod and look down. “You believe in God,” I look up, “so think about this situation in that way. If this time with Waleed’s family is easy when you think it will be hard, thank God that it was easy. If this time is difficult, then thank God that He is teaching you patience.”

I look at my friend and wonder again how someone who swears that he doesn’t enough English always knows exactly what to say. He is right, I know. It is a question of perspective. I resolve to change mine. That night on my way home, I buy chocolates that I take to Waleed’s mother. I struggle hard against the feelings of resentment that find their place in my heart in spite of me.

“What does that phrase mean?” one of my eager English students asks the following day. “Here, in the article: ‘don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’”

“It means that when someone gives you something, you shouldn’t . . .” I cannot meet Wahib’s eye as he watches me from his place as my student. “You shouldn’t look for what is wrong with it,” I finish flatly, both for my students, and for me. When I return home that day, I see still the anxious gleam in Waleed’s eye, the furrows of Sandra’s brow. When I tell them how I can never repay their kindness to me, I say it from the heart.

Two days later, I bid good-bye to my adopted family in Jericho, where they had stopped for the night before passing on to Jordan. I felt myself again, and rather than feeling small and lost, I merely felt the grateful pain of parting from good friends. As Wahib said, some days would be good, and I would be thankful for the joy they would bring. Some days would be difficult, and I would try to learn this thing called patience that has never been my strong suit. Either way, I was truly curious to know what the future would bring—and I could ask for little more of life than that. The hills of Jericho, edges worn smooth by hard desert winds, sat like hands folded in prayer on the horizon.

I gasp awake, sitting bolt upright in bed—a classic post-nightmare pose. But it is no nightmare that has awakened me.

I listened intently to the canned loudspeaker voice outside my window. Cars drive by all the time, announcing everything from ice cream to lost children. But not at 4 am. This voice is different: the accent is harsh, unfamiliar, and unmistakably not Arab. The throaty undertones sound Israeli.

I lean into the dark, hoping against hope that I will catch some word that I recognize. Are they announcing a closure? Or, more likely given the hour, are they looking for someone? I strain for the slightest sound of a knock, a footstep. The loudspeaker moves slowly away, and the deep silence is broken only by the early cries of awakened roosters.

After a few minutes my pounding heart quiets, and I lay back down in my bed, settling back to sleep, my eyes drooping.

The sound is sudden, and splits the night wide open: a rumble, a roar. Yells, frightened animals, breaking glass. My eyes open but I am too frightened to stir. Listening. Waiting. The hush-hush of my startled breath. The explosion reverberating inside my head.

A few minutes later the telephone rings. It is Fidah, who lives perhaps two minutes from my house now that I have moved to Beitunia. She is anxious, worried, and I hear her children crying in the background. The oldest, Salam, whimpers close to her mother, and I picture her tugging on her mother’s nightgown, or trying to climb into her lap. It must have been a demolition, Fidah tells me. She can see nothing from her apartment, but her windows were shattered by the blast. Does she want me to come over? No, she says, whatever you do, stay inside.

I ring off, regretting that I forgot to ask if there was anything I should know if soldiers come to search the house. I gather my blankets and move through the darkened house, afraid to attract attention with the lights. Outside the voices have ceased, and the night is silent again except for the occasional dog or rooster.

I make my bed on the couch across from the door, just in case. I curl up and breathe deeply, forcing my body to relax in spite of itself. After all, I have to wake up for work in a few hours. What should I do? Call in? I knew if I did, my colleagues would be sympathetic—I am new. But they would also shake their heads and think of all of the times they had been closer to this war . . . and persevered. I knew that in spite of my grainy eyes and headache I would work a full day.

In the morning I wake stiff and cold. In the morning’s light I see what I could not see in the dark: that every window in the house that was not locked has been blown open by the blast.

So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater standing beside the white chickens. The streets of Beitunia are quiet and mellow in the sunset glow when I walk, camera in hand, to the place where a family once pinned their dreams and made a life. I had passed by this house often to go to Fidah’s or my Arabic classes, a house among so many houses on a quiet street that wound its way through the valley outside Ramallah. There are children playing in front of the ruin, the pile of rubble that looks as if it has been pressed down by a very large fist. Had I seen those children before? Had I ever noticed the cheerful, fake plant that stood beside the gate? Had the Palestinian flag now topping the still-intact section of the house saluted me as I walked past? It seems incredible that these small details have so long escaped me—as Williams says, so much depends upon these details that in normal times are so easily overlooked.

We have been told that a bombing suspect lives here. I do not know if he himself is the bomber/martyr, or only an associate. Where is he now: detained, a fugitive, dead? This house, I reflect ruefully from behind the lens of my camera, was beautiful once, with its arabesque arches and pleasing lines. Suddenly I see the woman of this home, watch her in mind’s eye as she entertains her friends, pauses with satisfaction to look at the arresting view out her kitchen window, pauses in her cooking to scold her children as they swing on the furniture. Did she feel as I feel when I stand, happy and tired, in the center of my clean kitchen floor? Did she needlessly arrange the cushions for the pleasure of touching the soft cloth? The ache for what she has lost here must pull at her almost as much as the loss of her husband—the loss of her world, of her security. I mourn this loss on her behalf, for perhaps she has lost too much to mourn it herself.

My friends, I wonder what you will feel for this woman. Some would call her husband a criminal, others a hero. Some might agree that the destruction of his home was partial payment for his actions; others would call it a crime of war. Perhaps I want you to pity her—this wraith I have created; perhaps I merely want you to feel what I feel as I stand and look at her home. Because then, and only then, there is a chance that one of you can answer the question that echoes in my head as I stand in the growing dusk watching the Palestinian flag snapping in the breeze: what had SHE done to deserve to lose so much? What was her crime?

I am breaking my unwritten rule: this is one of those emails that might specially get me in trouble, and so I am asking that you be doubly careful when you send it on to whomever you think might find it of use . . .

Ya’el is a short, strongly built woman, and her compact figure is emphasized by the square-ish button-down shirt and tan slacks. Even in the yellowed glare of the impersonal neon lights, she is an attractive woman. Hanging from the lanyard that holds her nametag, there is a purple pen—the exact same shade as her eye shadow, although I doubt that she has realized this. She is much too busy for such frivolous colour coordination.

Ya’el stares at my passport as if her glance alone could uncover some buried truth. I look around with studied casualness at the five or six other internationals who have been stopped at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport as we entered from Amman, Jordan. Separated before by shyness or courtesy, we are now united by the shared experience of our frustration and humiliation. I wonder how many, like me, are lying, and how many are simply unlucky. We are not closeted away in separate rooms—not yet, anyway, although it is a possibility. Nor are we separated from our questioners by dividers or tables. Ya’el stands so close to me that I can smell her faint perfume, and could reach out and touch her arm. Or she mine, which is probably more to the point.

I have already told my story once to the first customs official—a mere technicality. Before I was allowed to board the plane to Jordan I was introduced to three other security officials, none of whom seemed to find my lies particularly believable. I had anticipated problems upon my re-entry. Ya’el ultimately will decide my fate.

“Miss ***, what is the purpose of your visit to Israel?” I repeat my carefully constructed story, complete with supporting letters: I am volunteering with *** Cathedral in Jerusalem (I do not say directly that the cathedral is in Palestinian-held East Jerusalem, although Ya’el surely knows this). I serve communion and work in the office. I have many Israeli friends, and I know their names and numbers by heart. I have taken pains to learn my story as I used to learn my lines for plays, but indeed the stakes are much greater in this performance. Ya’el could choose to deny me entry and send me back to Amman. She could be charitable and give me two days to gather my things and leave. She could have me detained for any reason or no reason at all for up to 24 hours. All of this rests in Ya’el’s capable hands with their shell-pink nails.

“This is your first visit?” she asks innocently. A large stamp marks my previous entry. No, I say simply, and wait for the next question.

“Why did you go to Amman?” To visit friends, one of whom I had studied with in the US. Several questions follow about my friends, my activities in Jordan. I answer them with the ease of truth.

“Miss ***,” Ya’el says, raising her eyes to mine. “Did anyone give you anything to take into Israel?” No. Even your friends, she persists? Did you pack your bags? Did you buy anything unusual? “Miss ***, I am only asking because in the past, people have unknowingly carried harmful materials into Israel. Do you understand that this is for your own safety?” Her tone is almost beseeching: believe in me, in the Israeli government. Believe that we do not want to upset you, but to protect you. I nod, making my eyes huge at the thought that people could be so devious as to ask an innocent like me to do such a thing.

Unfortunately for me, I know there is no such thing as innocence here, and that what Ya’el says is true. Ya’el must have her truth, as I must have mine. The part of our shared experience that releases me is what she fears, and I will not blame her for her fears, or her carefully constructed, government endorsed versions of truth or goodness or justice. In another place and time, I might ask her to grant me the same courtesy.

“Miss ***, excuse the personal question, but is your relationship to Mr. *** in Amman a romantic relationship?” No, I answer, and cover my anger with a little laugh and shrug. I have a boyfriend in America. An unnecessary lie, perhaps, but one that lends weight to my good girl image. What did my boyfriend in America think of my being here? “Probably the same thing your boyfriend thinks about your working here,” I say with a laugh. Ya’el smiles despite herself, and then frowns at my passport as if our shared laughter had been a serious breech of security.

“Why did you choose to fly to Amman? Would it not have been easier to go by land?” I have prepared myself for this question, and I do not hesitate in my well-rehearsed answer. If I think about it, I should perhaps baulk at the audacity of my own falsehood: “I’m scared to go through Palestine,” I gush. “It seems so dangerous.” One sentence, that I have now told to the first security official as I left, and now Ya’el. I wonder if I, like Simon Peter, strive merely to save my own skin, or if there is truly some greater good denying twice the life I lead.

The security supervisor comes over. A childish spray of freckles breaks the pale skin on the bridge of her nose, partially masked by small, fashionable glasses. She smiles a broad smile at me: “I am sorry for your delay, Miss ***. But times are very uncertain.” She proceeds to innocently repeat Ya’el’s questions. She speaks in Hebrew to Ya’el, and although my Hebrew is limited (it is close enough to Arabic that I understand pieces), I know that she is asking Ya’el if my repeated story is consistent. “Miss ***, I am sorry for speaking in Hebrew,” she tells me with false sincerity.

The supervisor nods her head and moves on to the next interrupted traveler, perhaps to the next concocted story. Ya’el prepares to hand me back my things. Our interview has gone on for forty-five minutes, and although she seems like a nice enough girl, I hope that she understands that I do not wish to prolong our encounter. I am weary. Weary of the weeks of fear that I would not get my visa—that my work would come screeching to a halt. Weary of studying lies with the avidity of truth. Weary of hiding my work, my life, myself . . . I fantasize of crossing Qalandia checkpoint with my three months’ reprieve stored in my purse the way a man in the desert dreams of water. A thirst not of body, but of soul.

“Miss ***?” Daring to hope that I am almost free, Ya’el’s question startles me. “Have you ever visited the Palestinian Territories?”

Yes Ya’el. It is as much my home as any place I have ever lived. It is where I have pinned my hopes, made my life. It is where I have done what women have done for eternity: learned to love each day that which I could lose at any moment. I have Palestinian friends—people whom I call “sister” and “brother” with truth and ease. I stand in line at checkpoints, and await the whim and humiliation along with the Palestinians—a race that you, Ya’el, may never have a chance to know, unless you are instructed to detain them at the airport. I have learned more in three months about politics and the world than I learned in my American lifetime. When I watch my president speak of the need for security and a strong opposition to terrorism, I can almost make-believe that I am in no way complicit to his brand of democracy. I do my work and tell my lies to you and to the IOF/IDF, and learn that putting one foot in front of each other is a kind of bravery. And hope against hope that when I have children, I will be able to point to any map, any globe, and show them Palestine. That I will tell them this story of living in a country that does not exist, and that it will be to them only a dreamy lullaby, remote from reality.

“No,” I say, cutting through my thoughts. No cock crows, but I am all-too-aware that this is my third denial. But I have three months to show Palestine the truth that I must cloak in lies to have a chance to tell. To live.

I am sitting at a barbecue, outside of an NGO complex in Zababdeh, a village near Jenin. The sizzle of cooking meat blends with the buzz of Arabic conversation that I gave up trying to follow a few minutes since. It is enough to enjoy the comfortable ache of muscle and mind after a long day of traveling from Ramallah, and watch an inky sky impossibly full of stars. I do not hear the ring of cell phone; pay no attention to the conversation that follows. It is only when the words “soldiers,” “curfew” and “Ramallah” cut across my thoughts that I begin to listen. The conversation pauses for a long, somber moment, and then resumes. No one in this group remembers the lone foreigner in their midst, and I swallow my pride and ask a man near me what has happened. “Ramallah is under curfew,” he replies, “there are soldiers in the city and there is a rumor that it will be reoccupied tonight.”

My “luck” is beginning to frighten me. In the past two weeks through no wisdom on my part I have narrowly missed being squarely in the wrong place at the wrong time in Gaza, Jenin, and Ramallah. Have gone or failed to go just in the nick of time. Have heard second-hand about friends, colleagues, and strangers caught in the midst of the latest action. Have wondered and searched too hard why it wasn’t me.

My Palestinian colleagues continue their barbecue chat, and I hollowly wonder how it is possible for them to carry on as if nothing has happened while our friends and family are in Ramallah. I direct at these men and women all of the fear and frustration I feel towards the faceless Israeli and Palestinian men in charge whom I cannot touch. Not knowing what else to do, I find a computer lab in the complex and search the news for any sign of what is happening. Dozens of the same men and women whom my heart has not finished blaming enter wordlessly with a private concern etched on their faces that they did not show in public.

I travel the next day to the village of Kufr Dan. My NGO has a project there, and I have come to observe the project manager, Waleed. I watch with growing respect and admiration as they approach the beneficiaries of our new project—see the care and professionalism with which they approach their work. A lot of time and planning has gone in to making sure that the beneficiaries chosen fit certain criteria: they must be able to work on the project, not have more than a certain amount of land, not have a well on their property. I observe the staff methodically rechecking each household, and the n, with their work out of the way, sit over coffee or cola and talk about the crops, the village, the upcoming Ramadan. In spite of their city clothes, these people, too, are the children of farmers.

At each house, it is the women who answer our questions. I think I must have misunderstood one of our questions, “Do we really ask these women if their husbands are unemployed?” To be without work and unable to provide for one’s family is a great embarrassment. Waleed nods: “That is why the men are not here—they are embarrassed for their families to see them not working.”

The houses seem as tired as their occupants, although some were obviously once grand. Waleed tells me that many of the people we visit used to work in Israel, but are prohibited from doing so since the start of the Intifada, and so are unemployed. The goal of our project is to help compensate somewhat for the lack of job opportunity in Jenin district.

Walking up to one house, we pass a new looking well, and I wonder how this family has come this far through the rigorous scrutiny. After a long pause, a man shambles out of the house, his clothes loose on his gaunt frame. He leans against his house and I wonder how on earth he could go about giving the required hours to our project. A tired looking little boy peers at us from the door that stands ajar, and hovers like a scared butterfly when I try to coax him out. He cheeks dissolve into dimples when I tease him with peek-a-boo. We speak with the man for a long minute before he shuffles inside. When I ask what has transpired, I a m told that this man has failing kidneys. “He doesn’t really have many options here—dialysis is very expensive and very difficult.” I swallow the lump in my throat and frown at the Arabic notations in this man’s file in what I hope passes for professionalism. Finally I trust my voice enough to ask if he has qualified for the project. Waleed looks down at the file before closing it slowly, then shifts his gaze to me: “Close enough,” he says firmly. Part of my role here is to make sure that everything is by the book, but nothing I know could make me want to change his mind. I nod.

After a long day in the field, I go to the American University in Zababdeh, for a music night a friend, Jonathan, has put together. Like me, Jonathan is interested in interfaith work, and we have had long chats about our Christian faith and bridging the gaps between it and Islam. I admire his drive, and his keen appreciation of Palestine and where he fits here. I sit in a university apartment surrounded by American accents and pizza, and before long, our aimless chatter turns to Palestine. What is the role of internationals here? Is it possible to be neutral? How can foreigners stand up for Palestine when they do not mix in Palestinian culture? What is the role of activism? Questions that fill my thoughts and often needle me with confusion about what my work here should be. I say as much, and trying to hide how discouraged I am with myself, voice my uncertainty about whether I should be more politically active here, “or stay in my little office writing my proposals and working on my projects.”

Jonathan’s voice surprises me. “That’s exactly why a lot of people here don’t like NGOs. Because all the people do is sit in their offices and write their proposals and avoid the real situation.”

His words have more sting than he intended—he has put a name on the inadequacy I feel. I hear the shrillness of my own voice as I run down the bureaucracy that limits our work, even as I curse my own damnable intensity and inability to take things in stride. I think we both know that my rant is just words, but our reasons are different: my work must seem to him paper pushing in spite of my protests, while I cannot think of any words to describe the compassionate dedication I have seen this day.

Jonathan picks up his guitar, and begins to play. Jazzy melodies, mournful ballads, country music, and modern beats pour from the group. For a long time I listen to him, and am surprised that the improvised lyrics sound familiar. Hadn’t I written something like that not long ago? I mentally review what I have written, and come up empty. I let the music wash over me, and relax small muscles behind my eyes and between my shoulder blades with relief. It occurs to me that it is not the words themselves that are familiar, but the place they are coming from. Jonathan’s songs excise that same place in him that my writing excises in me—gives a voice to all in himself and in the world that he needs to make sense of. I think about my international friends here, and realize that we have all carefully constructed some outlet: writing, food, painting, alcohol, activism, sex, music. We all have our channels for cleaning ourselves that keep us whole.

Towards the end of the night, the beat of a drum triggers gospel music. “Amazing Grace,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “When the Saints Go Marching In” blend one into the next. I watch the lights from outside climb up the walls to the ceiling, letting my voice run where it will. I close my eyes and give thanks for tears and close calls and friends and disagreements and music and the ability to make one man’s life a little brighter. My heart swells and cracks open before the God that has truly kept me safe thus far, and all that I can think to tell Him is, “Please, stay with me. I’m trying Lord.” I feel the song that we make with of a pinch of each of our talents, and remember the ending of a poem half forgotten: “With all its sham and drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.”

“I’m sorry, Padre,” I say into the telephone to my minister, “But I won’t be able to come for Sunday brunch for a while. I’m fasting.” I made the decision soon after I come here: to observe the Muslim fast of Ramadan. My Muslim friends ask me if I will as often as it comes up, and my stay here quickly taught me the correct answer: “if God gives me the strength.” I had been nervous to tell my pastor about my decision, but a surprisingly sympathetic conversation about Christian-Muslim relations a few days ago made me take heart that he would understand the decision.

The quiet buzz of the line lengthens into an uncomfortable silence. “I see,” he says flatly. “We have to get you out of that house—it seems to be having a bad effect on you.” He has in the past made references to whether it was good for me spiritually to live in a Muslim community.

“But Padre,” I said, protesting, “If I told you that I was fasting at any other time of year out of solidarity with the poor, or to teach myself to be more reliant on God’s strength, or to learn patience, you would be pleased. What does the time of year matter?” I do keep all of these things in my heart when I fast. My God might be a different God, but His gifts are very similar in many ways.

“NO, Padre. Not at all. I appreciate having this opportunity to focus on my faith, not to change it. I am no closer to converting that you are,” I finish with a laugh. It is the truth.

Some of my friends already knew that it was my intention to fast, but others were surprised to learn of my choice. One woman in my neighborhood, a Muslim, nearly dropped her parcels in the corner market, openmouthed. In my office I tack Matthew 6:16-18 above my desk: “When you fast, do not look somber as those who are not truthful, for they disfigure their faces to show men they are fasting. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face so that it will not be obvious to men that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you .” I take pleasure in the opportunity the posted verses give me to share a little piece of my faith with my co-workers even as I am sharing theirs.

In the moments when the hunger touches me, I offer a quick prayer for the patience and strength that I mentioned to my pastor. So far, He has granted my prayers. The first couple of days are difficult, and I surround myself with my Muslim friends so that I am not tempted to break my resolve to fast with them. But after that first few days, it becomes habitual, even easy.

I had expected Ramadan to be a solemn time of hunger and fatigue. As we plan projects at work, we are constantly reminding each other “remember not to plan anything during Ramadan.” To my surprise, I find it to be a happy time that I quickly grow to enjoy. I enjoy the early solitary breakfast eaten at 3:30 in the morning with only the company of kitchen lights seen from my window, and of snuggling back to sleep for a few more hours before work in the chill of the morning. Against all odds, I remember winter mornings in my family’s Florida home—of waki ng to the kiss of cool air through the open window on my cheeks, the rest of me warmed by thick blankets. I find myself animated during the day, productive, and am energized by the fact that I am able to balance a Muslim fast with my Protestant work ethic. When I say as much to my director, he shows all of his molars in a belly laugh: “Only you would think of that.”

Because of Ramadan, we leave work early, and I find a balance between my life and my work that I did not know I had lost. I spend time with friends and the families that claim me as their own, and relax without the constant pressures of my work driving me. I break my fast with them, and enjoy the feel of replete content after the large meal. After eating, we are all smiling and comfortable—each evening reminiscent of the night of American Thanksgiving. Full of food and family, we talk and laugh without pressure or pretense. But unlike American Thanksgiving, each of us has had to patiently wait through the hunger of the day to break the fast—this is not the easy excess of re ady abundance. An important difference between this culture and my own.

One of the youth clubs that my organization funds invited me for the opening of their “Ramadan Nights” festival in Jerusalem. I give myself plenty of time, but when I reach Qalandia, it is filled with hungry men and women eager to reach their homes. There are probably close to one hundred of us standing together, humbly, waiting our turn to present our papers and continue on with our lives. We pass through without incident—the slowly grinding gears of this conflict’s unending clockwork.

On the way to Jerusalem, I pass by a cadre of foreign-looking pedestrians. I grimace when I see them taking long gulps of bottled water and nibbling candy bars. Apparently no one has explained to them what a serious breach of Ramadan etiquette this is. I feel my own stomach growl.

I think am running late when reach Damascus Gate, but I have forgotten that the festivities are running on Palestinian time. As I enter the Old City, I run into the harassed looking coordinator of the club, hurrying to the gate. Soon the Boy Scout troupe will arrive, I am told. The young girls will lead the parade—he nods to a group of girls dressed in fancy disdashas carrying lanterns—and the youth will clear the way. The older boys are puffed with importance in their fez and club t-shirts. We hear drums, and the coordinator and I crane our necks to see the Boy Scouts approaching. They make quite a spectacle: Palestinian boy scouts dressed in British-style uniforms playing Scottish bagpipes in honor of the Muslim month of Ramadan. I laugh out loud, as we listen to the thundering music that seems to threaten the solid foundations of the walls that knew Jesus as a child. The joy of the moment is not even tempered by two more nationalities represented in our festivities: we are flanked by Israeli soldiers almost the same age as the boy scouts clutching American-made guns. I do not notice when they melt into the night.

Mothers and fathers trail behind the parade of their children, dressed in their holiday finery. Their faces glow with Ramadan, and pride at their children’s participation in this spectacle. There will be pictures in the newspaper, I know, that will be carefully cut out and saved for years to come, pressed into scrapbooks.

“What do Palestinians want?” A friend asks in an email. I have carefully gathered dozens of answers: peace, 1967 borders and Jerusalem as the capital, economic advancement, nationality and recognition. Long term goals, and ones not easily reached. Watching the crowd advancing slowly through the twisted streets of the Old City to the sounds of a wobbly bagpipe version of “Louie, Louie,” I find another, more immediate, answer. I watch the faces; blowing with frowning concentration into an instrument, wavi ng to a child, laughing with friends. There is an expectation in this crowd, something that I cannot name, from which I am wholly excluded. Each face carries an eloquent answer to my friend’s question: “Please, give us something that we can believe in.”

“Why do you do what you do?” has been a refrain from friends, family, and even strangers who have passed through my life. Meaning why do I live in Palestine, work in development, leave behind a network of people who care to go off to broken bits of the world. This essay is as close as I’ve ever come to an answer, I think. In a nutshell, I do what I do because as uncomfortable, as frustrating, as heart-wrenching as it often is, I never got the hang of seeing the world any other way . . .

“There is a problem with our youth clubs in Jerusalem,” my coordinator tells me one day, soon after I have taken over a project working with seven youth clubs in Jerusalem. In response to my raised eyebrows, he continues. “Our donor refuses to pay any value added tax, which is the way the law works for NGOs in Palestine. They have an agreement with the Palestine National Authority, so our clubs shouldn’t pay either for this project.” I nod, not seeing any problem so far. “But our clubs are in Jerusalem.” He finishes, and looks at me, and, when I do not answer, repeats with heavy emphasis: “Jerusalem.”

“And Jerusalem is not controlled by the PNA. It’s not part of Palestine. So they have to pay the Israeli Value Added Tax.”

“And the clubs can’t afford to cover the VAT for the duration of the project.”

This is the nature of development work in Palestine. It is truly a mixed bag of unexpected difficulties and incredible rewards—at the end of the day, there is a lot of very real work that needs to be done. But to do that work, we must spend hours traveling comparably short distances, shuttling from one taxi to the next and walking with downcast eyes through checkpoints and road blocks.

The morning that we are leaving for Jenin, Waleed, whom I am to accompany to the north, comes in wearing a reflective vest that looks to my untrained eyes like a construction uniform. “What’s with the new look?” I ask him, smiling.

Waleed smiles. “It’s the uniform for a local hospital’s paramedics. It is difficult for Palestinians to travel, and so I tell people that I am a doctor. A friend got me the vest, and I have a card from a CPR course I took a while ago. It’s in Arabic, and so the Israelis think I am a doctor.”

“And if you meet a soldier that reads Arabic?” I ask. He shakes his head and smiles. We both know what would happen, and now is not the time to dwell on such things.

I have become used to the stories that I must tell to travel into Israel proper—the same stories that I must tell to re-enter the country. But my trip to Jenin shows me the restrictions that my Palestinian friends face even inside the West Bank; the borders they must cross to reach family and friends. On the way to Qalandia, Waleed and I concoct our story: I am an American paramedic volunteering in the hospital where Waleed works. We are going to a clinic in Bethlehem. At Qalandia, we might be turned back if we say that we are going north. We make it through without incident, and promptly change our story for the next set of checkpoints. Now the clinic was in Nablus, now in Tulkarem . . . and finally in Jenin. Waleed tells me that in his last job, before the Intifada, he traveled to Jenin in an hour. The trip takes us four hours, three route changes, and four stories.

I am walking through a checkpoint on the way home from Jenin when I hear an army Jeep roar up beside us. I raise my carefully downcast eyes, and feel a ragged breath escape in spite of myself when I find myself looking across the chain link fence at the barrel of a gun. We stand, frozen, and I caution myself not to blink although I am not sure what that proves. Finally we are told to come around the fence and present our papers. I look the soldier in the eye as I repeat my story about visiting a clinic in Jenin, and calmly answer his few rapid fire questions. When he hands back our papers, I turn away with a perfunctory thank you, my shoulders squared. I feel Waleed’s eyes on me, and see a smile playing on his lips: “You have a good memory.” “That’s what they tell me.” I say, staring straight ahead. A Jeep drives by, its back doors open. A young soldier sits tiredly in the back, and our eyes lock for a long minute until the Jeep disappears in the distance.

I never tire of reminding my friends and colleagues that if it were not for the conflict (a very big exception, granted), Palestine would be a transition economy or better. Even as I toured Jenin, I could not help but compare the very real poverty that we were seeing with what I had seen in Nicaragua. Electricity and running water! Concrete floors in ever house! These were luxuries in the rural Nicaragua where I had lived. I try to explain to Waleed the poverty of a country he has never seen, but I do not know how to give my words meaning.

But the conflict cannot be forgotten, or denied. Several of my organization’s past successes are now closed and empty behind lost gates. In an intractable conflict such as Israel-Palestine, “development” becomes a Catch-22: the lack of mobility and military skirmishes necessitate relief efforts and donations. But in a thirty year old occupation, when does relief end and development begin? Where does the equally necessary work of giving the Palestinian people the tools they need to develop themselves fit into this conflict? Most organizations, like mine, choose a middle path by doing a mix of relief and development work, and hope that one hand isn’t erasing what the other is trying to do.

Luckily, Palestine’s best minds are available to cope with these sorts of questions. The conflict has ensured that there is no viable business sector here, and government work is hardly stable. Non governmental organizations (NGOs) offer seemingly endless work for trained professionals capable of high quality work. The local NGO sector here is not perfect, but it is sophisticated and professional in many ways. The catch is that many people are not attracted to NGO work for altruistic reasons: for them it is a job like any other job with a good income and a chance to get ahead for themselves and their families. They will do good work, but they will not always focus on the way in which that work is done, nor do they think it necessary to put in extra hours or rough and dangerous travel. Perhaps I would find this frustrating if I could look these people in the eye and know they had other options

I am doing research for a proposal on the Internet when I come across an online atlas fact sheet on Palestine. How funny that with everything that happens here each day, I can still feel a sadness when I scroll down the page and see “Nationality: Not Applicable.”

In our church, a visiting Reverend from Germany gives an address. I settle in, looking forward to a sermon in English that I wholly understand. At his opening words, my smile fades, and I half rise to leave: how ironic, he says, that the state of Israel—a state founded on the principles of the Torah—has earned the dubious distinction according to a recent poll of “greatest danger to the safety of the world.” I cringe at the thinly veiled anti-Jewish sentiment of the remark: not Sharon, not the occupation, but the entire state of Israel is seen as a threat. And I wonder why sometimes the Israelis seem fearful and angry . . .

The knowledge of what we are doing spreads over me like a blush, or a fever. When the two teenaged boys had explained to me in Arabic that they would take me to the taxis, I did not understand that they were proposing to guide me through the underbrush around the checkpoint. I swallow hard and prayed that we would not run into patrols to discourage dodging such as this. Had I known what I was doing, I don’t think I would have had the nerve to accompany my guides. But now we are already well on our way, and going back seems as dangerous as going forwards. I slog through a stream, alternately concentrating on balancing on the next slippery rock, and on the trip I am trying to make to Jenin. I am going to see the camp, and visit Palestinian villages affected by the Apartheid Wall/Separation Fence.

When I had tried to pass legally through Al-hamra checkpoint, I was turned back. The soldier showed neither anger nor sympathy. “There is a law; you cannot go,” he told me simply. When I asked him what the law was, he turned and walked away as if he had not heard. “What law?” I asked more loudly as the square of his back moved away.

A few hours later I am standing in the “yard” of Jenin Camp: a large open space that was once the most densely populated part of the camp. That is, before a nine day standoff with the Israeli army that left 52 people dead (figure according to Physicians for Human Rights). Before the tanks and bulldozers rolled in and reduced the area to rubble. Before even UN inspectors were denied entry. Before whispers reached even the deafest ears. Before the world learned to associate the name “Jenin”—“paradise,” in Arabic—with shadowy fear, unresolved anger, and senseless death.

The yard yawns starkly in the midst of the tightly packed houses and building that surround it. It is a large space for the camp, but a small space considering the hundreds of people who used to call this rough patch of earth home. I walk on this ground, and in spite of myself the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. It is eerie standing in this place that I first saw as the flickering pictures told a story about resisters being brought low by the fourth largest army in the world. From the unfamiliar void, landmarks I recognize from the Nightly News come one-by-one into focus.

In nature death makes space and mulch for life. Trees and animals fall, and from the soil they become, new shoots stretch precociously upward. I remember this cycle as I watch the children of Jenin camp taking full advantage of such a large place to play. I wonder, have these children lost that trick of regeneration, or does that magic still lie under their skin? Only time, and these children, will tell what sort of life they will suck from the destroyed homes and lost lives in which their roots are planted.

I had asked friends to help me to set up trips to villages affected by the Separation Fence/Apartheid Wall. What is your reason for going, they ask so that they might better help me. I hesitate; I can get statistics, information, pictures—even a power point presentation—from the “Wall Campaign’s” website (www.stopthewall.org). But I have to see this thing for myself, and find my own mind about what this means for me, and for Palestine. I have watched the American and Israeli presidents talk calmly from their infinitely secure vantage point about the need for security until I thought my nails dug into my palms would pierce the skin. Now I must put my own conviction to the test.

From a distance, the Wall/Fence is a swath of barren ground—a ribbon of tan amid the rich, fertile brown fields, olive groves, and forests of the northern West Bank. I visit the village of Zububa, where the Fence/Wall begins. Here it surrounds the village on three sides, and my guide, Yacoob, tells me of plans to put a gage on the only remaining access road.

There is a time when something terrible exists, but you do not yet know about it. A parent dies, a friend meets with misfortune, a child falls ill. You revel, without knowing you do so, in blissful ignorance, and when implacable knowledge shatters that bliss you long for the simple, uncomplicated moments of unknowing that came before. Sometimes it is possible to see the grey shadows of unasked-for wisdom gathering darkly on the horizon, and your mind shys away from that sadness like a frightened horse.

These are the thoughts that run through my head as the village of Zububa abruptly opens into olive groves and the Fence/Wall looms before me. My leaden legs move forward and my eyes fix on the immovable shape that grows larger with each step I take. But I long to close my eyes as if my own refusal to see could blot it out, and struggle to comprehend the overwhelming certainty of what the phrase “reality on the ground” truly means. The knowledge is a physical ache. I try to shore up the crumbling walls of my sense of a larger perspective, but I am afraid I fail miserably. When I am confronted with the Barrier, my desire to be balanced and fair seems a tissue-paper castle growing sodden with unshed tears. My thoughts swirl chaotically, and end up as dull incomprehension: “Dear God, it really is real. This really exists. One group of Your children has built this thing for the sole purpose of keeping another group of Your children contained because both groups have so much hate for the other.”

The Wall/Fence varies according to locale. At Zububa, razor wire rolls taller than I run before ditches five feet deep lined with rocks and concrete. On the other side of the ditch, the concrete-and-stone is raised, and then there is a chain-link fence perhaps six feet high topped with barbed wire. After the fence, in the center of the barrier, is a road to enable patrols. Then comes the same configuration of fence, wall, ditch, and wire, in reverse. The Barrier is a perfect palindrome. Small platforms sit at regular intervals—for cameras, Yacoob tells me—and portions of the fence are electrified. As he points out to me the features that my naïve eyes would miss, we are standing before the immense rolls of wire, in the middle of an olive grove, a fresh breeze ruffling hair and leaves amid dappled fall sunshine. Officially, these trees are in a no man’s land: no one is allowed within fifty meters of the Fence/Wall. I watch with curiosity as my hand reaches out to touch the wire. Yacoob comes up behind me; “You’re bleeding,” he says, pointing to the red bead on my finger. I don’t tell him that I had to pinch myself to see if I was really here.

The Wall/Fence is to me the physical embodiment of all of the layers of misunderstanding and pain that shroud the conflict. The Israeli government points to the suicide bombers who have crossed the porous borders to justify the construction of an impenetrable barrier. Many Palestinians actually do not object to a barrier, as long as it follows the Green Line and does not involve the confiscation of more land. Their anger comes mainly from the fact that the Fence/Wall leaves them unable to access their farmland on the other side, or, in extreme cases, to leave their villages except through gates. I have often smiled grimly when I hear experts talk about the parts of the Barrier that “more or less” follow the Green Line: should I tell the farmers in Zububa that their land is more confiscated, or less confiscated? There are villages in the West Bank that are surrounded on three sides by the Wall/Fence and on the fourth lie adjacent to an Israeli settlement. In other places, the Fence/Wall cuts deep inside the Green Line, leaving villages between it and the 1967 border. The newest section of the barrier to be approved will encircle several settlements deep inside the Territories, affecting still more communities. It is estimated that should the Wall/Fence be completed as planned, less than 25% of the West Bank will be left to the Palestinians. And in spite of the safety that the Fence/Wall is supposed to be creating, Hanadi Tayseer Jaradat, a successful lawyer and recent suicide bomber, still managed to travel to Haifa from her home behind the Barrier in Jenin district.

For me, the saddest bit of the reality created by the Wall/Fence is that it makes it that much more difficult for Palestinians and Israelis to interact and come together in a positive way. It is one more step that must be taken before there is any hope of scaling the barriers so many people on both sides have constructed on the inside—barriers that will remain solid long after the physical barrier has been made obsolete.

When I walk away from the Fence/Wall, I sit and talk with Yacoob and the head of the local Land Defense Committee. I struggle to ask technical, sensible questions about the impact that the Barrier has had on Zububa, but I am still shaken by the strength on my own reaction. When construction was beginning, confiscation notices were delivered, sometimes delivered in person, but sometimes nailed to trees in the middle of olive groves, or left in the middle of fields. Sometimes they were delivered on time, sometimes after the official period to lodge complaints had ended. Those who lost land were not offered compensation.

I am in danger of sinking into indignation when Yacoob corrects my narrow view of the impact: “Why are you looking only at villages near the Wall? My wife cannot visit her family now for many months, and when she goes I am always afraid that she will not be able to return home. The Wall[Fence] affects us all; we all know someone who has lost land, or been cut off from family. We all suffer.” The Barrier cuts into the land of some, but the hopes of all.

The committee head breaks in: “Security? What is security? Give a man a chance for life, and he will love you enough that you will feel secure. Take away a man’s land, and where are you? Take away a man’s chance to support his family, and where are you? If you don’t let a man more freely like a man, walk tall like a man, but make him cower like a dog with your gun, where are you? If you make a man feel that his life is worth nothing, then he has nothing to lose, does he?”

I say nothing, but look at the Fence/Wall, the fields beyond, and the Israeli villages less than a kilometer away. I stare at the man’s son, standing cupped in the curve of his father’s arm, eying me shyly. The image becomes the memory of a father and son I saw once as the service took me through one of the settlements that ring Jerusalem. In matching kipahs, the father swung his son through the air as the boy squealed his delight. Two boys, who love their fathers, who teach their sons to love their land. One boy will grow up in the shadow of a barrier that will limit the freedom of his childhood. The other will grow up despised by those who say he has no claim to the only place he knows as his home. Whatever side one is on, this is the tangled knot of resentment and fear that passes here for childhood innocence—the price they must pay simply for being born in paradise.

“Do people sometimes think that you are Palestinian?” a woman asks. I am at an Iftar (breaking of the fast) gathering held by the woman I am staying with in Zababdeh, near Jenin. “I mean, with your coloring, you could be.”

I laugh. “Only until I open my mouth.” The other internationals chuckle and nod sympathetically. “No, seriously, though. People will come up to me in Ramallah and start talking in Arabic. I’m always embarrassed that I can’t answer them.”

This brief exchange echoes in my head the following day, as I stand shivering in the cold shadow of a bus at Huwara checkpoint. I had been sitting in the belly of this bus, sneaking pictures with a digital camera at the scene before me in Huwara: bomb sniffing dogs, old men and women waiting in long queues, men in kipahs waiting for the bus, looking completely unaware of the liquid crowd of Palestinians that carefully parted around them. I was raising my camera for one last shot: an old man on a stretcher sitting in the cool morning air as dogs scouted every crevice of the ambulance in which he could have arrived. I sighed. I could see his IV . . .

The people on the bus began to shift and move, and I join the line to present my papers. I feel the same kick as I always do—the fear that something will go wrong. But I am more irritated at having to leave without my picture.

I hand my passport to the soldier without looking him in the eye. He asks me a question in Arabic, and I mechanically tell him that I do not speak Arabic—it is usually easier that way. “Where,” he draws the word out in frustration, “is your ID?”

“Your Palestinian ID card.” Palestinians do not have passports. They can qualify for a Jordanian passport with difficulty, and the ID card also shows whether they are restricted to the West Bank, or if they can enter Jerusalem.

He makes a sound between a laugh and a snort. “Where is your ID?” he repeats.

“I don’t have one, I told you. But if you look you will see that I have a current visa and passport.”

“If you do not have an ID, then I will have to take you to prison. It is illegal for Palestinians not to be registered. Please show me your papers.”

I swallow and take a deep breath. “I am not Palestinian, and so I do not have an ID card.”

We continue on more or less like this for forty minutes. The soldier occasionally leaves me to consult with someone else, a few other soldiers come. None seem to believe that I am not Palestinian. “My” soldier asks me where my bag is, and another retrieves it. “Open it,” he says, nudging my backpack with the end of his gun. I do, and he points his gun at a plastic bag with clothes. “Open it.” I hold up my clothes. “Tip the bag over, and drop the clothes on the ground!” he says sharply, managing to covey both my utter lack of intelligence and his own boredom. I watch as my clothes fall into the dust. When he is satisfied I ask if I can pack my bag again, and he shakes his head and walks off.

I take several deep breaths and try to think logically. I have not seen him write down my passport number. It is early in the day, and he probably would not arrest me without cause. He did not notice my camera bag, and so did not see the pictures that might have been enough to provide just cause for arrest.

How do you convince someone that you are NOT from somewhere? I rack my brain. I have shown this man an American driver’s license and passport. I have pointed out to him that I do not speak Arabic. My name hardly sounds Arab. But still he persists.

The soldier walks over again, and again demands my Palestinian ID card. I again go over my proof of identity, fiercely reminding myself not to cry and using every ounce of self control to keep my voice from quaking with unshed tears. I refuse to let these men see me cry.

“If you are American,” the soldier says with a small twist of a smile, “You know the Pledge of Allegiance.”

“If you need help,” he says ironically, nodding at the blue Star of David flapping in the breeze, “You can use our flag.”

I do not trust my voice to refuse, and so merely shift slightly away from the flag. I clear my throat, and repeat the Pledge of Allegiance in a voice that is subdued, but surprisingly clear. “ . . . with Liberty and Justice for all,” I finish, fixing my eyes of the young man. He tosses my passport on top of my clothes, and starts to walk away. “You may go,” he says without emotion.

My eyes are dry as I repack my bag and finish the ride to Ramallah. But despite the warm sun and the bulky winter coat and a sweater I wrap around me, I shiver for most of the day.

I reach my office, finally. Words tumble out in a froth of tears as I tell my friend Wahib what has happened. When I finish he says, not unkindly, “Don’t cry. This is the life here. Things like this happen every day.”

His words dry my tears and make my breath catch. “Thank you,” I say flatly, and turn away, hurt by his complete lack of sympathy. As I begin my work, the hurt burns black and turns to anger, and I imagine a thousand responses for Wahib, and for Palestine. This did not happen to me every day, it was not my life. Anyone who had been humiliated and denigrated deserved sympathy, even a foreigner.

My mind turns to work, and over the next hour the anger softens and melts away. Grudgingly, I ask Wahib how his weekend visit to his village was. He hesitates almost imperceptibly. “Good. My family is good. Beit Foriq is . . . bad.”

“A boy was shot by the Israeli soldiers. Then he was dropped out of a Jeep, or run over. His body was . . . mangled.” I cannot form anything coherent to say, and Wahib leaves. I sit there, feeling that my heart must be the size of a thimble: while I sat crying over harsh words and a heap of clothes, a family cried over the tangled remains of their son. I remember what I learned in my peacebuilding course, and remind myself that there cannot be a hierarchy of pain in a conflict such as this, but the words sound hollow.

I close my eyes, but my tears still overspill the lids. As I cry, the memory that makes my throat catch is not the soldier’s utter disbelief, or the threats. It is the way he looked at me with complete contempt, looked through me. As if I had no rights and no worth.

After months of trying to blend in, I have finally succeeded: someone treated me like a Palestinian.

I grumble to myself as I push through the streets of Ramallah. The sidewalks are bunched with shoppers, and enterprising people of all ages have set up tables with everything from balloons to underpants, over which people haggle indefinitely. People stop to find their bargains, to chat with friends, and sometimes seemingly just to announce to anyone within earshot that they are tired and their parcels are heavy. Good for commerce, bad for trying to walk anywhere. No matter, though, because the congestion is such that most people find it easier simply to walk down the street, oblivious to the honking cars and irritated drivers. I check my watch again, ignore the growl of my fasting stomach, and resign myself to being late. It is just before Eid al Fitr, the end of Ramadan, and I am going to Bethlehem to spend the holiday with the family of my friend Reem. If I ever get there, that is . . .

I am late, but am received warmly by Reem’s sisters Areej and Riham. There are seven children in her family, but the rest are having dinner with their grandparents. They spread a feast of grape leaves, soup, fresh bread, dates, and olives on newspaper, and we sit on cushions on the floor and break our fast together, chattering about our lives, Ramadan, and the upcoming Eid. I am still getting the hang of communal meals, and have to concentrate harder than they do not to slop food on myself as it travels precariously from plate to mouth on homemade bread. Once or twice I have held myself apart from a shared repast, citing a cold. My Palestinian friends blink and shake their heads in confusion: don’t American share kitchens, bathrooms, and offices? Doesn’t everyone end up sick anyway? It’s hard to argue with their logic.

I arrive in Bethlehem on Sunday, and we are not yet sure whether the Eid will be Monday or Tuesday—Ramadan is a lunar month of either twenty nine or thirty days. Later we find out that it will be Tuesday, and resign ourselves to one more day of fasting. Really, after a month of waking in the pre-dawn dark and eating in the early dusk it is a difficult concept to think that the day after tomorrow I will be training my body to eat normally again.

After dinner we go to downtown Bethlehem, for the novelty of shopping at night. The streets are more crowded than I would have thought possible, filled with the good humor of full bellies and money to spend. Teenage boys subtly try to catch the attention of pretty girls, who giggle or demurely adjust their higabs, according to modesty or worldliness. Palestinian police in uniform watch over the crowd, and at first it seems to my confused eyes that some of them are much too young. With a shock I realize that many of what I had mistaken for police were boys with toy guns—scarily realistic copies of the same weapons I saw out of the corners of my eyes as I walked through checkpoints. In spite of myself, I jump when a tiny boy near me puts the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. He shrieks with delight at the gun’s loud BLEEEP, and disappears into the crowd.

Reem’s sisters and I make our small purchases before the riptide of the crowd washes us into the central square. On one side, the Church of the Nativity, quiet in the midst of the Muslim festivities. Across from it, Bethlehem’s bustling central mosque. Directly across from the stairs where we sit to rest and enjoy the warm night, the Bethlehem Peace Center. The symbolism is not lost on me, and with my full stomach I put aside my earlier frustrations. In the excitement of the coming Eid, the people of Bethlehem seem exquisitely beautiful: the old women in their thobes, the children threading through the crowds in their games, mothers pausing for a breath before hoisting up again their burdens of food for their families. I smile, and think of my own mother, who is surely now preparing for American Thanksgiving.

The next day, I ask what will happen for the Eid, what shape the day will take. Reem’s sister Ahlam tells me of how they will make visits, and how family and friends will come and visit them. When they have satisfied my questions, they ask me about Thanksgiving. With a pang I think of my mother’s table, where the abundance of food is only eclipsed by the abundance of warmth and love. I remember sitting with her and making the long shopping lists, the scraps of raw pie crust that I loved as a girl, the turkey-smell that filled the house, the way my sister shooed me away from the sink when she washed the large, breakable platters. I remember my first Thanksgiving away from home, and the turkey I proudly brought to the table . . . thanks to my mother’s coaching. I tell them of my mother’s refusal to let anyone be alone on Thanksgiving, and the colorful assortment of boyfriends, foreigners, family friends, and employees that joined us at the table. I blink back tears of homesickness as I finish, “And now I’m here with you all for the Eid, just like people have come to our house so many times.”

The next day I have the rare gift of sleeping in, and take breakfast with the family, but after a month revolving around when to eat, food does not seem so important. We girls take turns making innumerable cups of tea, coffee, and juice for visitors. With my head filled with memories of my own family, I am happy to have people to care for—glad for the small pleasantries and chores of the rounds of visitors whom come to the house.

In the afternoon we go to visit their father’s mother, who greets us warmly. I am happy to sit quietly at the edges of the conversation, watching the way the grandmother’s huge arms encircle her grandchildren, and the love with which she coaxes the smaller ones close. On the way home, I laugh good naturedly with Ahlam and Areej about how cold the houses are—the stones hold in the cold—and our surprise when their grandmother pulled a wind-up mouse out of the front of her thobe. I remember the same gesture from the old women in Africa, in Nicaragua, in America. Grandmothers, I tell them with a smile, are the same everywhere.

Reem calls from America, and the sound of her voice coming down the wire from my homeland makes a lump rise painfully in my throat for my own family. But I look around the room, at the people who tease me like a sister and coddle me like a daughter, and have the rare feeling that in spite of all of the differences, I am just where I need to be. I smile, wondering who will fill my place at my mother’s table, joyful at this kinship of strangers. Reem’s voice pulls me from my thoughts, “Gab?”

What is the response over there to the Geneva accord?” a friend asked in a recent email. Geneva accord. What the heck is that? Living in the Middle East, the only English news I can find comes from Europe and America (if I read the Jerusalem Post I could have an English newspaper, but I do not for political reasons), and so I am in the odd position of finding out about many things here the same way as the least informed Americans: via television.

I found information on the Geneva accord on the Internet: an informal peace plan formulated by moderate Palestinian and Israeli leaders, with backing from the European Union and the United Nations. It has not been endorsed either by the Israeli government or by the PNA, but according to a recent poll its principles are endorsed by 55.6% of Palestinians and 53% of Israelis. The main sticking points are that the Israelis would cede control of the Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary and withdraw from most of the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinians would cede the right of return in all but a few cases, and Jerusalem would serve as the capital for both the Palestinian and Israeli states. Even the Americans have said it is a step forward, even though they are careful to point out that they still back the Road Map. (A friend of mine, who spent time near Jenin once joked that someone should point out to Bush that before Palestine needs a road map, it needs roads.) The symbolic signing this unofficial peace plan is set for 1 December.

I ask a number of Palestinians what they thought about the Geneva accord, in answer to my friend’s question. A couple of intellectuals say that they think that it is important because they feel it will yet again show the world that Israel is not at all committed to making peace a reality: “The Israelis did not stop the incursions and the killing during the ‘hudna,’ [ceasefire] and they will not stop now. We Palestinians are ready for peace, but how can we accept a ‘peace’ that continues to kill our children?” Other friends are no less fatalistic. They shake their heads and cluck their tongues in a way that is uniquely Arab. Another peace plan? Why? Nothing ever changes.

But that is the wrong attitude,” I argue, disappointed. “If no one thinks that the plan will succeed, then of course it will fail! But if enough people on both sides can convince their leaders that they want peace, then they must endorse it.”

One lifts an eyebrow at my naivete. “Really? Just like when your Mr. Bush listed to the millions of protestors against the war in Iraq?”

On 1 December my morning begins normally, but I am bothered by something that I cannot name directly. I had woken in the night, and listened carefully for some noise that might have awakened me, but the night was still. Remembering this, I listen again in the murky light of the winter morning, and hear a low siren and noises that sound like gunfire in the distance. I confirm from friends that the Israeli army is in the city. There had been sporadic gunfire the night before in a neighborhood I passed every day on my way to work, and the army had confiscated a catch of weapons that they had found in one of the houses. We are less surprised at the violence than that the militants have managed to get guns.

When the situation calms an hour later, I travel to work. The mood in the taxi is somber, and we crane our necks to see what we could see as we pass near the site of last night’s violence. Now it is eerily quiet.

Days like this I just have to get through, although each time the violence takes control of Ramallah shoulders are aching by the time I leave my office and the quality of my work is low. Life exists on two levels: the normal and even mundane routines of the office and the conflict that presses against the narrow membrane that separates our lives from chaos. “I have to finish with those financial reports today, and when I’ve reviewed them we should sit down and go over some of the procurement problems.” Gunfire? Is that gunfire? Where is it? Are my friends safe, is my home? “I should go and buy vegetables after work, but I’ll be home by five.” If the vegetable stands are open, if I can reach my home, if we’re not under curfew before that. “I’ve got a meeting tomorrow in Ar-Ram.” Is Qalandia checkpoint going to be open? I’ll bet today the road is closed.

The ways in which we cope have a kind of dark humor. “Hey, can I shut the window? I’m cold.” “Of course. Anyway, there’s nothing to hear now that the shooting’s stopped.”

I am sitting at my desk when there is an explosion so loud it rattles teeth and windows. Out my window I see the men running in the street towards the blast, and a huge, looming cloud of smoke and dust rising lazily over the Ramallah skyline. We are told that a four story building has been destroyed, and gunfire breaks out again in the wake of the blast. Three men and a boy have been killed in Ramallah today, and when I go home at four o’clock the roads are empty and the shops are shuttered. I travel with Wahib for safety, having swallowed my pride enough to admit that I am nervous. “Ramallah,” he tells me as our service travels through the quiet streets, “is a town of ghosts.”

I reach my home, and turn on Euronews to see what the rest of the world makes of this day, which has surely stolen some of the thunder from the signing at Geneva. It is the lead story: a Palestinian and Israeli are shown shaking hands, with flashbulbs popping. Comments from world leaders, a nod that there were protests by both hard-line Israelis and Palestinians. Though perhaps I should know better, I sit in disbelief when the next story begins—it is about the latest acts of violence in Iraq, and ironically the battle-scared men in hatas resemble much more closely my reality than the ridiculously Western and optimistic accounts of the Israel-Palestine peace process. The news carries no word about the violence that shaped our lives in Ramallah today, nor speculation for what this means on the very day that many in the world are declaring a new chapter in our search for peace on our behalf.

I fruitlessly imagine my own version of the news: “Three Hamas members were killed in Ramallah today in the latest of an ongoing string of targeted assassinations carried out by the Israeli Occupation/Defense Force. All men had small children, and leave behind extended families who mourn their loss. The quiet neighborhood in which these men lived has endured 24 hours of crossfire and violence as Israelis and Palestinians clashed, killing a nine year old boy in the process. The incursion culminated in the destruction of a four story building in which thirty-three other families not affiliated with any counter-Israeli operations also made their homes. All legitimate business and enterprise shut down in the makeshift Palestinian capital today as a result of the day’s violence, and the demonstrations that these deaths will provoke is anticipated to result in more deaths on both sides. In a related development today, in Geneva, Switzerland, some rather obtuse gentlemen congratulated themselves on developing a peace plan that has not been officially endorsed by either Palestinian or Israeli leadership, further showing that both sides cater more to extremists than mainstream moderates.”

The longer I am here the more certain I become that I can advocate no answer, articulate no solution. I clutch to the last straw of hope: the safe space of my own limitations, where I can acknowledge that the answers are not mine only to find.

A friend here tells me that she has met a man called Elyahu McLean—an organizer and peace activist. His name triggers memories; a dear friend telling me that this was one man who never loses hope that peace is possible. I could use a little hope, and before I really understand why I am dealing Elyahu’s number.

He listens sympathetically when I tell him that as much as I love my work, I am craving some bit of success amid so many failed attempts at coexistence. That my work is to create survival and make the present viable for Palestinians, but that my soul longs to find something called a future. Plus—I hesitate—I live and work with Palestinians, and as I read over my emails I am afraid that I am dangerously close to losing sight of the other side of this conflict. I am ashamed to confess all of this to this man I have never met, but Elyahu merely goes on to tell me of projects that fit my interests: a “peace café” and community garden started by Palestinians and Israelis, Interfaith peace vigils, and a gathering planned for next spring.

I hang up the phone feeling exhilarated and more than a little silly. How is a peace vigil any more worthwhile than the peace plan I was watching emerge stillborn? Wasn’t the training my organization provided to build the capacity of Palestinian grassroots leaders more valuable than a café? I smile at myself and shake my head; good thing I don’t have to choose one way of living or the other. I don’t know if I could, even if I wanted to.

Someone told me once that finding love was not about fireworks or rainbows, but about finding the person who was willing to sew together your network of patches. I don’t know if I have the strength or love for Palestine to create anything whole from what I find here, but this place leaves me no choice but to love my own network of patches.

My coat is nowhere near sufficient, and I shiver in the cold rain. In spite of its desert beauty, Palestine in December is cold, and the stone houses are impossible to keep warm. All is hardly calm and bright here, and if the stars in the sky look down where we lay, well, I can’t see them in the rain and fog. I feel as if I haven’t been warm in a month, and am look forward with longing to drawing a warm bath in a warm bathroom when I meet my family in Italy for the holidays.

So why, I ask myself for the third time, am I lugging my heavy laptop through the wet streets on a rainy night in December?

Our family Christmas tree in America is always a live tree. My parents never even bought a cut tree, and after the holidays we would plant it on our farm. Our Christmas trees were a hope for the future, and long before her dreams of a farmhouse were a reality, my mother lovingly planted trees that would grow up to ring the home she would one day build. I remember the years that my mother spent quietly planting her dreams when I watch families here caring for their olive trees. During the harvest season, the groves were filled with whole families singing, picking, and eating in the shady heat, from the tiniest baby to the oldest grandmother. Planting a tree when the future is so uncertain is something like a sacrament.

It’s funny, in spite of the fact that my family’s Christmas tree was always lavishly surrounded with gifts, it is only a special few that spring easily to mind as a part of what is Christmas. But I remember clearly the taste of Christmas baking, the sharp smell of the tree, the way the candles flickering on the mantel reflected in the windows. I remember the years when my sister was living on her own, but still showed up at the crack of dawn, travel mug of coffee in hand, so that she did not miss one second of the scramble to open the gifts. I remember the love of a family coming home for the holidays, and the sound of my father’s graveled voice reading “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” I smile even when I remember the small family mishaps that gave the holidays an itchy, uncomfortable feel in some years, and the frightened sorrow the year my father was dying—even in our anger and bitterness, we were together, and now, when I am far from home, I cherish even the memories of these less than perfect Christmases.

Perhaps I want to recapture those memories, perhaps I just want to find something of my own traditions in this foreign culture. Or perhaps the only plausible reason why I am braving a foul night to lug home a plastic tree is pure insanity.

The shop that I have been told sells trees shines out jewel-bright—a true Christmas star in the rain-dark streets. I enter, and am assailed by the sights and sounds of so many Christmases, in spite of the obvious contradictions. Saviors and santas stand together at attention among a cheerful pandemonium of lights and coloured balls. A train set waits ready to speed off, and a row of little drummer boys are frozen in a silent chorus. A lump rises to my throat as I look around; this will be my first tree of my own. I make my way to the plastic forest in the back of the shop, and pick out a tree that I can afford. Small, but big enough to nestle all of my Christmas memories underneath. I walk delicately between the crowded isles, seeing my family’s Christmas trees in mind’s eye: the birds with real feathers that nested in the branches, the frosted fruit that duskily reflected light, the balls that marked the birth of children, the ornaments inherited from my grandmother. I select my own fruit, and birds, and ornaments, placing them in the basket with care.

I must have paused and looked around with more than my usual degree of dreamy confusion, for the show owner comes and asks me what I am looking for. “Do you—” I hesitate, fully expecting to be disappointed. “Do you have an angel for the top of the tree?” The man nods, and comes back with a smallish box. I look at the tiny, serene porcelain face staring out for a long moment, and am assailed with dozens of memories of two small children, my brother and I, arguing over the angel. “Daddy, she put it up last year! It’s my turn now.” I’m sure that there were years when my father boosted one of us or the other to top the tree, but what I remember is the later years: I standing by my father’s side, my brother in his arms, my mother poised with the camera while we gingerly held the angel between us and placed her on the tree.

“It is not so expensive,” the shopkeeper’s voice called me back to the present. “I think it will look nice with your ornaments.

I blink back my memory-tears and smile a broad smile. “No. I mean, thank you; she’s perfect.”

I make my purchases, and take the tree home. I unpack the small olive wood nativity scene that I have bought in Bethlehem as gently as if it held a real baby, and place the figures with finicky care, arranging and rearranging them. Perhaps it’s a bit unromantic to snap together one’s Christmas tree, but I enjoy the ritual of separating the fake branches and fluffing the artificial twigs. I place the ornaments with care, one by one, ruefully thinking of the days when my brother and I were too young to be that patient. I am alone, but my family is with me.

I rock back on my heels, smiling at my little tree. With its lights twinkling and presents lovingly spread beneath, it really doesn’t look a bit Charlie Brown-ish. I wonder what stories I will tell in the future about this first tree, and to whom I will tell them. Will I laugh when I think of my stubby little tree, decorated with so much love? Will I carefully unwrap these olive wood ornaments from tissue paper worn thin with age, telling of my time here?

“Once, a long time ago, I lived in the place where Jesus was born and raised. On the night I bought the ornaments, it was rainy, and I learned just how heartbroken Joseph must have been to take his pregnant wife to sleep in a cold stone barn in the middle of winter. Each day I saw women traveling over rough roads and walking through checkpoints with their swollen stomachs and new babies, and thought of Mary traveling from Nazareth to Bethlehem. And without fail, whenever I saw a new baby gurgling with a joy untouched by the troubles and violence in its country, I gave thanks again for a Savior-child.”

A visa for Israel is ten centimeters by twelve-and-a-half centimeters, and, of course, blue and white. In the upper right-hand corner, the state of Israel welcomes you. It asks for your name, youth father’s name, the country of your birth and citizenship, year of birth, sex, and passport number. Seven questions, on a scrap of paper smaller than a postcard. Usually it lies folded neatly in the crease of your passport, and never leaves your person for longer than a few hours. I protect it, and loath it, both.

I write this article from a friend’s home, the night before I leave to join my family in Europe for Christmas. As always, where there is a chance that something elusive that I call happiness might be taken from me (in lieu of the ever-present possibility that I might be denied re-entry), I find myself turning the smallest details of my life here over in my mind, and finding them almost painfully beautiful. It is the blend of a thing and a feeling, this painful sense of possible loss: the labored rising and falling of my father’s chest as he held me in a long, gentle hug. The way the scent of a departed friend breathes from your muffler after he has gone. The baby-sound of my niece’s laughter. This message is devoted to some of the minutia that is at once mundane and at the same time composes the fabric of my life here.

Qalandia checkpoint is dusty in summer, muddling in winter. Enterprising sorts take advantage of the traffic to sell fruit, dishes, canaries, meat, snacks. They hawk their wares in an unaggressive sort of way, as if subdued by the solders that weave in and out of their midst. In the winter they stand in huddled knots around small fires, for all the world like the street vendors of New York, London, Narobi. The fringes of Qalandia are filled with sound: cars honking, men shouting the destinations of their taxis, boys calling to one another. The lines, too, are filled with chatter. But the center of Qalandia, where the soldiers wait in a bored yet intent sort of way, it is quiet. The sounds of cars and men enter the vacuum of quiet requests, with very few exceptions. Qalandia is a mass of tin and rock, mud and razor wire, and even over my six months here has evolved like some gigantic caterpillar: new barriers come up, metal detectors have been put in place (but are seldom used), human and vehicle traffic is routed and re-routed. The people are a cross section of Palestinian society: old women in their long embroidered dresses, young women with styled hair and Western clothes, conservative girls in higab and coat-like abeyas, teenage boys with thrust out chins and jutting brows, tiny babies blinking fawn-like from layers of cloth. Stand still long enough and the world would pass you by. Few stop to see if this is true.

After the rain stops, the stones of the Old City of Jerusalem glisten in the watery light of early morning. The hills in the distance still brood with fog and wispy clouds. Jerusalem rises up in my blood, and each footfall seems to pay homage to this beautiful, broken city. Some cities hold you at arms length, or try to dominate you with their size. Jerusalem is like a tired woman who has been loved too much: it embraces you in a tired sort of way, wishing everyone would stop asking it to be this or that, and let it be in peace. In night air so sharp my breath rises before me, I stand in Shu’fat on the fringes of the city, and I can’t tell the lines between East and West. Beneath the same blanket of stars, Jerusalem is whole.

The Mouqata in Ramallah, where Yaser Arafat/Abu Ammar and his government reside, is a pile of rubble, and I am always taken aback when I see it, not because of the twisted wreck of reinforcement bars and chunks of rock and concrete. Not because of the half-buildings lying open and exposed, or the bullet holes that riddle the walls. But because I know that inside the one more-or-less standing building, men crouched for long weeks while the siege raged around them. This has been the home of the president for the past two years, and he is not allowed to leave. In illness, the best doctors are brought to him, and world leaders have come to sit with him. By all accounts, he has what he needs, but as I stand, belittled by the shadow of the crater-like destruction, I wonder if, on clear days, he risks danger and stands at the window to watch the sun setting on the sea, longing to feel the pleasure of being free. In the night, it glows under spotlights, and I pause to carefully select a bit of rock from a pile near the outer wall. My hands are glad for the rough feel of its edges in my pocket.

“I’ve heard there’re lots of these things on the Internet. You know, these—whad’you call’ems? Blogs?” The man at the bar says with a hint of a smile but no malice. “I hear most of them last for six or nine months, and then the blokes run out of things to say.”

I shrug and nod, noncommittal, and politely tell him that if nothing else, it is cheap therapy. The sunset over Beitunia from my office window, the way the light falls like a shawl across the back of the woman at the checkpoint, the bright faces of the two sisters, encircled in their higab, the bashful boy whose dimples betray the smile hidden behind an old tire—the world is full of the tiny scraps of beauty, and miracles lie folded up in the creases of life like prayers in the cracks of the Western Wall. Perhaps one day I will run out of things to write about, but now it seems like there is so much left to say.

New Year’s Day marks the dawn of a new year, the promise of good things to come, seasons of change, and all the rest of the rot associated with a day I am secretly sure was selected arbitrarily by aged drunken monks wearing funny eyeglasses in the Middle Ages who went about deciding prophetic things like when the first day of the year was. (N.B. I have yet to convince anyone of this, and yet have also failed to find anyone to disprove said theory.) This New Year’s, however, is also my six month anniversary in Palestine.

There comes a time in everyone’s life when the rather shocking and often disturbing revelation comes: this is your life. THIS is YOUR LIFE. Yes, the preparation is over, the planning, the follow up. No no, this is it. Whether it is pleasant or miserable, this is life; the only one you will get. Eek. I am used to being able to keep commitment at a safe, respectable distance. I was more than a tad irked to find out that Life had somehow wrangled a commitment out of me without my knowing. It’s not commitment per se that is the problem, but mainly that making a crucial, commitment-type life decision means not choosing so many other things. For example, although I dearly love my career in NGO work, I do feel a pang of regret that I will in all probably be a world class physicist or Olympic athlete. Not that I’ve ever really wanted to do those things, but all the same it’s sad to know that they’re probably off the list.

I am fairly certain that most people have this sort of epiphany at the age of, say, sixteen, which is supported (unlike the monk theory) given the number of young people who are content to accept life as it comes and actually live, as opposed to obsessive list-making and mind-numbing responsibleness—you know, act like sixteen-year-olds. But I have always been a late bloomer.

I suppose it is obvious that I had one of these revelations recently. Given my newfound state of self-actualization, I decided to look at some of the more telling moments over the past six months, given that all of this has clearly led up to my mind-blowing intellectual breakthrough.

I have now been in Palestine 184 days. (The newly reckless me is not the least bit put off that it took knuckle counting, a calculator, and ten minutes (not counting the five it took to find the calculator) to figure this out.) In this time, have spent approximately 37 days frowning intelligently and looking as if I understand Arabic—not bad, given that the time was cumulative, not continuous. It is, however, slightly depressing to realize that I have spent only roughly 20 days actually studying Arabic, and that the end product of these 57 combine days is that I can now say things such as “I like book,” and “this for Naser please.” On the whole, frowning intelligently allows me slightly more dignity than talking like a well-intentioned but rather slow three-year-old.

I have learned to cook innumerable Palestinian dishes. Or, rather, have learned how to throw things together in a pot, Palestinian-style, and hope that the resulting saucy-stuff vaguely resemble something Palestinian. It has recently struck me that this is somewhat silly, given that I do not like, nor have ever been particularly fond of, rice—over which the various saucy-looking dishes should be poured. Instead in 2004 I have decided to spend the time formerly spent learning how to cook these things pondering how monstrously unfair it is to spend much more time and energy cooking foreign dishes that cause Palestinian guests to nod sympathetically and assure me that they can teach me how to cook “properly.” I am also considering adding “eat out in restaurants” to my list of New Year’s resolutions.

I have spent far too much time watching TV and have justified such a ridiculous waste of time by deciding it is a form of cultural study. On further reflection, I am not exactly sure that watching the foreign channels to see how they will cut out the sexy bits from American movies and TV shows qualifies as cultural study. Nevertheless, it is enlightening to discover that it is possible to show a 90 minute version of “American Beauty” that contains nothing related to homosexuality, nudity or explicit sexual acts.

I have learned how to work gas heaters and stoves, and still have all fingers, toes, and eyebrows intact. Again, from a strictly time perspective, it was perhaps a bit of a waste to spend at least a few hours at different times staring menacingly at the various small appliances saying hopefully hypnotic things like, “you want to cook this potato.” Still, it’s good about the eyebrows.

This was crucially important as I have also learned that the term “Palestinian winter” is roughly equivalent, in English to “will not be warm for four or five months.” The combination of old stone houses without central heating, limited hot water, and the mistaken impression while I was packing clothes in America that deserts were associated only with heat has meant that I am more or less constantly freezing. I felt a bit odd wearing all of my warmest clothes at once inside, but then realized that everyone does more of less the same.

I have learned how to work at least 90% of the gizmos on my cellular phone, thus appearing very urbane and suave when walking down the street. The importance of this became clear after an early incident involving the “vibrate” function when I innocently assumed that my mobile was a) demon possessed or b) about to explode. Either way, I don’t see why throwing it across the room was such a bad idea.

I have mastered the art of buying meat without severe embarrassment. Given my fore-mentioned broken Arabic, this tends to involve animal noises and pointing to various body parts. This makes it easier to have non-vegetarian friends over, although some rather serious misunderstandings have put me off chicken breasts, possibly for life.

And finally, I have become reconciled, even cheerful, about being considered a little off by most of my neighbors and co-workers. Women’s liberation is accepted to a large degree here in Palestine, and women here often work. But holding a position of responsibility is still a bit new:

“Well, I write proposals for several hundred thousand dollars a pop, review all reports sent to donors, and manage a $1.2 million dollar development project funded by the World Bank.”

Serene smiles and nods abound. “Don’t worry dear. After you’ve learned to cook better and can speak Arabic you can get married and give up that nasty job.”

In other words, in spite of the extremes of joy and pain that usually feature prominently in my emails, the fear of hopelessness and the odd exploded building, this is my life, and I am slowly learning what it means to live it.

A diversion from Palestine this week to share with you my Christmas vacation to meet my family in Rome . . .

I suppress a sigh of irritation, and shift uncomfortably in the people-packed throng of the security point at Ben Gurion Airport. I am on my way to Rome to meet my family for Christmas—something I have been looking forward to for months. I imagine a joyous family reunion, in which we all share deeply, meaningfully, about our work and lives, in between sessions of family cuddling and group sing alongs. I imagine a carefree family eating gelatos while wandering amid Roman ruins and Renaissance churches, exchanging thoughtful tokens of our admiration for each other on Christmas day.

But currently my plans seem to have stalled. The security has been heightened for the holiday season, and the airport is packed with travelers. I showed up as commanded three hours early for my six am flight, bleary eyed and having coffee fantasies. I have made it through the security interview—all that remains is to have my bag checked. I glance at my watch: over an hour spent in security so far. About another half an hour, and then I should be done . . .

I have roughly the same thought an hour later. I have progressed through the line, and am having the contents of my bag minutely inspected by a very sweet, somewhat inept girl. I remind her several times that it will do me no good if I make it through security but miss my flight, and she nods. “It’s just that it is difficult with the crowds for the holidays,” she says, “Everything takes longer.”

I debate the wisdom of pointing out the irony of everyone leaving the Holy Land for Christmas, but instead say, “Why didn’t you ask people to be here four hours early, instead of the usual three?”

She looks at me with remonstrance. “Then everyone would have had to be here at two in the morning.” As she hefts the next load of my clothes and toiletries to be X-rayed, I again consider pointing out to my companion that there is no real difference between two am and three am—both are still rather earlier than one should ask people to come if they are expected to answer a three hour stream of questions. I have been trying to ignore my unwashed hair, and keep from feeling greasy and dirty.

Finally, an hour later, the girl tells me that I can put my things back in the bag. “I’m sorry, but because your bag has been a . . . problem, you will not be allowed to take it on the plane. You will have to check it.”

I suppress a groan of irritation. “That’s fine,” I say as brightly as I can muster. “I’ll just grab my hairbrush.”

I glance at the clock—I have fifteen minutes until my plane is supposed to leave. “Riiight, well then, security risk it is.”

Finally released, I make a mad dash to the gate, carrying my passport and book in an airsick bag. Clearly, the lack of line means that everyone else has already boarded. I tear through the airport to the desk, and thrust my ticket dramatically at the woman behind the desk. She shakes her head slightly, obviously not seeing the urgency of the situation. I wiggle my ticket to catch her attention, at which she tells me none-too-politely, “The plane is delayed and has not boarded yet.” Of course. I knew that, actually. To prove my clear grasp of the situation, I nod knowingly and rush off in the opposite direction, hoping against hope that they will understand that I am not a lunatic, merely a very important person doing very important things, or a health enthusiast, or one of those Buddhist monks who meditate while running for days on end.

Three hours later, I emerge blearily from the plane in Rome. I had been trapped in the devilish middle seat between a sleeping, sprawling Tall Man and a rather large girl who didn’t quite fit in her seat. But now, off the plane, I am a confident traveler, sophisticated and aloof, flicking my clean and swingy hair from behind dark sunglasses. Some birds skitter across the runway in an Italian-y way, and I am bathed with the smug satisfaction. I walk down towards the shuttle, and blink. The floaty birds were actually someone’s old newspaper. Darn dark glasses.

Unfazed, I walk slowly and gracefully to the waiting shuttle bus. Only customs left now, and then I will be with my . . . Bugger. I have left the airsick bag with my passport inside on the plane. I dash back up the steps, to the smirking stewardess dangling my bag in front of her. I go back to the shuttle, ducking, with my eyes downcast. Chastised, I peek out at my fellow travelers, and do a double take. At least three fourths of the other passengers are carrying some sort of musical instrument. All ages of people, of all backgrounds, united only by the bizarre collection of French horns, ouds, violins—even a cello. My sleep-starved brain begins to wonder: was I supposed to bring a musical instrument? Was that how they picked me out at security? Maybe I should take up the guitar again before I next go to renew my visa.

I clear customs and take my bags, and go out to meet the waiting taxi driver. I am so used to not being able to talk to anyone that I do not even try to talk to him, but look through gritty eyes at the scenery. At the hotel, I am reunited with my family, and my two-year-old niece gratifyingly lurches into my waiting arms. She nuzzles my cheek, squealing “Unca MIKE,” with great satisfaction.

That afternoon we rejoin the driver who had met me at the airport to go sightseeing. Apparently I had been sufficiently preoccupied earlier that I had not noticed that he a) spoke very good English, and b) was a Roman god look-alike. I cajole my way into the front seat. As we travel around Rome, I impress him with my intellect and charm: “The light . . .”

“It’s so . . . pure. I just . . . love . . . light.” This was not going as I could have hoped. Thankfully he missed the last bit because he had started talking on his cell phone. It also turned out that he was leaving to go skiing the day after Christmas.

At one point my sister said that the perfect tableau for the vacation would be: my back disappearing in the distance, my mother with one map pointing one way, my brother-in-law with another map pointing the opposite direction, my niece asleep in her stroller, my brother picking up her sippy-cup, my sister taking a picture. I only got involved in the directions once.

This ended with me getting fed up and following my own directions, regardless of what my family decided. I reached the square and waited for my family, who emerged from a different road a full fifteen minutes after I arrived. Reminding myself not to gloat at my superior internal compass, I walked up, at which my mother turned and said brightly, “Oh, thank goodness you made it.”

I managed to drip gelato down the front of my sweater, and it was difficult to share deeply and meaningfully with a two-year-old around (although my family probably enjoyed the diversion from my Arab-culture explanations and Palestinian diatribe). My sister and I did, however, manage to have a sisterly moment in which she imparted upon me the wisdom that life had granted her:

“I want a dog,” I said. “You know, something cute and cuddly to keep me warm at night.”

“Or a man. You know, depending on the level of care giving I want to be responsible for. Stuffed animal first, dog in the middle, man on top.”

The next day my brother, sister, and I were sharing a cab back, and started talking about family roles. “I see myself as the peacemaker in the family,” my sister said, “You know, I’m older and settled and you all are doing your own things.”

My brother piped up, “Well, I see myself as the peacemaker, because I’m the youngest and I’m at home the most.” I remained silent, clearly not a contender given the whole ocean-apart-and-living-in-a-war-zone thing. But I had my career, my friends, a nice life—I started and sat bolt upright, a slow, burning fear coming over me. It’s true, I thought, No one ever thinks they’re the strange one. Everyone thinks they’re good and normal and everyone else is the strange one. Go and interview people in Belleview and they’ll have the same conversation I just had with my brother and sister. Maybe there’s no “strange,” maybe the normal one is really the strange one because we’re all strange except for the ones who are normal. That makes sense, doesn’t it?!

But in spite of everything, when I sat waiting for the taxi to take me from my family’s insanity to the insanity of my own life, I didn’t remember arguing on street corners or dropped sippy cups. I remember cuddling the sturdy little body of my niece, really getting to know my brother-in-law, waking up in the room I shared with my Mum, and, most of all, the feeling of being surrounded by the people who love me, in spite of all the dropped airsick bags, imaginary birds, hairbrushes, and street corners I could come up with.

The boy in front of me alternates, in the way of teenagers, between meeting my eyes with childlike simplicity and looking with a mature frown at the table before him. His face is still rounded in youth, but I see where in time hard planes will emerge from his boyhood. He has an engaging and easy smile, and appears comfortable to be talking to me, a total stranger.

As we sit, he tells me what he wants to write for his application essay for several American schools. I sit quietly and listen, my eyes on him, as he tells me the story of a friend of his. One night, during a curfew, some of his friends were playing football. The power had been cut, but was flickering on sporadically. The boy’s friend went to fetch the ball, and touched an electric fence. He did not survive the shock. He, like the boy, would have been eighteen now, and in the year since his death, the boy has thought much about the kind of life he wants, the conflict that indirectly claimed the life of his friend, his own worth. He was depressed, but he assures me that he is better now, and knows how valuable life is. He is breathtaking with his mix of sincerity and passion, and much as I long to believe him, I know he is lying.

I know he is lying because his father is my friend and colleague, and I have seen many times the bloodshot eyes and pain his son’s depression and rebellion have caused him. I have heard the stories of how he refused to go to school, stayed out late, shrugged off the concerns of his loving parents. I know he is lying because I have seen the same mixture of teenage resentment, raw grief, and intelligent mendacity within my own family. I know he is lying because despite being a colleague of his father’s, I am still much closer to his confusion and backlashes of youthful fear than I am to his father’s parental certainties and concerns. Yes, I look at the boy in front of me, and know he is lying. I would reach out and touch him, but I do not know if I would hold him or strike him, which.

The boy’s father is a passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause—a socialist who never promoted violence, but reform. He pushes himself relentlessly in his chosen work on behalf of his people, shunning publicity in favor of direct actions to ameliorate the suffering around him. He has spent three years in prison, and sometimes as we drive around Ramallah he dissects the pros and cons of the various prisons that confined him with an almost Epicurean appreciation of the hardness of mattresses, the staleness of food, the lone time when he was allowed a non-smoking room. He has told me in short, staccato sentences about being made to sit in a child’s chair for hours on end, a burlap sack over his head, answering questions about crimes he did not commit. He tells me with obvious pain about betrayals by friends and the way, when the lights had been put out, he thought only of his beloved wife and two young boys while other men clung to the shreds of their faith or vocation.

I have tried to give his father all of the advice that I could never take myself: don’t get angry, teach him about the effects his actions will have on his life, and let him make his own decisions. Don’t give up because he is so angry and scared at the world that he wants you to give up so that he can, too. I know his father cannot take this advice, any more than I could.

The boy and I together jot down notes for the essay he will never write. He will take these notes, trying not to smirk, and put them in a stack with the rest of the papers his parents tell him he needs, and think how easy it is to fool people into believing him. He will hide his pain—even from himself—and will continue to erect barriers to keep out everyone who loves him. He will be at times charming, when it suits him, at times depressed and moody, at times simply vulnerable and young.

I abandon our notes and tell this boy about life in America. I try to warn him about the people who have never met a Palestinian, who may be ignorant or hurtful. I try to explain to him what it means to be asked to speak on behalf of your people every time the issue comes up. I wonder, somewhat idly, if he will make the effort needed to go. The experience would either make or break him, and for me it is too soon to tell which it would be.

Would these two men, father and son, be so different if they did not live in Palestine—if they did not have the memories of the chair that cut into the backs of one’s thighs, the terrifying smell that filled the other’s nostrils? Would they merely find other experiences that could cleave them in two? Were they predestined, as some families seem to be, to burst at the seams from too much pressure and love? Perhaps their story is inevitable, universal, and the conflict is merely the backdrop for the sadness they inflict on each other. But neither they, nor I, will ever know any other way their story could have been.

January 13, 2004 - O Jerusalem

I am standing in a corner of our office lunchroom, talking excitedly to Mousa, my friend and colleague, about moving to Jerusalem that day. "I mean, I'll just be staying in a guesthouse for the first couple of weeks," I say in between bites of falafel, "But it's in the Old City, and the views are beautiful."

Rasha, another coworker, standing near, says something in Arabic, and I catch the word "egeneb." Foreigner. Me. Several of the staff cut their eyes at me, and I smile my frozen I-do-not-understand smile, and ask what she has said. She does not look at me, busily making herself a sandwich. "Haram [a pity]," she said, not meeting my eyes. "All of these internationals can come to our country and live in Jerusalem, the center of Palestine. But me, a Palestinian, I have a West Bank ID and cannot go." She finally looks at me. "My husband can enter Jerusalem with his ID, and I would love to go with my son and my husband, but it is not possible. I can't enter and see your beautiful views."

I am suddenly not hungry, and leave quickly without a word. I have already felt guilty about leaving Ramallah to make my home in Jerusalem, even before her comments. I sit at my desk and once more mourn the restrictions that define so much of the lives of my Palestinian friends. But also, I am hurt by Rasha's comments, by the implication that I am not sympathetic to her situation. I turn it over in my mind, and finally go to her office, feeling a bit foolish, but wanted to clear the air.

"Um . . . Rasha, do you have a minute?" She blinks a Palestinian yes, and I continue. "Well, it's just that . . . The comment that you made about people living in Jerusalem? It seemed a little . . . pointed." Already I feel that I am overreacting, and want to make a graceful exit.

Even in English, her words tumble over each other and come out too quickly, heatedly. "I did not mean anything directed at you. It is the situation here. This is our life, and it is awful that things are this way. I do want to go to the Old City with my husband, and it isn't fair that you should be able to go and not me. Foreigners in this country get treated so well, and we must be humiliated. Foreigners come in here and get cars and big salaries, and we never do." She looks at me intently, and says in a way that I find intensely patronizing, "This is our life. You can't understand the way it is for us—things are not the same for you here as for us. You can go to Haifa, to Tel Aviv—"

"But Rasha, do you understand that I don't do those things, in solidarity with my Palestinian friends? I stand and wait for friends at checkpoints, and try to help them through. I mean, I have barely been anywhere across the Green Line except for the airport."

She arches an eyebrow. "Barely? There is no such thing as 'barely'—you have a choice and we do not."

I look at this woman, feeling hot tears rush to my eyes. In the six months that I have worked with her, she has barely acknowledged my presence. She insists on speaking to me in Arabic that I do not understand, and asks me, in our superficial lunch conversations, who cooks for me and does my laundry. She seems unimpressed when I turn it into a joke and tell her I do those things myself. I have offered to watch her son, invited her and her husband to my home, stopped to talk with her on slow days. And we are as much strangers now as the first time we met.

"Rasha, of course I do not have the same situation as you. I know that. But I am here in this country because I want to help. I work to support the work that Palestinians are doing, rather than with an American NGO. I am here in solidarity with the Palestinians, and to tell others in America what happens here. I—"

"I'm not saying that you are not doing good work. I am just saying that you are not Palestinian."

Stung, I mumble some sort of an answer and leave. I go to my desk, put my face in my hands, and cry. I can keep my composure when questioned by soldiers and threatened with arrest, but this woman's bitter critique brings tears to my eyes. I cry, thinking of the intense loneliness of sitting drinking tea in dozens of rooms where I could talk to no one. Of the crackling ten-minute line that connects me to my mother's voice each week. Of the care with which I choose my words, my clothes, my actions, so that I do not offend. I think of the meetings during which I have gritted my teeth and tried not to daydream while Arabic bubbled and flowed around me. I turn over in my mind every Arab social convention I have followed out of respect for my friends and colleagues, even when I yearned for the freedoms I had left behind me in America.

But most of all, I cried because Rasha was right. I cried because beneath the veneer of cultural awareness and solidarity, I was so very different, and there was so much here that a lifetime of learning would still fail to teach me. In spite of it all, I wanted to fit in. I finally understood the challenge of members of minority groups: we none of us want to have to be like someone else. We want to be ourselves, and have that be all right.

In my tears I did not notice when Mousa came up behind me. He hovered sympathetically—to hug me would have broken a small army of social norms. "Hey," he said, his voice full of concern, "Please, don't let her do this to you. It isn't you; it's the conflict. You didn't make this situation; you just came here to try to fix it. Do you think Rasha would have left her home and come halfway around the world to live in the middle of all of this? If she hadn't been born into this, do you think she'd care?" He gave a small laugh. "I don't know if I would have had your courage, either."

"It's not about courage. It’s you all who have so much courage, every day—that’s what I admire so much about the Palestinian people. But I am so sick of people judging me based on what they see in American movies. I'm not some stereotype. I'm a person, too. I spent most of my adult life in America trying to celebrate the differences between cultures. I used to get so angry when Americans expected people who came from other places to be just like us. Now I am here and I am being judged by someone else's standards of what is right and good, and I am supposed to smile and pretend it isn't happening."

"But we do appreciate the sacrifices that you've made. We appreciate how respectful you are of our culture. Believe me, we do." I want so much to believe him, to be told that I am doing something right, that I am not as out of place as I feel.

"And what about me?" he continues. "I have a Jerusalem ID. I went to a school where I was one of three Palestinians. I speak Hebrew, and have some Israeli friends. A lot of people would call me a collaborator, and say that I am turning my back on my people. But if we are ever going to learn to live together, all Israelis and Palestinians will have to collaborate, won't we?"

It's true, I know. I look up and into Mousa's intent stare. I sigh. "I'm sorry; I know I shouldn't let it get me down. I think I just need to be a bit down for a while, and then I'll be okay."

When I leave the office, the grey day matches my mood. With my bags in tow, I navigate services, Qalandia checkpoint, taxis. Perhaps if the day had not taken the form it had, it would have been a nuisance, but as it was, I slogged through the drenched checkpoint as if my resolve could wave away the shreds of misunderstanding still clinging to my mind.

As the hills around Ramallah rolled past, I reflected again on my six months living there. I had made some friendships that I hoped would be lasting ones, had found challenging and rewarding work. But I had continued to live there because of a lingering suspicion that I had something to prove, to myself or to the world. As the lights of Jerusalem rolled into view, I wondered: did I want to live a life that was not my own simply to prove a point? Did I want to define myself based on what challenges I was able to meet?

I stepped down from the service, and in the darkness the Dome of the Rock rose like a glittering gem. The walls of the Old City came to meet me, and there was the feeling of surrendering the burden of my pride. I experienced the reality of what I would and would not sacrifice, and in the wide space of my own limitations, I found something like peace.

January 25, 2004 - Criss-Cross

Shadi is a quiet man, good at his job. With a broad smile and gentle manner, he greets his parishioners on Sundays. In between, he guides them through difficult times, shares their joys, makes sure they are not lonely or feel forgotten by the small congregation. Including me.

Palestinian ministers have permission to travel within the West Bank, and are provided with all the proper paperwork so that they can do so. This is important as since the start of the Intifada in 2000, Arab Israeli ministers who had been serving in West Bank parishes have been barred from entering the Territories. Shadi and other ministers must travel to see to the now-staffless congregations

He tells me his story on a bright morning, soon after a Christmas marred by violence. A suicide bombing in Tel Aviv claimed four Israeli lives, and in an unrelated incident four Palestinians were killed in the Gaza town of Jabalia. The Israeli government had issued statements saying that there would be no restriction on the movement of Christians for Christmas.

Shadi conducted a service in Bir Zeit, near Ramallah, at nine, taking his wife and his ten month old son with him. He then went to Ramallah and performed another service, and then headed to the village of Zababdeh, near Jenin, to perform a third.

It was a cold and windy day on Christmas. Shadi and his family traveled through the DCO without incident, but then arrived at the checkpoint of Ma’el Evrehim. Shadi saw no other cars, only several soldier standing and talking together. Finally, he honked his horn. One soldier shouted at him to stay put until he was called. Shadi waited for fifteen minutes more, before the soldier told him to turn off the engine and get out of the car with his wife. Shadi protested that there was a baby in the car, and that it was cold. The soldier replied that the child could stay, but that his wife had to get out.

With both of them out of the car, the soldier asked Shadi to remove his cross and put it in the car. Shadi asked why that was necessary: “Why does it bother you? Please, check our papers and let us leave.” The soldier did not push the issue; he checked the permissions for the three of them and the car, and let them pass. Eventually, they arrived at Zababdeh at 4:50, and had the Christmas service at five.

They traveled back to Ramallah on the 26^th, to go on a youth trip to Nazareth. They came to Al-Hamra checkpoint, and the soldier told them to approach. The soldier ordered everyone out of the car. Even the baby, Shadi asked? Yes, even the baby. The three waited in the cold until the soldier said that everyone but Shadi could return. Shadi asked why it was so difficult to get through. “Haven’t you heard of what happened in Tel Aviv?”

“Yes,” said Shadi. “And I am very sorry. But I do not see how detaining a minister will help. Why should my family suffer?” The soldier did not answer. After more than an hour, they were allowed to pass.

They came again to the Ma’el Evrehim checkpoint. A different soldier from the day before asked him to turn off the engine and come with him. When Shadi and his wife had stepped out of the car, the soldier told him to remove his cross and put it in the car. Shadi said that there was no need, and the soldier repeated his request. Shadi refused, and asked again, “Why does it bother you?” He also asked to speak to his supervisor, whom the soldier said was not available. The soldier again asked him to take the cross off and put it in the car, and Shadi replied that he would turn around and go back before he would take his cross off. He tried to remain calm, although he heard his son, alone in the car and crying. He asked if his wife could please go and comfort their son, but the soldier refused. The other man told Shadi that he would not be allowed to go back, and that his permission would not be checked until he removed his cross. Shadi heard the cries of his son; saw the unmoved appearance of the soldier. Slowly he removed his cross and put it in the car.

The soldier took his papers and placed them on a nearby rock, but they flew off in the wind. Shadi was sent to fetch the papers that had blown into a field. Next Shadi was asked to take their bags out of the car. The soldier proceeded to open every zipper, peer in every compartment, inspect every article of clothing. He opened Shadi’s Bible, leafing through the pages as he asked Shadi what it was. When he was finished, he placed it in the road. He did the same with a prayer book and hymnal. The soldier took papers out of envelopes, let the air out of the spare tire, opened the hood and checked the oil, gasoline, air filter. When Shadi asked why, the soldier just smiled. During the entire process, the baby’s frightened crying filled the air. Some of their things blew away in the strong wind, and each time Shadi was told to fetch them.

Finally, the soldier finished and told them that they could pass. As Shadi was putting their things back in the car, his wife went and comforted their son. A policeman came up, and told them that their baby had to be in a car seat. Shadi told the man what the soldier had done, and the policeman let them go. They finally arrived in Ramallah five hours after they had left Zababdeh.

“I thought to sue the soldier,” Shadi says, his eyes downcast. “But it would be a black mark on my record when I try to renew my wife’s permission. The soldier would not tell me his name, and I do not know if people would be truthful if I tried to bring in the law. So I thought that I could ask you to write this for me. I will send this to as many people as I can so that they can see what really happens here.”

He smiles a sad smile. “You know, while it was all happening, I thought, ‘If this happens to a priest who has a permission, what about other people who do not even have that ”

February 9, 2004 - Farah

I make my way through the sterile halls of the hospital, made cheerful by the excited Arabic chatter of families lovingly surrounding tiny newborn babies and their proud mothers. I pass by open doors packed with family members—women laughing or exchanging confidences in small knots, backslapping fathers, old grands and great-grands sitting quiet and firmly upright in the corners. I locate the right room, and enter shyly into this world of motherhood and familial ties. My coworker Riham blinks her greeting to me from the bed, her bright smile unchanged, her eyes tired. Her family offers me chocolates as I hand them my own box—a goodwill gift in honor of the new baby. The little person for whom all of us have gathered lies nestled with her fists bunched and body curling almost instinctively towards her mother, a shock of black hair that matches the silky lashes that lie on her soft cheeks. She is perhaps the newest person I have ever met, and I am again surprised by how much personality it is possible for a baby to have when only a day old.

In a way common to new young mothers here, Riham and her new daughter appear to be cautiously getting to know each other, circling each other warily as they are drawn together out of social convention and mutual need. Neither seems to know what to make of the other: one adult and clearly bewildered by the change of station that has happened in the last twenty-four hours, the other a baby equally bewildered by this big, cold, confusing place called the world filled with strange-smelling, cooing Big People. I am glad that I will be here to watch the bonds between them grow.

Riham and her husband Yaoob are truly a love story. As childhood friends they only had eyes for each other, but Yaoob was destined for the priesthood. Riham’s family tried to have her marry several different men, but she would only marry Yaoob. He had been guided toward the priesthood since he was a young boy, “but,” he tells me, his eyes twinkling, “there was Riham.” Yaoob is in his early twenties; Riham is nineteen. They had not planned to have this first child when they were so young, but as Yaoob presses a kiss on his wife’s head, his arm encircling her protectively as she cradles their child, I see the staid parents they will one day be, and my heart is glad.

Riham’s pregnancy was difficult, but not for any reason that I or anyone else from outside of this Alice-in-Wonderland world would call difficult. A difficult pregnancy in America means frightening complications, bed rest, doctor’s visits. A difficult pregnancy in Riham’s case meant that as her body swelled protectively around a new life, she had to walk through Surda checkpoint every day to come to work. She suffered the routine malaise of pregnancy: morning sickness, swollen ankles, back pain. But as she did so she walked through the summer dust and winter mud, waiting humbly in the cold so that she could present her identification to strange men. She worked until the day before her daughter was born, every day walking through the checkpoint.

When I came to work in Palestine back in June, I asked why Riham always wore black. She is in mourning for her dead brother, who died when she was three months pregnant. Her brother had gone to Jordan for a gallstone operation because the quality of care there is so much better than in the West Bank. He was not allowed to go to the superior hospitals in Jerusalem because he held a West Bank ID, and his condition was not life-threatening. In Amman there were complications from the operation, and he died of an infection contracted in the surgery. One hot summer day I visited Riham’s home for a lazy afternoon of swimming, food, and friendship. A copy of the poster the family had made for the dead man was carefully framed and hung in the salon, and I think what kind eyes he had. A few weeks later I ask what she and Yaoob have decided to name their daughter. A slight shadow crosses her face as she answers, “Farah, the same as my brother. In Arabic it means ‘Joy.’”

The day after my visit to the hospital, on a rainy afternoon, Riham takes her three-day-old baby home through the same checkpoint that she has traversed so many times before. Her husband, Yaoob, shows the soldiers the papers from the hospital, but in spite of the documents the soldier asks her to uncover Farah in the cold, and to empty the contents of her overnight back out for inspection. The couple has no choice but to comply. From three days after her birth—from the womb, actually, the occupation begins to shape Farah’s life.

A few weeks after Farah’s birth, Surda checkpoint is taken down. Riham no longer has to tremble with suppressed anger as she uncovers her baby; an Israeli mother’s son no longer has to tremble with fear that the swaddled bundle might be a concealed nail bomb. Amid the wreckage of so many failed attempts at peace, it is comforting to know that there is a sliver of hope can nourish a new family’s growing love . . . and Joy.

February 15, 2004 - Marionette

My service sits restless in a queue of cars at the French Hill intersection. I look out the window at the bizarre tableau unfolding. Police cars block all directions, and a huddled group of civilians and soldiers stands far off to one side. A soldier walks purposefully across the intersection, knowing he is the focus of so many eyes. In his hand he gingerly carries a small black backpack. He attaches two ropes to the bag, fiddling with it in a way I cannot see. He traces the ropes carefully back, and hoists the bag high in the air, dangling it from a light pole. It is then I realize exactly what I am seeing; this unsuspecting backpack is in some way suspicious, and is being checked for bombs.

The solider has finished arranging his ropes, and the show begins. He carefully flicks one and then the other, with the precision of a master puppeteer. Were it not for his serious face, I would half expect him to twirl and dip, so great is the resemblance to a ballet. My fellow passengers crane their necks or crouch in a half-stand to watch. The silence is heavy, unbroken even by a cough or a child’s whine. Pictures of the twisted, flaming wrecks of buses not so very unlike the service in which I sit, fill my mind. So similar, and yet a world apart.

The bag jerks in the air, and I see in my head a split-second moment I once passed in another service. A gang of boys, pelting a makeshift army barracks with rocks. One of the boys incites them forward, urging them on. Mid yell, one leg gives out, and he slumps to the ground, as if his strings have been cut. As the service speeds quickly past, I realize that I have just watched a man being shot.

With great finesse, the soldier uses the ropes to undo the zippers on the bag. In a moment as long as the collectively held breath in our service, he manages to unzip the bag. Papers flutter from their perch high above the earth, and I am reminded of sitting in my office as papers from the besieged World Trade Center began to rain softly down on lower Manhattan.

The soldier lowers the bag down, and examines it roughly, shoving papers indiscriminately back. I half expect him to kick the bag, so tangible is his frustration. I wonder about the child who will reach home and realize that he has left his bag, imagine his tearful pleadings to his angry mother that he didn’t mean to leave it. Would his angry mother know the tense moments her son’s incaution had caused? For the sake of the spanking he would surely receive, I hope not.

So often here, I stand with Palestinians. Humbled with them, humiliated with them, bound in many ways into the narrow avenues in which they are forced to make their lives. It is easy for me to see the Israeli soldiers and their government as the puppet masters who control our lives as if we were indeed inanimate objects. Sitting in the service and watching the scene unfold, for the first time I felt the fear Israelis must feel, and realized that if there is indeed a puppet master, it is not one side or the other, it is this fear—this seductive, animal urge that tells us that we must kill or be killed.

The police cars efficiently clear the intersection. The ooze of traffic continues, the knot of waiting people queues back up at the bus stop, the bomb expert moves on to his next task, the bag is relegated to a dusty evidence closet, its brief period of fame over. In five minutes, I am sure, it is as if this incident has never happened.

February 22, 2004 - Snow

I awake and peer out the window, eager as a child on Christmas morning. The murky sunlight of the early Sunday glitters and reflects brightly on the fresh blanket of newly fallen snow. Eager to be outside into this new, white world, I toss my camera and granola bars into my backpack, bundle into layers of socks, sweaters, scarves, and coats, and make for the door.

All week long, there were rumors of snow for Saturday night, as somber and pervasive as those of incursions, closures, and deaths. When I asked what harm a little snow could possibly cause, one of my colleagues explained, “You see, here there are no rules, no civil works. It takes a long time to plow the roads, and in a big storm, no one can leave their house. You should prepare.” My time here in Palestine has taught me to listen to the wisdom of my Palestinian friends; to follow their lead and stay in step in this unfamiliar world. Sure enough, ice and snow began to thwack against my office window early Saturday afternoon, and my office emptied in a scramble of coats and papers.

I set off without destination, wanting only to wander in this beautiful, newborn world that nuzzles so many fond memories of other snowy days. As I amble towards the main road, I realize where I want to go. I have seen it shimmer in the heat of a summer afternoon, lie sleeping in the cool of night, drip with winter rain, bustle with the excitement of Friday afternoon prayers. The Old City beckons to me like an old friend wanting to show off a new dress.

A car rolls up beside me; the driver rolls down his window: “Al Ouds?” Jerusalem? Yes, I say, and before I know it we are driving carefully towards downtown. I try to talk to him in my broken Arabic, but he laughs and switches to English. He regales me with stories of last year’s furious storms, and when I try to offer him something for the ride, he shakes his head with another gale of laughter. “God has blessed me with a good job and a good car that doesn’t mind the snow. I am glad to help my neighbors when I can.” I thank him profusely and he tells me that I am always welcome in his home, “for a ride, or just a cup of coffee.”

The Old City is delicately outlined in snow. In the early morning light, the city is empty; only hardy tourists and crazed photographers such as myself wander dazzled by the beauty. There is something personal, intimate, about this time alone with the city, which reveals itself to me in tiny details and forgotten corners made beautiful. A wren lands lightly on the ironwork beside my head, fluffing himself up as if he is heartily annoyed by the cold. An alley branches off from the Via Dolorosa, its stairs untrodden, its coat of snow unbroken by footsteps. A man, bent with age, makes his way carefully through the slippery streets, returning from his prayers at the Western Wall. I pass a group of Palestinian children eagerly scooping up snow into snowballs and, minutes later, pass a group of Israeli youth doing very much the same. For once, a snowball fight is just a snowball fight--child’s play--rather than a mimic of the violence that infests all our lives. An optimistic shopkeeper beckons to me as I pass. Emboldened by the unfamiliarity of the day, I ask the man, “How did you know that I was foreign?” “Because,” he says with a careless shrug, “You were smiling.”

Growing up in the Southern US, snow did not play much of a role in my early childhood. When I moved farther north to attend university, I was so excited that I made my friends walk across our campus in the season’s first snowfall. Living in rural Massachusetts a few years later, I loved to shovel the snow, and would wander for hours in the dark, deep woods, alone with the snow and the few animal shadows I glimpsed through the trees. One morning I left a blizzard only to wash up late that night in the steamy heat of Nicaragua in January, and it was sometimes with regret that I thought of the sharp bite of the chill.

The sun climbs higher in the air, and I am warm in my hat and coat. The snow turns to slush, and then to water, and the streets of the Old City turn to rushing rivers that wet my ankles. The drains fill and overflow, and gurgle their resentment at being so overburdened. Small children with hats pulled so far down that they move with each blink stare at the flowing stairs, confused at the sight of so much water without a cloud in sight.

Wandering without a destination, I climb a narrow metal stairway, and find myself in the Old City’s playground: the sunny rooftops, still filled with snow and children’s laughter. Couples stand arm-in-arm, admiring the snowy visage of the Holy Sepulcher Church and Al Aqsa mosque. Boys furiously race to gather an arsenal of snowballs, young children clumsily pat snow together in the manner of a sand castle, to make cone-shaped snowpeople. I stoop to help one tiny girl, whose fuzzy pink hat reminds me of my own niece. I roll snow together to make a miniature snowman, and her gap-toothed smile rewards my efforts if not my technique.

It is a peaceful setting, but there is no mistaking that we are not a people at peace. An Israeli mother carefully walks her children past a group of Palestinian youth, her eyes locked on the ground before her. Palestinian children fall momentarily silent as an Orthodox man passes by on his way to the Western Wall. The two sides do not fight; they ignore each other as much as possible. Twice this week, in this snow and in a small earthquake, the world has conspired to until us all: Palestinian and Israeli, Jew, Muslim, and Christian, foreigners like myself. Though we are far apart in so many ways, we share the same earth; the same sky.

I walk for hours, and find myself standing before the Western Wall. I wander up and down the stairs near the wall, trying to find a proper vantage from which to take my picture. A man tries to direct me, before finally giving up and leading me through the twisting, narrow streets himself. I do not have the heart to tell him when we arrive twenty minutes later that it is the same rooftop I have recently left. In the unchecked sun of the bright day, my snowperson has become a rather unexciting snowlump.

With regret, I tear myself away from the Old City and all its secrets. I feel refreshed by the time alone, by the snow, by the memories—happy and somehow free from the underlying melancholy that the conflict brings out in me. I make my way to my church, sliding in to the warm little chapel just as the service begins. A visiting minister steps to the lecture to give the sermon. “Compassion. From the Latin, it means ‘to suffer with.’ It is a willingness to share with people their suffering as well as their pleasures. It is the sort of solidarity that awakens a deep joy within. To feel compassion does not always make us happy—that we must find in other places—but it gives us a deep joy.”

February 29, 2004 - Ashes to Ashes

There is a gentle knock at the door, and the focus of our meeting turns towards the door. The secretary enters, and speaks rapidly in Arabic—I catch only the word “jesh.” Soldier. We pause and look at each other for a second, and then the agenda resumes. “There are soldiers in Ramallah,” the woman next to me whispers.

As always, I am torn between the fear and uncertainty, and needing—willing—that everything can in fact go on as normal. The same way that some people blinker themselves away from world events, in Palestine we all try to pretend that whatever the pain and suffering is right outside our door, perhaps, enshallah, it can once again pass us by unscathed. I have spoken to many Palestinians in Ramallah who have only a limited picture of what life is like in other cities, the daily curfews, arrests, deaths that haunt Jenin, Qalqilia, or Hebron. Soon after I came here, I learned that in a place with so much sorrow, it was best not to borrow others’ suffering. Your own might find you soon enough.

On days like this, perhaps the hardest thing is the sudden and complete loss of equilibrium. As I walked to work in the morning, my head was filled with the agenda for the meeting, shopping to do, emails I had to send, the pink blossoms of the almond trees waving in the wind. Less than two hours later, in the midst of this meeting that had consumed my thoughts, all I can think about is the sharp, staccato gunfire that we hear.

Our meeting again suspends, and we look at each other, uncertain if anyone will break the pretense that everything can go on as usual. Another blast sounds, and by tacit and silent agreement, we gather up our things.

Our office building sits near Clock Square, in the heart of downtown Ramallah. From our office window on the fourth floor, we have a clear view of the parking lot beside our building, and one of the main streets of the city. Usually it is a scene of bustling, workday activity. Today it is a front-row seat of the violence. Israeli jeeps clog the street, and the parking lot is soon filled with Palestinian youth. Other groups of boys fill the rooftops. The Israelis stand near their jeeps, with automatic weapons on full display, firing at the growing crowds. According to the army’s reports, only rubber bullets were fired, and I do not know the difference in the sharp cracks that fill my ears. Rubber bullets sound harmless, but they are actually steel bullets coated in a thin layer of rubber, and at close range, can be every bit as dangerous. Rocks, roof tiles, ladders, pieces of wood and metal: anything that can be picked up is thrown at the Israeli jeeps.

Our staff gathers in a tight knot at the window. Most simply watched, but one, Rasha, seems ready to go downstairs and throw stones herself. She turns to me, with a sort of exhilaration, “Do you have such brave boys in America?” she says with pride.

I hesitate, my eyes on the boys—some of whom still wear their school backpacks—recklessly running in the open in the range of the Israeli guns. Most of them are younger than my own brother, and I think of Rasha’s own baby son. “Il-ham-dil-Allah [thank God] we have no need for such brave boys in America,” I say, quietly.

As we watch, we hear via cell phones that the IOF/IDF has come into Ramallah to seize accounts and records from the bank that are suspected of being connected to Hamas and other terrorist/resistance groups. They are entering branches of two large banks: the Cairo Amman Bank and the Arab Bank. IT specialists are getting the records, and they are taking some of the money with them. We hear later that it is more than $5 million.

I rouse myself from the window, realizing that if the streets are closed, perhaps ambulances will not be able to get through. I look through our office first aid kit, and find nothing of use except for some sterile bandages and Kleenex. I take these, and a piece of white paper and marker. In letters large enough to see from far away, I write “MEDIC.” The people gathered at the window look on, and finally ask me what I am doing. As best I can, I try to explain that I have been trained in basic emergency medicine, and my duty to serve. “So if someone is hurt, even though I don’t work here with the hospitals, I have a responsibility to go and help. If you see someone who is hurt, please come and get me right away.” They agree, and with my small purse bulging with the few items I have been able to find, I go back to my own desk to send an email to my friends and family, telling them that I am safe.

The scream comes about five minutes later. Rania, her voice high and thin like a girl’s, runs in to tell me that someone has been shot in the street. Before I know it, I am racing down four flights of stairs, fumbling for my sign as I go. I burst into the street, and hold my white sign before me, in full view of the Israeli soldiers in the street. I pause momentarily for them to make eye contact, and then walk quickly to where the wounded man has been lain. Rasha is in the group, directing, beautiful and fiery as Athena in the midst of the fray. Gunfire echoes from up the street.

He has been shot in the leg, but it looks like a flesh wound. I kneel down, with his head in my lap, and for a long moment he looks at me through the blood that has covered his eyes, pleading. A ragged, round hole punctuates his right cheek, and blood drips from his mouth. He begins to shake, whether from seizure or fear I cannot say. “Who speaks English?” I ask quickly. Another boy nods, and I tell him quickly that I am an American EMT, my name, and that I am trying to find where the bullet exited. As I talk I use the Kleenex to wipe away the blood smearing his face so that I can see his wounds. There is no exit wound in the back of his head, or the side. I am about to check his mouth to see if it went out through his soft palate when mercifully a pair of gloved hands appear before me. An ambulance has gotten through, and I help load the man on a stretch and into the truck, glad to be relieved of my charge. I walk slowly back past the soldiers with my medic sign raised again, my arms shaking. I grab Rasha; “If the soldiers stop us, tell them you were helping me translate.” Her eyes flash, but then she nods. The whole episode took perhaps five minutes.

The way up the stairs on my rubber legs seems long. Upstairs several women are in tears, and they look with wide eyes at the blood that is smeared on my arms and purse, and at the bloody Kleenex in my hands. I go to throw the Kleenex away, but Rasha stops me. “Let me. It has to be disposed of a certain way, in our religion.” Our eyes meet, and I see something like kinship there.

The scent of blood fills my nose as I scrub my skin with water as hot as I can stand, as if trying to scald the memory of the boy from my body, remove the stubborn stains from my soul. The whole rest of the day I felt surrounded by that bloodsmell, and only the next day as I go to hang my long black skit do I see that it, too, is stiff with blood.

Now the violence outside has reached a boiling point. The schools are out for the afternoon, and hundreds of boys flock to the street. Molotov cocktails flash into fire, and pro-Palestinian chants mix with the sounds of gunfire and exploding tear gas canisters. The soldiers are now firing out the windows of the jeeps, which are impervious to even the worst the boys can throw at them. Rocks bounce harmlessly off, and the fire does not even char their surfaces. As if provoked by their failure to do any real damage, the boys grow more and more bold, running dangerously close, standing in full view of the soldiers. I am sure that I will be called downstairs again, and wonder if I could bear to do it a second time. But mercifully, none of the boys near our office are harmed.

I alternate between watching at the window and pretending that it is still possible for me to work. Finally we hear against all reason that the checkpoint is open. Soon after the soldiers pull back. Some boys use a dumpster as a blockade, and face off against the soldiers. The Anglican church, where I used to attend services, is in the midst of the shooting now. But now the gunfire is sufficiently removed from the door of our building that we can duck out and walk quickly to a taxi stand. We cut through buildings, and emerge cautiously roughly one block from our building—a block and a half from the standoff between the boys and the soldiers. I blink as if I have finally truly gone through the rabbit hole: here the shops are open and people walk in the street. Only the unmistakable yet faint tang of tear gas tells me that the scene I have just left is real. I make my way back to Jerusalem without incident.

It is Ash Wednesday, and the words of the service are as soothing to my mind as smooth stones to the touch: “Ashes thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.” I sink to my knees and pray for the boy, for the soldiers who shot him, for those who lost money, for those who took it. I pray for Rasha, and for the other women in tears. And lastly, I pray for myself, that one day I will find my own tears, and be able to cry about today.

The next day, my heart is leaden as I go to work. Will I find that my organization’s bank account has been seized? My own account? Will anyone I know have been hurt or arrested in yesterday’s violence? I smile when I realize that I went unhesitatingly to help and injured man amid shooting, but quake at the thought of what I might find in Ramallah today. It’s a funny thing about facing fear: sometimes the true test is not running into the danger you know is waiting, but timidly walking into the uncertainty you do not.

Bulldozers and work crews are still cleaning up the wreckage—in their efficiency all but the memories are gone in an hour. Our bank has escaped the raids, no one I know has been involved. The city is peaceful and quiet, and as I say wearily to my friend Mousa, “After a day like yesterday, any day is a good day.”

March 7, 2004 - Conversation
My friends, I know that some of you will find this account deeply upsetting. I apologize for that, but I can tell you that it is all as close to the truth as my recollections and those of my friend can make it. I do not wish to imply that this woman speaks for everyone, any more that I think that I do. But she speaks for herself, and I offer her up as one more voice in the chorus of voices here.

I am stirring a pot of lentils on the stove, irritated by the way they are slowly turning to glue. I glance at the clock; my friends will be back soon. I am cooking at the hostel where a friend is staying, and all but one of our group, my friend Chase, have briefly gone out. I turn when the door creaks, expecting to greet our friends with laughing recriminations about the sticky paste that will be our dinner. But instead, an old woman enters. Her pale hair is blond-white, covered by a scarf. She wears layers of clothing that seem too heavy for her, as if they weigh her stooped frame farther down. Her eyes are bright, and twinkle at us from behind her glasses.

“Hello,” she says in her accented English. Her voice is sweet and strong, and we smile our hellos in return. She busies herself with a cup of tea as we stir our own pots. I make a face when I taste our creation, and she comes over. “Here, let me taste.” I offer her the spoon as she smacks her spoonful against her palate. “Ah, yes. I think you can turn it down. Perhaps a bit too much spice.”

Chase and I turn off the heat and sit down at the table to wait for our friends. The woman continues to potter around. She tells us that she is only visiting Jerusalem, but that she has lived “in Israel for twenty years. I live near Jenin—you know, where all the terrorists are?” I freeze, and duck to hide a smile, incredulous.

“Yes,” the woman continues brightly, “We are the pioneers, out there in the territories.” I realize that the woman is a settler: one of the hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens who live in internationally banned settlements on Palestinian land. Some settlers move into these communities as it is much cheaper than living on the other side of the Green Line because the housing there is subsidized by the government—economics, pure and simple. But others live there because they feel that the West Bank is part of their God-given land, and that it must be reclaimed. By creating settlements and the miles of roads and thousands of soldiers that must be put in place to protect them, these people and the government that supports them are creating “facts on the ground”: generations of children grow up knowing such places as their homes, and slowly they will expand to claim more land on which Palestinians lay claim.

“They’re terrible there you know,” she lowers her voice, conspiratorially, “Those Arabs. Always shooting at us, always trying to kill us. Awful, dreadful people.” Her voice is light, as if she was talking about a disagreeable dog, or a poorly behaved child.

“Then why do you live there?” Chase’s voice is also light, but I hear a sharp knife of disgust. She goes on, “I mean, I always here about people living up there, and I wonder why you would want to, is all.”

“Because,” the woman says calmly, “It is where God put me.”

I dimly hear her asking my Native American friend if she is “a believer,” and Chase’s response about her pagan upbringing. I still can’t believe that this woman is speaking to my friend and I this way. We both work with Palestinians, live among them, support their right to a just peace. I realize then that as all she saw was us cooking in the hotel kitchen, she must think we are tourists. I angrily wonder how many unsuspecting visitors she has told her stories, and if they believed her.

“It’s so hard sometimes to believe that they [the Palestinians] can change,” she says. “My grandson was a lovely boy. Of course, he had converted to Christianity, but still, he was a very good boy. He even had some Muslim friends, and the other Muslims didn’t like that. This was in South Africa,” I place her accent, finally, “And he had black friends and white, all religions. Everyone loved him. At his funeral the rabbi even came, even though he wasn’t a proper Jew any more. But those Muslims, they killed him. He was riding on a motorcycle, and some of those Muslims, they arranged for a Muslim woman to run him over in his motorcycle. Just run him over and squash him flat,” my stomach lurches at the image, “I don’t see how they could have done that, when he was so kind to them.”

I suddenly see this woman not only as a conservative and bombastic settler, but as a grieving grandmother who in her inability to understand so tragic a loss has invented her own version of the truth. In spite of my own rising anger, I feel a twinge of compassion for her. “This is her truth,” I think. “No matter how wrong I might think she is, this is how she sees the world.”

She giggles like a schoolgirl. “I actually got arrested once,” she says with a wink. “Well, sort of. I went into Jenin to talk to the Arabs about God and peace and love. Some of them were listening to me. But then a soldier I knew from the settlement came along, and he took me away. I suppose he was scared that an old lady like me would get herself into trouble among those Arabs.”

“I just don’t see why we all can’t love each other,” the woman sighs. “That’s what the world really needs. Just love. I don’t hate the Arabs for doing what they do to us—it’s just their way. So I pray that they will realize that Allah is a god, but not the true God, because God does not promote violence like Allah does.”

She shakes her head, “Terrible people. You really can’t understand how terrible until you’ve seen what I’ve seen—seen an Arab kill a Jew in cold blood, slice him open, and eat his kidneys raw.” She pauses, solemn. “They told me it’s some ritual they have in their religion, for when the kill.”

I try to reply to everything this woman is saying; try to explain to her that Arabs are not the people that she has painted them to be. Try to explain a thousand memories of fathers carrying young daughters, men linking arms in the streets, women pinning and re-pinning their higab. But I cannot truly share these memories with this woman any more than she can truly explain to me her grief about her grandson—I cannot change a mind that is so locked in its own world, so far from my own truth that I share with you each week. I wonder about her grandson, wonder if he understood his grandmother, if he let her know that she was loved. Wonder how much her ideas were shaped by his death, and what she was like before. Sometimes in our pain and grief, all we really need to know is that we are being heard, and that someone cares. I force myself to look this woman in the eye, and open myself up to her suffering as well as that which she unknowingly creates.

Finally, her prattle ceases. “Well,” she sighs as she gathers her things, “I’ll be off. It was nice to meet you.”

I smile. “You as well. Safe travels.”

She smiles in return. “Thank you.” She pauses at the door. “Just always remember to love one another.” After a moment’s hesitation, I nod.

Chase and I sit in silence for several minutes. I am still too confused to open my mouth, knowing I that my first impulse will be to laugh away or belittle this woman and the deep hatred and misunderstanding she masks in a false veil of compassion and love. How can this conflict ever end when there are people with extreme beliefs like this on both sides? How can anyone change the mind of someone so convinced that they are God’s messenger? Where, where is the hope? It is an awful moment for me, full of doubt and pain.

Our friend Paul appears at the door, out of breath. “Hallo. Sorry to be so late,” he pauses, and looks at us. “Are you both all right?” He puts his hand on my shoulder, and gathers me in to a hug. Without speaking I begin, slowly and softly, to cry.

March 12, 2004 - Rays of Hope

The woman watches quietly, standing apart. Her coat is thick and warm against the cold day, and earrings are just visible through her carefully coiffed hair. I am struck by her lack of movement in the bustle and noise of Qalandia checkpoint, her calm presence. Her partner is vastly different: a woman whose long, grey hair is held fast in a thick braid, who rummages in her deep patchwork bag as she talks with a young Israeli soldier. I dimly remember seeing the older woman before, but flanked by an intense and energetic young woman who paced back and forth, her piercing eyes wide.

I wonder what these women are doing here, with their pale, freckled skin. Why they are standing apart, talking to the soldiers. Why anyone would stand at the tall wire fence that hems us in as we inch through the checkpoint, why they would want to observe the organized chaos that is Qalandia.

I am allowed to pass, and after a moment’s hesitation I walk up to the women and ask the most intriguing of all questions, “Can you tall me what you’re doing?” The younger woman appears caught off guard at my American accent, but smiles and nods. “We’re volunteers with Machsoom Watch,” she says, gesturing to her partner, who is now talking earnestly with an Arab youth. At my look of confusion, she continues, “We are an organization of female volunteers. We have people observing at all the major checkpoints for all shifts. We try to help people get through when they have permissions to cross the checkpoints that are not honored. We document the problems that we see, the abuses. At the end of each shift, we write reports, and we send them to newspapers, and the army.”

“And do people listen? I mean, Israelis?”

She smiles. “Sometimes. As much as anything, I think that it is important that we’re here.” She glances at the soldiers. “I have a son older than these boys. Thank goodness he’s in America studying.” She looks back at me, intently. “They are children. They are taught to be scared, handed guns, and put in charge of the people they’ve been taught to be scared of.” She shakes her head.

“Why did you choose to volunteer?”

Her eyes shift away, and squint at the Palestinians queuing at the checkpoint. “I believe we [the Israelis] have a right to be here. But it’s a right that was given to us, and taken from them [the Palestinians]. We have to learn to share this land, for our children and for our faiths.

“These are people. If you corral them, take their land, humiliate them, then you treat them like animals. No one deserves that. The Jews have been treated like animals throughout history, and as a Jew I bear those scars. I do not support treatment like that being done in my name, and in the name of my faith.”

I thank the woman, not sure if I am thanking her for the time she has given me or her work, or for that combination of the two that has given me hope. So often when I sit down to write, my heart is heavy, and my head filled with pictures that I wish I could forget. But I am heartened by the knowledge that hundreds of Israeli volunteers are willing to stand at checkpoints in all weathers to show their solidarity and assist where they can.

Machsoom Watch is not alone. There are many other organizations on the Israeli side that echo the woman’s statement, “Not in my name.” Arik Asherman, one of the organizers of Rabbis for Human Rights, went on trial in January for standing in front of tanks that threatened a Palestinian home in Beit Hanina. He and his group help Palestinians plant olive trees, bring in their harvests, and protect their homes against demolitions. And they talk, and share with Palestinians that they do not support the way their government is treating the Arabs.

In our circle of friends, we greet Avi warmly whenever we see him. With kisses on both cheeks, we ask, “When do you go away?” We are not referring to a vacation from his graduate studies in physics, but rather to his yearly prison sentence. Avi did his two-year mandatory military service because he could specify not to be stationed in the Territories. When the time came to do his month-long reserve duty for the first time, he refused. As a “refusenik,” Avi is imprisoned for two months out of every year for failing to comply with Israeli law. An association of refuseniks sends people to visit him, bring him books, bolster his spirits. He will voluntarily enter prison each year until he agrees to serve, or until he reaches the age of 45.

I have great respect for people such as these, who will stand up for what they believe, even when it means standing with people whom their government classifies as terrorists. They exist in a world apart: their efforts are often not seen by Palestinians, and whenever possible are ignored by the powers that be in Israel. Yet still, they are there: standing in checkpoints rain or shine, interrupting the normal flow of life for a voluntary jail sentence, planting olive trees and hope. In a topsy-turvy world of children with guns and fences for people, stories of common people like these on both sides who disgorge themselves of the diet of hate that is all-too-often standard here offer me a solid footing that I can understand, and believe in.

To learn more about Machsoom Watch, check out their website at http://www.machsomwatch.org/,

for Rabbis for Human Rights

http://www.rhr.israel.net

For more information on the refusenik movement, please visit http://www.yesh-gvul.org/english/

March 21, 2004 - Beyond Imagination

Dear Gabrielle,

I am a friend of ***, and she has been forwarding your writings to me. I appreciate them very much because I am thinking of going to Palestine to work with ISM [International Solidarity Movement]. I wanted to get your advice about how I can prepare myself for what I might see and experience while I am there . . .

Yours,

xxxx

Imagine. Imagine that you are waking up every morning to life under occupation.

You come to this land with glib answers and easy solutions: of course the settlements should be dismantled, of course the Wall should come down. It is only when you are standing next to the swimming pool at Ariel, or dwarfed by the eight-foot high concrete Wall at Qalqilia, that you realize that change will not be that simple.

You are invited warmly in Palestinian homes, and showered with affection and food. You sometimes wonder if these beautiful, caring people would be so kind if they saw you with your bare arms thrown casually around the shoulders of your boyfriend. You didn’t ever think such things defined you, but here it feels like they do.

You walk first timidly, then more boldly, through the checkpoints. You forget a time when you did not carry your passport with you everywhere, and perfect the flat, dead stare that shields you from the gaze of the soldiers at the checkpoints. When you find the courage to meet their eyes, you see your own bizarre mixture of fear and boredom reflected there.

You watch the tranquility of the changing seasons, marveling at the extremes of hot and cold, beauty and ugliness, that vie for attention here. You lick the juice of plump strawberries, oranges, apricots from your fingertips to make sure you don’t waste a bit of their sweetness. You make friends with stray cats, neighbor children, and baby goats, and lock away their smiles and nuzzles in a safe bit of your heart.

You measure travel in minutes, not in kilometers—distances mean nothing when there are checkpoints to cross. You remember what it was like to drive for hours without stopping.

You hope that your Israeli friends will understand that even though you care about them, some days you know that if you spend time with them you will take out your frustrations on them.

You exist on outrage at the things you hear and see, and marvel at the Palestinians that merely tell you, “This is the life.” You cling to the certainties of your theories and ideals until they are as full of holes as Yaser Arafat’s Mouqata compound. You only realize your outrage has turned into grim acceptance the first time you hear your own voice say that this is simply the life.

You feel the first acts of violence around you like a dull thud in your chest: curfews, closures, incursions. Gradually that thud becomes as much a part of you as a muscle ache after a long hike, or how gritty your eyes feel when you are tired. You want to cry, you want to scream obscenities, you want to punch the wall. But no one around you does any of those things, and so you keep your head down and work instead.

You walk through the streets, and people’s eyes follow you. You have forgotten what it feels like to be embarrassed by this, or exhilarated. The stares are merely the wallpaper of your life.

You hear of a suicide attack. When one group or another claims the bombing, you realize you do not know what party your friends belong to, and that you do not want to know.

You are admitted into the secret and beautiful world of women. You feel yourself relax when the men leave, and the women unpin their higab [headscarves] with a smile. Together you laugh and sing and dance and cook and watch children playing. You learn much about what it means to be a woman.

You see acts of war. The dull thud becomes the aching, painful banging of your own heart. You thought that you might get a rush from the “action,” but you were wrong. You tell yourself that such ugly and painful memories are beyond what you can endure—that you cannot keep going. Two weeks later you realize that you have endured, and that even the worst memories fade.

You cry until the tears won’t come any more, and then you cry some more. One day you realize it has been four months since you shed tears, and don’t want to wonder why. You are afraid of becoming broken. You are afraid of becoming immune to what you see.

You get headaches for no reason. You don’t sleep as well as you used to. You are tired deep in your bones, and no amount of sleep seems to make the tiredness go away. You realize that you’ve probably lost something, but with so much loss around you, how do you even give a name to your own?

You keep going because you know in your heart that no one should have to live the way the people around you are living, and that your willingness to share their burdens and joys is all that you have to give. But you know that in the end, this time matters more to you than to the people around you. You can never forget that you have chosen this life, and they have not had that luxury.

You cannot prepare for such a life. But you can ask yourself: if this was your life, what would you do? Would you continue to believe in paper promises offered by empty hands? Or would you take comfort in the familiar weight of the stones of the land that bore you?

I am far from being without sin. But sometimes I still fight the urge to throw stones.

March 24, 2004 - Hell

Is it possible to say that a spring day is peaceful, expect for the helicopters? Is it possible to say the day is beautiful except for the ugly scars of burnt tires? Can you say that you are calm except for the nagging fear that keeps you looking over your shoulder? In Palestine, this week, anything is possible.

It is spring now. Trees seem to green before my eyes, and if I watch for long enough, I can see the stalks of flowers growing up toward the bright sun. Friends walk arm in arm, as if they, too, have grown larger and more expansive in the warmth. Mothers call to children playing in the lingering, balmy dusk. On a recent trip to the Judean desert, a proud shepherd produced a day-old lamb, which stung the air with his angry, comical bleats as he butted his head against my legs demanding milk. I awake now to the sounds of birds, and the smell of sun-baked earth carries the lingering scent of the optimism and excitement I had before the dark, cold months of winter. The panorama of fecund nature: of renewal and optimism; of birth cycling back out of death.

Because I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me;

The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality.

My morning news show blasts the headlines: “Israel confirms Sheikh Ahmed Yassin dead in missile attack.” My body, warmed by the spring air drifting in through my open window, goes cold. I watch the pictures of ambulances, smoke, men running. I see a man pointing at the blood-spattered sidewalk, holding up bits and pieces of twisted, blackened metal. In a flash of horror I realize it is the remains of a wheelchair.

Sheikh Yassin’s name may not be the household word in the West that Yasser Arafat’s/Abu Ammar’s has become, but here he is well-known, and by many, better liked. When other figures gently backed off the troublesome issue of the right of return of 1948 refugees (who fled the then State of Israel, and are not allowed back to their homes), Sheikh Yassin was outspoken that no leader had the right to give away any part of the historical Palestine. For those people who still polish the keys to the homes they left behind, this is a message they can understand—a hope to which they can cling.

Yassin was paralyzed from childhood, and devoted himself to the study of the Koran. In 1987 he founded Hamas, and through his involvement in terrorist activities, he was arrested for eight years from 1989 to 1997. The television rolls with scenes of his life, and sudden death. I watch the television as thousands pour onto the streets of Gaza, and feel a trickle of fear between my shoulder blades. Once again, we are collectively thrown off our footing, and I wonder with dread what possibly comes next.

I have not quite made it to the end of my block when the director of my organization rings to tell me that we will observe at least the first day of the General Strike. I turn back home, relieved beyond measure to be able to justify staying out of Ramallah today. My mind still burns with images of a helpless, bleeding boy in my lap, and I do not relish adding more such pictures to the mix. I return home, and spend the morning watching the news as the story progresses. How funny, I reflect, that in spite of my earlier reluctance to go, I should feel so guilty at not being there when I see the pictures of violent clashes in Ramallah.

That day and the next pass in the slow, steady drone of the news broadcasts. I remember a time, not so long ago, when all Americans sat and watched, their daily routines interrupted, as a set of horrific pictures flashed before their eyes again and again. With every shop and office closed for the period of mourning, we can only sit and watch as the world around us falls apart bit by bit. I watch the Old City—less than a mile away—torn by protests and violence. I pick out the pharmacy where I shop in the background as I watch angry clashes in East Jerusalem. In my small apartment, these images are set to the music of the steady drone of the prayers from the mosque.

On the third day, I travel back to my office in Ramallah. The streets—so boiling and angry when seen through the flat, dead eye of my television—are now quiet. The silence is the silence of a breath withheld, a tense, angry silence. Even the bustle of traffic noise seems smaller, muted. The martyr posters of Sheikh Yassin—not allowed in East Jerusalem—paper his face on every shop and window. I am relieved to enter the world of my work and reengage with my own petty cares. It helps me to forget. Throughout the day our ears pick up at the sounds of airplanes and ambulances—are these routine, or has something happened? A car backfires in the street below our office, and we all jump.

I hear from friends that West Jerusalem is even more quiet: its buses empty, its shops standing idle. Soldiers mill in the street, but their presence does nothing to make most Israelis I know feel safe.

In its first statement after the assassination/targeted killing, Hamas said that the death “had opened the gates of hell.” A bone-chilling, gut-wrenching statement, one that made even my jaded foreign heart—so used to the melodrama that categorizes both sides of the conflict—skip a beat. But today, coming to work, I thought about hell. For many, it is a place of fire and brimstone and suffering. For others, it is a place of the forsaken, where all inhabitants are tortured by the knowledge that they are separate from God. A tearful mother once told me that hell was watching her child grow up poor and angry. How could Hamas say they were opening the gates of hell when so many of my friends walk through them, physically and mentally, every day?

Two days later, I find myself in Pinkas synagogue in the former Jewish ghetto of Josefov in Prague on a trip to renew my visa. The walls of the synagogue bear the names, ages, and homes of the Moravian and Bohemian Jews who lost their lives in the Holocaust. The entire ground floor is covered floor to ceiling with names—a somber reminder of the layers of loss that shroud the question of Palestine. On the first floor, there is a small museum displaying pictures drawn by Jewish children in Terezin. Drawings of school friends. Still lifes. Pictures of the dormitories in which the children slept. I read that drawing was considered an important part of the children’s education in the ghetto. I stop before one case, cold creeping over me despite my thick coat. “Returning to