"They wear their astonishment."

6 June 2009

The sunlight pushed through the slit in my left eye, and I rolled onto my side on the bare mattress. The bleating and tinkling of a goat herd pushing through the brush on the terraced hillside below my window tricked me into thinking that I was back in my homestay from SIT Fall 2008; there, in Dahiat al-Rasheed, goats or sheep wandering through the scrubby valley had awakened me most mornings. I sat up and pushed off the blanket, which surprisingly was necessary in this cooler mountainous region 900 meters above sea level. I was in Omar’s house in Ramallah, and it was late afternoon.

Maybe it’s the heat that makes the night-life here so vibrant. Our hosts regularly awakened mid-afternoon and stayed up until 4am, and I soon found myself in this reverse schedule, one night on a rooftop of an old evangelical boys school in Ramallah with a motley crew watching the distant lights of Tel Aviv twinkle on the horizon. The rooftop had the air of an expatriate gathering, despite the Palestinian majority, as most of the Palestinians present had spent much of their lives abroad: Omar and his brother were born in England and lived in the States; Sara, our Palestinian-British host spending her gap year in Ramallah, was English through and through; I’m fairly certain there was a quiet Jewish kid on the fringe. Muslim, Christian, Jew, agnostic, devout, skeptical, optimistic, discouraged – here was a real interfaith dialogue, a roundtable, a panel:
“But you Americans,” Sara was saying in her English drawl, “are such imperialists!”
“And who do you think we learned it from?” Wes contested.
“But what do you think about Obama’s speech in Cairo?” Sharook, puffing on the hookah, leaned in and asked. She had this sophisticated way of brushing her loose curls of rich, dark hair away from her heavily made-up face, her metallic jewelry glinting in the darkness. She continued, saying, “Obama said something about America breaking away from an empire…”
“It’s just words…” began another Palestinian.
“But to have him, to have an American president acknowledge the record in the Middle East, now that’s promising,” began Sharif. Nidal took the hookah from Sharook, shaking his head. Wes, Faye and I had watched Obama’s speech at Rami’s house in Jerusalem, and I suspect Nidal had felt ambivalent about Obama’s allusions to the “clash of cultures” – especially the conflation of Arab and Muslim. As Palestinian Christians, Nidal and Rami shook their heads and clicked their tongues at phrases like “the Muslim world”.
“The best part was when he said our women wear the ‘haajib’, and the people in the audience were like what did he say?” said Sharif, laughing.
“The haajib?” asked Wes. “You mean the hijab, the veil, right?”
“Yeah, haajib means ‘astonishment’, so rather than saying that the women cover themselves with the veil, Obama said women cover themselves with astonishment!”
“Yeah, but when he said as-salemu alaykum at the beginning, that was pretty intense,” Faye contested. “He got that right!”

The rooftop discussion went back and forth like this, until the lights twinkling toward Tel Aviv quieted themselves and the pink ribbon of dawn unfurled across the horizon.
(From a rooftop in Ramallah, Tel Aviv in the distance)

"We're kidnapping you!"

5th June 2009



(The wall, behind it are the rooftops of an Israeli settlement)


“We’re kidnapping you!” The Palestinian man pulled me and the two Americans into the backseat of a dark car and we sped away…to a trendy Ramallah restaurant.

(Did that opener send up any red flags?)

The wall separating Palestine from Israel flew past Sharif’s car, the graffiti melting into a continuous stream of colors of pain and hope. Sharif’s music rattled his tiny Asian-make car, and we Americans settled into the backseat; I let my eyes roam over the streaming wall, rising and falling with the roadway speeding beneath. It was one of those timeless moments I sought to internalize, until Sharif interrupted our reverie by pointing out an architecturally unusual section of the wall: “Look, the Israelis are trying to get all creative with building the wall!"




(Graffiti on the wall - "free Palestine, from Palestine with love", etc.)

Later, at Rami’s house in Jerusalem, he and his friend Nidal showed us mock terrorist videos they made in high school: young Nidal and Rami stood defiantly in front of a Palestinian flag draped in the background, hattas (koffiyas) and flags wrapped around their faces to disguise their identity. Holding a shaking piece of paper to the camera, Nidal read his last testament as a soon-to-be martyr, and Rami offered an occasional rousing “Allahu akbar!” In the dozens of outtakes, they doubled over in laughter or broke into dance moves. In one spoof, Rami huddled behind Nidal’s desk, pressing a yarmulke to his scalp, speaking to the camera as if he were an Israeli reporter while Nidal, off-camera, pelted him with various bedroom objects – pillows, crumpled pieces of paper, school textbooks.

I could not begin to recall and relate all the wisecracks and parodies my new Palestinian friends related to me, with a bewildering mixture of good humor and melancholy. As Omar, our host in Ramallah, ran his finger along the trench cut by a stray Israeli bullet through the stone framing his bedroom window (his house adjoins a military service road), or where a car bomb had exploded across the valley, or related events of the second Intifada as we drove through the city, it was with this strange mixture of enthusiasm and sadness.

There was no laughter, however, at Arafat’s tomb. Noisy Ramallah disappeared behind us through the gates as we stepped onto the eerily silent tile platform. A quote by Darwish, the late Palestinian poet, was engraved on a granite slab near the entrance. A solitary building, modeled after the Kaabah, but in the smoothest white stone rather than gleaming obsidian, rose before a reflection pool. Inside, we stood before the tomb guarded by two Palestinian soldiers, and we were silent, our various political beliefs put to rest. The only sound was the gentle flapping of three Palestinian flags billowing in the breeze, pressing outward like soldiers’ chests thrust forward and collapsing back into one another, inhaling, exhaling.





To learn more about the Separation Wall, check out NPR's four-part series "Israel's Barrier" at http://www.npr.org/news/specials/2009/israelbarrier/part4.html