taking jerusalem

We were making a U-turn. A family was out on the street, adults on metal chairs, children playing with sticks, all gathered around a fire in a rusty metal barrel.

A night under the stars? No, our driver explained. The IDF has taken this family’s home. There it was, actually.

We looked up and saw an apartment on the second story of the building in front of which they sat, an apartment smothered in blankets of white-and-blue.

As we passed the dispossessed family, they mistook us for Israelis and jeered at us. Not a moment later, we passed an Israeli boy — this time close enough for him to see through our tinted windows.

He spat at us. Our driver spat back.

It was tit for tat and that was that.

***

At my home in Amman, I had made a makeshift centerpiece for my coffee table. The pine cones hailed from forests at University of Jordan and the acorns smelled of Amman’s northwestern countryside.

I walked the vistas of the Noble Sanctuary in search of a rock or pine cone to take home. I wanted one of them to preside in regal fashion over the rest of my collection. Was there not a fallen prince for me restore to his former glory?

Pine trees dotted the place and pine needles were in excess, but not a pine cone was to be seen. I looked up, and there they were.

N pitied my pathetic attempts to procure a pine cone, so she called out to her cousin. (For the physics-minded, his displacement from our location was 5 meters and counting. His speed was increasing, his acceleration constant.)

He returned to humor my childish wishes, but at the last moment, released the branch into the air.

“It’s better we leave them here,” he said as if he’d almost forgotten. “The boys use them to pelt the soldiers.”

The pine cone was a fish that slipped through my fingers. But there, in its element, it looked lofty, dignified even. And, when the breeze shook the pine-laden branches, I could hear the swish of the river that all these stubborn fish called home.

go down, moses

The Grinch who stole my Christmas at the border crossing was the only one I met over the course of my four-day stay in the Israel-occupied West Bank.

The rest of the armed soldiers were amiable direction-givers. They were alternately bashful or jocular about their faulty English. When we opined about the dangerous contents of our bags or their military presence at every juncture, they seemed to appreciate sarcasm.

If the male soldiers expressed a sort of faint interest in us, the female soldiers did the same for the Arab men — only what men got was expressly negative attention.

On the cobblestone roads of Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers — often young and female — regularly stopped Arab passersby — always male, often old — and demanded Israeli-issued Jerusalem IDs. If the men were, like N, infiltrators, they were in trouble.

We knew we were flying under the radar. We were girls who, in the eyes of the occupation, could do no harm.

And, once, we lied.

We were going to leave Jerusalem that day and N knew she might never be permitted reentry. We wanted to see Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock one more time.

It was dawn, and there we were, backpacks, cameras and all. Three soldiers idly shifted their feet while two sat at a foldable table outside the main gate. An Arab Israeli was among them. They all turned to us, curious and a little relieved, as if we were among the highlights of a monotonous morning shift.

In Arabic, they asked us where we were from. In English, we told them the US. They nudged forward the best English speaker among them, then interestedly watched our exchange. We played up our effusive touristy apolitical American personas. Did we have our passports? We had anticipated this question. I pulled out my passport, which was kosher. N regretted that hers was at the hotel where we’d stayed — a manifold lie. They let the passport glide without so much as a glance. The Israeli soldiers seemed eager to chat and the Arab in uniform made conversational advances, so we made a quick but courteous retreat, and the name of the Noble Sanctuary acquired a new shade of meaning.

We had been carried through that security point on the wings of Americanhood and girl-privilege. We had avoided another potentially perilous fall (from Israel’s good graces).

And that is just the problem.

We were lucky it was morning. We were lucky they were bored. We were lucky we were young women. We were lucky in so many ways, but the implementation of justice shouldn’t depend on time of day.

The soldiers I met were mostly friendly and, I know, it serves Israel’s public relations and internal safety to have it so. But then again, I hadn’t raised a voice, let alone a fist against Israeli hegemony. I was there quiet and meek as a sheep, and they were happy to herd me along.

At the King Hussein / Allenby Border Crossing, on my way back from the Occupied West Bank, there was a young Israeli soldier with close-cropped hair checking passports and another Israeli soldier framed in a tinted-window booth. Like a clerk at an In-N-Out window, she smiled out and made funny faces at the children who hopped alongside their parents.

Her black hair was pulled back into a loose pony tail. She leaned forward on her elbows. With her right hand she waved us forward. In her other hand, she held a firearm, almost entirely out of view.

She smiled at me, a smile not unlike the one a slave might have seen from a kind mistress. A smile that, no matter how broad, cannot apologize for a downright racist institution.

That smile would disappear, I knew, if any slave made a quick, menacing movement or if the master sensed the beginnings of a slave revolt. Too swiftly, the gun would emerge, would be aimed, would fire, and no one would have a right to ask why. These would be the natural dealings between master and slave. All in the interest of the plantation and its owners — nay, in the interest of the slaves themselves, for what, pray, would the slaves do without their benevolent masters?

let jerusalem be jerusalem again

Blonde, hazel-eyed A got through fine on her American passport. The slouching IDF soldier in the window yelled at her but let her through all the same.

N was next. N was an American citizen, a Berkeley student, born in Jerusalem. Because of that last fact, she had earned a special oval stamp in her passport that identified her, in Hebrew, as Palestinian and, in English, as unwelcome.

Sure, N could visit Jerusalem, but only after she applied for a permit from the Israeli government — a permit granted under the direst circumstances — childbirth and terminal illness.

We pretended we didn’t know. We hoped that the screaming lady in the window would be blind with self-inflicted fury. Unfortunately, she saw fine.

“Irja’ lalbayt!” She yelled at N in the masculine. “Go home!”

N and I hugged a quick goodbye, then I tried my luck.

The sensor sounded its disapproval.

“Irja‘!” The lady in the window yelled. ”Go back!”

She impatiently waved me forward. Again, it beeped.

“Irja’!” she yelled again. (If she were a decade older, she’d have been Old Yeller.) A young man, also in uniform and with legs raised on a swivel chair, laughed as if he were watching The Daily Show. (In a way, he was.)

“What should I do?” I asked in all-earnest English.

She yelled in a language I didn’t understand — Hebrew? — and waved me away, in the direction of the lined up Palestinians. The young man laughed. I felt my face burn.

A Palestinian woman stuck in the turnstile behind me was my only comfort.

“Are you wearing bracelets? Jewelry?”

I took them off. Two bangles from my Palestinian grandmother. A watch my brother chose for me before I left for Jordan. A ring my mother had given me for my high school graduation and eighteenth birthday. Where did I think I was going, anyway, wearing these things? I dug under my scarf for what were once my grandmother’s earrings. Anything but the beep.

“Leave those. You should be fine,” the woman behind bars spoke, as if from experience.

I went through. Safe.

I pinned my passport photo page up against the window.

“Visa. Visa!” She yelled, and the young man beside her gave her some more positive reinforcement. She must think herself a real entertainer, whipping up laughs like that. She’ll probably try for singing, what with all the vocal training she gets at this border.

I showed her my hexagon-shaped visa stamp. Not Palestinian.

Now, for some unfathomable reason, she was yelling again, in tongues. Now she was waving her arms. Now the young man put his feet down because he was laughing so hard.

“What do you want me to do?” I was shouting, too.

Like a chicken straining to lay her egg, she released several useless screams before her efforts proved finally productive.

“Photo!”

I showed her the photo again, she waved me off like a fly and pressed the buzzer to usher the next insect into her swatting range.

I cried. I cried because I hate hate hate negative attention. I cried because my nightmares involve public humiliation. I cried because I knew that I couldn’t report her to anyone. I cried because I wanted to beat her into silence. I cried because I had come to a place where the human rights of Palestinians are systematically violated and I — I was stupidly, insensibly sensitive. I cried because I had no right to cry.

My self-pity was brief. A and I emerged on the other side of the border, and N’s older cousin — a resident of Jerusalem — met us there.

“They didn’t let N through?”

We shook our heads.

“Follow me.”

We exited the border, left Jerusalem behind us, reunited with N. The three of us hurried behind the man in the black jacket and phone to his ear. Not a minute later, another young man in a huge white t-shirt and baggy jeans  – an LA transplant, it seemed — hurriedly parked his car and climbed into the passenger seat. The cousin took the wheel. Wordlessly, N, A and I rode in the back.

This was the contingency plan. If it didn’t work, there’d be no Jerusalem — at least not for N.

After a half-hour of winding mountainous highways, we were at another checkpoint, this time for cars.

A black IDF soldier tapped the tinted windows. She searched our trunk. Peeking in, she looked at our passports: The two men’s. Mine. A’s. N’s.

She saw only American passports. Human faces. Five casual Arab strangers.

Had she looked closer, though, she’d have noticed that we girls were holding hands. Had she looked closer, she’d have seen that, behind our smiles, we weren’t breathing. Had she looked closer, she’d have discovered that we were smuggling into the city a strictly illegal substance — a Jerusalem-born Palestinian.

little jerusalemites

My professor’s instructions: Pick up your things and head to Such-and-Such Auditorium for a cultural event.

Given that I didn’t know where to find Such-and-Such Auditorium, I played the follow-the-leader game. As it did in kindergarten, the game served me well.

Once there, I found a handful students behind cameras, recording. Older men (and a woman) in suits — presumably professors — sat in the front seats.

A man who reminded me of Mahmoud Darwish held the microphone. His name was Sameeh Al Qasem. He was reading a trifold poem. Each set of verses employed the sentence ana mut’assif (I’m sorry), only in different contexts and to different effects. For example, in the final piece the persona apologizes to God, but not without a touch of bitterness.

During the entirety of his talk, I was trying to place him. Our professor hadn’t given us any introduction and, by the time we reached Such-and-Such Auditorium, we’d missed the formal introduction.

As it turns out, what I said about the striking resemblance between this poet and the late Palestinian national poet — well, it wasn’t all that far-fetched.

Mahmoud Darwish and Sameeh Al Qasem had been friends since the 1950′s.

“People think we were always samn ‘a ‘asal.” (Literally: butter on honey. Figuratively: two things that go well together. Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t make it up. And, no, I don’t eat butter with honey. I take it back. I do. ‘Aseeda anyone?)

“But that’s not true.” He continued. “We had our disagreements, but ask anyone in the Middle East — ask anyone if they heard me speak a word against Mahmoud, and ask anyone who knew Mahmoud if he said a word against me — never.”

“Each of us was regularly mistaken for the other,” the poet continued. “Readers would greet us by each others’ names. My poetry was even published once under his name and his under mine.”

Al Qasim gave us a little background on the following poem:

Taqaddamu… Kullu sama’in fawqakum jahannamu. Kullu ardin tahtakum jahannamu. Charge… Every sky over you is a hell. Every ground beneath you is a hell.

“Some listeners actually thought this ‘taqaddamu‘ was a directive for Palestinians or Arabs. A sort of rallying cry. But that’s anything but the case. There’s a story to this, actually.”

Al Qasim and Darwish were part of a human chain, peacefully protesting an IDF activity. Members of the IDF shot rubber bullets and threw tear gas canisters. Then, just as the links of the human chain began coming undone, little Jerusalemites arrived on the scene.

The schoolchildren came with backpacks packed with rocks. As they pelted the soldiers, they said, “Kadima (Hebrew for charge). Kadima, you sons of…”

The children succeeded in provoking the soldiers, thereby giving the protesters a moment’s respite. (I wonder what became of the children.)

The poem was born of that experience. Taqaddamu (the Arabic equivalent of kadima) pays homage to the children of Jerusalem who, ironically, came to the defense of the adults.

Funny thing is: I remember a lot about the aforementioned poem, only I can’t, for the life of me, remember who wrote it, Al Qasem or Darwish.

Yes, Mr. Sameeh. I’m one of those.

Sadly, there are no little Jerusalemites who can come to my rescue on this one.