Reflections on the Road: Two Countries and a Friendship Lost (II)

To begin at Part One of this two-part series, click HERE

December 2006

Twenty-six months later I'm standing at Qalandia checkpoint, en route from the West Bank town of Ramallah to Jerusalem.  I'm standing with hundreds of Palestinians in a line so thick and tight it is difficult to move one's arms.  And I'm getting angry.  When I had gone through this same checkpoint a day earlier, it took five minutes.  Now it has already been 90 minutes.  I can see the Israeli soldiers who control the line from behind their bullet proof glass, leisurely chatting with one another rather than facilitating efficient movement of the line.  A day earlier the soldiers had seemed considerate; one had even wished me a good day.  Today those on duty were showing us they didn't give a damn.

On the way from the house I was staying at in Ramallah to the nearby Qalandia checkpoint, I passed a demonstration protesting Palestinian-on-Palestinian political violence, which the day before had resulted in the deaths of the boys pictured in the poster.

The grumbling in the crowd rises and fades, rises and fades.  Babies are crying.  An occasional plea is directed from the crowd toward the bullet proof glass, located on the other side of the turnstile cage through which we all must pass.  It is behind this glass that we see the soldiers chatting, one pair even flirting.  "Press the button" an old man cries, referring to the button which allows the turnstile to make a one-quarter turn, which will then spit out a Palestinian (or the occasional foreigner) onto the other side of the cage, where he or she will then press an ID against the window for the soldier to check before passing through a metal detector.  Sometimes the turnstile stops part way through its rotation and a person may be stuck among its metal bars for minutes at a time.  And if a person is overweight or elderly, others in line sometimes have to shove the person's stuck body parts through to the other side.

 
The turnstile in Qalandia, on a normal day.  In the foreground is the x-ray machine for belongings.  Out of view to the right and left is the bullet proof glass.

The sun is setting and it is turning cold.  Everyone is this forsaken line has places to go, things to get done.  But for the past 15 minutes the soldiers refuse to press the button.  You find it hard to squelch the tightness in your soul as you stare into the bullet proof glass at people who are using power to provoke as much as to protect.

Qalandia Checkpoint

Finally you pass and are on the way to Jerusalem, where you race to the city bus station to catch the bus to Tel Aviv.  You look at your watch and cringe: you are already an hour late, and it will be another hour before you reach Tel Aviv. You call Zivah to give her an updated time of arrival.  When she berates you for messing up her schedule, you want to say: Welcome to life under occupation, where the presence of your military and the moods of individual soldier make planning something as simple as a cup of coffee with a friend in another town an uncertain endeavor.  You want to tell her that the phone you are using recently needed repair, and when your friend took it to a repair shop he nearly got shot when undercover Israeli soldiers jumped out of an unmarked van and shot up several cars on the street as they arrested a Palestinian.  But what you do say is:  "I'm sorry, Zivah, but please understand.  I left Ramallah with the intention of being in Tel Aviv an hour before our meeting time since the checkpoints are so inconsistent.  But today was particularly bad, and it was beyond my control."

A few minutes later, trying to relax on the bus, you hear the word "Qalandia" on the Hebrew-language station the driver's radio is tuned to.  You ask a fellow passenger what was said.  "An hour ago two Palestinians at the Qalandia checkpoint ran up to the place where they inspect cars and stabbed an Israeli security guard in the neck."  You close your eyes and remember the hatred you yourself felt as you stood in line at Qalandia not even an hour before the attack.  Dharamsala -- that magical town in the foothills of the Himalayas where you and Zivah first met, where hunchbacked old men and women humbly prayed, where you once felt centered and joyful -- feels so far away.

Zivah hadn't at all lost her attractiveness.  But as we cleared off a table at a pizza joint on the edge of Rabin Square and began to get reacquainted, the air felt thick between us, like when a rain is about to fall.  We hadn't even begun to talk about the conflict, yet it was with us at the table.  It was also inside us.

Unlike in India, where Zivah knew I was working on a book about Asia, here she knew I was working in the West Bank for two months, documenting through photographs the hardships faced by Palestinian Christian communities living under occupation.  In previous weeks, when I had called from a Palestinian's home or West Bank restaurant to say hello, she would ask in a tone more serious than funny, "How are my enemies today?"

Meeting in Tel Aviv was different for me too.  When we had first met in India, it was during a month in which I had visited waterfalls, watched monkeys play, listened to amazing music on the Ganges River.  But two years later this past month had included other things -- gunfire, scores of checkpoints, a rubber bullet missing my face by a matter of inches, the sight of a Palestinian drug off to jail as he protested the confiscation of his olive trees.  As I stood in line at the Qalandia checkpoint, I knew that Zivah's sister lived in an illegal settlement barely a mile away.  To Zivah, that land belonged to Israel, and it was her sister's home.  To me (and the Palestinians around me in line), it was stolen land, and it was one of the core reasons this conflict has continued its downward spiral.

So as Zivah and I ate our pizza -- we were sitting a block away from where a decade earlier Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated -- we felt the tension.  Yet we tried to transcend it.  Zivah told me she was engaged, updated me on her family, filled me in on how her travels had gone after we had said goodbye in India.  I told her about life in Tennessee, my writing progress, future travel possibilities.  But somehow, inevitably perhaps, the conversation turned to the actual things happening around us now, to policy and politics and how they affect the lives of the real people we care about.

 
The memorial to Yitzak Rabin, built on the site of his murder

Zivah told me about the fear her sister's family sometimes lives in as they commute from their settlement into Israel proper.  She explained how Palestinians devalue life, how there cannot be peace with such people.  I could understand much of what she said, but sometimes I disagreed and offered stories and statistics to suggest alternative ways of viewing an issue.  I told her of my Palestinian friends who live in fear of the Israeli military and settlers, of a military legal system designed for the benefit of settlers rather than the people entering their 40^th year of occupation, of the inherent injustice of building settlements on land that, in many cases, was taken from the rightful owners by either brute force or through mind boggling legal gymnastics against which no low-income Palestinian farmer has a chance.  But the most stunning part of our conversation came when I mentioned the story of my best friend in the West Bank, who as a high school student in 1987 was arrested and tortured in an Israeli facility for three days -- in addition to physical and mental abuse, he was not allowed to sleep -- until he signed a paper confessing to spray painting a political slogan on a wall (a charge which to this day he denies).  After a short stint in jail, he was released but barred from leaving the West Bank for ten years, which meant he couldn't go to the university in France he was planning to attend.  In response to this, Zivah looked straight into my eyes and said, "Wah, wah, wah.  What do you want me to do, cry about it?"

"No, that wasn't my goal," I said.  "But I thought that you'd feel some compassion for my friend, and acknowledge that Israel often hurts very innocent people."

"I'm sorry, but I don't care at all," she shot back.  "And I'm fine with that."

"But he's my friend, as well as very nice guy who never did anything wrong.  And now that he has kids of his own he wants to emigrate so that nothing like this will happen to his own children.  He's not and never was a security threat to Israel, Zivah."

"I don't care."

After a moment of stunned silence, the evening continued to descend into a friendship-splintering tailspin.  A thousand thoughts flew through my mind, most of which I thought best not to say.  I couldn't help, however, to recall conversations I had recently had with Hamas supporters.  When I would press them on their support for suicide bombings, pointing out how such acts strike down the lives of people I care about -- I would paint the most human portrait of a bombing victim I could and then ask how they could justify, much less celebrate, the death of such a person -- most Hamas supporters (but not all) would, in the end, grudgingly acknowledge there was a problem with their position.  Only the most extreme militant would say, "I don't care."

"Zivah, I'm sorry," I said, "but I don't understand how your attitude is different from the worst of Hamas.  You cannot feel -- you don't even want to feel -- the pain and loss experienced by an innocent person on the other side, even when he is a friend of your friend."

Zivah spoke more than I did in the next half hour.  "We hate people like you who come here to take photographs and write stories that give a skewed image of our country," she said.  "If you want to write about human rights, go to f---ing Iraq."

I walked her to the bus stop on the other side of the square, from which she would catch the bus to her home outside Tel Aviv.  One of the last things she said as she stepped on the bus -- she yelled it very loud, actually -- was, "My family would be ashamed if they knew we were meeting tonight."  A few seconds later the bus doors closed.  As the bus pulled away, the handful of Israelis around me politely didn't stare at this object of a young woman's wrath.  I myself stared down at the curb, feeling a way I never had before.  I had never lost a friend.  Not so suddenly.  Not so painfully.

In half an hour I was scheduled to meet another young Israeli woman, who would not only remain my friend but also encourage me to keep doing what I was doing in terms of my photography and writing.  But that night was nonetheless one of the loneliest nights I had experienced in Israel/Palestine.  After the meeting with this second Israeli woman -- I was interviewing her for an article -- I caught the last bus of the night back to Jerusalem.  Once back in Jerusalem at 1:00 a.m., too cheap for a taxi back to the hotel, I commenced the 40-minute walk along an eerily empty Jaffa Street.  So much was on my mind.  I could hear my friend's screams as he was tortured in 1987, and see him holding his son just the other day as I sat in his living room.  I could hear the somber tones of an Israeli recounting the death of a friend, torn apart in a Tel Aviv suicide bombing.  I could hear the turning of tanks, the groans at the checkpoints, the jeers of ideological settlers, the chants of jubilant Palestinians who I wish hadn't been jubilant.  I could see Zivah's flirtatious smile in Dharamsala and her piercing expression as she boarded the bus in Tel Aviv, which I knew indicated I would never see her again, at least for a long while.

 
Israeli border police in Jerusalem's Old City

		Joel Carillet, Gather Travel Correspondent
	Joel's column, "Reflections on the Road," is published every other Thursday to Gather Essentials: Travel. His articles, based on extensive travels in Asia and the Middle East, seek to shed light on humanity, both our own and that of others.   They aim not merely to entertain and inform but also to develop a sense of connection between the reader and the world. Joel's writing and photography have appeared in several magazines and newspapers, including the Kansas City Star and Christian Science Monitor.  Currently his agent is seeking a publisher for a book manuscript entitled Sixty-One Weeks: A Journey across Asia, and in February 2008 he began selling photographs through jcarillet.imagekind.com. When not on the road, he happily calls Tennessee home. Keep up with Joel's article series by joining his network, or subscribing to his content.