On
the bus from Jerusalem to Ramallah. Two countries at war, but you can take a bus to the other side. It's the number 18, everything is in Arabic and the
colour is green. There are two nuns with thick glasses, several men, women with
hijab, and without.
My friend Fadi will meet me when I get to the bus station in
Ramallah. We are travelling through East Jerusalem. It's all white bricks,
broken-ness, half-built. New developments; Jewish homes. I think that to do
this journey, to travel this land, is to begin to understand.
We cross. I am on the other side of the wall. Here are boulders and dust; clouds rise white from the street. I am outside the fortress where once I felt so safe. The first time, returning from Tulkarem, I breathed a sign of relief as I stepped onto the Israeli side. Now it is the other way.
There
is graffiti - English, gidon levi,
Arabic, change your politic. A dead
dog lying in the middle of the road.
They
tell us not to come here, we are so scared. I call Fadi like 50 times this
morning, every step of the way. I'm coming alone, is it ok? I'm getting the bus now, is it ok? Will you meet me? Is
it ok? Is it ok?
'It's
ok,' he says, every time. 'No problem, fine, even with a blue ID.'
You just take the bus to Ramallah from Jerusalem. From West to East. The sheitels give way to hijab, the shades to suntanned, wrinkled skin, and you are stripped, alone.
FADI
is waiting as we pull into the bus station. It was only a half-hour drive,
through the checkpoint without a stop. Getting into Israel is the part that's hard - no one cares if you leave. Adam,
a friend from the States, is waiting too. We kiss both cheeks in the boiling
sun and walk through central Ramallah to the Star and Bucks cafe.
Adam has already been here
for two days. It's not his first trip. A while back he spent three months
learning Arabic at Birzeit. Now, he's staying with Nabil, a Birzeit friend. Adam is Jewish. He admitted this to his
Palestinian friends only towards the end of Birzeit - they laughed and
said they'd guessed. But this time things have changed. Nabil was two months in an Israeli jail, and there's a fracture to their fragile trust. 'You
brought Israel to our house,' is what Nabil said.
As
we ascend to the coffee shop, Adam tells me to go first. This is in case
someone, on the narrow crowded stairs, tries to grope me. 'It happens a lot,'
he says. That's strange because so far I've noticed only quiet respect.
Nabil's wife is from Canada. She is
Palestinian, and Israel won't let any Palestinians return so every
three months she goes to Israel to renew her tourist visa, which last
time they refused. This is married life.
It's sweltering outside and the light seems unbearably
bright. People wander in and out of cars, travelling
at a snail's pace, all over the road. It's a free for all, no horns. And
everywhere, on the pavements in clusters, are groups of young men. They
hold hands and touch each other to make a point. We pass too close
and Fadi brushes his palm along the shoulders of an unknown man. No one bats an eye.
We sit in a shwarma place - the family area upstairs. There is air-conditioning.
We rest. A man and his wife sit opposite. His hand creeps between the buttons of
her jilbab. She has white skin, white hijab, big pale eyes. Eats shwarma like us. The man sees me see, does it again. I try hard not to look.
WE
GO on a walkabout. Fadi returns to his office at the Ministry of Social Affairs.
Adam wants to show me something. It's a monument to a Palestinian
man killed here last week by the Israeli army. It's hard to know what happened,
exactly, but I try to understand. 'The army comes in whenever they like.
The Palestinians try to resist,' says Adam, 'but they don't have the weaponry and if they shoot, the army just kills them. That's what happened to this guy,
I think.' Fadi's version, later, is that the man was 'wanted' and the army executed him.
A
man was shot dead last week on this street on this spot. And here are plants,
his photograph and a small handwritten sign.
Opposite, is a women's clothing store. The owner and two friends are sitting outside on stools. We have a bit of a chat, then the owner wants a picture taken with me. He saves it to his phone wallpaper. 'Don't show that to your wife,' says Adam. 'It's okay,' says one of the friends. He's not married. Got some issues.' The men all laugh.
IT'S TWO O'CLOCK - time to meet Fadi at his work. We take a taxi to the Ministry of
Social Affairs, passing the Muqataa, the Palestinian government buildings, a
huge white compound heavily guarded, on the way. Out of the centre, there are
wide and peaceful streets, fewer people and lots of space. Everything is
sun-bleached green and white.
I see a Jewish star etched
onto a wall. No one has covered it. Then another, spray-painted black onto
a green bin. 'Soldiers leave them as they go past,' says Adam. I can't believe they've just been left there and no one's painted them
out.
The
Ministry is empty - most people finish work by two. Fadi, who's in public
relations, meets us with his deputy. We drink coffee with lots of sugar from
little white cups. They'd introduce us to social affairs minister Saleh Zidan, only
he's in Gaza right now, so we go to the roof and look at Ramallah, the
whole of it, baking in the sun beneath. I take pictures, one of which Fadi
makes me delete, because in it, as he gestures to the settlements in the
distance, he is smiling.
This
is where social programmes are organised - widows, orphans, a shelter for women
beaten by their men. No one's
been paid for quite a while (the Hamas embargo, and Israel's withheld tax). Well,
sometimes something comes through - maybe 750 shekels a month.
BACK TO THE CENTRE in a taxi, the news comes on - and just like in Israel the volume
goes up. Except here, the word you hear is Isra-eel,
over and over again, instead of the Phlistin-eem
that they repeat on the news in Tel Aviv.
On the corners, we hang out. We chat. We meet people. Friends know friends. Everyone is saying hello. We stop for tea and a chocolate eclair at the Urobian, talk to Jihad, the owner, and Bassam, an employee. I think about Tel Aviv. There are so many beautiful women; here are so many - their skin, I notice, is very white, despite the scorching sun. Light and hungry eyes, diamond blue and green. They walk. Tight tops, jeans, sexy mane of hair. No one bothers them. 'They're Christians,' says Adam. So? 'Well, the Muslim women are supposed to be more pure. The Christians are known as loose.'
Salam
and Nabil are standing on a corner. Adam's friends. Salam wears a brown suit
and tie, even in this heat, with combed-back hair. He is a
journalist. We talk about Alan Johnston. 'He was kidnapped, but he was a friend,' Salam says. Back in the Star and Bucks Adam smokes nargila and we talk. 'Could you have a friendship with another woman, not
your wife?' Adam asks the men.
'Well,
it's okay for me to sit and have a coffee with my colleagues,' says Salam. 'But
more than that is not allowed. Once you have signed the marriage contract you
can't be intimate with any woman but your wife. In the villages, though, if you
even talked with another woman, it would be bad. You can say good morning, but nothing more than that.'
AS I SIT on the bus to Al-Quds I see a kite, a ragged
kite flying in the dusk-blue sky. One, then two kite-tails, then hundreds
sailing over the mounds of rubble under a huge pale setting sun.
I'm
on the number 18. It stops at Qalandia and the Palestinians get out. The rest of us stay put. A soldier gets on, throws a
quick look around, descends. We drive through and wait for the Palestinians on the other side. I see the flag of Israel flying above huge enclosures covered with barbed wire, and lanes, and traffic in
lanes, and soldiers, Jewish soldiers in green with guns.
Up ahead is the wall. We build. The wall we build to keep them out; the watchtowers, cameras and speakers to keep us in. And the same pale setting sun the other side.
