Ex Patria

The Door of Humility

We went to Bethlehem yesterday.

It was a long trip.  Considering that Bethlehem is just some 25 km away, the one hour drive seems excessive.  It's not that the roads are bad -- although those switchbacks are hair-raising -- it's that the Palestinian busses have to drive all the way around Jerusalem.  Imagine Ramallah to the north of Jerusalem, and Bethlehem due south of it.  Jerusalem is big but luckily, Ma'ale Adumim is not (yet) incorporated into the walled section, so it's an hour of driving when it should be half an hour.  On the other hand, you won't get into rush hour traffic, so there's that.

Bethlehem is strange.  The first big building you'll see on Manger Square is the Bethlehem Peace Center, which has a big banner on it that says, "Return is our right and our destiny."  Inside, you'll find a bookstore with political posters and lots of Pro-Palestinian literature.  As sympathetic as I am to the Palestinian cause, I don't think you can make peace all by yourself.  There's always two sides to the story, and so far, we're only seeing one side.  As Doug says, we need to spend some time in Israel to get a balanced picture.  The Bethlehem Peace Center definitely does not do "balanced".

That said, I discovered a team of photographers based in Bethlehem - Andrea and Magda.  Check out their work if you have a few minutes.

I'm of two minds about the Peace Center but their cafe is nice.  While socialist in style and decor, the food is really yummy, and the kids fell in love with their lemonade with mint -- after initial confusion about green lemonade and the spearminty taste. 

It was a very hot day, and the sun was scorching.  What with getting up a bit later than normal, the long drive, and having lunch first thing upon arrival, we ended up walking around in the hot noon sun which was a bad idea.  The kids were grumpy and complained about the heat and the dazzling brightness, so we turned to the Church of Nativity to cool off a bit.  Unfortunately, our weekend trips always coincide with large groups of tourists milling around.  The line that formed in front of the Grotto of Nativity was so long, and our kids were so grumpy, that we chose to forego that.  We came close enough to Jesus' place of birth, we decided, and who knows whether it was really right there, and not maybe over here.

The church itself is odd - both old and new, a rambling expanse with lots of incense burners dangling from the ceiling, some lovely mosaics, and various different kinds of priests and monks.  It's a veritable melting pot of Christianity, with Armenians, Franciscans, Greek Orthodox and others all right next to each other. I like that.  There is a lovely cloister, complete with St. Hieronymous statue, and not many of the tourists go there, so it's calm and green and quiet. 

What I really, really liked is the entrance to the church.  Now, this is the big thing, right?  Here, we are led to believe, Jesus was born and even if you don't go for the Son-of-God thing, you have to admit that Jesus got a lot of things very right.  So it's a cool place to go to, and thousands of tourists are going every single year -- and they all enter the church bowed down.  Because, you see, the main entrance is not a giant gate or double-door or mighty opening in a wall.  It's a tiny door, just big enough for a kid, and anybody over the age of 10 has to bow deeply to fit through.  That's why it is called the Door of Humility, and I can't tell you much this pleases me.  I find this very appropriate in a land where you find so many different religions who all think they got it right.  A bit of humility is really a good thing.

Of course, the story behind the door is rather prosaic.  There used to be two more bigger entrances which were walled up, and the present entrance was made smaller to prevent horsemen from just whisking through.  It's still impressive, this small hole in the wall of a big, big church, and one tourist after another bowing through.

We went to the Milk Grotto afterwards.  The story goes that as Mary and Joseph fled Herod's soldiers, they stopped in this grotto so that Mary could nurse baby Jesus.  A drop of milk spilled on the red rocks and turned them white.  Today, it's a popular destination for new mothers and women trying to get pregnant - it's said that if you mix the white chalk with your food, or simply touch the white rock, you will get pregnant and/or never have lactation problems again.  There are letters and pictures sent from grateful mothers from around the world attesting to the potency of the white rock. Well, if it works for them.  Personally, I'd never before seen an icon with a breastfeeding Mary complete with exposed breast, and that totally worked for me.

There have been churches and buildings over and around the grotto from early on.  The Franciscans then built a church over the grotto in the 1870s and a very modern church was added in 2007, complete with sweeping underground walkways that connect the modern with the old parts.  It's rather serene and also quite empty -- I suppose the tourist groups skip the grotto.  Or maybe we were just lucky.

On our way back we stopped at one of the many olive wood "factories" that produce an endless supply of Christmas ornaments for the rest of the world.  The owner is a shrewd and sweet guy whom I thought to be gay, although Doug said he didn't pick up on that.  For me, being a gay Palestinian in Bethlehem pretty much defines the word "trouble", so we made all our gift purchases in his shop.  We climbed the steps to the rooftop to have a breathtaking view over Bethlehem, all the way to Jerusalem, and watched the three workers produce masses of carvings in the little workshop.

Our kids were delighted by the wood scraps they got for free, and with the Angry Bird toys...

Oh, I forgot to tell you about the Angry Bird toys.

See, ice cream is a standard bribe that Doug and I employ to get our kids to look at boring old ruins.  Almost every ice cream shop we have passed so far had ads for "Angry Birds Ice Cream" -- and failed to deliver.  As my kids are obsessed with Angry Birds, this was a constant source of woe and misery. But in Bethlehem, on Milk Grotto Street, there is a little shop that actually has Angry Birds ice cream.  The kids were beside themselves with joy.  Imagine their glee when they discovered that each ice cream wrapper also contained a tiny Angry Birds pencil topper.  The happiness this evoked was undescribable.  It's as if they never had a toy ever in their lives before.

Anyway.  Angry Birds and olive wood scraps make great companions, in case you were wondering.  And while the parents come away from Bethlehem with impressions of tiny doors and Palestinian bookshops, the kids will always remember their Angry Bird toys.  In fact, as Jacob asked me today, can we please go back to the place where Jesus was born?  Because in that one street, there is that one shop...

 

Because they can

Our plan for yesterday was to rent a car and drive to Galilee.  For various reasos, this didn't happen.  Let's just gloss over this fact.

But we didn't want to stay inside all day, and Ramallah is shut down on Fridays, that being the Sunday of the Muslims.  So we decided to go to Jerusalem to shop, sight-see, and pass an agreeable day.

We usually hire a cab to go over the southern checkpoint, thus avoiding the infamous Qalandia checkpoint.  But those cabs are expensive since they have to come from East Jerusalem - Palestinian cars cannot enter Israel.  It's complicated.  In any case, a big cab for all of us to Jerusalem costs somewhat in the neighborhood of 50 Euros.  We don't want to pay that kind of money all the time, so we decided to take the 18 Bus to Jerusalem.  We've taken it quite a few times from Jerusalem (no controls at the checkpoint when leaving Israel) and it's fast, clean, and cheap.  With two parents, we thought we could brave Qalandia.  Now, if you ever have this idea, let me tell you that on Friday, there are no busses from Ramallah to Jerusalem in the mornings.   Weekend schedule, right? Our solution was to have the cab drop us off at Qalandia, walk across the checkpoint, and hire a cab on the Israeli side.

That turned out to be a very feasible but quite stressful idea.

I've read about Qalandia, and I wasn't surprised, but even so I was in a near panic all the time. See, Qalandia has the feel of a prison camp.  It's squalid and bare, and consists of iron bars, razor wire, and turnstiles. And cameras.  And lots of sign in Arabic and Hebrew.  Invisible guards. Mysteriously opening and closing gates.  Loudspeakers yelling at you.  Buzzers going off in the distance.  The clanking of the gates.  Helplessness.

There is a sort of holding pen at the entrance, a big hall with a few benches and quite a bit of trash.  This being a Sunday morning, effectively, the hall was empty.  I cannot image this on a hot afternoon when it is full of people.  Needless to say, there is no air conditioning, and the giant wall fans are apparently never switched on.

The first step is to go through a kind of lock - a long narrow walkway with bars on either side, and razor wire over your head.  This walkway is just wide enough for a single person and you better not be too tall, either.  Even though it's open enough with the bars, it feels claustrophobic and intimidating.  Which, I suppose, is the whole point.  At the end of this narrow chute is a turnstile that turns and locks for no apparent reason.  Sometimes, three people can go through before the fourth person slams into the gate that is suddenly not turning anymore.  Sometimes ten people can go through.  There is no rhyme or reason to it, and the feeling I got was of panic and urgency - press through fast, before someone unseen presses a button and locks the gate.

After this first turnstile, there is another chute-like area, this one wider so people press and push against another turnstile at the end.  You can see the screen machine and the metal detector, and sort of guess that this is where you will be checked.  But again, you don't see a single Israeli soldier.

This turnstile is even worse than the one before - it lets less people through and this time, it cut off Doug and Leah from us.  We watched them disappear through the check area and the turnstile just wouldn't open again.  The boys freaked and I had a hard time calming them down.

Just then, a door opened and two Israelis (not soliders, I don't think) came out to sweep the floor.  That was nice and all but all the while they swept, studiously ignoring us, the turnstile was locked (so that we wouldn't attack the cleaners?).  I was a bit panicked myself since I didn't know what was going on with Doug and Leah, and I was afraid my boys would be cut off from me on the next round.  I handed them their passports and told them to put their bags into the screening machine, and not to make a fuss of any kind.  Their Daddy (I hoped) would be waiting on the other side.  (Remember that all this time, we were in a metal cage, pressed against the turnstile that just would not unlock, and there was a feeling of helplessness, panic, and urgency in the air, all the while nobody spoke. It was eerie.)

The sweepers disappeared, and still the gate was not unlocked.  Someone, somewhere, was watching the proceedings, either getting a kick out of it or not caring at all.  It was hard to tell.  This impersonal treatment, the way that you don't see anybody, that everything happens automatically and that voices only come through loudspeakers, make this all seem very unreal and surreal.  1984 came to mind.

A man behind me, with a neatly cropped beard and intelligent eyes, told me to squish two of my boys into the turnstile at once, and to keep their passports with me.  I was so confused, and felt so threatened by the anonymous soldiers that controlled the turnstile, that I whispered to him, "This is horrible!  Why would they treat people like that?"  He quietly replied, "Because they can."

Because they can.

Eventually, we got through.  There was really not much to it.  There were four or five soliders in the checkpoint office, behind bulletproof glass, extremely young all of them.  They didn't seem to have a care in the world.   The soldier doing the checks only wanted to see the Israel entry stamp in one of the four passports I held, and waved us through.  At the end there is another turnstile that releases you into East Jerusalem which is not part of Israel in the eyes of the world, although Israel sees this differently.

Because they can. 

Yes, security has increased considerably in the past years and of course, Israel claims that the wall and the checkpoints are responsible for that.  Having seen how Israeli-Palestinian drivers can simply drive around checkpoints, how low security is at other checkpoints, how if you really wanted it would be a peace of cake to smuggle a bomb or two across, I cannot concur. The checkpoints are there to harrass the Palestinians, for no other reason.

I can choose to avoid Qalandia.  But many Palestinians, school kids and university students, workers, doctors, women, men, disabled, old and young - they don't have that choice.  They have to go through this every single day.  What this does to their minds, is anybody's guess.

 

PS: 

Here are two more very interesting accounts of Americans going through Qalandia, with photos.  I didn't dare to take out my big camera and shoot away.  An iPhone would have been handy...

Quite Alone - Crossing Qalandia

A Year On - Qalandia for kids

The Old City

The Old City. 

Holy to three religions - Judaism, Chrstianity, and Islam.  Western Wall, Dome of the Rock, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, all within minutes of walk.  I have to confess that we didn't visit any churches - with four kids in tow, that wasn't an option, really.  We just walked through the narrow streets, ate good food, enjoyed the sights and sounds. 

We entered through the Damascus gate into the Muslim Quarter.  Right there, we took a sharp left while everyone else was heading straight.  We found empty little side streets.  Flowering bougainvillea.  Painted doors and shutters. There were no other tourists, only a few local people on their way to some mysterious errands.  No vendors, no famous landmarks, only hundreds of years of history.  It was so very lovely.  The Muslim Quarter is a confusing mix of Medditerranean and Oriental styles.  One corner looked just like in Croatia, the next view would be a street corner in old Istanbul.  It was charming and enchanting.

Somehow we ended up on the Via Dolorosa.  The first station is a lovely little church in a quiet courtyard, with lots of green, inviting quiet and somber contemplation.  Alan copied a Greek mosaic from a wall because he wanted to find out what it meant, and we sat in the little chapel and were quiet.

Maybe because we were there early, it wasn't crowded yet.  Little did I know how very crowded it would become later in the day!  We sauntered through the narrow streets, under arches and through little tunnels.  We were turned away twice because we ended up at gates leading to the Temple Mount.  Since it was Friday, it was closed to all non-Muslims, it being their holy day.  I love that idea - it's not only a tourist attraction, it's a living religious site.  We had a tentalizing peek at the Dome of the Rock and I could snap a quick image or two (encouraged by two very, very young Israeli soldiers), then we retraced our steps through the souq of the cotton dealers, past stalls with sweets and bolts of fabric. 

We just drifted.  We had no real goal, but somehow we ended up in a "Shabbath-mode" security check.  (Don't ask.  I don't know, either.)  It spat us out at the Wailing Wall.

Now, the Wailing Wall is just this big wall, right?  You have a big section for the men who all have to wear a kippa and a little section for us girls.

But even though the Via Dolorosa left me feeling like I was the world's most unsprirtual person, the Wailing Wall made me cry.  I touched it, and tears fell.  Even the memory of it is strong enough to move me.  It's just a wall.  Go figure.

We walked back the Via Dolorosa to the Austrian Hospice.  It's a delightful little secret - tucked away behind a non-descript red metal door lies a beautiful building in real Viennese splendor, complete with a cafeteria selling Apfelstrudel and Sachertorte and wonderful coffee.  It's a quiet spot and you can sit in the garden under palm and sycamore trees and enjoy a rest from the bustle of the city.

Doug was on a quest to find a cistern he had visited years ago and that he thought the boys would like.  We never found it.  But we did visit the cisterns under the Ecce Homo convent/church/site. The cistern was almost empty (the gentleman at the reception told us it was because there had been some digging going on nearby) but it dripped and had tiny stalagtites and was cavernous enough to please our kids nevertheless. Goal achieved.

After some more drifting around, we decided to leave the Old City by way of the Damascus Gate - apparently at the same time as 1,000 other people.  It was a scrum, a push-and-shove, and I had a hard time hanging on to my kids and to my camera at the same time.  Later, I discovered that my camera belt had become loose and my camera was dangerously close to coming off the belt.  That doesn't normally happen by itself.  It's a rather solid construction.  Made me go "hmmmm".
It was challenging to keep the kids calm - imagine their view of backs and butts up close, being pushed and squished against each other.  At one point I missed a step (there was no way of seeing the ground) and nearly fell - that was rather scary.  Sweat-drenched, we were quite relieved when the Damascus gate spat us out onto Nablus Road.

Searching a book store (the kids had run out of books), we ended up at the American Colony Hotel which has a pleasant little bookstore but alas, nothing for kids.

The Garden Tomb is right across from the Old Arab bus station (yes, that's its real name) in East Jerusalem.  It's a highly disputed site of Jesus' tomb - archeologists have actually disproven the claim of General Charles Gordon that the Garden Tomb is the real place of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.  The tombs are in fact from the 5th century.  But that doesn't stop thousands of tourists of visiting the site, and it's (I think) the only site owned by Protestants in the city - so it's not going to go away any time soon.  It's a pleasant place, run by the British church, set in a nice little garden and full of religious groups who are singing hymns next to each other - different hymns.  Yes, it's slightly jarring.

We decided to take the bus back.  (Since Doug isn't allowed by USAID rules to use public transport in the West Bank, he... walked home, of course.)  The bus was air-conditioned, modern, fast, and cheap.  I can't see any reason not to take the bus any time it's possible.

There is so much we didn't see.  As of today, we have 30 more days in Palastine.  I dare say we will be coming back to the Old City at some point.

The Mountain of God

So we are in Palestine for five weeks.

Doug has a project here, and after long and angst-ridden discussions we decided to come as one big package.  That's, as my husband calls it, quite reckless.  He has no steady job at the moment and although we can live quite cheaply here,  the flights alone were frighteningly expensive.  But then again - the Holy Land!  Three world religions collide!  Whenever do you get to live here for a bit and really delve into the country and the people and learn and see and explore?  It's a rare chance, and we decided to jump at it.  While I still bemoan the funds we invested into El Al, I can't be sorry we came.  It's fascinating and lovely and I'm glad we can show this to the kids (and to ourselves). 

On our first evening, we saw a fat full moon rise over the Palestinian hills - it was breathtakingly beautiful.   Right now, the muezzin is calling to prayer - a sound that is so intimately known to me that I sighed a little breath of relief when I first heard it.  I had no idea that I missed it so much.
(For those readers -- do I still have readers? -- who don't know, I grew up in Istanbul and heard the muezzin every day.  I can sing right along.)

We are living the suburb of Al-Bireh in a corporate apartment complex that is eerily empty and houses, according to the many "CD" license plates in the parking lot, mostly diplomats from all over the world.  We don't see many of them, though.  Are they all on summer break? It's very quiet, and we have the pool entirely to ourselves.  The apartment is shockingly cheap - something is going on that we don't understand yet.  The complex is heavily guarded and I'm not sure whether that is necessary or a sellable feature for all those diplomats.

Ramallah, or "Mountain of God", lies almost 1000m above sea level and has a constant breeze going - which is why Jordanian princes liked to hang out here in the summer.   The weather is invariably nice and the skies are always blue (at the moment) but the temperatures are only around 20 t0 25C.  That's less than we thought, and the breeze is cool, and the pool water is cold.  That doesn't stop us from using it but there are chattering teeth all around when the kids emerge from the waters. 

But already, three days in, we can see the benefit of daily swimming:  Alan's swimming has evolved nicely style-wise, David is very determinedly recapturing what he's lost in over a year of not swimming much (Moldova had no pools that were easily accessible to us), Jacob ditched his floaties after the first day and is swimming short stretches, and Leah....  Well, Leah.  The first day, she didn't want to let go of me, despite the floaties.  The second day, she climbed in and out of the water all the time without actually getting her arms wet.  Yesterday, she swam like a little dog, paddling through the entire pool and her feet never touching the ground.  At this speed, she'll be swimming at the end of our stay!  That alone makes it all worth-while.

The city itself reminds me a lot of Turkish cities.  Not beautiful but with gorgeous old houses tucked away into secluded gardens, with a bustle and masses of people pushing themselves along the crowded sidewalks, the roads awash in cars that don't seem to follow any rule.  The grocery stores are tiny and carry only the odd products, while fruit stalls sell mostly Israeli fruit for not very cheap prices.  I have to get used to haggling again.  Haven't done that in a while.  Shopping is complicated and would be frustrating if we didn't only stay a few weeks.  Considering that, we just make do and carry on.

 Yesterday, we went to the Stars & Bucks Cafe where the owner was besides himself over my blonde kids (so many!  and three boys!!).  I had a strong coffee and the kids had cookies -- and I was amused about the obvious Starbucks rip-off.  They even have frappuccinos (new!) and I will try those next.  Tomorrow, we will go and explore Jeruslam, mostly the Old City. 

I'm not going to include too many images while we are here in Palestine.  While we have wireless access in the apartment, upload is terribly slow and takes forever.  But here's one of the view we have from the pool, complete with the minaret of our local mosque, a radio tower, and the ubiquitous water tanks.  ("How can you tell an Israelian settlement from a Palestinian one?  The Palestinian one has water tanks." -- See Doug's blog for why.)

More tomorrow!