Crossing the Jordan

Traveling in an occupied country, alongside an occupied people, is a challenging endeavor. Palestinians holding foreign (non Palestinian) passports and international travelers ("tourists") like myself are separated from those with Palestinian ids while on the Jordanian side of the border. One realizes this at a particular moment. Perhaps while at the Jordanian border control area, one questions only where one is to go and what to do. There are swarms of Arabs around buses, and yet I am directed to a bus that is apart from the swarms and to this bus I go. Aboard I hear a mix of Arabic and English, and it is familiar. Everyone has a passport. And then we cross the infamous Allenby Bridge that separates Jordan and Israel. And then the moment comes. We pass buses stopped on the Bridge, directly before the Israeli entrance. And the buses are full, windows un-openable and engine off, of waiting Palestinians. How long do they sit there? I've heard sometimes they wait days. And we pass them by, with our passports and air-conditioning. The end.

Crossing is challenging. The Israelis are amazingly capable and organized and efficient...at most things. But not at Allenby. And it took a little while, but I realized 20 minutes into the experience that it's intentional. There was no reason that the process be so chaotic, and yet it was terribly chaotic. I've been through various other border entrances to Israel, and none with the same exhausting disorganization. Oh, I'm forgetting to add something: Palestinians are forbidden by Israeli law from using those other crossings. Allenby is the infamous Palestinian crossing. By the hot and stuffy busload. Click--it all makes sense.

Israeli Settlers Attack Palestinian Shepherds

I saw a video yesterday of several masked men—Israelis from a settlement—who attacked an old Palestinian couple, shepherds grazing their flock. The BBC had been given this exclusive footage, a project of an Israeli human rights organization. And I know that the video never would have been aired in this country, and yet knowing that and even understanding why, I still don’t get it. I don’t get how we can turn a blind eye so often and to such heinousness. I don’t get how so many of us can actually believe such behavior to be defensive, justifiable, and always excusable. I don’t get how we can give such absurd amounts of money with such ridiculous mechanisms of accountability to a country whose government uses that money to continue a campaign of ethnic cleansing against indigenous people, to enable its military and citizens to violently occupy another people. I just don’t get how we keep paying our taxes, knowing that the government is using our money to make the world a more painful place for many. Watch the video (click here), and then please explain it to me because I really just can't get it.

Preparing to Return

I have lived with a family in Ramallah each time I return, and ever since I first stayed in the Holy Land four and a half years ago. Last summer I took the two older kids of this family on separate weekend trips into a land they are unable to enter. Using my passport-privilege, I can take a West Bank Palestinian child into Israel; an act the child's mother could not perform without Israeli military permissions. The land that is the heritage of these children, the sea from which their people came and the waters by which their histories have been made are forbidden places. It always has struck me as perverse that I, as a foreign tourist, can visit one of the holiest Muslim places--the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosque--and yet a Palestinian Muslim whose holy place this is remains forbidden. Access to places, to movement, is a fundamental human right, and yet it is denied to many humans. How is that allowed in a country that is a UN member and a so called democracy? I honestly cannot understand it. When these kids turn 16 years old, they will no longer be able to pass military checkpoints with me as their chaperon. We only have a few more precious years during which time I can show them their past, and what should be their present. There is something horribly, horribly wrong in this system which bestows on a tourist the rights it systematically strips of the indigenous people. And so, I return again to live my life under occupation. A choice I get to make as a tourist. A temporary solidarity in the name of justice and the promise of peace. Meanwhile, millions of Palestinian refugees await their right of return. Millions.