A Slice of Tranquility in a Sea of the Complicated

This afternoon, I rode my bike to the Damascus Gate, the main entrance to the Muslim Quarter in Jerusalem's Old City, and wound my way over the ancient stones of Via Dolorosa to the Austrian Hospice. Outside Damascus Gate and along the narrow passageways into the Old City, the bustling, hawking, noisy, chaotic life of East Jerusalem filled the air and shoved me this way and that as I picked my way along the smooth stones. Today, on Shabbat, all of West Jerusalem is silent and still. Nothing is open, save a few places that you'll only find if you know what you're looking for. But half a mile and a world away, East Jerusalem is bustling with life -- children chasing each other through the grass outside Damascus gate; women sitting in the middle of Via Dolorosa with their piles of leafy vegetables, parsley and nana (fresh mint) arrayed around them; men pulling hot pita out of ovens and others sailing down the Old City smooth-stoned streets on tires pulled behind laden carts; vendors of all sorts shouting prices and deals in the la-la-la singsong sounds of Arabic.

I managed to brush past nearly all of them and arrived at the Hospice only a 5 shekel bag of nuts heavier. A giant, heavy, and very locked wooden door faced me, and I nearly walked around the entire city-block sized complex before a kind woman, sweeping the alleyway in front of her home, told me how to get inside. I found the bell she had described and rang it. From the close-quartered hustle and bustle of one of Jerusalem's most crowded alleyways, I pushed open the doors into a space of indescribable and mesmerizing tranquility.

I am convinced that the garden patio in Jerusalem's Austrian Hospice is one of the loveliest man-made spaces in the whole world. I spent the afternoon in the tranquil, tree-shaded garden, sipping cappucino and savoring delicate apple strudel while reading my books, warmed by the soft Jerusalem sun streaming in through the trees -- delicate fern-like droopping branched trees and palm tress and cacti and pines. The rooftops of Jerusalem climbed upward beyond my view, piled atop each other, made of sacred stone older than imaginable and adorned by domes, crosses, and satellite antennae. I could still hear the cries of children in the streets, the patter of a thousand footsteps, voices of those buying and selling. The close-quartered chaos of the Old City. But seated at my pretty tiled table, beneath the trees and between the flowers, I was wrapped in tranquility, the chirping of the birds, the sun playing with its shadow through the old stone arches, around the flowers, and along the walls of the Hapsburg hospice. Occasionally, a white-robed nun walked by and smiled at me. Once or twice, the strains of song drifted into the patio - a touring church group singing inside; monks chanting from the alley below.

I climbed the stairs through the heavy old building, founded in 1857 for the Austrian Consul and as a protector of the Catholics and Ashkenazi Jews. From the rooftop, the whole world stretched into view. East and West. The Old City and the neighborhoods, hills, and valleys beyond. The defining golden Dome of the Rock, echoing yesterday with the prayers of Muslims observing their holy day, and practically touch it the Kotel (Wailing Wall), its plaza today full of Jews observing the Sabbath. Mount of Olives, Mount Moriah. Churches, synagogues, mosques. A thousand rooftops on a thousand homes on the foundations of thousands more, built over by conquerors and centuries and time. It's impossible not to feel God in this place, or awed by what dreams of God have inspired.

Yesterday, I strolled barefoot through the Mediterranean sands in Tel Aviv as the sun was setting, danced till dawn at a reggae festival, and fell asleep against my friend and his puppy dog as our Arab-driven mini-sherut sped into still silent and slumbering West Jerusalem. Today, I studied Hebrew in a Catholic Hospice in the Muslim Quarter of an ancient city, bought tahina from Ramallah, pita warm from the oven, and fresh vegetables from street vendors, before biking home through streets empty and silent in religious observance, rode my bike to my climbing gym (closed because of a popular post-Sabbath football match in the stadium it occupies), and typed a report on Palestinian-Israeli cooperation in science in a German Colony beit-kafe (coffee shop) with the only drip coffee I've found in the city. Tomorrow I go to Be'er Sheva in the Negev Desert to visit unrecognized Bedouin Settlements and work with a local Iman and a group of academics on their the Israeli Bedouin's terrible infant mortality problem.

A typical weekend in Israel, what a crazy place. It can make your blood boil, it can confuse you relentlessly, and it will probably haunt your dreams. But it's impossible not to love. Something about it -- the air, the sun, the soil. The absolute spontaneity and unpredictability. The white rocks, blue sky, and dusty rolling hills. The everywhere art and music, the long-haired religiously unreligious hippie types, the homes of so many kinds of prayer, the history and meaning inscribed into every last bit of dust. It sucks you in and inspires to distraction. Impossible not to love. Maybe that's the problem.

Across the Wall

I'm sitting now in the lovely garden patio outside Hebrew University's national library at its Givat Ram campus. Aside other academics - professors, students, visitors - I sip my Nescafe and sift through the pile of books beside me. There's a mix of people here on the quiet patio -- students in jeans, young women dressed in funky loose-clothed Israeli style, a few old ladies lunching beneath their wide-brimmed heats, a smattering of men wearing yarmulkes and others with long side curls and the characteristically dark Hassidic garb. Birds are chirping, the sun is shining, the fall air feels crisp and clear, and for the first time in several days, I can breathe easily. The tranquility of this space, the intertwined nature and wonderful cleanliness, feels a world away from where I have been. From the stress of humanity, the piles of rubbish, the enveloping scents of sweets and spices, the mad suks (Arabic markets) full of rotting vegetables and strewn with animal parts, the song-like call to prayer drifting out over the desert hills...from the other side of the Wall.

I spent this past weekend in the West Bank with my Finnish friend Anna, my former roommate and kiwi picking partner from Kibbutz Baram in the north of Israel. I had been to Ramallah only once before, and then enclosed in a taxi and driven straight to and from the Ministry of Health office. Anna had never been but was as interested as I. So we decided to make our first real West Bank excursion together, starting with Ramallah, moving to Bethlehem, and seeing what experiences we ran into along the way.

Our trip began at Damascus gate in East Jerusalem, where we found our way after some friendly help, to a little "bus station" full of "servees taxis," or shared vans -- similar to the Israeli sheruts -- that wait until full and take passengers to a specified destination for a fraction of the usual cost. It cost us NIS 6 ($1 = NIS 3 = 3 Israeli Shekel) a piece (about $2) to make the 20km, 30 minute trip to Ramallah. Our van threaded its way slowly through the crowded, narrow streets of East Jerusalem, into its outlying neighborhoods (passing the Helen Keller School along the way), and finally to the 8m high West Bank wall which, with some stops and starts, snakes along the desert hills to cut off East Jerusalem and Israel proper from the West Bank. We sailed through the checkpoint without a glitch (not much security on the way in). As we drove along, I looked back at the graffiti sprayed across gray concrete. Things like: Free Palestine, CONTROL + ALT + DELETE, God will judge what you have done, Stop the Apartheid... Some rather beautiful artwork. Some I'd rather not put into writing.

The road to Ramallah is not so different from East Jerusalem - more crowded and chaotic perhaps, the buildings made more of crumbling concrete and less of Jerusalem stone. Gashes were carved out of the hills, perhaps to sell the stone for building or to make way for roads. Both sides of the street were littered with garbage -- not just strewn but piled high and haphazardly. And the areas off of it appeared dense and poor. I could identify some buildings as homes, some as little shops or businesses. Many others were rather ambiguously identifiable. Most of them seemed to be in some state of disarray.

Our drive ended next to the suk (Arabic market) in Al-Bireh, the administrative center contiguous with Ramallah that houses most of its government offices and NGO centers as well as the suk and market area. Otherwise, there is little difference in appearance between the two adjoining towns. Generally speaking, Ramallah refers to Ramallah and Al-Bireh in common nomenclature. Ramallah generally seems smaller than its inflated representation through the media. The Palestinian Bureau of Statistics puts its population at about 118,000, with Al-Bireh adding another 38,000 or so residents. Without getting lost or caught in a crowd, one can walk across its commercial area in 30 or 40 minutes. Its streets are relatively wide and lined entirely, manahattan-style, with buildings -- shops, cafes, the ever-present sweet shops. Even with a map, we found ourselves constantly getting lost. Streets intersect each other at random angles, sizeable roundabout are inserted everywhere, and street names are generally not present (and most often only in Arabic when they are). To us, Ramallah seemed like a place of semi-structured and generally agreed upon chaos, even when compared to the noisy tension of Jerusalem. This is partially due to the garbage. There is quite literally garbage everywhere -- strewn, piled, on sidewalks, in the market, heaped in spaces between buildings, piled high on the otherwise pretty hills outside the city. Coming even from East Jerusalem, the general poverty in Ramallah smacks you in the face.

More than anything, the suk embodied the chaos of the city. Venders crammed together sold massive piles of vegetables, fruits, olives, spices. Men pressured us to buy their plastic coke bottles full of olive oil, their bunches of herbs or bags of nuts. Rotting fruit squished unavoidably inside my flip-fl0ps and the occasional rotting animal part made me catch my breath. The suk makes it seem like all of the West Bank is saturated in nuts, olives, fruits and vegetables (particularly bananas. Bananas were everywhere). Beside the meat section (large hung and piled hacked at slabs of animal) was a square surrounded by stalls and haphazard rooms and chocked full with mounds of stuff. Clothes mostly. Piled high or simply strewn about, vendors shouting next to the mounds, men and occasionally women pushing each other to sort through the heaps. I've been to my fair share of chaotic markets, but I think it's safe to say that this one took the prize. We ate lunch in a little stand on a side of the square -- a pile of pita and delicate long pieces of deep-fried falafel along with generous plates of hummus and foul (delicious ground bean dish), drowned in olive oil and dotted with spicy green paste. Pickles, onions , and a mound of lettuce. Sweet black coffee afterward. A feast for two for 20 shekels.

The streets around the suk were full of men's smoking establishments (another theme of Ramallah -- we saw very few women outside. A few shopping during the day, not one on the streets after sunset, and none inside the smoking cafes). Big, undecorated, white-walled cafes full of men -- older men mostly, some as young as 30 perhaps. Many wearing full robes and kaffiehs, smoking nargileh pipes in silence from the corners of their mouths. Others playing backgammon around plain plastic or metal tables. Some outside, puffing away silently and watching the crowds walk by. We walked inside a few to use the (very dirty) squat toilets (water jug only for left-hand style washing, it seemed), and were generally welcome inside though obviously entirely out of place.

Aside from the rubbish heaps and shisha, the other theme of Ramallah was sweets. Sweets shops are ominpresent, abounding with little densely sweet baklavah type desserts, cookies, giant flat pies for slicing off eggy-honey-sticky deliciously gooey desserts. Other shops are full of candies - chocolates, hard candies, chewy Arabic sweets crammed with pistachios. And then there are Ramallah's two famous ice cream shops, with their sweet stringy gummy flavors (they use resin in their ice cream, which creates its gummy texture, and will give you a little bowl full of spoons of as many flavors as they can fit inside).

We walked down a shop-lined street as the sun was setting (many shops close early on Friday apparently but reopen with vigor on Saturday) and watched the rippling hills of the desert valley light up in shades of orange. The hills were wonderfully peaceful after the chaos of Al-Bireh and the suk. We could hear children playing oustide of those cavernous, empty-looking multistoried homes, and glimpsed the shadow-like figures of the occasional vale-clad woman walking the streets. Ramallah felt nice there- - peaceful, livable, breathable. The call to prayer filled the hills as we walked, blanketed in sunset, not sure where to head, what world we were in, what to think of it all.

Ramallah is home to both the West Bank (formerly WB and Gaza) administration as well as the Palestinian arts and literati scene. A few cafes (generally with a smattering of NGO-type foreigners in them) had posters advertising a poetry event, Palestinian hiphop festival, and international film series at Al-Qasaba theatre. After nargileh and dessert at Ziryab cafe (seems to be the epicenter of the tiny literati scene, at least from the posters outside and the calm, and wireless, inside), we made our way to Al-Qasaba to see a Jordanian english-subtitled documentary, Recycle, along with about the only foreigners we had seen thus far in the West Bank. We headed into a bar/cafe nextdoor after the film with the 15 or so others from the theatre and, coughing like novices on the strong shisha, listened to the post-cinema Western crowd pass judgment. The bar could have been in Tel Aviv, with its hip music and lighting, western menu, and plentiful nargileh. Though Western, its patrons seemed less like tourists (of which we saw hardly a handful during our stay in Ramallah) and more like workers from NGOs or West Bank organizations. The rest of the night, we wandered the streets, wondering where the supposed Ramallah nightlife scene took place. We found a few western-type cafes with a few western-type people inside scattered in random places throughout the city. Generally, though, with the exception of falafel stands, everything was closed and the city had the feel of a somewhat decaying ghost-town, spontaneously overrun by rambunctious groups of young Palestinian men who wandered the streets or swerved around and around them in crammed cars. We thought that it might be that the handful of establishments which stay open at night cater to those who can pay. And those who can pay tend to be the handful of intrepid foreigners. Meanwhile, the locals-- particularly the burgeoning young male population -- take over the free and empty streets and probably spaces beyond our view.

After a night in a cheap, mostly clean, and with the exception of two other young Brits, entirely empty hotel, we woke early to the loud chaos of the streets and the nearby suk, found our way to a sweet shop for a sticky breakfast and black coffee, and headed off to Bethlehem. With the Wall in the way, the fastest route to Bethlehem these days (for those who can swing it) is through the check points into East Jerusalem, where a service taxi at a nearby station will take you to the nearest checkpoint. Bethlehem also is only 20km or so from Jerusalem, but it takes longer because passengers must get off the taxi at the border and walk through security control at the checkpoint. The Lonely Planet is not far off when it says that this checkpoint resembles a maximum security prison.

The most interesting part of our day in Bethlehem was probably the taxi ride there. On Saturdays, shared taxis don't run on the West Bank side of the Wall, and getting to Bethlehem requires a lot of haggling with the group of taxi drivers who wait there for people like us. We negotiated NIS 20 for the two of us for the 7km ride to Bethlehem but in the end couldn't get away with less than 50 with a striking detour built into our trip. Our driver decried the situation, the poverty, the harshness of life, and I think actually cried when we told him for the 20th time that we didn't want an afternoon long tour of the surrounding biblical sites (for NIS 60). Finally, we agreed with him that he would drive us through Dheisheh refugee camp, 3km from Bethlehem and crammed with 11,000 Palestinian refugees. The camp looked something like a partly-developed slum. Tiny streets wove up the hillside, crammed on both side by little homes, poorly constructed but with some degree of permanency, and a few shops full of cheap household type things. A number of people, mostly children and young men, were in the roads, some of them doing construction work. And lots of graffiti, some of it beautiful, some of it frightening (including the only swastikas I saw in the WB) lined the way.

Bethlehem is beautiful, though we found it a little less interesting, despite its obvious religious, cultural, and historical importance. The Church of the Nativity is the oldest continously operating church in Christianity (established around 338 AD), and the milk grotto chapel, where Mary's milk dripped onto a rock, blessing the grotto where she hid with the baby Jesus, was one of the more interesting I've seen. There were a fair number of tourists clustered around the holy sites, but in the narrow, shop and suk-filled, seething streets of the old city above it, we saw hardly any. Despite the odd fly-ridden animal part scattered on the ground at the suk, Bethlehem is cleaner than Ramallah, and the tourist-supported city tries hard to cultivate a visit0r-friendly image that Ramallah does not. We witnessed a celebration in the Nativity square in the center of Bethlehem, where the one millionth visitor to the Palestinian Territories received, alongside the Mayor and Governor and festive crowd, a 3 night stay in a Bethlehem hotel, for him and his wife. Buses arrived at the celebration, full of locals and wreathed in flowers and garlands.

The difficulty of re-entry into Israel seems to depend on the checkpoint. Coming back from Ramallah, a soldier boarded our bus, checked the id's of those who seemed to be Palestinians but gave the two of us no more scrutiny than a glance and a nod. Coming back from Bethlehem, we found ourselves crammed into a jostling crowd of tourists and Palestinians, all fighting to get through the rotating gate at the same time. Tourists show their passports and pass their items through the Xray machine without a problem. Palestinians show id and permit and have their hands scanned and fingerprints id'd. A man in front of me got turned back, permit apparently not valid enough.

Back on the other side, I walked Anna to the central bus station, through the streets of West Jerusalem. The Sabbath had just ended, and the city was still calm and silent. A few shops were just beginning to open. The bits of careless liter, the eye-sore construction work in the middle of Jaffa Rd paving the way for the 2010 Jerusalem tram system -- the various things about the crowded city that can feel jarring seemed entirely insignificant. Everything is relative, and a trip to the Other side certainly puts it all in perspective.

This is not the place to speculate or pass judgement. I've meant only to describe my reactions, observations, and experiences. The poverty was obvious and overwhelming, but so was the friendliness of most of the people we met. There were the usual jeers of men at times, but we never really felt intimidated, unsafe, or compromised. And there are signs of slowly growing infrastructure, or its capacity at least to grow. Schools, some left over from pre '48 and Jordanian annexation. Newer ministry offices. Bits of commerce. A little but growing art and literary scene. Amid lots and lots and lots of garbage.

That is what we found on the Other side of the Wall.

Snapshots from the Past

It's been nearly a month and half since I arrived in Israel, and to say that I've experienced and learned a good deal since arriving is a pretty dramatic understatement. I can't recount all of the experiences that I've had during this time, but I do want to provide some snapshots here of the evolution in my thinking about the area and the various communities and geographies I have wondered through...

23 September: Port Inn, Haifa
I'm in a pretty garden patio in back of the Port Inn hostel in downtown Haifa. A gropu of very American college boys is talking too loudly about lap dances "someting about them being "not so cool") at a table on the other side fo the patio. Ben and I left Be'er Sehva late yesterday, after I spetn the orning trying to arrane the logistics of my study adn work here. By teh time we left, it was after 3pm, and we were both grumy on our train ride to Natanya.

I'm still working out exactly how to engaged in my primary work goal: supporting Palestinian-Israeli public health cooperation by creating a program in health information technology and new media. It's a lofty goal, and I'm keenly aware of my cultural and political ignorance here, my general outlier status -- as soon as speech happens or an interaction takes place, I'm instantly outside. And I tend to be impatient about perfecting my arrangements immediately. Ben Gurion University in the Negev is a fabulous university, with a stated community and public service orientation and rooted in the sociocultural complexities of the Negev Desert in the south of Israel, home to its 150,000 Bedouin and much of its ever-growing new immigrant population. At the same time, much of my work will be centered around Jerusalem, and I find myself pulled there not just strategically, but for its color and complexity, its people and politics, and its endlessly overlapping layers of story and history and meaning. Part of my difficulty here is located simply in something like immigration syndrome and culture clash -- at this point all I can ask of myself is to absorb as much of the language and local knowledge as possible and have faith that I'll gain clarity and belonging as my year unfolds.

Next, there's the tension within me wiht regards to my relationship with Israel (this is going to be a more contentious topic of discussion throughout, so be forewarned). Israel is a hard country ot get to know, and it's very protective of itself and its version(s) of history. It aspires to be and feels Middle Eastern and European at the same time. It struggles to be on the right side of history, while at the same time there's a general feeling off oppression and ostracism that seems shared by the Jewish Israeli collective -- we are here because there is no place else. Accept Israel and Isralies and they will embrace you with open arams, stuff you iwth hummus and invite you to dine at their table for the Sabbath. I've neer had so many friendly strangers stop to help me just by looking quizically at a map. At the same time, the oppose is true if you find yousrelf on the wrong side, or at least it puts you in a difficult position because any admission of moral ambiguity leads back to certain questions about Israel's right to exist and the correctness of all it has fought for and achieved. And even if I want to think of myself as open-minded, taht's a question that as an American Jew, I have a gut-chelnghtingly hard time allowing myself to even consider. It must be somehow possible to criticize or critique without raising existential questions.

To a very real extent, I think that part of my task here will be tring to explore as many stories and versions and face of the prism as possible.

THE SHORE OF THE KINNERET
Tonight, on a rocky shore on the mystical Sea of Galilee, I found a friend camped in a sukkah on the beach, and together we explored our way through a moonlit 8th Century CE Palace. Wrapped in warm autumnal night air, we wandered through giant rooms with still standing walls of massive stone -- limestone piled on basalt, composite 130o year-old concrete filling in the gaps, giant pillars, and the broken but still perfect marble plating of walls and floors with designs still visible. Floors are tiled and patterned, covered over by a thin layer of sand. We crawled through tunnels and poked our way into rooms half excavated, climbed ancient stone walls and sifted through the sand to find pieces of broken clay pottery, smooth and perfectly carved and shaped. The top of an altar-like inset space in a great room had a symbol carved into it, like rays of a sun. Small pillars that look more like rayed pyramids were scattered around rooms, and ancient drainage tunnels ran through their floors.

We discovered the astounding cleverness of its 8th century builders - - notched stones to protect from earthquakes, the geometric center stones of massive arches, indentions in the floors to create hinges for enormous closing doors, knotches in the walls to hold the marble plating in place more securely. We sat in an ancient stone bath tub, all of one limestone piece, and looked at the stars, dulled only slightly by the distant lights of Tiberias across the waters. We discovered owl pellets and still perfect skulls of tiny animals. We tracked jackels into their tunnels and listened to their packs yelping in the distance, and we followed the trail of a porcupine into a tunneled room until we couldn't get any further. We ate the sweet fruits fallen from date palms growing from the Holy Land in the middle of an ancient palace at midnight on the shores of the Galilee. And we wandered home through its waters, warmer as you wade deeper, and felt the mysticism and the spirit of the place infusing us as we walked.

Israel today is a complicated and contested world, full of competing story lines and overlapping claims. In a land without certainty, there is truth - in the magic in the night air of the Galilee, a sunset over the ancient walls of Akko, a lone olive tree on the rocky slope below Jerusalem. Here there is spirituality enough to go around.

Baracked

36 hours ago, I stood in a crowded bar in Jerusalem and watched Barack Obama accept his election as the 44th President of the United States and the first to truly break the mold of the identity of this office. A day later, I and my friends who have supported Obama are still glowing from this success and even those who had been more ambivalent about his candidacy seem to recognize the significance of this day in history.

As I stumbled my way sleepily and smiling through the crowds heading to work, I paused for a moment to sit on a street corner and try to capture in writing the sentiment of the moment. Needless to say, I was too tired by the time I finally made it home to post this online, so I'm going to do it now, as if it were yesterday, because I think the experience of that moment and the sudden knowledge of its significance is important to remember:

Election Night, 2008

5:45AM, Mike's Place
It's nearly 6am, and I'm perched on a bar stool in Mike's Bar, in a little alley off of Ben Yehuda Street in downtown Jerusalem. The place is packed with Obama supporters and cameramen, and the air fills with claps, cheers, and blinding flashes as the blue state results filter in. I gave an interview in French a few minutes ago to Canadian National Radio in Quebec, and I've had photos snapped in my face all night long. Ronni, Hillel, Sarah, Ronni's roommate -- they'd been here with me before, wrapped up in the earlier stages of the experience. Ronni and her roommate stayed until 4am, and we enthusiastically chomped down fries and roared with pride and elation as Ohio went for Obama. They've all gone home now, though, but I'm staying as long as I can take it, fueled by cheap burekas and greasy french fries and the guilt of being too far away and not ever having done enough. No one wants to be left out of a moment that shaped history, that will be remembered, and so I'm staying as long as I am able, for connection to the excitement, the change, the moment, the responsibility... 9 more electoral college votes to go...

8AM, Street Corner, Ben Yehuda
All night in a crowded Jerusalem bar, the results came in at 6am, and we emerged bleary-teary eyed from exhaustion and emotion with Barack as our President, pride and assurance in our hearts. We counted down 3...2....1.... to the close of the Western state polls, and when they did, we heard the news, there on the screens and the lips of the commentators. Barack Obama elected President. Barack Obama elected President.

The sky is bright blue already and the sun is warming the night-chilled air. The road crew is out here working in the streets, the diggers are already digging, laying the tracks for Jerusalem's 2010 tram system. A man sweeps the steps above me, students, and business people walk to work and class. It's a new day in Jerusalem and in the world, and there is so much work to be done. But it's the "yes we can" that matters today, the sense of possibility, the knowledge that the world can, does change through collective action. And so we can begin together, to build our dreams and mold our collective future. Today, we will always remember. Today, as Americans, we are proud.

MORE LATER...

Touch Down Tel Aviv (Belatedly)

It's been over a month now since I arrive in Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport. I'm flipping through the pages of my journal and looking back into the blur of confusion, anticipation, and ignorance that accompanied me off the runway and into one of the most important, contentious, and fascinating region's of human history.

Though I contemplated doing so since accepting my Israel Fulbright Fellowship last spring, I've been reluctant to set up a blog and release my thoughts into the public domain for a number of reasons. First, I approach journaling as an extremely introspective and private experience, through which I sift through my thoughts and reactions and formulate the premature seeds of opinion. Blogs and diaries are often blurred, and in the age of uber-connectivity, I'm reluctant to release my premature and personal experience-based reactions to a vast and invisible community.

Second, the area in which I'm living is one of the most complicated, contentious, and multi-faceted zones of human existence. The centrality of this region to human existence is evidenced by everything from the bible, to the archaeological remains that dot the landscape, to the maps and kingdoms drawn and redrawn, to today's out of proportion onslaught of media coverage. Perhaps the linguistic turn theorists are right -- it does seem that there is no such thing as truth in today's Israel, only competing narratives and endlessly overlapping streams of stories and assertions. In a landscape the size of New Jersey, every piece of land and every hewn stone seems to have been claimed a thousand times over. This region gives the concept of legitimacy a whole new level of importance and complexity. Given the impassioned contentiousness of this area, I'm reluctant to add my own half-formulated viewpoints to the mix and make innocent or ignorant statements that could be taken as assertions. Words and claims here it seems must be chosen carefully.

My third reservation pertains to the general concept of blogging. Though I'm very supportive of and interested in the idea of citizen journalism and the empowering possibilities that this web-based medium can give to individual voices, I've been reluctant to engage personally. In part as mentioned before because a journal for me is a personal experience and I tend to guard my words and assertions closely before releasing them to a public I can't see and whose reactions I can't gauge. The careful editing and rewriting that goes into journalism and publication becomes almost impossible or irrelevant with this medium. The nature of the blog, which falls somewhere between public diary, published experience, and international citizen journalism would make a good subject of a media studies dissertation. In any case, what's clear is that it represents something new in medium and in reach, with beautiful and problematic possibilities, and I've been cautious about taking part until compelled by a reason that makes the medium particularly applicable to my experience and needs. Finally, given my tendency toward long sentences and journal-long journal entries, there's my fear and suspicion that blogging would become too time-absorbing or stressful, my entries too long to merit reading, and that the upkeep of a blog would negate or compete with the private journaling that is a very important part of my daily life.

So why the blog then? In the end, I decided to create a blog for both utilitarian and experimental reasons. Not being a big fan of sending out frequent mass emails, I can't possibly keep my friends and family as updated as I would like on my experiences abroad without recounting the same stories over and over in long emails and hand-exhausting letters. I hope that by writing a blog that encapsulates some of my daily experience and thinking, I'll be free to write communications that are more personal and frequent to my close companions. Second, the complicated nature of the region as I described above could be approached in two ways: either by withholding premature reactions or by diving into the stream of thoughts and opinions coming from every which way about the area. I do believe that a diversity of public opinions is vital and as I tend toward strong opinions and quirky, rather adventurous experiences, I'm going to experiment with adding my voice to the mix. There's the inevitable danger that by releasing so many voices, we lose our ability to filter. Nevertheless, technology creates new filters and in the end I don't expect that my blog will do anything more than makes some of my stories available to the friends I want them to reach. Finally, journals tend to disappear over time and some of the stories and thoughts that I write in them are narratives that I would like to share with others. This blog is my attempt then to share what have been and I hope and expect will continue to be some very interesting and unique experiences. I recognize the great privilege and fortune I have to spend a year in this area. I hope that this blog can be seen as one small in way in which I can give back.

So the bottom line is this: This blog comes with the disclaimer that it is inevitably and inherently one-sided. It is not meant to be anything more profound than a recounting of personal experience and some of the thoughts that it induces. If assertions are made, they shouldn't be taken as anything more than the premature and experience-based reactions of a quasi student. If entries are too long, feel free to skim. Dialogue about your own experiences and reactions if you are inclined. Frequency of postings will most likely be variable. And entertainment value is maybe hoped for but not promised.

With that, I'm releasing this blog into the uberscary and exciting public domain. Time to throw caution and skepticism to the wind and engage with a new and potentially powerful possibility. So happy reading and welcome to my year as a nomad and my wanderings in the Middle East. Enjoy! :-)