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.