Stardate: January 26,2020
Today we left Jerusalem. We drove out of the city in what seemed like the same way we had taken to go to Masada and to go to the Dead Sea. And yet we ended up in a city in Ramallah. It all had a very different feel from when we had gone on our adventure to the Dead Sea and Masada.
As we drove into Ramallah it seemed like any other city except that as we were going in, Jared pointed out a sign that said to Israeli Jews that it wasn’t safe for them to enter the city. It was perhaps the first time that I truly had a sense of danger, a real sense of danger not the fake sense of danger that I had had conjured in my own head when we went to the Bedouin community. This seemed like a real danger, there’s a governmental sign saying this is an unsafe place. The words of my mother before I left were ringing in my ears as she told me to be careful and to watch my back on this journey that I was embarking on. A journey she didn’t want me to go on at all. And yet, the city as we drove through seemed like any other city. It seemed like other places we had already seen, in some ways. There were shops along the street. There were mannequins in store fronts with displays of Americanized clothing or the latest fashions from Paris. It all seemed so normal, and yet so not. I guess I have just been struck this whole trip about how the American influence, or perhaps it’s just the influence of the world, seems so prevalent in places where I didn’t quite expect to see it. We pulled up and got off the bus and walked through a small courtyard area into a church, a Christian church. It opened up to a fellowship hall that was not unlike all other fellowship halls I’ve ever been in. It seemed almost familiar. There’s coffee and tea and a chance to sit together and to chat.
Our meeting was with Sam Bayhore. Sam was a man who had grown up in New England, the son of Palestinian immigrants. Sam grew up in Youngstown, Ohio. Several times in his talk he compared Youngstown, Ohio with Ramallah.. Sam talked about the first intifada and how he, following that, felt a call to come to Palestine. He married a Palestinian woman 25 years ago and had made his family in Palestine. There were several things that struck me originally about Sam; one, he’s a very well spoken man. Two, he was an educated man and I think that sometimes we in our Americanized way of thinking or in the Americanized news that we’re getting, we have this idea that Palestinians are some tribal group in the Middle East living in tents and squalor and they are unintelligent. They’re almost made to be some sort of “less than individual” based solely on the fact of where they live. And Sam wasn’t, Sam was very much intelligent and well spoken and told a coherent story that made great sense. It really resonated. And quite possibly for the first time I felt like I truly understood. Even though we’d heard from other speakers and even though we had been introduced to all of these ideas by varying people in varying ways, Sam’s way of telling his story really made it all make sense, even though it doesn’t make sense.
There are several things that I wanted to point out about what he said. One had to do with the airwaves and how they didn’t have 4G service which seems like such a small thing and yet it was available through Israeli SIM cards but not through Palestinian companies. That fact seems very important when talking about the disparity in what is being made available. He told a story about telecommunication products which was his line of work, at the port. The same goods, one set for Palestinians and one for Israelis would come in and the Israeli materials were cleared through customs in a relatively short period of time. However, the exact same equipment that was for the Palestinians took 10 years. I don’t think I’m misquoting that. It took 10 years. That seems like a very important point, that you can oppress people by what you allow them access to. How you allow them to be able to rise, to be able to function in the world. That it’s not necessarily the oppression that you do overtly but almost by omission. By just not giving them the materials or allowing them to use the materials like everyone else. The other thing that Sam talked about and I am not sure if it was the first time I had heard it, or if it was just that it was the first time that it really hit me, the word apartheid. That there are two different sets of rules depending on who you are. Sam seemed to think that there was no way for a two state system, that now it would have to be a one state system where all people would just be citizens of the same country. But then he talked about his daughters who have come to the United States and who are seemingly making lives and not planning to return to Palestine and I wonder how as a father he feels about the fact that he left the United States to go to Palestine and now his children have left Palestine to make a life in the United States. He seemed to have a “live and let live” kind of attitude about it and yet I wonder as a father how that feels.
The next part of our day was worship. It was a very interesting worship. One of my favorite parts of worship is singing and most of the music for the day was songs that we know and were sung together beautifully in two different languages. Because there were so many of us who were English speakers, we sang the songs in English while the Arabic speakers sang the same song to the same tune in Arabic. There was something very special about it. It felt like a representation of the harmony of human interaction even in a space where we don’t speak the same language, where we really can’t communicate.
Here is a recording on singing how Great Thou Art
After lunch we met with attorneys who deal with the military court system. I found those stories incredibly disturbing. Thinking that you may wake up in the middle of the night and find soldiers standing over your bed because they’ve used a device to pop open your door and sneak into your house. Fascinating and horrible.. And then the discussion of the fact that there’s no offering of any counsel or rights or anything to these people who are being arrested and taken to the military court. Anyway, it was just very distressing to me the numbers they were throwing at us. How many people live close to an Israeli settlement and how these tactics of the military are used for interrogation Keeping them blindfolded, coming into their homes at night, threats, lies. It just was all very distressing to me .And I wonder how as an ally, the United States can stand by and allow this lack of human rights to be the normal activity of an ally. At what point do we stand up and demand that there are some sort of human rights? I understand that we can’t force them into a Miranda situation but it seems like that would be something that we would want our allies to not be abusive to people who are living inside their country. And yet as I look at immigrants trying to come into the US and how we are abusing them at the border I wonder if we are not the same. I don’t like that feeling.
Our last meeting was with Mustafa Bugarti. He is a member of the Palestinian Parliament although it seems to me that it has been disbanded. However he still holds a position of leadership and he ran for president in the 2006 elections. He lost to the current president, although it seems that once the election was done and it didn’t go the way that Israel wanted, or that maybe the US wanted (we kinda fall in that together) that it was nullified. I have more questions about that then maybe I have answers.
Mustafa was obviously a politician and it seemed very obvious to me that he was trying to influence us in a very specific way. He kept coming back to the idea of apartheid and I seem to hear the rumblings of people around, perhaps Jared, perhaps Fadi, that he was manipulating the facts in a way to try to influence us. While we heard what he said I am taking it with a grain of salt.
We left Ramallah after that and went to Bethlehem. When we arrived in Bethlehem we went over to the fair trade market to hear a little bit about fair trade and the market that they had set up, which was very wonderful. They have brought in different artisans to be able to make and sell their wares. Then we had an opportunity to do a little shopping. I was very excited to get to buy myself a nativity which was one of my major goals since I collect nativities.
After we had completed our shopping we went to dinner at The Grotto which was probably the fanciest restaurant we ate in. The food was good, they had meat. There were dancers, which was a lot of fun. They demonstrated the traditional dance and then people were able to join in dancing with them. I did not join in but it was a lot of fun. A nice end to what was a very heavy information filled day with a lot of things that were difficult to hear.
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