It's Friday evening, and the old city is getting dressed for Shabbat. Candles in windows, girls in long skirts, pilgrimages towards the wall, the light turning jerusalem stone into gold. I left the heritage house with my dormmates studying siddurs to run off to this internet cafe in a cave. If it wasnt for the change in keyboards (from spanish accents to arabic and hebrew hieroglyphics), I could be anywhere.
Every country comes with its own heaviness. The past two days I have gone back and forth of the wall(s). Today we drove through beautiful stoney hillsides to Herodian, one of Herod the Great's palaces/fortresses. The only thing I can ever remember about Herod was that he was an ancient version of Stalin and drowned his wife in a pool of honey. Something magical about this place is the incredible wealth of archeological sites, of fallen temples, of old mosaics. Today I ran my fingers through a roman capital with engraved magnolias that had fallen off its column and picked up shards of centuries old pottery. "This country is a history of fences and ruins," our guide, Nevet's friend said, as we drove out, past the soldiers in army green leaning against a fence lined with barbed wire.
we drove through "the wild, wild east" through fences and land and settlements and fences and land. Each road seems to be a bypass road to another, one for Israelis, one for Palestinians, one avoiding Arab villages, another avoiding Jewish Israeli settlements. some settlements look like american suburbs, with slanting roofs for non-existent snow, swingsets, fancy cars. others are caravans covered with laundry for 2, 4, 6 kids. broken strollers and empty water bottles thrown into bushes, and kids playing in old, old automobiles. we were warned to stay away from the settlements in hebron yesterday, but today our guide said that 90% of settlers are non-ideological, it they come in a suburbia flight for the cheap land.
I came back to the hostel this afternoon and last night, tired, sun-stroked, heavy. I think of my cousin, Allen's hands wide open describing the "atomization" of the Palestinian land, the non-contiguous portions of land, where buildings rise up with no insides. It's a show, to build high stories, to sell fancy cars, to build the illusion that there is a growing economy, that everyone is doing fine. but building buildings is not state-building. Yuval at the dinner table, a son of a cousin of my grandfathers, the only person to turn religious at harvard's philosophy dept ("I had to leave israel where religion was repugnant"), gave me little hope, his questioning the very humanism of this land, the very desire of any individual to actually have a peace. "i will shave off my mustache if the palestinians get a slice of land" says a cartoon graffiteed on the wall of the Deheisheh refugee camp in the birthplace of the savior. slowly the beard grows and I think of Mrs. Arafat smoking Gauloises in pearls in a Parisian cafe, and I think of Guatemala and Lily asking me about poverty in the states as she writes her thesis on women who have lost their villages, their husbands, their children and who are trying to start a jam business, something new.
And what new is being built? Here the old is always being built. The girls at my hostel who leave every morning to their yeshivas, to complete their aliyahs, their "return home"s. "Hebron!" they said to me as I walked through the door, "did you see the patriarch's tombs! other graveyards are contested, but our forefathers are there, they are actually there!" And I did see the candles through the peephole in the hole of the mosque down to their graves-- the mosque where I put on a veil and where i told the israeli soldier outside that i was christian, because jews cannot enter. muslims cannot enter the street outside the synagogue, palestinians into israel, and israelis into Area A of the territories. Our guide today said his brother invented a holy space on the galilee. Even the pope visited the site on the sea through his helicopter seat. Here Jesus made the madman sane, here the Prophet tied up his horse, and here Hagar was banished from her land. Israel. Jacob was renamed Israel after wrestling with an Angel. To struggle with God is Israel and Israel is to struggle.
But in Israel, I always come back to a bed, heat, clean water. To cities of crowded museums, beaches with lit up hookahs, markets filled with young people and falafal heaps. Somehow I wake up new each morning here in my land of wealth. "Israel is amazing for the people it wants," Nevet said, and it is. But maybe these images and these struggles will carve their own place in my mind, my future memory and action. Or so I hope.
