What I've learned of Hebrew thus far:
Ani lo midaber ivrit
I don't speak Hebrew
Ata midaber anglit?
Do you speak English?
I've had a tough time navigating Israel with only English. After getting off the airport train to Tel Aviv, I gave up asking people for directions and just wandered around and got lost before calling a cab to the bus station, which is on the 6th floor of a really interesting shopping mall. The words that came to mind were "post-apocolyptic." This might've had to do with my uninformed image of Tel Aviv as a pristine city, but seriously, it was nighttime and I was between the train and bus station.
Thankfully, my friends from the plane helped me deposit my shekles into a pay phone and call my brother's friends, who talked me over to Be'er Sheva. Three hours, three forms of transportation and many shekles later, I met up with Tristan and now we're at the house of Amir and Yasmine. Amir is a musician; he has a room full of guitars and intruments that are like guitars that have names I can't remember. He played some of his flamenco-inspired tunes for us and damn...he is good. Yasmina is an art history student at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and she paints...also very well. We hung out, talked, played guitar, watched Babylon A.D. (haha) and now it's 2:30am or so. Tomorrow is Shabbat so things close early, but there's a big bonfire/music/food celebration that these cats (so Tris calls them) attend, so that will be awesome. Saturday night we make our way to Jerusalem, Ramallah, then to al-Aqaba. Provided I can acquire a cell phone and get in touch with everyone in my little notebook. I have a jillion things jotted down already. Like
Everyone is surprised that I want to go to the West Bank.
Great roads, great trains, great buses. Very Western feel.
From the birds-eye view of lit-up soccer stadiums to the fridge magnets in Amir and Yasmine's house, everything tells me that lives are established here. It's a young country, but it's anchored. The first thought I had coming out of the airport was, what would this place look like now under Arab rule? Would they have put all this together? Is this the ideal? Is there any use wondering, because we'll never know? I wonder because I used my extended layover in Atlanta to finish The Lemon Tree. Dalia started an interfaith school with the house built by Bashir's father, and Bashir remained in Ramallah at 60-something, still unable to return to Ramla. He still wished for the right of return for all Palestinians under UN Resolution 194. So I wonder what he yearns for, among the now-established soccer stadiums and refrigerator magnets scrawled in Hebrew. I note this anchored-ness everywhere, like I'm carrying Bashir's thoughts with me. My thoughts feel intrusive, un-welcome. I'm starting to understand the Palestinian sacrifice. Thoughts and feelings have to be sorted into productive and unproductive, legitimate and illegitimate. I feel that in the end, the only question I have the power to ask is, what knowledge and what skills do I posess that can bring peace?
I feel so defeated, having to throw my questions out like that.
Every sign of anchored-ness is a sign of victory, but there's a lot of fear here, fear that victory didn't bring freedom. Israel will never be free while Palestine suffers, because it will always be afraid.
Dalia says at the end of The Lemon Tree, "Our enemy is the only partner we have."
The highway signs pointing to Jerusalem gave a transliteration of Jerusalem in Arabic under the Hebrew, with "Al-Quds" in parentheses. Erasing Palestinian claims to the city by parenthesising their name for it....I heard this on NPR last year.
And now I'm here. Finally.
