"The Wall"

*Warning, I just read this and it is awfully long. Apologies.*

I have learned that when I say sentences like, "I'm going to the wall" or "I hate the wall" or "The wall stresses me out." What I am talking about is interpreted differently depending on the crowd I'm with. It is assumed by most who I hang out with, that I'm talking about the wall dividing Israel from the West Bank, the separation barrier, fence, wall, whatever you want to call it. That wall. Other times, though, it's assumed that I'm talking about the Western Wall, the Wailing Wall, the Kotel. So, I have learned to be more specific. This little blog entry is a tale of two walls, both of which I went to last week and both of which I found equally stressful.


Part 1: The Western Wall

Last Wednesday, I decided to finally take myself to the old city and the Western Wall, a site I've successfully avoided for about a month and a half now. On my way, I decided to stop at a cafe in the newish Mamila mall, which overlooks much of the old city. I sat sipping my limonana (a delicious mint lemonade concoction - Le Pain Quotidien has nothing on the holy land when it comes to making my all time favorite drink) and journaling when there were two successive blasts. Because I had just been reading a book about terrorism and because, um, I was in Jerusalem, my assumption was suicide bombings. About five other people sitting at the outdoor cafe looked vaguely concerned and peered over the railing's edge, where we saw traffic stopped outside a major intersection and police cars with flashing lights. The other thirty people in the cafe, however, were completely uninterested. Traffic remained stopped and tour buses unloaded, so I decided to play the part of vaguely concerned American tourist and asked my waitress what exactly was going on. She responded with a shrug and said, "Don't worry, those aren't the sounds of a bomb, those are the sounds of the police checking something that is not a bomb."

My program director later interpreted a bit further, saying that often someone leaves a bag, a package, etc, laying around at a bus stop and the police are called to detonate it. They have a robot and everything. Anyway, traffic remained stopped for about another twenty minutes and then everyone went about their business, while I spent the rest of my limonana drinking wondering how it is that a woman my age working at a cafe can distinguish between the sounds a bomb make and the sounds the police detonating a non-bomb sound like.

The left-winger in me has ruled so much since I got here, and recently I've been finding a little more balance in remembering that, while I completely disagree with almost all of the ways in which Israel relates to Palestinians and to the conflict, I think I forget sometimes that terrorism in Israel is a reality. And as much as I don't understand the right wing tendencies of most of my Israeli contemporaries, I also didn't spend my teenage years afraid to get on a bus, go to the supermarket, or go to a cafe.

Living in DC and New York, being wary of terrorism always seemed mostly like a joke. For weeks when I lived in DC, a giant, refrigerator sized box sat in the Capitol Hill metro station, unmarked. My friend Ruth and I once, after commenting on how long the box had been there, got on the metro, to the sounds of the overhead announcements saying something to the effect of, "If someone leaves a bag or package behind, please ask them, 'Excuse me, is that your bag?' If the bag is unclaimed, please alert the DC Metro police." For about another month, every time we walked by the box, our joke would be to turn to each other and ask, "Excuse me, is that your box?" (In the end, it turned out to be hiding a new trash can - why they kept it under a box for two months is beyond me).

At brunch in New York one day, a friend of mine who had recently had a baby was talking about how she and her husband had changed their emergency plan to include the baby. My single friend and I looked at each other and, each of us having no emergency plan, jokingly agreed to meet each other by the blueberries at Whole Foods in Union Square, half way between her Upper West Side and my Brooklyn apartment. When I walked through my subway station in Brooklyn, about once a month there would be an increased number of police officers, mostly checking their cell phones and occasionally stopping an Arab man and a white girl at that same time to check their bags. There are signs on the metro and subway with the encouraging slogan, "If you see something, say something", but the idea of recognizing that a terrorist attack is about to happen, finding a metro employee (when you can barely find one to let you through the emergency door when your card won't work) and then together stopping terrorism seems more like the plot of a movie than a realistic option. The TV show 30 Rock comically turned it into "If you suspect anything, do EVERYTHING." If like me, you like to procrastinate, you can watch the episode here, it's a funny one: http://www.free-tv-video-online.info/player/smotri.php?id=u1489158de4c.

But, in Israel terrorism really is real. People do call in "suspicious packages and activity" and not so long ago, suspicious packages often were suspicious. So, while terrorism is 100% completely not a justification for the occupation or for the actions of the IDF, it is good for me to remember that it's not all as black and white as I would like to make it.

Anywho, after paying for my limonana and learning the sound of police checking for a bomb, I made my way to the Jaffa gate, just outside the Old City. I put on my Jew-length skirt, checked my trusty google maps on my blackberry for directions, and started making my way towards the wall. Google maps, I hate to say, does not have the most accurate version of the Old City that exists, and I found myself walking up and down the same street in the Armenian Quarter before I broke down and asked an American tourist if I could take a gander at their map. As I walked down the steps towards the Western Wall, the golden top of the Al-Aqsa mosque glistened over the smooth, white, Jerusalem stone of the Western Wall. For a moment I felt both totally comforted, totally frustrated, and totally confused. As I walked through the security point, pulling out my scarf, I was reminded by a female soldier to cover my shoulders. I stepped into the giant plaza in front of the wall and was greeted by an array of people. Orthodox Jews in big families walked around, seemingly just out for a stroll; a group of I'm assuming new soldiers stood smoking and chatting, machine guns thrown over their shoulders, waiting to be taken down to the Wall; tourists stood in front of the Wall, holding guidebook and smiling brightly as people snapped photos of them; and security guards walked around looking for people breaking the rules.

I was also greeted by the incredibly crowded women's side of the Wall. A row of women sat in chairs directly in front of the Wall, and groups of women and girls waited stood behind them praying and waiting for a space to open up. After about five minutes of standing there, I was able to make my way up to the Wall, literally having to stretch my arm and lean over a woman sitting in front of me in order to touch the Wall and put two notes into a small crevice. As I stood there, with two women to my left crying as they clung to the Wall, women sitting below me enraptured in prayer, and a woman to my right, dressed in full Orthodox gear, talking on her cell phone, I tried to figure out what the Wall meant to me. I remember coming here for the first time when I was 15 and feeling a real connection. I remember putting my hand against the warm stone and feeling connected to something bigger than myself. I assumed then that it was a connection to God, and to the land of Israel. Now, though, I think it is a connection to the history, to the people around me who, much as I feel are totally different than me, are in fact connected to me.

Feeling overwhelmed and overcrowded, I headed away from the Wall and out of the Old City, retreating to the comfort of a giant iced coffee and my friend's apartment in Baq'a, an American neighborhood in Jerusalem where one hears so much English you can forget you're in Jerusalem at all. I spent the rest of the evening watching episodes of Sex and the City, eating macaroni and cheese, and pretending that I was in America.

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Part 2: The Separation Wall

The next morning I woke up bright and early for the first Dorot seminar on "The History of the Conflict" which in actuality, focused mostly on the history of the conflict in Jerusalem. We started the day on a bus and walking tour with Ir Amim, an amazing group you should all check out, which takes people on tours of East Jerusalem and was formed to, "render Jerusalem a more viable and equitable city, while generating and promoting a more politically sustainable Jerusalem in the future. Ir Amim aspires to a Jerusalem that is equitably shared by three world religions – Jewish, Muslim, Christian – and two political communities – Israeli and Palestinian. Ir Amim envisions a city that ensures the dignity and welfare of all its residents and that safeguards their holy places, as well as their historical and cultural heritages – today, as well as in the future. "

Quite a mission statement. With Ir Amim, which means City of People, we traveled through most of East Jerusalem, went through Jewish settlements, went through Palestinian neighborhoods, saw many parts of the "wall/security fence/separation barrier" and got an understanding of why this continues to be such a complicated issue.

The first thing that struck me about the tour was the presence of settlements in East Jerusalem, and how they are discussed in the media. What's interesting is that right now, if you've been following the peace talks at all, you'll note that a strong sticking point is the fact that the "settlement freeze" is supposed to end on September 26th, and Mahmoud Abbas has said that if the freeze is not extended he absolutely will not continue to talk. What's intriguing here, though, is that settlements are still being built. On what is not at all a technicality, but rather a somewhat silent agreement between all parties, the settlements in East Jerusalem, which are illegal under international law, are not put in the same category as the settlements in the rest of the West Bank. So, when Abbas says settlements, he's actually not including the settlements that are in East Jerusalem, and on which construction was continuing while we stood there watching.

Outside of one of the settlements, we stood on a hill overlooking Bethlehem. Between us and Bethlehem was a large wall which frankly, didn't look all that awful. In all honesty, Israel is not an architecturally beautiful country and in some areas I would have had a hard time distinguishing the wall from one of the many construction sites. Side story: Palestinians are also building rapidly in the West Bank close to Jerusalem and in Jerusalem. At one point, our tour guide directed us to a row of rolling hills where you can see Jewish homes being built towards the east and Palestinian homes being built towards the west, rolling over the hills in a race to have the strongest presence. What is more bothersome than the actual wall, I think, is the path it goes through. From where we were standing, the wall cut through a fairly small olive grove, which belongs to a Palestinian man. Israel is not disputing that the entirety of the grove belongs to the man, but they do insist that the wall must go through the grove for security reasons. The man is still allowed to come into Israel to care for and harvest the trees, but he must get there by traveling up to a check point, come into Israel and travel back down along the wall to his trees. He also is not allowed to bring his farm equipment into Israel, so has been struggling to find ways to access equipment within Israel.

Just a short distance up from those trees, our tour guide directs our eyes to a house with a triangle roof (an odd sight in Israel). The house we are looking at, he tells us, was taken over by Hamas during the Intifada and shots were fired on a daily basis from that home into the settlement. The proximity of everything here is part of what is so complicated, and what a peace-deal making border would look like is impossible to imagine as the neighborhoods weave in and out of each other.

After the tour with Ir Amim, we met with a woman who is organizing women in Sheikh Jarrah, a hotly contested neighborhood in East Jerusalem where Jewish settlers are slowly encroaching on Palestinian homes, and often having the Israeli government evict Palestinians from their homes. The woman who spoke was born and has lived in Sheikh Jarrah her entire life, and her anger at the Israeli government was palpable as she spoke. While I agreed with each statement she made about her desire for a two state solution and for a capitol in Jerusalem, she occasionally stretched and exaggerated facts and I felt so frustrated to have someone I completely agree with ideologically following the same tendency that I see coming from the right wing to bend facts to make their story seem stronger. There's no need to distort the facts as, as they are, the facts pretty clear demonstrate the oppressiveness of the Israeli government, and when you do bend the facts, you lose credibility. I am interviewing next week for an internship with an organization that works with her organization, and I'm hoping that I'll be able to get to know this woman better and understand the way she presents certain pieces of the story. You can see video of the weekly protests in Sheikh Jarrah here:
http://current.com/news/92605865_jews-and-arabs-march-against-evictions.htm.

After leaving Sheikh Jarrah, we had a short break before heading to meet with the head of NGO Monitor, an organization which sees itself as protecting Israel from an international deligitimization campaign run primarily by the European Union and Israeli ngos. Last winter, NGO Monitor launched a war against the New Israel Fund an amazing organization which promotes civil society and human rights in Israel. A number of my friends work for NIF and so I had gathered a list of questions to ask the director. As I went through my list of questions, he answered each one with a half truth, exaggerated facts to an insane degree, played himself to be an innocent, centrist, and ended almost every answer with a story about a terrorist attack he had known someone or a friend had known someone who had been killed in. His willingness to completely disregard reality and to play both the Holocaust and terrorism as sympathy cards was truly unbelievable. It was infuriating but in someways comforting, as he is someone who fits the mold of everything I disagree with, and was therefore completely easy to disagree with, debate, and feel no internal conflictions about. What is harder for me are the people like the woman I met in Sheikh Jarrah, who I feel so much more connected to and agree with so deeply, but who raises questions within me about my role, about the much grayer issues where I feel conflicted within myself about my beliefs. I've been told time and time again that these questions don't get answered, and as given a pep talk about how it actually is better to be struggling with them for years than to come to a conclusion after two months and call it a day. But still, I wish it were all just a little bit simpler. Sigh.

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In Other News

- After a few nights of trying to cook pasta instead of eating bread and hummus, I finally learned how to and got the courage to actually light my gas stove, a feat those of you who have ever seen me try to light a lighter should recognize is an amazing feat.

- I spent Yom Kippur in the north of Israel on a kibbutz where I had a fabulous time until my repenting took the form of a stomach virus and I spent most of the time laying sick on a couch and watching movies in Hebrew.

- I had my first Hebrew lesson yesterday and successfully carried on a conversation about what I would like to order in a cafe for about four and a half minutes. It's amazing how long one can talk about what kind of burekas and coffee to get.

- Finally, I'm finally starting to use my camera! I tried to upload photos here but my computer was being cranky so you will have to go to picasa on this link: http://picasaweb.google.com/Alice.Mishkin/JerusalemDayTuval?authkey=Gv1sRgCPu9-sLHh8nzrwE# . You'll be able to see pictures of the different walls that stress me out, the nature and coffee that makes me happy, and a few of my fellow fellows.