A Wrinkle in Time

(Apologies to those whose adolescence was not shaped by Madeleine L'Engle, whose sci-fi classic this title references)

Being in the Occupied Palestinian Territories muddles one’s sense of distance and time. Traveling between Ramallah and Jerusalem in 1946 was a ten-kilometer bus ride south, a distance comparable to that between my apartment in Brooklyn and Midtown Manhattan. Today, the two cities are on opposite sides of the “Separation” Wall dividing the West Bank from Israel, although over two hundred thousand Palestinians still live in East Jerusalem.

I can’t envision a straight path from A to B when I set off from the Friends School in Ramallah. Instead, I see time: forty-five to ninety minutes of speed-bumps, vehicle-switching, checkpoints, and passport-showing. “Distance” as the crow flies no longer exists. It is as if you are not actually traveling through space but rather passing from one space-time continuum to another and losing an unpredictable amount of time in between. As if you sometimes got stuck when Apparating and appeared an hour later at your destination. As if you were crossing a tesseract.

At first it does feel like you are on your way somewhere. You turn off of al-Nahda Street from Friends and head through al-Bireh, a city older than Ramallah that has now become part of one extended metropolitan area. The usual series of Arab shops files out, then repeats: mini-market fronted with icebox of frozen treats, bakery with open oven and racks of various shaped loaves, odds n’ ends store adorned with hanging tricycles, backpacks and shoes, dark window of moneychanger office, the miniature screens of a cell phone store. The sidewalks swarm with multicolored veils above and the dark curls of children below. You swerve to avoid the old women in traditional embroidered dresses who toddle into the streets with their purchases balanced on their heads. You are in an Arab city. It could be downtown Amman, Cairo or Damascus.

As you leave the city center behind, the streets widen and empty of pedestrians and the prices in shop windows fall. You make slow progress because of the speed bumps striping the road every few meters. Every driver I have ridden with knows the location of these “sleeping policemen” by heart, even though they are unmarked and seem to be placed at random.

When you get out of town and onto the highway, the speed bumps taper off. The driver, regardless of his character, then floors the gas and tears forward with the gleeful recklessness of a teenager in a convertible on the first day of summer vacation. But the sudden freedom of the highway brings with it the first evidence that you are not traveling through an Arab country: the road signs announce the names of the places along the highway in Hebrew, then English, then Arabic. You are still in the West Bank, what would appear on a road map (no pun intended) to be the land allotted to Palestinians. But none of the places on the signs are Arab: Bet El, Giva’at Zev, Ma’ale Adumim. Following the arrows up to the tops of the surrounding hills, where the Israeli settlements’ identical orange roofs twinkle in the sun.

Why are there no Arab places even mentioned? Because this is an Israeli highway, servicing only Israeli settlers. To get to Arab towns, you have to use the circuitous, speed-bump-infested back-roads. As hill after hill of orange roofs loom, the impression that you are traveling through the West Bank fades. But you aren’t in Israel yet either. You are on Camazotz. You have entered a time-wrinkle.

The entrance to Ma'ale Adumim, one of the largest Israeli settlements.

This surreal spree through no-man’s land ends as abrubtly as it began: concrete road blocks slam on your breaks and channel all traffic into the Qalandiya checkpoint. By now, all sense of distance and time is lost. If you are on a bus, you disembark and enter the netherworld described in my last entry. If you are in a car with yellow Israeli plates and have an Israeli, East Jerusalemite or foreign passport, you join the queue of cars awaiting cross-check. If you are driving a car with white or green Palestinian plates or have a West Bank ID, Jerusalem’s proximity is doubly meaningless for you. Your journey is over, unless you have a pass issued from the Israeli government for health or professional purposes.

But you would never have come that far anyway; to you, Jerusalem is a mere legend, a place known through family stories but about as accessible from your home as Seattle or Mars. Mazen, a teacher of history with a PhD who speaks fluent Russian and makes wine, can’t remember the last time he went to Jerusalem, but he’s sure it was in the nineties. Adil, the director of a Palestinian cultural center who studied archaeology in Berlin and taught at Toronto University, recently turned down a speaking engagement at the American Consulate in Jerusalem when Israeli Security would only issue him a three-hour pass. Rashid, a sixteen-year-old student at the Friends School who speaks fluent English and has traveled to Europe and the States, has never been to Jerusalem. “I think I may just not go, ever,” he shrugs.

But those who can pull up to the gateway, under surveillance of mammoth watchtowers whose square eyes seem to move with you. The guardians who determine whether or not you pass back into real time are heavily armed college-age Israeli soldiers, who peer in your windows and flip purposefully through your passports. They do not search your car or interrogate you; an American passport, accent and smile seem to give you a free license to bring whatever you want through the wall. They merely reserve the right to intimidate.

Once you’re through, you speed alongside the wall towards the city. All the license plates are yellow now, and there are no more speed-bumps. The signs continue in three languages. When you hit the periphery, Arab shops begin to file out again, this time with advertisements in Hebrew as well as Arabic, and the veils and and head-balancing acts reappear. But as you approach the city, indications of Israeli infrastructure begin to multiply, emblazoned with blocky Hebrew letters – city buses, schools, gas stations – as well as Israelis, carrying suitcases, wearing miniskirts, walking quickly.

The suburbs expand into highway bypasses towards different parts of Jerusalem, and the old city emerges on the right. As you turn in on Jaffa Street, modern Jerusalem’s main drag, the veils and street sellers are replaced with yamakas, shin-length skirts and beards. Stars of David twinkle proudly in shop windows. Children’s wispy side-curls blow back from their faces as they run up and down the sidewalks after their parents. On the left, Ben Yehuda Street climbs through chi-chi wine stores and cafes; hippies dance in the sun and teenage girls flaunt their summer dresses, while soldiers in fatigues and Orthodox families weave through them.

“Ramallah? No, never been over there!” says the American Methodist pastor who has been living in Jerusalem, working at the Christ Church Guesthouse for the past two months. “Gonna try to make it though, when I get some time to travel.”

Ramallah really isn't ten kilometers away. It belongs to a different world, accessible only to those who willing to brave a wrinkle in time.

No (hu)man's land

For those of you who have encountered the West Bank checkpoints, this story should be no news to you. For those of you who haven't . . . read on.

The "Separation Wall" being built between the West Bank and Israel.

I thought I had learned the drill at the infamous Qalandiya Checkpoint, having been through once before. When the busses from Ramallah (or anywhere else in the West Bank) to Jerusalem arrive at the checkpoint, they pull over and let everyone off. The dispatched passengers then make their way across a parking lot full of Palestinian drivers with Israeli license plates crying “al-‘uds, al-‘uds!” (“Jerusalem”) and over to a mammoth hangar. Temporarily incarcerated, the travelers fall into a snaking line up to a wall of metal bars. The line bunches up around the one entrance, which is barely as wide as a man’s shoulders and squeezes the crush of people into single file as they pass through a tunnel to a body-length turnstile like the New York subways. The turnstile opens long enough to let a few dozen people through, then locks again.

When you finally get past the stile, you find yourself in an inner chamber with walls twenty feet high and a new wall of bars, this time with six turnstiles in separate compartments. You join one of the crowds of Palestinians pressing up against the bars and wait again. The turnstile allows three people through at a time, then locks shut. Nonetheless, the fourth person invariably tries to lunge through as the stile clicks locked and rattles their bodies back to stillness. The rhythm of the door’s three-turns-and-a-lock – shlick . . . shlick . . . shlick . . . ka-CHUNK – establishes a ruthless regularity as you inch forward. No single file here – it’s each man, child and little old lady for him or herself, although there does seem to be a consensus that the little old ladies should be given right of way when they are noticed underfoot.

Sometimes inexplicable pauses arise between openings and people begin to mutter. But their stunning powerlessness has become a default state of being. Those waiting with friends and family chat, gossiping or planning their errands on the other side. Children weave between bodies until a parent’s hand reaches through to snatch them back. Teenage girls lean inside the stile, each with a foot on the lowest bar. They swing mindlessly back and forth as they chatter. Then it clicks open and they tumble through giggling, place their purses on a conveyer belt, and step up to a double window with their travel documents (Palestinians do not have passports – depending on whether they live in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem, annexed in 1967, they carry varying levels of residency papers).

After showing documents, you pass through yet another turnstile to freedom, which begins with a second parking lot where the busses wait to recuperate their passengers. You show your ticket, board, and wait for the bus to fill. Then you go the remaining few minutes to Jerusalem. Total distance: about 12 kilometers. Total time: an hour and a half.

**************

I had been warned that the morning crowds of commuters could make for longer lines at Qalandiya, but my traveling companions, a British Quaker couple, and I arrived with plenty of time to get to the tour agency in Jerusalem. It was their first experience with Qalandiya, and they were adamant about toughing it out. This time, there was no waiting at the first turnstile, but the antechamber before the actual checkpoint teemed with at least two hundred people. It occurred to me that the “system” I thought I had witnessed a few days before may not have been a system at all, but merely one random manifestation of how the checkpoint is run on any given day. The grim reality of arbitrary rule chilled the blood even more than a predictable system of control. I warned the couple, Alan and Elspeth, that there was no telling how long the checkpoint would take and that perhaps we should consider getting a car from one of the eager drivers outside, who enter Jerusalem via one of the known holes in the “Separation Wall.” But they demurred, claiming that we had plenty of time, and reminding me that our governments were responsible for funding and allowing this monstrosity in the first place.

A fair point. We waited.

For fifteen minutes, no one moved, but people kept coming in from behind and surging past us. I tried to urge Alan and Elspeth to relinquish their politesse and push forward with everyone else, but eventually the tide of bodies separated us. We pressed into the same turnstile line at least, and waited. No one was going through. People began to mutter, then complain, then shout and press the “call” button into the office on the other side. No response. The gate remained locked.

After another twenty minutes, it began to allow one person through at a time, then lock again for unpredictable intermissions. “One at a time!” indignant shouts rose. Perhaps this was unnatural even for Qalandiya. A few announcements came through in blaring, staticky Hebrew: first they closed the window we were standing at (bodies stampede to the right), then reopened it five minutes later (bodies stampede back to the left). Well-dressed Palestinians bypassed the line and barged in front with minimal comment from the monotony-dulled crowd. One man did grumble as a suited, sun-glassed man swept from the back right into the turnstile. The newcomer screamed back that he had been there the whole time and pushed through. People started crowding into the stile two and three at a time.

At last my turn came. Dazed after an hour and a half in a mob of oppressed, angry humans, I walked through the turnstile in front of me and turned right towards the busses.

But on the right was a wall topped with spikes. To the left was a corridor leading through a turnstile into another parking lot, disconnected from the busses. I had gone through the wrong gate.

I ran back to the turnstile I had gone through. Of course, it was locked. The trickle of travelers coming through inform me that that gate was only for the post office (yes, Palestinians have to go through the Qalandiya checkpoint to mail a letter). I run back and forth in the corridor in a panic, eying the walls and trying to imagine myself vaulting over them. Impossible. I would be shot. Oh shit. I pressed the call button again and again and finally earned a stream of screaming Hebrew, then silence.

A couple of Arabs finally came through the corridor that had become my prison. They told me I would have to go out and back around through the checkpoint again. No! My spirit fluttered fiercely against the bars of my trapped body. Then I saw an Israeli guard outside. I leaned against the stile and called to him in English, and he came over. A tanned, rugged middle-aged man with a white-blond ponytail.

“Hi, listen, I went through the wrong gate,” I panted, trying on a disarming smile over my tensed muscles. “Is there any way you can put me back through?”

He sized me up and chuckled. “Where you from?” he asked.

“American,” I sighed with relief for a change, handing over my passport. “New York.”

He nodded and smiled, flipping through the pages. “Ah, New York . . . Welcome to Israel. Why you come through this gate, girlie?”

“I didn’t know it made a difference. I can’t read Arabic,” I lied, offering a rueful shrug.

He raised his eyebrows, amused. “There was no one there to direct you?”

I shook my head.

“Okay,” he handed me back my passport and said reassuringly, “I’m going to call and see if I can get you through. Don’t worry – just be patient.” He disappeared.

It is impossible to be patient and not to worry when you are stuck in a walled corridor in heat approaching 90 degrees facing an empty parking lot and a huge army complex into which your sole chance of escape has vanished. I pushed against the first gate again, recalling my yoga teacher’s frequent reminder: the definition of madness is to attempt the same thing the same way over and over again and expect a different result. Then a man appeared on the other side and magically let me through, then vanished. My body melting in relief, I charged at the gate to the busses.

Ka-CHUNK. Locked.

I ran back to the turnstile into the checkpoint window and called out. No reply. Were their windows soundproof? Probably. Why let explanations and excuses be even a remote possibility? A man passing through informed me that this gate was now closed for travelers to Jerusalem, and was open only for the post office. Now made reckless with fear and frustration, I stamped back through the post office gate, out into the deceptively open parking lot and into the complex, where I found the kindly Israeli guard at the desk.

“Ah, they send you back to me. Why you not wait? I tell you be patient. Okay, I see what I can do."

A languid phone call in Hebrew ensued, out of which I distinguish only the word “Amrikai.” He hung up and grinned.

“Come with me now, I’ll take you back over there and someone’s gonna let you in. So relax!”

Two Palestinians were coming out of the turnstile as the officer buzzed me back through. The look of shock on their faces confirmed that such an exception would never have been made for them. At the next stile, two Israeli soldiers, a boy and a girl barely more than teenagers, had materialized, in fatigues and heavily armed. I showed them my passport and they smiled at me and shook their heads.

“Why you go through this gate?” the boy asked, his voice teasing, with an almost flirtatious twinkle in his eye.

“I couldn’t read the sign, sorry!” I stuck to my lie. Their smiles widened and they buzzed me in.

“Hey, you be careful, okay?” the girl warned. “It’s dangerous over there.” She cocked her head back at the swarm of waiting Palestinians (along with poor polite Alan and Elspeth) as she buzzed me through the final gate to freedom.

“Yeah I will, thanks.” I gave my captors-turned-saviors a real smile. “You should make some signs in English!” Somewhere in the mixture of relief to be escaping and to be suddenly joking with peers rather than trying to talk sense to a screaming intercom, I liked them.

Young Israeli soldiers in downtown Jerusalem. They are actually watching a bunch of Israeli hippies dancing around shirtless to some tribal drumbeat.

As the 18-bus rolled on towards Jerusalem, the aftershocks of my brush with Palestinian reality crumbled my thoughts and opinions into an indecipherable mush. Images sparred and splattered against one another: the hunched old ladies in traditional Palestinian embroidered dresses smashed into turnstiles, the high spiked walls, the Arab men smoking and pressing up on all sides, the grinning Israeli soldiers with whom I immediately felt a shared cultural bond, the conveyer belts, the guns, the teenage girls swinging against on the gates, the fatherly Israeli guard, the indecipherable Hebrew screeching on the intercom, my own voice in English saying, in so many words, “Hey, I’m American, we’re allies, buddies, friends! You don’t have to treat me like you treat them! My country funds this whole operation, so it’s cool, I’m not upset. Just new here, sorry!”

So it’s less obvious than I would like to dictate my gut responses to these conflicting encounters. But I also realize that as a foreigner I enjoy a tremendous privilege that few West Bankers or Israelis enjoy: being able to see humans on both sides of that checkpoint. Interaction in the netherworld of Qalandiya forces both Israelis and Palestinians to see one another as animals.

Ramzi reflects

Ramzi has been blind all his life. His eyelids and lashes, which stretch across the hollows beneath his eyebrows, still twitch, as if protecting phantom eyes from the dusty air. Those “eyes” still seem to light up with his wide, snaggle-toothed smile. These frequent smiles have creased his cinnamon-brown skin into darker folds, the hue of his brown-black hair and grimy knuckles. Ramzi’s hunching, groping walk further diminishes his short stature, making him appear boy-like from behind, even though to look at him dead-on one would place him at around forty. When I told Ramzi my age, his eyeless smile erupted and he crowed, “Then you were born in 1981, like me!” We were, in fact, born ten days apart.

I met Ramzi at a classical music concert at the Friends Boys School. I had invited Nassar, an acquaintance via ArteEast whose writing I had translated with a friend earlier that year. He brought Ramzi, and introduced him to me at intermission. Ramzi attempted a phrase or two in English, then launched into his life story without further ado in eloquent, earnest Arabic. The words poured from him in no general direction, his speech devoid of gestures, his empty eye-sockets gazing past me. He had escaped from Gaza with a day pass two years ago and had been hiding in the West Bank ever since. He had no West Bank ID and couldn’t get one, so he couldn’t pass any of the checkpoints. His wife and children were still in Gaza. He had tried to get them out but to no avail. “My people have suffered so much, and all because of the Israelis, all because of the occupation,” he repeated rhythmically in between each verse of his story. Nassar stood by with an unreadable expression on his face. Had he introduced me to Ramzi to drive home even further the desperate plight of the Palestinians? Or had he perhaps not realized that Ramzi would impart this diatribe? I murmured sympathetic responses, increasingly aware that he required none. Eventually another man standing by listening – perhaps another Gazan – intervened and whispered to him,. They clasped hands and drifted back towards the auditorium with barely a dip in Ramzi’s monologue.

I sit behind the three of them, Ramzi, Nassar and the new man, watching them listening to Brahms Piano Trio No. 3. Ramzi’s head cocked in concentration. My friend Emile and I had discussed the waking dreams that classical music can inspire; what mental images, or impressions rather, could Brahms bring to the mind of a blind Gazan? I didn’t get a chance to ask Ramzi, because when we left the concert hall, the second movement of his concerto of memories and opinions began.

As we separated from the noise and crush of the crowd, Ramzi began to direct his narration towards me more specifically, and registered for the first time, with delight, that I could speak Arabic. Another theme thus wove its way into his streaming solo (as with the other themes, he first devoted a whole verse to developing it, then recapitulated it every few minutes): how wonderful it was to meet an American who spoke Arabic! what a lovely person I must be! and a Sagittarius born in the same year at that! and what did I think of Palestine? and did I find it beautiful? and was I happy here? and he hoped I was “happy” in his beautiful country. (This, mind you, mixed in with the continuing themes of his hardships.) Nassar held Ramzi’s elbow on the other side and whispered an ostinato of “daraj . . . daraj . . . daraj” (“step”) alerting Ramzi of changes in elevation. Ramzi’s feet stumbled through the instructions as if disconnected from his rhythmic, gushing speech.

Ramzi has never seen his country, but was resolute in his frequent declarations that it is the most beautiful in the world. He began a litany of places that we must visit together, describing each as more enticing than the next.

“You know, you are speaking with a beautiful woman,” Nassar informs Ramzi.
“I know, I can tell that she is beautiful,” Ramzi nearly giggles with joy, his smile twitching with a brief shyness. I am beginning to wonder what impressions the notion of ‘beauty’ makes on his mind, and what particular elements inspire it – voices, kind words, smells, warmth, breezes, descriptions of visual attributes from other processed in his own private language. Later, sitting at Zan, a bar in downtown Ramallah, Ramzi explains.

“I have never seen color, of course. But I don’t need to; I know colors from having heard so much about them. I know when I hear green that it is associated with trees and plants, when I hear blue that it is associated with the heavens and purity, red is the heart and love, white is peace and innocence . . . I have learned all of these. All colors register “signifieds” (he uses the Saussurian term, in Arabic: “madluul”) in my mind the same way it does for others, without having seen them. You know that you don’t have to see something or someone to know them, or have a feeling of knowing them. For example, I have never met Barack Obama but I know him through his words and his actions, from what people say about him, from the feeling that he gives me. I love this man, I think he will do good in my country and everywhere. He is kind and intelligent, and respects Islam. I would like to write him a letter about my situation, do you think he would read my letter? I think he would have to read it, because he is a good man. I know these things, and I think of them when I hear the words, ‘Barack Obama.’ But I have never seen him. Colors are like this to me, I know them, and have known them all my life, but only in what they signify to me.”

Ramzi lives and thinks in a pure Saussurian world of signifiers and signifieds, without images, without visual memories. While the rest of us are beholden to images’ impact on our reasoning and understanding, Ramzi inhabits a world of symbols. Even his name, “ramzi”, means “symbolic”.

In his blindness, Ramzi has mastered one of the most complex systems of symbols I know of: classical Arabic. Without having ever seen the sloping script, the short vowel symbols floating above the stream of connected letters, he speaks the ancient language with a clarity unparalleled in most Arabs I have met anywhere, on the level of university professors. It occurred to him at some point in our conversation to switch to classical or “Modern Standard” Arabic, called fuS-Ha (“the most eloquent”), which he supposed might be easier for a foreign student of the language. He explained that his background as a radio announcer accounted for his mastery of spoken fuS-Ha, and set off on a lengthy cadenza to prove it.
“If I have correctly understood the situation, it is good and right that we speak only fuS-Ha! What is your opinion of this proposition of mine? I find it to be a most excellent and suitable plan, but only if it pleases my lovely new friend, and she finds it to be as excellent and as suitable as I in my humble opinion have found it to be.”

After a few more minutes of such oration, I manage to interject in passable fuS-Ha that I did indeed find it to be an excellent and suitable proposition, and he began a new speech expressing his joy in all of the flowery locutions that high classical Arabic has to offer (“I am delighted a great delighting, it pleases me a great pleasing, what a joy of all joys it is to . . .”). Despite the repetition, I had to remain vigilant, for he would suddenly direct a trick question at me to test my knowledge of Arabic grammar. When I answered correctly, the thrill would send him off on a lengthy reflection on my mastery of Arabic, although I had likely only uttered twenty full sentences, albeit containing the constructions that Ramzi considered to belong to the highest possible level of fluency. Eventually, his interest in hearing me speak fuS-Ha induced him to give me the floor more often, but he monitored my speech for points to correct or praise. His responses thus consisted of linguistic observations rather than reactions to content, but I suppose one could call it a conversation.

As Ramzi’s enthusiasm for our ceremonial exchange escalated, I realized how much it must mean to him to be demonstrating his prowess in formal Arabic. In Gaza, his education and resolve had allowed him to found and host a radio program for the handicapped. Here in the West Bank, his isolated and uncertain situation had relegated him to the bottom of the employment chain: a street tamarind juice-seller. These unfortunate men wander the streets downtown during the high shopping hours with heavy metal canisters of syrupy brown juice strapped to their backs, their plaintive cries of “tamar-hindi bi-shaykl, tamar-hindi bi-shaykl!” ("tamarind juice for a shekel!") blending with the bustle of traffic. To boot, tradition dictates that they wear the clownish dress of bygone Ottoman courts – shiny red, gold-tasseled shirts with puffy sleeves, matching pantaloons and “tarboushes,” cup-shaped tasseled hats.

Ramzi refused to admit to any shame about his most recent line of work. “People should work at all different levels of society,” he avowed. “Otherwise how can they know and respect their fellow men? They cannot. ‘I am thankful to my God’ (he says this phrase in English for emphasis) that I have had the chance to work at many different jobs. Yes, my current job, selling tamarind juice, may not make a lot of money. At times, it is tiring. But thanks to my God, I have work and I am serving my society. Thanks be to God. And tomorrow, if you find yourself downtown on an errand, perhaps, perhaps, you will happen upon me at work – what a lovely surprise that would be, if you were to happen upon me at work! – and I could give you some tamarind juice.”

I assured Ramzi that I would keep an eye out for him the next day, but picturing him feeling his way through the merciless crush of bodies and cars with his walking stick in a clown-suit at high noon was uncomfortable to imagine.

The next day as I elbowed through the crowd with my laptop (the internet in my apartment on the blink, on my way to an internet café), the tamarind sellers’ cries echoed with particular stridency. I told myself I couldn’t bear to see Ramzi humiliating himself this way, but my eyes disobeyed and flitted past the identical costumes to the faces. Eyes popped back at me.

Until there he was, feeling his way on the corner of al-Nahda and al-Quds Streets, calling with as a lusty a shout as any, “tamar hindi bi-shaykl!”, his tarboush cocked on his head. But then I was walking by, without stopping, in a moment of revelation that he would never know I had passed.

I made it about seven steps then turned around and went back. “Ramzi,” I called him, lightly touching his shoulder. “It’s Anna.”

It took a moment for this to register, then delight and greetings abounded. Before I could protest, he was fumbling for his plastic cups to pour me a cup of tamarind juice. He successfully topped off a glass and extended it shakily towards me, smiling with all the pride and encouragement of a mother presenting her child with a birthday cake ablaze with candles. Shoppers stared at the spectacle as they passed: a white girl with a laptop receiving a lecture in formal Arabic on the salutary qualities of tamarind from a blind street vendor.

I sipped at the would-be elixir, listened to the lecture, and considered the possibility that Ramzi enjoyed his job. Perhaps in not being able to “see” the things we do – the silly tarboushes, the busy, annoyed faces of the crowds – Ramzi is able to “see” himself as providing a service that people need. And go home with money in his pocket, knowing that he has worked and supported himself another day.

“You only have the right to work, not to the fruits of your labor.”

-Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

A free lunch in Palestine

The view down the hill from Ramallah, Palestine

MY new friend Nassar promised me that I would not have to haggle for my vegetables in Palestine. The frequent battles waged over half-kilograms of cucumbers during my Cairo days weighed heavily against this opinion however. Memories of astronomical prices mumbled with averted eyes, then shouted indignantly with finger raised, then confirmed by the vendor’s phalanx of male family members dampened my confidence, and I steeled myself as I approached Ramallah’s teeming produce market. Not that I was looking for a fight; truth be told, I have found myself loathe to contest prices quoted to me in Ramallah, likely due to my well-meant but ineffectual notion that Americans deserve to pay double in Palestine. No, the fact of overpaying itself did not chafe so much as the unpleasantness of a dishonest interaction, even one that did not escalate into an argument. It makes the stuff taste worse.

The familiar cacophony of whooping vendors rose through the noon haze as I descended into the tarpaulin-covered market, just to the south of Manara Square in the center of Ramallah. Shoppers had first to pass through an aisle of “durable” goods (items of clothing and cleaning supplies that looked like they might last a week) before reaching a wider square filled with produce stands.

As my Obama tee shirt and light skin began to come into focus amidst the mass of Palestinian shoppers, the closest voices began to add, “wel-cahm!” “helloooooo!” as well as the Arabic “ahlan, marHaba, itfaDDali!” (“Welcome, hello, help yourself!”) to the streaming chant of prices and products. Keeping eye contact with these eager salesmen to a minimum, I opened ceremonies by purchasing a bundle of mint from a hunched old lady out front. One shekel (about 25 cents). This boded well, so I entered the market with buoyed confidence.

As my ears grew accustomed to the welcoming shouts, now in surround sound, the eyes could take over, devouring the feast of colors arrayed on row upon row of stalls. Against the crumbling gray background of Ramallah, these fruits and vegetables glowed with the brilliance of colors before a storm in Tornado Alley – their life force heightened against the volatile air. The gleaming reds, greens and purples vied for my eye with seductive power far more potent than their harvesters’ cajoling.

I exchanged “marhabas” with a vendor and began selecting tomatoes. He immediately thrust a black plastic bag out, which I refused, showing him my handy “green” (also literally green) cloth shopping bag. He cocked his head, nonplussed, and offered me the bag again. “La, la la, li Himaayit al-bi’a,” I explained. (“No no, it’s to protect the environment!”) He still looked unimpressed, but withdrew the bag, shaking his head as if I had asked to have schwarma meat scooped straight into my hands without bread. My four tomatoes also cost a shekel. I began to feel like I was passively ripping them of, and considered reenacting a scene from Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity! In which the narrator, in an attempt to divest himself of his sudden fortune, haggles up the price of a key ring in Morocco to forty times the vendor’s original quote. My tomato man had already turned to the next customer though, so I moved on.

When the next vendor, a younger man with black curls loosening from the wave gelled over his forehead, refused to let me pay for three cucumbers however, I had to protest. He smiled and shook his head, said, “ahlan!” and cast my measly handful of cucumbers a bemused – really, belittling – glance. It seemed to be an affront to accept payment for such a trifling amount, especially if I wouldn’t even take a bag. I begged and begged but he retreated back behind the pile of cucumbers away from my reaching handful of coins. I shrugged, thanked him, and moved on. True, most of the shoppers were Palestinian matriarchs purchasing enough cucumbers to feed a family of seven for a week. But with my unpredictable schedule, even three cucumbers and four tomatoes would be a challenge for me to get through before they went bad.

Attempts to buy one pepper, four baby eggplants, five baby peaches and two lemon-limes (they are all hybrid species here), all without bags, also met with affectionate derision. The only few shekels I managed to pay for anything were disbursed in furtive layups over piles of produce into makeshift cash registers, which drew retaliation of additional veggies lobbed back at me. Far from the Cairenes’ mendacious oaths and threats, each transaction in Ramallah ended in mutual bemusement and good will. “But you guys,” I wanted to plead with them. “I want YOU to charge me more! I can pay! I have an American salary, it’s nothing to me, it’s okay!” But if decades of occupation and subhuman treatment and living standards can’t extinguish these people’s sense of pride, hospitality and generosity, far be it from me to compromise their standards.



Steaming flatbreads just off the sizzling iron domes the bakers spread the dough on also cost a shekel, and crumpled warmly into the top of my now bulging shopping bag. One item left on the list: olive oil, the essence of one of Palestine’s most recognized and poignant symbols, the olive tree. I imagined that the shelves would abound with different regional varieties.

Back on the street, I squeezed through the line of shoppers and bins of nuts and fruits into a small grocery shop and surveyed the merchandise. The sight of Hebrew lettering all over the packaged products, the only evidence to the naked eye that your are not in any other Arab city, still makes me do a double take every time. In Egypt or Syria, the only place you would see Hebrew writing in the marketplace is marching in menacing fonts across the covers of books preaching the evils of Zionism. I realized the taboo status Hebrew has thus achieved in my sensibilities -- it actually looks sinister. Need to work on that. Maybe seeing it on my soap and butter wrappers will help.

Meanwhile, after three scans of the rows of bottles of various oils, I still couldn't find olive oil. How could this be? Suddenly I was afraid to ask anyone. Had Israeli destruction of olive trees advanced so far as to decimate Palestinian olive oil production? Or was it simply a staple so rarefied and abundant that there was a whole olive oil store somewhere? At last one of the store employees asked what I was looking for and I told him.

“Ah, yes,” he replied immediately, and ducked through the open door into the dank, cluttered backroom. He fished a two-liter juice bottle out of a pile of flotsam and handed it to me. Seeing my puzzlement, he explained, “This is our olive oil. We make it ourselves and bring it in to sell by the kilo.”

Ah. I swished the viscous liquid around in the bottle. It’s olive oil all right. I lost myself momentarily in an attempt to imagine this boy and his family harvesting and pressing these olives in the countryside somewhere nearby. I hoped their farm was safe from the "natural growth" of Israeli settlements.

“Okay,” I told him. “But I just need a little, I’m only here for three weeks. Do you have a smaller bottle?”

He popped into the backroom again, rooted around on the lower shelves and produced a half-liter water bottle. He shook out the remaining water onto the floor, filled it with olive oil, weighed it on the decrepit scale in the corner and handed it up to the cashier, who re-weighed it and handed it to me. Thirteen shekels (not quite three and a half dollars). I planned silently to come back before I leave and buy out their whole stock to bring home, and offer to bring them all with me.


Being in Palestine gives me fantasies of being a fabulously wealthy benefactor, or having superpowers that would allow me to change their plight with one wave of a benevolent hand.