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.