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.