“Yes.” I’m holding onto it for dear life.
“There,” he says, pointing to a group of four soldiers, eighteen, nineteen years old with M-16s, eyes scanning bags and ID badges. “You walk through. There you will find Samer.”
“You’ll know Samer when you see him,” he says. I want to say to Mohammad: I’ve never been to the West Bank. I don’t want to end up like one of those two mutilated Israeli soldiers captured in Ramallah in 2000, whose lifeless bodies were dragged through the streets and beaten by a mob. I’d rather not become a decapitated moron, a limbless news item. I promised my mother I wouldn’t do anything dangerous on this trip. You had to wait until the fourth year of the intifada to make your first journey to the Holy Land? You had to go now of all times? Mohammad looks at me, tilting his sunglasses down toward the end of his nose. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he asks. I get out. Before I can even say shukran, Mohammad has reversed the Mercedes onto the highway and sped off toward Jerusalem.
March 12, 2004. I have come to Israel to write a play about a divided house. A director in Tel Aviv has expressed interest in the story, which began when a Palestinian friend I’d met in Toronto, Suha, was living in the house in question. It was 1997, and Suha was in Jerusalem studying Israeli land-assessment laws. She had rented a room in a house that was under dispute between an Israeli and a Palestinian family. According to Suha, in 1967 the Abudalo family fled their house because of the Six Day War—they were afraid of the advancing Israeli army. When the Abudalo family returned a month later, they found Shimon and his wife—two Israeli Jews—had occupied the “empty” house. Hassam Abudalo was so incensed he locked himself in his former bedroom for a month and refused to leave. He would sneak out of the bedroom at night to steal supplies from neighbouring construction sites in order to build a shelter for his family. Afraid of getting caught up in the Israeli legal system, Shimon did not complain to the authorities, and the two families, according to Suha, had managed to live together from 1967 until today. Suha and I often talked about the situation in Israel and whether a peaceful solution would ever come about. One day she said to me: “You want to understand the situation? Go to Jerusalem, see this house for yourself.” She wrote down the address.
I bought my ticket to Tel Aviv. And after this tour of the West Bank, I thought I would catch a ride back to Jerusalem and visit the house where Palestinians and Israelis somehow live in peace. I walk through the maze of cars and people toward the checkpoint. Someone sells chai from a silver pot. At the checkpoint an Israeli flag proudly flaps above a mess of concrete, camouflage, and barbed wire. Soldiers scrutinize cars and their occupants, slowly, slowly. There hasn’t been a suicide bombing in some time, and tensions are low, making this one of the “better” days at Qalandia. I pass tables with fake Levi’s, Kelvin Klein T-shirts, homemade orange pop. A tin-roof-covered walkway marks the pedestrian passageway between the Occupied Territories and Israel, and I walk through with other Palestinians. The Israeli soldiers don’t ask for anyone’s passport—who’s going to bomb Ramallah? In the lineup on the opposite side of the checkpoint people have stopped bothering to honk. What’s the point? their eyes say. Life is this waiting. Behind the cars lies an open field of broken glass, blown-out tires, and rusted metal. Home is this junkyard: the West Bank, prologue to a nation. Amid the rubble and chaos stands a man well over six feet in height with a completely shaved head, wearing a blue-and-white Reebok track suit with red vertical stripes. He spots me immediately and approaches to shake my hand. He smiles goofily.
“Fucking shit,” he says. “Let’s get the hell out of this mess.”
I do not argue with the man they call Samer.
The West Bank. The name conjures images of boys throwing stones at slightly older boys with guns that shoot rubber bullets, tear gas, or grenades. Mothers weeping for their martyred sons, coffins carried through howling crowds.
Comments