Weekend 4: Palestine

After last weekend’s exhausting trip around the Dead Sea, I decided to take it easy this weekend. Don’t worry, it didn’t happen.

At work on Wednesday, I tried to come up with another cool place to go that would be simple and easy to reach. I had heard a lot of talk about a guy from Nazareth and thought that perhaps Nazareth would be a good destination to have in mind. There are even direct buses from Tel Aviv, but that would be too easy.

I wanted to go to Jerusalem for a few things and figured I’d spend Thursday night there. Geographically, Tel Aviv is on the coast, Jerusalem is inland southeast of there, and Nazareth is all the way in the north. Between Jerusalem and Nazareth lies the West Bank (Palestine). Whatever, I’ll just cut through there, I thought, no big deal. It’s probably faster and more interesting than going all the way around. The latter half would prove to be true.

After work on Thursday, I caught the 400 bus from Bar Ilan to Jerusalem. The bus never made it. About halfway there while climbing a hill, we slowed down and stopped. The driver had us all get out and stand on the side of the road. About half the people made it onto another bus; I was in the unlucky half. A few of us did make it into a passing sherut though (taxi van) and arrived just before sunset.

I walked towards the Old City and found the market I had visited during my first trip to Jerusalem three weeks before. First order of business: return those ripped shorts from last weekend. I found the guy who sold them to me, pulled the deteriorating article from my bag, and told him that I wanted a new pair. He examined them and obliged, saying that he’d only do it once. I bought a pair of nice athletic shorts from him out of appreciation.

Continuing around the market, I noticed the toy selection. In the US, stores sometimes sell toy guns—plastic pistols that kids use to play cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers. In Israel, the toy gun selection consists not of pistols but of M16s and AK47s. I’m not sure what games the kids play.

After browsing the market extensively and exploring the nearby streets, I continued on to the Old City. In the darkness of night, I sought the Muslim Quarter, which I knew housed the cheapest hostels. The one I stayed at last time, Al Arab, cost only thirty shekels but felt unclean to the point where I questioned the safety of lying on their beds. I decided to try Hebron Hostel, which ended up costing forty shekels a night but had clean and comfortable accommodations.

Hanging out with the other guests that evening, I met two women who worked in the West Bank city of Nablus. I knew Nablus was one of the biggest Palestinian cities and thought it’d be a good place to see on Friday as it lies right on the way from Jerusalem to Nazareth. I asked how to get there, and they told me I had to go through the city of Ramallah, which falls in line between Jerusalem and Nablus. Sounds like a plan.

I awoke early on Friday (10:30) and as my first mission, headed over to the Armenian part of town to visit the Jerusalem’s Armenian Museum. No success—the museum was closed for renovations and had no estimated reopening date. Oh well, might as well head to Ramallah then.

To get to Ramallah, one takes the Palestinian buses that leave outside Damascus gate of the Muslim Quarter, so I walked all the way back and located the correct bus. The buses are small, holding maybe two dozen people, and they’ll stop anywhere to let passengers on or off. We drove for a while, and I looked out the window until eventually we stopped and everyone got off, so I did too.

Upon exiting, I saw a small restaurant with a man making little “pita pizzas”—pita breads with cheese, mushrooms, and olives on top. I had seen these before but not tried them, and noticing that it was lunchtime, I walked over and purchased one. “I’ll heat it for you, ok?”

“Sure.” Big mistake. He popped it into the microwave for way too long before setting it down on a table in front of me, its cheese bubbling beneath the saran wrap that enveloped it and turning it into one oozing, pulsating package. I waited for it to cool and ate it, but I still found the thought of plastic melting into cheese unpleasant and won’t soon order another.

As I walked down the road, I realized that I never really had to go through any security to get into the West Bank this time, and I was confused. I asked a foreign-looking woman if I was really in Ramallah despite not going through security on the way in. “You are, and don’t worry; you will on the way out.” I looked forward to seeing if she was right.

Ramallah wasn’t too interesting, at least when I was there during the Friday midday call to prayer. All the Muslims do their thing where they shut down all the shops and restaurants and crowd into Mosques, so I walked around a fairly dead city. One interesting thing I noticed was the number of fake franchises. I first saw a “Stars and Bucks Café” and thought it was funny. Subsequently, I ran into both a “Kentucky Fried Chicken” and a “Kids 'R' Us” that were clearly not the real things. This was something new for me.

When I’d had enough of Ramallah, I started telling people that I wanted to go to Nablus and got them to point me in the direction of the bus station, and proceeding in this manner for a few minutes brought me to a large building with big yellow vans traveling in and out. This station was the first place that I ever had any trouble with an Arab. Here’s what happened.

I asked someone where the buses to Nablus left from, and he told me to take the elevator to the second floor. A kind man then saw me heading toward the elevator, which was tucked away out of sight, and he led me over and pushed the button for me.

I thanked him and entered when the door opened. He followed me in and stood half in the doorway, cornering me and at the same time preventing the door from closing. He then began saying a bunch of stuff in Arabic, getting progressively more aggressive, and he started reaching for my shorts. I semi-expected him to laugh and say “nah I’m just messing with you,” but he persisted.

Unsure of what to do, I yelled “YALLA!” at him (Arabic for “let’s go!”) and pushed him out of the way. He stood back as I turned the corner and took the stairs.

I was glad that I passed that challenge, but at the top of the first flight of stairs, I realized that the stairwell had no lights. After verifying the walls’ lack of switches and seeing that even my sharp night vision failed to penetrate the darkness, I decided that the previous moment’s experience should dissuade me from venturing into the strange building without the ability to see what waits a meter ahead of me. Fortunately, although I take pride in traveling light, Kyle Knoblock comes prepared. I retrieved a flashlight from my backpack, illuminated the stairwell, and pushed onward.

Climbing several more flights of stairs brought me at last to a door leading into a parking garage where Palestinian men and families clamored into and out of yellow vans. I said “Nablus” to a driver and he pointed to a vehicle. I got in.

The ride took us through scenic countryside, and I sat amused watching the passing fields, trees, mountains, and villages of the West Bank. Occasionally we stopped and dropped people off until the last couple exited at an intersection near a few small buildings. The driver looked back at me as if to ask what I was doing. “Nablus,” I told him, and he continued driving.

A couple minutes later when the density of buildings increased and the surroundings gained an urban feel, I saw that we had arrived. We pulled into a parking lot.

I knew the ride should cost around twenty shekels, but lacking change, I handed the driver a fifty. He thanked me and waited for me to leave. “Can I have my change?”

“What?” He pretended not to understand.

“I know it doesn’t cost fifty shekels.”

“Yes, fifty shekels.”

“I saw the people before me get out, and they only paid you fifteen!” We went back and forth for another minute. When he saw that I was not about to let him get away with overcharging me, he gave me twenty-five shekels back. I left to explore the city.

Nablus turned out to be a large city with a lot of life for a Friday afternoon. Buildings reached no more than five or ten stories into the sky, but there were tons of them, all white or beige and slightly rundown, their rooftops crowded with satellite dishes and water tanks. The whole city sat in a valley and baked in the afternoon sun.

One thing that I notice about myself is that upon seeing big rocks, towers, mountains, and the like, I feel an overwhelming desire to climb them. Normally I’m with people who don’t feel the same urge, so I have to resist. However, on this day I was alone. Thus, when after a few minutes of walking the streets I looked up into the surrounding hills, I immediately thought, “I want to be ON that.” I saw no reason why I couldn’t be, so I walked to the nearest edge of the city and began following the streets uphill.

Roads snaked upwards along ledges and past numerous houses and apartment buildings. Palestinian children played in the streets and watched me as I passed.

As the buildings fell behind me and the streets turned into paths, I followed one to its end and began climbing on my own. The terrain was rocky and steep, and the mostly-harmless grassy plants concealed occasional prickly ones. A few scrubby trees stood on top.

My only real worries were venomous snakes and spiders, the latter having given me some trouble in the past. Thus, I used the proven be-careful-and-watch-where-you’re-going method, and everything turned out alright.

Hiking onwards, I noticed that white, out-of-place rocks began lying in straight lines, piles about waist-high and toppling over. As I looked down on the ones beneath me, I saw to my amazement that they formed rectangles. I was hiking through ruins, ancient buildings that had sat on these hillsides since the days when man and dinosaur walked hand in hand. They now go unnoticed by the inhabitants of the city below. Examining the ground confirmed my suspicion: pieces of brown ceramic pottery lay in the soil. The ground also produced a few seashells, signs that these hills, like much of the surrounding area, had been underwater long before their human occupation.

When the top was in sight, I realized that an old, rusty, barbed wire fence along with some concrete barriers enclosed the entirety of it. I wondered what was inside. Not going to be stopped, I circumambulated the region until I found an open passage.

The summit evidently used to be more interesting than when I found it. I could tell that the fence once contained something important, but at present, only trees and cement blocks stood inside. I was alone.

Standing on a rock overlooking the sprawling Palestinian city, I listened as an echoing Arabic chant erupted at once and emanated from all of Nablus’s mosques, filling the valley with sound—time for afternoon prayer.

I walked to the other side of the hilltop and saw a road below that led up a nearby hill, its peak laced with cell towers. I decided to descend to the road and follow it up.

Half an hour later, I approached the top of the neighboring hill only to find a gate—an open one nonetheless—next to a warning sign and a fence guarded by several watchtowers. I had discovered a military base. There are indeed times when I decline opportunities to explore unknown places and sneak into areas where I shouldn’t be, and this was one of them. After surveying the area, I began to walk back down the road.

Not more than five minutes later, I saw a green army vehicle cruising up the road below. It slowed as it approached me and a soldier got out. “Blah blah blah blah blah?”

“English?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Well, I was in the city down there, and I hiked up here to see the view.”

“You were down THERE? The people is very bad. Where are you from?”

“I’m from the United States.” I showed the solider my passport and answered a bunch of questions about my trip through the West Bank and my work in Israel. He talked to the other soldiers in the jeep, made a phone call, confirmed that I had not entered or taken any photos of the base, and ten minutes later announced that I was free to go.

Seeing that the late-afternoon sun would set within a couple hours, I began to hurry down the mountain. I passed the barbed wire, climbed over the ruins, dodged the prickers, and eventually reached a cliff that I had climbed on the way up. I glanced around to find a better way down and saw an old stone mosque-looking building perched on the ledge in the distance. It looked worth checking out, so I jogged over.

When I reached the crumbling building, I examined the rough exterior and walked around to find that it lacked a wall and was quite open and empty. The dome on top and alter inside told me that it indeed was once an operating mosque. After exploring the rooms inside and peaking at a basement chamber and an area carved into the hillside, I decided that I really should try to get back to the city and find a bus to Nazareth.

As I emerged and began walking away, I heard voices behind me. I kept walking, slightly faster. Men started yelling in Arabic from what sounded like a hundred meters away; I don’t know what they said, but I figured it would be best not to acknowledge them. Confident that they wouldn’t deem me a non-Muslim as long as I didn’t speak, I continued until I knew I was a safe distance away and then looked back. Three men sat on top of the dome of the mosque I had just emerged from. More confused than anything, I scampered down a safe portion of cliff to a landing and from there made my way down to a road that took me back to the residential areas.

I followed the streets down the mountain and felt secure, finding myself again amongst children and families. Realizing that I didn’t know where the bus station was or even exactly how buses across the border worked (I had heard that they don’t go directly to Nazareth but instead to a city called Afula, slightly south of there but outside the West Bank), I grabbed a passing cab.

To my surprise, the driver spoke a bit of English, and when I told him I was from the United States, he gave me a friendly “welcome to Palestine!” I explained to him that I wanted to go to Afula and asked him how to get there. He responded that I’d have to cross the border at a city called Jenin (pronounced “Janine”) and said he’d take me there for ten shekels, which seemed too good to be true.

It was too good to be true. Fifteen minutes of driving brought us to a “bus station” (parking lot with some yellow vans in it), and he directed me to the van to Jenin. Whatever, he was a nice guy, and the taxi ride there was still much cheaper than one of the same distance in Tel Aviv, let alone the US, so I paid him and said goodbye.

I climbed into the indicated van and confirmed with the three passengers that it was indeed heading for Jenin. For some reason, we sat in the parked vehicle for forty minutes before leaving, but the other three didn’t say anything so neither did I. At last, the driver entered and we took off.

The short trip to Jenin passed uneventfully, and when we arrived, I paid and got out. “So, now I’m here,” I thought as I looked at the streets and buildings surrounding me. Wondering what to do next, I approached a circle of men sitting in front of a nearby shop. “Ingleezi,” I asked them, hoping that they spoke English. They all pointed to one man. “Do YOU speak English,” I asked, although the answer was fairly obvious.

I told him that I wanted to go to Afula and had heard that there was a border crossing nearby but that I didn’t know how to get there.

“You cannot go to the border now—it is dark! The border is closed,” he informed me.

“Oh… so, are there any good places to stay around here?”

The man consulted his friends and concluded that there was one hotel nearby, but he said it was expensive—on the order of forty or fifty dollars a night. I agreed that that was too much, and he went to talk to some Arab policemen sitting in their parked car. After a minute, he told me that they knew somewhere and to get in with them.

The last time this happened, I ended up in a Chinese jail, but somehow I felt that this would be different—there must be at least two thousand miles between Jenin and the nearest Chinese jail! I got in with the police and traveled around town for a bit. We ended up at a marketplace full of vendors closing up shop, and they pointed to a little alley running alongside it. I thanked them and left to see if we were really at a hotel.

An awning and a vine-covered lattice cloaked the passageway through which I walked. At the end, a staircase wound up the face of a building. I reached the top and entered to find a huge, open, nearly-empty tile-floored room with a kitchen in one corner and a woman at the stove. A man sat on the floor smoking and watching television. The woman smiled and welcomed me in.

Using the internationally-recognized hands-together-on-the-side-of-the-head pose, she asked me if I was looking for a place to sleep, and I enthusiastically confirmed that I was. She led me down a hall and using an old-fashioned skeleton key, unlocked a door to reveal a spacious room with two beds, a window overlooking the market, and a bathroom complete with a shower. I asked her “bikam,” how much? She answered “arbi’een” and I proudly held up four fingers to demonstrate that I understood (it happened to be close enough to the Hebrew word for forty). She nodded and I handed her the money. Ten dollars for a private double with a bathroom? Amazing.

I registered at the front desk (the kitchen counter), looked around the small place and determined that I was the only guest, and stepped outside onto the patio where I had entered. I noticed a spiral staircase going upwards and asked if I could climb it. The woman seemed to approve, and soon I was standing on the roof overlooking the small city as night fell upon it. Men still cleaned the market below, people filled the street, and the lights of a neighboring mosque’s tall minaret shed a green glow.

Having obtained lodging and stored all but my valuables in the room, my next goal was to find food. I took a photo of the front of the hotel (the marketplace and the awning) in case I needed help finding it later and set out to procure some supper.

I walked down the road a bit until three guys around my age came up and started speaking Arabic to me. I greeted them and asked, “Ingleezi?”

One of them responded that he did in fact speak English. His name was Zahir, and he said that he and his friends noticed me wandering around and hadn’t seen me in Jenin before. Evidently they don’t get many tourists there. I told them the story about why I came to Israel and why I came to the West Bank and what I’d been doing all day, and I mentioned that I was trying to locate a good place to eat.

They told me that they wanted to take me to their favorite spot, and I followed them on a winding route that led us to a busy restaurant. They said that the best thing there was the chicken shawarma (sliced meat cooked on a rotating spit), which sounded good to me. One of the guys went and did all the talking for me, and I watched as the owner prepared a large pita bread, known as a “laffa,” shaved off a bunch of meat, and rolled it all up with hummus and vegetables.

When I took out some cash to pay for it, Zahir told me not to worry about it and that it was all taken care of. I insisted that I had money and tried to hand it over, but nobody would take it. They then told me that I could stay and eat or else walk with them to go meet up with some friends. Of course, I chose the latter.

I ate my shawarma as we walked down the road. It was the best I had ever had.

On the way, I noticed that Zahir seemed to know everyone in town and greeted people as we passed. Occasionally we’d stop to talk briefly with a group, and Zahir would announce that I spoke English and was a visiting American, which never failed to please.

Eventually, some guys joined us, and we had seven or eight of us walking together. We started leaving the main part of town and heading towards the less densely settled outskirts. We stopped at a stand on the side of the road and purchased black coffee in little pink Dixie cups from an old man. They said it was the best coffee in Janine, and it was indeed pretty good. Again, nobody would accept my money.

At last, we reached an intersection where a road vanished off into the distance, surrounded by fields on either side. One corner boasted a bit of grass, a tree, and some rocks arranged roughly in a circle. “Sit,” said one of them happily. Realizing that we had reached our destination, I had a seat on one of the rocks and everyone followed suit.

The next couple of hours formed some of my favorite memories of the summer so far. The guys were all around twenty-two years old and had just completed their degrees at a handful of universities around the West Bank. At first, they rattled off various American bands and artists that they listen to and movies that they like, eager to make connections. We ended up talking about a wide range of topics, communicating in a mix of English, Hebrew, and Arabic, and I learned a lot. Discussing politics, they explained how they see themselves as Palestine, not as a part of Israel. Talking about college, they told me about their studies and social lives at school. I particularly enjoyed discussing girls with them and the conversation that ensued when one of them jokingly claimed that another had twenty girlfriends.

“Haha alright are you guys even allowed to have girlfriends,” I asked.

“Yes, of course we are!” they answered.

“Really, so do people have many relationships during high school in Palestine?”

“Well, we’re only allowed to have one girlfriend… then you have to marry her.”

I suspected as much. They also told me that they love American girls and the clothing that they wear. I asked if a girl could wear that sort of clothing in Jenin, and they told me that guys would like it but that society as a whole wouldn’t accept it.

While we talked, people came and went, including a few Palestinian police officers who were in their mid-twenties and knew a bunch of the guys. Lots of police seemed to be patrolling the area with huge guns and some of the thickest body armor I’ve seen. I asked why there were so many around; the answer had something to do with Hamas. At around midnight, we left the corner hangout spot and walked back into town.

Zahir asked where I was staying, and I showed him the photo I had taken. I told him I could probably find my way back ok, but he said that a few people were going that direction anyways and that they would accompany me to ensure that I made it back without trouble.

As I opened the door and entered my room, I found my belongs untouched. I unpacked on one of the beds. Then, I did something that I had not yet done on a weekend in Israel: I took a shower.

While the warm water poured from a pipe in the wall and fell to a drain in the floor, I thought about my good fortune and the hospitality shown to me in this small city whose existence I was unaware of that same afternoon and whose ground I had considered myself stranded on. I would visit again any time.

My sleep that night was interrupted briefly by the 4AM call to prayer broadcast by the neighboring mosque, and I awoke in the morning around 9:30 when the marketplace below grew busy. I had to check it out and spent a couple hours shopping and exploring before buying another shawarma for lunch. It cost only ten shekels, less than half of what it would in Tel Aviv.

A bit before noon, I bid farewell to Jenin and caught a taxi to the border, where I experienced the most intense border crossing of my life. Picture a large warehouse containing a maze of uncovered rooms with eight-foot high walls so that you can look up and see walkways overhead where armed soldiers patrol. Each little room has two or three doors, a bench, and above it a camera, speaker, and microphone. An unseen being watches your every move, and a voice guides you through the complex, instructing you where to wait, which door to open, and which room to enter.

The border crossing took nearly an hour, which seemed a product of the rarity of a tourist wandering around in that part of the country. It was not crowded at all; I think I was the only one there most of the time, but I couldn’t be sure since the setup prevented me from seeing other people. The voice led me through a series of seven small waiting rooms, telling me when to pass from one to the next. I could hear locks click automatically each time. At one point, it instructed me: “open the door to your left—yes that one. Now, walk in. Do you see the door in front of you? Ok, open it and enter the room. Now place your backpack on the ground and unzip each compartment. Leave it there and go back two rooms.” I was allowed to return ten minutes later to find my belongings spread around the room and was told to repack them.

The last step included interrogation—three guards simultaneously questioning me about everything from specific tourist sites I had seen in Jerusalem to the name of the professor I worked for to what I planned to do that evening. In the end, I passed and the guards permitted me to leave.

The situation on the other side restricted passage to Afula as much as the crossing itself. I exited to find a few Palestinian families seated at picnic tables and a large parking lot. There was no bus stop. I saw a taxi parked in the distance; it was empty. Every few minutes a family would trickle out of the crossing and head for the parking lot, and I asked a few if they were going to Afula. No success.

The sun grew hot, so I returned to the shaded picnic tables. I asked a group of men there if they spoke English. They didn’t, but they seemed to understand Hebrew, so I explained that I wanted to go to Afula and that I needed a bus or taxi and that there weren’t any there. A voice from behind me responded in English. I turned to find a short headscarf-clad Muslim girl that I had previously failed to notice. She told me that she and her mother were actually waiting for a taxi and that they could drop me off in Afula on their way.

We talked for a bit, and a few minutes passed before a taxi pulled into the lot. As we got in, I asked where the two of them were headed, and the girl told me that they were actually going to visit relatives in Nazareth.

“Nazareth!?! You know, I think I’ll just go with you all the way there. I don’t need to go to Afula.”

The taxi dropped us off in Nazareth just minutes away from the site I had been seeking all weekend: the Basilica of the Annunciation. The colossal church marks the spot where the angel Gabriel supposedly revealed to Mary that God had knocked her up. It is the largest church in the Middle East.

The Basilica of the Annunciation was indeed huge and beautiful, but it could not compare to the journey there. I looked around, watched part of a Spanish mass, and left around 3PM.

Next, I wanted to visit a place called Nazareth Village, a tourist site that claims to reconstruct the Nazareth of two thousand years ago and that Lonely Planet purports to be “well done and worth a stop.”

I looked at my map and saw roughly how to get there, but of course many streets were unmarked. After walking for a bit, I stopped in a store to ask for directions. “Oh, he can take you there,” the owner said, referring to one of his workers. A few minutes later, we were in the car together.

After driving for a bit, the guy said to me, “You want big church, right?”

“No,” I told him, “I already saw the big church. I want Nazareth Village.” Somehow, the owner had failed to communicate to him where I wanted to go, and this man barely spoke English. I knew enough Hebrew to say everything to him, but I did not know the most important part: the Hebrew name for Nazareth Village. He drove me back to the Basilica of the Annunciation, and when I reaffirmed that I did not want to go there, he stopped at a store to ask for directions. In the end, we made it to Nazareth Village around 4:00.

I went inside to the ticket counter. The man looked confused. “I’d like one ticket,” I said.

“No, we are closed for today,” he replied.

“What? You don’t close until five.”

“Yes, but we have no more tours. You can visit the gift shop if you like.” I entered the tacky, overpriced store and immediately noticed an open door leading outside that bore the label “Builder’s Walk.” I had no idea what it meant but wanted to find out.

In retrospect, the door was the park’s exit, where groups finish the tour and are forced into the gift shop. At the time, I found myself outside alone in Nazareth Village, so I went on my own tour. The buildings and farms looked authentic and were well recreated, but I’m sure a tour guide and actors populating the village would have improved the experience. I suppose my unauthorized trip was worth the zero-shekel price tag, however. I avoided a guard and escaped undetected.

Ready for the weekend to come to an end, I found a van heading back to Tel Aviv and a bus home from there. I arrived at my apartment around 9PM, the earliest yet. Although the past two days had been long, tiring, and very eventful, I returned well-rested and decently clean for the first time. Life just keeps getting better.