We arrived in Tel Aviv two days ago and went straight to the taxi service to Jerusalem. When I asked the driver to take us to Qalandiya Checkpoint, he looked at me quizzically and repeated, “Qalandiya?”

“Yes, that’s right, Qalandiya.” I said.

“Where you go?”

“Ramallah.”

“I no take you to Qalandiya. We go to Damascus Gate, then you take taxi Arabic to Qalandiya.”

The driver was Israeli. Maybe he wanted nothing to do with being near Qalandiya Checkpoint, which is where you cross into the West Bank, into Palestinian territory.

So, we did what he said and took the taxi van to Damascus Gate where we would find an Arab driver to take us the rest of the way to Qalandiya.

Our cab driver from Damascus Gate to Qalandiya was an Arab-Israeli, a Palestinian who was one of the “Arab 48”. An “Arab 48” is one of the Palestinians who were allowed to remain in Israel following the 1948 War. They were the fortunate ones. The rest of the Palestinians (approximately 780,000) lost their homes to the Israelis and became refugees.

Our Palestinian driver drove us to Qalandiya. It was night. Linda’s mother said that we might have problems getting across the checkpoint because we were foreigners.

“It just depends on the soldier,” she said when we spoke with her on the phone the day before we left. “Just try to blend in with everybody else.”

I explained to her that as a big white guy, “blending in” could pose a challenge for me—not to mention that the girls with their blonde hair would likely not blend in as well.

We would just have to go for it and hope for the best.

We passed through the checkpoint without a problem. The driver’s car had a yellow license plate, which is the color of Israeli plates. The Palestinian cars have either green or white plates. Cars with yellow plates can often cross into the West Bank without stopping. I slouched down in my seat and turned my face away from the soldier seated in the booth, but at the last second as we eased to a stop then began accelerating again, I glanced over at the soldier. She was reading a newspaper and I could see her hand finishing off the waive that told the driver to move along. I also saw other soldiers busy searching Palestinian cars that were coming the other way into Israel. The cars were in a long queue

“See how long this?” the driver said to me, waiving his hand over at the queue of waiting cars.

“Maybe it take two, maybe three hour to get across,” he said. “Sometimes longer, maybe being four or six hour.”

In a car, you can tell when you’ve left Israel and entered Palestinian territory. The ride suddenly becomes much bumpier because of the poorer conditions of the roads. I think this has less to do with the Palestinians preferring to have bad roads and more to do with the fact that they have no money to fix the roads.

The driver took us directly to the hotel in Ramallah that Linda’s uncle, Na’eel, had arranged for us to stay at.

[For those of you who do not already know, Linda is a Palestinian who lived with our family in Oregon last year. We were going to the West Bank to visit her family. We were also going with a bag full of camera equipment with the intention of interviewing Palestinians and Israelis about the conflict. Kacey had been awarded a teaching grant to go do this. With our two young daughters in-tow, we would travel to the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Israel.]

It was 9:00 p.m. From door to door, we had been traveling for over 30 hours straight. Na’eel took us to dinner with his family. We ate a feast of hummous, babaganoosh, salata lamb, chicken and kebab. After dinner, Na’eel took us all over Ramallah, showing us where Abbas lived as well as the palatial mansions of the wealthy who lived in the hills overlooking Ramallah. Above those, on the highest point around the city, was a Jewish settlement overlooking everything. It was easy to identify because of the tall communications towers that rose up from the hills like spikes.

“This house belonging to American citizen,” Na’eel explained as we went by a three-story mansion with nobody home. “This one American citizen too.” He made a point of pointing out how many of the homes in Ramallah were owned by American citizens.

“Why are so many of the homes owned by Americans?” I asked.

“These are the Palestinians who left during the first Intifada,” he said. The first Intifada began in 1987 and lasted until 1995. Many Palestinians left the country. Many others stayed and died. Of those that left, many of them went to the U.S., became U.S. citizens and prospered. After the Intifada was over, they came back to the West Bank, started businesses and families and built large homes. It was a prosperous time and the future looked brighter than it had for some time. Then the second Intifada started in 2000 and everything began going to hell again. Many left and the homes we drove past were dark and empty.

Back in downtown Ramallah, the streets were crowded with shabab (young men) and loud with the honking of horns as taxis, cars, buses and vans did a bumper to bumper dance in which I counted, at a minimum, half a dozen near collisions. Or so it seemed like that to me. For Na’eel, it was just another day of driving in Ramallah. At one point, we were right next to a jeep full of Palestinian with machine guns bouncing up and down as we went through the pot-holed streets.

“Um, who are those guys?” I asked Na’eel, partly out of curiosity and partly because I wanted to bring to, which would perhaps prompt him to take evasive action.

“Those are the police,” he said matter-of-factly and kept the car steady driving along side the jeep. I hoped that the policemen all had the safeties on their machine guns flipped on.

We returned to the hotel. The girls all went to sleep. I couldn’t sleep and went down to the lobby to use their wireless Internet connection to check my email and to place some phone calls to America. As I sat there in a hotel in Ramallah, thousands of miles from home, it felt strange to be so easily and completely connected to that world. Except for the time zone difference, it didn’t really seem to matter that I was in a hotel in Ramallah. I could have been anywhere. I couldn’t help but think how much the world had shrunk since the last time I was in the Middle East in the early 1990s. Back then, it was like I’d fallen off the ends of the earth and no one knew how I was doing or what I had been up to until they received a letter or a postcard. There was time lapse and the distance made a difference. Now there was only time zones and the distance made no difference whatsoever. The physical me was far away, while the virtual me was still completely connected and in the same place I’d left him.