You cannot drown in the Dead Sea.

Well, I suppose you could if you were really desperate. But I don’t recommend it. The water is too buoyant because of all the salt. The water is nasty too. Everything dies in this sea and turns to black sludge at the bottom that could be mistaken for something else. Visitors scoop up handfuls of this black crap and rub it on their bodies and faces.

Apparently this is good for you and has all sorts of healing effects. I rubbed my body with this black goo and must admit that it did make me feel different. I wouldn’t say that it made me feel ten years younger or 30 pounds lighter. For sure, I felt much dirtier than before application of said goo. I felt like I needed a shower. The smell made me feel like puking. Perhaps this is medicinal.

If you can’t make it to the Dead Sea, you can purchase this stinky black goo for exorbitant prices from online stores and select spas all over the world. But if you go to the Dead Sea, you go with a feeling of obligation to float in the salty water and bath your body in the black mud.

Our youngest daughter, Emma, was not so easily convinced. At six-years-old, she was wary of entering a sea called the “Dead Sea” because it must mean that people die there. After much parental coaxing, she took a couple of cautious steps into the water, but immediately retreated to the shore.

“I can feel the bones of the dead people,” she cried.

“Those aren’t bones, they’re rocks,” her mother said. “Come on silly.”

Emma walked out cautiously again to her mother’s waiting arms. While she overcame the imaginary bones beneath her feet, she could not withstand the very real burning that the salt water causes when it opens any scrape, cut or other body cavity opening.

I can attest to this. My ass was on fire as I floated in the Dead. It’s like I’d just been administered an enema of habañeros sauce.

After repeating “no pain, no gain” for a couple of minutes, I realized that I was getting no gain from the pain and should get my ass out of the warm salty water and to a cold shower.

Here’s a bit of travel advice: consult your guide book before traveling anywhere. This will likely save you time and headache. We did not do this before traveling to Jordan and had a hellish day because of it.

We left Ramallah at 9:00 a.m. to go to the Allenby bridge border crossing. Our cab driver got lost in the desert and had to make a cell phone call back to the taxi office to figure out where he needed to turn to get to the Allenby bridge. When we finally arrived to Allenby at around 10 a.m., there was a long queue of buses, micro-buses and cabs. Our driver could not take us through the Israeli checkpoint there to the Jordanian border. We had to switch to an Arab-Israeli micro-bus.

We sat in the micro-bus and waited for our turn to cross.

We sat and waited for our turn.

We sat and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

After about an hour, it was clear that our line wasn’t moving. What was clear, however, is that Israeli micro-buses kept arriving and being called right to the front of the line. I was seated next to Samir who was a Palestinian-American from Chicago. He was waiting there to take his sick mother, who was in the cab in front of our micro-bus, to Amman to be treated for a recent stroke she had.

Samir said that they’d been there since 7:00 a.m.

“They have a special arrangement,” he said, pointing over to the yellow and white Israeli micro-buses that passed us on the right.

Kacey, the girls and I got out and walked up to the checkpoint where the soldiers were.

“Why aren’t we moving?” Kacey asked one of the soldiers.

“You should take a taxi.”

“We are in a taxi,” Kacey said. “We have small children and there are other children on our bus. It’s hot and they’re uncomfortable. You need to move us across.”

“I’m sorry,” the soldier said. “There’s nothing I can do.”

Kacey was not convinced and persisted.

“Yes there is,” she said. “You are making a choice to allow this line through,” she said pointing to the queue of Israeli micro-buses, “and not these,” pointing now to the Palestinian line.

She was right. You could tell the soldier was slightly embarrassed by our observation of what was going on at Allenby.

“There’s nothing I can do,” he said again, then turned and left.

We went back to the bus.

Some of the Palestinian drivers were becoming agitated and were arguing with the main guy who was standing there deciding who would go next.

We waited. The girls were hungry. The Palestinian families that we were on the bus with shared the bread and cheese they had brought with them for the long wait they knew they’d have.

Another half hour passed. It was 11:00 a.m. If we didn’t get to the other side before noon. Linda, who left at 5:00 a.m. in the morning, would leave without us. That’s assuming that she wasn’t on one of the big buses queued on our left bringing the Palestinians who were brought over from the Jericho processing area. Because Linda was a West Bank Palestinian, she had to go through a different area before coming to Allenby. The Palestinians on the micro-bus with us were Arab-Israelis, probably from the Arab quarter of Jerusalem. Linda left at 5:00 hoping that would give her enough lead time to meet with us on the other side.

Kacey got out and went back up to the checkpoint to talk to the soldiers. I followed a bit later to make sure she didn’t get in an argument with the soldiers, an event that probably wouldn’t improve our situation.

As I walked up to the checkpoint, I passed the Palestinian drivers who were still standing out in the sun arguing with the head guy. It seemed as though a riot was about to start. Kacey was talking to a different soldier this time. I hung back because the soldier was a small guy and I didn’t want him to think I was coming up to intimidate him in some way. I could tell from Kacey’s hand motions and pointing that she was remaining calm during her discussion. After a bit, she turned and came back toward the buses.

“What did he say?”

“He said that the lines are treated equally,” she said. “I told him that they weren’t and it was obvious that they were giving preferential treatment to the Israeli micro-buses. He said he’d get us moving. I think he will.”

As we passed the cab at the front of the Palestinian queue, the head guy called it forward. The cab driver gave us a thumbs up as if knowing that Kacey’s conversation with the soldier broke the dead-lock on our line.

They moved some more taxis and micro-buses through. They even moved the some of the big busses filled with other Palestinians who had come over from the processing area in Jericho. Perhaps Linda was on one of those buses. We didn’t know.

Finally, at around 11:30 a.m., it was our turn. We pulled up to the gate. They checked under the micro-bus with a mirror. Then a soldier boarded and asked for passports.

When he got to us, he asked if we had a Jordanian visa.

“No, we’ll get them at the entry point,” Kacey said.

He told us to wait a minute and left the bus with our passports.

A few minutes later the head guy came on board and called me forward to the door.

“I must advise you,” he said, “that you cannot get a Jordanian visa at this crossing.”

“What?” I said. I couldn’t believe I was hearing this.

Kacey came to the door too.

I gave her the bad news.

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“You can try,” the head guy said, “But I guarantee they won’t give you one. Not from this crossing. Then you will have paid the $150 exit tax for nothing.”

“What? A hundred and fifty bucks to leave Israel?”

“Yes. You need to go to the Sheik Hussein crossing north of here.

“How far is that?”

“About an hour, maybe hour and a half.”

Shit.

Our driver, who didn’t speak any English, was getting antsy. He wanted to get his passengers across and wanted us to either stay or go.

“It’s your decision,” the head guy said.

Kacey was crying.

I was pissed.

The girls sat in the back of the micro-bus oblivious to their parents blunder.

“I think we have to get out and go to Sheik Hussein.”

We got the girls off and unloaded all our bags right there at the checkpoint.

The driver spoke with the head guy who explained our predicament.

The driver told us to wait right here and that he would pick us up on the way back from the border crossing then take us to Sheik Hussein.

We really had no choice. We were stuck out in the desert with no other options.

We sat and waited.

The head guy apologized for our situation and offered us water.

“It’s all our fault,” I told him. While we had been waiting there, we read in our guidebook about crossing into Jordan. Out situation was right there in black and white:

“Americans need a visa to enter the country [Jordan], which can be bought on the spot everywhere except at the Allenby Bridge crossing.”

I felt as though Kacey and I should be standing side-by-side wearing matching T-shirts that said: I’M WITH STUPID→

What was already going to be a long trip had just become a lot longer. And a lot more expensive too.

The driver returned. We loaded our baggage back up and began the journey north to Sheik Hussein, which took about an hour and a half.

We had another problem too. We didn’t have enough sheckels to pay the driver and would need to cash some more travelers checks.

The driver said that was no problem and we’d figure it out at Sheik Hussein.

The drive to Sheik Hussein was pleasant. We chatted with our driver about his family and the landscape. We were passing through a large swath of land in the West Bank that West Bank Palestinians were not allowed to enter. If you find that ironic, that’s because it is. A large portion of the West Bank is closed to West Bank Palestinians, even those who have land there like Linda’s father. This area is rich in agriculture and even though it is technically Palestinian territory, there are numerous Israeli settlements, which are easy to spot because they are new and beautiful and stand out amongst the squalid tent homes of the Bedouins farming small patches of land and herding goats. There’s other indicators too such as all the road signs being in Hebrew and the Israeli flag popping up here and there along the road to Sheik Hussein. The crossing is so far north that we actually left the West Bank and entered Israel proper up by the southern end of the Sea of Galilee. Unfortunately, we would have to travel this same distance all the way south on the Jordanian side of the border to get to Amman. All in all, I calculated that our blunder would cost us 6 hours.

The checkpoint at Sheik Hussein was staffed by young Israelis in white polo shirts. They carried only radios and no machine guns. Our driver explained our situation to the guy at the checkpoint.

“You have no sheckels to pay?” he asked, looking at us as though we were wearing matching T-shirts that said: I’M WITH STUPID→

“Yes, that is correct. We have travelers’ checks and need to change money.”

“Wait here,” he said, stepping off the micro-bus and shaking his head.

He picked up the phone at the checkpoint and made a phone call. A bit later he came on the bus and told the driver he’d let him through to the terminal, but only for a little bit while we changed money.

The driver thanked him. Clearly, this was not normal, but our stupidity had created an abnormality, a glitch in the Matrix of daily life Arab and Israeli relations.

We changed money and paid our driver. Then began the process of exiting Israel. After we were done with that, we went outside to wait for the bus that would take us and the other people there across the Jordan River and to the Jordanian processing center.

The bus finally arrived and took us all across.

We got our visas on the Jordanian side. Because we were traveling to Syria, the passport agent put our stamps on a separate piece of paper as had the Israelis when we arrived at Tel Aviv. Syria does not recognize Israel as a sovereign nation. If you have an Israeli stamp in your passport or a point of entry stamp into Jordan that made it obvious you had crossed over from Israel, the Syrians would deny you entry. The irony of this was not lost on me: denying entry to Syria because you had an Israeli stamp or another country visa indicating you had come from Israel was more of a recognition of Israel than a denial of its existence.
Once we got our visas and went through the inspections, we got a service taxi for the long drive to Amman.

We didn’t arrive until 6:00 p.m. We were hot, tired and hungry. We were frustrated too. Linda had given Kacey directions to her parent’s apartment in Amman, but the driver had problems finding it. He drove around asking people if they knew of such and such market and school that the apartment was near to. No one seemed to know. Kacey suggested that the driver call Linda at the apartment—assuming she had arrived already.

“But I have the keys to the apartment in my bag,” I said. “So even if she was here already, how would she get into the flat?”

“Maybe her aunt has a key and let her in,” Kacey said. Linda’s aunt and uncle lived downstairs in the same apartment building.

The driver called. Linda answered. She gave him directions and seemed quite confident that we were very close to the apartment and he’d get us there no problem.

Ten minutes later, we were driving around lost in the same neighborhoods we had driven through earlier. The driver tried calling Linda again, but she didn’t answer.

“She’s probably outside looking for us,” I said.

I just wanted to get out of the cab. I was sick of cab. I was sick of driving around all day.

One of the landmarks Linda had given was Jabri Restaurant. We had passed by it several times during our meandering drive through the neighborhoods.

“Let’s just get out at Jabri,” I said. “We’ll wait here and keep trying to call Linda until she goes back inside. Then we’ll have her come get us and take us to the apartment.”

“Okay,” Kacey said. “How do we say that to the driver in Arabic?”

I was tired and frustrated and really wanted out of the cab. This somehow dramatically improved my fluency in Arabic. I told the driver to take us to Jabri and we’d wait there for our friend.

We unloaded all our bags onto the sidewalk, paid the driver, then just sat for a bit before going in search of a telephone to call Linda at the apartment.

While we were sitting there, I noticed that there was a small sign on the road that said Jabri in Arabic with an arrow pointing down the road.

“Hey, look at that sign,” I said to Kacey. “It says Jabri too. Maybe there’s two or something.”

I walked down the road to check and as I was walking I saw Linda coming the other way.

Indeed there were two parts to Jabri: the main banquet part and the smaller restaurant down the street. Our driver had been driving around and around the wrong area.

We grabbed another cab and loaded up our bags for the short trip to the apartment.

It had been a long trip and I was tired and frustrated until Linda said she had just gotten there too. She had left Ramallah four hours before us. And while she had gone a much shorter distance than we had, her overall travel time was much more because she was a Palestinian. So who was I to complain? Who was I to complain?

On Tuesday, we traveled to Bethlehem to visit the Church of the Nativity and see the birthplace of Jesus. Bethlehem is not far from Ramallah, but it took an hour to get there, weaving through the back roads and villages in order to avoid the main checkpoints along the way. We did get stuck at a tiyar for about 20 minutes. Tiyar is the Arabic word for a temporary checkpoint. The permanent ones are called masoob. If you’re lucky, you only have to go through a masoob to get to where you are going. But usually, you’ll hit a tiyar or two along the way.

As we waited at the tiyar, I asked our driver, Ahmed, if it was like this most days.

“Yes, most days,” he said. Ahmed was missing fingers from his stay in an Israeli prison some years ago.

When we finally got to Bethlehem, we met up with a tour guide that one of Linda’s friends had arranged for us.

He spoke English and gave us a great tour of the church.

There were very few other tourist, and our guide told us that tourism had plummeted since the Israeli military invaded Bethlehem and the entire city was locked down with Palestinian militants trapped inside the church. Some of the windows in the main sanctuary were still broken from gunfire.

The place were Jesus was born is literally underneath the church. You go down some stairs into a crepuscular, cave-like room. The birthplace is surrounded by candles and icons. A star in the floor marks the supposed exact spot where Jesus spilled out of Mary’s womb. I didn’t get a very good view of it because there was another group that came down with us that had some very devout Christians in it who were compelled to kneel down and kiss the star again and again. While said ground kissing may have been spiritually cleansing, it was far from sanitary. Just to the right of the birthplace and down some more steps is the manager.

Unfortunately, because we left in the early afternoon and it had taken so long to get to Bethlehem from Ramallah, we only had time to see the Church of Nativity. We left to head back across the main checkpoint through the wall the Israelis are building. Here there were x-ray machines and metal detectors, similar to an airport. [For more information about the wall, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_West_Bank_barrier ]

“Are we getting on an airplane?” Emma asked.

“No this is just a checkpoint.”

“Oh, it’s like an airport.”

Through the checkpoint you enter the Arab quarter of Jerusalem. From there we got on a micro-bus back to Ramallah, through narrow and winding pot-holed streets the went right along the wall until you reach Qalandiya and cross back into Ramallah.

This is Huwara, hot and cruel, the first of several checkpoints on the way from Nablus to Ramallah. We wait with several hundred Palestinians under a currogated roof. There are full-height metal turnstiles in front of us and on the other side of those turnstiles are Israeli soldiers with machine guns.

Nothing is moving; not even the air.

We’re told that the soldiers are cranky this morning at Huwara and things are moving slowly today as they do most days here.

I’d be cranky too if I were an Israeli soldier. They’re dressed in dark green with heavy body armor on. They wear big helmets on their heads. It’s hot and there’s all these Palestinians around them who are hot and tired of waiting, agitated and crammed like cattle into the waiting area.

Thousands of Palestinians have to pass through Huwara every day. We wait along with everybody else. It’s mostly men here waiting; some women and children too. The men tell us to move forward to another line, a “special” line that has a gate along the side. We’re ajnabi (foreigners) and will receive special treatment.

We work our way up to the gate. The soldier there lets two other people through then closes the gate and wraps a heavy metal chain across the top. We’ll need to wait for him to return.

All the soldiers here are in their early to mid 20s. There are males and females but with all the heavy gear on the only way you can tell the difference is that the women have hair spilling out the back of their helmets.

We wait.

They begin allowing people queued up in the line next to use through the metal turnstile. They go through one by one, stopping at the booth with soldiers in it on the other side. They hand over their Palestinian ID and any items they may be carrying. They pull up their shirts. They pull up their pant legs. While all this is happening another soldier standing off just to the side is pointing a machine gun at them.

I want to take photos of all this, but don’t dare take my camera out here at Huwara.

We stand and watch Palestinians going through the checkpoint one at a time. I’m timing them. It takes an average of two minutes per person. One is turned away, comes back through and begins to head back toward Nablus.

An old man makes his way to the front and walks up to one of the turnstiles that isn’t in use. He begins to try and go through but he’s turning the turnstile toward him as if pulling open a door. The soldier on the other side pointing his machine gun at people as they come through begins shouting “No, no, no,” to him in Arabic. The old man seems lost and confused by the turnstile door that keeps closing the path through each time he tries to open it by pulling it toward him. The other Palestinian men in line pull him away and bring him over to the turnstile that is in use. They tell him to go next. He begins pulling the turnstile bars toward him just as he’d done on the other one and seems just as confused by the way this one keeps closing on him too. The younger men help him through. He shuffles forward, seemingly oblivious to the soldiers. They have to physically make him stop. He seems startled and confused by their sudden appearance. They check his ID, then he shuffles on and out into the sun on the other side of Huwara.

We wait. Abu Majdi dropped us off at Huwara a half hour ago. It is now mid-morning and getting hotter by the minute.

The soldier working the side gate returns. A Palestinian man and his daughter are in front of us. He lets the daughter through but tells the man he has to go to the back of the line that is going through the turnstile. He says he needs to accompany his daughter. The soldier tells him to go to the back of the line. The men at the front of the line for the turnstiles tell him to come over and go in front of them. He begins to come over, but the soldier tells him that he can’t do that, even if the others will let him. The soldier tells him again to go to the back of the line. The man looks very frustrated and turns with his head down and begins walking slowly to the back of the line. I do a head count. There are about 60 people in that line. If the current average of 1 person per 2 minutes keeps up, he’s looking at a 2-hour wait. And that’s his best case scenario.

We’re next.

The soldier asks me where I’m going in Arabic.

“What?” I say to him in English.

“Who are you?” he asks in English.

“My name is Scott,” I say.

“You are American?”

“Yes.”

I hand him my passport along with Kacey’s and girls’ passports.

“This is your family?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing here?”

“We went to Nablus.”

“You shouldn’t be here. It’s dangerous.”

By “here” he means the Palestinian terretories.

I just nod my head. I agree with him. It is dangerous. However, based on my experience in Nablus the past couple of days, my view of what the source of danger in Nablus is probably very different from his.

“Weren’t you scared in Nablus?” he asks.

“A little bit,” I say, remembering the other night when you could hear the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) invasion going on in Askar and wondering if they would come into the city center.

“I recommend you don’t go into the Palestinian territories. It’s dangerous and once you go in we cannot guarantee your safety.”

Cannot guarantee your safety? I nod my head again in agreement. He’s absolutely right. Nobody’s safety is guaranteed in Nablus, especially when the IDF invades and starts shooting up the town.

I want to tell him how I think he can guarantee my safety: tear down this checkpoint and all the other checkpoints between Palestinian cities and towns in the West Bank. Stop invading Nablus and other cities in the middle of the night. Stop preventing the Palestinian people from moving between their own towns and cities. Stop disrupting their education. Stop strangling their economy. Stop making them live every day in fear. Just stop all of it and get out and return to Israel to patrol and protect your borders just like every other country in the world. Do this and I guarantee that my safety and the safety of millions of Palestinians and Isrealis will increase 10 fold. This checkpoint, this hell called Huwara inside of Palestinian territory will not stop one suicide bomber from entering Israel. But through this daily humiliation and overbearing occupation, there is one thing here at Huwara that I am certain of: all of this will only help create the hatred that opens the door to the dark path that leads to desperate and disastrous actions.

But I don’t say anything to him. I just remain silent as he hands our passports back to me and tells me to move on through to the other side and not return to the Palestinian territories. He’s the one who calls the shots here at Huwara. He’s the one in control, the one who tells me what to do and where to go or not go. And as I walk along the chain-link fence and concrete barriers—an American in Palestine who has known nothing his entire life but the freedom to go wherever he wanted to go in his own country—I feel for a fleeting moment what it must be like to be a Palestinian.

We wait now on the other side among the fleet of taxis waiting to take those who got across to Ramallah. Everybody is just waiting. We’re waiting for Linda, who was right behind us, but she does not show. We go try and find our luggage, which had been taken across the checkpoint after being X-rayed by the IDF on the other side. I don’t see our luggage, so I stop and ask a man making coffee in a dilapidated and partially covered wagon if he knows where the porters drop off the bags. He says somewhere over here, waiving his hand along the rows of taxis waiting for a fare. He asks if we need a taxi. I tell him we’re waiting for a friend of ours to cross the checkpoint. He asks were I’m from. I tell him. He asks if I can arrange an American wife for him so that he can have dual citizenship. I laugh and tell him the bad news. He offers me coffee and refuses to take any money from me for it.

We wait.

I walk back up the row of taxis, back toward the checkpoint. There is no sign of Linda. There is no sign of our luggage. I stop and talk with one of the guys working at the covered stands selling drinks and food. While I’m asking him where we might find our bags, I see that they are right there in the stall behind him so I go and get Kacey and the girls.

We continue waiting for Linda. She should be here by now. Something has gone wrong. Perhaps the soldier figured she was with us and sent her packing back to Nablus just because she was friends with Americans. We don’t know and we can’t go back now and find out without probably stiring up more trouble. So we do the only thing you can do at Huwara: we wait.

Twenty minutes later Linda emerges from the checkpoint. She’s flustered and frustrated. Apparently, the soldier closed the side gate again right after we went through. She told him she needed to go with us. He wouldn’t let her through. She yelled at him that she had a British passport. After Linda had some more verbal volleys with the soldier in charge, all the young Palestinian men were yelling together for them to let her through. This made the soldiers nervous and when they couldn’t get everyone to calm and quite down, they let her through the side gate and sent her on her way.

Today has been a long day. I had gone to bed at around midnight, but was awoken at 2 a.m. by the sound of heavy gunfire just to the south. Between booms you could here the motor of a tank humming. I laid awake wondering if the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) was invading the city. The gunfire lasted for about a half hour, then everything was silent again and I feel back into a light sleep until the call to prayer at 4:00 a.m.

In the morning, I asked Majdi what he thought the gunfire was all about.

“Probably they [IDF] were trying to capture somebody.”

I asked if maybe we shouldn’t listen to the news to see what it was about.

He switched on the radio.

“There probably won’t be anything about it,” he said. “It was small. This happens most every night. But maybe there is something.”

There wasn’t.

We left the house at 7:00 a.m. Majdi was taking Kacey and I to Askar and Balata, which are two of the half dozen refugee camps located on the outskirts of Nablus.

We drove through Askar. Majdi was looking for someone he knew that we could perhaps interview. Kacey filmed while I took pictures. Najar began as a tent camp for refugees of the 1948 War. During the ensuing decades, the tent camps were transformed into densely packed neighborhoods of cement buildings and narrow streets. These are the poorest areas in Nablus and the poverty is stark as is the ongoing destruction from IDF invasions.

“Probably what you heard last night was something happening here.”

We stopped and Majdi talked to a man he knew. Majdi explained to him our project, but he declined to be interviewed.

We moved on to Balata, where we stopped at the UN station. Majdi went inside and talked to the people there. They said there was no one to talk to until 12:00 if we wanted to come back then.

We left Balata and went back toward the house. On the way, we passed a prison that had been bombed by the IDF during an invasion in 2002. I asked Majdi to pull the car over so I could take a picture of the prison. He said he would take us up onto the hillside where the view was better. We stopped up on the hillside not far from Majdi house. While we taking pictures a man called out to Majdi from his balcony. He invited us to come have coffee with him, which we did. Kacey interviewed the man and his grandfather. We also interviewed a man and his wife who lived with their two children in the flat upstairs.

We got back to the house around 9:00 a.m., downloaded pictures and video then headed to the offices of Amideast, which is where Linda’s sister, Saleena, teaches English. Kacey interviewed teachers and students for about an hour and a half. After that, we took a cab to Najah University where we met with the Head of the English Department. He was kind and spoke with us, but did not want to be filmed. He said that the checkpoints were a big disruption to education. Students traveling from outside Nablus often couldn’t make it to class because of delays at checkpoints. IDF checkpoints are located throughout the West Bank. Essentially, every town is cut off from the other by a checkpoint. Palestinians cannot move freely between towns in the West Bank. While this has an impact on education, it also has an impact on the economy and on healthcare.

We then met with the Public Relations Director. He told us that two Palestinian students who had been in Israeli prisons were going to speak to a visiting delegation from Scotland. We asked if we could film their talk. He said he would check and that he’d let us know at the beginning if it was alright to film them. It was.

We left the university, returned to the house for dinner, which is traditionally around 3:00 here. After dinner, we downloaded more pictures and video footage, then took a much-needed nap.

This evening we went to Majdi’s shop to interview more people. We interviewed several people, one of whom was old enough to remember his entire family fleeing Jaffa in 1948. One of the other interviews was 25 and paralyzed from the waist down. He repaired cell phones in Majdi’s shop. He had been paralyzed two years ago when an IDF sniper bullet entered his shoulder and lodged in his spine. He was sitting in his living room having tea with his mother when he was shot.

He was an apprentice furniture maker when he was shot and paralyzed.

“I ask God,” he said, “why does this happen to me? Then I realize it is the will of God and I would need to do something different. So I go to school and learn how to repair cell phones.”

It is now after midnight. We are watching the local news, which is giving live coverage of an IDF invasion of Askar refugee camp where we visited in the morning. They are also showing footage from Gaza where a 6-year-old girl was killed when her home was blasted during shelling in Rafah. The IDF has denied responsibility:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3272708,00.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5161034.stm

I awoke this morning at 4 a.m. to the call to prayer. It was still dark, but from the veranda I could see the lights of downtown Nablus twinkling like stars that had fallen to the ground but continued to burn brightly.

We have gone all over Nablus the past two days with Linda’s father, Majdi, as our guide. Majdi has lived in Nablus his whole life and in the same house since he was 5 years old. Today, we went through the old city of Nablus, which is a maize of narrow streets and shops. It took us a while to make our way through as it seemed that every other person we passed knew Majdi and we would stop while he exchanged greetings. Majdi owns a shop in downtown that sells cell phone and other electronics. His shop was our first stop of the morning outing where we got a great interview with one of his friends regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The old city is the heart of where the resistance fighters live. Many of the walls and doors in the old city are covered with posters of young men who had been killed by Israeli soldiers. Some of the areas in the old city were blackened with soot from fires during various invasions.

I asked Majdi why people didn’t rebuild and open the destroyed shops.

“There is no money for this. And even if there was, no one rebuilds because they know the Israeli will come again and destroy.”

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.