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.