The Tour – Part 1

My Dad had decided a long time ago he was going to come and visit us while we were in Ramallah so he added a week onto his trip of ‘The Old Country’ – that being Mennonite villages in the Ukraine – to see Israel and Palestine with us. So we planned a tour trying to basically cover off the entire country in terms of both geography and religion in a week. I think we pretty much covered everything, except the Dome of the Rock, but only because Elle was unsuccessful in convincing the security guard she was half Muslim (and half Christian). Her heart just wasn’t in it.

So we started in Tel Aviv. I first had some trouble convincing Dad to leave the apartment not because he had jet lag, but because he wanted to fix a few things up. “Look Tam, if I just had a caulking gun I could at least make sure the shower curtain doesn’t fall down anymore”. We walked all day, looking for sandals in the market, introducing falafel to him for lunch and ending up in Jaffa. Old Jaffa felt a bit sad, a beautiful Arab city with apparently the oldest port in the world, which now felt a bit like Harbourfront Centre in Toronto (minus the beautiful stone, architecture and ancient ruins), full of touristy Israeli shops selling ‘certified’ antiques and crazy macramé.

The next day we drove to Jerusalem, and were met by our new landlords, who we liked instantly not only because they were newly minted lesbians, but because they had fresh laundry and bought us cake. They invited us for lunch, and Dad gave them the history of the Mennonites while we tried to figure out our next destination. (“Mennonite?” they asked. “Anabaptists”, Dad clarified. Blank stare.) Jerusalem was crazy busy at the time, with the beginning of Sukkot(1), and the roads and streets were both packed. So we planned to go into Ramallah the next day to check out an apartment we heard about that was available for November 1st. Ramallah was on our itinerary for Dad so we drove in the next day, but only after we spent the morning in the market, helping Yael (2) with a project she had been planning but needed a bold Hebrew speaker. Elle volunteered and asked people on the street to finish the sentence, “The end of Israel is the beginning of _________”. Thinking this question may be slightly provocative, I felt we should bring Dad along for protection; he may be 66 but he is quite fit. As it turned out, nobody was really offended by this question, but many were more baffled at the notion of an end to Israel, which just didn’t seem plausible. One ultra-orthodox guy seemed quite okay with the concept though, because it meant the coming of the Messiah.

Waved through the checkpoint, we made a stop first at the Moqata, Arafat's tomb, and drove to Ramallah to pick up Reem, a friend of Yael’s, who had arranged the apartment viewing. As we waited for her in her living room, we watched an Arabic version of “The Biggest Loser” which apparently was produced out of Dubai. Funny how through the tears, music and supersize graphics broadcasting their weight loss, we were able to understand everything perfectly. In fact, we had to pull ourselves away from the TV once it was time to go. The apartment was in a great area, was a great price and only needs a bit of “freshening-up” (and is a bit dark…) but it has fig trees in the yard so I was sold and convinced Elle it “didn’t need much work at all”. We were then invited in for our first of many cups of tea for the day by Huda, the landlady, and when an elderly Palestinian woman invites you for tea, you don’t say no! As we found out, Huda is one of Ramallah’s 1500 original residents, the other approx. 175,000(3) being Palestinians from other villages. All of Huda’s kids are in the US.


Our next cup of tea was at Sonia’s, another friend of Yael’s who is a tough, wonderful woman we hope to get know better once we are living in Ramallah. She had been thrown in jail in her youth for her anti-Israel activities and told us how they showed them holocaust films in jail. It was interesting though, because unlike Ibrahim, another young activist we met, who had lots to say about the Occupation, Sonia used one simple word: It is ‘unfair’—‘unfair that my son cannot be a regular scout and camp outdoors, too dangerous, unfair that we cannot move around’. Ibrahim was a young guy who came hobbling into the restaurant on crutches. He claimed he had been injured 81 times as a peaceful resister in the village of Na’alin, and wouldn’t stop until the Occupation was over. He and Neta(4) got into a passionate argument (in Arabic) on the finer points of what effective resistance was, but quite honestly, despite the translation, it was beyond me. I was simultaneously drawn to his passion, admired his commitment yet felt somehow unsure of this guy who seemed to wear his injuries like badges. It felt confused. I suddenly understoof our “vacation" was about to end. I looked over at my Dad smoking perhaps too much narghila. We still had to finish our tour.

Footnotes

1. Sukkot – Jewish festival of ‘booths’ (aka The Feast of Tabernacles—not to be confused with Quebecois ‘tabernac!’). It involves building a ‘Sukkah’ in which you have your meals for the week. Sukkot and various other holidays all just finished on the 22nd.
2. b.h yael – friend of elle’s, and mine who happened to be in Jerusalem at this time.
3. Huda told us the population of Ramallah was approx. 180,000 but I can’t seem to find any real statistics.
4. Neta Golan – friend of ours who we have visited in Ramallah before. She is an Israeli activist who lives with her Palestinian husband and two children.