Traffic Jam — Al Atatra, Gaza Strip

Qalqilya: The Wall

On a settler highway running north-south past the Ariel settlement block, you might never know that you were cutting Palestinian territory in half with your speedy commute. The wall to your right if you're going north, to your left if you're going south, looks like one of the sound barriers you find on I-495 around Washington DC, the kind that keep bedroom communities quiet and serene. But it's not a sound barrier — it's a physical barrier, a separation wall constructed in 2002 to enclose the approximately 40,000 residents of Qalqilya. The wall cuts Qalqilya residents off from their land, from the labor market in Israel many once depended on, and from their families.

In early June, a week after these photos were taken, Qalqilya witnessed a spate of violence that captured the insanity of Israeli-Palestinian blood politics. Israeli authorities made it known to the PA security forces that they wanted several high-priority targets from the Hamas paramilitary wing dead. Who knows what the Israelis promised to the PA in exchange for doing their dirty work. PA forces botched an assault on a Hamas safehouse, getting three officers killed in an attempt to kill their own targets. Two Hamas fighters and the owner of the house also died in the attacks. A string of retributive arrests took place in the West Bank and Gaza over the ensuing days. The violence and the political turmoil that resulted threatened to derail the fragile reconciliation talks between Fatah and Hamas in Cairo.

In the end, Israel decided to remove its major checkpoint going into Qalqilya from within the West Bank, and also decided to allow yellow-plated cars belonging to Arab Israelis to enter Qalqilya freely (Israeli citizens, Jew and Muslim, are prohibited from entering Palestinian territory almost everywhere else, although it's an odd prohibition, given that 400,000 Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem).

It seems the IDF got what it wanted. And lived up to whatever promises it had made to the PA.

LIFE ALONG THE WALL: QALQILYA, WEST BANK

Tel Aviv by night

Went out in Tel Aviv last weekend just for the night. Stayed up 'til dawn walking the streets, stopping for the occasional beer. Tel Aviv is a very walkable place — there's a long street called Rothschild that has a double-lane bike highway running through the middle, flanked by grass and benches. There are open air kiosk-style restaurants every couple of blocks or so, and people stay out all night. Tel Aviv is a good place to shoot photos — chock full of weird lights, weird buildings, and weird people. It's a good place to be a weirdo.

Tel Aviv is known as a "bubble city." It's a place you can go to escape the tension of Jerusalem. Which is to say, it's a place you can go to escape Israel. Or to escape Palestine, in my case. Tel Aviv's residents give the air of blissful detachment from the hostile, hateful politics and cutthroat geopolitics that make their lives (and my escapist weekends) liveable and colorful. I can't blame them — they're in too deep. Why not enjoy the sea, pretend to anarchist sympathies, crank up to punk rock, and go out for sushi?

Down the street from Tel Aviv is the old Palestinian city of Jaffa, or Yafo in Hebrew. I regret that I wasn't able to photograph Jaffa on this trip. The old citadel juts out into the sea, gleaming under yellow lights in the distance. The storefronts in downtown Jaffa are vaulted arches affixed with cast-iron-latticed windows. It's beautiful, and tragic. Jaffa is still a predominately Arab city, but Jewish Israelis are busy buying up the choicest properties, just like everywhere else.

Tel Aviv was a boondocks when Jaffa was in its prime. Tel Aviv was a Jewish settler outpost when Jaffa was the pearl of the British Empire's holdings in Palestine. Now Tel Aviv is spiked with sky scrapers, filled with bars, bikinis and modern art. There are also drugs, prostitutes, Russian mafiosos. You have to take the good with the bad ...

Jaffa is still sleepy by comparison. It's maintained its tranquil seaside aura amidst all the turbulence and disappointment of the last six decades. Its walls and arches will outlast decades to come, that much is certain.

Japanika: a booming kiosk shushi restaurant on Rothschild St., Tel Aviv


Cool lights on the sidewalk on Rothschild St.


One of Tel Aviv's crumbling anachronisms


Rothschild St.


Poster graffiti, Tel Aviv subterranean




Stencil graffiti in a bar explains the Tel Aviv bubble

Jerusalem, Old City: Orthodox on Shavuot

Friday, May 29, was a Jewish holiday called Shavuot. I went to the Old City to watch the Orthodox Jews pour in through the Damascus gate on their way to pray at the Western Wall, sometimes jogging — clutching their big fur hats to their heads, strollers rattling across cobblestones — to get to the Wall before sunset. I didn't know until now what the Shavuot holiday signifies. I just Googled it and found out that it marks the day when God handed the Torah over to Moses at Mt. Sinai.

I would have known last Friday, on Shavuot, when I asked four or five Orthodox to explain the significance of Shavuot to me. Each successive person looked at me with a look of disdain or discomfort, or some mixture of both. No one would answer me, or even respond to my "Shalom," and the dozen or so people that I made eye contact with and smiled at looked straight through me, as if I weren't even there. Maybe there's a prohibition against smiling on Shavuot — when the Orthodox observe Sabbath conditions — or maybe they were reluctant to speak to me for fear of embarrassment or because of poor English language skills. Whatever the case, the experience caused me to wonder if the Orthodox behave similarly to more secular Jewish Israelis, or if the silent treatment is reserved for foreigners and Arabs. Do they not condescend to acknowledge my presence because they are God's chosen people, and I am not one of them?

I walked home in the quickly cooling air of early evening. I stopped to take a picture of some Arab kids playing soccer in a park lit by electric lamps. A few of them came up to talk to me. We talked about all sorts of simple things — food, geography, soccer (mentioning Barcelona is a quick way to make friends, even if you, like me, know nothing about soccer), etc. Then I said I had to go, and as I started to walk away, I heard a kid yelling "Cous ukhtek, cous imek." Your sister's pussy, your mother's pussy. Two common insults hurled at me for no reason that I could understand, other than the fact that the kid probably thought it would be funny to make fun of me loudly in a language I couldn't understand. But I did understand, and I made him aware of the fact that I understood. I asked him why he would say such a thing.

Instead of apologizing, he threw a rock at me.

A Palestinian woman sells parsley next to the Damascus Gate as Orthodox Jews pour in on Shavuot


Foot traffic inside the Damascus Gate as Orthodox Jews make their way to the Western Wall


The Orthodox have large families, rivaling the Arab "population bomb" with their reproduction rates.


Orthodox men speculate on what's causing the blockage at the Damascus Gate.




Oranges and apples inside an Israeli soldier's helmet at the Damascus Gate.

Jersusalem, Old City: first impressions

I spent the morning walking around inside the walls of the Old City. It's a maze of cavernous, arched alleys, riddled with street vendors, tourists, and locals of various faiths of the Book making the daily trek to their sites of worship. The vendors seemed tense. Not so quick with jokes or smiles, but not pushy either. In front of a falafel stand, I raised my camera to a blank wall to measure the light. The boy working in the stand yelled, "No photo." I turned and looked at him, wondering what objection he could possibly have to a foreigner aiming his camera at a blank wall. The boy's face registered a small look of surprise when I spoke to him in Arabic. "Why?" I asked. "Aaschen hayq," he responded. Because.

It must get pretty annoying to work in a place that's flooded with tourists who are always snapping up shots of your daily life, which they (and I) can't help but see as exotic, fascinating, quaint. But, the Old City is a tourist area, right? Perhaps a highly spiritualized and politicized tourist area, where you can cut through the tension with a knife, but a tourist trap nonetheless. Tourists take photos — it's what we do. Get over it.

I sat on a wicker stool with a group of old men and ate a falafel under the vaulted arcade that leads up to the Dome of the Rock. I drank a cup of Arabic coffee and a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. I watched Muslims pass back and forth to the mosque — the second holiest site in Islam — for Friday prayers. Occasionally a Jew would pass by, only to be turned away by an Israeli soldier and armed security guard at the gate. The Dome of the Rock is reserved exclusively for Muslims on Fridays, the Muslim holy day.

I was turned away by the same guards, in fact. And not so pleasantly, either. I approached the steps, and wasn't even going to enter, and a private guard lunged up from his stool. "It's closed! Muslims only today." "Okay," I said. I stood on the step, catching a glimpse of the stunningly intricate blue and gold paintwork on the side of the mosque. "BYE!" the guard shouted at me. Immediately, the soldier chimed in, "bye bye!" He shooed me away with his hand. I stood there, transfixed, on the edge of rage. A vendor had a toy stand inches away from the soldier and guard, so I asked, "I can't stand on the steps?" "No." "What if I want to buy something from this stand?"

They begrudgingly said, "Okay." I told them that they didn't have to be so rude. They stared at me blankly. I should have asked them why they behave that way, why they would be so hostile to a foreign visitor, or anyone for that matter. It wouldn't have done any good. And maybe there's something I don't understand about why they behave that way. Whatever the reason, that type of behavior doesn't put the best face on Israel.

This Friday is a Jewish holiday called Shavuot, so the Old City was packed with orthodox on their way to the Western Wall, or Wailing Wall — the last remnant of the 2nd temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. The orthodox have different styles of dress depending on where their families came from in Europe. Men wear big black hats, mostly wide-brimmed variations on the homburg and fedora, usually made of felt or velvet. But a certain group, I'm not sure which, wears giant circular fur hats that I never get tired of staring at. I know it's not nice to stare, but these things are amazing. I'm going back to the Old City this afternoon to try to get some more photos of them.

There is a checkpoint before the entrance to the Wailing Wall area. There is a metal detector and there are armed guards. Something about the presence of armed guards at the entrance to a holy area, a peaceful sanctuary, seems contradictory to me. Call me crazy, but I'm sure it's not what God intended. But where is God in all of this?

Here are some photos from today in the Old City. Look out for more soon.

Orthodox men entering the Old City through the Damascus Gate, on their way to pray at the Wailing Wall

An old man rocks back and forth as he recites the Torah in a tunnel adjacent to the Wailing Wall

Men pray at the Wailing Wall. Tables and plastic chairs are available for those who wish to sit and study Torah.

Israeli soldiers patrol the Arab quarter of the Old City near the Dome of the Rock, Wailing Wall

A woman in traditional Palestinian dress sells fresh mint in the Old City.

Most Palestinians want unity gov't — but what do their leaders want?

I saw this Reuters article this morning and it reminded me of a survey I read about in a recent International Crisis Group report, titled "Gaza's Unfinished Business." The survey in the ICG report showed that 40% of Gazans had no faith in either Fatah or Hamas before the Israeli offensive, and that number has risen to 60% in the months since the offensive. The Bir Zeit survey reported in this article claims that 58% of Palestinians (from a sample of over 6,000 from Gaza + West Bank) want a unity government. They should have it — but their leadership stands in the way.

The fundamental principle of democracy — before you get into variations like representative democ., parliamentary, etc. — is, to put it roughly, "let the people decide, and give the people what they want." The will of the people should supersede political differences; in a parliamentary system, parties debate and oppose one another with the ultimate goal of achieving a political outcome that is satisfactory to as many of the "people" as possible, including underrepresented minorities.

Perhaps I am naïve, but if the will of the people is so clear in Palestine, why doesn't the leadership respect it? Both Fatah and Hamas claim to support democracy. In fact, Hamas often claims to be the only truly democratically elected government in the Middle East; the Islamic movement's supporters cannot get over the ironic rejection of Hamas' victory by the West, so keen to spread democracy, so much less keen to respect its outcomes. I am reminded of Caliban's remark to Prospero in The Tempest:

You taught me language, and my profit on't
Is I know how to curse

The sharp-tongued anti-America rhetoric that we hear from Hamas' leadership should not surprise us; we are, in so many ways, Prospero. We have given Hamas the tools to walk and talk like a democracy, and they are using their newly acquired skills to throw mud in our faces. And we should not expect anything different — our support for democracy in Palestine was always half-hearted at best, and never intended to allow for majority representation of Hamas.

But now that Hamas has the mandate in Gaza, and responsibility for 1.5 million people who are currently recovering from a catastrophic invasion, will they continue to curse us, and to curse Israel, without giving their own people what they so desperately want and need, the unity government that will be a critical step toward ending the siege and confronting the expansion of settlements in the West Bank? Will they continue to allow their resentment at being spurned by the Palestinian elite and the West to dictate the path forward? And as for Fatah, will they recognize Hamas as the coequal that they have clearly become? Or will they cling to power in the West Bank through underhanded means and deprive their own supporters of a viable political future?

What is it, really, that both Fatah and Hamas want? Do their priorities represent the people?

Gaza: Portraits young and old

I've taken a new interest in portraiture after spending some time with photographer Asim Rafiqui in Gaza last winter. Asim and I were working together on a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. You can see our project page here. We each wanted to do something different than what our fellow journalists were doing in the aftermath of Israel's winter offensive against Hamas—Asim as a photographer, and I as a writer. We were working on more long-term, subjective projects, and we were interested in showing more than destruction and immediate suffering. Not to say that destruction and suffering aren't worthy subjects; rather, we knew that our peers in the foreign media were covering those aspects of Operation Cast Lead's aftermath extensively, and we knew our grant afforded us the opportunity to approach our subjects with a bit more intimacy.

Asim shoots black and white photos with two vintage Leica M7 cameras. He has a masterful eye for light, and he knows how to put his subjects at ease with one or two simple words and gestures. Watching Asim work with his subjects was like a live workshop. The beauty of portrait photography, I learned, is that you can put a little bit of yourself in every portrait, but you never have to put words in anyone's mouth. All you have to do is fill the frame with the humanity inches from your lens, and if you do it right, the picture says it all.

I'm not claiming I do it right yet, but I'm trying to learn. I look through my photos from Gaza and Egypt pretty often, and from Montana and Virginia too, and I never get tired of looking for new phrases in the wonderful stories that faces tell.

Here are three of the portraits I took in Gaza last winter. I'll post more soon.

Ahmed Hussein, 65, Jabalia

Gazan girlscout, Gaza City

Waaji Imsalaam, 70, Jabalia

IDF and Hamas: "opposite and complementary narratives" of winter offensive

From Amira Hass's story in Haaretz, 24 May, 2009:

Comparing Hamas and IDF accounts of the winter 2008-2009 offensive in Gaza, Amira Hass notes the following: "Fighting . . . was intensive, continuous, complex: opposite and complementary narratives of Hamas and the IDF, and both can be believed to the same extent."

"To the same extent," that is, if the extent is "not at all." The IDF says the fighting was intensive and complex in order to justify the extreme amount of damage it inflicted on civilian structures and lives. Iz Al-Din Al-Qassam fighters say the fight was heavy and long because to say otherwise is to admit that they ran away, which they did, and which they are perfectly happy to admit out of the other side of their mouths, as Hass notes in her article: "In all the organizations, and particularly Iz al-Din al-Qassam, the decision was taken not to lose fighters. Not to commit suicides."

Gazan civilians are stuck between the "opposite and complementary narratives" of Hamas and the IDF. It's a deadly, voiceless space.

Mark Regev on the issue of settlements

From the Washington Post, 24 May 2009:

"Netanyahu spokesman Mark Regev said there are no plans for a full settlement freeze. 'The issue of settlements is a final status issue, and until there are final status arrangements, it would not be fair to kill normal life inside existing communities,' he said."

I just get hung up on that phrase, "it would not be fair to kill normal life inside existing communities." Is that not exactly what the settlements and their concomitant security fences and checkpoints do to "existing [Palestinian] communities," that have existed for a lot longer than the settlements?

I took a tour of the security fence/separation wall about ten days ago, and it's nothing if not a mechanism to "kill normal life" and to divide communities, to cut off farmers from their lands and towns from their markets. I talked to one man who owns olive groves on the "inside" of the fence, meaning the Israeli side. He's allowed to cross to his fields during three half-hour intervals each day — at 8:00, 12:00, and 4:30 — and if he gets stuck when the fence closes for the night at 5:00 pm, he has to report to the nearest Israeli military post, where he'll probably have his permit revoked. On the way north from Ramallah, far from the security fence, we passed an olive grove that was still smoldering from an act of arson by settlers that left several acres burnt to a crisp. The farmers were there when we passed, looking on helplessly. A fire truck was parked on the highway above, unable to reach the flames.

When Mr. Regev speaks about fairness, I wonder if he thinks about the truly unfair impact of the settlements on West Bank Palestinians. I wonder if he thinks about what it might be like to walk out of your door one morning and see your grandfather's olive groves going up in smoke.

An electrified security gate on the separation fence that cuts off Palestinian land from Israeli-controlled land on the massive Ariel settlement bloc. The settlement bloc is home to some 40,000 people.

Olive groves burned by settlers north of Ramallah. In the lower left, Palestinian olive farmers look on helplessly as the flames spread below.

Mutant citrus

This crazy treat is called a bomula. It's a citrus fruit that's about
the size of a soccer ball before the skin is whittled off, after which
it's the size of a slightly smaller soccer ball. The taste is
somewhere between a mild orange and a mild grapefruit, no hint of
soccer ball at all. I ate it at my new friends' house near the hotel
where I am staying in Ramallah. Razan works with me at CARE and she
and her brother Mohammad have ensured that I don't whither away in the
hotel after work, so tonight they invited me over for spaghetti and
bomula and fresh picked corn on the cob with their parents. Mrs.
Jalajel is an excellent bomula carver, as the photo shows. Once again,
I find myself marveling at the hospitality I seem to find everywhere I
turn. As much as anything else I am learning here-- language,
politics, history -- I know that some of the most important lessons I
will take away from Palestine are to be found in the simple moments
like the one I shared with the Jalajels tonight. Be nice, be generous,
be grateful.