Separation and Understandings

In the last post, I wrote about visiting an American friend from school who had a week off before starting work as a counselor in an American Zionist summer camp. I went in Jerusalem in order to bring her to Ramallah. I didn't use her name because she is afraid of getting in trouble for her visit to Palestine, but from here on out, I'll call her Sophie.

I had taken the bus to the Arab quarter in the old city, but a friend from East Jerusalem had told me that it also stopped at the main bus station, so we decided to catch it there. Sophie was pretty sure that no Arab buses stopped at the station itself, but we figured that it stopped nearby, and that we could ask people where. However, this proved to be a harder task than we had predicted.

Most people just gave us confused looks when we asked where to find the bus to Ramallah. A few genuinely thought about it and directed us either to the inter-city buses or to the station information desk, where a young women glared at us and said she didn't know. One man we asked told Sophie that we shouldn't go there. She replied that I lived there, and his eyes widened. “Crazy!” he said, first in Hebrew, and then in English, so that I could understand. Finally, we gave up and took the city bus across the city to the Arab quarter.

It had never really occurred to me that I should be afraid to come to Ramallah. I had looked at news reports a bit and talked to an Arab-Israeli friend in order to make sure that it wasn't currently a violent area and to assess its political stability in the wake of the revolutions sweeping the region.

Sophie, however, had been more concerned, and had only agreed to come after contacting the US embassy and enlisting me to accompany her through the checkpoint. Even so, she wanted to keep her visit a secret from most of the people she knew. In the morning before we left for Ramallah, Ariel, a family friend of Sophie's who we were staying with, asked me what we would be seeing in Jerusalem that day.

Her Israeli friends had expressed fear of visiting the Palestinian territories, though she told me that the only one who could verbalize a reason why they would be afraid to come wanted to be a politician and didn't want a West Bank visit on his record.

Apparently politicians aren't the only ones who experience trouble over connections to Palestine. Sophie's phone was turned off after she tried to call me at my Palestinian number, and on top of worried lectures from friends and family members, she was pretty sure her Israeli employers would forbid her visit.

In fact, the Israeli government bars its citizens from visiting cities like Ramallah, which are in the Palestinian controlled Area A. While it seems the ban is rarely enforced, Israelis risk arrest, fines, and even prison. As far as I can tell, the Palestinian government does not prohibit Israeli visitors, though police could technically turn people over to the Israeli authorities.

Meanwhile, my friends in Ramallah were confused, and thought it somewhat funny that people would be afraid to come to visit them.