VANISHING: Notes from the West Bank 1. BEAT L.A.
I am in East Jerusalem, in the Old City, standing at the ATM in what was once part of the Armenian Quarter, but now, since the six day war in 1967, is part of the Jewish Quarter. Let’s just say the Armenians didn’t have a whole lot of say in the matter. I first tried to use the only other ATM I could find that was within walking distance of the Damascus Gate, my easiest point of reference. It was in front of an Arab bank and the numbers were in Arabic on the keypad, but it was out of order. I went back again this morning and it’s still out of order. So now I’m trying to get money out of this Jewish Quarter machine. I’ve visited it twice before since I got back to Jerusalem. I notice a man in a yarmulke standing nearby. He’s short and wiry, probably in his fifties, and has his arms crossed in front of him—and is looking at me, squinting, with a frown on his face—not happy to see me. I noticed him the other day too, but paid him no mind. Now he’s back, or maybe he’s always here. Like Cerebus at the gates, but with only one head. I make eye contact even though I don’t want to. He does that thing with his chin men do in the Middle East and gives me a not quite sneer and looks away, and then eyes me sidelong, as though maybe on second thought I am not even worth sneering at. 1
‘You,” he says. You can not use this machine.’ “What do you mean?” I say. “We don’t like people like you using this machine.” I am both indignant and nervous. People like me? Does he know I’ve been picking olives with Arabs the past month in Jayyous? Spent a while holed up with same in the Muqatta with a bunch of self hating Jews and other assorted internationalist flotsam just past the Kalandia checkpoint in Ramallah? That I’m with ISM? Maybe he doesn’t like shiksas using the machine, and he has some kind of internal shiksa detector. Is he Mossad? “I see no reason I can’t use it.” I say, and with showy conviction I insert my card into the slot provided, hoping my jittering hand is not evident, and pick English as my language of choice. He moves a little closer and does the chin thing again, staring at me, or some point immediately over my head, and shifts to his other leg. He is within arms reach of me now, and I do not think this is such a good thing. I just want to get my shekels and get out of here. “This machine,” he states emphatically, “This machine is for ‘Dodgers Fans ONLY. No Giants fans are allowed here. You will have to leave.” For a moment I am shocked. They say the Mossad knows everything, but this seems to be taking things a bit far. Then I remember. That’s why he’s staring at my head. I’m wearing my Giants cap. And have been for over a month, alternating it with my other hat, a boring and generic looking sun hat. I prefer my San Francisco Giants cap. Keeps out the sun, covers my hair (I feel ridiculous in a headscarf) and reminds me of home. The Giants were 2
knocked out of the playoffs the day I got to Ramallah over 5 weeks ago, news as disturbing as the other news of that day—that Arnold Schwarzenegger is now my Governor. I wear it so much I hardly know it’s on my head. But he does. “You should not be wearing that hat in this neighborhood,” he says. And since half the neighborhood once lived in Brooklyn, maybe he’s right. I certainly wouldn’t wear it in Los Angeles. He has a very stern look on his face. I look sternly back. “BEAT L.A.,” I say with conviction. He bursts out laughing and his whole face changes. The years fall away and for a moment, spaniel eyed, he looks twenty years younger—but quickly recovers. “Los Angeles,” he hisses with contempt. “They never should have left Brooklyn. ” I do not say the obvious—You never should have either. Instead, we talk baseball for a couple of minutes, two fanatics of the National League Diaspora, throwing down stats in the shadow of Haram al‐Sharif and the Western Wall.
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2. NORTH GATE It’s mid morning at the north gate of the Wall in Jayyous. October 2003. The gate does not open, the gate was supposed to open hours ago. An Israeli Jeep sits on the other side of it, and the big trench the Israeli military dug this summer is now filled with coils of razor wire—manufactured in Long Island—that they dropped in one night when we were all sleeping. Electronic sensors sit every few yards, and it’s all topped with eight lines of barbed wire. Not quite the concrete slabs of Qalqilya and Tulkarm but it serves the same purpose. A crowd waits in front of the gate, staring. Men on tractors. Men with donkeys and on foot. Women too, sitting separate from the men and all staring toward their land, waiting for this earliest of three twenty minutes window periods per day when they are allowed to cross. It’s harvest time. We’ve been here for hours. Since about 7:30am. The heat is rising as the sun gets higher. It’s now about 10:00am. The cool hours of early morning, best for picking olives and hauling big sacks full of them, are long gone. Henry, from Canada, is pointing to an Israeli soldier, Iraqi Jew by birth, or so the rumor goes. We’ve seen him a lot in the few weeks we’ve been here. He always shouts at the farmers and sticks his finger in their faces, pushing and shoving them. There is a lot of turnover in the soldiers, but he always seems to be here. A lot of them yell, a lot of them are real bullies. But he is screamer. Despised by the Internationals. Henry says to me, “Look at his gun.” 4
I look at his gun. “Do you notice anything?” Henry asks expectantly. I try my absolute best to notice something: I notice nothing. “No.” I say. Look at everyone else’s gun. Now do you notice anything? “NO!” I snap, annoyed and irritated in the heat. “There’s no clip in there,” Henry says, “It’s not loaded. He’s unarmed. It’s like that every day. And he’s not even wearing a helmet. The clip, Henry points out is the skinny metal rectangular box thing that holds all the bullets and dispenses them into the weapon when the trigger is pulled. It sticks up like a cigarette pack and operates along the same principles. I look at the other soldiers, the five or six who stand on this side of the Wall or the other, hanging out by the jeep, standing in the entrance to the gate. Their guns all have clips. They all are wearing helmets. I now know much more about guns than I did a moment before, and understand much less about what is going on before me at the North Gate of Jayyous than I thought I did. I wonder how many other things are like this here, invisible to me, and to others like me, crippling our understanding of what is obvious to everyone else with the eyes to see. “He just likes to bark,” Henry says. “But they all get through when he is here. Not like that really polite guy yesterday, who wouldn’t let anyone past. Or the day before.
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This is harvest time. They don’t pick now they lose the crop. Every day counts.” Before I left California for Palestine, I had asked people who had been here before for advice. “‘No’ does not always mean ‘No’,” Nancy had said. I watch the Iraqi Jew screaming, as he pushes another Palestinian farmer through the gate toward his land.
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3. RAIN I climb through the hills on the other side of the Wall on switchback trails with two women and their patriarch. They are not sisters, or mother and daughter. Are they sisters‐ in‐law? Niece and aunt? They are somehow related to the old man, whom I picked with the day before, along with Lisa, but I can’t figure it out even when they explain it to me in English. It’s the heat. I am out of breath. They are not. We have been picking olives all day, but we take a break from the olives and move to another very small tree and pick very small orange fruit which I take to be kumquats. The younger of the women urges me to eat a few of them, which I do. In fact, she picks them and puts them inside my mouth and smiles encouragingly at me as she does so. I stand still before her, with my mouth open. An obedient child, even though I am much older than she is. The burst of flavor inside my dry mouth is so good it’s shocking. Long dry grass everywhere, with sharp stickers that catch on all fabric, and really scratch if they reach bare skin. The man leads the donkey past us, pebbles dislodging under its hooves, and then ties it under an olive tree, relieving it of its burden of two 100 pound olive sacks. He throws the sacks over his shoulder first. And then drops them on the ground nearby. He’s at least seventy. I marvel at his strength. ‘Oh, nothing like he used to be since the operation last year,” one of the women notes in her superb English. They 7
both understand it well, which is rare for the women in the village.. He wears utilitarian western style clothes, loose fitting black chinos and a drip‐dry white long sleeved shirt—except for his headgear, the traditional white burnoose and with black rolled band. It is a well fed, good looking donkey, dark grey with a white muzzle and white fur inside its ears. Yesterday, when no one was looking it ate all the food our hosts had brought for Lisa and me to eat, and the paper wrapping too. Our hosts are not eating because it’s Ramadan. I am not observing Ramadan of course, and my half‐hearted attempts to fast in solidarity are met with amused but firm resistance. “No, No, you eat. And drink. We will fast. We are used to this. Now we look at the donkey, who stands very still in the dappled shade under the tree, except one ear twitching slightly, and one watchful eye upon us. I go hide behind another tree and drink as much water as I can from the liter plastic bottle I have brought. Olive harvesting is hot and dusty. Dragging from tree to tree and then squatting and standing in the full sun, sifting the leaves and stems from the fruit. Stuffing large canvas sacks with olives and then sewing up the bags. Exhausting. It must be close to a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. For awhile we all rest. Lying under the trees. Then we get up and pick some more. The temperature begins to drop and after awhile it starts to rain. First a rustling through the long grass and then all is 8
wet for a few moments—a straight downpour. The grey boulders before us darken and then bloom as the lichens on them, camouflaged most times as barely visible smudges of pale stain, now glow suddenly with bright color revealed by the water. Bright veins of red and orange. Splotches of black, bright green and bright yellow. The air, as always, smells of miramia, the wild sage of Palestine. But now more so. With the rain comes more smell of wet dirt and the pebbles at our feet. Sounds both familiar and unidentifiable reach us from far away, ricocheting off the raindrops. . The country side is spread below us, rectangles and ovals— stone walls delineating ancient property lines—the olive trees, the villages, the mosques each with a minaret, and then encroaching settlements looming in the distance, creeping closer and closer to the villages and then this one almost on top of us, right behind us although if we face this way we can almost pretend it’s not there, except for the persistent sound of poorly played bongo drums emanating from within. This is an economic settlement, not an ideological one . The settlers here were offered low cost loans for very large houses with lawns and pools. Loans they don’t have to repay if they can stick it out for ten years. The rain stops. I take a picture of one of the women, smiling and holding a bouquet of miramia and wild flowers. I try to coax the other woman to get her picture taken, but she refuses. 9
The man is again dragging the hundred pound sacks of olives onto the back of the donkey and has no time for posing because we are leaving now. I go to take a picture of the boulders and the lichen, but the color has vanished with the rain and they are just grey stones again.
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4. LAST DAYS IN JAYYOUS Today driving back from olive picking with Abu Ghassanʹs daughter, daughter‐in‐law and Abu Ghassan, bumping over the dirt road in an old car with all of us covered in dirt and sweat from the road back and none of them having had anything to eat or drink since before dawn he turned and asked me from the driverʹs seat: “Well, what do you think of our softly life?” I had to laugh. II. Three days after Ramadan begins dozens farmers still wait outside the locked gate to re‐enter Jayyous at an hour after the agreed upon time of 4:30PM. I am inside on the Jayyous side with some other Internationalʹs watching helplessly as they are kept from their homes and dinners. Unseasonably cold, and raining, and none of them have had anything to eat or drink since before the sun came up. It’s getting dark. A woman approaches the gate from the outside and beckons to me urgently. I am apprehensive since I speak almost no Arabic and can do nothing to assist her. She stares at me intently when I approach and then begins pushing small green skinned clementinas (tangerines) one by one through the chain link into my hands. My backpack is back about 20 feet behind me and I try to explain that I canʹt hold very many but she insists that I take them, and keeps pushing them through the fence into my arms until I am awkwardly cradling at least ten, with a few guavas besides. 11
Then she says, “Do you see what Israel do? ‘Do you?” Never taking her eyes off my face, even as a few of the clementinas fall from my arms to the ground. “Yes, “I say, “I do.” “Not nice,” she says. “No, not nice,” I say. And then she turns and walks away. I call out to thank her for the fruit but she doesnʹt turn back around. Later that night I catch a ride on a tractor with a flatbed ride going back up the hill. The flatbed is full of cold, hungry, tired women, now damp in the rain. I cling to the railing, my feet dangling over the back, the ground rushing up at me, the night landscape of Jayyous flying by, the lights of the settlements looming out over the horizon. The road is bumpy as always, and the driver goes as fast as possible as always. Behind us at the last turn before town a battered white sedan with one glaring headlight and the words NO FEAR stenciled in English in small letters on the hood.
END F.S. Rosa visited the West Bank for six weeks in 2003. These fragments came from e‐mails and notes made during that trip.
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