Is This What it Means to Be a Foreigner in Palestine?

In this episode we have a crash course in clanic values in Palestine when yours truly is robbed and the question of justice—formal justice or informal justice is forced upon me, the wayward traveler. 

Intro music by Sam Widaman, episode music by Bull of Heaven, He is Not Dead, but Sleepeth

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Transcript

“Is This What it Means to be a Foreigner in Palestine?”

In a neighborhood adjacent to the Palestinian Authority’s headquarters, near Yasar Arafat’s grave and the yawning soldiers guarding it, not all our windows had bars on them. It was quiet. Sarah and I lay in a queen-size bed and that bed lay in the center of the room. As if the bed should be the most important object. Or was it important because of what was done on it? Which, if you think about it, is mostly made of dreams. 

I lay naked under the covers. 

The position of the bed naturally meant the room was split 50/50, with her books on her side, and mine on mine. Her political, me pure fiction. She read on the subject of apartheid in Israel, about the treatment of Palestinians within Israel and gave me this:

“Defined by a maze of laws and rules, citizens are divided into artificial categories. As Israel is, by definition, a Jewish state, Jews profit from their privileges, rights, and economic benefits, while the minorities, namely Arabs, see their movement largely restricted. Their economic prospects and access to land, housing, and water are limited. They suffer arbitrary arrest. And it’s all justified by a concocted, heavily mythologized account of history to lay their claim to the land of Israel, the fucking Bible."

Sarah and I were in a long-term relationship, going on a decade back then. We had numerous unfinished and ongoing conversations. Conversations that carried in and out of several days at a time. Subjects would drop off and reappear months later. We both knew that we needn’t have an opinion about everything, but, as travelers, who are mostly made of comparisons, it was as if these opinions served only to test the circumference of the known world. 

I gave her this, something poetic I had observed that day. The small idiosyncrasies that set my heart thumping: I said, “When I was eating a falafel sandwich today, at that restaurant on the corner, you know the one that gives on to the intersection near the pet store, well, in the flowered median of the road, a banner read, “freedom for political prisoners.” Below the sign were several bird cages full of canaries. I guess the owner of the pet store moves his birds from place to place to give them air. The thing was that there were the photos of prisoners, and directly below them all those colorful birds also behind bars. But what was amazing was that as soon as I saw this, a man came shlepping up the sidewalk and in perfect English asked me wasn’t Palestine beautiful. I looked at the long stretching hills and expansive views, and concurred, it was beautiful. 

“Yeah," Sarah said, "and it's strange, of all the places, “I have a feeling of belonging here, but I know it's only a feeling." 

At the opposite end of the house, our roommate, a Greek woman, therefore a foreigner, and her partner, a Palestinian, were having pillow talk. Sophia occasionally laughed. Raed boasted a smoker’s cough. 

Ramallah translates to “the hills of God. " It was ten minutes as the crow flew from Jerusalem. An occasional shepherd grazed his herd in the field facing our house. It was a call back to more pastoral, idyllic times when the proverbial oranges in Jaffa were ripe. Ramallah, which was once a temperate holiday retreat for those living in the hotter lowlands near the sea, became so celebrated people flew in from the Gulf Countries for the Mediterranean breeze as it met the height of pines. They flew into the now defunct Qalandiya airport, just one of the many dinosaurs extinct due to the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank.

Our house, made of two-foot thick walls of limestone, was idyllic for the hot summers, and less for wet winters. That’s what I said to Sarah. She read by lamplight. The windows were single pane and, nodding off to sleep was hindered by the noise outside. A plastic table being blown in the wind or rather. The windows slid clumsily on the rails and the sound traveled across the stone floors and through the thin walls. 

"There is someone out there.” I answered my own question. I could see my breath in our bedroom.

A light flashed through the transom window. It strafed under the crack beneath the door. I reached for my clothes, but not so surely. Sarah, already dressed, sprang from the bed. 

Is it strange to say she was the first to the door? Should it be the other way around because I am a man? Was it a biological imperative or a social construction that I should beat her to the door and is it politically incorrect to say that caring for her meant protecting her, me a man, and her a woman? 

 I had seen her antagonize a neo-Nazi in Eastern Hungary. Seen her give lip to cops in America, so it didn't surprise me she was the first to the bedroom door. Those who are unaware of danger can be called courageous but should they be? In Hungary, in the bar at closing time, the gun was pointed at me. In America, it was I who persuaded the cop to let us off. I did this by feigning meekness. American cops love that. 

Maybe the difference is this: Sarah had never been in a fight. Her parents never raised a hand at her. They were influenced by reading the writings of Montessori. She would later say that, knowing she would never be hit, it empowered her. “I could push my parents off a cliff and they wouldn’t stop me.” 

Personally, I've been in countless fights. I grew up with an older brother. I grew up in America, which for the record, has had me on the ground more than any single place I've since ever traveled, including supposed war-torn countries, so called failed states. I got jumped before I got laid. My stepfather, he got the belt out. 

Back in the house, I trailed Sarah in my underwear.

And there was someone. He was dipped in black from head to toe and raided our linen closet with the help of a cell phone flashlight. The light ran across Sarah’s face, then down her body. 

Fuck Sarah yelled and pitched the man across the foyer floor. I moved directly behind the mass of bodies. There was movement, but what was shadow and what was form was trading places, and who was who was difficult to discern.  

Then we were in the living room. In the style of Palestinian houses, it was a room to welcome guests, extended families even. An antechamber you could call it. It was spacious, lined with windows to catch the afternoon light in cigarette smoke. The room was sealed off from rooms further back in the house, rooms of matrimonial beds, rooms of pillow talk. In this antechamber, where we were supposed to welcome guests, only the man's outline against the rain-streaked windows was visible, for all of a second. It was one elastic second that stretched, pierced by the impact of crashing furniture. 

I knew that a knife would be more comfortable in me than the regret of it being in Sarah, over and over and over. I jumped on the form wrestling with her to get on top of him. 

We rolled, but I failed to get a hold on him. There were no lapels, no collar, no straps and my grip slipped at each grab. We were close, and I caught the odor of nervous sweat through his thick clothes. Or it could’ve been mine. I swung a punch then guarded my vitals. Waiting. BUT the knife wasn't there. It was only shadow boxing. Two eyes stared out from holes in a balaclava. He turned out to be scrawny. A fair fight then. It was a thin man looking for a fortune in a foreigner’s house. Bad luck! I was also unemployed, myself looking for a job in a foreign country, with only a grad degree to puff me up. 

The man slipped from me one last time, then threw himself out the window into the rain. As he hit the picnic table he had pushed up to the outside wall, it collapsed, with a crash and he yelled Allah Akbar into the starless night. Sarah switched on the light. The coffee table was flattened. Brochures and journals on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict littered the floor. 

There was a large poster I had never seen as it was covered by another. It was a map, or four maps. Four images showing the slow and steady eroding of the Palestinian land over the 20th century. The first image showed Palestine from 1897 to 1947 in which Jewish settlements were few and far between. The second image showed Palestine after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and following the 48-49 war. 78 percent of historical Palestine was now Israel. The remaining 22 percent fell under the administration of Egypt and Jordan—Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip and Jordan the West Bank, which is, obviously, the West Bank of the Jordan River. In 1967, following the Six-day War, Israel took Gaza, the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, and occupied the West Bank. Passing Palestine from one occupation to another—from Jordanian to Israeli. Then from 1967 to 2005, the poster shows the growing amoebic forms of Israeli colonies within the West Bank. 

The poster hung on one tack.

Raed stumbled into the living room with Sophia behind him. As he made to wipe his eyes of sleep, I questioned his honesty. Had he been asleep, or only hiding? In any case, I made a knee-jerk judgment, the adrenaline must have still run hot in my veins. Maybe he was having sex, that would make his absence understandable, forgivable. At least for me. In Palestinian society however, sex out of wedlock was not so forgivable. Was that then why he hid behind the curtains?

The four of us glanced outside from the dozen windows. We slid the defective frames in their slots. The cold air swallowed the room. Only stone fences were visible, the empty road, the lights on Arafat's grave. The rattle of one, two, three chain link fences was audible in the immediate distance. Of someone stumbling. The threat floated out there, and our house—with its cold tiles, the Byzantine mosaic in the foyer, and some of the windows barred—became a cage. 

Sarah moved away from my embrace to inspect a welt on her thigh. I was disappointed I had little to show for the fight, other than BO. We then reenacted the scene to make it understood to our roommates, but firstly to make it understood to ourselves. We put the actions back into that ten seconds.

Naturally, I chose the parts where I should’ve done something else, moved a different way. Been the first to the door. Been a man. Or what I thought a man was. I chose those parts and garnished them with justifications—that we could’ve worked together and carried a weapon. Weapons are always ideal solutions, especially for people who don't have them.

I wiped the condensation from the fixed window, the one with bars, and scanned the neighborhood. Four men, tousled hair and barely dressed, prowled outside our gate. The fluorescent street lights caught the angles of machetes as they pointed them in directions around our house. 

They were in league with the thief, that’s what I thought in the heat of confusion. We were about to be surrounded, bound, and gagged. The thought rode on the association between machetes and beheadings. What can I say, I had seen too much TV. 

“Stay inside,” one man waved. “We’re your neighbors. Where did he go?” 

The man's calm presented a normalcy, a mastery of a situation foreign to me. The men's rapidity betrayed the coordination of an informal neighborhood watch program. A policing, parallel to policing. Although I felt relief, and safety, this was accompanied by paranoia, a raising of stakes in a game I didn’t choose. 

I pointed. One of them climbed the barbed wire outside while Raed spoke to the others in Arabic. I understood the directions and expletives, the basics every language learner learns. 

 Again, it was all taken care of, we were reassured. 

“No problem,” were the exact words. This was a sentence often used in Palestine, “no problem.” You heard everywhere. I suppose it attests to Palestinians' ability to relativize. Because there were problems—to every culture its neuroses. But, for Palestinians, above those neuroses, feeding into them, and feeding off them, was the Israeli military occupation. 

They forbid us leave the house; one man phoned the police while the others talked amongst themselves. No problem was repeated with dismissive gestures. 

“Yeah,” Sarah asked, “but what are you going to do if you find him?”

“No problem.” 

“Right, don’t kill him though.”

“No problem.”

The police arrived and interviewed the men with the machetes in the courtyard. Or, actually, the machetes were no longer there. The police knocked on our open door and shuffled in, heads darting. Their wide eyes showed satisfaction at entering a foreigner’s harem, where unmarried women laid their heads at night. I guess sometimes, it’s not the traveler that does the traveling! Raed, previously all no problems, became mousey. 

The police dusted for fingerprints. They scrutinized our bedrooms. It was January, and, thinking I was heading for a desert oasis not three thousand feet above sea level, I had only brought light jackets and sweaters. I wore all my clothes every day to protect me from the cold wind. I was a regular soldier of the Salvation Army. Did I mention I was broke? I dressed accordingly. Two cops nodded to each other. One paused his glance on a pair of Sarah’s underwear. They interviewed the women of the house, never mind they were in pajamas. They ignored me only until before leaving, guaranteeing me that they were on the case. 

“No problem,” I replied.

Raed, finally translating what the police had said, told us that we were no doubt robbed because we were foreigners. 

“Does he think that all foreigners are loaded?" I asked.

“Oh, I don’t think that’s what it is,” he said, “you don’t have family in the country, so it’s less risky.”

“Right,” Sarah said, “but you do.” Raed was from Qalandiya, actually. 

“That’s where he went wrong, that is, if he’s found. People are killed for less than entering a house where women live, and especially for hitting a woman.”

…

The next morning, I was still unemployed. Instead of cleaning the living room I took a bath and to feel productive, pro-active even, I read about the criminal justice system in Palestine. Everything is always easier when turned into an abstraction. Thumbing through a dog eared brochure from a human rights NGO, I read that Palestinian law was multilayered, integrating the British Mandate laws, the Jordanian laws that used to govern the West Bank before 1967, the Egyptian law that governed Gaza Strip before that same year, in addition to the Israeli military orders. There was also what is considered tribal justice and this, the brochure argued, has remained predominant. Palestine was not technically a state, its institutions were weak. The monopoly of violence and therefore the monopoly of justice was also weak. Because the Palestinian Authority had limited or no control over 62 percent of the occupied West Bank (the area under full Israeli control as per the Oslo Accords) Palestinians living in the West Bank preferred to seek recourse in informal courts. 

The bath water got cold rather quickly. You know, no insulation and all. 

Sarah sent me a text message. There was a protest at the Qalandiya checkpoint, the main passage between Ramallah and Jerusalem. 

I got out of the bath and proceeded to put on my entire wardrobe then borrowed a bike leftover from the last roommate. An oversized jacket on a rusty cruiser.

Although I was new to town, I knew the general direction and figured I couldn't miss it. You can't miss a smoking trainwreck. You follow a 30 foot high reinforced concrete wall a meter thick. You find the multiple miradors. The checkpoint opens between these miradors. All traffic is funneled through several lanes, all foot traffic is funneled through several aisles covered in barbed wire. When it gets busy you can’t move forward or backward and the space around you is barely enough to raise your arms. Some days it's  closed, and you simply cannot enter Israel. Or what used to be Palestine. When it's not busy you can move through the conduits, observed by CCTV at every turn, making sure not to get your sweaters caught on barbed wire. It sounds like prisons in movies, with orders barked from hidden speakers. They’re in Hebrew, saying “next” or “wait '' or another command. They come from twenty year old soldiers. The command is given to an old man, or an elderly Palestinian woman who has literally had a prison built up around her in the space of a lifetime. 

Another idiosyncrasy: if you look at it from a certain angle, you'll see another little prison. It's made from four walls. No sunlight penetrates the single window, which is no doubt bulletproof, out of which the men and women of Israel will spend their youth doing mandatory military service. For the young Israeli it's just a little something tedious and dehumanizing to make him or her hate Palestinians. For the Palestinians, it is but one of the many humiliations and hindrances of living under occupation. And the plastic bags flap like flags in the razor wire.

 I coasted toward the checkpoint, toward Jerusalem, cold, but sweating with apprehension. The Israeli army was inside the West Bank, on my side of the wall. Dozens of adolescents gathered rocks on the side of the street. 

I rolled slowly and admired the graphic design on posters of martyrs wheat-pasted on the wall. The quality of the asphalt road slowly degraded as it approached the checkpoint. I weaved. Trash, mixed with gravel from the booming construction industry filled the potholes. I rode through the dust and a foreshadowing of tear gas. 

The lines looked clear. Youth pitching stones and journalists on one side versus the olive-green army on the other. There was a Banksy graffiti of a girl floating over the wall with the help of a handful of balloons. A massive portrait of Omar Barghouti, handcuffed, was painted as high as the mirador. Barghouti being the co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award in 2017. Barghouti also vocal critic of the Palestinian Authority which he sees as a tool for Israeli oppression: a subcontractor for the Israeli occupation, serving its "security" needs and relieving it of its civic burdens of running education, health, sanitation. 

Barghouti's fine portraiture, done with spray paint, had been burnt during former protests. Black soot caked the wall. As I was examining it, I realized rocks were coming from over my head and behind me. I was too close to the front line. I braked. A rubber bullet hit a road sign above me and five feet to the left. It was as loud as a car wreck. The youth ducked behind the concrete barrier for cover, and I doubled back and shot into an alleyway to observe. I’ll call it a journalistic distance. Just enough to bear witness. I leaned in with a DSLR camera to get pictures of hooded adolescents casting stones. As an amateur writer too chicken-shit to set foot in civil-war Syria, I got my fix in Palestine. I could have found it though, that existential kick in the ass of war. I could have been shot by soldiers if I needed that, too, but not more easily than I could’ve been sideswiped by an SUV tearing out of the parking lot of a four-star hotel. 

But that wouldn’t have been exotic, now would it? 

After an hour I rolled home uphill. It was as if gravity was telling me to turn around. And there I heard the unmistakable snap of live fire. 

I changed gears on my bike to plow through the rutted street. I cut in and out of the bottleneck of the city. Old men, veterans of multiple wars, smoked the day away in cafés. Women browsed through sweatshop attire in air-conditioned malls. There was a glossy teeth-bleaching salon. SUVs idled in traffic. On the main street, English graffiti read: “Fuck the system.”

Although the West Bank is under military occupation, it is technically a free market. And so the world’s flavorless produce and bootleg T-shirts were allowed to flow into the territories, competing with Palestinian production. Thus, the little slice of paradise was held hostage by the world economy and force-fed cheap products from more powerful countries. Your average Palestinian was, and no doubt still is dressed in cheap Chinese knockoffs of Western styles, fashion victims of countries with monolithic TV programming.

As a foreigner, I walked straight out of those televisions. I flashed in white skin as I circled the city of Ramallah like a chained dog. I was but one of thousands of well-intentioned interns and international activists channeled through the occupied Palestinian territories each year. Jobless, the day spreading out before me like a childhood summer, I studied the contemporary history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a rooftop café that overlooked the city. When I flicked my cigarette, my ashes floated toward Jerusalem.   

In 1994, the Israeli government and the Palestinian leadership in exile signed the Oslo Accords. This allowed the Palestinian Liberation Organization to return to the Promised Land and set up shop. With the stroke of a pen, a whole pack of freedom fighters were transformed into bureaucrats. They called themselves the Palestinian National Authority, or the PA for short. They chose Ramallah as their administrative capital, a stone’s throw from Jerusalem. The status of Jerusalem as capital of a Palestinian state is still a contentious issue, even though, if you look at international law, and the armistice of the 1967 war, the Green Line, falls squarely within the holy city. 

With donor money flowing, government buildings and villas and rooftop restaurants like the one where I sat sprouted like mushrooms, at least in Ramallah. In September 2000, collective disappointment with the “peace process” led to the Second Intifada, a popular uprising. The five-year conflict resulted in 1,010 Israeli and 3,147 Palestinian deaths, and an overflowing photo album of Palestinian martyrs thumbed through by my generation. The photos also tiled the city walls, that unique art of martyrdom that paralleled iconography, the canonization of Palestinian youth.

The uprising was given as justification by Israel to erect a thirty-foot-high wall that suitably annexed 9.5 percent of the West Bank into Israel. From the rooftop café, I searched for the wall in the distance and found it in the foreground of Jerusalem. At this distance, it resembled miles of tombstones packed tightly together. Beyond it lay the landing strip of the Qalandiya Airport. 

I continued reading. The same hooded adolescents from the protest earlier filed into a booth in the corner. 

In 2006, a fratricidal power struggle broke out between Fatah, which dominated the PA, and Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement. The bad boys of Hamas secured the majority during legislative elections, but the International Community backed Fatah, those who had hitherto run the PA and those who were comfortable sitting in on negotiations with Zionist cartographers. 

Fatah took control of the West Bank and Hamas took Gaza. The PA, headed by Fatah, crushed local resistance on behalf of Israel, all the while tooting their horns for symbolic victories. In 2012, the PA secured a UN observer state status. The celebrations in the streets were unexceptional. No one knew what it meant, except maybe a change in government stationery. 

Meanwhile, the synthetic poverty in the occupied Palestinian territories was branded and sold by the development industry. This directly removed from Israel the burden of responsibility for the destruction of Palestinian lives, livelihoods, and infrastructure. Voilà, the well-intentioned NGO interns by the thousands that flowed through the occupied territories. 

That’s how I came to be in Palestine carrying a grad degree in international development. When I arrived, it wasn’t all-out warfare. Instead, pretty women with bleached teeth distracted me. Women walked out of gyms with brand-name purses whose logos I had tried to forget.   

I closed the history book and watched the hooded youth I had seen at the protest earlier. They ran through the events of the day, mimicking the explosion of stun grenades, mimicking the arc and velocity of their slingshots. I guess violence begs reenactment. It feels like a dress rehearsal for retribution.

The young men looked alive, far more than me in any case, flipping through the social sciences. I admit though, I was disappointed when I noticed them knocking back Coca-Colas. Glancing at the server wearing Gucci, I questioned the authenticity of it all. After all the international flights and the research on a sixty-plus year conflict, the facts didn’t add up. The can of Coke, horribly ordinary, threw off the equation. The smell of tear gas was drowned out by café lattes. I watched young Palestinians laughing on their second round of drinks. Their smiles were so large that it almost cut their heads in half. 

I wondered if you could get your teeth bleached in Chechnya, or a shot of Botox in a rebel-controlled capital. I knew that one could score a Coke under military occupation in a free market. Suppose it’s like jet-setting to exotic destinations for Palestinians also searching for authenticity—for those penned in between thirty-foot-high walls.

I left the café and went looking for a job. I handed out my resume with all the fervor of a paperboy during the Great Depression. One of my New Year's resolutions (yes, even though I pretended the contrary, I still made them) was to be employed before my thirtieth birthday. It was ambitious, what with the local economic context, but I was told my diploma in international development was worth something. I had no other choice but to believe it. It was the only thing I had invested years in, other than being the patron saint of good times, other than sitting and writing. 

Alas, I was turned down for a job time and time again. Yet even a refusal bordered on an interview, each person gave me the number of a connection, a cousin, or an uncle across town who worked in this or that. They took me in and offered me coffee or tea. There was no work, they were sorry to say, but there was family, their family, and wouldn’t I stay to eat? We smoked while we waited for the tea, discussing the intricacies of their family tree. I met the son, the brother, the mother. I continued, stopping by windows plastered with the acronyms of development agencies. People were so forthcoming that I started to draw conclusions. I said to myself, here are people, united in a common struggle, a valiant struggle. I’ll admit, I took to them. I always got behind the underdogs. They say that idealization is patronizing. In my defense, I had read too much Marx as a teenager. It made me short on nuance. It was all too easy, a lazy conclusion, but I was tired. New to town, I was searching for allies. I was lonely, and the chitchat did me well.

…

That afternoon, when the ten second robbery had been picked apart, reconstructed, and the trauma distilled into memory, Sarah and I disposed of the folded-out coffee table in the living room. We moved the couch to collect the scattered political literature and lo and behold—our man had made a fateful error. He dropped his phone in the scuffle.  

We, meaning Sarah, Sophia, and I debated whether we should do anything with it. After calling Raed for his opinion, Sophia insisted on turning the phone over to the police. Raed would be over to do just that shortly. He was strangely out from behind the curtains about it, now he wasn't caught with his pants down.  

“No worries.” The phone was delivered to the police. 

A point: The police of the Palestinian Authority were not some revolutionary guard in armed struggle with the occupying Israeli state. The former was some sort of Little Brother for the latter, and the latter, Israel, was/is the world's number in cyber security. Or maybe I'm dramatizing, I have no idea how hard it was to trace a flip phone to its owner in 2013. 

Now here was where the strange calculations began. In helping us, the police were protecting foreigners. It’s true Palestinians are irreproachable hosts. Inadvertently, you feel like a guest or are made to feel like a guest. Either way, it all quickly went out of our control. 

The phone was traced to its owner. 

“It’s our fucking neighbor. He’s in jail as of an hour ago.” Sophia paced our living room. “The police want us to come identify him.” 

I opened the window he had crawled through and looked at the fences separating our yards. In his yard, I spotted an unattended child. Wondered where his father was. The child attempted to walk through the garden, only to trip on the branches of tubers. With each time he fell, my desire for vengeance dissipated. Or could you say my empathy grew?

“The police want to know if we want to go through the formal or informal courts. They told us to think it over.”

…

It was a debate that lasted all night. We could’ve brought out the hookahs and rolled rice in wine leaves for the occasion. A goat should’ve been slaughtered. A German named Alexandra sat on the couch. Sophia had invited her to this impromptu get together. She promised that Alex had great energy. I mean, she was 24, so that wasn’t difficult. She sat near Alla, another 24 year old. He didn’t have great energy. Was it because he lived under military occupation or was he naturally combative? I knew him, had seen him. If you went out every night in Ramallah within a week you meet everyone who goes out every night in Ramallah. Alla was womanizer, preferring foreigners. It was easy that way. 

A quick story to prove my point: We, a few foreigners, were driving back from the Dead Sea, one of the few holes you can swim in military-occupied Palestine. We drove toward the center of Ramallah, which is a roundabout. Now, I had seen civil society protests against the Palestinian Authority with protesters diverse in sex and age. There were protests by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a leftist political party. They protested the resumption of peace talks with Israel, a state they did not recognize. But, on this day, when the sun was soaring in the sky, there was a protest of the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine. The black banners flew, and men also dressed in black and waving Korans clamored around the statues of four lions in the roundabout. Our two door sedan was quickly subsumed by the movement and we drove at the speed of the protest with two French nationals aboard. Both wore bikinis. This attests to two things— our lack of tact, and that perhaps it's true, some Western girls just might be easier than Palestinians. 

I’m cherry-picking, telling a tale of spurious correlation. I know. But isn’t that the nature of memory?

I mean, if you see a couple of Palestinian youth making out on the hidden stairwells that connect the hilled city, know that their choice of cover is serious. A Western woman though, especially Western women who travel internationally, will probably have premarital sex. Which in a sense, is a godsend for the sexually frustrated. 

To have marital sex in Palestine, on the other hand, is an undertaking. Mahr, the approximate translation of dowry, is a payment in the form of money or possessions, which is paid by the groom, or the groom’s father, to the bride Their demands can be very hard to meet, starting with an exuberant engagement party and ending with a list of conditions that should be included in the Mahr. The example of the unrealistic demands that the parents ask of the groom can range anywhere between 5,000 Euros and 40,000 Euros. I digress. If you’re only looking to get laid without tarnishing your reputation, sleeping with a foreigner is a common workaround. 

So now you know why Ramallah, with its rotating cast of foreign women, is a Disneyland. Particularly as many foreigners don’t stay. It's difficult to renew visas. It’s difficult to live under occupation. 

Back to the discussion. 

Alla’s arm was wrapped around Alex’s neck. She leaned into it. Played with her hair. He had nice skin, had some sun. His genes stretched back, past the oranges in Jaffa, to some initial sedentarization of man. He knew how to talk. About Palestine. Why wouldn't he? Alexandra inspected a split end. 

And because the Palestinian economy is what it is, nothing but manual labor has sculpted Alla and he powers through the pageantry of the discussion, with its alcohol and cigarettes. He is the loudest in the celebrity of his youth. You’d be crazy not to want to suck his cock, to put it figuratively. Alexandra clearly agrees by the way she looks at him. 

“You can’t send a Palestinian to jail, as if we don’t have enough problems already. Come on, look at the guy’s house."

His house was pushed back from the street. There was some construction undertaken but it looked like it had long been stalled. Moss grew on the concrete. 

Alla's friend, a local musician who also pulled many foreigners, agreed. 

“Look, you don’t know what they’ve been through. That family, I’ve heard of them. They were run out of Jericho. About adultery." 

Alla continued, “You also need to understand Islam.” Here he didn’t develop, which I found interesting. “You don’t know how justice works here. He’s already shamed by his family, and will be shamed by the neighborhood soon. Isn’t that justice enough?”

Both Sarah and I argued the same point. That we didn’t want justice or retribution. It was the need to know that we could sleep at night. “I wake to every sound.” I said. “The wind in the pines out there in the courtyard. When the stray cats climb over the fences.” Trauma I guess is what you call it. Our two friends, Khaled and Ahmad, agreed with us, regardless. They bummed us endless cigarettes.

Sophia, flanked by Raed, changed sides again and again. At first, yes, she also wanted closure. Closure, she said, not justice or retribution. Then, she said, “It’s right, we should just forget about it.” This was Raed’s position—Raed added that the neighbor would obviously not return. I wondered if it was obvious now that our man knew there were locals in the house. Raed made light of the situation by saying that the neighbor now knew that there was nothing to find in the house. 

Several hours of back and forth over Arak and it was Sarah and I who were outsiders. Foreigners come to oppress a local. Foreigners, in a word. 

There was another guest, a published poet, another fixture of nights in Ramallah. A ghost who sat in the corner. He was 10 years our senior and smoked cigarettes through the discussion. He didn’t weigh in on a thing. Maybe it was some small idiosyncrasy that set his heart beating. 

The same evening, around midnight, the neighbor's older brother knocked on our door. Again, I waited for the knife, but instead he entered the house coolly, as if it were his. He insisted that we needed to talk. I made him tea—going through the motions of Palestinian tradition. I offered him a seat, perplexed. He adjusted his pants and sat on the couch.  

“Ok,” he started, “My brother is in jail. You have to help me out.” Although Sarah sat facing him with a bandaged hand, he addressed me. What was meant to be a sign of respect came off as callousness. “I’ll tell you how we do things in Palestine.” He lit a cigarette and paused, taking a sip of tea. “My family will meet with the family members of your roommates in Qalandiya. We will talk and settle on an agreement. But if my brother goes before the courts, he will surely get a year in jail. He has a family to take care of.” 

He explained. His brother was the crazy one in the family. I wished he would elaborate. I wondered if I was the crazy one in the family. The neighbor paused.  “He was drunk,” he said of his brother, with a gesture of a bottle to the mouth. After a prolonged silence, in which I thought to myself, if I robbed a house for each time I was drunk, I’d be the richest man on earth, the neighbor said that he was studying law. I asked him to enlighten us on the justice system. 

His expression was one of confusion as if I had derailed a negotiation. Then, he became excited. To tell the truth, I rarely understood what Palestinians were thinking. Or anyone, apparently.

 “Sulh is a word in Arabic,” he explained, “a parallel court system made of family members. Elders of the victim and—” here he stopped, “my brother” I suppose he didn’t want to call his brother the accused. “It is where they meet. There is a process of reconciliation to stop retaliation. Money is paid for reparations. There is a little shaming on the family name in the end.” 

“Right, I understand. But … ” I looked out the window to the olive tree shivering in the breeze and back to him sitting confidently on the same couch his brother threw Sarah over. “The only reason your brother robbed us was that we have no family, so he could get away with it. Robbing foreigners because they are foreigners is to say we are worth less than you. There’s the insult. So, that’s why we have little sympathy for your brother. I don’t want to see him every day, next door. On the other hand, I’m not a vengeful person, although living here, I’m tempted to become one.” 

“Wait, you’re sympathetic to him because he’s Palestinian? Have you ever thought that my brother only robbed you because you’re next door? Not because you’re a foreigner?”

“I haven’t.” 

“You should.” 

I sipped the tea, and over the glass I watched him squirm. It was enough for me. I didn't need the catharsis. I had only recently had my reality rearranged by the cheap trick of travel. I had better things than revenge on my mind. It was not that I was filled with great reserves of empathy, but rather that I was better at forgetting than forgiving.

“Fine, we’ll not press charges.” 

The family didn’t show up to the trail. But the needle thread itself. The police jailed the man although we never pressed charges. 

Revenge was enacted for us, because it was an exercise of ostracization for their society, not for us, two individuals. Individuals who also happen to be foreigners. So it makes sense, that we were robbed, during the holiday season when the world over experiences spikes in crime, and that we should be the target.

He got six months. Before those six months were up we moved houses across town. It lay in a different valley, one in which an Israeli colony drained its wastewater into the valley. Another valley that gave onto other considerations. 

They say that in the first year of living in Palestine, you hate the Israeli occupation. The second year, you’re frustrated with living with Palestinians. And by the third year, you’re gone. 

I no longer live in Palestine, which is not necessarily true. There are still unnumbered questions never answered. I find myself often traveling back there, in memory. 

 Nothing means what you think it does. You expect people to be traditional, you look for that as a traveler and it perverts your perspective. Some cultural understanding that goes way over your head, higher than planes that you rode in on and ride out on. It reminds of quote attributed to Hassan as-Sabbāh, the founder of the Nizari Ismali State in Iran, better known for its military group, the Order of Assassins and the quote is: 

Nothing is true, everything is permitted. 

Which is itself not true.