Israel/Palestinian Territories, Part II

One day in Jerusalem I was wandering through the Old City when I ran into a small crowd of people blocking the passageway through. They were watching a shop television that was pointed outward.

Al-Jazeera was showing live images of a large group of men, policemen I think, who had been killed in a town square. The camera crew had arrived before the ambulances, and they took sweeping shots of the square full of dead, perhaps twenty mangled bodies. I asked a Palestinian where it was. "Gaza," he said. "Forty are dead so far."

I continued on, very concerned. The Israeli/Palestinian cease-fire of six months had just ended days before, and nobody had known what was going to happen. Militants had been firing rockets from Gaza into Israel with increasing frequency, and some sort of action by the Israelis was largely expected. But this was beyond what most had thought. Every shop that had a television or radio tuned in to the coverage, and within minutes it seemed all in the Old City knew.

This is probably why people were so easy to get spooked a few minutes later as was I continuing on through the densely packed alley. The crowd of people suddenly stopped its typical walking pattern and started started stampeding towards me, yelling in different languages. I looked ahead and saw smoke. Someone yelled a questioning "Bomb???" in English, which seemed to excite everyone even more. The shopkeepers all quickly threw their wares into their tiny shop and closing the steel doors are fast as possible, but it seemed more to protect it from the smoke than anything else. I tell you, that place cleared out FAST.

Logically, I thought, if I hadn't heard a "boom" and there was already smoke, it couldn't be a bomb, so I just kind of stood there with a small group of people and after a minute walked tentatively ahead. Sure enough, we saw a decent size grease fire in the middle of the walkway ahead. So we all grabbed some rags by the garbage and threw them on top of the fire, putting it out quickly.

(The shops, it turned out, didn't re-open. In fact, the rest of the Old City shut down soon after in solidarity with the people of Gaza.)

Still, if that didn't worry me, my next stop did. I needed to go to Bethlehem to check on my stolen wallet from New Year's Eve. I faced this with a small amount of apprehension because of its location just within the walls of the West Bank, but I decided to take my chances anyway.

I jumped on a slow-moving bus from Jerusalem and made my way back to the Church of Nativity where the tourism police were. They hadn't found anything from my wallet of course, but they had al-Jazeera on and I saw that the death toll had now climbed to 150. The policeman, who spoke good English, saw that I was watching and asked me a few questions about what I thought about the whole thing. I was as ambiguous as possible because, really, it isn't my place at all to get involved here. But eventually we got into a long conversation about the whole mess.

It turns out that he had been in the same building, just yards away from the Church of Nativity, a couple years before when the Church it had been taken over by militants and besieged by the Israelis. He expressed more a sense of bewilderment towards Israel's policies ("What are they trying to accomplish in the end in Gaza? And what in the West Bank?") and the USA's stance ("I just don't understand why they don't seem to care about us") than anything else. This impression has largely been matched by most Palestinians, both before and after the strike, with whom I've talked to. Anger, yes, but more confusion than anything else. And a why-are-they-doing-this-to-us mentality combined with, let's be honest, a strong anti-Semitic streak, makes for a pretty explosive potential here.

While the average shopkeeper might simply want to make a living to support his family, a number of people wish horrible things on Israelis. It doesn't take many people to set off a rocket or detonate a bomb, and with Hamas in charge of Gaza and locked in a power struggle with Fatah for the West Bank, there's no telling what they'll do next. Hamas doesn't recognize Israeli's right to exist and their stated mission is to destroy it, so its natural for Israel to be hostile towards them. Furthermore, Israel's history with all of it's neighbors leaves much to be desired, and its understandable why the two sides don't trust each other.

But if the military ends up destroying Hamas with this incursion, then it has cut off the only leadership Gaza really has. What next? Who takes control? If they fail and Hamas stays in control, then Israel will have presumably strengthened Hamas in front of the entire world - especially those with al-Jazeera on 24/7. After the Lebanese War, Hezbollah was actually empowered. Does Israel truly think the same thing won't happen to Hamas?

So, basically, it seems to me kind of a waiting game with no possible good ending. I don't know.

Anyway, when I was done at the police station I wanted to walk back to the checkpoint to get through the wall and out of the West Bank. I wanted to talk to some more Palestinians about what was happening. The amount of solidarity they expressed for Gaza was impressive, and their attitude towards me in general was perhaps the first time I've ever felt genuine hostility because of my nationality. Individuals have expressed it before, but it's almost always directed towards my government. Rarely the population as a whole. Here I got a strong sense of "You guys, your government, everyone over there, are evil. Burn in hell."

Eventually I came to the wall that surrounds the West Bank.

The wall is just horrible. It's a giant grey monstrosity, ineffective at its purpose, and significant beyond anything else as a tangible sign of oppression for the Palestinians of the Israelis. Protesting slogans of resistance, peace, love, hate, anti-US, anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, atheism, anarchy, socialism, and every other stripe cover the bottom portion of it - a poignant and sobering message to a world which, as far as the Palestinians believe, seems not to care about their plight. I followed it a while, simultaneously reading it and hating it. At one juncture, right below an Israeli-manned observation tower, a rock landed some meters away from me.

Not having noticed anyone around me, I took a quick glance around; no one. But then another one landed, and another. Finally, a distance away, I saw a group of twenty or so teenage and 20-something men launching an entire volley. Their body language didn't seem to indicate hostility towards me. But while their target appeared to be the Israeli-manned observation post above me, they knew I was there and didn't seem to care if they hit me. So I decided to get out real quick.

My position was between the wall, which created an angle with an adjacent building that made it impossible for me to continue, and the rock throwers, who were hiding behind a tree and a cement wall. Because I had backed myself into a literal corner and because they seemed to be concentrating on the post, I trotted to the other side of the street away from the rocks and walked up the road towards them to get away from them.

The Palestinians showed anxiety in their actions, as they were careful not to remain exposed for long when throwing. They would run out from behind a cement wall, hurl the fist-size rocks, and then run behind a large juniper that was near the wall. After a moment of rest the group would scamper back to the wall for more rocks. Then they all jumped out and start hurling rocks again. Evidently these guys had past memories from throwing rocks and didn't wish to be shot at or detained at a later time.

This, I found out later, was only a small example of many larger protests and riots that were already cropping up all around the West Bank. But all I wanted to do was get out of there, so I hugged the opposite wall from where the throwers were and started up the street. I waited until they had just thrown a volley and then passed by them on my way to a taxi that was just ahead of me. As I was starting to jog towards it I heard a crack behind me as a stone hit a brick store I was near. When I turned around, a half dozen of them were pointing at me and picking up stones. They threw a volley my way but I was mostly out of range by that time and the taxi driver casually opened the door for me and then yelled something toward the stone throwers.
I jumped into the taxi and asked the driver what he said. "Don't hit my car," he replied with a grin.

He brought me to the checkpoint saying "You probably shouldn't be around the West Bank by yourself any more over the next few days." He paused. "Sorry about the rocks."

My planned expedition for the say into Hebron, deeper within the West Bank, was obviously out of the question now, so I retired to my hostel for the night.

The next say I decided to exit Israel. There wasn't any danger to me that wasn't there before, but it was time for me to leave anyway. Luckily I made the Egyptian border in decent time and went back into Cairo, entering the city for, incredibly, the 5th time in as many weeks.

As I write this, the death toll in Gaza has passed 400. As it was, the first day saw 200 deaths in the largest Palestinian single-day toll since the war in 1967. It doesn't matter that 75% of the deaths are members of Hamas - al Jazeera isn't mentioning that part when they show results of the strikes. But even if they did, it wouldn't make a difference. Hamas is largely admired and respected in the Arab world, and to them this is like Israel trying to take out out a foreign government.

I'm hearing that the West Bank has had numerous protest - two rioters were killed the other day and many other injured. Lebanese have attacked their Egyptian embassy, blaming the government here for encouraging the attacks. Ditto in Yemen. Al-Jazeera has been covering the campaign pretty much non-stop and the Arab world is just pissed as hell. Here in Cairo there are marches and popular demonstrations against the the Egyptian government and Israel. Basically, this is just a tense time right now, and though I feel just fine with being in Egypt, it's yet another reason for me to want to get out of here.