Visiting the West Bank

Author's Note: My visit to the West Bank was probably the single most powerful and moving part of my entire three-week trip, but I didn't get around to writing this entry until two months after I'd been home in the U.S. (Although this entry is dated June 7, the day this all happened, I'm writing it in early August.) I'm not sure why I kept avoiding and procrastinating writing this, probably because I know it's such a charged subject and because there was just so much to process and write about that I didn't even know where to start. I settled on simply writing a narrative about my experience and allowing the reader to "listen in" on my raw thoughts and feelings as I encountered the things I did. This entry became so long that I decided to divide it into several sections with different headers, to help break the story up. I hope you'll stick with me and read through the entire experience; all of it seemed too significant to edit any of it out. - Tracy

Planning my visit

When I was first doing research for my pilgrimage to Israel, I Googled "Bethlehem," since it was definitely one of the top Christian sites I'd want to visit -- the site of Jesus's birth. I discovered, to my surprise, that Bethlehem was not in Israel at all, but in the West Bank.

"Oh my gosh, Bethlehem's in the West Bank? Can I even GO there?" I thought, as images of suicide bombers and gunfire from the evening news flashed through my mind.

Then I checked myself. Maybe the West Bank was like Harlem in New York, or Roxbury in Boston -- places that lots of people said you "shouldn't go," and that were "scary," but the people who said you shouldn't go there were mostly white middle-class people and their fears had a lot to do with uncomfortability around racial and economic class difference or just downright inaccurate stereotypes. I'd been to Harlem and didn't feel unsafe there; I'd been to Roxbury and didn't feel unsafe there either. Granted, I didn't walk around those places alone at night, but I found that a lot of the hype was just that -- hype.

So I started asking around about the West Bank, and the general consensus I got from all the American Christian people I knew was that it was perfectly safe to go to Bethlehem and visit the Church of the Nativity. Thousands of tourists do it every day, and there are even buses that run from Jerusalem to Manger Square, they told me. I decided I definitely wanted to go to Bethlehem, but figured I'd work out all the details of that trip once I got to Jerusalem, since it was close enough to be a day trip from Jerusalem.

On the day that Rachel and Kevin and I went to the Dead Sea, they told me about a trip they'd taken to the West Bank a few days before from Jerusalem. "Oh yeah, we just took one of the Arab buses from East Jerusalem and got off in Bethlehem," Rachel said, "and we just flagged down a taxi driver and asked him to show us around."

"We're not really interested in all the religious sites," they told the driver, "we just want to know what life is like for you under the occupation." So he took them all around the West Bank on a four-hour tour of Bethlehem and Hebron, telling them all about life in the West Bank and the Israeli settlers confiscating their land and the tension and violence and physical separation barrier walls at Abraham's Tomb in Hebron between the Jewish and Muslim sides. 

"It was just so crazy," Rachel said, "because here were these people, praying in two languages that sound so very similar, and venerating the same prophet, and yet they had to have these bullet-proof barriers between them while they prayed."

The driver told them that as a Palestinian, he was not allowed to go on the Jewish side of the wall. "You can go, since you are American," he said, "but we're not allowed over there." He told them how the "security" at Abraham's tomb was blatantly biased, with the Palestinians required to go through multiple checkpoints and metal detectors and scans, while the Israelis could walk right up after going through one single scanner. "They do it just to wear us down," he said, "to make things difficult for us."

The Jewish side of Abraham's Tomb (Rachel's picture) 

The Muslim side of Abraham's Tomb (Rachel's picture)

After hearing about their trip, my appetite was whetted to learn more, and I knew that I could not do what so many Christian tourists do and simply go and visit the Church of the Nativity and return back to Jerusalem without really engaging with the local Palestinian population. Given my penchant for work among homeless people and advocating for people on the margins of society, I felt that I wouldn't be being true to my faith to take that kind of isolated, spectator approach to my visit to the West Bank. Rachel and Kevin said they'd gotten their taxi driver's number and that they were sure he'd be willing to show me around. I called Rachel a few days later to ask for his phone number, but ultimately chickened out of calling him. I just didn't feel comfortable as a woman traveling alone to call up some random taxi driver and ask him to show me around. If I'd had someone with me, I might have done it, but not by myself. 

So I started investigating tours. Rachel had told me there was also a group called "Breaking the Silence," comprised of ex-Israeli soldiers, who give tours of the West Bank. This sounded fascinating to me, so I looked them up, but there were no tours scheduled to go before I would be leaving Jerusalem. So, I started looking around for other tour groups. All throughout this trip, I had bristled at the presence of tour buses packed with tourists taking pictures and generally looking very out of place. I cringed at the thought of being "one of them" for this excursion to the West Bank, but decided I'd have to just bite the bullet and do the tour bus thing for this one day, to give me a somewhat safe way to explore the West Bank. I settled on going with a company called Green Olive Tours, on an eight-hour day trip from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. I wished I could visit Hebron and Abraham's Tomb as Rachel and Kevin had, but that tour only went on Thursdays, and I was flying out from Tel Aviv Thursday evening. So, I settled on just going to Bethlehem. 

The tour description said the Church of the Nativity would be included in the tour, so I knew I'd get a chance to see it, but it also said we'd see a refugee camp and get to see the Wall up close and some of the Banksy graffiti art on it. All these things sounded like the same kind of tour that Rachel and Kevin had gotten from their taxi driver, so I decided to go for it. It seemed like I would get to see pretty much everything I wanted to see from this tour.

Arriving in the West Bank

**A note on pictures: None of the pictures in the first part of this entry are my own; I have found them online and given credit where possible. I did not start taking pictures until after I was in the West Bank and past the security checkpoint and had asked if it was ok to take pictures; before then I thought maybe I could get in trouble with "the authorities" for trying to take pictures.**

Photo from TripAdvisor

Tuesday morning I got up early and made my way to the Notre Dame Hotel in Jerusalem (pictured at right), just outside the Old City, which was listed as the pick-up spot for the tour. I had reserved my spot online, so I hadn't actually spoken to anyone with this organization before I showed up, and I essentially knew nothing about the logistics of getting to the West Bank. I assumed a big tour bus -- of the same kind that passed me constantly for the thirty minutes I waited outside the hotel (I actually got there EARLY cause I didn't want to miss it!) -- would arrive to pick up the folks on the Bethlehem tour.

I had asked the guard at the gate to the hotel where the Green Olive Tours picked up, and he pointed me to a spot on the corner. I stood there for a while, noticing two young college-aged-looking girls sitting with their hiking backpacks stuffed full and speaking in English with British accents. I wondered if they were going to be on the same tour. After thirty minutes passed and it was getting closer and closer to pick-up time and no one else had arrived to wait with us, I was starting to wonder if I was in the right place.

"Are y'all waiting for the Green Olive Tours trip to Bethlehem?" I asked the two girls. They affirmed that they were, and we shared our confusion at the lack of other tourists present. "I guess this is the right spot?" I said, looking around and peering at the tour buses that kept pulling in to the circle up by the hotel lobby and then departing without so much as a second glance at the three of us.

Suddenly, a yellow cab pulled halfway up onto the curb in front of us. The driver rolled down the passenger window and asked brusquely, "You are waiting for Green Olive Tours?"

The girls and I looked at each other. 

"Yes," I said. 

"Get in," he said quickly, motioning to the back seat.

I looked back at the girls again. What? This random cab driver is telling us to just get in with him? Where's the tour bus? What the heck is going on? 

The driver put the car in park and jumped out with a piece of paper in his hand. "Tracy?" he asked, looking down at his list. "Yes, that's me," I said, assuming he really must be with this company if he had a print-out of my registration. He identified the other girls as well and started throwing their luggage into the trunk. I don't think I would have gotten in the car with him if those other two girls hadn't been with me, but I figured, okay, what the heck, here we go...!

We got in the car, and the driver spurted off on a wild maniac dash through the streets of Jerusalem, dodging cars and traffic signs and any other obstacles in his way.

"I take you to the checkpoint, and then you meet your guide on the other side," he said.

"Um, what? You're going to drop us off?" somebody said. Maybe it was me.

"Yes, I take you to the checkpoint. Your guide will be waiting on the other side. You will see him. His name is Yamen. He is a brown-skinned man with a shaved head."

Oh, great. What specific identifying information! I pictured a whole line of brown-skinned men with shaved heads standing around on the other side of the checkpoint and the three of us very white girls trying to figure out which one was Yamen.

The cab driver pulled up in front of the main Jerusalem-Bethlehem checkpoint, bid us farewell, and zoomed off. The girls and I stared up at the monstrous concrete complex in front of us, surrounded by iron bars, with only one way in that we could see, up a long ramp. "Um, oh BOY!" I said out loud, looking at the girls, assessing their general comfort level. They also seemed wary of this whole thing, having expected, as I did, a tour bus with air conditioning to safely escort us across the border in the hands of some seasoned local expert tour guides. "Oh my God," one of the girls said as we walked through the long corridor and into the checkpoint area, "this is the real thing."

Entering the Bethlehem checkpoint. (Not my picture)

It was around 9 a.m., so the morning crowds had already dissipated and the checkpoint was almost empty when we went through. We all had our passports out as we approached the guard timidly, expecting a severe round of harassment about our intentions in crossing the border. Without so much as a second glance at us, the guard waved us on through, without even the pretense of looking at our passports. We didn't ask any questions and just kept walking. After we got out on the other side and started down the next barred-off walkway, the British girls laughed at how easy that had been for us to cross. "Oh, well, I mean, I guess they could tell we're tourists. I mean, we don't exactly look like terrorists," one of them said. We all laughed, but I couldn't stop myself from saying, "Yes, but what does a terrorist 'look' like?"

After working on the film Divided We Fall and meeting many brown-skinned people in the U.S. who were mistaken for "terrorists" after 9/11 based on just such a stereotype of the Palestinian Arab "terrorist," it was a strange thing to now be encountering those very Palestinian Arabs that everyone was so afraid of and that were at the root of the anti-Arab, anti-Muslim sentiment in America. I had this sneaking suspicion that even if the identity wasn't mistaken -- these really WERE Arabs, not Indians or Mexicans or Bangladeshis or Pakistanis -- that the stereotype was still incorrect. And yet, years of conditioning via the media and movies and the general culture in America to be afraid of Arabs -- particularly in -- GASP -- THE WEST BANK -- still made my stomach tighten a bit as we crossed that border.

Any fears I had were soon assuaged when we met Yamen, our brown-skinned, bald-headed guide, who was indeed waiting for us on the other side, with a huge smile on his face and a bubbling enthusiasm. He quickly picked us out, introduced himself, and motioned us to follow him a few steps away from the area where all the cabs were waiting to pick up passengers.

Taxis waiting on the West Bank side of the checkpoint (not my photo)

"So, my name is Yamen, I live here in Bethlehem, and we're going to show you a bit about what's going on here today," he said. "People don't realize what's going on here. But we're going to show you. Now, while you're here in the West Bank, you need to learn a little Arabic. So, I'm going to teach you -- yalla. That means, "Let's go," or "hurry up," like, "Come on, let's go." Ok. Ready? You need a little Arabic. So. Yalla!" 

He bounded off down the street, with the three of us and another white woman from Belgium who was staying in the West Bank for a few days and had joined in on our trip tagging along behind him. I noticed that he was wearing a t-shirt that said, "Merry Christmas, Bethlehem!" on it in French and English, showing a cartoon of the Wall and a metal detector with a man with a large sword inspecting the shepherds and the three wise men on camels. I laughed to myself and thought, "I like this guy already."

First Encounters: Settlements and The Wall

Our first stop was just down the street from the checkpoint where we'd entered Bethlehem, where Yamen pointed out to us an Israeli settlement in the distance. 

"You see? The settlers are over there," he said, pointing. "That is Palestinian land. They just come and take it and build their settlements on it, and the Israeli soldiers protect them."

"Can we take pictures?" I asked, worrying that at any moment an Israeli soldier would show up and confiscate my memory card.

"Of course," he said, nonchalantly. He went on to talk more about settlements and how many Israeli citizens are living -- illegally, according to international law -- in the West Bank. 

"Obama talks about 1967 borders," he said, referring to President Obama's speech in mid-May calling for the recognition of a Palestinian state using the 1967 borders after the cease-fire at the end of the Six-Day War. "If you want 1967 borders, all those people have got to go," he said, pointing to an immense suburban settlement full of towering apartment complexes.

"So what do you think will happen in September?" one of the British girls asked, echoing my question to the American Israeli rabbi solider in Jerusalem just two nights before.

Yamen shrugged in much the same way as Bob had. "Nothing will change," he said. "These people aren't going anywhere. You want 1967 borders, they'd have to leave. That's not going to happen."

We then walked along "The Wall" for quite aways. (Unlike my Jewish Israeli guides on Sunday's excursion across the border, the folks in the West Bank had no trouble identifying where the Wall was!) As we looked at the countless graffiti scrawled on the Wall (not present on the Israeli side), Yamen pointed out all the Banksy art. "There, that's Banksy!" he'd say, with an air of pride, seemingly excited that the anonymous British graffiti artist had brought publicity and attention to the Wall through his art. "With Love and Kisses - Nothing Lasts Forever," said a ribbon that Yamen told us was Banksy art. Not too far from there, someone had scrawled over a figure of a man standing facing the wall, "Once a human rights teacher was born in Bethlehem." 

Much of the graffiti in this area played on the irony of the subjugation and oppression taking place in the city of Jesus's birth. Yamen told us that most of the graffiti was done not by locals, but by visiting tourists -- and indeed, much of it was in English. It was obvious that lots of Christian groups had not lost the connection between the city of Jesus's birth and the people who are being oppressed there today. "Jesus wept," someone had scrawled on one part of the wall, and in another area someone had stenciled the words to Ephesians 2:14 - "For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility." The British girls and I were going nuts with our cameras, taking pictures of one set of graffiti art after the other. I felt very touristy doing so, and somewhat silly, taking pictures of writing on a wall. Surely there was something more "artistic" for me to shoot? But the messages on the Wall were just so compelling, I couldn't stop myself. There was more than one allusion to Berlin, with phrases like "this wall must fall" and "Apocalypse now! Berlin 89!" Idealized murals of the city of Jerusalem showed transcendent hands holding a ladder with a heart descending from the sky as a dove flew over the city with an olive branch in its mouth, and a large Christmas tree was depicted encircled by a large, towering concrete wall. 

I couldn't help but make the Berlin connections myself as I walked along this all-too-real wall. I remembered when my sister and I visited Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during our trip to Germany in 2005. The checkpoint was now a tourist destination, a museum nearby depicting history of Cold War-Era East Germany. Across the street from the museum was a food court area called, cutely enough, "Snackpoint Charlie." The frivolity with which that site was now treated in the tourist market was striking compared to this real-life version of an active separation wall. I found myself hoping that someday my children and I could visit "Snackpoint Bethlehem," when the West Bank Wall would be no more than a museum. Perhaps my children will one day be given pieces of the West Bank Wall in high school as an honor when they show leadership potential, as I was given a piece of the Berlin Wall in 10th grade.

Aida Refugee Camp

We continued on to the Aida Refugee Camp, where Palestinian families have been living since 1948 when the state of Israel was first created. It now looked like a fairly well-developed area of apartments -- at least in contrast to the images of people living in tents that the phrase "refugee camp" conjured up in my mind. Yamen explained that for the first seven years after 1948, the people had indeed lived in tents, but eventually began to build more solid structures as it became apparent they were not going to be able to return to their homeland anytime soon. Many of the people living in the refugee camps are Palestinians who fled from their homes in what is now Israel during the fighting and violence that ensued after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. These families were told they would be able to return to their homes after the violence stopped, but those promises have yet to be fulfilled. There is now a third generation of refugees growing up in this camp and others like it across the West Bank.

The thing I couldn't quite figure out was WHY these people weren't allowed to return to their homes -- some of them still have the keys to their homes, now on Israeli land, that their families had lived in for hundreds of years. The Palestinian people who did NOT flee the violence and remained in the land that became Israel eventually were given Israeli citizenship -- like the many Arab people I had encountered in Nazareth and Jerusalem. It didn't make sense to me -- so these refugees were punished just because they fled from the violence and did not want to be killed? What if they just wanted to go back to their homes and were willing to be Israeli citizens and didn't want to try to make Israel back into a Palestinian state? Nope, they still wouldn't be allowed back in, was the answer I consistently got from different sources, because the Israeli authorities were worried if they let the Palestinian refugees back in, the Arabs would become a demographic majority in the state of Israel.

The government's agenda is to preserve Israel's existence as a "Jewish state"... which it certainly can't be if the majority of its citizens aren't Jewish. So for that reason and that reason only (from what I could gather), three generations of people are living in refugee camps on blocks of land that supposedly belong to them -- "Palestinian territories" -- but where they are not allowed to build or plant crops and where even their water supply is controlled by Israeli authorities and is often cut off at random, for no particular reason (or worse, for a particular reason -- to benefit Israelis at the expense of Palestinians. For more on the "unnecessary drought" in the West Bank, see my fellow FTE Ministry Fellow Staci Imes' blog entry, "The Senseless Drought." Staci spent three months in Israel and Palestine this summer as her Ministry Fellowship project.)

When I say the refugee camp looked "well-developed," please understand that that is a relative term. It was certainly well-developed in comparison to a tent city, but it made even the worst of Section 8 housing projects in the U.S. look like the Taj Mahal. Concrete slab buildings butted up against one another, and livestock often lived right underneath people's homes in cages since there was no green land for farming. (The grid-like gated area under the building pictured at right housed a whole hoard of goats, for example.) The entire place was a concrete slab; I didn't see one blade of grass the entire time we were in the camp. Young children ran through the streets and smiled shyly at us, and Yamen pointed out that they had nowhere to play -- no playgrounds, no green grass to run around in -- and said they were all coming to him asking for toys and things because often he would bring them gifts when he came through here.

He showed us a school in the refugee camp run by the United Nations that was boarded up on one side because of all the gunfire that had been directed at the school by Israeli soldiers from the other side of the Wall during the second intifada in 2001-04 (approximate dates). The bullet holes were still visible in the doorway to the school (pictured below), and that entire side of the building had no windows. Why were Israeli soldiers shooting at an elementary school? "Some of the children were throwing rocks at the Wall," Yamen explained. 

On the outer wall of the school was a beautiful mural of the Kabba, the holiest site in Islam in Mecca and the site of Muslim pilgrimage, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, where I had been just two days before. Yamen told us that it is now very difficult for Palestinians in the West Bank to travel to Jerusalem, which many Palestinians consider their capital. "I haven't been in Jerusalem since 1999," he told us, even though Bethlehem is less than six miles from the heart of Jerusalem.

Now I know my A, B, Cs... for today, at least

After our trek through the refugee camp on foot, we made our way to Yamen's car, a six-door extra-long vehicle that could seat eight and had "Limousina" plastered across the front windshield in stickers. We all piled in and Yamen gave us a driving tour in his very un-air-conditioned car of the greater Bethlehem area, singing along in Arabic and English at the top of his lungs to the different songs on the radio. He pointed out various shops, restaurants, historic sites, and the "borders" between the different "areas" in the West Bank -- Area A (full Palestinian control), Area B (shared Israeli-Palestinian control) and Area C (full Israeli control). The boundaries of these areas were marked by short concrete pylons sitting on the sidewalks (pictured below).

"Um, what?" I asked, incredulously. "That's IT?? That's what marks the boundaries between these different areas of control, and yet there's this huge wall around the whole West Bank to mark THAT boundary?"

Yes, well, apparently these boundaries are a bit more, shall we say... mobile. Yamen explained that these concrete blocks would change color or move on a regular basis and an area that had been Area A (full Palestinian control) would suddenly become Area C (full Israeli control) and the Israelis would start building a settlement on that land.

On our tour, Yamen took us to an area just outside of Bethlehem that had recently been designated Area C and where construction was beginning on a new settlement. Just down the road from that site, he pointed out a completed Israeli settlement, which we could expect that other area to look like soon. The Wall (which is still under construction) is being built in such a way that it essentially annexes these lands for Israel, putting the settlements on the "Israeli" side of the Wall and cutting off access to those areas for Palestinians.

Israeli settlement near Bethlehem, with barbed wire where the Wall will eventually go

As Yamen told us about this, I couldn't believe my ears. Well, I could, but I couldn't. So the Israeli government can just come in and... excuse me, but I can't seem to find a better word for this... f*** with the boundaries of what land Palestinians actually have control over, and no one does anything about it? Why don't the Palestinians do anything about it?

Well, really, what can they do? The Palestinians don't have a real government or a state, and most of the areas that are actually SAID to be under "full Palestinian control" are only the central parts of the cities. The areas that Palestinians actually control are a bunch of isolated geographic pockets that aren't even contiguous (that is, they don't share a border or touch each other), so they are completely surrounded by areas under Israeli control. All the transactions we made in the West Bank took place in shekels, the Israeli currency. And yet, we left the state of Israel when we left Jerusalem and crossed the checkpoint... but we weren't really in another country.

It was all very confusing to me and didn't seem to make sense; my mind didn't have a place to put "occupied territory that isn't part of any country" in my system of categorization. I began to understand where the so-called "terrorist" violence in the West Bank comes from. If I lived there, I'd probably want to start shooting at Israeli soldiers, too. What do you do when you are rendered politically impotent and are unable to organize your people in any meaningful way to work for change? What else is there to do but turn to violence? I found my strong belief in non-violence being tested. I didn't want to think that violence was the answer, but I literally could not see any other option for these people. I was about ready to sign up to join a revolutionary army to overthrow the state of Israel.

Yamen then took us to see a section of the Wall that was still under construction. As we drove, I was surprised to notice that I actually recognized the road we were on -- it was the same road we'd taken when I was with the Israeli folks for the interfaith meeting at the restaurant in "no-man's land." Then we turned on the road to Beit Jala that the Israelis had pointed out to me on Sunday, saying, "See that road? We can't go down there." And two days later, here I was, going down that very road with a Palestinian guide! I realized what a unique position I was in as a visiting American, able to travel freely between the ares that were restricted to the people who actually live here.

I was surprised to see, as we looked at the Wall from this high vantage point, that it was encircling the very road I'd driven on from Jerusalem in the car with the Israelis on Sunday -- the same road where I'd noticed what looked like a large sound barrier and asked if it was "The Wall," and been given a negative answer by my Israeli car-mates. Well, turns out that "sound barrier" actually WAS part of the Wall. I don't think my Israeli hosts were intentionally lying about it; I think they really didn't know that it was part of the Wall. It certainly looks very different on the Israeli side than it does on the Palestinian side.

View of the Wall from the vantage point of the road to Beit Jala

View of the wall from the Israeli side, driving on the road seen in the picture above

The Wall from the Palestinian side -- all concrete slab, no nice stone ornamentation

Later in the day, Yamen drove us down a "shared road" that both Israelis and Palestinians could use that ran through the West Bank to some of the Israeli settlements and showed us a bus stop where Israeli settlers waited for buses to Jerusalem, where most of them work. Orthodox Jewish women in long skirts pushing baby carriages waited for the bus, surrounded by several Israeli soldiers with large machine guns. 

"See, the Israeli soldiers come out here to protect the settlers, because people here shoot at them and throw things at them," Yamen explained.

I was livid. Something about the image of these women standing here in a land they do not even own and being "protected" by the military forces who were illegally occupying this land, really set me off. I wanted to throw rocks at them! Shouldn't someone be "protecting" the Palestinians from these settlers instead of the other way around???? I began to feel a deep anger building within me toward the entire state of Israel, at its very existence, and at the twisted theology that made these people feel they were entitled to this land because God gave it to their ancestors over 5,000 years ago.

Church of the Nativity

Our visit to the Church of the Nativity was strangely anticlimactic for me. After being bombarded with all this information about the injustices happening in the West Bank, to just saunter off to visit the church seemed rather unimportant. We met a different guide at the church, who took us through on a very orderly timeline, to have us back to Yamen in time for lunch.

I joined the crowds in line to touch the spot where tradition says Jesus was born, and after I knelt down and touched it and stood up, an Orthodox priest handed me a little paper icon of the Nativity, like my own personal certificate of completion for kissing the spot where Jesus's bloody body rushed out of his mother's womb. 

Outside the adjacent Roman Catholic chapel was a small plaque that said, in English and German, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. (St. John 1.14) When dark is the world today, This Child brings the world the light." It was particularly poignant given all the things I had just seen, and I began to understand that Jesus lives not only on the streets of Boston and New York and Atlanta where I had encountered him in the faces of homeless people. Jesus lives in a refugee camp in Palestine. 

We left the church and met back up with Yamen, who took us on a walking tour of Manger Square and the market (sooq) there. As we walked, he asked me what I was doing on my trip to Israel, and I said I was on a pilgrimage. He looked somewhat alarmed.

"You do realize this is not a religious tour, right?" he said. He later told me that he often had "religious people" get angry when they realized that this tour was not just about seeing the church but about seeing the realities of life for Palestinians in the West Bank. "Why are you showing us all these things?" they'd ask angrily, when Yamen led them into the refugee camp. "I don't want to get into this 'political' stuff; I just want to see the church."

I assured him that no, I was well aware that this tour was about getting a taste of Palestinian life under the occupation, and that to me, that was a religious pursuit.

"Personally, I don't think I'd be being true to my faith as a Christian if I were to come here and NOT meet the people and see the injustices that are going on here," I told him. "For me to come here and turn a blind eye to what's happening to the local people and just go to 'see the church' would pretty much contradict everything that Christianity is about."

"Ah, I get it," he said, nodding. "Yeah, I know what you mean."

Beautiful Resistance

After a wonderful lunch at a local Palestinian restaurant, we went back to the refugee camp to meet with the general manager of the Al-Rowwad Cultural and Theater Training Center, Dr. Abdelfattah Abusrour. Dr. Abusrour, who appeared to be in his late 40s, was born in Aida Refugee Camp and left to get an education in Europe. He talked about experiences in school when administrative people tried to figure out what to put in his "nationality" box on his forms. 

"They listed me as Jordanian," he said. "I took it to them and said, 'I am not a Jordainian. I have never lived in Jordan. I am a Palestinian living under Israeli occupation.' So they took it back and changed my nationality to 'undetermined.' I do not have a country. It's like I do not exist."

After living abroad, Dr. Abusrour decided to come back to his homeland, even to the refugee camp itself, to work with his people and help motivate the children to what he calls "beautiful resistance" to the Israeli occupation -- through artistic expression in visual art, theater, and music. His organization is committed to non-violence, a stance he had chosen because of all the negatives he had seen come out of violence, even violence in resistance to the occupation, even violence "for a good cause." 

"Violence is never the solution," Dr. Abusrour said. "Violence only creates more violence. I call my work 'beautiful resistance,' which some people take offense at because they think I am saying that other kinds of resistance are not beautiful. Well, I don't think they are. Violence is never beautiful, and I want our children to realize that they have another option besides violence to resist the occupation."

Dr. Abusrour spoke to us in his office, where I noticed he had posters of Martin Luther King, Jr., Ghandi, and Mother Teresa hanging up over his desk. He offered us tea and showed us this 10-minute video (below) about the work of Al-Rowwad that brought tears to my eyes. 

When the video was over, we had some time to talk with him about his work. After many questions and answers about the specifics of what Al-Rowwad does, about its history, about his personal history, and about his opinions on a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine, I changed the topic a bit. I asked him -- and Yamen, who was with us -- how they could keep going every day, how life under the occupation didn't completely tear them down.

"What gives you hope?" I asked, remembering a question my friend Valarie Kaur asked all her interviewees for the film Divided We Fall that we worked on together. After talking in detail about their experiences dealing with post-9/11 hate crimes and being at the brunt of violence and discrimination, Valarie would ask, as a final question, what gave these people hope. I sat in on some of the interviews for the film and I was always impressed with how that question changed the tenor of the conversation and the atmosphere in the room. Now, sitting in the office of a Palestinian man in a refugee camp in the West Bank, the answer to that question seemed more important than ever.

Dr. Abusrour took a deep breath and sat back. The answer to this question did not come as quickly as the sound-bite speeches about what his program does that he has probably delivered thousands of times.

"We do not have the luxury of despair," he said slowly. "We can't. We must keep going. For our children. We have to give them the belief that their future can be better."

As if on cue, his younger daughter, who seemed to be around six years old and who had been running in and out of the office throughout our time with him, came running into the room squealing, evidently having been the brunt of a squabble with her older sister and the other kids who were playing in the next room. She crawled onto her dad's lap and buried her head in his chest, looking up occasionally and peering at us -- especially me, it seemed -- with deep beautiful brown eyes.

As her eyes held mine, I thought about the young girl I'd encountered on the streets of Turkey during my foreign study in college who had motivated me to begin outreach to homeless people. This girl appeared to me as a similar icon, as a manifestation of God's presence, as a messenger or prophet. What will her life be like growing up here? I thought. And what am I going to do to make a difference for her life and the lives of thousands of other children here?

"For me, I am a Muslim, so I turn to my faith for hope," Dr. Abusrour continued. "I really do believe that ultimately injustice will not prevail. I believe that one day all of us will be able to live together in peace."

Yamen shrugged off my question with a smile and a yalla -- it was time for us to go, and Yamen didn't seem to be the deeply philosophical type. Instead, he wanted to make sure he had time to take us out for a Palestinian beer before we had to head back to Jerusalem.

Life goes on

Despite the harsh realities of many aspects of life in the West Bank, life does go on. Palestinians are able to live some semblance of normal lives -- within the narrow confines of the spaces they are allowed to inhabit. Yamen took us out for a beer at a local bar after our tour was over, proudly telling us that this beer was locally brewed in Tabeh in the West Bank. I was amazed by what an optimistic and positive and friendly attitude Yamen had, even after spending his time showing people the depressing realities of his city week after week.

At the bar with Yamen (center). British girls in the middle, Belgian woman on the right

As we wrapped things up at the pub, Yamen took a call on his cell phone and then announced with a grin, "Good news. The driver from Jerusalem is going to pick you up here so you don't have to go back through the checkpoint."

In a short white, another yellow taxi pulled up outside the bar, similar to the one that had driven us to the Bethlehem checkpoint that morning. The Israeli driver got out and greeted Yamen warmly with a big hug and a pat on the back. I can't remember whether they spoke in English, Arabic, or Hebrew, but it was the equivalent of a "Hey, what's up, man?" kind of friendly guys greeting. It was nice to see the way Green Olive Tours (the company who organized our tour) -- run by an Israeli Jew -- is bringing together people from both sides of the Wall and building friendship through a shared desire to expose people to the injustices happening in the West Bank.

As we drove away, I couldn't help but feel a bit strange knowing that we, with our American and British passports, could breeze freely between the West Bank and Jerusalem, but Yamen hadn't been able to go there for years and probably wouldn't be able to go back anytime soon. The image of Yamen standing on that sidewalk and waving to us as we left will stay with me for a long time.