(un)Holy Land, Part 1

Okay. So now that my Arabic vocab test--which I very well couldn't study for in Israel--is over, I can get down to writing about my most recent adventure. Sorry for the delay. And if anyone wants to know how to say reconciliation conference in Arabic, let me know.

Some pictures unabashedly stolen from friends.

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Our trip to the Holy Land was only a few days away, but between scheduling difficulties and political realities, we weren't sure it was actually going to happen.

The original plan, which was to take a ferry to Jordan and then make our way to the Allenby Bridge crossing, had been nixed in favor of a direct bus from Cairo to Jerusalem that ran from the Sheraton. It went through the Taba/Eliat border crossing in the Sinai, which originally hadn't been on the table because Hammad, as a Palestinian-American, wouldn't have been let through. Even with his US passport, Israel would deny him entry due to his last name alone. For him, the Allenby crossing was the only viable one, as Jordan doesn't consider the West Bank a part of Israel. However, he decided to take a few more days off and flew to Amman instead, so we were free to cross at Taba. We'd meet him in Palestine.

The excuse for this trip was Sinai Liberation Day (aka when Israel decided to give the Sinai back to Egypt), a national holiday here. We had Wednesday off, and wanted to leave for Israel Tuesday night and take a long weekend, returning on Sunday. But when Sarah went to the Sheraton to buy us all tickets to Jerusalem, she found that the buses only ran on Thursday and Sunday. She bought them anyway, but after some harried email exchanges with Hammad, it was decided that we should return them and take public transportation all the way to Jerusalem.

Thus Monday and Tuesday found us running between the AUC travel office, trying to buy a seat on the Tuesday night bus to Taba, and the Sheraton, trying to return our rather expensive Thursday tickets. We only got about half of our money back (~$25), after the idea of using them as return tickets on Sunday fizzled out: no one at the Sheraton could tell us the Jerusalem to Cairo schedule, so we just ate the money.

But the Sheraton did manage to tell Sarah something about the West Bank being closed. We had all woken up to our respective BBC homepages telling us that the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel was over, some militants had been killed, and rockets were being launched into various West Bank towns. The main purpose of our trip was not to see Israel, but to spend a good deal of time in Palestine. Would we even be able to get into the West Bank? And more importantly, would we make it out?

Our destination was Ramallah, which is located significantly south of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade-controlled areas where the fighting was breaking out. We figured that the friendly people at the Sheraton were referring to northern Palestine, but when it was time to leave Tuesday night, I think we were all a bit concerned as to the viability and safety of our trip.

What I would find out, however, is that most of the things you hear about in the news with regard to Palestine don't really affect daily life. To six clueless American kids, headlines like Hamas Fighters End Israel Truce are worrisome. To Palestinians, that's unfortunately business as usual, and daily life more or less remains unchanged.

So we packed our bags and headed to our favorite bus station. After attempting to secure some return tickets for Sunday and being told that you could only do that in Taba, we got on our 22:15 bus to the border. It was loaded with other AUC kids who were either on their way to Israel like us or using the Taba crossing to get into Jordan for the break.

I think I've already devoted enough space in this blog to the wonderful experience that is 7 hours on an Egyptian bus, so I'll skip the details this time. In a few words: cold, loud, long, and uncomfortable as hell.

We arrived in beautiful Taba at the crack of dawn, under a pink hazy sky that hung low over the cliffs of Jordan. After stomping around the Taba bus "station," finding no one there and figuring that we'd figure out our return trip on the fly (HINT: foreshadowing), we made the 15 minute walk to the border crossing.

Egyptian customs? Kind of a joke. We paid 2 LE at the gate for a little ghetto paper stamp that we later affixed to our exit document. We laid around the station while they entered all of our information into their "system" by hand. I think they took a tea break. But to their credit, they did not stamp our passports when we asked. Why? Because an exit visa from Taba is just as good as an entry visa into Israel, and we were still under the delusion that perhaps Israel wouldn't stamp our passports. Many countries in the region, including Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, will deny you entry into their country if you've been to Israel, so we were all hoping to get through with a clean record.

No such luck. We walked about 100m to the Eilat border control office, which was decked with enough blue and white so as there could be no confusion as to where you were. Nationalism had thrown up all over the border, and it had apparently eaten swags of plastic Israel flags for dinner.

We were immediately greeted by a very professional looking (read: aviators, too much hair gel and three-inch heels) woman who was clearly master of her domain (which was a tiny little podium, but whatever). Our "story" was that we were just going to Jerusalem to see the holy sites. We had a hostel booked (we actually did, for one night). No mention was to be made of Palestine or staying with a Palestinian family, as this would incur massive interrogation and might end our trip altogether. So this is what we told her, and into the building we went.

Our bags were searched to varying levels of thoroughness: some thrice, some once, some with those little swabs that look for explosive residue. I had heard that it wasn't a good idea to bring in any Arabic material into the country, as it just invites questioning, so I had xeroxed the pages from my textbook for the test and hidden them in my backpack. Also tucked away in my planner were Hammad's informative emails, damning in and of themselves. My backpack wasn't touched, but the guard did go through my messenger bag--"Are all of these books yours? ..Are you sure?"--and flipped through my planner, but didn't find the emails.

I was second to go through passport control, and Jacob had already tried and failed to get through with his passport unstamped. I guess his rationale ("to travel freely in the region") had not sat well with the official, as she made it clear that she was exasperated with me when I asked for the same treatment. I told her some story about traveling to Oman in May, to which she said she would call the Ministry of the Interior to get permission to not stamp me, which would take three hours. We didn't have three hours, however true that was, so I just shrugged and let her stamp it. I didn't want to see Beirut anyway. Right?

After buying some shekels, we hopped on a bus to take us into the city of Eilat. There, we bought a 65 shekel (about 4 shekels to the dollar) bus ticket to Jerusalem that left in two hours, and killed time by grabbing a totally underwhelming breakfast. The bus station was filled mostly by IDF soldiers who looked like they should still be in high school. Something kind of funny about a semi-automatic weapon in one hand and a rhinestone-bejeweled cell phone in the other. It was weird to see so many soldiers using public transportation, but I guess that's how they do it there? They all seemed to have a very high degree of autonomy, though, so maybe they were on casual status.

It was four hours from Eilat to Jerusalem. We stopped halfway through at a rest stop, where there was: one, free restrooms; two, clean restrooms; and three, toilet paper. To say that it was nice to use a bathroom that wasn't hostilely guarded by a grubby, shiftless man looking for baksheesh is a mild understatement. To say that it was nice to use a bathroom that wasn't a Hepatitis magnet is the understatement of the year.

Once we made it to Jerusalem, we realized that our plan--get to our hostel and then call Hammad--hinged on first finding our hostel, and we were without a map of the city. The woman at the information booth, whose job was apparently to just shake her head in admonishment, had neither a map nor a clue where our hostel was. We did have a rough idea of its location, though: across the street from the Damascus Gate of the Old City. We finally managed to catch a bus that took us in the vicinity, and after some of the semi-directionless walking around that is part and parcel to backpacking adventures, found it.

Even though it was late in the afternoon, our rooms weren't ready, so we dropped our bags and went to call Hammad. He promptly told us not to check into the hostel; his friend in Jerusalem had an empty apartment where we could crash. But like the Sheraton bus tickets, we were out luck. The hostel got angry when we tried to leave, so we ended up just staying there for the night. It was at this point that I realized a US$50 bill was missing from my wallet, where it had been safely nestled between a 100 Shekel bill and two US$10s. All my other money was there, it was just the fifty that was missing. Looked everywhere. Searched my bag twice. No idea how it managed to run away, but as it's a fortune in Egypt and to a lesser degree in Israel, it made me a sad panda for a few. But I tried not to let it bother me. Karma will balance it out in the end, right?

We met Hammad and his cousin in front of the Damascus Gate, and proceeded to explore the Old City together. They had taken a bus into Jerusalem that afternoon from Ramallah, and were in the city illegally. Even though Hammad was born in Jerusalem, as a Palestinian from the West Bank he is no longer allowed to enter the city freely. At the checkpoint in Ramallah, he had flashed his US passport, which didn't have the magic entry visa that we got in Taba, meaning he came straight into the West Bank. For a Palestinian to obtain an entry visa into Israel is an almost impossible and certainly time-intensive and expensive process.

Luckily, the IDF soldier didn't go through his passport very thoroughly; she was too busy making fun of his cousin's name for being so Western, I guess. So they both made it through, but were on guard the entire evening. Israeli soldiers will commonly stop people who look Arab and investigate their passports and paperwork. If caught in Jerusalem illegally, Hammad could be fined up to US$800, intensively interrogated or even arrested. Even though he is an American citizen just like the rest of us, his heritage prohibits him from visiting one of the most important cities in the world that happens to be the city of his birth. Does that seem right to you? Anyway, he dressed as Western as possible that night and stuck close by the rest of us, especially Laura and me, who were so obviously American it hurt.

The Old City is an intricate web of narrow streets running every direction, filled with bazaars and shops selling everything you can imagine. We stopped in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is built on what is thought to be the Hill of Calvary, where Jesus was crucified. Inside the church, rocks from the original ground are still visible under glass. The Old City also holds the entrance to Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque, two incredibly important religious sites. After Ariel Sharon's infamous 2000 visit to the Dome of the Rock, non-Muslims were barred from the Temple Mount; however, the site has been recently opened to non-Muslims during certain hours. Unfortunately, we missed our window, so only Hammad and his cousin could enter, after surviving the scrutiny of both the Israeli and Arab doormen and convincing all parties that they were, in fact, Muslim.

After that, we met up with Hammad's friend who is studying in Jerusalem for the semester at Hebrew University. We went on a cool night exploration of the Old City, ending up at the Western Wall. After visiting the respective sex-segregated portions of the wall, our group was sitting in the plaza when a couple with a baby stroller stopped next to us. The man started talking to the boys, and the woman started talking to us. And by talking, I mean practically interrogating:

Are you here with a group? No, just friends. Not Birthright? Nope. Just traveling on vacation. When did you get into Jerusalem? Tonight. Where else in Israel have you been? We just got here. Well, where else are you going? Just Jerusalem. Where are you from? The US. Oh, us too! But we moved here. Do you all go to school together? We're all studying in Cairo together. Why did you want to come to Israel? ... Um...to see Israel? Wtf? What hostel are you staying at? uh...one by the Old City. WTF?

Seriously. She was smiling the whole time, but included almost no traditional hi-how are you-pleasantries. Creepy. The border guards in Eliat weren't even that thorough. Turns out the man asked the boys almost the same questions, and when we found out that they told him a slightly different story--that they were on spring break from the US--we got out of there. We spent some more time in the Old City, got a good look of the infamous excavations/ reconstructions/ ramp/ whatever the Israelis are doing there, and then returned to our hostel and collapsed. It had been a long day of travel and interrogations, and we hadn't even made it into the West Bank yet.