(un)Holy Land, Part 3

"Is that gunfire?"

Across our empty ice cream bowls we looked at each other. A faint popping noise could be heard in the streets. The room, filled with chattering families, hushed. I'd never heard gunfire outside the firing range, where even through ear plugs the sound was jarring; this noise was oddly muffled.

Pop. Pop pop.

Two Palestinian women ran to the low-set window and crouched to peer down onto the street. After a moment's reflection, they stood up, and shrugged their shoulders. Casually, a man gave me a look that expressed a sense of the routine, almost of complacency. He chuckled softly, seeing our faces. This, unfortunately, was just another day. Without any sense of emergency, the families packed up their belongings and went downstairs. We were told by the owner to stay upstairs for five minutes, and we readily agreed.

Our minds turned to our friends coming from Israel. Although we didn't know the circumstances surrounding the shooting, now probably wasn't the time for three Jewish kids to be crossing the border into the West Bank. It probably also wasn't the time for a bunch of American kids to be running around the streets of Ramallah. But our friends were already in transit, and we couldn't very well leave them to fend for themselves. Hammad told us to stay in the ice cream shop, while he went to find taxis to take us back to Deir Debwan.

While we were waiting, we adopted the air of placidity that seemed to pervade the almost-empty shop. Just another night in Ramallah. Soon, the owner came up and told us that the gunfire had been from men firing into the air: a Palestinian had been killed nearby and all the shopkeepers were to close in solidarity. The gunfire was their warning system. We speculated on the cause of death: had it been a continuation of an argument we had seen earlier that night on the streets? Or was it simply an IDF-Palestinian scuffle?

After fifteen minutes, Hammad had not returned, and the shopkeepers were getting antsy. We were the only patrons left, and all the downstairs lights were off. If the men on the street saw the upstairs lights on, they would think the shop was not complying with custom. They wanted us to leave. "It is not dangerous on the streets for you. It is dangerous for us," one man explained, "to stay open." Sure, sure, but there was no way I was headed out to aimlessly wander the streets when men were shooting into the air. Bullets, you know, come down.

We migrated downstairs, stalling. A metal door had been closed over the storefront, which the shopkeepers occasionally cracked open to watch the street. The mood was tense; they wanted us gone. While we were waiting, I asked one of them what had happened, and they told me it had been a fight about a stolen car, and someone had been killed.

Without a way of contacting Hammad, we were stuck; eventually Carolina decided to call Hammad's uncle, who told us to wait five minutes and, if Hammad wasn't back, he would drive to Ramallah to come get us. Almost immediately after hanging up, they returned: Hammad and our three, bewildered friends from Israel. He had negotiated three taxis back to Deir Debwan at a steep price, but we were willing to pay almost anything to get out of there.

In a rush, we thanked the ice cream shop employees for staying open, and dashed across the dark street into our waiting taxis. Ramallah was dead, the streets were dark. Only a half an hour ago this had been a vibrant locus of downtown nightlife, and to my Western-trained mind, forcing a shutdown of a center of commerce in protest only exacerbates the economic troubles of the region. But so it was. And while the shops were closed, there were people on every corner, exhibiting the complacent mood I had seen earlier. I guess anything less than a full-on shootout is part and parcel of living in the West Bank, but for us, we were ready to leave.

We sped through the dark hills of Ramallah on the long road back to Deir Debwan. The moon cast a soft back light onto the mountains of the West Bank, barely visible as we plunged into the valley below the city. On the radio, strangely, Brooks & Dunn's Only in America hissed softly through the speakers:

Sun coming up over New York City
School bus driver in a traffic jam
Starin' at the faces in her rearview mirror
Looking at the promise of the Promised Land
One kid dreams of fame and fortune
One kid helps pay the rent
One could end up going to prison
One just might be president

Only in America
Dreaming in red, white and blue
Only in America
Where we dream as big as we want to

We dipped behind a mountain, on top of which sat a massive Israeli settlement.

The signal sputtered, and died.


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Hammad's uncle told us the version of the story he had heard: Hamas and Fatah factions had scuffled, and someone had been killed. Later I searched on Google News for information about the story, and found only this.