Day One in Nablus

Greetings, all, from the sunny city of Nablus! Nablus is one of the largest cities in the West Bank, a couple hours north of Jerusalem. It is also home base for Project HOPE (Humanitarian Opportunities for Peace and Education -- http://projecthope.ps), the non-profit for which Gabriella and I are currently volunteering as teachers of English, drama, and first aid in the local refugee camp, Balata. But before I get into all that, some highlights of our journey thus far...

Gabriella and I flew into Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv two nights ago, where we conquered our first obstacle, Israeli airport security. Were customs officials to find out we were planning on participating in humanitarian reflief in the West Bank, we would have been denied entry into Israeli and sent flying home on the spot, with a stamp on our passport refusing entry for the next five and a half years. Indeed, several other Project HOPE volunteers have already shared stories with us of being pulled aside and interrogated by Mossad agents (the Israeli CIA). One poor Alaskan college student volunteer was kept locked in airport security for an entire day, his bags held for and additional four days before they finally let him in. Another Egyptian-German volunteer was held for five hours, a French volunteer for four. We were lucky to be traveling as a couple -- apparently they target tourists traveling alone, since these are the most likely candidates -- and we also had a golden cover story. When asked why on earth we were planning to stay three months in the country, Gabriella launched into a mile-a-minute lecture about this artist she was researching for a grad school thesis, Chagall, who has several major works in and around Israel, and after about a minute of this the customs officer interrupted,
"Okay! Okay!" and stamped our passports just to get us out of her hair. We were extremely lucky, though we've been warned leaving the country will be much harder.

We spent the night in Tel Aviv at a very groovy, Indian-themed hostel -- lots of Bjork playing in the downstairs bar/lounge -- where everyone looked like they could star in the next Jesus movie. The next morning we were off, first via bus to Jerusalem. Gabriella and I spent the ride sandwiched between two Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers (there were maybe eight on the bus total, all with their M16 automatic rifles in full view). The female soldier next to Gabriella spent the whole ride on her cellphone, but the male soldier next to me proved a willing conversationalist. He was American, and had come to Israel to do his mandatory 3 years in the IDF in order to maintain his Israeli dual citizenship. All Israeli citizens are required to do service, with some exceptions (conscious objectors, Orthodox Jews, Arab Israelis, etc.). He was on year two of three, and had opted to be placed in the anti-terrorism unit, which performs nightly incursions into the West Bank arresting about a dozen people at a time, and by day mans the checkpoints through which Palestinians must cross in order to travel around the West Bank. I didn't have a tape recorder within reach, but I did manage to write down a lot of what he said after the fact, nearly verbatim. Here are some quotes:

"It's fun. When you're in this line of work, you have to think it's fun. You know, before a mission you get all revved up."

After asking him about the recent mass arrest of about 80 Palestinians in Nablus, where we're currently living:

"There are 10 or 11 arrests every night in Nablus. It's a hotbed. You only hear about it in the news when there are 80 because 10 or 11 is normal."

About his gun, and whether he named it:

"We have to take it everywhere, because you never know. People ask if I named it, and what am I gonna say, 'Argh, yeah, I named it Betty!'? Nah. You come back from a mission and you just throw it to the side, or back from a check point and you just throw it to the side, on your bunk or whatever. You say, 'Eugh, I'm done with you.'"

"They say 99.9 percent of all terrorist attacks are stopped before they start."

"We killed an Arab once, and command said his brother was going to strap a bomb to his chest and set it off in a couple weeks, but since you killed his brother, now he's going to do it sooner. So we find him and take him in, and it turns out he was only helping someone else get a bomb, but then we go after that guy and that attack is stopped."

"Sometimes at a checkpoint you take apart a whole car just to stop being bored. You take apart a whole car, though....well the other day we found fifty bullets inside the tire well."

"You have seven seconds to surround a house. If you can do it in five then you've done a really good job. And then you go in. You always go in."

"They tell you you'll be scared for your first mission, and then after that it's meh, but I wasn't even scared the first time. I was all revved up, like 'Let's go! Let's go!'"

"I'm doing command training now, and they talk a lot about the 2nd Lebanon War, and they'll freely admit how much they screwed that up. I mean they really screwed it up. They were giving grenades to guys who'd never thrown them before. There wasn't enough water. Food, water, weapons. Everything."

He actually suggested we visit the West Bank. He said it contained some of the most beautiful land and sights that he'd ever seen. He'd seen more of the West Bank than of Israel during his two years here, and was rather jealous of our plans to tour Israel (I didn't mention we'd be staying in Nablus for two of the three months we were here).

Once we hit Jerusalem, we took a cab across town to East Jerusalem, the Palestinian side of the city, where from the old Arab bus station we took a tiny van-bus to Qalandia, passing through the first of several checkpoints. Here we saw the infamous "Wall," or Barrier, or Separation Fence, or Security Fence, or Anti-Terrorist Fence, or Apartheid Wall, depending on who you talk to. While most of the fence is made up of a series of razor wire fences, ditches, guard towers, and security cameras, in this area it is just a giant concrete wall, about 24 feet high, which is what more often adorns the photographs in books and magazines. As we passed through the checkpoint, we saw a mural of anti-occupation graffiti: "Free Palestine!" "People are stronger than Walls." "End the Occupation!" "I am not a terrorist." Plus painted holes in the wall, portraits, etc. You can google it and see much of the same artwork and graffiti.

In Qalandia we changed to a different bus to Ramallah, the capital of the Palestinian Authority. By change busses I mean one bus dumped us on a street corner, we flagged down a second, shouted in the window, "Ramallah?!" got a nod from the driver and hopped in. In Ramallah we changed to a group taxi of sorts to get to the Nablus checkpoint, and passed through several others along the way. The taxi driver instructed us to buckle our seatbelts as we passed through the checkpoints (Israeli law is apparently very strict about seatbelts), and IDF soldiers eyed us down the scopes of their rifles as we drove past. Finally we hit the checkpoint into Nablus, through which we passed very easily, though the line in the other direction, leaving Nablus, was monstrous, hours and hours of waiting in pens that looked to be made more for cattle than people. Thankfully we wouldn't have to face that just yet. After we walked through the checkpoint, we hopped our final taxi and ended our three-hour journey at Nablus's city centre and the Project Hope offices/apartment, which are on a hill that overlooks the valley in which Nablus lays and the opposite mountain up which it sprawls. Absolutely gorgeous. We met several of the sixteen other volunteers living here, some of the Project Hope staff (including Hassan, who will be giving us private Arabic lessons -- woohoo!), and promptly crashed.

While living here we are expected to use as little water as possible. Gabriella and I have yet to shower, and when we do there is a basin and a cup sitting in the shower stall which we are supposed to use instead of running the water through the shower head. The toilet has two flush handles, one for small flushes, and one to be used sparingly for larger ones. This is all because each house in the West Bank is fitted with a small, black water tower on its roof (or several, depending on how many live in the building), and these water towers are filled with only a limited supply of water each week. If the water were to run out, tough luck. And run out it does, as Israel diverts 80 percent of West Bank water to its own settlements within the West Bank.

So far our stay has been very pleasant, nevertheless. Everyone has been incredibly nice, children wave and shout "Hello!" to us on the streets everywhere we go, as if it were a game, and the food is amazing. This morning we ventured across the street to the Project HOPE offices to find out what they had in mind for us during our three months here, only to discover that we'd be teaching classes this very afternoon. Gabriella and I observed a class taught by a volunteer for whom she'll be taking over at the end of the week, then Gabriella taught another class she's taking over already for a volunteer who left early (I got to sit and watch), and then the two of us were thrown into our first drama class at the refugee camp, where we battled for an hour with 13 of the most high-energy 8-to-15-year-olds you've ever met. We had a translator with us, a delightful Palestinian college student who studies English Lit (and who bonded very quickly with Gabriella over T.S. Elliot and Samuel Beckett's Endgame), but it was still rather difficult getting the kids to follow any directions. Some great work did emerge out of emotional statues and using them in one-minute scenes, but pass-the-clap was a disaster and afterward Gabriella and I felt like we'd just been hit by a truck. We're still trying to figure out what to do with them for the next week and a half, after which we'll be assigned a different group. They're very anxious to play and jump in and show us everything their imaginations are spouting -- one group of girls kept going off in a corner and coming up with scene after scene even though we'd only asked for one and the other groups hadn't had a chance to present yet -- but they're a wild bunch, and will definitely require some taming if this is going to go anywhere.

Violence is definitely a major part of the childhood vocabulary here. In drama class there was a lot of hitting and pushing and slapfights, nothing too serious but a bit much to pass as normal. On the way home from class we ran into some teens lugging around sound equipment. When one spotting us coming up the hill, he turned a speaker tripod on its side and mounted it atop an amplifier, making a mock machine gun nest, and started firing imaginary bullets at us. As we passed he shouted, "Zuhzuhzuhzuh! Zuhzuhzuhzuh! [machine gun noises] Hello! How are you! This is Israel! Zuhzuhzuhzuh!" He and his friends thought it was a riot, of course. Posters commemorating martyrs are everywhere here. Then again, so are IDF armored cars, IDF soldiers in full body armor locked and loaded on street corners. Checkpoints. The occupation is a very felt presence. One feels that at any time the army could descend and take someone. And they do. The teens with the mock machine gun nest didn't dream that up out of nowhere. So the cycle is rather vicious.

Over dinner tonight we talked with one volunteer who had previously spent some time at the Treatment and Rehabilitation Center for Victims of Torture in Ramallah, doing interviews, social work and therapy of sorts with Palestinians who had been arrested, or had family members arrested or killed. She is a Londoner but speaks fluent Arabic. She told horrifying stories of Muslim women being forced to strip naked and pose in sexual positions, of entire families being carted off to prison for months, years, or decades at a time, three-year-old children forcibly removed from their parents, babies who don't recognize their mothers. We're going to interview her formally in the morning.

And that basically wraps up our first full day in Nablus. Phew. We have pretty regular internet access in the apartment and the Project HOPE offices, so please email either of us with questions and responses. We'll do our best to address anything you all are curious about. You can email me at john@poliglottheater.org, or Gabriella at gabriella@poliglottheater.org. We'll try to blog some more in a couple days. Be well 'til then, and stay in touch!

Much love,
John