mass of white Jewish settlement buildings clustered on the crest of the hill opposite. After lunch in a quiet shaded restaurant, Ghaith refused to let me pay, or contribute. ‘You’re my guests,’ he said.
Getting through the checkpoint late that afternoon was more complicated than coming the other way. We inched forward in a crush of cars, all trying to cut across one another. Boys squeezed sideways between wing mirrors, knocking on car windows and gesturing with their goods – packs of cigarettes and bags of sumac, kites in the shape of military jets. I couldn’t make out the frequent loudspeaker announcements from the soldiers’ booths. In Ramallah itself I had not felt afraid, but at the Qalandia checkpoint the atmosphere was tense and angry.
My anxiety increased as we were searched and questioned: the pressure to get out was building behind me, and building in me, reinforced by the watchtowers, the booths, the heavy, ominous mass of the wall. Now its concrete physicality and power became real and felt, as we were suspended, exposed, caught on the cusp between inside and outside, waiting to be allowed to exit, or enter.
When, at last, we were waved through, I drove off in the wrong direction, and with my attention not fully on the road I hit the curb hard, and shortly after felt with sickening certainty the lopsided sagging crunch of a punctured tyre. We were out of sight of the checkpoint, round the bend from it, and there was nothing but the great blind expanse of the wall on one side, and waste ground on the other. I had no way to make a phone-call and we had to walk back to the checkpoint to ask a soldier if I could borrow a phone.
The soldiers laughed among themselves, gesturing towards us with their chins. One of the bus drivers came over and pointed out a man who, he said, would be happy to change the tyre. The man was tall and silent. He walked back with us and got to work without saying a word. By the time he had finished changing the tyre it was getting dark. He wouldn’t accept any payment for his work. ‘You’re welcome,’ he said – ‘ bevakasha ,’ and walked off slowly back towards the checkpoint.
In the deepening dusk I soon got lost. With what was always my unreliable sense of direction, and that ever-changing layout of roads, it was impossible not to. Roads marked on the map were closed; other roads did not appear on the map. Two that we took came to an end in piles of boulders and heaps of earth, and a third in a high fence and closed gate, heavily guarded by soldiers and jeeps. In the end, we followed the direction of the rest of the traffic, and were soon stopped at a roadblock. Ahead of us, a man was ordered out of his car. Soldiers turned him against the side of the barrier kiosk; with two guns trained on him, he was roughly searched, his pockets emptied.
The other soldiers gestured us through impatiently. I drove on, looking for some sign, any sign of a familiar name or landmark or direction. We were in volatile Arab East Jerusalem and its constellation of villages. We were in the West Bank, in the dark, without access to a phone, utterly lost. I’d taken my fourteen-year-old daughter into danger, and I was terrified.
I wondered what I had done in my reactive, would-be liberal naivety. I remembered getting lost in East Oakland in California in the mid-1990s, at the height of the crack-fuelled gang wars, when the city had the highest homicide rate in the US. I was in a part of the inner city, the ghetto, where to show that you were lost, to stop and ask for help, or even to stop and look at the map was a reckless invitation to become another murder statistic. Now, as then, all veneer of liberality peeled away. I was in Arab territory and I was therefore in danger. I had forgotten the man who had helped me just a short while before – an Arab, a Palestinian; I had forgotten the man who had been my host, a man who was considerate, critical, funny, protective – an Arab, a
Getting through the checkpoint late that afternoon was more complicated than coming the other way. We inched forward in a crush of cars, all trying to cut across one another. Boys squeezed sideways between wing mirrors, knocking on car windows and gesturing with their goods – packs of cigarettes and bags of sumac, kites in the shape of military jets. I couldn’t make out the frequent loudspeaker announcements from the soldiers’ booths. In Ramallah itself I had not felt afraid, but at the Qalandia checkpoint the atmosphere was tense and angry.
My anxiety increased as we were searched and questioned: the pressure to get out was building behind me, and building in me, reinforced by the watchtowers, the booths, the heavy, ominous mass of the wall. Now its concrete physicality and power became real and felt, as we were suspended, exposed, caught on the cusp between inside and outside, waiting to be allowed to exit, or enter.
When, at last, we were waved through, I drove off in the wrong direction, and with my attention not fully on the road I hit the curb hard, and shortly after felt with sickening certainty the lopsided sagging crunch of a punctured tyre. We were out of sight of the checkpoint, round the bend from it, and there was nothing but the great blind expanse of the wall on one side, and waste ground on the other. I had no way to make a phone-call and we had to walk back to the checkpoint to ask a soldier if I could borrow a phone.
The soldiers laughed among themselves, gesturing towards us with their chins. One of the bus drivers came over and pointed out a man who, he said, would be happy to change the tyre. The man was tall and silent. He walked back with us and got to work without saying a word. By the time he had finished changing the tyre it was getting dark. He wouldn’t accept any payment for his work. ‘You’re welcome,’ he said – ‘ bevakasha ,’ and walked off slowly back towards the checkpoint.
In the deepening dusk I soon got lost. With what was always my unreliable sense of direction, and that ever-changing layout of roads, it was impossible not to. Roads marked on the map were closed; other roads did not appear on the map. Two that we took came to an end in piles of boulders and heaps of earth, and a third in a high fence and closed gate, heavily guarded by soldiers and jeeps. In the end, we followed the direction of the rest of the traffic, and were soon stopped at a roadblock. Ahead of us, a man was ordered out of his car. Soldiers turned him against the side of the barrier kiosk; with two guns trained on him, he was roughly searched, his pockets emptied.
The other soldiers gestured us through impatiently. I drove on, looking for some sign, any sign of a familiar name or landmark or direction. We were in volatile Arab East Jerusalem and its constellation of villages. We were in the West Bank, in the dark, without access to a phone, utterly lost. I’d taken my fourteen-year-old daughter into danger, and I was terrified.
I wondered what I had done in my reactive, would-be liberal naivety. I remembered getting lost in East Oakland in California in the mid-1990s, at the height of the crack-fuelled gang wars, when the city had the highest homicide rate in the US. I was in a part of the inner city, the ghetto, where to show that you were lost, to stop and ask for help, or even to stop and look at the map was a reckless invitation to become another murder statistic. Now, as then, all veneer of liberality peeled away. I was in Arab territory and I was therefore in danger. I had forgotten the man who had helped me just a short while before – an Arab, a Palestinian; I had forgotten the man who had been my host, a man who was considerate, critical, funny, protective – an Arab, a