Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

“We should lie and say we’re all Jewish,” declared Wesam. “Then they’ll let us in.” After a moment’s thought, he faltered. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe only Muslims are allowed in on Fridays.”

“I think if we say we’re Christian it’ll be more likely,” I whispered back, spooked by the vacant, dusty streets ringed by tangles of barbed wire.

“No,” Alex countered, “if we just say we’re all Americans it’ll work. They’ll like that we’re all Americans.”

We were visiting Hebron, home to Arabs, Jews, and the famous Tomb of the Patriarchs. Our guide, Wesam, was a fellow American of Palestinian descent, who agreed to accompany us to the troubled West Bank city. It was Friday evening. As we tiptoed through the Shabbat-emptied streets of the militarized Jewish neighborhood, we discussed strategies on how to evade the inevitable soldiers who would be guarding the religious site.

Of the four of us, one was a non-practicing Jew, one a non-practicing Muslim, and two non-practicing Christians. Actually, the one other thing we all solidly had in common, aside from our American citizenship, was a healthy skepticism about religion. And here we were, guessing at what religious lie would most likely get us into a religious site that had been a recent flashpoint for religious violence.

My first few weeks in Israel had been tough, especially as a journalist trying to maintain objectivity in a land charged with deeply entrenched opinions. Remembering a previous trip to the country, I thought my neutrality wouldn’t be a problem, but it didn’t take me long to realize that things had changed dramatically from my last visit three years before.

I had visions of humanizing a land synonymous with hatred, of revealing positive, hopeful stories and bringing new insight to a seemingly intractable conflict. But as it turned out, the summer of 2006 was a bad season for hope and insight in the Holy Land.  

When I landed at Ben Gurion airport along with my fellow journalists, Jessica and Alex, on June 28, we were well aware of the Israeli air strike that had killed a picnicking family on a beach in Gaza, and the Israeli soldier who had been kidnapped by Hamas a few days earlier.  But we were full of energy, and a healthy dose of self-importance.  

Our first day, we pulled up to our hostel in East Jerusalem and interrupted a shouting match between an Orthodox Jew and an Arab man over a bicycle accident. “Jew killer,” hissed our otherwise jocular cab driver, jerking his chin in the direction of the young Arab, who was yanking twisted handlebars from the other man’s grasp.

That night, a group of young men loitering in a pool of seedy yellow light shouted, “F**k your mother America” at my back. No flirtatious invitations to practice broken English this time.

On the morning of July 13, the pressure that had been swelling for months—or I guess generations—exploded again onto Al-Jazeera and the BBC. Everyone stopped, transfixed by the grayscale images and jerky camerawork of war.    

I couldn’t bear the idea of watching those tiny green explosions or the stupid talking heads or the sooty billows of smoke all day. We headed for the Mount of Olives, thinking that a walk, a view, or some time in a quiet Orthodox church would soothe us, give us perspective. At the Tomb of the Virgin Mary, however, I ended up yelling at a priest. He had admonished me for wearing a low-cut shirt while turning a blind eye to a pair of young American men in Bermuda shorts and dirty tanks tops.

I was wracked by anger at the judgment, intolerance, and yes, the hypocrisy we’d been steeping in—and perpetuating—over the past month. I was disgusted that the one truth I’d been able to uncover, for all my trouble, was that the only consensus left here was the communal laying of a smooth path to war. After three weeks in The Holy Land, the free-floating rage had lighted on me.

So I suppose it’s fitting that my most hopeful moment was also my most apprehensive. Although it is virtually impossible to predict what identity, religion, ethnicity, or nationality is most likely to get you past a military checkpoint like the one we were headed for, the one thing we were sure of was that whatever authority figure awaited us was certain to demand we take a side.

As we neared the checkpoint in Hebron, we fell silent. We had no plan as we approached the soldiers and their cement blocks and their jauntily angled guns.  

Suddenly Wesam declared, “I am a Palestinian-American, my family is Muslim.”

And I said, “I am an American, my family is Christian.”  

And Alex said, “I am an American, my family is Christian.”  

And Jessica said finally, “I am an American, my family is Jewish.  We’d all like to visit the Tomb of The Patriarchs together, please.”

Of course, this tactic didn’t work, and we were turned away with a fair amount of disgust, but not before we had the pleasure of basking in the utter bafflement of the group of soldiers that formed around us. Maybe inspiring a stunned reaction from a gang of soldiers seems like a small victory, but it left a deep impression. The experience asserted a new idea for me: that in a world pulled apart by extremes, by animosities so deep and polarized they threaten to suck everybody into their dark centers—that neutrality, humanity, and skepticism become a stand in and of themselves.