He was right, though, that the Israelis would force their presence on the Palestinians, and that this would change Palestinians’ attitudes toward their oppressors. Today, the identity of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation is defined as much by their everyday interactions with Israeli security forces as by their interactions with their own family members. For Palestinians, there is no such thing as a routine drive to the store, no such thing as a quick jaunt to the doctor or the post office or the bank. The West Bank – the Occupied Territories – have been carved up by protruding Jewish settlements that reach deep into Palestinian areas. They are like fingers pressing into an inflated balloon, bisecting neighborhoods, communities, and even cities.
While these fingers of Jewish settlement – and the private roads feeding them – have cut off such economic centers as Bethlehem and Ramallah from each other, it’s the hundreds of temporary and permanent military checkpoints that are most disruptive, transforming a ten-mile trip to a friend’s house into a straitjacketed journey of several hours, punctuated by soldiers drawing guns at each passing car.23
These checkpoints are the places in which Palestinians are forced to confront their subjugated status and feel the shame of submission on a daily basis. As the noted historian Rashid Khalidi writes in Palestinian Identity:
The quintessential Palestinian experience … takes place at a border, an airport, a checkpoint: in short, at any one of those many modern barriers where identities are checked and verified. What happens to Palestinians at these crossing points brings home to them how much they share in common as a people.24
After coming across Khalidi’s words, an image surfaced in my mind. It was from a video of a Palestinian–Jewish dialogue group, a roundtable discussion in English held at the University of Minnesota, posted online, in which a Palestinian man recounted his checkpoint story: He and his wife and children were trying to drive home when they were stopped at a military roadblock by some Israeli soldiers. The family was asked to exit their car. The uniformed soldiers, guns drawn, just teenagers, started asking their checkpoint questions, harassing the family. They weren’t seeking information. They were looking to shame them. “But it didn’t really matter to me; they were just playing games with us,” the man recalled in the video. But then the man looked down at his son. The boy’s teeth were chattering violently and his pants were soaked, the piss running down his legs into a puddle in the sandy soil at his feet. The barrel of one of the soldiers’ M-16s was absently pointed between the boy’s eyes. The man, realizing what was happening, pushed the barrel away from his son’s face and screamed, “What the hell is wrong with you?”
The soldier – just a kid, just a stupid teenager who probably knew family or friends or fellow soldiers who had been killed by Palestinians – pointed at the man and sneered, “You’re a Palestinian. Tell him to get used to it.”25
For nearly a hundred years, Palestinians have been expected to “get used to it,” have been expected to submit to a greater power – first Britain, now Israel – while subjugating their political rights, their humanity, and their identity as a nation. And the accompanying economic, geographic, and social devastation wrought upon the Palestinians during this time has trickled down from generation to generation. For too long, they’ve been under the thumb of an undemocratic, military legal system in the Occupied Territories. For too long, they’ve suffering through indefinite detentions, indiscriminate raids, home demolitions, and missile attacks. For too long, they’ve watched soldiers visit violence upon them for the temerity to protest nonviolently, within the borders of their own villages, Israel’s expanding settlements. This has been their inheritance. It was Mohammad Odeh’s inheritance.
Which is not to justify Mohammad’s murderous act – I’ll never be callous or naive enough to explain it away so conveniently. There’s no justification for the murder of innocent men, women, and children. None. No reason can be given to legitimize such brutality.
Reading historical volumes in the university library, I refused to justify Odeh’s crime. But I also refused to ignore the context surrounding it. I refused to ignore the historical backdrop out of which an East Jerusalem man with a newborn infant, who came from a decent, moderate family, could willingly place a bomb in a university cafeteria and think, This is good. Think it was good and then express remorse.
And I refused to acquiesce when fellow Jews, hearing of my plans to meet Mohammad, would look at me, shake their heads, and say, “There’s nothing to understand,” their eyes silently saying, Poor, poor David. He wants to know why the bombing happened. It’s because those people are pure evil, that’s why.
I often looked at such people, unwilling to acknowledge the suffering of the Palestinians, and would say nothing, unable to mouth a response. Instead, I would look beyond them and see my impending return to Israel, to Palestine. I would see an image of Mohammad’s mother staring back at me, her expectant face lined with worry, but willing to talk. And I would think, May this trip give me something to say to her, to them, and to myself.
PART V
Reckoning
22
A trip does not begin at the moment of departure, when grooved wheels start spinning upon asphalt or crunch over gravel. It does not begin when landscapes scroll peripherally, when geographies shift and political borders are crossed, revealing themselves to be nothing more than lines drawn with invisible ink.
A trip begins at the moment of conception. It begins when a desire for movement vibrates firmly in the mind, when anticipation becomes an itinerary.
I sat prostrate in a booth at JFK, waiting to board my flight to Tel Aviv. I knew my trip had already commenced, but wanted to pinpoint its beginning, to hear a gun go off; I needed language to tell me that, yes, it has started, the marathon has begun. And so I paid the airport’s internet access fee and looked up the word “trip” online. Definitions. Parameters. These were what I needed.
The first entry I found said, “journey or voyage,” a definition I could accept, a definition that emerged some time in the 1600s out of the Middle English word trippen, to step lightly.
I was stepping lightly.
Scanning the etymology and history of the word, I wondered if someone, stepping lightly hundreds of years ago, had caught a toe on an exposed root and fallen face-first – an action which allowed for the definition of trip to include “a stumble, a misstep.”1 And I thought, Am I stumbling? Is this trip a misstep? Am I a fucking idiot? Here I was, moving toward an Israel I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to enter, moving closer to a Palestine that scared me, moving toward the source of things.
Finally, the airline staff called for passengers to board Delta flight 148. As I passed through the gate and neared the plane’s open hatch, New York’s December chill seeped through the gang way’s molding, marking my fear. A fear that propelled me forward, quickened my pace. The gun had gone off. It was time to start running.
In some ways, my trip had begun when I first received word from the Israel Prison Service that Mohammad had denied my request for a meeting. I was immediately suspicious. Mohammad’s refusal was so tidy, automatically invalidating any need for a decision from government bureaucrats. And when Mariam con firmed such suspicions by writing, “The family and Mohammad want to meet you,” I was unable to let things rest. These discordant answers seemed to be a tumorous outgrowth of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, a conflict so pervasive it was able to invade and occupy the truth. Someone was lying, and I was intent on finding out who – not for the sake of some ethical principle, but to remove the cancer.
Weeks before leaving for Israel, I tried contacting prominent figures in Israeli intelligence circles, people with connections, people capable of checking the status of my request to meet Mohammad from within. I was determined to find if I’d been given a convenient answer by the Ministry of Public Security, an answer which needed no explication or justification from prison officials. In the weeks before my flight, I stayed up many n
ights sending email after email to Israeli politicians, strategic fellows, journalists, and professors, searching for someone on the inside willing to do some digging for me.
When the responses arrived, they came from Knesset members, former ambassadors, renowned scholars, and foreign correspondents stationed in Jerusalem. I was awed by the outpouring of interest from these people of consequence, whom I had basically spammed. But for all the well-wishes and notes of encouragement, nobody seemed willing or able to help. The journalists didn’t want to risk alienating their governmental connections. The professors claimed impotency. The politicians suggested I turn to the Ministry of Public Security, the very people I did not trust. Then I received a note from Mordechai Kedar. The message was brief:
Dear David,
I highly appreciate your efforts. I’ll try my best to enable your visit.
I’d written to dozens of people within the Israeli security apparatus, but had no memory of sending an email to this man, a research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies claiming the capacity to “enable” a meeting with Mohammad. I poked around online and found his biography:
Dr. Mordechai Kedar (PhD Bar-Ilan University) served for twenty-five years in IDF Military Intelligence, specializing in Arab political discourse, Arab mass media, Islamic groups and the Syrian domestic arena. A lecturer in Arabic at Bar-Ilan, he is also an expert on Israeli Arabs.2
This guy’s the real deal, I thought, emailing back a formal note of gratitude and wishes for continued correspondence.
But nothing else came. The line went silent.
Well before dawn on the day of my departure, I awoke to my cell phone vibrating beneath the pillow. Someone had left a message. Groggy and worried, I thumbed in the phone’s password and listened. A deep, coarse voice speaking English with a Hebrew accent crackled through, the cadence slow and cautious:
David. This is Mordechai. Now it is 4:30 in your place. Can you call me? The Prison Authority want your passport number and if you are coming alone. If not, who wants to visit the prisoner and everyone’s passport number. If you don’t call, I’ll call again. The bagel and lox are waiting for you.
The bagel and lox are waiting? Trying to clear my head, I rose and rooted around for my international calling card. It was well worn from dozens of calls to various Israeli government offices.
The phone buzzed again.
“Hello?”
“David. This is Mordechai. You got my message, yes?”
I rubbed sleep from my eyes and nodded. Then I remembered to speak: “Yes.”
“David, my contact at the Prison Service is ready to help you. Can you give me passport number of anyone who want to visit?”
I pulled the passport from my external-frame Kelty backpack and read the number aloud, vaguely recalling Kedar’s email, but still not exactly sure with whom I was speaking.
“I give this number to him and we see what happens. When do you come?”
“Tomorrow. I arrive tomorrow.”
“Okay. This is soon. Do you have phone in Israel?”
“I’ll be renting one, yes.”
“Then you will call me when you are here?”
“Of course.”
“Okay, David. Have a safe trip. We will speak soon.”
[Click.]
I returned to bed and fell into the sheets. But later that morning I awoke in a panic. “Shit, shit, shit. Jamie, I think – I’m not sure, but maybe I might have done something bad last night.”
Jamie raised an eyebrow as our girls crawled into bed. “What on earth are you talking about?” she asked while our oldest pecked her cheek with kisses.
“Last night I gave someone from Israel my passport number. A man called and asked for my passport number. So I gave it to him. If it’s the person I think it is, it’s someone trying to help. But now I don’t know who I gave it to.”
“Who are you worried you might have given it to?”
“I don’t know. What if it was somebody from the government? What if they don’t like what I’m doing? Fuck, I hope there’s no one waiting for me at customs. What if they don’t let me in? Can they do that?”
“Why’d you give someone your passport number?”
“He asked. I don’t know. It was four in the morning.”
I pulled out the phone and listened to Kedar’s message again, then pressed it to Jamie’s ear. “Listen to this.”
“Bagel and lox?”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Sounds like he’s trying to help. Do you know who this is?”
“I think it might be the big intelligence guy who emailed me. Remember him?”
“So go email him and ask if it was him.”
I emailed Kedar and waited, hoping something would pop up in my inbox before leaving the country. But no message had arrived by the time I closed out of dictionary.com’s window and was herded onto my flight by Israelis wearing Delta’s red, white, and blue uniform.
As I navigated my way through the jet’s cramped aisles, brushing past burly Chasidim and teenage tourists, I wondered if I would be denied entry into a country I feared to enter, a country I needed to enter.
Once we were airborne, I distracted myself with an in-flight magazine article on Roman cuisine. While reading, I began to sing. “It’s the hard-knock life, for us. It’s the hard-knock life, for us. Instead of treated, we get tricked. Instead of kisses, we get kicked. It’s the hard-knock life.”
My girls were addicted to musicals, at least those classics to which they had been exposed by Jamie and a host of well-meaning gift-givers. At the ages of four years and eighteen months, their addiction had grown acute. First it was The Sound of Music. Then Mary Poppins. Just days before I left Wilmington, the girls had been given the soundtrack to Annie by a friend and poet who doubled as a sometime-babysitter. When we put it on for the first time and pressed play, they immediately began chanting, “Annie! Annie!” Grasping our hands, they danced around the living room and tugged us toward some ethereal joy.
I caught myself singing audibly – feeling a sudden loss, an absence at the memory these lyrics elicited – and looked over to find a woman seated on the plane glancing my way. She smiled. I shifted my eyes down and lowered the hymn to a whisper, moving my lips to the song’s rhythm, a song that felt essential. I had never left my children for more than a day, and was holding them within the lyrics, holding my place amongst them with each syllable.
I sang hoping to survive this journey to Israel about which I had deeply embedded fears – fears I knew to be irrational, despite the fact that the last time Jamie and I were there, she had almost been taken away.
So my lips kept moving, reciting the lyrics as we banked toward the Atlantic, toward the Mediterranean, toward the known past and the unknown future.
I’ve never been able to sleep on airplanes – something about the ridiculous height, the opportunity for free-fall without warning, keeps me alert during even the most dreadful stretches of sleep deprivation. On international flights, when the lights are lowered and most passengers turn onto their sides, pull miniature blankets up to their chins, and sleep with open mouths, when the brain sends out tentacles of dopamine, instructing the limbs to fan out and relax – even then, my mind refuses to relinquish control over its surroundings, refuses to make such allowances. Sleeping pills have no effect. Melatonin-inducers have no effect.
So I remained awake during the sixteen-hour trip from New York to Rome to Tel Aviv, singing the soundtrack to Annie.
As the flight attendants extinguished the cabin’s main lights and passed through the aisles, distributing tea, I thought, Why must things be so hard? The question sounded bombastic, overly dramatic. It made me cringe. And yet, despite the ironic impulse to dismiss it, the question reflected my true state, providing cover both for the personal obstacles that had surrounded my attempts to confront Mohammad as well as the larger political struggle squeezing both Israelis and Palestinians. I felt sandwiched between a conflict w
ith no perceptible solution and a psychic conflict wholly subservient to the blood being shed in the land to which I was flying. Seeking my own form of reconciliation had forced me to consider the failed attempts at a greater reconciliation in Israel and Palestine. It forced me to consider how this journey fit within a much larger struggle.
I had delusions, to be sure, for I thought that my decision to meet with the Odehs might somehow shift the balance, such that Palestinians and Israelis, hearing of my brave efforts, would decide to stop shouting for a moment and talk. I knew it was foolish to think in these terms, to believe that my own attempt to heal by confronting “the other” might inspire others to follow the same path. But I also refused to believe differently. This has turned into a mission, I thought, understanding I had chosen to merge the personal and the political, that I had fashioned a selfish quest for sanity into something larger, something unrealistic. As the survivor, I was now trying to take everything that had happened – Marla’s death, Ben’s death, Jamie’s suffering, my hyperventilating – and transform it, place it all in a chrysalis and let it grow wings, grow something that could emerge and fly, pollinate, pulsate in the air, make the desert bloom. The cliché was so tired it kept me awake.
I knew I was being guided by hope, by a hope that a resolution could be brought on all fronts, a hope which expanded from the knowledge that the two peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, or more specifically, Jews and Muslims, share the same mythical forefather: Abraham. And they – I should say we – share more than just a father. We share a common experience: abandonment.
Abraham’s son, Isaac – the one who was bound and almost murdered by his father – wasn’t the only child Abraham failed at God’s behest in the Book of Genesis. There was also Ishmael, whom Abraham fathered with his maidservant Hagar after Sarah was unable to produce a child. Ishmael, Abraham’s first child, was eventually rejected – cast into the desert with his mother and a water bottle when rivalry erupted in the household, Abraham showing them the door after God instructed him to do so.
What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill Your Wife? Page 20