First, on a rainy Sunday morning in the Jerusalem area of Palestine, my apologies for a variety of "blog snags." Those who know me in my present incarnation, know that incarnation does not include a facility with cyber functions. I have been struggling to master this blogging on my iPad and have clearly been only moderately successful, with some blogs full of typos and strange typography, eg. one looooonnnnnngggggg paragraph, others omitting sentences or paragraphs resulting in non sequiturs or at least head-scratching leaps. I'll keep trying.
Second, to make up for some omissions in previous blogs.
Friday night, Khitam and I went into Jerusalem to pick up some wine and to visit old friends of hers, Samir and Sulayma. Samir went to school in the States and was doing research and quality control of drugs here at Beir Zeit University - I'm not sure of that spelling - until he retired recently at age 65; he now works in public health for the Palestine Authority. Sulayma is in charge of early childhood education with ANERA (American Near East Relier Agency, I think). They live in Samir's family house, where he grew up, near the Damascus Gate to the old city. It's a lovely house in town, furnished with comfortable furniture and traditional Palestinian trimmings, plus a lot of family photos. We brought a bottle of wine and of course Sulayma had set out a small feast of "snacks": dates, dried apricots, white cheese (now is the best time to get it here because it is fresh; Khitam and Sulayma, and I'm sure many many others, buy it in bulk, soak it in salty water with a local spice that looks like but isn't carraway seeds), two other cheeses, hummus, Arabic bread, local olives - always, olives! - and more.
Samir told me about his Jerusalem identity problem, a not unusual one for Palestinians living in Jerusalem. He has a Jordanian passport and a US passport, plus a Jerusalem identity card which enables him to continue to live there under Israeli rule. He was traveling frequently to Saudi Arabia for work, so he used his Jordanian passport to go into Jordan to fly to Saudi Arabia - you can't fly
there from here; it's political, not aeronautical. Then he would use his US passport to get into Saudi
Arabia, again for political reasons: you can't use a passport with an Israeli stamp to travel to Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, and more. When he was stopped at the border here and showed his
Jordanian passport, it was refused so he showed his US passport. As a result, the Israelis confiscated
his Jerusalem identity card. Now in order to reside in Jerusalem, where his family has lived for
generations, he must renew a visa every year, with no guarantee it will be renewed. If this sounds Kafka-esque, it is. When he pleaded his case before an Israeli court, they ruled that if he remained in
the country for two years, the government would reissue his Jerusalem identity card. That was five
years ago. Now his visa is about to expire and he has returned to court to plead his case. His lawyer
says he will get his identity card in a couple of months. He's hopeful, but not optimistic. "What can I
do?" he asks. "I am stopped at a checkpoint and an Ethiopian soldier who came here three years ago
takes my passport, examines it and asks me questions. At that moment, he controls my fate. I have been here for generations and he has been here for three years!" Again, he shrugs as if to say: "What
can I do?
In Jaffa, Friday, Khitam and I stopped at her favorite Palestinian restaurant in the old city. It's not a big place, nor fancy. The waiters aren't in uniform, and service is casual and efficient. You sit, the
waiter brings the menu, returns with a mezza of several kinds of salad and dips, including two
varieties of baba ghanousj - crushed eggplant, tahini and spices - cheeses, pickled vegetables, Arabic
bread and more. You order, dig into the mezza and soon your meal arrives; I had a traditional
Palestinian chicken dish, prepared on spiced and oiled Arabic break, and Khitam had a spicy shrimp
dish, the shrimp fresh from the sea nearby. Good food and we were stuffed when we left. I also felt
like I needed a shower after all the dipping and drippings.
The drive through the old city with its old Palestinian houses, shops lining the streets and the streets
clogged with shoppers and tourists was an eyeful. This is the old city that has changed little in the
last many decades. Around it has grown a more modern and less interesting Jaffa that is Israeli; the
old city is still predominantly Palestinian. On the other side of the old city is the Mediterranean Sea.
We talked above the crashing waves for a couple of miles before driving back here. 'Twas a lovely
day. I'd like to return for a couple of days next time.
Yesterday was "radiator day." We went into Jerusalem in the morning for Khitam's four hour
workshop with kindergarten teachers. She worked with them on storytelling and I told a couple of
stories. When we finished, Khitam called a mechanic about her car. On the drive in, it had begun smoking again, so we stopped, put some water in the radiator, and proceeded to the workshop. The mechanic said he couldn't send anybody right away and for her to try to drive to his shop. We set off, drove for about fifteen minutes in heavy traffic, then pulled off because the radiator was smoking again. She called the mechanic wo said he'd send someone to a meet us at a nearby gas station. We drove there, waited and the messenger arrived. He checked the engine, told her she needed to replace the radiator, filled it with water and told her to drive carefully back here to find someone to replace the radiator. Off we went, but when we got to the checkpoint into this area, it was clogged and the radiator was smoking again so she pulled off in a military zone by the checkpoint, the only space available. Immediately an amplified voice ran out in Arabic: "Move your car! You're in a security zone. Move your car immediately!" She got out and hollered that she had trouble with the engine. Again the voice, saying the same thing. It was a moment out of 1984 - there are several of those here.
So she got back into slow moving traffic and eventually we made it to her mechanic who did not have a radiator but called a "radiator repair guy" who did have one and off we went to his place where, in 45 minutes, he replaced Khitam's radiator. Total cost: $120; no one charged her except the radiator repairman. We drove back here with no smoke, no heating up engine and ready to relax.
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