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Friends, so much in Ramallah is so not what I expected. (Read my post of April 29 below.)
One surprise for me was just how gorgeous Fadi and Suha's apartment is. It's in a very lovely new building set among other lovely new buildings. Has plenty of space inside, beautiful new appliances and a wide open balcony patio area where I was treated to a sumptuous breakfast of fresh breads, cheeses, eggs, fruits and sliced veggies even though both Fadi and Suha had to leave for work.
(Fadi works in a peace-building organization in Jerusalem and drives there and back, through the check points, everyday. Suha does great work of her own in Ramallah-based organizations. Surprising for us who don't live there, Suha is not allowed to cross through the checkpoints and enter Jerusalem at all unless an Israeli organization applies for a permit for her for each and every visit. Even when the Jewish Israeli director of the foundation where Fadi works applied for Suha to be permitted to come to a reception, she was denied.)
Looking off their balcony in the bright morning sun, it surprised me how much their nearly center-city Ramallah neigbourhood closely resembled the nicest residential areas in older west Jerusalem. The white stone-clad buildings and roadways, the terraced earth, the patches of tall wild grass and thistles and occasional olive trees all were so very familiar to me. Take a look at these photos from Fadi and Suha's balcony. 
If you know Jerusalem, you'll see what I mean. It is a fifteen minute walk to Duar as-Sa'ah, Clock Square in English (even though it is round and has no clock), a small, quietly bustling little commerical area in the center of Ramallah.
It struck me as not only a nice place to visit, but also a nice place to live.
Everyone agrees that Ramallah is a bubble in Palestine. No other place has developed as Ramallah has. Nowhere else in Palestine is like Ramallah. But, I believe Ramallah shows how Palestine could develop when given the chance . . .
Trying to get to the Jamal abd El-Nasr mosque as dusk was settling, day rolling away before the night, I passed a small store with "Handmade in Palestine" on its awning in English.
Intrigued, I peeked inside and found not the tchatchke shop I was expecting but a small, tidy shoe store. Walls lined with shoe boxes.
Two women, a mom and her daughter, both veiled in hijabs, were waiting perhaps for one more customer before closing for the night. They welcomed me stiffly. After some initial hesitation, the daughter spoke very good English and began to tell me with pride about the shoes, all made entirely in Hebron. Her father started the shoe company with designs and processes from right there. All natural leather. The very first soles made in Palestine.
Her name? Haifa.
Why? (Need I ask?) "I am from Haifa, but right now we are refugees."
Could I introduce her to people with my little camera?
No. She did not want to be on camera at all.
Could I record her voice but not show her? I want people to know.
Briefly checking in with her mom, Haifa, 19 like my son Yehuda, said that would be OK.
After I shot this little interview, Haifa invited me to sit down. She wanted to talk with me very seriously about Israel and the Palestinians. She had a lot to say and was very strong and clear in her opinions. She was good at listening too.
Her father, who started the shoe company, has been in prison for three years now with no trial. He's charged with something she is sure he would never do. I didn't ask what. He's imprisoned near Ashkelon -- by the sea far on the other side of Israel, hours by bus and through God-knows-how-many checkpoints.
She's allowed to visit him once every two weeks and always goes.
People in Palestine say that Ramallah is not like the rest of their country.
"It's a bubble," said Sam Bahour, the Ohio-born Palestinian entrepreneur who came here after Oslo to help develop the country.
This afternoon in Ramallah, I stepped out of Stones, a hip focaccio place on a side street near the center of town where I had just immersed myself in an enormous baked potato with mushroom and cheese sauce, and nearly literally bumped into this young, energetic woman. Madees Khoury was delivering kegs of her family's Taybeh Beer -- proudly the first Palestinian microbrewery. Here's the briefest of introductions.
Reflecting on myself and why I want to share this encounter with you, I realize it is to show the non-scary side of Palestinian life.
From what I see traveling around here, 99.44% of Palestinian life is non-scary.
But, so often the picture in Canada and in the Jewish community of Palestine is both desperate misery and rabid anger. I hardly ever see an image of Palestine and Palestinians which is attractive, interesting, lively or happy.
Walking through the streets of Ramallah, Bethlehem and Dheisheh, sitting in cafes, talking with people, going into the Abd el-Jamal Nasser Mosque at evening prayer time, even in listening to a young woman whose father's prison now for three years with no trial, I have experienced a side of life which is deep, rich and very attractive.
Two hundred souls, Israeli and Palestinian, gathered for two days of the Israeli Yom ha-Zikaron & Yom ha-'Atsmaut (Remembrance Day and, following it, Independence Day) as well as to mark the Palestinian Yom al-Nakba (Day of Catastrophe).
It is, of course, the very same day.
The same day, two very different narratives.
Each narrative is part of the whole -- and only part.
Each has hardened. Each shuts out the other.
Two divergent narratives tear people apart.
Even more true, hardly ever do those people meet with hearts open.
Nearly never do they hear the story of the other, much less enter the heart of the other.
Two hundred of us here in this land chose to come together
to listen, to share memories, to be present and
to make possible visions of a future better than the
ongoing deep traumas of the past and present.
I thank God I was blessed to be among those people. I want to share the experience with you.
Beyond words, how can I share it?
Here are small introductions to nine souls who live in this land . . .
Ramallah surprised me.
I went there in the dark of night and was amazed at what I saw in the next day's light.
I'll share a bit with you . . . but, first, why go there?
All my images of Ramallah were bleak at best . . .
A very crowded, dirty, rundown town that I walked through in 1971. Old rickety diesel buses belching black fumes in tightly packed streets, people hawking wares in your face, all set in the beautiful softly rolling hills north of Jerusalem.
Exotic, fascinating for 19-year old me, but not at all comfortable.
I would have gone back.
I would have, but outbreaks of fighting, renewed war, tensions and fears got the best of me. I never saw Ramallah again.
Even without ever being there again, images of Ramallah formed in my mind.
Michal and I were living in Jerusalem with our two youngsters, Yehuda and Sophie and baby Miriam in 2000. In October, the intifada took a horribly ominous turn for the worse. Two Israeli reservists made a terrible wrong turn on their way home from the army. They found themselves unexpectedly in Ramallah. An enraged mob attacked and nearly killed them. Palestinian police rescued them and held them in the lock-up in a Ramallah police station for their own protection. I remember that morning. It was breaking news. I watched CNN bulletins with a dozen other men waiting in a greasy, smoky car repair shop Talpiot in Jerusalem, only a few miles from the scene. All of the Jews in the shop were Israeli reservists. The Palestinians in the garage, obviously, were not. Horror gripped us all as the TV showed mobs overwhelming the police. They broke into the lock-up and butchered the two errant Israelis. I remember the scene clearly: in real time on CNN from only a few miles away, a Palestinian man ecstatic with blood on his hands from personally killing the Israelis . . .
. . . and then, as we watched, the Israelis launched helicopter-borne missles at the police station and blew it up, killing God-only-knows how many, introducing a new level of weaponry into this latest escalation of violence, opening the possibility of the surrounding Arab militaries using missiles of their own against us in Jerusalem.
RamAllah. Not a place I'd want to be.
An even more recent image: Yasir Arafat holed up in the Muqtada, his headquarters in RamAllah, fighting breaking out there, the building itself a scorched, burnt out hulk.
And yet, since then, I've known several Jews who have gone to live in RamAllah. One is a Canadian-Israeli activist who married a Palestinian. One is a conscientious, devoted young American Jew who actively brings other Jews to see the realities of the occupation . One is the son of one of my hero-rabbis. I could hardly imagine living in Ramallah and thought of them as making a great sacrifice so that they could fulfill their ideals.
And now, I've known that Ramallah is the seat of the Palestine Authority, the place where Palestinian intellectuals, artists and entrepreneurs find each other. It is the portal to Palestine for the international community. It could not be like my mental images. I wanted to see for myself.
Just before midnight on Sunday, Fadi Rabieh, a young man I have learned to deeply respect, picked me up at Abu Leil's felafel stand just outside Yehuda's dorm on the north side of Jerusalem. Fadi and his wife Suha stayed with us last summer when they co-lead the Palestinian kids in Vancouver's Piece It Together program.
Fadi drove me a couple of miles through the orderly Jewish neighbourhoods of expanded Jerusalem. We then went along the separation Wall which I'd never seen except in pictures. It seals Palestinian areas off from Jewish ones. You can't even see what is on the other side. We crossed checkpoints into the Palestinian area and immediately entered a different world -- one obviously untouched by municipal services despite having been annexed by Israel. Fadi slowed the car as three horses leisurely wandered across the street on their own in the middle of the night. After only a few miles, we were in the centre of Ramallah. Fadi took me to his and Suha's apartment.
Friends, so much in Ramallah is so not what I expected. (Read my post of April 29 below.)
One surprise for me was just how gorgeous Fadi and Suha's apartment is. It's in a very lovely new building set among other lovely new buildings. Has plenty of space inside, beautiful new appliances and a wide open balcony patio area where I was treated to a sumptuous breakfast of fresh breads, cheeses, eggs, fruits and sliced veggies even though both Fadi and Suha had to leave for work.
Looking off their balcony in the bright morning sun, it surprised me how much their nearly center-city Ramallah neigbourhood closely resembled the nicest residential areas in older west Jerusalem. The white stone-clad buildings and roadways, the terraced earth, the patches of tall wild grass and thistles and occasional olive trees all were so very familiar to me. Take a look at these photos from Fadi and Suha's balcony. 
If you know Jerusalem, you'll see what I mean. It is a fifteen minute walk to Duar as-Sa'ah, Clock Square in English (even though it is round and has no clock), a small, quietly bustling little commerical area in the center of Ramallah.
It struck me as not only a nice place to visit, but also a nice place to live.
