Getting into Palestine

“I’m on my way to volunteer for the IDF,” the girl said to me as we sat side by side. “I’m gonna go to med school, but I wanted to volunteer first while I’m still young.”

I flashed a warm, awkward smile under my covid mask. “Oh, that’s so special,” I managed, shifting uncomfortably in my aisle seat.

She asked me why I was on my way to Israel, and I gave her the same bullshit reason I had been practicing for 48 hours. The fake story I would soon be telling the customs guys at the Tel Aviv Airport when they’d ask me why I was coming in. “Something something visiting my family in the Golan Heights, something something learn our Jewish history, something something I hear the beaches in Tel Aviv are breathtaking.”

It’s true- I do have family in the Golan Heights region, full of settlements that are illegal under international law. I mean, I think they should be expelled from their home, but they’re family.

The process of being granted entry to Israel was so daunting, I had little room during my travel to be daunted by what I was expecting to find in Palestine. The radical extremists who run “the only democracy in the Middle East” have, in recent years, passed laws that basically ensure they can turn you away or detain you for whatever reason they want. And given that I was running a high-profile congressional campaign on cutting off all aid to Israel at the time, it’s fair to say that I’ve very publicly said some shit that they do not want people saying. “They’re not going to like that you call it a ‘genocide,’” the thickly-accented Israeli lawyer with whom I consulted before my trip told me. He took a breath… “Which it is.” The use of that pause, whether for comedic effect or not, was extremely Jewish. You’ve really got to hand it to him.

I was heading to the occupied West Bank, which meant I needed the State of Israel to think I was doing something else, which meant I had to book a hotel room in Tel Aviv, buy museum tickets and shit like that, and have an alibi. Fortunately, I have a friend who was in Israel with his family and gave me a list of shit to say we were gonna do that only someone who was really going to Israel would be able to conjure up.

After several foreign policy experts prepared me for what would surely be a rigorous entry process and had me convinced that I’d be turned away immediately if not detained for hours, it turns out I just kinda waltzed right in. I guess having family and friends in Israel is a good enough reason for them.

Now that I could leave the fear of getting detained by Israeli customs behind (at least until my return flight a week later), I was able to make some room for the overwhelming sense of dread that accompanied entering a war zone as somebody outspokenly on the side of those living under violent occupation. The Israeli lawyer, the foreign policy expert, and the former Pentagon employee all used the same three words when describing my eventual destination of Zone C of the West Bank to me: “the Wild West.” The law is whatever the nearest Israeli with a gun says that it is. The army, illegal settlers, rogue militias… there would be no difference. All of them were utterly lawless, and if you mean no harm to the Palestinians they target, you are considered their enemy.

If you’re unaware of this like I was, Israel has apartheid’d the West Bank into three zones. Zone A is under full civil and security patrol by the Palestinian Authority, though the PA isn’t exactly famous for standing up to Israel. Zone B is mixed control between Israel and the PA, though again, “control” is not exactly a reasonable word to describe what Israel gives the Palestinians. Zone C is boundless Israeli dominance, full of settlements, checkpoints, and military zones. Good fucking luck if you’re a Palestinian who wants to build something, or walk home if the home your family has lived in since long before Israel’s bloody founding is in a part of town that Israel sections off.

Several minutes of failed small talk passed before I realized that the guy who had been sent to pick me up at the airport does not speak very much English. I was growing worried that he just didn’t much care for me.

I would be spending my first night in Zone A, in Beit Sahur, a suburb of Bethlehem. The trip had come together so quickly, I hadn’t taken the time to think much about what I was actually getting myself into. My friend Jasper, who organized the trip, sent me reading materials from his Substack, to which you should subscribe. But still, I had never flown internationally before, I had never really seen how people outside the U.S. lived their lives, and this trip was planned 48 hours before my flight took off (I learned that “‘48” is also what a lot of Palestinians call Israel. There’s this thing called the Nakba, Google it). So as our vehicle made its way past the checkpoint from Tel Aviv into the West Bank, what would normally have been weeks of mental preparation all got crammed into about an hour.

What in the fucking hell was I doing?

Hell. See, that’s one of the things that’s always perplexed me about Judaism. Why don’t we have a hell? Somebody’s gotta do something about that. Maybe one of the old guys from those billboards that say “Messiah is Here!” can talk to G-d about amending our scripture. There are some people who will not see nearly enough justice in the mortal world for what they’ve done, and I find the concept of eternal punishment for them quite a bit more soothing than any notion of eternal bliss for myself.

I was also starting to realize that I had no idea what time my body thought it was. I don’t remember if I slept on the airplane. I think I must’ve, though that’s quite rare when I’m flying. But the concept of jetlag was (and still is) very alien to me. It was bright out, and I supposed I was awake, but everything was so confusing at the time that I didn’t really have the capacity to understand how my body should’ve felt. It didn’t matter. There was a whole day ahead of me, so if I was tired, I’d have to get the fuck over it.

What I could comfortably say about Palestine after my first fifteen minutes there is that nobody knows shit about Palestine. Even the people I know who are ardently pro-Palestine don’t know shit about Palestine. I have been all over the occupied West Bank, made good friends there, and read extensively about these matters, and I still don’t know shit about shit. The Palestinian Authority civil security vehicles driving around blasting Christmas music while officers dressed as elves waved at everybody was my first sign of that.

Later this week, I will write in strong detail about my trip to the Palestine Natural History Museum, the Banksy hotel built outside the apartheid wall, and the affable dad with a hearty laugh around whom Beit Sahur seems to orbit.

I learned Beit Sahur is where the angels told the shepherds about Jesus’s birth. I’m like 95% sure that’s what I was told. Israel torments them, make no mistake, but in ways that differ from their torment of a city like Hebron or a village in Zone C.

Looking around, it really dawned on me that I was in another world, and that I hadn’t really been in such before. I’ve traveled to almost every state in the U.S., and coastal cities certainly feel very different from Standing Rock (where I spent one of the worst days of my life), but this was like I’d stepped into another universe.

My discussion of Day One in Beit Sahur will cover the fun part of my travels. Day One was a lot of fun. It was certainly not without its darker discoveries, stories of how the settlements are forcing Palestinians into living situations akin to “the projects,” and the State of Israel is decimating the tourism industry around which the Bethlehem community has been maintained for a very long time. But there were fewer tragedies than joys on the first day, and I can’t quite say that about the more heartbreaking chapters ahead.

This past week has been very dark for some people I’ve come to love dearly, and Israel’s methodical choking of these people has gotten gravely worse.

Seeing what has been unfolding has been making me a darker version of myself. But I’m just some asshole who lives in New York City, and my friends in Palestine don’t get to run away from the nightmare we’ve made for them the way that I did. If their spirits can endure, how can I allow mine to break?

I’m trying not to. But I’m only human. And what’s happening in the occupied West Bank is as inhuman as one could imagine.