Published on July 14, 2005 By O G San In Travel
Oh shit.

We should have sorted out our lies beforehand. Meghan and I joined the line at passport control at Ben-Gurion airport together. The vigilant, stern-faced young woman at the counter may well have noted this. But as Meghan passes through, having explained her travel plans, I realise that she must have lied. I will also lie, of course. I just hope it’s the same lie.

“Where do you intend visiting?” the dour lady asks. “Oh, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem” I reply as nonchalantly as I can. This is the truth, but not the whole truth. I will indeed be visiting Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. But I also plan to go to a few places which aren’t on many tourists’ itinerary in the Holy Land - Ramallah, Nablus and Jenin.

This is not illegal. However, if you admit at Israel’s premier airport that you intend going to the West Bank, you may be carted off for a grilling by the country’s notoriously thorough security services.

So I omit these details and am waved through without fuss.
“What did you tell her?”
“Tel Aviv and Jerusalem”
“Me too”
Great minds think alike, and fools seldom differ. But which are we?

A taxi whisks us off towards Tel Aviv, along some of the best roads I’ve ever seen. It is Saturday night, the end of the Jewish Sabbath. We arrive at the Gordon Hostel, right by the beach, next to the dilapidated Tel Aviv Hilton. Close to midnight, the place is still busy, full of the usual collection of stoners and weirdoes who frequent cheap accommodation the world over. But, unlike them, we didn’t come for a good time, we came to learn.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Where did it all start? When was intellectual curiosity first piqued? Probably back in 1988 when a nine-year old Belfast boy watched on TV as Israeli soldiers brutally broke the bones of Palestinian children during the first intifada. For an insanely politically aware child, this was the first stirring.

I came to political maturity in the 1990s, the years of hope, the years of Oslo. Of course, I was happy for the Israelis and the Palestinians, delighted that they had started a process which would lead to a better future for their children. Then I read a book which made me realise that I was wrong, the whole world was wrong. Oslo was not a good thing at all, in fact it was a very, very bad thing.

That book was Peace And Its Discontents, a slim tome of Edward Said’s newspaper columns from the earliest years of the peace process, now known to me as “the peace process”. With his devastating prose the Palestinian intellectual set out how Oslo, far from leading to a true peace in the Middle East was in fact an instrument of surrender, “a Palestinian Versailles” as he memorably put it.

At Oslo, Said asserted, the Palestinians had received no guarantees on Jerusalem, the refugees, water or final borders. They had in effect agreed to guard their own prisons (Ramallah, Rafah, Jenin etc) while the Israelis expanded their settlements around the prison walls. This was not “the peace of the brave” but rather “the peace of the desperate”, a terrible deal concluded when the PLO, thanks to its idiotic support for Saddam during the Gulf War, was at its weakest.

This was 1999, a year before the second intifada. Not yet exposed to the peerless Robert Fisk, I saw Said as very much a voice in the wilderness, vilified as a naysayer by the “peace” camp but proven horribly correct the following August.

It was in this atmosphere, with the second intifada not yet a month old, that I began a Masters in Comparative Ethnic Conflict at Queen’s University in my native Belfast. There were around 20 others in the class from around Europe and North America. To a person they were magnificent. We were a clannish bunch, we ethnicistas, forever drinking and talking politics. Most of us had a pet conflict, a place which transfixed us. Some chose a less well-known conflict such as Colombia. But for me it was the obvious one, the Daddy of them all - Palestine.

There was something about the struggle in the Holy Land which grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. The conflict had everything: religion, economics, history, big wars, little wars. To top it all, the “bad guys” in this story were the Israelis, the Jews, history’s eternal victims who, having finally won their place in the sun proved that they were just as bad as everyone else.

When dissertation time came around I chose Palestine but I was a little hazy about the title. I changed tack a few times before settling on a study of Israel’s demographics. In the end the dissertation was no good, as I always suspected it would be. It was as though there was so much to write about this conflict that I couldn’t focus on just one aspect until it was too late.

The School of Politics was kind enough to provide some funding for myself and a classmate, Meghan, whose dissertation was on Palestinian theatre, to travel over there for research. One of our lecturers suggested that while we were there we should attend the Friends of Birzeit University international work camp. This was a ten day solidarity programme run by the university outside Ramallah.

Before going to Ramallah were were supposed to be doing research. Meghan went about this diligently, cultivating contacts and making a list of things she wanted to see and do. For me “research” entailed an afternoon at Tel Aviv University library looking for books in English. I hadn’t come to read, I could do that at home. I came to experience, to see for myself.

I considered it dishonest to write, with all the mock authority a 22 year old could muster, about a place I had never visited. For the three weeks we were there, I resolved to act like a sponge, to listen rather than talk, to observe all the little details, no matter how trivial. It would take a fool not to learn from such a trip. So I suppose I was a wise man after all.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

But not so wise when it came to the basics of life in a stiflingly hot country. We spent the second day on the beach. Neglecting to put sunscreen on my feet proved to be a costly mistake. The following day, during an epically long walk from the university back to the hostel, I realised that one of two things had happened: either my shoes had shrunk or my feet had grown. Back at the hostel I removed my shoes to find my feet immensely red and swollen. Yellow third-degree burns peppered my feet. My ankles had gone on holiday and wouldn’t be back for weeks.

As an Ulsterman, I refused to accept the blindingly obvious fact that I needed medical attention. What can I say? We are a stubborn people. You know that scene in The Holy Grail when John Cleese is playing a knight who’s not much good at sword-fighting? “Bah, it’s just a flesh wound” he scoffs, looking at the stump where his arm used to be. Well that’s an Ulsterman.

The following day however, not even my bloody-mindedness could disguise the fact that my mobility was seriously impaired. Lying on my bed, looking at the dead skin on my feet and feeling no pain at all, I could convince myself that all was well. But to stand up was to subject myself to excruciating pain. It was all I could do to hobble down to the street to get some food. I couldn’t walk around Tel Aviv and that meant I couldn’t walk around Haifa either.

Haifa: a place I really wanted to see, where Arab and Jew lived in relative harmony, where the Bahai sect had made their home after their expulsion from Iran. Meghan had planned to go there on research and I had planned to tag along, not for research but just to inhale, as it were. We were due to go on Wednesday but for me this was just not possible. A day of sitting in the hostel reading Tony Adams’ somewhat disappointing biography beckoned. I felt bad that I wouldn’t get to see Israel’s second city, but I felt much worse for Meghan.

In the end she decided to go by herself but I knew this wasn’t an easy decision for her. She would never have come to Israel alone, the fact that someone was with her was a comfort, not least to her parents back in Rhode Island.

On the Thursday I was a little more mobile, so we went out for a dander to Kikhar Yitzhak Rabin (Yitzhak Rabin Square) where the Israeli leader had been gunned down in 1995. My feet were still sore but it was at least bearable to walk.

Standing still though was impossible, since this meant that my entire body weight bearing down on my feet. I could limp along the street happily enough but I couldn’t stand still at the pedestrian crossing. As I waited for the little green man to pop up, I had no choice but to walk around in little circles to keep the weight off my feet. Bizarrely pale-skinned, with beetroot red feet and acting like an extra form One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, I must have been quite a sight.

Through it all, Meghan was a star, never once complaining about the strictures imposed by my disability, nor about the stupidity which led to the disability in the first place. She was always patient and full of ideas as to how to ameliorate my condition.

But there are no two ways about it, the fact that I couldn’t walk easily restricted our Tel Aviv experience. There was not as much “sponge-work” as I would have liked. Nevertheless, I will try for a conclusion.

My overriding impression of Tel Aviv was that the city reminded me of my hometown before the 1994 ceasefires. There was a constant security presence in the Israeli capital: helicopters flying overhead, bag inspectors outside supermarkets, soldiers patrolling the beach.

But, just like the Belfast of my youth, Tel Aviv had a spirit of defiant normality. Later on, when a Palestinian in the West Bank asked me how things were in the city I replied “you haven’t got them rattled”. In spite of the chance of sudden and horrible death at the hand of a suicide bomber, Tel Aviv was a remarkably normal city.

It was also a remarkably western city. Our next destination though was a city of the west and the east – Jerusalem.

Comments
on Jul 14, 2005
very interesting! come again...contact me and togeher we can explore both sides if the 'infamous' wall. Your experience at the airport remind me of my own... even though I am an Israeli citizen..I get the third degree every time I leave or enter that airport..could it be because of my political involvement? Probably...
on Jul 14, 2005
Excellent! I look forward to the next installment.
on Jul 14, 2005
Now that I have had time to properly digest this trip down memory lane, I must thank you. It is, always, interesting to view an experience through a different pair of eyes--add that to the glory of hindsight and I have difficulty remembering that I was there at all.

Great minds think alike, and fools seldom differ. But which are we?


Well, we can't possibly be the latter because we differ all the time.

The School of Politics was kind enough to provide some funding for myself and a classmate, Meghan, whose dissertation was on Palestinian theatre, to travel over there for research.


Sort of--and not really important to the story, but it was on the role of theatre in divided societies--I did actually have many pleasurable interviews with a theatre company in Tel Aviv while you were holed up in our "somewhat lacking" accomodations.

One of our lecturers suggested that while we were there we should attend the Friends of Birzeit University international work camp. This was a ten day solidarity programme run by the university outside Ramallah.


I think it is important to note here that she was intent on killing us off

In the end she decided to go by herself but I knew this wasn’t an easy decision for her.


While it scared me senseless, it was probably one of the best things that I did on the trip--not because Haifa was that much better than say, Nablus (in fact, they were equally breath taking) but because it pushed me so far outside my comfort zone that it was impossible not to learn from the experience.

Meghan was a star


Your memory is far kinder to me than mine.

In no particular order, the other things that stick out in my mind about Tel Aviv (advance apologies for not elaborating)--the shop across the street from the hostel that sold snapple and played Hebrew "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," my post office experience (who knew you couldn't mail a package without showing your passport), the desire of everyone (especially shopkeepers) to tell you "their" side of the story, searching for soup nuts for Alexa, the overly generous guy at the bank, the enormous cockroaches in the hostel, the fact that my bed was in the middle of a wind tunnel, the shock my senses took seeing teenagers with guns, and the overwhelming feeling that this place wasn't as "different" as I thought it was.
on Jul 18, 2005
Thanks all for your comments.

Mano,

Be careful, I may take you up on that offer one day

Meghan,

Thanks for your detailed response, you brought back to my mind some things I'd forgotten.
on Jul 19, 2005
Mano,

Be careful, I may take you up on that offer one day


I meant every word of it... DO take me up on it....