After several failed attempts at finding someone willing to show us around Ramallah, Diana Shoef put us in touch with Tsafrir Cohen, the director of the office of Medico International, an NGO that provides medical services in areas of conflict. He was happy to meet us there and even take us to lunch and point us in the right direction about seeing the town and learning from his perspective about the screwed up situation in Palestine. We embarked nervously on our journey to the other side, but we felt it was our duty to go, even if just for one afternoon, and peer into the eternal shadow of Israel.
We took the bus to Jerusalem and then boarded a mini-bus to Ramallah, the trip took about 40 minutes through various suburbs and where we could peek from time to time at the infamous separation wall. Entry into Ramallah was uneventful, the bus just passed over a couple of speed bumps by a checkpoint. The hard part, we were to learn, comes on the way back, especially for the Palestinians, who have to suffer the daily humiliation of not being able to travel freely in their own land.
Ramallah is a chaotic and lively place, rather shabby in some corners, but very much like any other small Arab town. The streets are bustling, and everyone seems to be going about their daily lives as if nothing else mattered. No one paid any attention to us, as they are used to foreigners coming in either as political tourists, journalists, or workers in the many relief agencies. Terrible as it sounds, we were somehow disappointed to find the goings on of everyday life so normal, without any visible signs of Israeli abuse or of Palestinian militancy.
Tsafrir met us in the Manara, the dilapidated central square that already looked familiar to us from seeing it on the news, sometimes under heavy artillery fire. Tsafrir’s story is in itself quite interesting and emblematic of the deep divisions that haunt the societies on both sides. He was born in Israel, managed to get kicked out of the army and then fled the country, finally adopted German citizenship, and now lives in the West Bank (with his German partner), trying to somehow help people get better access to health care. During lunch and then in his office, with the help of a chillingly clear interactive map, he showed us the Kafkaesque reality that the Israelis have managed to impose on the Palestinians, while at the same time grabbing more and more land from them. It was disheartening to walk through the hilly streets of Ramallah and see in the distance, always on the top of the neighboring hills, the red-tiled roofs of jewish settlement homes.
We cannot even begin to describe the perversity of the ways in which Israeli power has managed to subjugate and neutralize Palestinian society, and our short afternoon in their land made it crystal clear to us that the occupation of the West Bank and the construction and expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank cannot be tolerated and is the real obstacle to any peace agreement that should lead to these two peoples living side by side. Needless to say, we are revolted by the terrorist tactics of Palestinian militants, and also firmly support the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state in this itsy-bitsy plot of land that is so essential to their history, but it is immoral to do so at the expense of the Palestinians being able to live a normal productive life.Later in the afternoon we visited Arafat’s tomb, not because we hold any particular affection for the man, but because it was the only noteworthy monument in the whole city.
After a cup of very strong muddy coffee and sticky sweet desserts, we boarded the mini-bus back to Jerusalem, and it was on the journey back that we experienced some of the strongest emotions of the day. The bus stops at the checkpoint where all the passengers must disembark, then walk on foot to the other side through a dehumanizing warren of cages, turnstiles, metal detectors, and Israeli guards behind bulletproof glass. We were lucky that we and everyone else on the bus got by quickly, but it is known that sometimes there are awful delays at the crossing for no other reason that the guards woke up in a bad mood that day.
It was only as we were driving away from Ramallah that we realized that we were leaving a prison as the exit road skirts closely to the security barrier, topped by several layers of razor wire and dotted here and there by tall observation towers.
It was painful to realize and impossible to comprehend how after Auschwitz could a Jewsish nation come to build such similar structures. Once again we were caught in the midst of an enormous moral dilemma.
**Note: a couple of days after reading this post, Tsafrir wrote an email to us with the following message:
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