How the Other Half Lives

So with my passport surrendered to some friendly Russians who promised they could produce a tourist visa within 36 hours for a few sheckles (I procrastinated on a thing or two before leaving the States), I decided to try and skip across to the Palestinian town Beit Sahour before my flight out the following day. An American friend from college, Jared, came over a year ago on a Birthright trip, found an apartment, and has been working there for Ma'an News Agency ever since.

It took most of the day to get my act together in Tel Aviv, hop a bus, hike through Jerusalem, and find "Damascus Gate" along the Old City. After Birthright it feels a bit taboo (and thus quite exciting) being in a part of Jerusalem where Arabs are clearly in the majority, like venturing over to the girl's side of the gymnasium during the 5th grade dance, and by now it's getting dark. But with surprisingly little trouble I manage to find my way onto the "bus" (read: minivan) to Bethlehem, pay a few sheckles, and we're off.

Along the way I'm sort of poking my head out the window, checking out the scenery, and, yeah, trying to see if I can catch a peak of this separation fence I'd been hearing so much about. Then, all of sudden after about a half hour, a 30 feet high concrete barrier appears smack across the center of the road. For a brief moment I think we're going to hit it, but the bus driver pulls a fast one, circles around, and pulls to an abrupt stop. There's a small rush to the checkpoint, everyone's trying to get home from work, but I get stuck fetching my guitar out of the back (goddamn hippie) and end up at the end of the line.

To clarify, calling the Bethlehem crossing a "checkpoint" is sorta like calling King Kong a mid-sized monkey or Dick Cheney a great marksman. For some reason when I think of checkpoints I think of barbed-wire, some soldiers, and maybe some moveable wooden sawhorses blacking the road. At worst you think of Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, maybe. The Bethlehem crossing is more like a prison intake facility, a massive structure with bright spotlights, dozens of lines and stations to file through, and long narrow corridors with 15 foot fencing (bending in at the top) taking you from place to place. A heavily-armed kid who couldn't be more than 18 helps sort out the rabble, pushing two or three folks in at a time, telling a father he can't go in the same line as his kid. My lack of a passport turns out to be no big thing, though --- white privilege mixed with confidence triumphs again! --- and finally you emerge into a big courtyard. It's still the Israeli side of the wall, and there's a massive banner draped on it reading, in Hebrew, English, and Arabic (without the slightest hint of irony), "Peace Be Upon You (Israeli Ministry of Tourism)." Finally I pass through a little gateway, down some more fenced corridors, and find a taxi to take me on to Beit Sahour.

(Aside: there is holy stuff EVERYWHERE in this place. That dirty, abandoned lot across the way from Jared's apartment? Yeah, it's the exact spot the three shepherds were hanging out when Jesus was born).

I'm drained as hell by the time we get there, but Jared prevails on me to go catch a movie at a friend's house. Along the way he translates a lot of the graffiti. There on the side of this gas station is an incredible piece by British artist Banksy. This poster is for this political party. This one is the most recent martyr poster... went to his funeral a few months ago. Around back of the police station he shows me where one night a gorgeous mural of historical Palestinian resistance leaders just appeared. The location of the mural is a key thing here, kind of a "fuck you": the Palestinian Authority police are widely seen as, at best, an infuriatingly inept and powerless force, and, at worst, collaborators in the occupation.

The next day the taxi takes me back to the wall, but I want to walk around some first before crossing back. There's a place where there's a very obviously sealed metal gate --- sort of like a giant garage door in the wall --- and I walk by some men say in English, "It's closed." This takes me a sec: the wall is very tall, and it seems very plain that no one is getting through this door, unless perhaps they're in an Israeli tank. Finally I realize that this is a joke, I make some sort of comment about how I've never scene anything like it, which earns a nod. The first man says, "May it fall soon," I reply with, "Inshallah," which gets a few more nods, and I walk on.

Two last observations from my briefest of visits to the "other side":

1) At least around Bethlehem, it's very clear that the wall's positioning has very little do with protecting Israel proper, or even Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The nearest house on the Israeli house here isn't actually anywhere close to the wall. If you step a block or two back onto higher ground, you can see how the wall cuts across the Green Line, literally right up to people's houses, and places a 30 foot concrete barrier between them and their olive groves. Now I've never cared for olives, I find them disgusting personally, but that would piss me the hell off.

2) The graffiti is absolutely incredible. Recently a lot of European artists came down and did pieces in this area (not to universal acclaim by the locals, incidentally) but it really is a hell of a gallery. One piece consists of a couple of stencilled kids, who appear to have cracked a hole in the wall, and "through it" in bright, photo-realist style, you can see a tropical paradise scene. Another piece just consists of bold, black, 6 foot letters that read, "ICH BIN EIN BERLINER." My favorite, though, was definitely:
I spend the day making my way back to Tel Aviv, where I play a punk show that night that's a benefit for a group called Jews Against Ghettos. (How do you argue against that, really?). The band after me had a pretty impressive video display of actions in the West Bank projected behind them while they played, and someone else passed out their lyric sheet before their set. There should be a rule that all punk bands have to go back to doing that (nah, all musicians really), because if you're not saying something that some kid can back home afterwards and re-read and think about it, you shouldn't be opening your mouth in the first place. It made me realize how long it'd been since I've been in a place where punk actually felt like it might matter. The show hardly raised any money after paying for the space, but that turned out not to be that relevant. The gig was supposed to be for medical bills for a girl who'd recently been shot in the head, but that evening she died anyway.