Monday, June 16, 2008

The apartment in Ramallah

Youssef picked me up around noon at the hotel. The weather was not as hot as I had feared as there was a light breeze that made the sunshine tolerable. People wear considerable amounts of clothing here, the men wear jeans or cargo trousers. Very few wear shorts. We drove towards Ramallah but the journey began in the direction of Tel Aviv. We drove upwards and Youssef pointed across the landscape and said that right over there is the Dead Sea. What I saw was the Wall, snaking its way through the valley. That fact that the Dead Sea is visible from Jerusalem made it clear to me what Larissa (a Palestinian artist based in Denmark) had pointed out to me before my departure: the land is continuous with a continuous landscape. Palestine/Israel is a connected continuum and the borders that are now so violently drawn with walls and fences are artificial and separate people who should be living together. Larissa had also said that the Semites historically are a single people and that the religious differences, Islam, Judaism and Christianity, came later. All the people here are Semites, both Palestinians and Israelis. Why anti-Semitism has later been interpreted to mean only anti-Jewish only the gods would know.

In Youssef’s taxi, with its Israeli number plate, we flew right through the Qualandya checkpoint, which controls all traffic in and out of the West Bank. The checkpoint is manned by Israeli border police, a notorious section of the Israeli army. The soldiers are young and their casual behaviour at the border is disturbing. They carried their loaded automatic weapons as if they were musicians in a grunge band just carrying instruments. There was a lot of running around at this opening in the wall, which spread out in several branches around the checkpoint. There were various buildings set back from the passageway, wedged in between the branches of the wall. There were a lot of mini-buses parked on the Israeli side and there were all the different groups, women, men and children, gathered all around, on their way in or out of the various buildings. From the cab it wasn’t clear what was going on but Youssef told me that they had probably been waiting for an hour or two and that all of them would then be searched, the men, the women and the children. The Palestinians are not allowed to bring their own vehicles through the checkpoint, so all the small buses on the Jerusalem side of the checkpoint were mini-buses with Israeli number plates to bring people into Jerusalem or wherever they were heading. Cars with Palestinian number plates are simply not permitted for use in Israel. But cars, such as Youssef’s, with Israeli number plates can also be used on the West Bank. The armed soldiers, wearing dark glasses, were mostly, however, surveilling the traffic that was heading in the other direction and leaving the West Bank. They ordered people who wanted to enter Israel to get out of their cars and open their trunks while the soldiers looked on. After we had passed through, Youssef told me that it was probably going to take him about an hour to get through on his way back after dropping me off at Ramallah.

When we drove through the checkpoint it dawned on me that, of course, the Israeli soldiers don’t care about who gets through to the West Bank. All their attention is directed at those who wish to leave the West Bank and drive into Israel. There is obviously no Palestinian border control as the checkpoint and the Wall are exclusively an Israeli project. This is probably why on the Palestinian side of the wall there was a huge painted graffiti piece asking for a reboot: Ctrl-Alt-Delete.

Now the quality of the roads changed dramatically; they were full of pot holes, and plastic bags swirled about in the dust. The landscape still had a lot of buildings spread out across the hills and there were quite a few brand new ones with 3, 5 or 7 floors. Almost all of the houses, tall as well as low, were built with yellow sandstone. Youssef told me that the new houses had appeared after the Oslo Accords between the Israelis and Palestinians in 1993 and the establishment of Palestinian sovereignty in 1994. Palestinians who had lived abroad had returned to invest in the development of the future Palestinian state but there had been no urban planning and Youssef complained about all the buildings that had been built with no overall coordination: a tall 7-floor building stood right next to a small 2-floor one, etc. In his mind this was a big mess. I, however, found it slightly liberating for my Danish control-resistant mentality.

After we had driven for about 20 minutes we were met by a white Mazda. It turned out to be Samar who was waiting for us. She would take us to the apartment where I was going to stay for the next 6 weeks. We drove up and down and back and forth for about 10 minutes through the hilly landscape until we arrived at a rather exuberant villa with a double garage surrounded by a fancy cast-iron fence. It was a true rich man’s mansion; and, to my surprise, there were quite a few in the outskirts of Ramallah. So this was the place where I was going to stay, in the ground floor apartment with the owner living above me.

As I was the first person to use this apartment, everything in it smelled completely new and there were still stickers on the sink and the toilet (but no toilet paper). There were two rooms, with a large combined kitchen and lounge as the main room, and a bedroom with two beds — in other words there was plenty of space. All the rooms had a cool, tiled floor and the sofas in the lounge fitted the style of the house — exuberant. Samar, who had invited me down here, was a very friendly woman, and we got along easily. She had lived in London for some years but had now returned to Ramallah where she was in charge of ArtSchool Palestine. It was nice to finally attach a face to all the many emails we’d exchanged before my departure.

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