souvenirs
40mm sponge round tip
“How much for the bullet?”
It wasn’t really for sale, but I could see it on a shelf behind some half-used cans of spray paint. The proprietor called his shop a gallery, but it was more of a garage: a concrete cell with a bare floor and a steel door. He was selling Banksy and Banksy-esque graphics on T-shirts and poster paper.
The gallery was well-placed to move this inventory: right under the separation wall. It was along this wall, and the surrounding areas of Bethlehem and Beit Sahour, that the artist Banksy took his stand with simple, clever images of peace and non-violent resistance.
High-strung, or maybe strung-out, the proprietor repeatedly jumped into and out of the shop. Nervous and twitchy, in rapid-fire English, he’d point out five or six items that I surely couldn’t live without, and then he’d leap outside again to continue an animated, Arabic conversation with a handful of men. It was a schizophrenic encounter. He desperately wanted me to buy something, but whatever he had going on outside was urgent.
When I asked about the bullet, though, the proprietor stopped in his tracks and looked me directly in the eye.
It is natural to want a memento from travel - a souvenir to take home and place on the coffee table. The bullet would make a nice one - an object of drama to provoke thought and conversation.
There is no shortage of mass-produced souvenirs to buy in Palestine, but I’m not interested in ornaments as much as insight. For souvenirs which represent the opposing vectors of truth in this country of conflict, you have to look deeper than the gift shop shelves. You have to look behind the paint cans and the roadblocks, and you have to listen to the people.
Ahmad Mograbi
An hour’s drive from the gallery under the wall, Ahmad M. works in a store in Jericho which sells art glass to tourists. It’s the kind of store where your mother would tell you to put your hands in your pockets and not touch anything. As we shopped, Ahmad noticed my footwear and asked if they were real Keen sandals. It seems that Keens are difficult to get in Palestine.
Ahmad was friendly and enthusiastic and appeared to be middle-class. Jericho is a nice enough place that people go there when they retire - a Palestinian Phoenix. In the grand scope of all of humanity, there are a lot of people in the world worse-off than Ahmad, living in places a lot worse than Jericho. But he couldn’t get Keen sandals there.
The fact that a person cannot purchase a particular brand of consumer goods is not a definition of oppression, but it tells us something when a Palestinian is unable to purchase Keen sandals, but an Israeli just a few miles away has no problem doing so. It tells us something because it is Israel which controls the movement of people and goods into and out of Palestine.
Maybe he loved the style and wanted them for himself, maybe he planned to sell them for profit, or maybe it’s a game he plays with the Americans who come on the tourist buses, but Ahmad wanted my Keen sandals badly enough that he proposed a trade, right then and there - the shoes on my feet for the ones on his. I only had a moment to think about it - our bus was loading, it was time to go.
Trading shoes with a complete stranger is a weird proposition, but I sensed the seed of a story, so, under pressure to make a snap decision, I went with it. I gave him my Keens and I took his Adidas - a souvenir with a bit of truth attached - that not everyone who lives under the control of the State of Israel lives under the same set of rules.
Allies, friends, The Good Guys - that’s how I’ve always thought of the modern State of Israel. Israel has been a good partner for my country, the United States, in a region where we don’t have many of those. I celebrate that after thousands of years of persecution, and the horrors of the Holocaust, that the international community made a way for the Jewish people to have a homeland of their own.
But the problem is that the land was already occupied when the Brits and the UN gave David Ben Gurion the keys to the place in 1948.
The ongoing struggle to control the territory has been bloody, with attacks and all-out war perpetrated by both the Israelis and the resident Palestinians. Israel has emerged as the stronger power and now projects varying degrees of control into areas that were intended to remain Palestinian: the Golan Heights, Gaza, the West Bank. The resentment in the Arab community is enormous.
An hour or so after trading shoes with Ahmad, as we traveled the main Jericho-to-Jerusalem road, we approached Khan Al-Ahmar, a village where Bedouin Arabs have lived for longer than Israel has existed as a nation.
Khan Al-Ahmar sits low on the side of a hill of scrubland, solidly inside Palestinian West Bank territory. But Israel has its own plans for that particular hillside, and orders have been given for the army to clear the Arabs out.
This kind of thing is rarely reported in the Western press, but it happens all the time. An internet search will show the maps of Palestinian land that Israel intends to develop for its own use, and the Palestinians who live there will simply have to go live somewhere else. They have virtually no say in the matter.
As you might expect, the eviction order had enraged the people of Khan Al-Ahmar, and things were getting tense in the village. We weren’t supposed to see it.
As our bus neared the area, we encountered some traffic congestion. The police were in the process of setting up a roadblock to divert traffic away from Khan Al-Ahmar, but the barricades were not yet in-place. While another bus occupied the attention of the officials, our driver executed a brilliant workaround, and we went forward on the road that they were trying to close.
“You’re going to see something here,” our guide said. I didn’t get my camera out fast enough.
Parked on the roadside were Israeli military and police personnel, armored vehicles, and ambulances staged for action. On the right was the village. Angry people were massing and preparing for confrontation - fists were raised, a fire burned in a rusty barrel, Palestinian flags were flying. The shit was about to hit the fan.
Khan Al-Ahmar, October 24, 2018
I wish our bus had been going slower. I wish I had been faster to get my camera ready. I wish I could have stayed to watch - not to turn an unfortunate situation into a spectacle - but I’m curious, just what, exactly, does it look like when an occupying power moves into a village with bulldozers and levels the place, leaving the residents homeless and their livelihoods destroyed? Is it as coarse as it sounds?
Badly framed and poorly focused, shot from the window of a moving bus, I only got a few pictures of Khan Al-Ahmar to keep as souvenirs, but I’m not likely to forget my fleeting glimpse of those people about to lose everything.
It was a turning point in how I view my friend, my ally, Israel, because now I’ve seen his dark side. This dark side is not often fully presented in our Western media. We’ll see the pictures of the angry Palestinians, but we rarely hear the full story of the Israeli provocation.
Even here, in the land itself, it would be possible to be a tourist and not get a sense of the conflict. Our tour buses breeze right through the checkpoints, so unless you’re paying attention and asking questions - like why everyone else has to stop for the soldiers - you may not notice the controls on how people move around, because you, yourself, seem to move so freely.
If you don’t notice the triple-fence with the razor wire and specifically ask about it, you may never know that it is to separate Israeli land from Palestinian land, but that Israel built the fence not on the actual border, but around the resources it wants to keep for itself.
If someone doesn’t explain to you that the cluster of fresh-looking houses on that hilltop is an Israeli settlement on Palestinian land, you would have no idea that it was anything other than a housing development. The houses are clean and modern so they add a look of progress to the picture of the landscape, but the reality is that the settlement is part of an intentional strategy to fragment the Palestinian territory into a disconnected, ungovernable patchwork.
Israel has often had to be vigorous in its self-defense, and I support that. But, until I saw it for myself, I didn’t realize the extent of Israel’s intentional oppression of their Palestinian neighbors. It was shocking and bewildering to see, and a hugely disappointing thing to discover about my ally.
We visited a Palestinian farming family who lives in caves because Israel forbids them to build structures on their own ground. If they were to build a house, it would be bulldozed.
While helping to harvest olives in a Palestinian Presbyterian churchyard, the pastor noticed me looking up at the Israeli F16s which had been drawing contrail circles above us all morning. “Always there”, he said. “Don’t forget they are boss.”
Others talked of being denied entry to olive groves that their families have tended for generations. Access is controlled by Israeli soldiers and their mood of the day.
Checkpoints on routes of travel mean that Palestinians within the West Bank can’t count on being able to keep medical appointments or business engagements in other cities - they can be detained and turned back at any time, for any reason.
It all points to a level of constant harassment that makes life unnecessarily difficult and discouraging for the Palestinian people.
I didn’t come to the Holy Land to find a social justice cause - activism isn’t my thing - but this one is right in front of me. At every turn, I’m confronted with difficult truths about my ally. It’s like learning that your favorite colleague at the office goes home and beats his wife . . . we work so well together, but this new understanding is confusing and sickening and it certainly changes things. It has to, doesn’t it?
For the first time in my life I’ve had a personal look into the other side of a conflict that is central to the relationships of the West and the Middle East. I grew up absorbing the perspective that was fed to me, and it was simply, “Palestinians are terrorists.” But here in Palestine I find a much more complex conflict wrapped up in history, politics, religion, righteousness, geography, and entitlement.
A tourist will experience hospitality and warmth on both sides of the Green Line and think that these are all good people, and we should be able to solve this. But as one digs deeper, there’s always one more layer - one more obstacle to peace. Palestine is such an important place in world history and such an important piece of present-day geopolitics that I want to know more. I want to really understand what is happening here. I would love to return and stay long enough to walk a few miles in Ahmad’s shoes. And, to be fair, to find an Israeli to walk with, as well.
Place your finger anywhere on a map of Palestine, and you’ll be pointing to a hotspot. Every city, every village, every olive grove has the potential to be the next place where harassing policies are enforced against people who are not just going to take it anymore, and violence will erupt.
Among the hotspots is the city of Bethlehem. Wikipedia tells me that Bethlehem and Jerusalem are six kilometers apart, but the surrounding rings of development have merged into each other, as cities tend to do. They’re so close that you could throw a rock from Bethlehem to Jerusalem - or a hand grenade - and enough Palestinians have done so that the Israelis have built a wall. It’s a real separation wall like they used to have in Berlin. It might be the ugliest thing I’ve seen, but I guess aesthetics aren’t the point.
When tensions flared in the early 2000s, rather than do something noble, like look for a solution to ease them, Israel’s solution to the divided people was to divide them further.
From a security standpoint, the wall has been a success - greatly reducing attacks - but from a standpoint of advancing understanding, it has done nothing.
Many Americans don’t realize that Bethlehem is not an Israeli city, it is a Palestinian city, but Israel controls the access. Israel forbids its citizens from entering Bethlehem at all, and the comings and goings of Palestinians are regulated at Israeli military checkpoints. The peaceful little town that we sing about at Christmas time is actually ground-zero in a dangerous conflict.
We spent six nights there, and I felt safe enough exploring Bethlehem on my own, but you can only walk so far before you hit the wall, in all its hulking, menacing presence. Immovable, impenetrable, intimidating: the wall stands as a crushing representation of Israel’s approach to coexistence. Slab-sided, monolithic, Brutalist: the wall has no regard for neighborhoods or human connection.
In my short stay, I came to love Bethlehem and all of Palestine that I was able to see. I also loved Israel. I loved the landscapes and the people and the food and the hospitality on both sides. I loved the immense history of the Holy Land and the feeling that life there today is the continuation of a story that goes back through the offices of popes and armies of crusaders, and through the lives of David, Joshua, Moses, and Abraham.
But, after all I’ve seen, I have to ask my friend, my ally, Israel, why some of the people under their control can move around more freely than others, and why some have legal recourse for their grievances and others don’t, and why some people are systematically pushed aside to make room for others. And I have to ask why, when that intentionally-oppressed population protests, they are shot.
I came to the Holy Land to see the historical sites, but I’m taking home new questions about the political and humanitarian situation of today. Maybe these questions will be my souvenirs, along with Ahmad’s shoes, the pictures of Khan Al-Ahmar, and the bullet.
So, how much for the bullet?
The proprietor of the gallery broke his stare, reached back behind the paint cans, and pulled out the spent projectile. He held it in his hand and considered it for a moment. Perhaps it is a souvenir of his own - a memento of the conflict he lives within - maybe a token of his own participation.
It’s not a bullet per se, but the tip of a 40mm sponge round. Non-lethal. Sometimes when the Israelis shoot at the Palestinians, they don’t need to kill them.
Sometimes.
A sponge round is shot from the same gun that would shoot a tear gas canister or a grenade. It might be non-lethal, but it would definitely hit hard, break a rib or two, and redirect one’s attention.
The proprietor of the Gallery Under The Wall had difficulty believing that of all the artwork in his shop, I wanted a used rubber bullet for a souvenir, so I bought some postcards too.
The art that he sells is intended to draw attention to the Palestinian perspective, and the bullet can’t help but do the same thing. You can’t see it without wondering about the circumstances in which it was fired, and who it hit.
“For you, the bullet is my gift,” he said, and then his focus shifted beyond me - toward the wall and the men outside. He didn’t seem to mind parting with the bullet. I suspect he knows how to get another one.
