Jerusalem and More cont...

Recently I was chatting it up with a few (international) lawyers who were trying to argue which borders of Jerusalem bore the most merit under international law, and what areas were in fact still contested and which were not.   I am slightly fascinated by the discussion, but not as much as I am fascinated by the myriad of ways life can be made difficult for the East Jerusalem resident.

Today I went to visit a friend in a neighborhood called “Ras Al-Mud.” Truth be told it is kind of a rough neighborhood.  There were plenty of clashes there a few months earlier, so I’m always a bit hesitant when I go in.  Last time I went to her house, I made the mistake of pulling over the car at the side of the road directly in front of a Jewish settlement that takes up about one and a half blocks of this so obviously Arab neighborhood.  I had no idea why people were looking at me so funny, until my friend jumped in the car and said, “Why are you parking here, hurry up, go before everybody gets suspicious!”  I couldn’t understand how settlers would feel at “home” on this strange block.

To get to my friends house, you turn down these extremely narrow, bumpy roads that meander up and down hillsides with barely enough room for 1 car and a pedestrian to get by between the houses crowding the roads on either side.  There are plenty of houses with floors and rooms left in the midst of some stage of building….I’m guessing because building permits were denied or orders by the Israelis came down to demolish by the entire structure, and families gave up on building.  Children dash in and out of cars, and even in the cold winter weather, you see residents sitting outside their houses, in the tiny courtyards, smoking their sheeshas.  I feel so sad when I drive through this neighborhood – an area that feels a bit like a dying refugee camp, except most of its residents have actually held their family homes here for centuries.

As my friend gets lunch ready, I stand in the kitchen trying to help, but always drawn to the view out the kitchen window.   My friend catches me staring out the window and makes a comment, “Nice view, huh?  Every time I see it, I remember my time in Germany during the green summer where everything was so clean and fresh.”  I chuckle and try to explain to her why I find the view so fascinating.  Directly out the window is a beautiful lemon tree (now in season) and beyond that into an open garden area with a concrete slab, a series of family olive trees (now past harvest).  Then the view overlooks a series of houses, again with makeshift additions added at odd angles to houses, then into a rambling valley where an Arab village sits, threatened by extinction for the sake of a zoo that Israel wants to build on the land. Then further off to the near horizon where one can follow the gray slab barrier wall north to south as far as the eye can see.  And beyond that, the hills of Jordan glow yellow in the far distance.

My friend’s own house, approximately 100m2, has a demolish order on it for what the Israelis claim is an area of 70m2 that is illegally built.  My friend tells me how she dreams of escaping this life, of just running away and running off, spending a year somewhere completely different.  I tell her that I don’t think she should take that voice lightly, that we all have dreams that whisper to us (or shout at us and slap us across the face!) and we should head their voices.

Oddly enough, on this particular day, my friend asks me to describe to her what my life was like directly after my ex-husband left me.  I don’t talk about this period of my life with a lot of people, and nobody ever really asks.  But, this is a dear friend, we know so much about each other’s lives, and if she is asking, I must share.  So I tell her that I remember spending a lot of time sitting on the floor crying and that’s most of all I remember about that time when my marriage had disappeared on me so suddenly, I found myself jobless and I feared I would lose my son, my house and my sanity.  And then I tell her, “People here think I am American, so I must be wealthy, and I couldn’t possibly have any worries in the world.”  But the battles I have fought for 7 years internally, trying to get back my sense of self, have been the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.  What people don’t understand is that all of us are given challenges to overcome in life.  Some are more visible than others.  And what I truly believe gets us through those challenges, is listening to those small voices, which sometimes sound a little nutty, but which essentially call from our hearts to move beyond the real or imaginary boundaries of our current situations.