haifa, part 1

I have a few half-completed posts from my trip to Palestine with IFPB that I'm trying to turn into completed posts.  Here's the first one.

The day after I was interrogated at the Allenby Bridge, I got up at the crack of dawn to go to Haifa.  It was the end of a three-week trip and I was pretty exhausted.  But we hadn't been anywhere in the north of Israel, my friend M wanted to go with me, and more than anything I wanted to talk to M about what had happened at the bridge, because she's Palestinian and has been interrogated many times by Israeli border officials.  So I dragged my luggage up the Old City steps and onto a bus.

She asked me how I was, meaning were there any lingering effects from my border adventure the previous day.  I told her I was fine.  Of course I was.  They'd let me in, right?  They hadn't hurt me or anything, and I had never been worried that they would.  I knew it wasn't that kind of situation.  The worst they were going to do was try to scare me.  And in the grand scheme of Israeli repression, what was a little psychological roughing-up, really?  It was nothing, I said.

Really, I wanted desperately to talk about it, to pour out the whole story, every detail.  I wanted someone to commiserate, to tell me I'd made the right choices, to say, "those bastards," with the shake of the head and the wry half-smile that says, "I've been there."  But she said we should be careful what we talked about on the bus, so I held in the story and we talked about other things.

I spent most of the day in a haze of cognitive dissonance, wandering through the stunning ordinariness of Haifa.  I got out most of the salient details over coffee in a shopping area that felt oppressively normal.  I kept thinking about that quote from Joe Sacco's Palestine:

"Make no mistake, everywhere you go, not just in Marvel Comics, there's parallel universes.  Here?  On the surface streets: traffic, couples in love, falafel-to-go, tourists in jogging suits licking stamps for postcards...And over the wall behind closed doors, other things--people strapped to chairs, sleep deprivation, the smell of piss...other things happening for reasons of national security."

Okay, yeah, my experience wasn't nearly that dramatic.  But still.  I'd spent a few hours in that other world--or at least in the first circle of it--and today the ordinariness of the normal world that covered it up seemed unbearably criminal and sick.

Throughout the day, little things kept setting me on edge.  The soldiers that seemed to be on every bus.  A woman's voice with a particular accent.  The bag search at the bus stop, which two days ago would have been a minor annoyance, but today felt invasive and icky.

By lunchtime there was a cold twisty knot of anxiety in my stomach, almost enough to keep me from eating.  This wasn't a final-exam or a night-before-the-big-pitchfest nervousness, but something deeply wired into my body's emergency response system, an elemental fear.  It wasn't the kind you could channel into a burst of adrenaline and focus, but the kind that paralyzed, the kind that made you want to curl up in a ball and hide somewhere.  I realized the source of this fear was the thought of going through another Israeli-controlled border terminal (Ben Gurion Airport) in less than 24 hours.  I had to do it because I had to get on the plane to go home, but I really, deeply did not want to.

I realized maybe I was not as fine as I'd said I was.

Then I started to get angry.  I was angry at them for having so much control over me, and angry at myself for letting them.  It felt like something that had been done against my will, this installation of fear.  No matter how many times I told myself I wasn't afraid of them, that they didn't intimidate me, that my non-Palestinian identity kept me safe from actual physical harm, it didn't matter.  My emergency responses were doing something else.

I was ashamed, too, at the thought that I'd let them get to me.  I felt I wasn't living up to the Palestinian standard of toughness.  Because what they did to me was so minor, really.  Barely a blip on the radar compared to the repression they dish out against Palestinians.  But it had still left a mark.

I also felt a kind of backhanded awe for the enormity of the oppressive power Palestinians have to face every day.  And I realized why everyone always says they're fine.  Because there's always someone who has a worse story.  Because everyone feels a responsibility to be tough for everyone else, to shrug it off with a defiant grin and a flash of bravado.  Because you don't want to admit how much of a hold they have on you, because if you admit it you might never get out.

I admitted to M that I was feeling really nervous about the airport.  "It's helpful to prepare for the worst," she said.  This didn't seem like very comforting advice at the time, but it actually turned out to be quite useful.  After preparing myself for a strip search and more questioning, the quick bag check and pat down with clothes on, and the fact that the airport security people were merely bored and not hostile, felt like a gift.  But that made me a little angry too.  Because being only mildly harassed by airport security shouldn't feel like a fucking gift.