Before me as I write this essay is Palestine & Palestinians, published by the Alternative Tourism Group in Beit Sahour (www.atg.ps). It embraces landscape, geography, buildings and monuments; history; flora, fauna, and climate; food, drink and custom. A section is devoted to colonization and occupation. An introductory history takes one from the Iron Age through the Al Aqsa Intifada and the global crises of Palestinian refugees.
I begin with a bird’s eye view of this book because I agreed to write about “tourism in Palestine.” After I accepted the assignment and began the actual writing, I realized that what I had in process was a kind of memoir with reflections on tourism. Tourism in Palestine is bound up with neo-colonialism. Yet my conclusion, which I reached while writing this, is that “enlightened tourism” as it might be called, is more helpful than not. It’s clearly easy to be an ignorant tourist, falling into fanatical delusions, and stubborn romance with US-Israeli propaganda. This, of course, is not what I mean.
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In 1979 The American Colony was one of the most beautiful hotels I’d ever seen. Its low buildings, which rose among lush gardens, were made of Jerusalem stone. Just beyond the foyer and reception desk a central garden burgeoned with lemon trees, luxuriant plants, and a central pool where large goldfish idled. Prize rooms for the ultra-privileged opened onto the courtyard. If you were a journalist you could get a discount for a spacious, pristine room and bath in one of the outlying buildings. Between 1979 and 1985, when I was staying on assignment for a month and more in the West Bank, I lived at the American Colony for $10 a day. The pleasures of being there – waking up in the morning to brilliant sunlight illuminating the walls and floor, reading the paper and having coffee in the garden, writing up my notes, listening to the BBC in the evening (it was then more critical of Israel, as I recall, and fairer to the Palestinians); meeting interviewees and friends. When I wasn’t working I strolled down Nablus Road and Salah-al-Din Street, inhaled the aroma of coffee and spices walked through the Damascus Gate and meandered about, sometimes shopping for gifts. I still have the kuffiyehs I bought then, made in Palestine.
I’d never wanted to go to the region before 1979, when the editor of Boston’s The Real Paper sent me there to write about Israeli women. After that trip I would return regularly for six weeks to months at a time on assignments for that and other publications. After the Second Intifada I visited four times, publishing articles after each tour. Throughout, I never thought of myself as “a tourist.” It may be that all foreign journalists, being spectators in others’ countries and contributors to their economies, could be called “tourists,” though I think that’s a stretch. Solidarity activists fall more easily into the category though most wouldn’t like being described that way.
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Some memories from 1979. The mayor of the village Halhoul, Muhmmad Milhem, stood in the American Colony Hotel garden, trying to figure out who I might be. In the US I had read a story about Halhoul in The Jerusalem Post by Ian Black. Black described a particularly cruel form of collective punishment (or so it seemed in those days) – a month-long, 24-hour-a-day 30-day curfew imposed on Halhoul in the spring of that year. Two of the town’s teenagers, demonstrating on the main road against Israel’s temporary jailing of the pro-PLO Milhem, had been shot and killed by Kiryat Arba settlers. For these murders Halhoul, not Kiryat Arba, was punished.
On first sight Milhem was one of the handsomest men I had ever seen – tawny hair, bronze skin, crystalline blue eyes. He was rather short, but his bearing made him seem taller. One of several pro-PLO mayors elected in 1976 (the first and, for years, the last time Israel would permit West Bank elections), he would be exiled in 1980. Milhem became my first direct source to life in the West Bank. He seemed to me a true representative of his people; I thought of him like the great American civil rights leaders.
I had persuaded The Village Voice to commission a story about Gush Emunim, the ultra-right-wing spearhead of the Israeli settlement movement, ancestor of today’s Jewish vigilante terror. My husband’s cousin contacted a distant relative who lived in the settlement Kiryat Arba, and introduced me as a young Jewish woman in search of enlightenment. Sometimes I visited Kiryat Arba settlers the same day as visiting Halhoul. Several times I spent the night with “my” settler family. Their apartment was directly under that of the settler who had killed the teenagers (he was in jail at the time of my visit; later he’d get off with no penalty.) Lying in bed in the settlement and hearing the muezzin’s call to prayer echoing over the hills from Hebron, thinking of the murderer in his cell and his empty apartment above me, was one of the more chilling experiences of my life.
In the course of running around in the early summer heat, gathering information for this group of stories, I wound up with a case of heat stroke and a determination to return. “You’ve caught the bug,” an Israeli-Jewish friend, Peretz Kidron, told me. “You’ll always come back.” True: I’d conceived a passion fueled by hatred of injustice; a growing love for the Mediterranean warmth and hospitality of the Palestinians; love of the West Bank countryside; fondness for parts of West and East Jerusalem; an exhilarated sense of being at the center of world politics; a conviction that what I wrote might, perhaps, make a difference. At the time almost no left-wing American journalists (or any others for that matter) were writing about the West Bank (the scholar Sara Roy began her work in Gaza in 1985). In the United States almost everyone else on the left was preoccupied with the anti-Apartheid movement and Central and Latin America.
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1982. “The press corps,” meaning both American and European mainstream journalists, descended on the American Colony upon Israel’s June invasion of Lebanon. In the evenings during the 1982 war, the American Colony hotel became a site of oddly cheerful “war tourism” – lots of drinking in the cozy, luxurious bar, lots of laughter and talk. At one point I was asked to play “Don’t cry for me, Argentina” on the piano: a gaggle of men sang loudly and sentimentally, and applauded. At another point a small group decided to jump in the pool, strip down once in the water, and skinny dip.
On yet another occasion I remember a group of mainstream press reporters talking in hushed tones about a distinguished visitor, David Cornwell (John Le Carre). The journalist-admirers of this powerful writer either self-censored or were censored by their editors. Thus John Le Carre enacted their own longings to publish more freely. A photographer from US News and World Report, Stephen Brown, kept lamenting to me, “They didn’t print my gore shots; they’ll only print my rubble shots.” Stephen had managed to access hospitals in South Lebanon where he saw the horrifying results of Israel’s attacks. Much of the press corps, ignorant before they arrived in 1982, turned against “the Izzies,” as they began calling the IDF, and became sympathetic with their Lebanese victims.
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From 1979, Dr. Israel Shahak, one of Israel’s greatest dissidents, professor of chemistry at Hebrew University, head of The Israeli League for Civil and Human Rights, became an adviser and friend. He had survived concentration camps, fleeing Bergen-Belsen with his mother when he was eight. Usually I visited him at 2 Mi-Bartenura Street in West Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood, growing fond of it, as I did of him. His two-room apartment was a chaos of piled-up newspapers, magazines; a table, a bed, and a few chairs. He always debriefed me, suggesting topics for my writing. Shahak himself would never go farther into the West Bank than East Jerusalem, which I think he didn’t visit often. He said he would not visit the West Bank or Gaza as long as the occupation existed, refusing to be a tourist among the people his country was brutalizing.
The last time I went to Palestine in the ‘80s was during the First Intifada, 1988. For the first time I didn’t stay at the American Colony. The elderly American couple who owned it, the Vesters, had put it to under Swiss management and many of the workers I knew had been let go. I visited one of the former American Colony workers in his village. He was no longer the friendly, cheerful person he’d seemed on the job. Embittered and angry, he told me about friends who were in hiding from the IDF. His wife, overshadowed by him, intimidated by me, hung back wordlessly. It was a glimpse into the complexities of a more real Palestine than my articles on collective punishment had ever explored.
For a night or two in 1988 I stayed in a home in the village of Qabatya. Qabatya was known for its “fiery” resistance to the occupation. Many of its young men had had their arms and legs broken by the IDF following the “break-their-bones” orders of Ytzhak Rabin. I still have negatives of the photographs I took of the injuries, as I do of injuries I saw when visiting the wounded – men, women and children – in al-Maqassed Hospital in East Jerusalem. Going to sleep in Kabatyah I listened to the whistling of the shebab at night, signals during the First Intifada. It was the other end of the trajectory that had begun with my Kiryat Arba-Halhoul schizophrenia.
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During the nine years of my visits between 1979 and 1988, I marveled at the West Bank’s terraced hillsides, at once somber and radiant with olive trees, their leaves billowing silvery-green, and with the darker greens of fruit and nut trees. A friend took me walking in the hills, hosted me, and introduced me to the pleasures of food in Ramallah and kanafeh in Nablus. One could travel the length and breadth of this part of Palestine in a group taxi or car. The monstrous architectures of separation and imprisonment – all that younger journalists and solidarity activists now know – didn’t exist. While there were settlements, there weren’t the vast excrescences of suburban sprawl that now desecrate and scar almost every part of the beautiful hills. 1 For example in 1979 Elon Moreh was still a trailer camp. Kiryat Arba was small and self-contained well into the 1980s, as far as I recall. A Gush Emunim sit-in was underway in 1979 at the Hadassah Hospital in Hebron. There, I interviewed Miriam Levinger, wife of the infamous Rabbi Moshe Levinger of Gush Emunim (for a brilliant history of Gush Emunim see Robert I. Friedman’s Zealots for Zion New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.) I asked her if she didn’t fear the Arabs all around her. A shrug: “So? In Brooklyn there were the schwartzas [blacks]. Here there are the Arabs.” She told me the settlers were in Hebron to stay.
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After 1988 I took an editorial job in the Boston area and didn’t return to the West Bank until 2002. A friend warned me that crossing a place called “the Kalandia checkpoint” would be a sordid experience. I’d read descriptions. But these hadn’t prepared me for the vast vistas of rubble, broken glass, jersey block barriers, trash, and snarls of razor wire that confronted travelers after vehicles dropped them on one side, leaving them to trudge the wretched expanse to the actual cement structures where the IDF soldiers waited.
Nothing prepared me, either, for the vastly expanded settlements – a California sprawl of white identical prefabs with red-tiled roofs – whole cities and suburban towns. Nothing prepared me, either, for the disappearance of the familiar, narrow, simple road between East Jerusalem and Hebron, the one I’d traveled so often and with such certainty 22 to 30 years earlier. On my last visit in September 2009 I asked an interviewee in Bethlehem to point out the original road for me: he couldn’t.
“Tourism” suggests not only visits by outsiders to other people’s countries and cities, but the permanence of those countries and cities, their architecture, their art. The only West Bank permanence is the continuous obliteration of the Palestinian landscape. Even the towns and cities have had to be built up vertically – an ugly and counterintuitive architectural accommodation to Israel’s seizure of the surrounding land. As we stood in 1979 at the highest point of his village, next to the mosque, Mohammad Milhem pointed to settlement houses. He said they were cancers that were devouring his people’s land.
On my visits to Palestine since the second Intifada I have often been filled with feelings of instability and loss. Palestinian interviewees and friends told me they, too, experience constant loss of bearings. This is because Israel continuously gouges out Palestinian land, builds new highways and tunnels, and cuts off older paths in the space of weeks and months, creating ever-encompassing architectures of domination, imprisonment, and separation.
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In September, 2009, I traveled with a friend to the West Bank she for a Palestinian-crafts import business2 I for a series of articles on Palestinian nonviolent resistance3. In the evenings we went to restaurants in Ramallah, savoring the delights of Palestinian food with glasses of wine. At the same time, I was mindful of the advice of a Palestinian acquaintance in the U.S. He had told me to “get out of Ramallah as soon as you can.” Ramallah is turning into a cosmopolitan center split off from diminishing rural islands in a sea of settlements.4
At one point, I walked around East Jerusalem in the evening. The American Colony was utterly changed. The cheapest single was 37 times what I’d spent two and a half to three decades earlier, The place teemed with NGO and other visitors. “The NGO-ing of Palestine” (as a Palestinian acquaintance put it) shows, at least in part, the success of Israel’s strategy to divest itself of any responsibility for the territories it occupies, making Palestine an international charity case. And an Israeli tourist industry (backed of course by the US) has developed, engulfing East Jerusalem landmarks and in the process erasing their earlier Palestinian context. Gentrification in East Jerusalem, hallmarked by the hotel-restaurant glitter, is at one with the depredations of ultra-rightwing settlers and expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah.5
The last evening of my stay I walked into that neighborhood, just a few minutes away from the American Colony, for my interview with a family that had been evicted by the IDF. They were camped out on the sidewalk. Their house, just opposite, now flew Israeli flags; settler fanatics lived within. The family offered me a loaf of warm bread.
As Palestine sinks under US/Israel brutalities and the “peace process” charade, a certain sort of tourism can be an act of resistance. This is a knife-edge, since tourism in Palestine is now willy-nilly part of US-Israeli neo-colonialism. But the mission statement of the Palestinian Association for Cultural Exchange (PACE), which conducts excellent tours of the region, begins with the aim “to preserve and promote Palestinian Cultural Heritage” and “build an infrastructure for tourism.” In solidarity reporting there is much unmitigated grimness. One cannot avoid that since it is all around one in the West Bank. But it’s possible to go to Palestine, buy your copy of Palestine and Palestinians in Beit Sahour; tour with PACE; take short courses in Arabic; see films and attend concerts in Ramallah; then break from that cosmopolitan center and find what still exists of rural Palestine. This would be what I choose to call “enlightened tourism” – never more necessary than now.