PART FIVE

Palestine

A PALESTINIAN PONDERS AN ISRAELI SETTLEMENT
NEAR BETHLEHEM.

 

 

LATE ONE AFTERNOON IN Ecuador, I was peeling off dirty clothes for a shower when something slammed against the cabana’s sloped metal roof. My first worried thought: the cabana’s been hit by a meteor. I opened the door and rushed onto the wood bridge to the path. There in the dirt, a large white bird, bigger than a football, lay on its back, its claws twitching, its neck twisted.

I hurried back to the room, slipped on my boots, not bothering to tie them, and ran up the path to the lodge. Mika was talking to some folks at the table where I’d spent two days dropping larvae into alcohol.

“Hey,” I told him, interrupting his conversation—this was the first time I’d spoken to him, I realized later—“some kind of bird just hit our roof—I think he’s hurt.”

We ran back down to the cabana, along with Zachary, the machete-wielding Robin to Mika’s Batman. Edward, the amateur ornithologist, hurried down as well.

The bird squirmed on its back.

“Looks like a quail dove,” said Edward.

Mika got down on one knee, picked up the dove, and nestled it in his red sweatshirt, holding it against his stomach.

“Best thing to do is keep him warm,” he said.

He took the dove back to his cabana, cradling it. When I saw Mika at dinner that night, he said the dove was woozy, though it eventually stood on his finger, and its pupils had stopped dilating. Mika left it outside on a stump. The next morning, he stopped me at breakfast.

“I have news on your dove, mate,” he said. “When I checked the stump this morning, there was a bit of poo and a few feathers. So I suspect he took off. Though he might have been someone’s dinner—he was right at puma height.”

Either way, a happy ending. It all depends on how you define a happy ending.

The hour-long drive from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem reminds me of winter in northern California. The mild December temperatures, the mountain highway, the yellow streetlights as evening turns to night. Until my folks moved back to Virginia, Julie and I would visit them once a year, usually after Christmas, landing in San Francisco and heading to my parents’ home near San Jose. Julie loves skiing, so we’d drive to Lake Tahoe, my parents gambling in the casino—Mom addicted to slots, Dad playing video poker—while Julie and I hit the slopes at the nearby Heavenly resort.

The first time I went skiing, back in high school, two friends tried to teach me. We went to Ski Liberty in Pennsylvania, riding to the top of the Dipsy Doodle slope, which is about as menacing as it sounds. I dismounted from the ski lift, slowing my momentum by falling face-first in the snow. My friends swooshed to a people-free area by a clump of white-covered pines, and I followed, wobbling and slipping and tumbling, like a gunshot victim on skis. With a little help from their instructions, I developed the following technique:

Ski three feet.

Fall.

Stand up.

Ski three feet.

Fall.

Start to stand up—fall—stand up—ski—

Fall.

I was so bad that I finally removed the skis and walked back down the hill, which was humiliating, though faster than if I’d “skied” to the bottom. After a lesson I improved quickly. Julie never tires of skiing—she’d love nothing more than a monthlong ski trip—but after a day or two on the slopes I’m done. My main objection is that skiing takes place in the cold. I just can’t see going out of my way—packing thick clothes, making airline reservations, taking off work, traveling—all to visit a place that’s far colder than the cold at home.

Dad enjoyed living in California, and developed what I consider a fairly sane policy about snow. Basically—

If I want to see snow, I’ll drive to the Sierras and look at it, and then I’ll drive home.

That was probably his only regret about moving back to Virginia: the cold. In February, four months before he died, he and his golf buddies played eighteen holes in 20-degree weather. When the ball hit the fairway, it was like hitting asphalt, he said; the ball would bounce fifteen feet in the air. For me, the cold feels right only at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Maybe I’ve been brainwashed by the corporate Christmas mythmakers, but Santa was headquartered in the North Pole (as opposed to, say, Pensacola) and the TV Christmas shows were all set in winter wonderlands. Had I watched Frosty the Strawman each year I might feel different.

This is the first time I’ll be away from my mom and my sister and Julie over Christmas, a separation the mild weather accentuates. In some ways, it doesn’t bother me. Because here’s a little if-you-want-children-but-don’t-have-children secret: Christmas is the shittiest time of year to not have kids. That’s when parents go to Christmas pageants or take the kids to see Santa; when the whole family decorates the tree. (Some parents, I realize, might say this is the shittiest time of year because they have kids.) And yet I feel Grinch-like for leaving Julie, because she loves Christmas as much now as she did as a kid. She wraps garland around the railings, hangs up lights, wears Christmas sweaters and socks. We own, I’m convinced, the East Coast’s largest collection of Christmas music, from the Chipmunks to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And this is a time of year when you’re supposed to be with loved ones.

So what we have here is a classic contradiction: I’m kind of happy to be gone, except that I’m sad to be gone.

Every human being, whether in Santa’s workshop or San Jose, the West Bank or Northern Virginia, is a red-blooded, oxygen-breathing contradiction. I was so concerned about climate change that I flew to South America in a carbon-spewing jetliner. In my attempts to help others I’ve neglected the people closest to me. While in China, I missed my nephew’s college graduation. I missed Mother’s Day. As I climbed the Andes in Ecuador, I missed the funeral of Adam’s dad. And now I’ll experience Christmas in the Holy Land—the most contradictory spot in the world—spending two weeks in the little town of Bethlehem, a town of hope and hopelessness; the birthplace of a pacifist savior whose name has justified centuries of killing; missing not just Christmas, but Julie’s birthday.

Julie was a Christmas baby. Born on December 25.

And so I arrive in Israel with a sort of guilty optimism: guilty for what I’ve left behind, hopeful for what I’ll find. I’m here because of Jonathan’s still-sturdy Costa Rica philosophy—you only learn about yourself when you’re outside your comfort zone—but also because … if you want to make a difference in the world, you need to see the world differently. You need to move beyond your assumptions and experiences. And if you want to understand suffering, you need to go to Palestine. The Palestinians have no monopoly on suffering; they’ve both endured suffering and inflicted it. We all suffer. Rich, poor, Muslim, Jew. But understanding suffering without visiting Palestine is like understanding the Bible without reading Genesis. Nowhere else on earth do the elements that so make us human—violence, hope, compassion, pain—seem on such stark and jarring display.

It begins in a back room at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv. I’m escorted there, shortly after deplaning, by an airport security agent. As security personnel go, she’s pretty: formfitting, no-nonsense pantsuit, brown hair in a ponytail, more like a businesswoman than a cop, or whatever her inspect-the-traveler role may be.

The room is for those who are deemed threats. I suppose I should have expected extra attention given the country’s reputation for scrutinizing passengers, and given that I’m traveling to Bethlehem, although everything started normally. I left the gate and marched with the masses to the passport control booths, where a bored twentysomething woman inspected my passport.

“What will you be doing while in Israel,” she droned.

“I’ll be in Jerusalem for two days and then two weeks in Bethlehem.”

“What”—sigh—“will you be doing.”

“Oh,” I said with a nervous laugh. “I’ll be sightseeing in Jerusalem and volunteering in Bethlehem.”

My volunteer organization, Volunteers for Peace, forwarded a warning before I left, a message from our hosts in Beit Jibrin, the sixty-year-old refugee camp where I’ll be staying:

Even if the situation is calm now, you should expect that the situation may get tense. It is important to know that as a foreigner you are supposed to have freedom of movement (in comparison with the Palestinians) and security. But because your presence in Palestine is embarrassing to the Israelis who are committing crimes against the Palestinians you should be aware that you might not be welcome by them.

Not welcome? Me? How could I not be welcome? I’ve come here with what I believe is a typically American view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yes, it’s ping-pong politics. Back-and-forth violence. Back-and-forth outrage. Endless retaliation and blood. But when I see Israelis on American TV news, I see statesmen in suits. When I see Palestinians, I see hoodlums throwing rocks. Israel is our ally. Harry Truman considered recognition of Israel one of his chief accomplishments. The nation is a world leader in science and technology. Its citizens have persevered, and thrived, in the face of hideous terrorism. And yet … (This is the land of And yet…)

And yet … the state of Israel was founded on land where Palestinians had lived for a thousand years. Imagine being forced from your home, the home of your father and grandfather, the home of generations. Imagine a life of marginalization and harassment. Since 1967, Israelis have demolished 24,145 Palestinian homes, according to a truth-in-reporting group called If Americans Knew. The Palestinians are branded as militants, yet from September 29, 2000, through December 2009, a period that included the Second Intifada, the number of Palestinians killed was six times higher than the number of Israelis killed. As I write this, more than seven thousand Palestinians are prisoners in Israeli jails.

Always look at the other side, Dad wrote. Often you don’t fully understand things unless you put yourself in the other person’s shoes.

In 1938, Mahatma Gandhi wrote about the Holocaust, and the “Arab-Jew question.”

My sympathies are all with the Jews. I have known them intimately in South Africa. Some of them became lifelong companions. Through these friends I came to learn much of their age-long persecution. They have been the untouchables of Christianity. The parallel between their treatment by Christians and the treatment of untouchables by Hindus is very close.... But my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me.... Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct.... I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of nonviolence in resisting what they rightly regard as an unacceptable encroachment upon their country.

The more I’ve learned about the conflict, the more conflicted I’ve become.

I share none of this with the woman in the passport booth, who doesn’t appear curious to learn Gandhi’s worldviews, let alone my own. She hands me a slip of paper to give a gate guard, the next round of security bureaucrat waiting ahead.

Secureaucrats, I dub them. This uniformed secureaucrat gives my passport to the pantsuit secureaucrat, who immediately asks questions—

How long will you be here? What will you be doing? Where will you be volunteering?

I don’t know where we’ll be volunteering. It’s a series of projects, rather than working at, say, a school. We’ll receive the schedule when we arrive in Bethlehem.

“I know at least one day we’ll be at a farm.”

“A farm?” she says skeptically.

“A farm.”

The V-word—“volunteering”—is probably the reason for my special attention, because it means I’ll be interacting with locals, though “volunteering,” to me, seems like a pretty positive word. I try to imagine what other upbeat words might raise concerns—

I’ll be making balloon animals for two weeks in Bethlehem.

Balloon animals?

Balloon animals.

I see no balloons in your bags....

I once read a book about post-9/11 U.S. security efforts, called Fortress America, which discusses the Israeli approach to security. One tactic is for screeners to ask constant questions, some of them innocuous, in the hope that you’ll eventually screw up. It’s like someone throwing a bucket of baseballs: the more balls that come, the less likely you are to catch them. I have nothing to hide—the most dangerous thing in my bag is an electric razor—but I don’t want to get stuck here, so I decide to be perky, big-time perky, figuring if I’m cheerful they’ll assume I’m a dork as opposed to a terrorist. And so I tell her we’ll be working at an olive farm, and I say it in an Up With People golly-gee-willickers kind of voice.

Guess what, boy and girls—we’re going to an olive farm! Hooray!

“What do you do for a living.”

“I’m an editor.”

“You’re a journalist?”

“I’m an editor.”

An editor! Yippee!

She says she needs to scan my luggage. It’ll only take a few minutes. I pick up my backpack from the carousel.

“Do you get paid to come here?” she asks as we walk.

“No—I wish.”

“Your ticket is paid for?”

“I actually pay to volunteer.”

She looks at me funny.

“It’s screwy, I know.”

This is when I notice we’re walking—alone—past dormant carousels in an empty corner of the airport. We stop at a closed door. She slides her ID card through a slot to enter. I smile, wondering if I’m about to be interrogated. Inside, another woman runs my backpack and carry-on bag through a scanner. She walks to a machine and pulls out a long blue plastic spoonlike wand with a square cloth on the end that could easily—or not so easily—be shoved up an orifice. Next she opens my bags, rubbing the insides with the wand, checking, I assume, for explosives, inspecting everything—my sleeping bag, shirts, camera, phone, the backpack itself. The top of my electric razor pops off and whiskers spray on my socks.

“What is this,” she asks, holding up a small purple vinyl bag, the top tied in a knot.

“Toiletries. You know—brush, shampoo, toothpaste.”

She unties it, empties it in a bin, and takes it to another room.

An irritated middle-aged Brit is undergoing the same procedure. His sunglasses are propped on his head; he looks like a jet-setter not used to being detained. A morose dark-skinned couple—they might be from Mumbai, based on a label on one of their packages—sit in plastic chairs. They look like they’ve been here for hours.

The guard returns the bin from the room behind us, and tells me to go to the room.

“Empty your pockets,” she says.

I walk through a metal detector. Three times. Finally the pantsuit secureaucrat hands me my passport and says I can leave. My clothes sit in a mound in my open backpack, and on top are the blue underpants I accidentally received from the hotel laundry in China. That’s right, I’m still wearing them. Seeing them makes me smirk, and that smirk bloats into a giggle, which I suppress, because giggling at the end of a security shakedown would surely reignite the process, and explaining mystery Chinese underpants to humorless secureaucrats would be a chore—

I’m sorry—these underpants belong to another man—I didn’t steal them, though—is it stealing if you wear another man’s underpants without his knowledge?…

I mush everything in my bag, not bothering to fold my clothes. The pantsuit guard thanks me. I nod and leave, and the Mumbai couple continue sitting with long faces, having no such trouble suppressing smiles.

I’m staying at the Christ Church Guesthouse in Jerusalem, less than a five-minute walk from Jaffa Gate and the ancient city wall. I collapsed on the bed in my clothes the night before; now I enjoy a guesthouse breakfast of pitas, olives, tomatoes, and cheese, and dedicate myself to the things one must do while in Jerusalem. Before heading to the Western Wall, I dive into the Old City, descending down tunnel-like David Street, a claustrophobic hub of stone steps and tourist-shop stuff, the tin-awning stalls lined with postcards, plates, menorahs; scarves and patterned dresses high on hooks; “Guns N’ Moses” and “Super Jew” T-shirts.

I pass the Petra Hostel, where Mark Twain once stayed—it’d be easy to miss, a small red sign above the door, the harsh lighting making it seem more like a subway stop—and then a jewelry store and more stalls and more stuff, stuff, stuff. In one shop a man kneels with a black umbrella, until I realize, no, it’s an automatic weapon. I’ll pass multiple men with weapons. One of the volunteers I’ll meet tomorrow, a woman from Spain, says she told an old man in Jerusalem how startling it was to see so many guns, and his surprised response was:

Really?

A shopkeeper sees me and waves his arms. “I have special deal for you.” An African woman, part of a small tourist group, haggles with the shopkeeper next door over luggage.

Sixty!

No more than forty-five!

Fifty!

I wander down side streets, the smells shifting as I walk. Baking bread … ammonia … something citrus (tangerines?) … an unknown spice. Soldiers in green uniforms pass with rifles dangling; a monk strolls by in a hooded robe. Hasidic Jews walk and chat in their customary black suits, white shirts, and long beards.

When I retrace my steps and return to Jaffa Gate, past fruit stands and high tile street signs in Hebrew and English and Arabic, the street feels spacious, the new city extending beyond the open gate. I walk in the sun along the Old City wall through the Armenian quarter, descending a hill to the Western Wall entrance, the golden Dome of the Rock behind it, passing through a security shack with an X-ray machine and metal detector. A sign reminds visitors that the divine presence is here. The shack leads to a plaza, often described as an open-air synagogue, the wall behind it a backdrop to constant photos. A group of children hold balloons above their heads. About fifteen soldiers, college-age, men and women, pose in rows; the women good-looking, earlobes with pierced pearls, brunette ponytails, sunglasses on the tops of their heads; the men with cropped hair, grinning for the photo.

A fence blocks entry to the wall. You can enter if you wear a yarmulke, but I stay back, preferring not to gawk as people pray. So I gawk instead from a distance, admiring the Hasidic Jews as they rock, the cracks of the wall filled with prayer notes. Two boys throw rolled-up balls of paper at each other; kids will be kids, even at one of the world’s holiest sites. Near the fence young men in white shirts and white yarmulkes dance in a circle around a table covered by a wine-colored cloth, the table loaded with books and scrolls. It’s joyous to watch. Even here in the plaza, away from the wall, people pray.

Through an enclosed ramp near the women’s side of the wall I reach the Temple Mount—Muslims call it Haram al-Sharif—again going through security. This is the entrance for non-Muslims. The Temple Mount is quiet, like a park, open and green after the claustrophobia of the Old City’s streets. Boys play soccer on the grass near the back. I wander, then reenter the Old City maze, strolling in shadows past merchants and men smoking a hookah pipe. Feeling lost, I go back the way I came, but a cop with a rifle stops me: this is a Muslim entrance. And so I roam, holding my open map like an idiot tourist, before discreetly latching on to an Asian group that asks shopkeepers for directions. When I make it back to the shops of David Street, the sunglasses racks and T-shirts feel like home.

And then comes an oh shit moment.

Late in the afternoon, I pay sixteen shekels and embark on the Ramparts Walk: a walk along the top of the ancient city wall. Starting from Jaffa Gate, I stroll for about twenty-five minutes, admiring the views of the Dome and the Old City, the water tanks and satellite dishes on clustered roofs. With the sun setting I turn around, eventually exiting through a tall black turnstile at Damascus Gate. I walk down stone steps, push the gate—

And it doesn’t move.

I shake the gate—clang clang clang clang.

Nothing. A small silver, U-shaped bike lock is on the handle. I march back up the steps to the turnstile. The bars turn an inch or two, then lock.

As darkness descends on Jerusalem, I am trapped in a prison of seven steps.

I could be caged here the entire night. That’s my first thought. And it’s already getting cold. My hands are in my pockets; the chill creeps through my sweater. But someone will pass, right? I’m close to Damascus Gate, which is heavily traveled, although as I look through the bars of my unexpected prison, rock-and-cement walls at my sides, all I see is a rising, curving stone street that’s rapidly becoming dark.

In front of me is a two-story apartment building. A small girl walks onto the balcony above to collect flapping laundry. I shout up to her—

“Hey—excuse me—do you know anything about this lock? Is a policeman nearby?”

She rushes back inside with a pile of sheets.

I’ll wait five minutes or so, I decide. See if a cop or soldier walks by, then attempt to climb out. I could use the gate latch as a step—maybe—lift myself up, put my other foot on top of the gate, and climb over. Maybe. The other option is to walk back up the steps and shimmy across the ledge to the gate, though there’s precious little room for shimmying. And even if I could stand on the top of the gate without falling, I’d need to leap ten to fifteen feet to the stone steps below, which seems like the ideal strategy for breaking an ankle. I’m about to attempt it, despite the foolishness of it, when a young black-haired boy, maybe eight years old, runs up to the gate.

“Hey!” he says.

He slips his skinny body through the gate bars, first his head, then his chest, green sweater and black jeans, then his white sneakers. It’s the kind of thing you can do when you’re eight.

His head is about as high as my hip.

“Come,” he says.

He runs up the steps.

“Come.”

The tall turnstile is a like a revolving door, only instead of glass its four sides are black horizontal bars. He twists it to the right, just enough to slip around the bars before they lock, then pushes it to the left, slipping by the next set.

Why didn’t I think of that?

I do the same. It’s not as easy for me, obviously, but I manage to squeeze by. He waves. He wants me to follow him on the wall.

“Come.”

He walks, I follow. The Muslim call to prayer sings from loudspeakers. He stops, points at the view of rooftops and says something in Arabic; what I imagine is a tour guide spiel. We pass a school below. On an asphalt basketball court kids in gym clothes dribble from one baseline to the other. Two coaches seem to be critiquing their dribbling.

“Basketball,” says my eight-year-old rescuer.

“Yes—basketball,” I say.

He waves playfully to the people below, and despite the energetic bounce to his tyke-sized steps, the more we walk along the wall, and the darker it gets, the more I wonder if he’s leading me to a surprise meeting with his five or six much bigger brothers for a game of separate-the-American-from-his-shekels.

“Here,” he says.

I’m guessing we’re at Herod’s Gate. We descend the steps to market stalls selling fruits and breads under fluorescent lights, the women wearing head scarves, carrying plastic bags.

“Money,” he says.

Okay, I’d figured I’d give him something before he even asked, and I’m happy to be free without getting robbed or breaking my tarsal bones. I hand him a few shekels, pat him on the back, say thanks. He scurries off. I walk to a street outside the wall and head back toward Jaffa Gate, following a singing, torch-carrying Hanukkah throng to the Tower of David, directly across from my hotel. As I walk, it occurs to me—

I wonder if the kid is the one who locked the gate.

When Julie decorates our home for Christmas she places a red wooden toy soldier on the narrow mantle above the fireplace. The soldier has a happy Playskool expression, black grenadier hat, swinging arms. Dad brought it home from Denmark. He worked there for a few weeks after I was born, sent by his employer to repair check-processing machinery for banks. I’m embarrassed to say we never discussed what he did there, or what he experienced. Sometimes I wonder: why didn’t we talk about this? You think you know the people you love until they’re gone, and then you realize the questions you never asked, the questions that seem less important when they’re here.

I was six months old when Dad went to Denmark. He returned to find me even fatter than when he left. I was so wide when I was born, and so long, that I ruined my mother’s insides for future siblings. While Dad was gone, Mom took me to Sears for a baby picture. I wore a little red-jacket suit, but the bow tie wouldn’t fit around my too-fat neck.

Denmark was Dad’s only trip to Europe. He never lamented this. I think he was grateful, even a little amazed, that he made it to Europe at all; amazed that a poor farm kid could travel to China, to journey so often to Japan. I’ve had more advantages in life, but I feel grateful as well when I travel. I feel grateful my last morning in Jerusalem as I walk the Via Dolorosa, the route Jesus supposedly followed while carrying the cross; as I enter the dark, loud Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which Christians believe holds Jesus’s tomb; as I continue to misplace myself in the Old City’s cramped, confounding streets. It’s humbling to wander these tight ancient alleys, to know this is the center of faith for so many people, a center of human history.

I eat a simple tomato soup lunch back at the guesthouse, pay my bill, heave my backpack over my shoulders, then head out past tourists, locals, soldiers, and scooters, exiting through Jaffa Gate. The meeting point for volunteers is the Faisal Hostel, just outside the Old City wall, about a twenty-minute walk. When I arrive I’m sent upstairs to a narrow lounge, one wall lined by an orange couch. People mill about, chatting. It’s like a UN summit. I hear conversations in French and Italian, the accents of Irish and Brits and Scots. I talk with a Croatian woman and a woman from Spain. A Finnish girl looks like Dora the Explorer. It’s a mix of ages—an Italian couple appears to be in their sixties—though more weighted toward the college crowd. The common denominator is that all of the Europeans seem to smoke: the room is foggy, like the Ecuadoran cloud forest on late afternoons.

We board buses crowded with late-afternoon commuters, led by Perrine, a lovely Frenchwoman who lives in the West Bank. She’s here because our Palestinian hosts, given that they’re Palestinian, can’t enter Jerusalem. Palestinians can only enter if they have permits, like the Palestinian laborers, almost entirely men, who pack the bus.

We arrive at the Gilo checkpoint to enter Bethlehem. The men scramble from the bus: they must pass through the checkpoint—they must be out of Israel—by a certain time or they lose their permits.

The checkpoint is like a prison. We head through a penned passageway, pass through turnstiles, then walk to booths. A soldier with a machine gun waves me forward. I show him my passport, then walk through an outdoor area to another turnstile. Palestinian laborers pass through here twice a day, every day; through this cold, colorless chamber of echoes and insinuations, of metal bars and black weapons, of stern and staid expressions.

As we exit, we see the separation wall. It’s overwhelming: twenty-five feet high—roughly twice the height of the Berlin Wall—topped here by metal posts and a chain-link fence, built in vertical planks, one next to the other, concrete and gray.

The Israelis call it a security barrier. And from the Israeli perspective, the $2 billion wall is a success, reducing the influx of suicide bombers and protecting settlements. Another unofficial benefit: although the government states on its official security fence website that the wall “does not annex any lands to Israel,” other organizations say the barrier has claimed roughly 9 percent of the West Bank’s land—in addition to land already snagged for settlements. For Palestinians, the “Apartheid Wall” has led to the loss of farmland, divided families and towns, made it difficult to reach jobs, doctors, schools—to do the simplest of activities. The wall may make sense militarily for the Israelis, but there’s an unhealthy paradox here, like a cigarette that both treats and causes cancer. The short-term cure inflicts a long-term curse.

We walk down an empty street, led by a few locals here to greet us, the wall looming to our right, splattered with graffiti, a mix of slogans (“Build bridges, not walls”), occasional humor (“Can I have my ball back?”), and elaborate paintings. One looks like an acid trip—a scene from Yellow Submarine: splashy colors, a wavy rainbow, a giant smiling ladybug and butterfly.

In a red heart with white lettering someone has written, “This wall is a big bullshit.”

The slogans continue:

Palestina Libre
Only Love Will End War
Tear Down This Wall

And then a peace sign of black, green, and red—colors from the Palestinian flag; a charging rhino that seemingly crashes through the wall; a silhouetted man and woman, holding hands, a fighter jet descending upon them.

I can never decide if the paintings beautify the wall or stain it. It doesn’t really matter, because the gray still dominates, a concrete plague along the land.

I stroll with Aarif, an independent photographer who’s carrying a shoulder bag and a camera with a massive lens. He’s young—twenty-six—though I would have sworn he’s my age. He’s one of our escorts, a freelancer who works for a news agency.

“I notice almost all the graffiti on the wall is in English,” I say.

“It’s mostly done by internationals.”

Aarif gives a brief anti-wall summary, which I will hear frequently: five years ago, the International Court of Justice issued an opinion stating that the wall is illegal. The wall has been denounced by organizations ranging from Human Rights Watch to the Red Cross.

“You American?” he asks.

“Yeah—what gave it away?”

“I can tell by the accent.”

“That’s probably not good…”

“No—that’s good.”

“I just mean an American accent isn’t as nice as a British accent.”

“No, really—you sound Hollywood. Like Rambo.”

“You’re not the first person to tell me that.”

We talk about the conflict as we walk down stark streets. Like a lot of young Palestinians, he speaks excellent English.

“The problem is you have extremists on both sides, so there’s always a cycle of retaliation. People grow up in an environment where family members die.”

I stare at the wall. It’s grotesque. One of the most grotesque things I’ve ever seen. “We need a thirty-year truce,” says Aarif, “just to clear people’s minds.”

We reach the refugee camp, dropping our bags inside the Beit Jibrin Cultural Center, our base of operations for the next two weeks. The center is a colorful anomaly on a trash-strewn street—more like an alley, really—the doors a welcoming blue. A mural extends across the building at street level: a man and woman holding hands, children at their sides; the neutral expressions of mannequins modeling clothes. The children wear T-shirts with an image of Handala, a popular comic character. He’s a youth drawn in outline form, seen from behind, hands at his back, his round head with nine protruding rays of hair, like a refugee Charlie Brown. “He is a 10-year-old boy who lives in a refugee camp and observes the injustice of the world around him,” I read in the cultural center, better known as the Handala Center. “He acts as a symbol of the refugee cause and is a testament to its creativity, steadfastness and resilience.” Handala’s creator, Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali, was assassinated by unknown assailants in London in 1987.

Black graffiti runs across the mural; black power lines crisscross the narrow street. Everything is hard here. Asphalt and concrete and iron. No grass. No playgrounds. The few trees are almost invisible, consumed by squat structures. The most prominent tree isn’t even real; it’s painted on the side of a tiny market near the Handala Center, the tree’s trunk and bare branches a pencil-lead gray, wrapped in barbed wire, a ringed sun like a dim dartboard behind it.

Of the fifty-nine Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East, Beit Jibrin is the smallest: roughly two thousand people in a 0.02-square-kilometer neighborhood of three- and four-story apartment buildings, the windows covered by bars. Most families fled here from the Beit Jibrin village about thirteen miles northwest of Hebron, and more than half are descendants of the Azzeh family (which is why the camp is frequently called al-Azzeh). The village was included as part of an Arab state in the UN’s 1947 Partition Plan, but was captured by Israeli forces in the 1948 war. Forced from their homes, the refugees and their children, and their children’s children, have lived here ever since, along with refugees from the 1967 war.

“These camps have been here for sixty years,” says Mahad, one of our hosts, his accent thick as the black beard stubble on his long thin face. “We are guests, but we will return to our villages. It may be sixty more years, it may be one hundred years, but someday we will return.”

Mahad works at the Handala Center. Among his jobs: he records the oral history of first-generation refugees, with second and third generations conducting the interviews. He sits with us on plastic chairs in a harshly lit third-floor room, the walls void of posters or pictures, as we eat soft pitas filled with hummus and falafel. Later we each pay a two-hundred-dollar fee to the International Palestinian Youth League, which is running the volunteer program, then shuffle up echoing stairs to the large fourth-floor room where we’ll soon have nightly meetings. We sit in classroom-style chair-desks as Adli Daana, IPYL’s charismatic secretary general, gives a welcome speech. A handsome man, probably in his late forties, he exudes a politician’s aura, the ability to work a room, striding with an actor’s self-assurance in a leather coat that looks like a racing jacket, a red stripe with white border across the arms and chest.

Daana accuses the Israeli government of apartheid. “We want volunteers to see this, to see the difficult situations that Palestinians face every day. But we also want you to see the real Palestinian people. We love life,” he declares. “We love it.”

IPYL was founded, he says, to combat hopelessness, the lack of direction in the lives of Palestinian youth. Eighty percent of young Palestinians are depressed, according to a United Nations Development Program survey. The numbers are worse in Gaza, where 55 percent of youths described themselves as “extremely depressed.”

“Jesus Christ was a Palestinian,” Daana tells us, this being Christmas. “He was born here, he lived here, he was raised here.” Jesus was also a Jew living in what was then known as Judea, lest we forget. Bethlehem still has a large Christian community—by law the mayor must be Christian—though their numbers have fallen from 92 percent of the population in 1948 to under 50 percent of the town’s 27,000 inhabitants today.

Once Daana is done, Fateen, who’s running our two-week program, passes out a schedule and discusses our work—from building rock walls to cleaning streets—and social activities. He’ll try to get tickets for the Christmas Eve service at the Church of the Nativity, but given the region’s relative calm, various dignitaries and politicians will be attending, so tickets are scarce. We will, however, decorate a Christmas tree, though instead of traditional ornaments we’ll use bomb casings and tear gas canisters and other leftovers from Israeli attacks.

Perhaps alarmed at how Westerners accustomed to boughs of holly might respond to barbed-wire tinsel, Daana rises from his seat and raises his hands in not-to-worry, damage-control reassurance. “It’s symbolic,” he says, chuckling. “Don’t worry. It’s symbolic.”

In another symbolic gesture, we male volunteers will be not be sleeping in the same building as the female volunteers, unmarried slumber being a no-no in a Muslim community. The women will sleep here in the center, packed together in a ground-floor room, while we men will stay in a second-floor flat across the street. We gather our things and trudge in a masculine pack down a narrow alleyway in the dark carrying backpacks and blankets. The blankets are padding for the floor, which is where we’ll sleep. It’s a two-room unfurnished apartment with all the charm of the checkpoint: peeling white paint, the floor a spackled linoleum gray. Outside it’s cold, probably in the low 40s, though it feels colder in the apartment. As far as I can tell, no building in Beit Jibrin has central heating. Our chilly flat has a sole electric space heater, which sits near the bathroom door.

The bathroom has a toilet and a sink. That means we have roughly twenty men and one toilet. Oh—and no shower, though there’s one in the unit next door, which is where Fateen and a few volunteers will sleep, since the flat has quickly filled with bodies and packs. A path extends between sleeping bags to the toilet and a smaller back room, where seven of us will sleep. It’s like a room for interrogations: a single harsh lightbulb dangles on a wire from the ceiling. I snag two of the blankets, spreading them under my sleeping bag. There’s no carpet, so the floor is hard and cold. I crawl into my sleeping bag and zip the bag up around my head so only my face is exposed. The eye mask I brought to block sunlight warms my nose.

I’m sandwiched between Burt, a boomer-age bearded Belgian, and Mike, a college-age Brit. Two Italian men snore. Doug, a terrifically nice guy from Philly who’s here with his wife, is stuck between the stereo snoring. “It was like sleeping on an airport runway,” he says the next morning.

I wake up several times during the night, stiff from the linoleum. I dream about Adam and his son Erik: they wear football jerseys that stretch to their feet, like nightgowns, and they can’t stop laughing. I wake up after that, and the whole idea of being home, and being comfortable, already seems strange.

Visitors to Jerusalem are sometimes inflicted with a condition known as Jerusalem syndrome. Basically, they’re so overwhelmed by the city they believe they’re prophets—like visiting Disney World and convincing yourself you’re Snow White.

I felt the opposite. I felt small in Jerusalem. I’ve felt small on this entire journey. Small compared to the Andes Mountains and China’s masses; small in my skill level and contributions. I feel even smaller in Beit Jibrin.

A friend of mine at work sometimes wanders into my office on Monday mornings, and if it’s too early, and we’re too out of it, we’ll chat for a moment in a bleary, not-caffeinated-enough way, until she’ll finally say, “I have no personality” and wander back to her office. That’s how I feel here. Void of personality. Like my humanity was quashed the moment I walked through the checkpoint, which I’m sure is the intent. Less of a man coming out than going in. Sausage grinder to the soul. And the wall. The life-sucking wall. How do people face this planked, cold, concrete snake every goddamn day?

And yet, I’m sure I’d feel different if I were Israeli.

Always look at the other side, Dad had written.

Of course, it’s hard to see the other side when there’s a twenty-five-foot concrete wall in the way.

After breakfast we walk en masse to Bethlehem. Tomorrow we’ll start our work; today is explore-the-city day. We take a side road past a mosque and an auto repair shop to reach Manger Street, about a twenty-minute walk to Manger Square, passing mom-and-pop restaurants, convenience stores, tourist shops selling olive wood carvings of the manger scene. Mountains rise in the distance, though more prominent are the settlements on a nearby hill, surrounded by security walls, backed by a construction crane. Mahad watches as bulldozers rumble up a twisting dirt road. His eyes are narrow beneath a black stocking cap, a black-and-white Yasser Arafat–style scarf—a keffiyeh—around his neck. He tells us the settlements are like military bases: the Israeli military used them to launch attacks during the Second Intifada.

At Manger Square, next to the Church of the Nativity, a massive Christmas tree stands nearly three stories high, decorated with red bells and clumps of gold grapes and red-and-gold balls. The church resembles an old stone fortress, with thin windows for firing arrows. We crouch through the Door of Humility, a short door designed to keep soldiers from charging into the church on horseback. Inside, the church is sparse but broad, the smell of incense hovering. Light from a high window streams between stone columns. Gold lamps hang from the ceiling, their shiny red tops like a police car’s siren.

Beneath the church is a crypt: here, the faithful believe, is where Jesus was born. Portions of the church date back to the fourth century. It has survived threats from the Crusades to the Second Intifada, when, in 2002, Palestinian resistors, some armed, barricaded themselves inside for thirty-nine days.

The Second Intifada devastated the local economy. With political instability came severe restrictions on travel and trade. West Bank camp residents depend on work in Israel—most of the camp’s residents worked as day laborers before the Intifada, says Mahad—but now they’re severely hampered by checkpoints and the wall. The youth unemployment rate is around 30 to 35 percent, though people here think that figure is low. In Gaza it hovers around 50 percent.

We leave the church through Manger Square and head into an old-town section, ascending tight pedestrian walkways, past jewelry stores and tourist shops and food stands. When we reach the Aida Refugee Camp, Mahad gives a ten-word history of how the refugees lost their homes.

“The soldiers, they come, they say, ‘Get the hell out.’”

Established in 1950, the camp is more than twice the size of Beit Jibrin. Aida’s original residents came from seventeen different villages, and the camp is struggling even more than Beit Jibrin with overcrowding, with 43 percent unemployment, with poor water and sewage networks. During the Second Intifada, twenty-nine housing units were destroyed and a school suffered severe damage from an Israeli military operation.

The separation wall looms over a graveyard just beyond the camp. Everywhere, the wall is tattooed with images. A single eyeball sheds a tear. Multiple black Handalas stand with their hands clasped behind their backs. Why? someone has spray-painted in black.

When the oppressed becomes the oppressor, reads another tag.

More elaborate is a yellow tractor smashing a human heart with a wrecking ball. Nearby is a quote from Gandhi—

VICTORY ATTAINED BY VIOLENCE IS TANTAMOUNT TO A
DEFEAT, FOR IT IS MOMENTARY.

We leave the road and scale a hill made of crumbled cinder blocks and occasional chunks of asphalt. The wind flaps a blue plastic tarp, half buried by rocks. Twisted cables shoot up from the debris; a rotting mattress rises from the rubble like a crooked tombstone, its mesh cover ripped. Doug finds a little girl’s white shoe. Above the toe are Valentine-style hearts.

“Were these buildings?” I ask Fateen.

“These were Palestinian houses,” he says. “They were destroyed for the wall.”

Fateen points at the wall. Towns and villages were cut in half, he says.

“There’s a couple near here—they were supposed to be married. After the wall was built, they can’t see each other because they live on different sides. They go up on top of their buildings and signal each other with hand gestures.”

We walk down a side street. The call to prayer blares above; a boy rides by on his bike and yells “Beep!” Children kick a soccer ball. A plastic grocery bag floats over the wall.

Afternoon traffic picks up as we head back toward Beit Jibrin. We take a different route, approaching the back side of the neighborhood’s gray buildings, walking past a small one-story house. A dog stands on the flat roof of the carport. How he got there isn’t clear; a rickety ladder is the only way up. Two boys and their father pull a chain around his neck, trying to get him down, but the dog is scared; yelping, crying, barking, growling; refusing to move. The father says something in Arabic, and the boys climb down and retrieve a red plaid bag, about the size of Santa’s sack. They struggle to put the dog in the bag. The dog’s howl is piercing, shrill. Eventually, after some fumbling, they succeed, lugging the pooch down as he flails in the bag. When they release him and attach his chain to a pole, the dog is still crying. The father laughs.

As we walk down the alleyway, past bullet marks on the walls, I can still hear the dog’s shrieking, horrible howl.

That evening, we see photos of suffering Palestinians: the widows, the homeless, the poor. The photos are on poster boards, set on chairs in the pale third-floor room of the center where we eat our meals. I look at the photos, then go outside, standing in the cold, in the night, leaning against a graffiti-scrawled alley wall.

I miss Julie. I feel like … I’ve never missed her as much as I miss her tonight. It’s Christmastime, her birthday is coming up—

What the hell was I thinking?

My last evening in Jerusalem, before going to bed, I sat at the desk in my humble room and wrote a note in her birthday card. I sealed the envelope, walked to the bathroom, squirted toothpaste on my toothbrush, and started brushing. And then—why then, in a bathroom, as opposed to any of the holy sites I’d visited during the day—it hit me.

I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to be apart from her. Everywhere I’ve gone—Xi’an, Quito, Jerusalem—I’ve thought … “I’ll have to come back here with Julie.” Like I haven’t really been there if she’s not with me.

I feel alone, sitting on the steps, depressed by the wall and the rubble and Aida and Beit Jibrin, still hearing the terrified snivels of the roof-bound dog, feeling my blank personality like a weight behind my eyes. I send her an e-mail on my phone, any qualms about contacting home left behind in Ecuador.

I’m sorry for not being there. When Dad died, one of the big things I wondered was how we’re meant to spend our limited time. I want that limited time to be spent with you.

I have an opportunity to do things in life that others can’t. I should be satisfied with that. I am satisfied with that. Funny, though, how life works. Once you’ve figured everything out, you’re tested.

I noticed Monique the first night. She’s French, wavy black hair. I watched her smoke a cigarette with an amused smile as Marcen, a friend she traveled here with, performed a semi-mime routine, waving his arms and grinning like a clown.

I was surprised to hear the French accent one evening after a meeting as I wrote in the notepad that doubles as my journal.

“I want to know what you are writing,” she said.

I looked up from my scribbles.

“Me? Oh. You know—just taking notes.”

“But why in this horrible meeting.”

We’d met to discuss a possible Christmas party, the kind of meeting that makes you want to cancel Christmas forever.

“It was so horrible that in some ways it was funny,” I tell her.

“I don’t see anything funny. Just horrible.”

She’s right. It was horrible. Instead of just telling us, “You have three Christmas party options—here they are,” Fateen asked for ideas. Given that we have forty volunteers of varying ages and nine different nationalities, that question invited a range of competing ideas and even some anger. A volunteer named Paul, who looks like an English Ted Kaczynski and just arrived at the camp, said that instead of a party we should distribute food and soup to the homeless.

“It’s hypocritical to go the Church of the Nativity and not serve others. It’s bullshit!” he yelled. “It’s crap!”

Everyone, regardless of nationality, wore the same puzzled look that said—

Who is THIS asshole?

“Our presence here is statement enough,” said Mary, an annoyed young Irishwoman.

Paul then evoked Jesus, as well as Muhammad, in a speech that, I confess, I found incomprehensible because of his accent, though he infuriated the Irish girl even more.

“Why are you dragging religion into this? I’m not here to be religious—I’m here to be a good person!”

Fateen settled folks down: “Guys, guys…”

More Christmas suggestions spewed forth.

We should pass out candy or chocolate.

No, no—tools. That’ll make a bigger difference in the future.

The center is hosting us; we should buy something for the center.

“Speak slow,” said one of the Italians.

We should work for the elderly.

This is about building relationships—maybe we should play soccer.

We should clean houses or repair them.

“Speak slow,” said one of the French.

We should have a party for the children.

It’s a refugee camp—you can’t have a party for the children.

Why can’t we have a party for the children?

Because it’s a refugee camp.

A middle-aged Scottish woman and a bossy middle-aged New York woman, who clearly don’t like one another, began to argue. Nothing got resolved.

“Horrible,” says Monique again.

“Okay, horrible.”

“So you will show me what you write?”

“Nah—it’s not that interesting.”

She smiles, a smile that seems to say there’s more to you than you’re letting on, and heads down the steps with some of the French contingency for an outside smoke.

I stay in the room and talk with Doug and his wife, Kayla, the couple from Philly. They’re in their late twenties, and traveled to Paris, and then Jordan, before arriving here. Doug broke a bone in his lower right leg playing Ultimate Frisbee days before they left home; he’s wearing a black medical boot. Kayla plays as well. They’re fit, and thin, so I was surprised to learn that Doug played the tuba in the Drexel University pep band. He doesn’t fit the tuba stereotype.

“You should have brought your tuba here,” I say. “Some gentle tuba music might have helped soothe the anger in that meeting.”

Kayla decides I’m an undercover CIA agent, since I’m here alone and frequently writing in my pad.

“I bet you’re taking notes on all of us,” she says.

“It’s true—you should see some of the shit I’ve been writing about you.”

“I knew it! You were airdropped into the country.”

“Yes—totally top secret. To avoid detection I didn’t use a parachute.”

“And your bag is packed with weapons.”

I show her my hands. “These are the only weapons I need.”

“You’re a dangerous man, Kenny.”

We had discussed bowling one night—for the life of me I don’t know why, other than there’s not a lot to do in a Palestinian refugee camp—and I had made the mistake of saying I was in a bowling league as a kid, and had my own monogrammed blue ball that said “Kenny” in script.

Kayla finds this very amusing.

There’s one other American I chat with from time to time during my two weeks. Benjamin is twenty-eight, looks younger (though acts older), of Mexican descent, now living in New York and going to art school while working at Starbucks. He seems shy, but he’s simply soft-spoken, thoughtful. The night I e-mailed Julie, when I was in such a deep funk, I went outside, down to the dark street, hoping the chill would clear my head, waiting for dinner: there was a gas leak, so dinner was cooked on Coleman-style stoves. The Italians made pasta. We didn’t eat until after 10 p.m. Benjamin stood near the door, mainly to escape the cigarette smoke. We talked about our time here so far. We were both shocked by the size of the wall, both aware that we’re hearing one side of the story. I ask him what he thought of the Church of the Nativity.

“I don’t like to take pictures in places like the church,” he says. “Too often people miss why they’re there. I’ve seen people at art museums take pictures of paintings without actually looking at them.”

“Are you a churchgoing guy?”

“Well, I believe in God, but I don’t go to church every Sunday.”

“I guess I believe in God. I mean, I could see that God or something so unfathomable that we think it’s God created the universe or the Big Bang. But I don’t believe in a God who knows whether I brushed my teeth at night. And I have a problem with biblical literalism. You know—insisting that the world was created in seven days.”

“You ever read Kierkegaard?”

“No,” I say, admitting my ignorance of the father of existentialism.

“Kierkegaard says absurdity is essential for religion because to have faith you need to suspend reason.”

“I’m interested in philosophy,” I say, “I’m just never sure where to start.”

“It all starts with Plato,” says Benjamin. “Everything since is just an argument with Plato or just restating what Plato said. The issues never change. Modern times, same issues.”

On our first day of work I wake up early and head to the Handala Center for breakfast. As I leave the flat, I carefully open the door, making sure I don’t whack an Italian guy’s face as he sleeps on the floor. Others rise from sleeping bags, stretching, scratching, putting on clothes.

I walk down the split-level steps past graffiti-sprayed walls. Up high is a black-and-white painting of a bearded martyr, a keffiyeh around his neck; a snarling, sharp-fanged lion behind him. Painted below are two Palestinian flags, rows of barbed wire on each side. Four camp residents were killed during the Second Intifada, says Mahad. Many more were injured and arrested. Fateen says every family has a father or son who’s been shot, arrested, or martyred. People here seem resigned to it.

After eating what will be our standard morning chow—pitas, jam, tomatoes, cheese, bologna, tea—we ride in buses to nearby Nahalin to build rock walls at a mountain olive farm. Nahalin is not only separated from Bethlehem by a barrier, but it’s also surrounded by four Israeli settlements, making access difficult. The settlements have pushed the villagers from their farmland, a common practice, we’re told. An estimated 90 percent of men age eighteen to thirty-five in Nahalin are unemployed.

The bus chugs to a stop. We exit and walk up a long, steep road of dirt and red rocks, past olive trees and occasional piles of goat dung, the sky a bright blue, the clouds in compact puffs like tanks. The landscape is scrubby and brittle. Two yellow flowers poke from a wall, their stems twisted. On a hill to our left sits a red-roof, white-walled settlement. The settlements are expanding: the clangs of construction crews echo across the valley. In Nahalin, and throughout the West Bank, boxed-in Palestinians expand by building up, since there’s no room to build out. Son gets married? Build a second floor. Another son gets hitched? Build a third floor.

The wind blows as we climb, tossing everyone’s hair. The stone walls are for the olive trees, to help control spring rains and erosion, though given the stark rocky landscape, I’m amazed that it ever rains, or that anything can grow.

Using nearby walls as a model—they stand anywhere from knee to waist high—we stack rocks, making sure one level is solid before stacking on more. Most of the rocks are the size of bowling balls, some smaller, some larger, some flatter; others are boulders that require five of us to move: we strain to flip them from one side to another. A farmer in a New York Yankees stocking cap gives a thumbs-up when we’re done.

An eighty-two-year-old man, skinny but strong, swings a sledgehammer with precision authority, slowly cracking one of the boulders into slabs. Everything about him is wiry and taut: his sledgehammer-like frame; the long, stringy white beard; his ears poking out from a white headdress, which drapes over his shoulder to his orange wool sweater. He is not so much old as ancient; his skin as weathered and parched as the landscape. A fierceness burns in his eyes. He could kick my ass. Without question.

The old man argues with a pudgy Palestinian farmer. They shout over each other in Arabic, pointing, gesticulating.

“The old man thinks the road is too narrow now for cars,” says Habib, part of the Handala team. The argument continues as I sit with Habib on one of the newly completed walls. We eat lunch: pitas filled with bologna and pickles. He’s nice kid, eighteen, upbeat, smart; disheveled hair and glasses on a Ringo Starr nose. A big reader. He taught himself Russian—he visited a friend there—and also speaks English, Arabic, and a little French.

“So I’ve been wondering if most Palestinians dislike Americans,” I say to him. “Well, not so much wondering. I assume you don’t like Americans. It’s more like, how bad is it.”

Since World War II, no country has received more U.S. aid than Israel. In 2009, the United States gave Israel an estimated $7 million a day. We help bankroll everything from the military that harasses Palestinians to the separation wall that screws up their lives. So I’m not expecting him to sing “God Bless America” or the Mickey Mouse Club theme.

Habib chews his bologna sandwich. “It’s not dislike,” he says. “Most people distinguish between the American people and American policy—the American government.”

I ask him where he lives. Hebron, he says.

“Do you go through a checkpoint to get to Bethlehem?”

“Yes, but I don’t always have to stop.”

“What about Jerusalem?”

“I can’t go there.”

“Why—because you need to fill out certain paperwork?”

“Because I’m Palestinian.”

“So you can’t go at all?”

“I can only go if there’s a reason—like family or a job. Sometimes if it’s a religious holiday.”

We finish our lunches, looking out over the brush and the craggy land. Two months from now, on February 25, Habib will be blasted with tear gas. In Hebron and throughout the West Bank, that date is known as Open Shuhada Street Day. The street was closed by the Israelis in 1994 to protect settlers in the city. The closure wounded the local economy; Palestinians struggle to navigate the city. For some a ten-minute walk is now an hour-long commute.

As Palestinians protest in Hebron on February 25—along with some Israelis and international activists—soldiers will fling tear gas canisters into the crowd. Habib will later write to Kayla about the incident:

I was only a few seconds away from being arrested, and am grateful to God I wasn’t shot. I did feel myself like I was swimming in a sea of tear gas, unconscious almost, tired and very dizzy by the gas I just inhaled, just minutes before the soldiers tried to arrest me. I had an onion trying to lessen the effect of gas bombs on my face, eyes and respiratory system. They threw a sound grenade at me, and in my shock I threw the onion at the soldiers, unintentionally. That’s what Newton says in his third law; maybe Israelis should arrest him for discovering that theory. I went away, as far away and as fast as I could, they did want to arrest me, and all I could do is just walk away!

To be honest I was very scared that day. It was the fear of getting shot or arrested, or both, either one is not helpful or good for me. I am a young Palestinian, who loves football, and I also love my country, but I don’t know what my feelings become after such incidents. My feelings toward my country become those of a raged, bitter and scared young man. The feeling that I am constantly in danger, the fear that something bad might happen to me all the time. And it does almost happen every day.

Newton’s third law, in case you’ve forgotten your old science lessons, is that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. But in the messier world of humans, the laws of physics are twisted. For every action the reaction is often twice as severe.

In one of Dad’s late-night writing moments, he took stock of his strengths:

I am:	I want:
-Dreamer	-to be the best
-Thinker	-to be loved
-Sensitive	-people to remember me
-Different	-to contribute
-Believer in God	-to make people happy
-Happy	-my family to be happy, healthy
-Giver, not taker	-to make a difference

I’m not sure why he did this. Maybe one of the many Stephen Covey–style books he read suggested it. But it’s typical for him. He wanted to be successful. And yet the rest of the list is about happiness, helping others, giving. For all the success he attained, his legacy was never that the company shipped x amount of units or that he improved efficiency or boosted profits. His legacy was the people he supported, the people he inspired. And I think he knew that.

Dad was always close to his cousin Abigail. She was ten when he was born; his family visited her family on their farm most weekends. “Your father was totally at ease with who he was, and I believe he was like that from birth,” Abigail told me at a family reunion after Dad died. “I often rocked him to sleep on those weekends. I would sing hymns to him and he never fought sleep like so many babies do.” She smiled thinking back. “He was always just so comfortable with who he was.”

I always thought I was, too. I thought I knew myself. Now—here—I’m less sure.

I never asked Julie how she felt about me vanishing over Christmas and her birthday. That’s how we are. Part of me thinks it’s not a big deal for her. Part of me thinks, “How can it not be a big deal?” Mom always says, “You two never talk.” She’s right, but I like that about our relationship. We’re comfortable with each other. Sometimes we don’t need to talk. We may be a world apart, but I know she loves me. And she knows, I hope, how much I love her. But I would only realize much later, when I was done traveling, when I fully understood how deeply my introversion had hurt her, that there’s a fundamental difference between knowing you love someone and showing that love. I am guilty of knowing and not showing.

Doug and Kayla are spending the night at the Paradise Hotel on Manger Street to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Doug made the arrangements with Fateen, so it was a total surprise for Kayla. For those of us not spending the night in a hotel with a real bed and a warm curvy human underneath the sheets, Fateen asks us to clean the center.

I mop the floor in the room where we eat our meals. The activity at least warms me up. Before mopping I was shivering, despite a windbreaker and sweater and long-sleeve shirt, despite two pairs of socks. I poured a cup of steaming water, which is meant for tea, just to warm my hands. It always feels colder inside the Handala Center than it does outside on the street, which is where I find Benjamin after we clean. He’s going with Carina, a Spanish volunteer, to talk with a local family for the evening. Several small groups are doing this throughout Beit Jibrin, and I’m thrilled when Benjamin invites me to tag along. We’re escorted by Tariq, a local guy who helps out at the center; he’s one of the family’s neighbors. The few streetlights are dim, the alley graffiti barely visible in the night. The family lives in a ground-floor apartment. Aisha, the mother, smiles, nodding, welcoming us. She leads us to a cramped family room, mauve-and-white-covered love seats against three of the four walls, a table in the middle, matching chair on the other side. A setup conducive to group therapy. A faded painting of a mountain and stream hangs on the wall, like something from a hotel. On a small TV is a soccer game. Palestinian men seem rabid about Spanish league soccer, particularly Barcelona and Real Madrid.

Aisha points at us to sit—her English is limited—then scoots down the hall. On a corner table is a small Christmas tree, maybe three feet high. Later, when Carina comments on the tree, Aisha turns on white lights, which fade on and off. I spot reindeer dishes on a shelf with knickknacks and pottery. I’ve heard that many Muslim families in Bethlehem, like this one, celebrate Christmas. They seem proud of Jesus: he’s the local boy who made good.

Aisha’s husband joins us. He’s not a big man—thin, at least six inches shorter than me, graying hair—but his handshake is as firm as his presence. Aisha brings a pot of Arab coffee on a tray. It’s strong, served in small cups. I haven’t developed a taste for it yet.

“What do you think of al-Azzeh?” the husband asks.

“The people are friendly. They have been very nice to us,” I say, keeping my English clear. “Very warm.”

That’s not what he means. I can tell from his serious eyes. What he means is—

Do you think al-Azzeh is a shithole.

And I’m thinking…

It’s a ghetto.

A not-wholly-unpleasant ghetto—I feel safe walking the streets—but the buildings seem less like homes than factories, bleak and uninspired. Functional.

“Were you scared to come?” he says.

We weren’t, we all say, but our families were. One of the speakers at Handala had talked about the perception of Palestinians as villains, particularly in the United States, pointing to movies like True Lies and The Siege. “Palestinians are not simply Arabs,” he had said. “We’re the worst Arabs.”

My sense is that most Palestinians are baffled by the idea that they’re considered the terrorists. I explain to the husband something I’d noticed before I left home.

“If I told people I was coming to Bethlehem, they’d picture baby Jesus. They’d say, ‘Ohhh, that’s so nice.’ But if I said I was coming to Palestine, or the West Bank, they’d look concerned. A friend of mine asked me if I was bringing a bulletproof vest.”

He asks how Americans view Muslims. I tell him it depends on where you go. You’ll find plenty of Muslims in big cities, but less so in rural areas. I’m reminded of Costa Rica; of the rural Minnesota teenager who asked Jonathan if there were cows in England. She had never met a Jewish person until meeting Hannah, and had never met a Muslim.

“Who did you vote for?” he asks me and Benjamin, referring to the presidential election.

“I didn’t vote for either candidate,” says Benjamin.

The husband nods in approval. “Obama is no different than Bush. He does not care about my people. U.S. soldiers kill people every day somewhere in the world.”

“What about Arab leaders?” says Benjamin.

“Our leaders do nothing. Abbas does nothing. We are weak. Arab nations are weak.”

We pick up a few details about his life. He works for a Palestinian telecommunications company. He was in jail for four years. Benjamin asks why.

“Because I want freedom,” he says. “We live here. We are born here. I want to be free. My people need freedom. My people need a state. We are poor—look here,” he says, raising his arms to the tight room where we’re sitting. “We have no country. My country is a five-minute drive because of the settlements. My country is stone fence to stone fence.”

Aisha has left and returned with a second tray, this one with mint tea and a plate of wafer cookies. I ask her husband if he thinks attitudes will change between Israelis and Palestinians. I tell him about racial attitudes in the American South, that we still have racism, but things have improved radically in the last fifty years.

He seems skeptical. He could accept the 1967 borders, he says, but the Israelis take more land. From his old village, he tells us, he can see the settlements.

“When I was a boy we lived near Jews,” he says. I hear nostalgic variations of this on multiple occasions while I’m here:

Our families helped their families, and their families helped our families.

My grandmother spoke Yiddish because she watched Jewish children in the neighborhood.

This is not an ancient conflict, people like Mahad and Fateen maintain. It dates back to 1948. And the problem, they say, is not Judaism, but Zionism.

The father smokes one of Tariq’s cigarettes. “I respect the Jewish religion,” he says. “I do not respect the Israeli government. What the Nazis did to the Jews was terrible. But what the Jews do to Palestinians is the same as the Nazis.”

He is opposed to Osama bin Laden, he tells us, because bin Laden violates Islamic law by killing innocents. Tariq notes, probably to get a rise out of Carina, that Islam allows multiple wives, but you must treat each wife equally.

“Multiple wives seem like a lot of work,” I say. “I can barely manage one.”

The husband agrees. It is too difficult. “Maybe okay if you have half a wife,” he says.

Aisha has left and come back again, this time with a bowl of oranges. She is pretty, though I’m sure she was prettier once. Her black sweatshirt makes her look frumpy, but in a pleasing way. Her dark hair is uncovered. Carina asks her if she works outside of the home. Tariq translates. She’s a housewife.

“Why are you asking her questions?” the husband asks.

“I want to talk with her because she is so quiet. She hasn’t been here the whole time.”

“She is quiet because she does not speak much English.”

As Carina will note on the walk back to Handala, the husband is left-wing politically—he tells us he’s a socialist, and hails Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez as a freedom fighter (Chávez broke ties with Israel after the Gaza conflict, hence his popularity here)—yet he is clearly conservative when it comes to the roles of women.

Carina asks Aisha what she thinks of Palestinian men. She thinks a moment while peeling oranges.

“Rubbish,” she says—and she throws her head back and laughs. We all laugh. We talk and talk—the husband sits with his thin legs crossed, smoking another cigarette—discussing everything from the Iraq War to housework, realizing eventually that it’s after midnight.

“You are always welcome in my home,” the husband tells us. “I open my home to you.” It turns out Aisha has a relative who studied in New Jersey.

“I have a friend in New Jersey,” I tell them of Hannah.

They escort us to the door and we return to the stark street, trash blowing as we walk, plastic bottles skipping and rolling against our feet. A night like this, I decide, is why dialogue is so important. Because a Palestinian may have softened his views of the United States. And an American gained insight on what it’s like to be a Palestinian. That has to be worth something.

Burt the bearded Belgian is in striped cotton briefs, his butt about four feet from my face. He’s bending over, skinny pale legs extending from his underpants, looking for socks. Burt is a sweet, gentle man, though seeing his striped-cotton middle-aged behind is not my preferred way to start the day, and on this morning it’s literally the first thing I see. Granted, we’re in such close quarters that Burt has surely endured an equally unpleasant view of my ass in not nearly as festive briefs. There’s no space between Burt’s sleeping bag and my sleeping bag and Mike’s sleeping bag and Emmanuel’s sleeping bag, which is stretched behind our heads. I lie closer to them than I do to Julie in our bed back home.

I look away from Burt’s ass, staring up at paint peeling from the ceiling in strands, the single lightbulb hanging. Mike, the college-age Brit, sits up bleary, resting on his elbows.

“It’s starting to smell like eighteen guys in here,” he says in a croaking morning voice.

I unzip my bag, get up, put on jeans, and step over Mike to slide open the window, so we can air out the room with the fresh smell of … goats. The family living behind our building has a few farm animals.

“A few more days and the goats will be complaining about us,” I tell Mike.

Doug has smartly moved to the flat next door, deciding he couldn’t take two weeks trapped between the Italian snorers, though space is equally tight in his new digs. He’s sleeping in the only spot he could find: partially under Habib’s bed, his legs below, chest and head sticking out the other side.

“Funny how that’s a step up from where I was,” he says.

Bruno is such an impressive snorer—it starts within minutes of closing his book each night—that a few guys from the bigger room come in at night to listen and observe.

“It’s like having a vibrating bed,” I tell them.

At breakfast I ask Doug and Kayla about their night at the Paradise Hotel. Turns out the hotel’s owner, Joshua, lived just a few blocks from them in Philly. He joined Doug and Kayla for a drink. “The biggest mistake I ever made was coming back to Bethlehem,” he told them over a cup of Nescafé. Bethlehem is his hometown; he moved back because the West Bank, at the time, seemed peaceful. But then came the Second Intifada. And the wall. And the checkpoints.

“They make life hard,” he said. Last winter, the hotel was booked from before Christmas to after New Year’s. Then the fighting began in Gaza. Joshua lost nearly one hundred thousand dollars in canceled bookings. This year business has improved due to the relative stability, but he plans to sell the hotel in two years, when his son is ready for college, and move back to the States.

“He doesn’t think things will get better, even though he’s relatively privileged,” Kayla writes in a blog for family and friends. “He told Doug, ‘Don’t tell your coworkers about the boycott. Don’t bring up the Palestinians—nothing good comes from it.’ He was so adamant about it.”

We eat breakfast, then walk to the morning’s volunteer gig: a two-story building near the Aida camp that’s being converted into a youth and cultural center. Palestinians are building such centers to preserve their traditions, from music to architecture to folklore. A brown wood-grained archway shaped vaguely like a keyhole stretches from one side of the street to the other. Sitting on top is a giant black key—“the largest key in the world,” says Mahad. The key, he tells us, is a powerful symbol to Palestinians: when families were forced from their homes, they had minutes to grab essentials—money, photos, and, in many cases, their keys, since they expected to be back soon. Those keys are now family heirlooms.

The building has been gutted. In front is a concrete barrier; on it someone has spray-painted their desire for freedom. We go to the second floor. The steps are gone; it’s more like a split-level concrete ramp with two-by-fours for traction. Wind whips through large square holes where windows will eventually be. Cinder blocks are stacked in mounds. A few of the Irishmen pound the jagged remains of a concrete wall with jackhammers, debris ricocheting off of walls (someone says they’re using the wrong type of bit). The rest of us form a bucket line to dispose of rubbish that piled up during the gutting process: chunks of cinder blocks, tile, swept-up gray dust, pieces of wood, and wires, which we dump from a balcony into the bed of an orange dump truck below.

The two young Italian guys, who seem like lifelong friends but met right before coming here, sing “Bella Ciao”—Goodbye, Beautiful—an antifascist resistance tune from World War II. It’s a catchy little ditty, and everyone sings as we work—

O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella CIAO, CIAO, CIAO!

Dust rises from the crash of debris in the truck bed below. My coat is covered, my sunglasses caked; I can feel the dust in my eyes. The truck gets full, rumbles off to dump the trash, then returns. The process starts again.

After a few hours, we walk back to Beit Jibrin for lunch, passing one of the more striking graffiti paintings in Bethlehem: it’s a soldier, viewed from behind—hands against the wall—frisked by a little girl in a dress. On another wall is a dove with an olive branch in its mouth, a gun-scope target on its breast. I never see billboard-type ads for products—for cereal or soda or cell phone service. The most-advertised products are cynicism, frustration, harassment.

We take a shortcut between apartment buildings, snaking through trench-like alleys. “Bullet holes,” says Habib nonchalantly, pointing at some pipes.

Later he notes some red and green graffiti in Arabic.

“It means ‘freedom.’ I know who did this—he’s in prison.”

We enjoy a takeout lunch at the Handala Center: roasted chicken with yellow rice and nuts in Styrofoam boxes. As we eat, Mike and Peter, another Brit, say that a week before we arrived, Fateen was stabbed in the leg during a soccer game. Fateen fouled a guy—hard—and apologized. The guy was pissed. “So Fateen tells him, ‘If you won’t accept my apology, and you don’t want to get hurt, don’t play.’ And the guy pulled a knife and stabbed him,” says Mike.

“I wonder if the guy got a yellow card,” Peter quips.

“It was a red card,” says Mike. “It was covered in blood.”

I’m a little bloody myself. I cut my fingers today while dumping cinder blocks and other debris into the Dumpster. There’s blood on my jeans, my coat, my canvas bag.

“I’m amazed no one’s been hurt yet,” says Peter.

“Think of that construction site,” says Mike. “No masks for the dust, no hard hats, volunteers using jackhammers, we’re dropping debris while people are working underneath…”

“Apparently a few locals and UN people complained about the dust.”

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency operates a school next to the building we were cleaning out, and has offices there as well. Each camp is served by a UNRWA office: the UNRWA handles services a municipality might normally provide, from trash to water to clinics.

“Yesterday at the olive farm I kept getting hit by rocks—this eighty-two-year-old guy was pounding boulders with a sledgehammer and stuff was flying,” I say. “Maybe it’s part of the fatalism here. Why wear safety goggles given all the other shit that’s going on?”

“That’s probably why they all smoke,” says Mike.

Mike and Peter also visited a family last night. They asked the family what they do for fun on weekends.

“They said, ‘We don’t do anything for fun,’” says Peter. “They just live day to day and see what happens. They don’t plan ahead.”

When we were working, Mike and Peter and I manned the end of the bucket lines, like a three-man paddle wheel: get the bucket, dump it, pass the empty bucket back up the row, get in line, receive the next bucket. It was quite efficient. At one point I accidentally dropped one of our buckets into the truck bed. Fateen was down below, and climbed into the bed to retrieve it. He flung it back up; I caught it, thanked him, and tossed it again to the folks in line.

“I want to come up,” he said.

As in, I’m going to climb up the front of the building.

He can’t be serious, I thought. There’s no way he’ll reach this balcony. It’s too high. Why is he even attempting this?

He stepped up onto the roof of the truck’s cab.

“Give me your hand,” he said, raising his.

“For real?”

“We can do it.”

I reached down. Fortunately I have long arms. We gripped hands. He jumped as I pulled him up, throwing his foot against the balcony’s corner. I put my left hand under his left arm, heaving. He crawled over on his stomach, rolled himself onto the balcony.

It seemed unnecessarily reckless. But maybe that’s what happens when you feel powerless. When there’s little hope, there’s little fear.

We’ve started venturing out at night for drinks, a welcome development since there’s little to do in the camp. Fateen’s only request is that we not return drunk, since we’re staying in a Muslim neighborhood. He takes a large group of us to a restaurant on Manger Street, about a twenty-minute walk from the camp. It’s Christian-owned, so there’s alcohol. A young man croons into a microphone, white shirt with black tie and black jeans, accompanied by a piano player, singing Lionel Richie with an Arab accent, then launching into “I Will Survive” and “Hotel California.”

“Oh—I love this song,” says Fateen. We settle in at a long table and he sings along. The TV beams a slick, soulless, shoot-’em-up action flick starring John Travolta. After that, it’s the campy testosterone of WWE Raw.

“He’s my favorite,” says Fateen, pointing up at the tall, glowering Undertaker, who straddles another half-nude man in tights.

Is this really the Middle East?

We order beers. Shakila, an American volunteer from New York City, scans the hookah menu, then orders a pipe with tutti-frutti-flavored tobacco. She was sick her first day due to a raw goat dish she ate while visiting relatives in Lebanon, but she seems fine now as we discuss the Christmas party. A day or so ago, Fateen suggested a party at a resort—“I have a deal for you: one hundred shekels; dinner, Turkish bath, DJ, one free soft drink …”—but some folks didn’t want to pay that much, and others felt uncomfortable partying at a resort without our new Palestinian friends, so someone again suggested we host an event in the center, and Fateen again said, “This is a refugee camp—you can’t do it here,” and people got bored and tried to leave but Fateen made them sit back down, and he said a nonprofit is hosting a party on the twenty-third though it won’t have a Turkish bath or one free soft drink, and some people said they want to go to Manger Square for Christmas Eve and someone said it’s selfish to have fun when people are suffering—

It went on for forty-five minutes.

I looked up during the meeting and saw Monique watching me across the room as I took notes. I held up my pad and she smiled.

“When Fateen says ‘This is a refugee camp,’ what he means is that they’re Muslim,” says Shakila. “They don’t celebrate Christmas like us. And they kind of resent Palestinian Christians. Christians are discriminated against, too, but they have an easier time getting paperwork or permits approved.”

The hookah arrives. She inhales, water bubbling in the pipe’s belly, hot coals burning in foil on top. The Italians have some, I have some—hey, when in Bethlehem, right?—and I must say, the tutti-frutti is tasty. Doug and Kayla enjoy the pipe so much they eventually buy one to take home.

Our more frequent hangout is a restaurant called the Bonjour Café. It’s a shorter walk, up a long hill not far from the camp, past Bethlehem University. Nice place. Modern blue lights over the bar, a menu with pizzas and sandwiches. I’m talking sports one night with Kayla and Doug, and I ask them about Michael Vick, given that they’re both from Philly. The Philadelphia Eagles signed Vick, I explain to Monique, who’s part of the large party, after he’d served time in prison for participating in a dog-fighting ring. I’m a dog lover, so I’m not exactly a huge Michael Vick fan. Kayla rants about how people get sooo upset about dogs yet they don’t care about what’s happening here in Palestine and some baby got murdered in Philly and people didn’t get nearly as outraged about that as they did about Michael Vick and just because you have four legs and eat fuckin’ Milk-Bones doesn’t mean you’re more deserving of sympathy than a murdered baby.

“Vick paid his debt to society and he should get a second chance to pursue his chosen profession,” she says.

Pause.

“I mean, they’re fuckin’ dogs.”

“Wow,” I say. “There’s something you don’t hear often. ‘You know what really pisses me off? Puppies.’”

She laughs. “One of my coworkers said, ‘You’re a cold SOB.’”

I excuse myself to use the restroom. It’s a tiled wonderland. A working toilet! That blue cleaning stuff when you flush! A working sink with soap! Hand towels! And it’s clean!

Back at the flat, we’re experiencing the problems you might expect from eighteen guys sharing one tiny toilet and sink. Problems such as, you know … getting inside to use it. Want to brush your teeth? Someone’s inside. Something more urgent? Someone’s inside. The best strategy is to wait outside the door. Emmanuel, the tall young Belgian, knocks on the bathroom door one day, asking in heavily accented English how long the current occupant will be conducting business.

“You take beeg sheet?” he says.

The toilet leaks, so the floor is a constant puddle. Add in eighteen sets of dirty shoes, and it’s a muddy puddle, with muddy footprints leading out. Bruno the Italian snorer, bless him, is particularly dedicated to mopping it up.

Mike noted the irony that one of the Christmas party ideas was to repair old widows’ homes. “We can’t fix our own fucking toilet,” he said. “We’re shit workers. If anyone wants to fix some plumbing, I’ve got a great project right here.”

Though you wouldn’t know it from the leak, water is a precious commodity: Israeli authorities, we’re told, give priority to the settlements when it comes to water resources. During the summer Bethlehem had water one day a week (and not surprisingly, there’s no wastewater treatment, so like Ciudad Quesada and even Xi’an, this is a don’t-flush-the-TP zone).

We’re experiencing these aqua issues firsthand: the men’s flat no longer has running water. As with many local buildings, our flat gets its water from rooftop tanks, and the tanks, at the moment, are empty. The Handala Center gets its water from the reservoir, so we use that as a fill-up spot, bringing over buckets and bottles and lugging them back to the flat. I bought bottled water at the small market down the street, mainly for the bottle, so I could fill it to wash my hair in the sink (I also bought a sponge for sponge baths) or to refill toilet tanks.

Conor, a big, dreadlocked Irishman, suggested a toilet-water conservation policy:

“If it’s yellow keep it mellow, if it’s brown send it down.”

So the handsome bathroom at the Bonjour Café is a plumbing paradise.

“Oh my God,” I tell Kayla and Doug when I come back out. “The bathroom is amazing. You’ve got to go use it.”

“Jeez—you’re like a schoolgirl,” says Kayla.

“Go in there. I wish I’d brought my shampoo.”

We’re soon joined by Akbar, a friend of Mahad’s. They greet with Euro-style kisses on the cheeks. Akbar was studying in Baghdad to earn an MBA, but came home after the U.S. invasion. Despite their day-to-day challenges, Palestinians are among the best-educated people in the Middle East. Akbar works as a special-needs teacher, which he enjoys, though he still hopes to earn his business degree, this time in India. Love, however, may derail his schooling: he and his girlfriend, an Iraqi refugee, are discussing marriage. This leads to a lively cross-cultural discussion about families and marriage and culture. Palestinian society is becoming less conservative, Akbar says: “You no longer hold up a bloody sheet for your family on your wedding night to show your wife is a virgin.”

Monique, a regular on these postdinner outings, tells us about her ninety-five-year-old grandmother, who lives alone, an odd concept for the Palestinians. Earlier, when I was writing, she had asked me again, “When may I read your notes?” I smiled, and I made excuses, and I closed the pad so she couldn’t see.

We’re participating in a weekly Friday protest in the village of al-Masara, at a roadblock manned by Israeli soldiers. I’m not sure how I feel about this. I had thought this trip would be more about volunteering than politics, although the title of the program—“Stop Occupying Christmas”—should have been clear.

On my previous trips, I volunteered through one organization, which took care of everything: placement, food, place to stay. This time, the organization I signed up with—Volunteers for Peace—is one of several orgs funneling folks to IPYL, which is running the work-camp, as it’s called here. Multiple organizations has led to confusion about the work we’ll do. Two of the Scottish women thought they’d be working with children. The older of the pair looks to be in her fifties and recently had back surgery, so she struggled to walk up the mountain when we built rock walls (and certainly could not lift rocks). Her accent is so thick that several of us translate for the Palestinians.

I ask Perrine if the work we’re doing is helpful, because so far it seems more symbolic than substantial. “Yes, it is helpful, but the work is not as important as working together,” she says, which sums things up fairly well: this is less about volunteer labor and more about exposing us to the Palestinian experience, which the Palestinians appreciate.

The al-Masara protest, Fateen tells us, covers a variety of grievances. It’s a demonstration against two nearby settlements, and the construction of a third. It’s also a demonstration against the Israeli government not only for building the wall, but for confiscating Palestinian land and water to do it.

This is a nonviolent protest, says Fateen. He and Mahad frequently compare Palestine to South Africa (a comparison many Israelis say is grossly inaccurate). Fateen scheduled a lecturer one night to discuss the campaign to boycott Israel, which includes not simply a commercial boycott—encouraging people and organizations to stop buying Israeli products and investing in Israeli companies—but academic and cultural boycotts: asking musicians, for example, to not perform in Tel Aviv.

“The international community enables Israel. It pays for Israel,” said the lecturer. “That’s why we believe the boycott is necessary. And it is not just about economic impact, but showing Palestinian youth that they can have a role.”

Fateen asks if anyone has questions about the protest.

“Will Israeli soldiers be there?” Bruno’s wife asks.

“They will be there,” said Fateen. “But they won’t shoot you.”

“Don’t throw stones,” Mahad advises.

“Yes. We want to say to the world, ‘We are civilians in front of soldiers.’ This is the message. They have guns. We are civilians. The soldiers will be on good behavior. They know you are there. And there will be media there.”

Kayla tells me later that it’s Palestinian media. “Preaching to the choir,” she says.

“Can we take pictures,” asks Ella from Croatia.

“You can take pictures, but don’t put your camera in their face. We don’t want to make the soldiers nervous.”

Yes—let’s not make the soldiers nervous.

Almost as an afterthought, Fateen says we can skip the protest if we’re not comfortable. And this is partly what’s bothering me: no one asked if we wanted to protest. I’m probably the only one thinking this; everyone else seems more gung ho. I want to go, but I feel like I’m in a new relationship where we’ve haven’t kissed yet and now I’m being pressured to go all the way. This protest may be nonviolent, but nonviolence hasn’t always been the preferred method for addressing Palestinian grievances. Hopefully that’s changing, at least among young men like Fateen and Mahad. So I’m attending, but I’m attending, I decide, as an observer.

The morning of the protest, we stop first in Bil’in, visiting a small cultural center that is under construction. It’s a simple structure, next to an existing school, nothing more than cinder-block walls, and we haul materials inside, again forming lines, passing buckets of cement and more cinder blocks. Afterward we walk up concrete steps to the roof, the cold wind stinging red ears. A local guy thanks us and gives a speech, pointing out the inescapable view of the wall.

“We have faith in our rights,” he says, “not faith in weapons.”

His breath flashes and vaporizes in the damp air as he talks. An Israeli scientist recently won a Nobel Prize, he says (Ada Yonath, who won in chemistry with two Americans for work on ribosomes that may lead to new antibiotics), and yet the world doesn’t care that the Israeli government has uprooted thousands of trees, and thousands of lives, to build the wall. “They try to make our lives more difficult so the people will leave. I could get a U.S. visa like that!” he says, snapping his fingers. “But we will not leave!”

We walk back down from the roof and kill time before the protest near the three-room school. No students are there, this being Friday. I go inside, mainly to escape the chill. I walk alone in one of the classrooms. It’s more like a bunker. The walls need painting and patching, a hole lets in the cold. Assignments are taped to the wall: the children are learning French. I’m reminded of a similar exercise that Julie and I did in Costa Rica: the kids labeled body parts of a Dalmatian from a coloring book—the eyes and ears and nose and legs.

I wonder how children can learn in such a frigid, prisonlike room.

On the wall is a stick figure drawn in pencil. The figure carries a Palestinian flag. Behind him, drawn in pen, is an equally crude truck. In the truck is another stick figure, this one with a gun. The stick figure in the truck fires his gun at the stick figure with the flag.

We walk up a barren road, about sixty of us, soldiers visible in the distance. Several marchers carry a large Palestinian flag stretched over their heads. Marcen has one corner, one of the Irish guys has another; two Palestinians take the other two. A little boy carries a yellow Fatah flag; another, maybe twelve years old, holds a sign with a poster-size image of a grinning Yasser Arafat. A few of the protesters are Israelis.

The protest organizers lead an Arabic chant. Kayla says it translates roughly as—

Stop the occupation!

Stop the wall!

In Berlin they destroyed the wall!

In Palestine we will do the same!

The English chant is more hostile—

1, 2, 3, 4!

Occupation no more!

5, 6, 7, 8!

Israel is a fascist state!

About fifteen soldiers, all in green, stand in a row behind knee-high coils of silver razor wire. Two jeeps are behind the soldiers. Buildings that look like warehouses loom on the side. On a hill—more like a cliff—two more soldiers stand.

We pass squatty cinder-block homes and shops, no sidewalks, just dirt and rocks. At the wire, we stop. A farmer makes a speech, shouting the usual rhetoric, first in Arabic, then English: “The Germans in World War II said they were just following orders,” he says. “Now the Israeli soldiers say they are just following orders.”

I’m standing in back with Mike, who seems a tad unconvinced by Fateen’s don’t-worry-you-won’t-get-hurt speech. “We might be more valuable if we were injured,” he says.

We’ve heard the story of Tristan Anderson, an activist and photo-journalist from Oakland, California, who nine months earlier was shot in the forehead at close range with a tear gas canister at a nonviolent protest in Nil’in. Anderson suffered a traumatic brain injury. The Israeli Ministry of Defense called the incident an “act of war,” thus absolving itself of liability. I assume this means Anderson committed an aggressive act by attacking a flying tear gas canister with his skull.

I move up about three feet from the soldiers. Peter asks one how old he is. Eighteen, he says. Some look older, but they can’t be more than twenty-one or twenty-two, the soft faces contrasting with the combat helmets and long black weapons.

A few of them laugh at the speeches. I can’t tell if it’s nerves or arrogance.

An Irish volunteer snaps a picture of a soldier giving him the finger. Israeli military photographers snap photos of the protesters. Doug walks over to me.

“See the guy in the middle,” he says. “He had his finger on the trigger. I was right in front of him and I told him he shouldn’t do that. He was the only one. And so the guy next to him put his finger on the trigger and laughed.”

Palestinian boys run up to the wire. The boys hold black nylon straps that are used to ship cinder blocks. They wrap the straps around the barbed wire and pull.

The soldiers rip the straps from the boys’ hands.

This protest may be routine, but the tension is heavy like the damp cold; as though it would take only one small thing to provoke the soldiers; to ignite a massacre.

A few of the kids roll a tire into the wire.

The children shout at the soldiers.

A soldier pushes a kid in the chest.

One spark—that’s all it would take. That one soldier with his finger on the trigger.

The kids seem to back down after the boy is pushed. They pose for volunteers’ pictures in front of the razor wire, like rappers, trying to look tough. One boy has a keffiyeh wrapped around his head. Only his eyes are visible.

I notice a woman off to the side wearing a beige vest with a dove logo. She looks like some sort of official; blond hair, glasses, retirement age. She’s smoking a cigarette. I ask if she’s here to monitor the protest.

“You’re from the States,” she says, a bit surprised. “Where from?”

“Virginia.”

“New Jersey,” she says.

Her name is Anne, and she’s in the West Bank for three months, based in Bethlehem, the only U.S. participant out of twenty-five volunteers with a World Council of Churches group called The Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel. They’re here to monitor situations, such as this protest, and to help prevent human rights violations. She also works frequently at the Bethlehem checkpoint. About twenty U.S. churches are participating, far lower than the number from Europe.

“They’ll usually behave while we’re here,” she says of the soldiers, “but sometimes they’ll harass people after we’re gone.”

She takes a drag on her cigarette. The protest seems to be quieting down. One of her colleagues, a German gentleman, talks of a town where he stayed in the West Bank. A settler accused a villager of stealing his goat. At 2 a.m., he says, village residents were pulled from their homes by soldiers, forced to stand outside in the cold for over an hour. In another town, two soldiers took a bath in a pool used for drinking water. “Just for fun,” he said.

“Why do they do that?” I say. “Do they want to make life so tough that people leave?”

“You’re asking why—who knows why?” says Anne. “Why are some of the soldiers laughing? We planted olive trees and the settlers pulled them up. Why? Why would you do that? I think they just … I think they want the land. It’s that simple.”

I ask her if being here has made her pessimistic. She nods.

“The only way anything will change is if the U.S. government says, ‘We’re going to stop giving you three billion dollars a year unless you quit harassing these people.’ Three billion dollars—how crazy is that? People at home have no concept of what’s really happening here. There’s no clue about what these people face every day.”

She asks if we’ve been to the Bethlehem checkpoint in the morning. No—only the evening we arrived. The line, she said, extends out the building at 4:30 a.m., as men struggle to reach to work on time, fearful of delays. It’s like enduring airport security every day: passing through metal detectors, removing belts, emptying pockets, putting ID cards on a card reader, placing a hand on a scanner to check fingerprints.

As I talk with Anne, one of the volunteers, the bossy New York woman, stands in front of the razor wire—and the soldiers—and begins her own personal chant, shouting “Shame Shame Israel!”

Our hosts are not happy. Then she shouts about Hitler and Nazis. Not at all the message the protesters want to convey. “First of all, she’s an idiot,” writes Kayla that night in her blog. “Secondly, she hijacked the message of the protest. Apparently she was pulled aside earlier and told not to engage in conversation with the soldiers. General questions are okay but nothing provoking. So she made two mistakes. She doesn’t understand that in the end, this isn’t our fight. We’re here to say we think this is wrong and to support the message that the villagers want to send—mainly, stop building a wall.”

I get Anne’s e-mail address and say goodbye—we’re heading back to the village and the bus. Some Palestinians whistle as we walk. The Italians lead another chorus of “Bella Ciao.”

Today, the nonviolent protest remained nonviolent. It didn’t feel nonviolent, but no rocks were thrown, no weapons fired. Two weeks from now, soldiers will jump over the wire and throw sound grenades at protesters, forcing them back to the village. In February, a group of twenty Palestinians, eight internationals, and seven Israeli activists will be assaulted with tear gas and sound bombs; another seventy-five Palestinians will be stopped by the military before even reaching al-Masara. In July, two protesters will be hospitalized and one detained, along with a journalist.

That evening, Doug tells me the protest depressed him. All that energy and effort and anger, and yet the only people to hear it were eighteen-year-old soldiers who couldn’t care less; whose stereotypes were reinforced—the kids causing trouble, the antagonistic banners and shouts. “I wonder if they even listened to the farmer’s speech,” he says. “They’d already made up their minds about the people on the other side of the barbed wire.”

Kayla, who exudes a tomboy toughness, had the same downcast reaction as we left. “I let most of the crowd pass—I kept looking at the soldiers,” she wrote in her blog. “And I started to cry a little.”

In the afternoon I sit on the steps outside the flat, writing in my journal. It’s warmer than it was this morning at al-Masara, and the air is fresher outside than inside. I’d thought about writing on the roof, in the sun, but Devin, a nineteen-year-old Taiwanese-American who seems more like an old wise man (minus the wrinkles), is leading a meditation class. Monique told me I should come.

“I’m already pretty mellow,” I said, declining.

As I sit on the steps, some kids wave from a window in the building next door. They hold up a schoolbook, and ask if I speak French.

“English,” I say.

Their mother appears and waves. “They learn English and French in school,” she says.

“Ah—very good.”

“Very good!” repeats her son.

I point at my head. “Very smart,” I say.

Unlike my other trips, I’ve felt distant from the children here, which says more about me than it does about them. We hang out on the streets, and the kids are often there, sometimes playing soccer in the narrow street, the ball smacking walls and cars. Doug and Kayla brought a Frisbee and teach kids to throw. Doug thinks we should write “Happy Hanukkah” on a Frisbee, have everyone sign it, and fling it over the wall. Peace through Frisbees.

A local boy, he can’t be more than four, always tries to sell us postcards. The cards are connected, accordion-style, and when they hang from his sticky hand they’re almost as tall as he is. He never speaks—I wonder if he has some sort of disability—but grins, walking up to people, raising his postcards. I assume he wants money, but he may just be showing them off. One day we notice his pants are on backward. Another day his shoes are on the wrong feet. Later I learn the boy’s father has been in prison since before he was born.

One afternoon, in the fourth-floor room where we hold group meetings, some local children perform a traditional folk dance called dabke. Everyone claps as the children march in place, hands on their hips, the girls in gold silk tops with red scarves on their heads, the boys with black vests over red shirts. Their black pants spin in rhythm; they stamp their feet. It’s like the Palestinian version of Riverdance. They look serious as they perform. Not nervous, but confident. Businesslike. They learned dabke here at the center. The theme of the dances, I’m told, is typically love. It’s a dance you might perform at a wedding.

We see the flip side of dabke a few days later: Palestinian rap. Three high-schoolish guys mimic the finger-pointing yo-yo-yo motions they’ve clearly picked up from MTV or its international equivalents. They rap about Hamas and Fatah; how Palestinians are trapped between them. One kid raps about settlers who burned his uncle’s house.

“They gave us two choices: die or die,” a short-haired teen in a sweatsuit pronounces into the microphone. “But we choose life. Many people talk about a two-state solution—”

“A fake solution,” says his chunky colleague—

“We want equal status—”

“We want the land that belongs to us! Why should I live in a refugee camp?!”

The chunky kid instructs everyone to clap. Teens in the back of the room chant the main line in Arabic, which sounds to me like:

Ath-eeee-uh!
Ath-eeee-uh!
Ath-eeee-uh!

Distortion disrupts the middle of the rap. Samir, a new addition to our team of Palestinian hosts, fixes the sound system. The audience is a mix of volunteers and local teens, though as Kayla notices, more local girls than usual are here.

“Sorry for the sound system,” the chunky kid says, “but money talks, and we make from nothing a big thing.”

I have no idea what that means, but he says it with authority.

They rap about Gaza—“Fuck the Arab world and fuck the Arab leaders—raise your hand for Gaza!”—then move on to the boycott, an audience-participation number.

“When I say boycott, you say ‘now’! Boycott!”

Now!

“Boycott!”

Now!

“When I say Palestine you say ‘free’! Palestine!”

Free!

“Palestine!” Free!

They end to rowdy applause.

“The camps … It’s a bad life, bad houses,” says the chunky kid. “The kids don’t know. They think it’s paradise. We give our love to the children in all of the camps.”

A group led by Samir takes the microphones. He joined us a few days ago, and he’s now sleeping next to Bruno in Doug’s old space. Samir handles everything from our bus trips to our grocery lists.

“People don’t know about Palestine,” he tells us. “You internationals can go anywhere in the world, but we cannot go to our capital, Jerusalem. Hip-hop is a way to speak the world’s language.” They start to rap—

The revolution is BACK! BACK! BACK!

You gotta watch your BACK! BACK! BACK!

Rafid, an attention-craving boy who hangs out here, dances on the table in the back of the room, waving a Palestinian banner. A Scottish volunteer and an Irish volunteer take photos.

“Hands up for the prisoners!” says Samir.

Hands go up. Rafid dances harder as more cameras rise. A bunch of teens dance on the table with Joe, a Brit who’s so tight with his new Palestinian posse that he’s been dubbed Joe-hammad. Marcen is invited to join in; he waves his arms in front of the computer’s projector screen; ties his scarf around his head.

The chunky rapper is back, rapping about Hamas. Like most rap, it’s angry. But it’s anger released. Creative expression as opposed to throwing rocks.

Mahad had told us there’s debate among Palestinians about rock throwing, mainly because it provokes the soldiers. But he justifies it. The soldiers disrupt protests before any stones are thrown. The stones are symbolic. People are angry. It’s an outlet. Sometimes, he tells us, when the soldiers throw tear gas canisters, the gas isn’t released. So the Palestinians pick ’em up and throw ’em back. Some Palestinians make their own homemade tear gas: chicken shit in water, letting it sit in the sun for days.

“Tear gas is bad the first time,” one speaker tells us, “but after that you get used to it.”

To the Palestinians the symbolism of rock throwing seems obvious:

The Israelis have guns, jets, tanks, bombs. We have rocks.

One evening we watch a video of a nonviolent protest. It’s presented by a representative from the Stop the Wall campaign. He’s a third stringer: the gentleman who was supposed to speak was arrested in his home eighteen hours earlier (“administrative detention,” to use the official term). No one knows his status. The organization’s leader was arrested a few months ago as well. So this guy gives the talk then shows the video, which focuses on Nil’in, a small village that was separated from its farming land when the Israeli government built the wall. The villagers vowed to stop construction, blocking roads and causing delays.

The video starts with young men, faces covered, throwing rocks at Israeli jeeps. The soldiers respond with tear gas and rubber and plastic bullets. But I didn’t watch the video and think, “Oh those poor outgunned rock throwers.” I thought, “Geez—those rocks really pissed off the soldiers.” As Kayla noted, the subject of the video becomes the rocks, not the wall. And no one here understands this difference in perception, that when most Americans see rock throwing, they see anarchy—not martyrs.

Many of the videos we see bother me. As they’re intended to. They’re simply-produced, you-are-there mini-documentaries, no narration, usually no more than three or four minutes long, showing the mistreatment of Palestinians by settlers. Several of the videos are produced by the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, otherwise known as B’Tselem, which politically is a bit like the ACLU of Israel. In one online video, a farmer returns to harvest his olive trees following a ruling from the Israeli High Court of Justice. When he arrives and picks olives, some settlers walk outside. “What’s he doing on our land?” one of them says. Despite the ensuing violence—the settlers force the farmer and the cameraman from the olive trees—this is the primary point of the video: to show a man who’s harassed for “trespassing” on his own farm.

What’s he doing on our land?

It’s the ironic, tragic punch line. But before he’s booted from his land, the farmer is confronted by a female settler. She’s hysterical, screaming—“Who killed my father? Maybe your nice friends killed my father!”

The pain runs deep. And this woman’s pain is as deep as any Palestinian’s pain.

I’ve had a hard time shaking two videos in particular. The first is in Hebron, arguably the West Bank’s most troubled city. In the video, a Hebron settler—a woman—torments a Palestinian woman and her children. They live on opposite sides of a dead-end street in the Tel Rumeida neighborhood. A thick screen runs along steps in a Palestinian apartment building: the screen is a shield for residents because the settlers and their children, protected by the soldiers, often throw stones at the Arabs.

“Sit here, in the cage,” the settler woman says to the Palestinian in Hebrew, forcing them behind the screen. And she taunts the woman and her children in a cold, mocking voice, her face pressed against the pen, lips pursed, sneering the same words—

Sharmuuuta…

Shar-muuuuuuuuutaaa…

The word—Sharmuta—is Arabic slang for “whore.”

One night a few of us sat on the fourth floor—me, Doug, Kayla, among others—waiting for a meeting to start. Projected on the pull-down screen was a video taken several years ago. A group of Palestinian youths had thrown rocks at soldiers. The soldiers opened fire. The video showed an emergency room, doctors treating a thirteen-year-old boy. He was hit with a projectile like bird shot that decimated his jaw and shoulder, lodging metal into his chest. His face and neck were bloody. Doctors huddled over him, shouting instructions.

The bloody teen in the video was Fateen. He would be in the hospital for forty-eight days. Jaw wired shut. Shoulder disfigured. Front teeth replaced.

“How can you watch that?” Kayla asked him.

He didn’t answer. Just puffed on his cigarette—he started smoking in the hospital; there was nothing to do but smoke and suck on his feeding straw—slumped in his chair, the cold light of the screen turning his face blue as he stared at his ravaged younger self.

We spend two days cleaning Manger Street, starting near Beit Jibrin and working our way to Manger Square. Along the road is a satirical street sign for a tow-away zone: instead of a car the sign shows a tank. In that same mirthful spirit, Habib tells me a joke.

“Why was Jesus born in Palestine and not Lebanon?”

“Don’t know. Why.”

“Because God couldn’t find any virgins in Lebanon.”

Ah, but seriously, folks…

The road is divided by narrow curbed islands with bushes. We pick up trash, dig up weeds, turn over soil. Given our size and bright yellow highway worker vests, we’re hard to miss. The locals appreciate our efforts. A shopkeeper brings us bottles of water. A restaurant owner brings trays of Arab coffee. Taxi drivers honk horns and say thanks: “God bless you! Very good!”

On a balcony a woman yells to us: “Where you are?” We assume she wants to know where we’re from.

“U.S.A.!” yells Tyler, a Minnesotan who’s going to school in Scotland.

She applauds and waves. In Hebron, a group of guys will approach Kayla and say, “Welcome, welcome, welcome.” Throughout the West Bank, folks are thrilled to see visitors.

Tyler churns up dirt with a pick as I collect wads of trash. The cars pass close.

“I don’t know if it’s the exhaust or the cigarettes or the hookah pipe or all the dust from the construction site—probably all of them—but something funky is living in my chest,” I say.

“I know—I don’t usually smoke,” he says, digging. “But smoking is such a social thing here. I’ve probably taken a year off my life.” He smiles, eyes hidden behind white-frame sunglasses. “But it probably wouldn’t have been a very productive year.”

I’m paired with Monique most of the second morning. I use the pick, she plucks trash from the bushes. She finds a BB gun pellet—her nephew wanted a BB gun, she tells me. He finally got one, shot a wall, and the pellet ricocheted, nailing him below the eye. (Dad once shot his older brother Georgie in the butt with his BB gun. “He never teased me after that,” Dad said.)

“Why do children play war?” Monique asks.

“Well, it’s a boy thing, right? Girls don’t play war.”

“No … but why boys?”

“I don’t know. Boys are high-energy and aggressive. You know—testosterone.”

“So you think it is hormones.”

“I’m sure it’s learned, too. Look at their role models.”

She mentions the professional wrestling we saw on TV.

“I do not understand why that is popular,” she says. “I see boys wear T-shirts with wrestlers on them.”

“Most boys are rough; they like that kind of stuff. That’s why boys don’t play with Dalai Lama dolls.”

“I do not understand.”

Her English is excellent, but my English, I find, sometimes confuses her.

“It’s not worth repeating,” I say.

Slowly our group works its way down Manger Street in the direction of Manger Square. I’m collecting trash in a burlap sack—cigarette butts, broken glass, coffee cups, gum wrappers.

“You are the garbageman,” she says, “and I am the garbage-woman.”

We receive an unexpected treat: a free buffet lunch from the owner of a large restaurant on Manger Street. It’s a banquet hall for tour bus crowds: ten-foot-high windows presenting views of parched, sacred mountains. The owner is a large man with a big silver wristwatch, black goatee, and black stubble, hair parted neatly to the side.

“I see you working today,” he tells us. “It makes me feel very happy. I invite you to eat here to thank you for what you are doing for Bethlehem.”

It’s a spectacular spread and I load up: mushroom soup, salad, rice, mashed potatoes, chicken, vegetables, bread. Liters of soda sit on the table. We’ve been eating conservatively since we’re such a big group. Not today. This is a feast.

Conor, the big dreadlocked Irishman, lets out a satisfied aaah when he’s done. He drops f-bombs with Hannah-like frequency, though with his accent it sounds more like fookin’.

“That was fookin’ good,” he says. “That restaurant owner is the fattest fookin’ Arab I’ve seen since I’ve been here. That’s good, you know—I like a guy who runs a restaurant to be big. It means he eats a lot. He fookin’ enjoys it.”

As long as we’re here I take advantage of the restaurant bathroom. The men’s flat still has no water, so we’ve become restroom opportunists. Peter now carries his toiletries on every trip. When I enter, he’s shaving in the sink. A shirtless Mike shampoos his hair. I stay clothed, yet manage to take almost an entire bath.

That evening I chat outside with Doug while Kayla writes her blog, using a small Acer computer she brought. The usual crowd of Europeans stands on the street, smoking. It’s a beautiful evening. The weather is suddenly springlike, warm like the pink sunset to the west. A woman in a white scarf pushes a double stroller with twins; Monique and others swarm around them, cooing. The mother smiles with pride.

“Kind of nice to see something happy,” I tell Doug.

Back home, the D.C. area was pounded by two feet of snow. Philly got nailed as well, says Doug. Kayla comes outside. She says their pastor e-mailed his sermon to his parishioners rather than trudge through the snow to church.

“What a pussy,” she says, laughing.

Julie e-mails me wintry photos of our snow-battered home: our covered cars and bushes, the shoveled sidewalk tunnels. It’ll be a white, frigid Christmas. I view these in a T-shirt, in 65-degree weather.

The morning we go to Hebron begins, oddly enough, with Conor playing Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” on a portable stereo next to his sleeping bag. Conor is a fledgling mandolin player, still teaching himself the instrument, which he brought with him to Bethlehem. He often sits on his sleeping bag, leaning against the wall, strumming chords.

“You like Johnny Cash?” I ask.

“He’s the fookin’ king, man.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the canon of country music, “A Boy Named Sue” was recorded live at San Quentin Prison, a song about a kid whose father abandoned him and gave him a girl’s name to make him tough and mean.

Hebron is a town named Sue. Established by the Canaanites almost 5,500 years ago, it’s the West Bank’s biggest city, with two hundred thousand Palestinian residents, yet dominated by a powerful pocket of settlers and the army that supports them: a combustible mix of dominant minority and impotent majority; of unchecked authority and simmering hatreds.

We exit the bus and merge with ambling pedestrians, Fateen leading us down hectic streets, past small stores and gritty food joints, walking to the office of the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee, which preserves and restores housing for Palestinians in the Old City. Every Palestinian town has seemed run-down, but the HRC office has a sparkling old architecture/new interior shine. We sit in a lecture hall, awaiting a presentation, when Fateen enters and asks—

“Has anyone seen Jerome?”

Jerome is French, and seems like a friendly guy, though he’s not exactly the sharpest piece of cheese on the tray. With his buzzed haircut and jutting nose he reminds me not of a Frenchman but of Benito Mussolini, though more like the dictator’s goofy yet goodhearted brother. Think Benny instead of Benito. Jerome annoyed the female volunteers by washing his clothes in their first-floor sleeping area—there’s a tiny kitchen in the room with actual running water—then hanging them to dry without wringing them out, thus dampening the floor and sleeping bags, leaving a persistent musty smell in the windowless room.

Fateen is worried. And ticked. “Who has their badges,” he snaps, making us raise our hands. “This is why I tell you to wear the badges.” The badges are clip-on plastic slits with a card inside stating our name and country. On the back is Fateen’s name and cell phone number.

Of course, it’s not like Jerome can casually wander the city. For security reasons, Hebron has undergone a form of carefully planned inconvenience—urban constipation, if you will. The city is divided into two sections: H1, as it’s called, is overseen by the Palestinian Authority, though subject to Israeli raids. H2, which includes most of the Old City—roughly 5,500 Palestinians and 400 settlers—is under Israeli control. H2 is shorthand, I presume, for “twice the hassle.” To protect and accommodate the settlers, Palestinians are prohibited from walking on certain streets. Other streets are blocked by concrete barriers and stone walls. If an Arab house borders a settlement street its doors are welded shut: Palestinians climb over roofs to reach their buildings. Eighteen checkpoints are located throughout the Old City, so getting from point A to point B can mean multiple metal detectors and inquisitions. Children walk through metal detectors every day on the way to school, their bags inspected.

Settlers carry automatic weapons on the streets. They shoot holes in water tanks on the roofs of Palestinian homes. Sometimes they attack internationals—this happened to an Italian group, according to the HRC.

“The Hebron settlers are effective because they are strong,” he says. “They don’t get permission for building work; they just do it. The settlers took over a building, and the Israeli high court said no, you cannot do this. But a commander declared it a military zone. If the soldiers come in, tell us to go, we cannot stay. So the settlers kept the building. The Israelis are strong. We are not.”

Since 1996, the HRC has renovated nine hundred buildings, supplying five thousand Palestinians with homes and preventing the military from confiscating empty properties. A range of organizations and foreign governments—including Sweden, Spain, Germany, Ireland, Canada—have provided assistance.

When the presentation is over, Fateen, who has been pacing in and out of the lecture hall, triumphantly raises his cell phone. “We’ve found Jerome,” he says.

Jerome had wandered into a shop almost as soon as we arrived. He left, looked for us on the cramped sidewalk, couldn’t find us. Eventually he entered another store and showed the owner his badge. The owner spoke some French. He took Jerome’s badge and called Fateen. As the owner made the call, Jerome asked him, “Do you speak Arabic?”

Which would be like traveling to France and asking a shopkeeper if he speaks French.

Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque, also known as the Tomb of the Patriarchs, is a sacred site to Muslims and Jews alike. The stone structure, roughly two thousand years old, is said to be the final resting place of Abraham and his wife Sarah, along with their son Isaac, grandson Jacob, and the two men’s wives. In 1994, on the fifteenth day of Ramadan, Baruch Goldstein, a physician and settler, entered the crowded mosque and opened fire on the nearly 800 worshippers, slaughtering 29 Palestinians and wounding 125 others. Goldstein was eventually hit in the head with a fire extinguisher and beaten to death by survivors. He remains a hero to many Hebron settlers.

The massacre of Palestinian worshippers led to a series of security measures that affect … Palestinian worshippers. To pray, Palestinians pass through a series of post-Goldstein checkpoints, which we experience as we visit the mosque: the turnstiles in an old tunnel, the stern guard in an obligatory booth. After that, we head to another checkpoint, walking through metal detectors and providing our bags for inspection. A soldier inspects Peter’s bag, and seems puzzled as he pulls out a can of shaving cream, soap, shampoo, washcloth, brush…

We proceed one by one, congregating on a walkway to the mosque and waiting for the rest of our group, which annoys the soldiers. They tell us to move farther up. I’m reminded of something the HRC speaker said of the mosque: “It’s not a holy place—it’s a military base.”

Inside, we remove our shoes; the women put on gray hooded cloaks. We pass the women’s praying area. It’s a series of white arches and gold lamps, the floor lined with red-and-blue rugs. The main prayer area, which is coed, is larger and more open, the design more elaborate, its domes painted in blues and reds and whites. Security cameras, like Orwellian eyeballs, hang in the mosque, watching every person and prayer. We see the green doors where Goldstein entered along a back wall, nubs in the marble from the bullets’ spray.

When we leave, Samir, our rapper roommate, is detained by the soldiers. He and Habib were stopped on the way in: they’re both from a neighborhood that fought an Israeli incursion during the Second Intifada (ID cards issued by the Palestinian Authority show your religion and your neighborhood). No one knows why Samir is held. He seems like the last guy who’d be singled out for questioning, just because … he’s preppy. More L.L.Bean than Islamic Jihad.

We stand, waiting for him near the checkpoint. The soldiers yell at us to move.

“Just stand against the wall and wait,” Fateen tells us.

“We won’t leave without him!” the bossy New York woman barks.

“We won’t leave him,” Fateen says calmly. “It’s better if we’re out of the way.”

We gather by the wall, again drawing the ire of the soldiers. Fateen tells us to go through the security turnstiles back to the market. He stays and talks with the soldiers while children try to sell us key chains and bracelets with Palestinian colors. Joe-hammad sits on a step, morose. Margaret, a Canadian college student, starts to cry. A Scottish student holds her. Others use the time to buy sandwiches, candy, scarves. We hear theories about why Samir is being held. Someone says he was lippy when we entered. Others say his papers weren’t in order. Monique says the soldiers didn’t like the Palestinian flag stickers some volunteers wore on their shirts.

Forty-five minutes pass before Samir is released. He holds a document instructing him to report to authorities tomorrow for an interview, which seems a tad odd.

Clearly you’re dangerous but, eh … come back tomorrow.

He receives handshakes and hugs. He’s not sure if he was stopped because of his neighborhood—“Because of that, the soldiers didn’t like me,” he says—or if it was random: they sometimes stop every third person or so who enters to pray.

Fateen reassures him. He shouldn’t have any problems. Samir has never been arrested, he’s traveled to Europe (which means he’s been approved for visas), and he’s never been shot, which is, we’re told, another oddity of the region: if you’ve been shot you’re considered a security risk. The day we built rock walls, one of the farmers told Kayla that he wanted to move to Amman—his daughter was engaged to a Jordanian there—but he couldn’t leave because he was shot years before.

Now that we have Samir back, we wind through the mazelike market—an open-air souk—following Fateen. An old man sells black-and-white keffiyehs. “Merry Christmas!” he says. “How are you! Merry Christmas!”

Above our heads, from one side of the souk to the other, is a wavy, horizontal, chain-link fence. The market is next to a building where settlers live. From their windows, the settlers throw garbage down on the Palestinians below. The fence serves as a metal net, to block the plummeting trash. Much of the hanging debris is decaying in dead, mysterious lumps. I look up and spot what appears to be a milk carton, rotting and limp.

Since the day I passed through the checkpoint into the West Bank, I’ve tried to remind myself that I’m only hearing the Palestinian perspective. That I haven’t made Israeli friends the way I’m making Palestinian friends. That anguish exists in Israel just as it does in Palestine. Because I know the Israelis are good people. I know the Palestinians are good people. I truly believe, despite centuries of evidence otherwise, that all people are basically good. No one is born evil; no one is xenophobic in the womb. We are tainted by hand-me-down hate. Habib says of the settlers in Hebron, “Their only contact with us is to beat us, or throw whatever they can at us.” As far as I can tell, the bulk of Hebron’s ultra-Orthodox settlers are—and please forgive the lack of subtlety—wackos. Extremist, militant, out-of-control nuts. And that nuttiness is being passed to future generations; to the children who throw rocks and learn cute kill-the-Arabs ditties in school. Even many Israelis think the Hebron settlers are fanatics. But who am I to judge? I don’t know these people any more than they know me. And ignorance, and isolation, and fallacy are all twined in hatred’s DNA.

I don’t believe in taking sides here, because each side can match sorrow for sorrow, atrocity for atrocity, rage for rage. In the months after my departure, Hamas gunmen will kill four Israeli settlers, including a pregnant woman, just outside Hebron. Animosity grows here like olives. But as I walk under a fence installed to catch trash hurled by one people against another, I can at least say here’s no equality of power here. Some people have it, some people don’t.

Being here has changed my view of oppression. Oppression is not simply about guns and tanks and bombs. Oppression is a thousand daily inconveniences. It is tortoise-speed checkpoints and lines, lines, lines. It’s being frisked before you enter a house of worship, and being detained by soldiers when you leave. It’s security cameras watching as you pray. It’s the lives of an armed few dominating the lives of the unarmed many. It’s your neighbors pelting you with insults and stones. It’s hanging a fence to stop the falling trash, rather than stopping the trash from falling.

Always look at the other side, Dad wrote. Often you don’t fully understand things unless you put yourself in the other person’s shoes.

We walk past the stalls to a street corner. A teenage boy tries to sell bracelets to me and Monique. He shows us the road behind a gate, the road now closed. Guard towers peer down.

“Please buy,” says the boy. “Very hard here. No business. Please buy.”

He holds up the bracelet. It’s the colors of the Palestinian flag.

Earlier, on our way to the Ibrahimi Mosque, we’d seen a once-thriving market that’s now a dead zone due to road closures. Rows of green garage-style doors, all closed, none of the shops open. No trash. No people. Our morning host from the HRC had remembered his boyhood, the souk so crowded that he clutched his father’s hand, afraid of losing him forever.

Over 70 percent of Palestinian shops are now closed, he said.

“Please buy,” says the boy. “Please buy.”

Monique and I apologize. We don’t buy.

We walk back to the IPYL office, a thirty-minute trek. Once there we eat sandwiches and watch a documentary, If Americans Knew, produced by the U.S. organization of the same name. We take cabs back to Bethlehem. Eight of us are packed in a sedan with one local woman in front. It’s dark. Our driver tailgates other cars, blinking his lights. He passes when he shouldn’t pass—while approaching blind turns. Mike is next to me, offering concerned commentary.

“Don’t, don’t … please—don’t…”

The driver roars left past four cars on a two-lane road, a pair of headlights glowing ahead.

“Oh God … Don’t…”

We swerve back to our lane.

The driver keeps shouting, pointing his finger. We can’t tell if he’s talking with the older woman in front or yelling at other drivers.

“The problem with people who believe in the afterlife is that they don’t care about this life,” says Mike. “I don’t really want to die yet.”

We zoom past another car. “I want a Snickers bar after this,” says Mike. “Actually, if I go through the windshield, melt it and give it to me intravenously.” And then—screeeech—we come to almost a complete stop, creeping over inverted speed bumps. Mike shakes his head.

“I don’t understand anything about this place.”

The closer it gets to Christmas, the more I feel the stinging distance of home. I say this despite hearing “Jingle Bells” in Arabic at a Manger Street tourist shop; despite seeing an inflated sidewalk Santa bouncing in the wind. I’ve seen Kris Kringle’s image in Bethlehem more than Jesus Christ’s. Not far from the Stars & Bucks Café—a terrific corporate rip-off; it’s the same black-and-green color scheme as Starbucks, with Stars & Bucks T-shirts for sale—a cardboard Santa flashes a peace sign from a restaurant window. Behind the window an Arab family waits for lunch, two older women wearing head scarves, Coke bottles on the table.

I’ve splurged a few times and bought a Coke from the sparse market near the center, along with the occasional candy bar—a substitute for the usual holiday sweets. Back home, Christmas Eve at my sister’s house is all about the cookies: chocolate chip and peanut butter and iced sugar cookies. On Christmas Day Julie’s mother makes an early dinner of ham and scalloped potatoes, with birthday carrot cake (Julie’s request) for dessert.

I’m part of the team that’s responsible for tonight’s dinner, so I know we won’t be eating anything that tasty. It’s me, Conor, Carina, and a Belgian woman. The night before we met with Samir in the kitchen to discuss what we need—and more important, what we can afford. Conor has cooking experience so he’s in charge. He wanted five roasted chickens, mainly as a time saver, but Samir says it’s too expensive. So after a lot of bargaining—Conor had wanted apples, but if we give up apples can we have chickens?—we settle for five chickens, uncooked.

“Here we are in Palestine and the most contentious fookin’ meetings are about the Christmas party and what to have for dinner,” says Conor.

The Christmas party has been settled, but not without another contentious meeting—

Turkish bath, one free soda, D.J....

Why don’t we combine the parties on the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth?

I can’t make the decision; you make the decision!

I help cut carrots, apples, and tomatoes for dinner. The chickens are full chickens, heads and all. Conor chops off the necks, and cooks a delicious-smelling stew in a giant pot with onions and potatoes. He and I carry it, each of us holding a handle, lugging it down the outdoor steps from the apartment. Skinny feral cats scurry to hide as we walk. We haul the heavy pot through the alleyway into the center, up three flights to where we dine. It seems like a huge amount of food, but it’s consumed quickly.

“It is very good,” says Mahad with a grin, though he seems like the kind of guy who would say that regardless. Mahad has kept a low profile during the Christmas party nonsense. Everything was finally sorted out: some people will go to a party hosted by a nonprofit; others, myself included, will go to a resort, tempted mainly by the Turkish bath. We’ve agreed to pay extra so some Palestinians can come. Mahad, however, quietly declined the offer. From what I heard, he was uncomfortable with others paying his way. It was a personal choice, made without self-righteous pronouncements. I admire that.

Maybe it’s because he’s a part-time artist—Mahad painted one of the murals we saw on the wall at the Aida camp—but he seems more reserved than the other Palestinian men. Kayla says Mahad spent three years in an Israeli jail. When he was first detained, his hands were cuffed behind his back for twelve hours, his arms raised to just below his shoulders. The worst thing, he told Kayla, is that the soldiers never asked questions. They just held him. For three years. Given that he’s promoting nonviolence, that he talks of boycotts rather than bombs, I assume he was arrested for his political views. You don’t really have to do something to be arrested. In Hebron, Kayla talked with a Red Cross worker. During the Second Intifada, the military declared almost four hundred curfew days in Hebron over three years. Sometimes the curfews lasted up to seven days in a row, which meant you stayed inside. If you didn’t, you could get shot or arrested. Because of the curfews, a lot of Palestinians who worked in Israel lost their jobs.

The Red Cross worker was a teenager at the time. Once, after three curfew days, desperate for fresh air, he snuck from his home for a break, and a soldier saw him by the door. The teenager—fourteen at the time—was arrested.

Three days before Christmas we work at a center for abused women in Bethlehem. It’s a nice place: arched pink ceilings, stone walls, Persian-style tile, a needlepoint map of Palestine. In the office are new computers—the center receives government funding, says Fateen—and a framed picture of Arafat. I’ve seen far more framed Arafats in Palestine than framed Maos in China, even though in 2004, the year of his death, 87 percent of Palestinians believed his government was corrupt. I assume he’s remembered more for his defiance than for any lasting deeds.

The women are baking. They roll small balls of dough, and the center fills quickly with a soothing, waffle-like smell. Behind flour-dusted aprons they’re dressed in stylish Western clothes. Bethlehem, or at least the parts I’ve seen, seems moderate. This isn’t Saudi Arabia, where only a woman’s eyes are uncloaked. More Palestinian women are in universities than men, a woman from the UNWRA’s women’s office told us one night, though most jobs are for men, assuming they can find work. The women tend to get married, then earn side income through jobs like cutting hair. At the Handala Center, a group of about thirty women do embroidery, using traditional designs to create everything from handbags to glasses cases. In some households it’s the only stable income.

We clean up the gardens and grounds. While others dig up weeds and trim trees, I focus on a trash-filled corner, where a tall stone fence meets a vine-covered cinder-block wall. Pedestrians must toss their trash from the sidewalk above: I collect candy wrappers, soda cans, water bottles, cigarette butts and boxes, chip bags, broken glass, torn newspaper pages—it’s like excavating a 7-Eleven Dumpster. Afterward, I help carry cut tree branches and vine trimmings to a dump spot across the street, then dig holes to plant daisies. Conor is building what looks like a well with rocks, which is later filled in with dirt and flowers. He’d prefer flatter rocks.

“It’s a fookin’ humpy fook,” he says, pointing at one.

I’m guessing this is not an actual geologic term. It becomes, however, my mental synonym for a struggle. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict? It’s a fucking humpy fuck.

Lunch, made by the women who run the center, is our tastiest, most satisfying meal yet. I load a plastic plate with sfeeha—mini doughy pizzas with lamb meat and onions and peppers—then dip pitas in a bowl of yogurt sauce, a trail of olive oil on top with basil and tomatoes, and scoop spoonfuls of green olives and a salad of oil-drenched tomatoes and cucumbers. Once we’re done the ladies serve afternoon tea. They seem grateful. The grounds are transformed. Clean, neat, welcoming. Bright with fresh flowers.

That afternoon I join Monique and Perrine and a few others for coffee at a local restaurant. In Hebron, on the long walk from the Ibrahimi Mosque to the IPYL offices, Monique and I talked the entire way, discussing everything from the head scarf issue in France (she thinks it’s silly) to a previous volunteer gig in Djibouti (very sad) to her job teaching philosophy to high school students. She lives in a depressed region, and the students aren’t interested in the class; they don’t see the point, or they’re only concerned with grades. She thinks often of quitting, perhaps spending a year in the West Bank, though the restrictions on women make her wary.

“I wonder how women deal with the rules they follow and what they see on TV—your American shows.”

“You mean the wholesome all-American values portrayed in our fine high-quality network programming?”

She looks ill.

“The problem is that you get all our worst shows,” I say. “I was in Paris once and saw Knight Rider dubbed in French. You don’t get the good stuff.”

“I did not know any of it was good.”

“Of course it’s good. Except—okay, most of it’s crap, but some of it’s good crap.”

“Even if it is good crap it shows a life they cannot live.”

“Okay, I’ll give you that one.”

“I talked with a woman today at the women’s center,” she says. “She says Islam does not allow men to beat women.”

“Well, they must be ignoring that or the center wouldn’t exist.”

Kayla noticed that girls play on the roofs of buildings, while the boys play in the street. Fateen said it’s because fathers want to protect their daughters. Violence is less of a problem in Bethlehem, which is stable at the moment, but more worrisome in cities like Hebron, where hostility can easily erupt.

After coffee we head back to the center, then walk to a protest for political prisoners. The mayor of Bethlehem speaks—the protest is in front of a Palestinian telecommunications building—and he invokes Jesus, calling him a political prisoner (or so Doug tells us after eavesdropping on a translation in the crowd). Women and families stand by a Christmas tree and hold photographs of imprisoned husbands and sons. If protests are a form of political theater, this is not a particularly exciting show.

“I did not know protests could be so boring,” says Monique.

Our own near-prisoner, Samir, has returned from his interview at an Israeli military base. Samir’s father gave him this advice: “Whatever they offer you, don’t accept it.” It’s a standard strategy: the interviewers deprive you of something—in Samir’s case, heat (he waited for two hours in a refrigerator-cold room)—then become your buddy by giving you what you want, or need, so you’ll offer something in return. Armed with this insight, he walked through a metal detector, got frisked, raised his shirt for wanding. After that he was taken to a different location. At long last his interrogator arrived.

“Are you nervous?” the questioner asked.

“No—I’m cold.”

The questioner, Samir said, spoke better Arabic than he did.

“You’re cold—do you want some tea?”

“No.”

“Coffee?”

“No.”

“If you’re cold you must want something. Hot water?”

“No—I don’t want anything. Please stop asking.”

And so it continued.

Do you want this?

No.

Do you want that?

No.

The offers improved.

“Do you own a car?”

“No.”

“You must want a car—you need a car.”

“My father owns a car and I’m the primary driver.”

“Do you have any friends?”

“No—I have no friends.”

“How can you not have any friends—you’re in university.”

“I live with my cousins.”

“What are their names?”

After a few hours, they let him go. Being detained and questioned is almost a rite of passage for Palestinian men. Now he’s one of the boys.

Although we’ve happily regained Samir, we’ve unexpectedly said goodbye to Patrick, a tall Irishman. Late last night, Patrick returned to the flat drunk, and tried to crawl into Conor’s sleeping bag. This was problematic, since Conor was already in the sleeping bag. Patrick apologized to Conor the following morning, and to Fateen as well, public drunkenness being a headache Fateen does not need. As we departed for the women’s center, Patrick asked Fateen if he could skip work. When we came back, his stuff was gone. According to the rumor mill, Patrick got cabin fever, couldn’t handle the stress of Palestine, needed to study for his master’s—no one knows for sure.

Rather than mourn Patrick’s departure, I steal his mattress pad, and Conor and Tyler spread out their stuff, moving their sleeping bags to create a bit more room. “I just picked up twelve inches of space,” says Conor. “I’m occupying it like the fookin’ Israelis do.”

The last few years before he died, Dad and I would go Christmas shopping together at least once: him for Mom, me for Julie, both of us clueless about what to buy. The trip always involved lunch, usually at Burger King. How this tradition started, I don’t remember—it was typically the only day in the year that I’d eat at Burger King—but a Whopper and fries was part of the deal. And it was usually the highlight given that we’re both such lousy shoppers.

The first Christmas after his death I was at Fair Oaks Mall, where we would usually go, and I saw a man from behind in a department store: same height as Dad, same green winter jacket, same black and gray hair. For a flash I thought it was him. I actually stopped as I was walking. And just as instantly I realized—

No. Duh. Of course not.

Looking back, as a child, I rarely remember Dad having fun. He was always working, whether it was office work (which to him was fun) or chores around the house. I can picture him raking leaves and shoveling snow, walking to the carport in winter for firewood, wearing a beat-up jacket he called Old Blue. Mom always wanted to throw Old Blue in the garbage. Dad refused. He was an even-tempered man, almost impossible to ruffle, so on the few occasions when he did get mad, it was shocking. Once Mom nagged him repeatedly to move his briefcase from the top of the stairs. So finally he picked it up—and threw it down the steps.

Whoa.

Dad loved aviation, and had he gone to college, I’m convinced he’d have majored in aeronautics. We’d go the massive air show at Andrews Air Force Base when I was young, marveling at the acrobatic Thunderbirds and Blue Angels, the Hawker Harrier jet hovering above heat waves on the runway. Once, as an adult, I was traveling for work, and stopped in California for a few days to see my parents. Dad and I went to an air show at a nearby base. It was brutally hot, so he bought a Blue Angels hat to protect his head from the sun. After he died, that hat was one of the few things I asked for from Mom.

One year as a kid I received a Vertibird as a Christmas gift. The Vertibird was a small helicopter attached by an arm to a mechanical center. It came with a little controller for making the Vertibird climb and fly in circles. Dad loved the Vertibird. He sat on the floor, piloting the Vertibird round and round, making it go up and down. The copter had a hook on the bottom for picking up a plastic space capsule and life raft. He hovered the helicopter over the life raft, lowering it, lowering it … slowly … lowering it … the hook getting close—

Got it.

I had more fun watching Dad operate the Vertibird than I did playing with it myself.

A mother plays with her baby girl on the street in front of the center. She sets the girl on the hood of a parked car—the girl can’t be more than two—walks about ten feet away, turns around … and runs toward her! The girl giggles before she arrives, waving her arms, squealing before the mom scoops her up and lifts her—Wooooooo!

As usual, we’re killing time before working, so I lean against an abandoned white van, watching. The van has a flat tire in back, tarlike gunk on its sides. Garbage lies underneath: cans and plastic bottles. People tend to throw their trash on the ground here. Even Fateen does it; I saw him toss an empty bottle on the street. It annoys me, but maybe that’s part of the lingering booted-from-your-village mentality. Discarded people, discarded waste.

A few nights ago, folks at the other end of the street celebrated the release of a camp resident who’d spent five years in an Israeli prison. When he arrived, everyone cheered, fireworks flared; the men embraced him, dancing in the street, the women watching from windows and rooftops above. Banners stretched from building to building with Palestinian flags and strings of colored lights. The residents at that end of the street, I’ve been told, are members of Fatah.

I keep leaning against the van, watching the woman and her daughter, when finally a jean-jacketed Palestinian gentleman, his head wrapped in a red-and-white keffiyeh, arrives to tell us our work plan. We’ll be helping a farmer clear his land in the mountains overlooking Bethlehem. The farmer recently was granted access to his land, but he has to farm it, or he risks losing it (in some cases, unregistered land that is uncultivated for three years can be declared state land and used for settlements). The owner has paperwork saying the land remains his if he clears the brush and builds walls.

Someone asks if soldiers are likely to appear.

“No, inshallah”—God willing—“but it has happened in the past. If the soldiers arrive, don’t talk to them. The owner will talk to them. He has the paperwork.”

It’s a roundabout bus trek because of the security wall and settlements. Cameras stare from chain-link fences; jets roar above. When we arrive, stopping on a dirt road, the farmer explains our job: digging out a dry brush called natsh. The brush is prickly, surrounded by rocks; a hardy, thorny plant well suited to the harsh, arid, treeless terrain.

We grab picks, using the narrow end to dig up rocks, the wide end to dig out the plant. Once extracted, the brush is thrown into piles. Even with gloves the pointy plants are hard to hold.

It’s warm out. I wipe my forehead with my forearm. Swing, swing—hit rock—swing. The brush is everywhere.

An old Palestinian man works, red and white keffiyeh on his head, two black cloth rings holding it place. He’s wearing a gray dishdasha—a gown that stretches to his feet—and a long black vest. At noon, he stops, get on his knees, and prays.

After lunch, a shepherd leads goats and sheep through the rocks. The animals stop and eat some of the brush. When the old man joins him, the scene is almost biblical, except for the number of people (myself included) taking photos, the sprawl of Bethlehem in the distance below. I set my camera on a rock, attempting a timed photo. Julie is normally the photographer on our trips. A red light blinks before the camera clicks.

Monique walks toward me across the hot rocks. We admire the view.

“It looks pretty from here,” she says.

“Things always look so much nicer from a distance. It’s like those photos of Earth from space. You’d never realize how screwed up the place is from just seeing this big blue orb.”

We stare a bit longer at the scenery.

“I hear you bought that little boy’s postcards,” I say as we walk back to our picks. The boy who was always holding postcards above his head is now holding pencils.

She smiles. “I needed a souvenir,” she says.

By the time we’re done, our sunburned, sweaty group has cleared three massive piles of the stubborn brush and started a rock wall. The jean-jacketed host boards the bus as we leave.

“Thank you for your hard work,” he says. “You do an honorable job because you are the first ones here. In a few weeks, we will plant olive trees.”

I hope that’s true, though I wonder. Supposedly more volunteers will clear more brush, and professionals will build retaining walls and plant the trees. Kayla talked with a woman from the Palestinian Authority’s Interior Ministry who came to observe our work. She told Kayla of the ministry’s efforts to track down deeds to the land, which will aid their legal battle. Most of the records date back to the Ottoman Empire, she said, so the ministry is seeking assistance from the Turkish government.

The farmer waves. Everyone applauds as he walks off the bus, facing the parched land that is his land, for now, where he’ll keep uprooting the thorny brush, separating it from the dry dirt.

At a meeting one evening, a few volunteers asked for a nonsmoking area in the center, which is like asking for a ban on screaming babies in a maternity ward. Fateen estimates that 99 percent of Palestinian men smoke, and probably 75 percent of women (though rarely in public). I’m not loving the smoke, either, but it’s the Palestinians’ center, we’re guests, they like to smoke—or need to smoke—so who are we to demand changes? Just suck it up—literally—for two weeks or stay outside.

The cigarette brand of choice seems to be Jamal, a Palestinian product, though American cigarettes are popular as well. We may not be giving them freedom or equality or apple pie, but by God we are giving them lung cancer. I’ve seen Palestinian boys who look twelve years old, if not younger, with cigarettes hanging from their mouths.

The children here sadden me, how conditioned they are to inferiority, the expectation that violence and arrests and bullshit are part of life. Two nights before Christmas, in one of the Handala offices, volunteers and locals make Christmas ornaments for IPYL’s ten-foot-tall Christmas tree. It’s intended, as Fateen said our first day, as a political statement: the ornaments are Israeli tear gas canisters and bullet cases and mortar shells found in Beit Jibrin and Bethlehem. The tree will also be decorated with plastic cups, each with the name of a village taken by the Israelis in 1948 and 1967.

The office is crowded with people and stuff: a desk and shelves and a table for the ornaments. Above a computer, taped to a cabinet, is a printout that looks like an eye exam:

E
ND
THE
OCCU
PATION

Local kids help with the decorations, including Rafid, the boy who danced during the rap show. He’s maybe eleven or twelve, and desperate for attention. He grabs volunteers’ cameras, wanting to take photos. He hangs on people. He’s clingy. While folks work on the ornaments, he holds up two Israeli tear gas canisters and yells for Doug to take his picture. Later, outside, he holds a shell on his shoulder. A local takes his photo.

This is how boys get attention and validation. I saw the same thing at the al-Masara protest, the children posing for pictures in front of the razor wire and soldiers, unfazed by the weapons.

One day our flat came under assault from some of the local kids. They pelted our door with cucumbers and other assorted vegetables. I’m not sure if they were provoked or if it just seemed like a fun thing to do. Conor went on the roof another afternoon to play his mandolin, and four kids tried to take the instrument. The black case was open next to him; inside were two cigars he was bringing home to a friend. The kids snapped them in pieces.

Conor smacked one of the kids upside the head.

“They were nicer to me after that,” he says.

Are these just a few bad kids? Or is this anger that’s lurking in each of them?

Mahad and others carry the long, skinny tree to a street corner. Busloads of tourists are arriving in town for Christmas Eve. The tree is positioned in an old metal barrel and leans against a wall. I wonder if tourists will get the opposite message; if they’ll see it as anti-Christmas. Like firing rubber bullets at Rudolph. A big jingle-bombs middle finger to Santa and sleigh rides.

A few reporters document the scene, some cabbies honk as they pass. Volunteers lead a chorus of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” The next morning, the tree is still there, but some of the armaments are gone. I assume they were taken by the children.

Monique asks if I want to walk along the separation wall. I can’t imagine why she wants to see it up close—or why she wants me to go with her—but I walk with her after breakfast. We leave the Handala Center, passing fresh trash on the street: cigarette boxes and orange peels. A bread man pushes a cart through the alleyways, announcing his morning wares.

Khubz … Khubz … Khubz…

We turn left on Manger Street and stroll next to the massive wall and graffiti.

“Mahad does not like the graffiti,” she says. “He thinks the wall should be ugly.”

“I don’t think he has much to worry about.”

“I think the graffiti is good. Most of the messages are peaceful.”

“Well, I can see his point. If you paint it it’s kind of like you’re accepting it.”

“I like the expression.”

“You notice almost all of it’s in English.”

“It is probably dangerous for Palestinians to write with the towers watching.”

We keep walking. I pull my video camera from my canvas bag and shoot some of the graffiti, assuming that I, too, am being watched.

“We should probably head back,” I finally say. We’re supposed to meet at the center around 10 a.m.—I think—to find out if we’re working.

She stares at the wall. “I don’t care anymore,” she says.

She thinks we have the morning off. I heard we’re planting trees. I convince her to walk back, where Fateen tells us that yes, it’s Christmas Eve, so the day is open.

“You should listen to me,” she says. “You are not so clever.”

We go for coffee on Manger Street, in the direction of Manger Square. Across from a traffic circle is the Marvel Restaurant. Inside, we say hello to the owner, who wears a bright orange Marvel sweatshirt.

“May we sit outside,” Monique asks.

He smiles and drags a table to the sidewalk. Monique sits in the sun.

“It’s like a French café,” I say.

She pulls her cigarettes from her purse.

“So I wonder if you are happy you came here,” she says.

I’m surprised by the question.

“I don’t know if I’d use the word happy, but sure—I’m glad I came. I mean, it’s good to see this. It’s been educational. This isn’t the story we hear at home.”

She lights the cigarette.

“You look lonely.”

This surprises me even more, though I appreciate her concern.

“You always look so serious,” she says. “Always off by yourself. You walk from one corner of a room to another.”

“I didn’t think it was noticeable. I hope people don’t think I’m a stalker.”

“That is what they think.” She smiles and blows smoke.

“I don’t know,” I say. “The whole place kind of depressed me. Watching those men run to the checkpoint. And then going through the checkpoint. And seeing the wall. It’s all so … dehumanizing. Plus—most people here are younger than me. I could be the Finnish girl’s father. And I’m by myself. So I tend to just stay by myself.”

We talk about Fateen and Perrine. I only recently learned that they’re a couple. She’s French, and he’s fluent: he studied French literature and grammar through a university cultural exchange program in 2003. Perrine is becoming a Muslim today so they can get married. Because they’re not yet husband and wife, and because the West Bank is predominantly Muslim, they can’t act like a couple. Which is why I was clueless.

Romances are blooming among the volunteers as well. Some of the female volunteers are falling for local Palestinians, and volunteers are hooking up with other volunteers. One couple, Monique tells me, spent the night at a local hotel. They told the owner they were married but the Mrs., oops, didn’t have her passport.

“Wow—I didn’t even know they liked each other.”

She makes fun of the word like. Sometimes she’ll repeat certain words I use, imitating me in a nasally American voice. Walking and talking become a flat “waalking” and “taalking.”

“The women in our room—they talk about the Palestinian men that are most attractive.”

“Forbidden fruit,” I say.

“And they talk about showers. They are obsessed with showers.” Kayla has said this as well: the women are competitive about taking showers, and lamenting that they can’t take more showers and longer showers. If the roles had been reversed—if the women’s building had lost water instead of the men’s—I have no doubt the women would have commandeered our flat.

“I am so sick of talking about showers,” she says.

We pay our bill and walk back to the camp. White trucks packed with Palestinian Authority security forces drive by; men in green uniforms with black machine guns. “Ah, the police with their machine guns,” I say. “You can tell it’s almost Christmas.”

There’s a demonstration that afternoon on Manger Street near the camp as tourists and dignitaries arrive in town. I’m not sure who organized it—I assume our hosts—though it’s small: mainly our group of volunteers and some local teens; a chance to again remind out-of-towners of the Palestinians’ plight. A teenager hands me a sign, poster-sized, tacked to a wood handle. Monique has one as well. The sign is in Arabic, and—I’m sorry. I refuse to hold a sign when I don’t know what it says. I hand it to one of the teens.

A motorcade of black cars—presumably Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas—drives slowly past, men in black suits walking on both sides. Monique talks with a French tourist couple. I ask her what they said.

“I told them about why we are here, and the man said you will not go home the same.”

“That’s true—you’ll stink from the lack of showers.”

She whacks me on the head with her sign. She has a charm that seems particularly bright here; a mix of seriousness and playfulness that makes Beit Jibrin seem not so sad. Later, she balances the sign on her head and carefully raises her arms, like a tightrope walker.

“This is so the planes can read the sign,” she says.

In 1958, a month or two before Dad graduated from Wakefield High School, he went on the senior class bus trip to New York City. My father had some wild friends back then, though Dad himself was not a terribly wild guy. But on the senior trip, he and his buddies got so drunk that he was kicked off the baseball team, forbidden from attending the senior prom, forbidden from attending graduation. Their behavior was so bad that Wakefield actually ended its senior class trip program due to Dad and his drunken pals. Which is impressive in a Bluto kind of way.

Telling you this story is disrespectful, according to my mother. (Which is why she won’t reveal what Dad and his pals did while drunk.) But I don’t want you to think Dad was perfect, or that I’ve exalted him to some saintlike position in my mind. Dad had failings and flaws like any of us. His steady manner, I suppose, made it seem like he had fewer.

“He didn’t need to be the center of attention,” said Kevin, Dad’s friend. Kevin still maintains that my father was the best manager he ever worked for. “He wasn’t someone who had to hear himself talk. He didn’t need to be the loudest person in the room. He evaluated people and their strengths and put them in a position to succeed.”

Dad became something of a wine drinker after moving to California, not all that surprising given their proximity to Napa. When he and Mom moved back to Virginia, I noticed he was drinking a gin and tonic every evening. One before dinner. Maybe one after. Sometimes two. I never thought it was a problem, but I wondered, at times, if it was the start of a problem. Had he lived, had he become bored by retirement—

“No way,” said Kevin, who doesn’t drink. “He was too disciplined.”

I always admired that discipline; the management books he read, the long hours. But as I got older, I thought his priorities were misguided. He regretted not spending more time with us, and you know what? He should have spent more time with us. It’s not that I feel cheated; I feel like he cheated himself.

Now that I’m in the Middle East over Christmas, away from Julie, I see more easily how it happens. You tell yourself you’ll make up for it. You justify it. Dad balanced his own ambitions by saying my sister and I would never experience a childhood like his own. I’ve told myself that being here, alone, will strengthen my marriage, because I had to break free of my no-kids funk. One mid-December night, about six months before Dad’s death, I turned on the Christmas tree lights—Julie had already gone to bed; I’d worked late that night—and lay down on the couch. I read some Christmas cards, including holiday letters from long-lost friends, the kind with clip art and photos and happy paragraphs about their kids’ many accomplishments. And reading those letters about first steps and family trips and report cards and recitals … that’s the night it hit me. The night I really felt the weight of it.

I’m never going to be a father.

I lay on the couch that night until almost 4 a.m.

I don’t have many regrets when it comes to my own father, but one stands out. When I was a kid, Dad worked for a couple of startup tech companies formed by a friend. Typically the companies failed after a few years. I remember how thrilled he was when he was hired at a Fortune 500 company, because it meant stability and benefits.

When I was in high school, my next-door neighbor delivered the Washington Star, an afternoon newspaper. Each summer their family went on a summer trip to Rehoboth Beach and I’d deliver the papers while they were gone. In 1981, while I was handling the route, the Star announced it was ceasing publication. “I’m carrying on the family tradition of killing companies,” I told Dad. I was joking, and he knew it, and it would continue to be something of a family joke. But it bothers me that I told him this, and never how much I admired him.

No man is indifferent about his father. His life is the standard, good or bad, whether he abandoned us, enlightened us, or burdened us with the weight of his deeds. Anger or esteem, resentment or reverence—you may love your father, you may hate your father, but you are not apathetic about your father.

Dad never wanted me to be him. He only wanted me to be happy. He only wanted me to do my best. Here in the West Bank, I don’t feel like I’m accomplishing either.

On Christmas Eve, after helping Doug and Kayla prepare a group lunch of canned tuna and veggies, the three of us walk to Bethlehem. We skipped most of the early-afternoon festivities in town, letting the crowds thin out. Upwards of fifty thousand pilgrims are arriving, mostly Christians, mostly from Israel and the West Bank. Only a few hundred of Gaza’s roughly four thousand Christians were granted permits by the Israeli government. While the streets don’t seem too packed—many Palestinians can’t get here because of the security and the time-consuming hassles—we felt it best to avoid the mass of Christmas tourists squeezing through the Door of Humility into the Church of the Nativity; the visitors watching the annual parade, with bagpipers and Palestinian boy scouts and girl scouts marching to Manger Square.

Sometimes you know pretty quickly when you’ve made a friend for life, and I feel that way about Doug and Kayla. A few nights ago the three of us went to the Bonjour Café. While walking up the long hill, we met three teenagers coming the opposite way.

“Hello!” said one as we passed.

We all nodded, but none of us said anything—we each thought the other would offer a chipper response—so the teens must have felt dissed, because behind us we heard a loud “Fuck you!”

We busted out laughing. I always seem to laugh with them, and in Beit Jibrin, laughter is a necessity. That first night at the center, the IPYL leader, Adli Daana, told us that Palestinians have a dark sense of humor. It’s a coping mechanism.

We enter the old town. “Think anyone else will tell us to fuck off?” I say.

“Merry Christmas—fuck you!” says Kayla.

Doug laughs. “There’s a Christmas carol you’ll never hear.”

We have hours of free time until evening, when everyone’s heading to Manger Square for Christmas Eve. As we wander through crowded markets, we run into Monique. The four of us walk, eyeing the multitude of wares—the fruits and CDs and clothes and cloths. Doug and Kayla leave for a tour and an olive-carving shopping trip with Joshua, their hotel owner friend, so Monique and I grab a drink. The restaurant—St. George’s—looks out on Manger Square. We sit at an outdoor table, watching the square as it fills, the stage workers preparing for the Christmas Eve concert.

It’s getting chilly. The temperature was pleasingly warm when I left the camp with Doug and Kayla—near 70 degrees today, compared to the icy postblizzard conditions back home—so I didn’t bring my sweater. I cross my arms to keep warm. Somewhere, though we can’t see him, a singer croons “Silent Night.”

We order a first round of beers, and then a second. I nod my head toward the blond-haired tourist family at the table next to us.

“Let’s play a game,” I say. “German or not German?”

She studies them. “What do you think.”

“I say German. Note the sandals with socks.”

She gets up, stands behind them and pretends to survey the square. The father looks up. Monique nods. Merry Christmas, she says. Merry Christmas, they respond. She chats with them for a moment, then sits back down at our table.

“Canadian,” she tells me.

“Canadian? No way…”

She smiles and pulls a cigarette from the box. I shake my head.

“Canadian. Jeez. That’s embarrassing.”

“You are right to be embarrassed.”

“Maybe they’re German-Canadians.”

“Or they’re lying.”

She lights a cigarette as I watch.

“Do you want one?”

“Sure—what the hell.”

I have maybe two to three cigarettes a year, usually in Richmond. Tom and Adam and Terry are classic beer-makes-me-want-a-cigarette smokers. Meaning they never smoke unless we’re at a bar or they’ve had a few drinks.

I’m not a good smoker.

“Do I look cool?” I ask.

“Oh yes,” she says. “You look so cool as you cough.”

I ask her how she would normally spend Christmas Eve. She doesn’t answer. I get the clear vibe that she doesn’t want to answer. So I ask if she’s bringing home any gifts.

“Maybe I will bring home a child,” she says. “Though I will need to split him up to fit in my luggage.”

“You can reassemble him when you get home.”

Children occasionally wander by the tables asking for money. Monique gave away her last few coins to one boy, but now another is pestering her. I used my last coins for the beer.

“No—I don’t have anything,” she tells him.

“Yes,” he says.

“No—I’m sorry.”

“Yes.”

He repeats this.

Yes yes yes yes

“I think it’s a lost cause,” I say.

We decide to head back. The boy finally wanders to another table.

“You are cold,” she says.

“Yeah, I should’ve brought my coat.”

She takes my hand and kisses it. We stand up, and I smile, and I think—

What was that? Was that a French thing?

Julie has e-mailed me Christmas Eve photos from home. She sends photos of my mom, my nieces and nephew, my sister’s two golden retrievers. The photos are a lifeline to home, and I view them again and again on my tiny screen.

Christmas Eve has always been one of my favorite nights. When I was kid, we’d go with our next-door neighbors for a candlelight church service—we were one of those families that only went on Christmas Eve—and then back to our neighbors’ house, where folks would swing by for cookies and ham biscuits and drinks while we hyper kids ran around the basement.

Here in Bethlehem, most of us make a postdinner trek back to Manger Square. Between walking everywhere and limited food given the size of our group—second helpings are no guarantee—I can tell I’m losing more weight. After the daily hikes in Ecuador I was down to about 180 pounds, the least I’ve weighed since high school. And I feel thinner now.

Once again I’m Doug and Kayla’s third wheel. The square is packed; by the time we arrive, around nine o’clock, the concert is booming under bright colored lights. We squeeze our way through the throng. The concert is not choirs singing church songs, but pop music from around the world; a Latin American singer shimmies with her backup singers.

“Notice anything about the crowd?” says Doug.

“It’s, like, ninety-five percent men.”

“And the only women are foreigners.”

The towering Christmas tree by the Church of the Nativity is bright with strands of white light, a beaming star on top. After the salsa singer, belly dancers perform. Men rush the stage, cell phone cameras raised above heads like digital candles. Guys sit on the shoulders of buddies.

“This is probably as close to nudity as it gets here,” I tell Doug.

We missed about three-fourths of the concert, and now all the performers join for a final, swaying, arms-around-each-other, peace-on-earth number. And that’s pretty much it. The crowd starts thinning out.

“Now what?” I say.

We kind of thought the celebration would last longer than 10 p.m. While milling about the square we run into some of the other volunteers, including Monique, who joins me, Doug, and Kayla. We walk around the back side of the church, looking in the window of a shop selling religious items. In a small wood cradle is a doll, which I presume is baby Jesus but looks oddly like Bob’s Big Boy. The four of us have a beer at St. George’s, then walk back.

Though it’s not yet the twenty-fifth, that afternoon I’d sent Julie a Happy Birthday e-mail.

“I was thinking earlier that we probably haven’t been apart for your birthday since we were in college,” I wrote. “I am sorry for that: it won’t happen again. But you are very much with me, and I hope you have a wonderful Xmas with your parents and an equally happy birthday. I love you very much—see you on Monday. Miss you…”

She e-mailed back.

“So what made you decide to make this trip at this particular time?”

I wasn’t expecting that response. And because it’s e-mail, I can’t tell the tone. Is this sarcastic? Is this genuine curiosity? Julie is smarter than me, she’s warmer than me, but she’s just as enigmatic. So I can’t help but wonder if this is code for a question more like—

How could you leave me on Christmas? And my birthday?

I’m sure my answer was unsatisfying: this was pretty much the only time I could find a volunteer gig in the West Bank.

We walk back to Beit Jibrin. Doug and I leave Kayla and Monique at the center and head back to the flat. I unzip my sleeping bag, sweep out some of the grit with my hand, and crawl in, the floor hard despite the blankets underneath. I look at my watch. It’s almost midnight. Back home, it’s about six o’clock, Christmas morning.

“How do you feel, United States?”

Monique asks me this, sitting on the curb in front of the Handala Center, leaning against a wall, sunglasses on, enjoying a morning cigarette in the sun.

“I feel groggy,” I say.

“I do too.”

Our volunteer work is done. Had I known this I would have scheduled my flight home earlier. But I’m here, so today, Christmas, is basically a day to explore. Doug and Kayla are heading to Jerusalem; I give them my maps and my Lonely Planet book. They’re going even though Doug has caught the Handala cold bug that’s infecting us one by one. Sore throat, coughing, lots of nose blowing. I’ve avoided it so far, though viruses are clearly thriving in our tight quarters. We’re also sharing cups and silverware, which only sort of get clean. So this is one helluva happy Christmas if you’re an infectious microorganism.

A few other folks have upset stomachs. Having learned my lesson from China, I brought plenty of queasy-tummy tablets, which I’m distributing to needy volunteers.

“I hear you have Pepto,” Tyler asks me on the street. I feel like a drug dealer.

I sit down next to Monique on the curb, resting my arms on bent knees, the sun warm on my face. A woman with a scarf over her head stands in the doorway next to us and says Merry Christmas. Thank you, we say—Merry Christmas.

Since the day is free, Monique has organized a road trip. She talked with Bruno the Italian snorer: he said Jericho is only an hour away and it’s a beautiful trip. So I’m joining Monique and Marcen and Camille, a Belgian woman. After breakfast, we walk down Manger Street to a garage where cabdrivers congregate. Marcen makes a deal with the driver of a minivan. We take a new route in a new direction, passing a homemade Homer Simpson painting on a wall. Hanging from the van’s rearview mirror is a small Arafat image, about the size of a baseball card, and below that an American flag air freshener.

“Hey—check it out,” I say, pointing at the Stars and Stripes.

Monique hums the beginning of the national anthem and salutes.

After passing through a checkpoint, our driver becomes a lead foot, screeching on tight turns through twisty roads in the harsh, tan mountains.

“This is like one of your American movies,” says Monique as we jerk from side to side.

Finally we reach the exit to Jericho. Just outside the town, our driver stops. Behind a white iron fence, surrounded by dirt, is an ancient sycamore tree, its trunk about four feet wide. According to legend, it’s the tree from Luke 19:1–10. A rich tax collector named Zacchaeus climbed the tree because he couldn’t see Jesus amid the crowd. Jesus saw Zacchaeus and told him he’d spend the night as his guest, which irked some I’m-so-virtuous members of the throng. “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner,” sneered a pious observer.

I like those moments when Jesus defies social expectations. He hangs out with the tax collector. Lets the immoral woman scrub his feet. Tells the self-righteous to go ahead and hurl that first stone if they’re free of sin.

I’ve always wondered how the average American would respond if Jesus appeared tomorrow in Anyburb, U.S.A. My own personal belief—and I have zero evidence to support this—is that in much of America, race is less significant than status. As long as you mow your chemical-enhanced Kentucky bluegrass yard and scrub your oyster-gray midsize Volvo XC90, people don’t care about color. It’s the melting-pot triumph of credit scores over creed. So if a shaggy Palestinian guy in ratty clothes showed up tomorrow with zero cash and zero possessions, claiming to be the messiah, spouting the message that the rich would have an easier time getting that Volvo through a needle’s eye than going to heaven, folks would be suspicious. At best, he’d be disregarded as a homeless hippie kook. At worst, an anti-American psychopath. The second coming would result in a second crucifixion.

It’s a lovely tree, by the way.

As for the main drag of Jericho, there’s not a whole lot here. Our driver hangs out by his minivan as we stroll on third-world streets past churches and mosques and small packed-with-stuff stores. We wander down a dusty side street, stop for a drink at an outdoor sandwich joint, sitting next to sweet-smelling basil plants. I pop open a Coke can. Cow carcasses hang on hooks in butcher shops. Beneath a beat-up blue cart a cat watches us, protecting two squinting kittens.

Monique, Marcen, and Camille speak French and I’m lost. They apologize and I say no, hey, it’s understandable. I share the extent of my French:

Hello, goodbye, thank you, you’re welcome, hat, egg, cheese, wine, ham, milk, apple juice, empty, shit.

“‘Shit’ is good to know,” says Marcen.

Marcen is from Morocco, though his accent is more French than Monique’s. The English word good, as he speaks it, rhymes with food or glued or sued.

Monique teaches me a drinking term: cul sec, which is the French equivalent of “bottoms up.” It means “dry ass,” she says—to leave the glass completely parched. I like cul sec so much I jot it down.

We reunite with our driver at the agreed-upon time, and he takes us to Tel es-Sultan, the site of ancient Jericho. It’s anywhere from seven to ten thousand years old, though it’s now a series of pits, more interesting for the rocky, Mars-like landscape rising beyond to the mountains. Nearby is a cable car that takes the curious to the Mount of Temptation, the spot where, it’s said, Jesus was tempted by the devil. A monastery is there, but it’s only open in the morning, and we’re watching our shekels. We decide to pass.

“We were tempted,” says Monique, as we walk to our minivan, “but we did not give in.”

I’m thinking the day was a bust when we decide to see the St. George’s Monastery. Marcen negotiates with the driver as we zoom past the desert mountains, leaving the highway for a lonely side road. The road ends at a quasi parking lot. There’s only one other car, and nothing but overwhelming desert, yet a man has a shaded stand where he makes orange juice. Monique buys a glass.

We walk through a three-arch archway, a cross on top, and then down a winding stone road. The drop-off from the road is steep, a canyon opening up before us, desolate, the sandy mountains seeming soft, as though they’d crumble if you touched them, and yet gritty enough to survive the ages. When we finally see the monastery in the distance, we almost gasp. It’s beautiful, carved into the cliffs, and were it not for a few blue and white domes and small red-roof balconies, it would blend into the mountain face. Greek Orthodox monks still live here, as they have since the sixth century.

It’s a solemn, peaceful place. Bethlehem’s bullet holes, the wall, the soldiers at checkpoints—they seem so far away. We gaze at the mountains, the canyon, the monastery; the few sparse trees like moss at its base; admiring the stillness and becoming part of it.

After all the debates, and all the meetings, about twenty of us go that night to the Murad Tourist Resort for a Christmas party. Monique was among those who declined; she felt it was inappropriate to stay in a refugee camp and play at a resort. She may be right, though we’re joined by Fateen and quite a few of our Palestinian friends. They seem delighted to be here, laughing and joking and sharing a pipe. My argument—and I couldn’t sway Monique on this—is that we’re pumping money into the local economy. Multiple times, speakers at the Handala Center discussed the drop in tourist dollars because of the Second Intifada and the wall. When I went to New Orleans, spending money in restaurants was probably more valuable than the work we did. I’m sure the same is true here given the high unemployment rates.

“The money will go to the owner,” says Monique. “He does not look like he needs money.” He’s not the owner, but a resort rep named Fahad, a friend of Fateen’s who came to the center one night to answer questions. He seemed like an okay guy, though something tells me Fahad’s top priority is to take very good care of Fahad.

I’m sticking with my help-the-economy theory. It’s easy to be holier-than-thou on these types of trips, and feel that spending cash on pleasure is inappropriate, but the locals seem thrilled that we’re drinking coffee and Taybeh beers and ordering falafel sandwiches. Men are working tonight who wouldn’t be if we’d stayed at the center feeling pure.

As is always the case here, the resort’s splashy brochure, which highlights the four water slides and the garden and pools, makes a political statement:

The resort provides Palestinian residents, who have been denied access to many tourist places beyond the green line due to the crippling occupation and the separation wall, with a space for entertainment and relaxations. The Palestinian people are determined to enjoy life despite the bitterness of their suffering and their dire circumstances.

It’s worth all the awful meetings for the pool and the hot tub and the Turkish bath. Everyone is giddy, swimming, splashing, then running to the saunas. The Turkish bath has olive oil soap and ropelike pads for scrubbing. It’s the first time any of us feel clean—especially us men—in almost two weeks.

Dinner is in the al-Day’a Tent, a large party room that could double as a dance hall. The overhead lights give the room a dim orange hue; a Christmas tree glows near a corner. We start with pitas and an assortment of dips; dinner is beef with vegetables and potatoes. A few volunteers had requested a vegetarian meal. The kitchen replaces the meat with french fries.

A woman sings with a small band after dinner. Fateen and the others sing along, clapping and laughing. Some of the Europeans hit the dance floor, as do Kayla and Doug: he moves pretty well for a guy with a broken leg and a boot. A few of the young Euro volunteers make out under the pulsing lights. I stay back at our long table, drinking my one free soft drink, feeling like a very old chaperone, though that’s not a complaint. Some people pine for their youth, but I can’t imagine wanting to be twenty again; to be forty and missing high school. A friend once told me a man’s best years are in his thirties, but I think my forties will be my peak. I have nothing to base this on, just a gut feeling. A persistent belief in possibilities.

On the ride back, Kayla and Paul discuss music. Paul McCartney’s name comes up.

“He’s such a wanker,” says Kayla.

“A wanker?” I say. “The man wrote ‘Hey Jude.’”

“He’s a wanker.”

“What about ‘Eleanor Rigby’? Or ‘Let It Be’?”

“Wanker.”

I laugh. “Merry Christmas, Kayla.”

“Merry Christmas, Kenny.”

Our last day, Fateen organizes a trip to the Dead Sea. I’m excited to see it; so excited that I don’t mind clambering into yet another minimal-leg-room bus to make the same drive we made yesterday (only farther). When we reach the checkpoint, Fateen asks for everyone’s passport. He gives the stack to a soldier.

“Two Palestinian flags are hanging on the windshield,” says Monique with a nod of her head. The tiny flags hang from suction cups. “That is very provocative.”

“We need the American flag air freshener from yesterday.”

“This air freshener is red—they will think we are Communists.”

As we wait—the national pastime here—Conor questions the effectiveness of examining our passports and not examining the bus.

“What’s to stop us from having a terrorist in here?” he says.

The gate finally rises and we drive past concrete barriers to the highway, passing settlements on a peak with palm-tree-lined entrances. The settlements look down on slums; cluttered clotheslines and rusted roofs with rusting water tanks. We exit the desert highway, then head down a side road to the beach, passing several empty, deserted, neglected buildings.

At the first beach, Fateen gets out, then comes back. We can’t go here. Why, someone asks. “Because they don’t allow Palestinians,” he says.

We go to the second beach. The same thing happens.

At times here I’ve thought … this is what the Deep South was like during Jim Crow. I feel that again as we search for a beach. In June 2008, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the country’s largest human rights organization, filed a petition with the Israeli Supreme Court claiming that Palestinians are regularly prohibited from entering beaches in the northern Dead Sea, and that the checkpoint we passed—the Beit HaArava checkpoint on Route 90—was established to keep Palestinians away. The reason, according to the petition, was that Israelis managing the beaches claimed a mix of patrons hurt their businesses.

We’re finally allowed to enter the third beach we approach. We pay an entry fee and walk through a turnstile. The facilities include a restaurant, a shop selling beach towels and T-shirts, and a locker room with showers. Monique talks me into a cup of coffee before I venture to the shore. I sit, sip, and unzip the bottom legs of my quick-dry pants to make shorts.

“You are a biker,” she says.

“Yeah—I bike a fair amount. How’d you know?”

“I can tell by your legs.”

I have my father’s body: skinny but strong legs, no ass.

Kayla and I walk to the water. She doesn’t have a bathing suit, so she’s improvising, wearing a black sports bra and underpants, which looks like a bikini. I had reassured her that no one would notice the difference, and now, as we stroll through the sand, I chastise her in my most shocked, most self-righteous tone for wearing undies to a family beach.

“You’re an asshole,” she says, much to my satisfaction.

The Dead Sea is known for two things: its salt and its mud. The salinity level is so high—almost nine times that of ocean water—that fish and plants can’t live here. It also means you’re buoyant. I lie on my back and sprawl on the water. Kayla curls up in a ball, floating.

About ten feet in front of us, Ryan, one of the Irishmen, growls in pain.

“Arrrghh—I got it in my eyes,” he says, standing. “Jesus—it’s worse than the tear gas.”

Yesterday, Ryan and Jerome and a few others attended a protest near Ramallah. The soldiers fired tear gas and flash-bangs: a grenade that unleashes disorienting sound and light and can cause temporary deafness and blindness. Jerome brought back an empty tear gas canister, showing it off like a souvenir from Six Flags.

The Dead Sea mud is rich in minerals, and good for the skin, which is why beachgoers famously smear it on their bodies. The mud is supposed to treat everything from acne to arthritis to anxiety; from psoriasis to muscle stiffness. Shiny mud-covered people wander the shore, the dim sun reflecting off their metallic sheen.

After coating myself with Dead Sea muck, I rinse off at a shower on the edge of the beach and walk along the water. Two Arab men sit in the sun in plastic chairs, wearing white shirts and slacks. Large crystals of salt are scattered like white rocks along the shore. Conor finds one the size of a small watermelon, which he plans to take home. I pick up a smaller, tennis-ball-sized rock to show Julie.

Monique stands on the steps that lead from the beach to the restaurant and facilities, frowning. “This is a settlement,” she says, having wandered the grounds and seen the nearby homes and security. “We have come to have fun at a settlement.”

“I’d wondered if those abandoned houses we passed on the way in once belonged to Palestinians,” I say.

“Of course they did. I can’t believe Fateen would bring us here.”

She drags a chair across the sand to the water’s edge, and she lights a cigarette, crosses her legs, and looks out at the salty water.

Back near the restaurant are tall shrubs with pink flowers. We congregate there before leaving. Monique walks with me back to the bus.

“My hands are sticky,” I say, rubbing them. “I’m not sure if it’s from the sea or the mud.”

“Use my magic potion,” she says, handing me a bottle of hand cleaner.

I squirt some and hand it back; she squirts some and uses too much.

“Smells like vodka,” I say.

“This cannot be used in homes for alcoholics.”

“So do you regret coming here today?”

“Yes.”

“Have a drink of your hand lotion. You’ll feel better.”

While waiting for the bus we observe a row of international flags: Italy, the United States, Canada, France, Sweden…

“There’s no Palestinian flag,” says Monique.

“And the American flag should be bigger than the rest,” I say, to annoy her.

The bus pulls up. On our way back, we stop at Nabi Musa, a site that Muslims believe holds Moses’s tomb, then drive through the desert. Not long after we return to Beit Jibrin, Monique asks if I want to grab a beer. There’s a six-thirty meeting at the center, but nothing starts on time here, so sure, I say—let me clean up a bit: I’m still sticky from the salt, a Dead Sea film on my flesh. I wash my hair with a bottle of water in the bathroom sink, then scrub myself with a sponge. I sniff my sweater to see if it’s tolerable, not that I have an alternative.

We take the usual route: through camp, up the steep road past the Bonjour Café and Bethlehem University to the old market streets. The sun is setting. A few nights ago, Mahad invited Doug and me to the roof of the Handala Center. Doug is a serious amateur photographer, so our hosts encouraged him to photograph the work projects. We climbed up a pull-down ladder, exiting through a hatch to the roof, the three of us looking out over Beit Jibrin and Bethlehem. The Judean mountains rose above the haze and the brown landscape. As the sun dipped from view, the sky turned a piercing pinkish orange, the few clouds a bright sci-fi gray.

Tonight, the sky is sullen. Darkness comes fast, blue then black.

We’re on a side street of shadowy buildings. A church rises across the street.

Monique is quiet. She seems lost in thought, lost in the darkness.

She stops.

I turn and look at her, wondering if something is wrong.

“May I kiss you,” she says.

My face, I imagine, is blank. Blank with stupidity. Blank with shock. As blank as my ill-prepared mind. In eighteen years of marriage, no woman, other than my wife, has asked to kiss me.

Monique walks toward me. Her arms slip through mine. Her lips are warm.

She nestles her head under my neck, her hair ruffling in the breeze, and we stand for a few moments, together, and then we continue walking toward Manger Square.

When I was in high school my parents separated for a spell. My sister was finishing college, so it was just me and Mom. Dad was living in Maryland, near where he worked. His commute from home was long: almost an hour each way, depending on traffic. We should’ve moved—we even looked at houses—but they didn’t because of me, so I wouldn’t switch schools and leave friends.

They’d been married for more than twenty years, since they were eighteen. Dad had a classic midlife crisis. After working so hard for so long, working so much harder than the guys with degrees, he must have thought the usual thoughts:

My life is half over. I’m not going to achieve all I’d hoped to achieve. Is this all there is?

I wasn’t much help to Mom. I was a junior in high school, and all I wanted was to see my friends and be with Julie. I was bad about coming home on time, which irritated Mom. If I was supposed to be home at 11 p.m., I’d make it back around 11:30. One night, well past my Mom-imposed curfew, Julie and I stood in her carport, kissing.

“Who’s that?” she said abruptly.

A shadow was marching down the street.

“I dunno . . .”

Looks like . . . a bathrobe?

“Oh my God—that’s my mother. I better go . . .”

I kissed Julie goodbye and walked down the driveway. Mom was furious. I don’t remember her rant, which was justified, but when you’re sixteen and in love, nothing else matters. I feel bad when I look back, because her marriage was in crisis and I was no help.

Dad came frequently to the house and moved back several months later. We moved to California when he took a job there, but I soon came back to Virginia for my senior year in high school, living with a friend and his family. Mom and Dad stayed married, forty-seven years in all, until Dad’s death.

Manger Square is quiet now that Christmas has passed. Monique and I sit at one of the green plastic outdoor tables at St. George’s restaurant. She lights a cigarette. We order two Taybehs.

“We have not discussed our personal lives,” she says. “I have enjoyed that, you know? But perhaps we should.”

We talk about our parents. Our hopes and disappointments. Children. Relationships. Loss. Her father recently died. I talk about Julie, holding up my hand so the ring is visible as we talk.

Monique would like to have children, but she wonders if she’s too old.

“You’re only thirty,” I say.

I was surprised to learn her age. I thought she was my age. And I mean that as a compliment.

I ask her how old she thinks I am. Most people—Kayla, all the teachers in China—guess about thirty-five. Sometimes even thirty. I have gray hair near my temples, but a baby face. She studies me.

“Forty-three,” she says.

I’m stunned. “That’s dead on,” I say. “I mean . . . that’s exactly right.”

“You are disappointed because I did not think you were younger.”

“No, no—it’s just . . . no one ever gets it right.”

“I’ve always been good at this.”

“At guessing ages?”

“At solving riddles. When I was a girl, everyone would come to me when something was missing, and I would find it.”

She takes my hand on the table. Rubs my fingers with her thumb.

“Let’s get something to eat,” she says. “I’m feeling a little drunk.”

We order chicken shawarma from a stand. I tell her we need to go back for the meeting.

“I don’t want to go,” she says. “Please. Let’s stay here. We have time.”

Behind the stand is an inside dining room. I check my watch. For two weeks I’ve shown up on time and sat, waiting. We might as well follow Middle Eastern time.

“Let’s stay, warm up, eat, and then we’ll head back,” I say.

She’s happy, and orders a cup of spearmint tea. She takes my hand again on the table; looks at our hands together. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know if I should pull it away. But then she pulls it off, as if remembering—

Wait—you’re married.

We begin the walk back to Beit Jibrin. I’m trying to convince her the meeting will be fine. Afterward there’ll be a party, and then volunteer performances.

At the top of the hill, the city opens up: the Bonjour Café and homes below, city lights—apartment lights—gleaming to our left, though it’s the darkness that dominates. The streets are empty, the sidewalks empty. The West Bank is still.

She stops.

She embraces me.

Back home, I have a lot of female friends. I work with a lot of women. I don’t think about it. And I enjoy being with Monique. I love her spirit, her sense of humor. She cares about people. I feel close to her, particularly now, particularly here. But I never saw this coming. And I’m not sure how to handle it. I’m not sure I’m equipped to handle it. I’m in bomb-scarred Bethlehem, I’m holding a Frenchwoman, she’s holding me—this is not how my life works. It’s like I’m back on the Tarzan swing in Costa Rica, moving too fast, in too many directions, my ego offering internal high-fives—Damn, dude, you’ve still got it—my mind trying to control the situation, and wondering if I really am in control of the situation, and if I’m not in control then what the hell might happen here?

And then a calming thought, a reassuring voice, whatever you want to call it, tells me—

Don’t do anything you’re gonna regret.

Which startles me. Because it’s a tether to my real life. Because I know on some deeper level it means—

Remember who you are. And who loves you. And who’s waiting for you.

You only find out about yourself when you’re outside your comfort zone.

I had wanted, I’d said, to scrape away the layers of myself and discover what’s underneath; scrape like I scraped that stubborn shed in New Orleans, peeling off what’s dry and chipped and dead.

I know now.

I know, perhaps more than I’ve ever known, who I really am.

Strip me to my core and . . .

I’m a guy who loves his wife.

The same woman I’ve loved since I was fifteen.

And that’s all I am, and all I’ve ever been. And it’s all I want to be.

“Where have you been?” Kayla asks when we return. Everything started on time. The meeting. Dinner. Of course. Plates of cookies sit on a long table that’s covered with a white plastic Christmas tablecloth. The meeting, I hear, focused on how to advance the Palestinian cause once we’re home. Kayla says the bulk of the discussion was an argument over what to call the Facebook page.

The mood is festive yet sad. Kayla meets Mahad’s mother. She tells his mom how impressed she is by Mahad; what a kind man he is. The mother says this is the first time in several years that all three of her sons are free. And then she cries. Kayla doesn’t know what to do. In the time we’ve been here, I’ve not heard one Palestinian denigrate Jewish people or Israelis. They emphasize that the problem is not the people but the policies. But as Mahad’s mother quietly weeps, she tells Kayla, “I hate them. I hate what they have done to my family.”

We move to the bigger room on the fourth floor, the site of many meetings. Fateen thanks everyone for their efforts. Tonight is intercultural night, and as in China, volunteers perform. An older Frenchwoman plays guitar and the Finnish girl sings—a beautiful, vulnerable voice. The Italians lead another spirited rendition of “Bella Ciao,” this time with the lyrics projected in English onto a screen. Joe-hammad reads two poems he wrote, sounding on the verge of tears when he’s done.

Afterward, almost everyone goes to the Marvel Restaurant for a final shindig. We drink Taybehs and everyone sings. “Bella Ciao” returns again. Paul plays a sing-along of “Norwegian Wood”—everyone la-la’s the sitar part—and “Give Peace a Chance.” Kayla Googles lyrics for “Livin’ on a Prayer” and we sing, the Brits and the Irish chiming in on the Ohhhhhh-OHHH chorus. We stay until almost 3 a.m.

“It is probably the most business he has in years,” says Monique.

I think back to the boy in Hebron. Please buy. Very hard here. No business. Please buy.

You couldn’t pay me to be a Palestinian in the West Bank, let alone in Gaza. I find it almost comical now when I hear some TV wonk or newspaper opinionator harrumph about Palestinian demands. Why would anyone want to be a Palestinian? What could possibly be appealing about it? The high unemployment rate? The lack of security? The lack of land, water, rights, power, money—what? As one of the young rappers said, it’s a bad life. If I have to live in the West Bank, I want a home in one of those palm tree and swimming pool settlements, plucking olives from confiscated trees, protected by troops.

Peaceniks have often dreamed of a Palestinian Gandhi. A leader who recognizes that when one side is strong and the other is weak, nonviolence is the mightiest force. It’s not too late for a nonviolent shift, I suppose, though it’s hard to picture macho Palestinian men joining hands and singing “If I Had a Hammer.” But when I hear young men like Mahad speak of boycotts, and when I hear Fateen pronounce, We want to say to the world, “We are civilians in front of soldiers,” well, perhaps there’s hope, though my cynical guess is that the Palestinians will remain fractured politically and philosophically, and that militants will continue to lob missiles into Israel, and to ignite themselves on buses, and to validate bloody reprisals, and that twenty years from now, maybe more, maybe less, the Israelis will have grabbled most of the land, settlement by settlement, fence by fence, leaving some paltry scraps for a small, symbolic, impotent Palestinian state.

If I’ve learned one thing from my time here, it’s to live by the words of Bethlehem’s most famous son—In everything do to others as you would have them do to you. It seems obvious, yet in the urgencies of life we forget, though virtually every religion emphasizes the same theme:

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you.

One should seek for others the happiness one desires for himself.

Do not unto others what you would not have them do unto you.

(That’s Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, just to save you a search.)

Some philosophers have questioned these golden-rule statements with a simple argument: how do you know how others want to be treated? But I think we all know what constitutes torment, and we all know what constitutes malice, and we all know when we’ve treated others in ways we’d never wish upon ourselves.

Always look at the other side, Dad had said.

The challenge in life is not simply being kind to others. The challenge is being kind to those who don’t deserve it. To be kind to those we despise. To choose empathy over scorn, peace over cruelty. Violence is easy. Any idiot can kill. Compassion requires effort, the restraint of brutal instincts. It is, as Conor so eloquently said, a fucking humpy fuck.

The next morning Monique and I drink a final coffee, sitting at a two-person table outside a restaurant on Manger Street, the one with the peace-sign Santa on the window. It’s a warm, T-shirt morning: I pull off my sweater and drape it on the back of my chair. In a way, it’s like last night never happened. No awkwardness, just two friends sipping java.

She makes some sort of an anti-American crack, partly for my benefit, partly because she has a genuine anti-American bias, and I say, “Listen, just for me, tell me five things you like about America. Actually, I’ll make it easier for you: tell me three things.”

She thinks, legs crossed, holding a cigarette. “Well, I like you. And I like your Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore.” She pauses. “And I like the idea of your national parks.”

“Good choice.”

“And I like your national anthem.”

She hums it again, sounding like a horn, as she did on the trip to Jericho—

Brr brr-brr brr brr BRRR . . .

“That’s five,” I say. “You gave me a bonus.”

We go back to Handala to help clean up. All the men work on the flat. Four of us haul the refrigerator out of the kitchen, down the steps. It’s awkward, heavy work, the fridge barely fitting. I hadn’t realized it didn’t belong in the kitchen. The apartments are normally used by the women’s group that creates handmade crafts. I’m sure they’ll love returning to a largely unventilated room and the stench of eighteen underwashed men.

A small group of us head to town for lunch, to the same Santa-in-the-window restaurant where Monique and I had coffee. Doug orders the Philly cheesesteak, which—surprise—is not as good as a real Philly cheesesteak. Afterward, some of us head back; others are staying in town. Devin is on his way to Gaza. Monique and Marcen are traveling to Jordan, then returning to Beit Jibrin for New Year’s Eve.

Monique and I say goodbye. I’ll miss her. I’ll miss her bel esprit. And yet I’m also relieved.

Back at Handala, we drag our suitcases to the littered street. Doug and Kayla donate their Frisbee to the center; Mahad asks them to sign it. I pull my tall blue backpack over my shoulders and fasten the straps. As we leave Beit Jibrin, the three of us plus Conor, Benjamin, and a few others, Kayla notes that the local boys look bitter. She thinks it’s because we’re leaving and they’re staying.

Mahad escorts us as we walk along the wall, the hideous gray wall, back to the checkpoint. Among the paintings and scrawls are the words “Made in the USA.”

A few local guys wave as we walk. “You from Azzeh camp?”

“Yeah, man,” says Conor with a grin.

Ma’a salama, they say.

Goodbye.

We reach the checkpoint. Mahad embraces each of us.

It’s time to go home. I want to go home. I want to see my wife.