Nervousness seems to be a constant feeling I come across on this trip. Since Kish Island was a little too reckless for my liking, I decided to go to the West Bank of Palestine instead. There are many daily tours from Jerusalem, which made it seem more legit, and the rocket exchanges between Hamas and Israel typically originate from Gaza as that is Hamas controlled and the West Bank is ruled by Fatah. As we drive to the Palestinian military checkpoint, I see the varied forms of the contentious West Bank Barrier. In some areas it is a brick wall, and in others just a metal fence with electric barb wires. I was hoping to see Bansky’s latest work somewhere on the wall, but alas I was not so fortunate. The wall has severely limited access for Palestinians to enter Jerusalem for work, medical purposes etc; they must hold permits to enter. There used to be some 300,000 Palestinians working in Israel, but now only 30,000. It is understandable as to why Israel is building the wall; it is surrounded by 18 Arab nations that want it defeated. In fact, Ahmadinejad has said that Israel must be destroyed, and when questioned about the lives of the millions of Muslims that live there, he repeated the same; Israel must be destroyed. Some crazy $#%&ed up shit going on in this region!! But the wall is still controversial as they are building many parts of it on Palestinian land.
So we are on the bus, me, a former navy officer from Mauritius and our Muslim driver. The officer is on a religious pilgrimage (as many of the folks that I met in Israel), and we are going to Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ. He starts narrating Christian history (which I am interested in as I had gone to Catholic school for many years), and the conversation moves to Islam and suicide bombings in Israel. While interesting, it was not the right time to talk about this. We have a Muslim driver who is taking us to Palestine, and here he is criticizing Islam. All I wanted to say was “dude shut the hell up”, but couldn’t quite come up with the right way to say it.
The border checkpoint was pretty informal as we did not look Israeli and there were only 2 of us on the bus, the Palestinian authority did not check our passports. It’s amazing to see that just across the border, how different life is. The West Bank looks much poorer than Jerusalem of course. We visited the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem and walked through the various chambers, with catacombs..all I could think of is Poe’s Tell Tale Heart. We end the tour at a gift store, where I buy random things, unneeded of course, but felt obliged to support the local economy.
I was sitting in the hostel in Jerusalem with several other wanderers; there is breaking news on BBC about a hijacked bus near the Israel/Egypt border, with civilian deaths. Two folks from Holland were quite shocked, as they were to go to Eilat the next day. Thank God I never listened to anyone who told me to take a bus from Israel to Egypt. This type of thing happens often, but you never realize the gravity of the situation until you are there. The next day at the airport, I got searched for a good 3 hours, as did the rest of the passengers flying from Israel to Egypt.
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