on travel in palestine
TRANSCRIPT
-
8/6/2019 On Travel in Palestine
1/8
Nathaniel Whittemore
Essay 2 October 14, 2005
In writing, the flavor and texture of food are often reconstructed but
never truly remembered. The act of eating is simply too banal to mean much
on its own. It requires moments of association to become more than
perfunctory. Meals are acts of creation. They are remembered because she
said yes, because the Pyramids flickered in candle light to the left, because
they are the setting for the end, the beginning, or both. The meal gives
context and content to the routine of existence. Our claim to cuisine is our
mastery over necessity. If eating is surviving, to dine is to live. The ghosts of
meals past are never cheeseburgers, lobsters, or borsch. They are new lovers
caught in furtive glances and grandfathers talking about Ted Williams one
last time.
My memory of my time in Palestine begins and ends with meals. In
between, there was food but never the moments of enlightenment or self-
realization that make eating memorable. The feeling of the food on my
tongue and the tingling of my taste-buds are long since forgotten. When it
comes to the middle, I mostly remember the martyrs.
We arrived in Tul Karem, Palestine at dusk. It was light enough to read
the Al-Aqsa Brigade grafitti but dark enough to see the glow of far-off
sheesha embers as men gathered to discuss the events of the day. Although
Alex and I were moving on our own, we had caught a ride that day with a
group of International Solidarity Movement volunteers. They were there to
learn about forming human shields and yelling at Israeli Defense Force
1
-
8/6/2019 On Travel in Palestine
2/8
soldiers. Most of them were young and American and bursting with ideology
and passion. The best of them were already a bit skeptical of their own role in
this big confused place. We hopped out at the Windows for Peace center and
thanked them for the ride.
Windows for Peace is an organization run jointly by Israeli and
Palestinian women, dedicated to providing creative and artistic outlets for
Palestinian children in refugee camps like the one found in Tul Karem. We
had come to talk to them about volunteerism and youth reconciliation in this
most volatile of political climates. It was part of a bigger trip that would take
us everywhere from Serbia and Bosnia to Egypt and Palestine to Uganda and
Rwanda.
We were greeted at the Center with the rich smiles of volunteers and
the rich smells ofshwarma. In Palestine, shwarma is ground lamb and beef,
slow-roasted all afternoon with parsley and onions. The meat is wrapped in
aiyeesh, the bread whose name means, literally, life. Cabbage and pickled
vegetables are added and finally tahini sauce is dribbled over the whole
concoction before its wrapped up and stuffed into a double layer plastic bag.
It is a Chipotle Burrito and a Jimmy Johns Gargantuan wrapped into one. No
mouth is big enough to take it on, and when the sauce starts to leak down
your cheek, you find yourself less embarrassed than worried that you might
lose a bit.
As we tucked in, I couldnt help drifting from our conversation to think
about how the dishes compared to other Arab food Id eaten. Lebanon is
almost as famous for its food as it is for its women. Ask anyone from
Alexandria to Damascus where to go for the best fava beans and theyll tell
2
-
8/6/2019 On Travel in Palestine
3/8
you Beirut. Jordans national dish is a broiled lamb head on top of rice and
cream sauce. In Aleppo the steamy sweet cardamom drink Sahleb warms up
any November night, and if you know where to go in Cairo, you can find fresh
Mango juice for just one Egyptian pound a little less than an average stick
of gum in America.
But Palestine is the hidden gem of the Arab culinary world. They do
spice better than the Egyptians and toppings better than the Jordanians.
Unlike the Lebanese, theyre not afraid to dip into the food gutter and fry up
some falafel, even when the companys refined.
Despite this, its not a country well-known for its food. It might be that
when we think of reputable cuisine, we think in terms of elegance. Our
palettes jump immediately to dainty banquets and salmon mousses. There is
nothing so frilly about Palestinian food. It is French fries stuffed in pitas and
various meats on various sticks. Its well cooked beef, always cut close to the
bone.
Then again, it might just be that our discourse of Palestine has no room
for a culinary dimension. Imagine the New York Times Sunday magazine
headline...Of Shwarma and Suicide Bombs
But then, for me, thats why that first shwarma was so good. Without
ever knowing exactly why, Ive been hooked on this place since I first read
about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 7th grade. My interest had manifested
itself in projects, papers, course work, and finally, in Fall 2004, study abroad
in the region itself. During that semester, I traveled to Cairo, Beirut, Tripoli,
Aleppo, Damascus, Petra, Wadi Rum, and Alexandria. I climbed Mt. Sinai in
the middle of the night to watch the sun rise and slept in the desert under the
3
-
8/6/2019 On Travel in Palestine
4/8
brightest Bedouin stars. Yet somehow, when December rolled around, it was
almost time to leave and I was more than out of money, and I still hadnt
made it to Palestine.
So as I dug into my sandwich one summer later, Aziz and Mahmud
bantering on about value added taxes or something, it felt a bit like
completion. It was my return to the Middle East, a place that had in subtle
ways become another home. I sat there, the shwarma settling. I was happy
and content to listen and finally see for myself what I had been reading about
for so long.
Tul Karem is nothing like the refugee camps we would later see in
Uganda. The children with flies that covered their faces, so persistent as to
be ignored, were nowhere to be found. There were no bellies distended from
parasites or malnutrition. Unlike camps like Lira and Gulu, nobody looked at
us as though we might be able to write a report that might somehow change
the squalor in which they lived. In Northern Uganda, a place torn apart by 19
years of child abductions and bush warfare, there are sometimes serious food
shortages, but a quiet resilient hope that seems equally rooted in faith in God
and faith in the international community. In Palestine, they have food to
spare but that sort of hope is in tremendously short supply.
Instead, there is cold irony and black humor. Children, especially boys,
in Tul Karem search not for salvation but release. Unlike Uganda, where the
enemy is rebels in the bush, a government that seems not to care, and a
world that seems not to notice, Palestinian kids face their demons every day.
They are the long hours spent waiting indeterminately at one of the ever-
4
-
8/6/2019 On Travel in Palestine
5/8
moving checkpoints and that great big grey wall that screams you are here
and here is where you stay. They are the nagging fears that someday it will
be my turn to be arrested, held, and beaten just because.
This was the refrain that we heard repeated time and time again in our
few days in that camp. The trauma of being a Palestinian young man is so
deeply psychological that it is nearly impossible to intellectualize.
I had known, before traveling, that I was against the Wall separating
Israel and the West Bank. I thought the policy of staffing mobile check points
with teenage Israeli soldiers, themselves terrified, could only result in more
problems. I knew these things, yet I was totally unprepared for what I actually
felt standing next to the Wall, sitting next to Arab men on the buses that
shuttled us between towns, looking up at the grey watchtowers knowing that
all it would take was one wrong move and I could have a high-impact round
pumped through my neck.
To be a Palestinian teenage boy is to live in a state of constant
emasculation. Work and money are controlled by the Israelis. Freedom of
movement is controlled by the Israelis. Communication with the Israelis is
controlled by the Palestinian National Authority - the hopelessly corrupt
Palestinian National Authority. It seems like the only way to take control of
your own life is to violently wrench it away from those in power. Really, the
only real freedom is in your choice of death.
Martyrdom is the centerpiece of struggle in Tul Karem. Every where
one goes there are posters of the dead. They are little folk heroes and fallen
friends. When you eat, the martyrs watch over you from all sides. They are
5
-
8/6/2019 On Travel in Palestine
6/8
little postcards on the mobile falafel stand and framed posters hung in the
sweet shops.
But there is always ambiguity. No one ever really celebrates a
situation that calls for self-annihilation. No matter how much graffiti lauds
their sacrifice, those martyrs are, for the boys in the camp, not political tools
but empty seats in the classroom and a missing player in the weekly soccer
game. They are friends.
What we fail to see in America is that the Palestinian cult of martyrdom
is not about chaos, not about hate, not even, as we so often suspect, about
God. It is the rational calculus of boys confronting their mortality every day. It
is about asserting control over destiny, if only for a moment. Like dining, it is
the recognition that just surviving is unacceptable.
We left the camp earlier than we expected. We told ourselves it was
because of certain rumblings from certain groups about a certain set of
Americans that they weren't so keen on having as visitors much longer. But
really it was because we couldn't take the strain. There is something powerful
and frightening about a place where people have such an intimate and open
relationship with death. By the third day, we felt not only an intellectual
comprehension but a blood-pounding-the-ears identification with the
rationality of those martyrs, and that spooked the shit out of us.
Taking advantage of the privilege that would follow us for the entire
trip, we got out of there. We had carved a little sense of place in East
Jerusalem and high tailed it back, hoping that our mainstay "Al Mattam
6
-
8/6/2019 On Travel in Palestine
7/8
Restaurant" would cheer us up. As we sat waiting for our food, Alex and I
talked about the whole strange affair.
On the way back, as if to cement the experience, I was pulled off the
Arab bus at an Israeli checkpoint and held for about forty-five minutes as the
soldiers handed around my passport. One by one they grimaced at my Syrian
and Lebanese stamps, mumbling in Hebrew and disgustedly scrunching the
noses that their oversized helmets fell down upon. They never said a word to
me. It was, again, about control. It was a release from their sometimes
monotonous, sometimes terrifying routine, and a way to let me know, silly
American who rides with these Arabs, who was boss. It was embarrassing and
frustrating at the same time. The bus waited the entire time, and as I climbed
back aboard, the grumbling acknowledgment of my broken Arabic apologies
made me feel like I had been through an initiation.
The delivery of the meal broke us out of our reminiscing. Luckily, I had
never been the type of person for whom affected moments stymied hunger.
No story I've ever told involved the words "and gosh, you know, I just couldn't
eat." But as I bit into this shwarma, the one I had ordered not just for its
flavor but for its sentimental value, there was no rush of connection, no
homecoming in the hummus. The tahini didn't even drip down my face. The
whole act was chewing and swallowing and washing it down. I gulped the last
bites, finished off my Miranda orange drink and paid.
We would come back to Al-Mattam a number of times before we left
Palestine and Jerusalem for good, and each time the food was spectacular -
just as it had been before the trip to the camp. But for that one meal, there
was something off. Maybe its that Al-Mattam was unique in its total lack of
7
-
8/6/2019 On Travel in Palestine
8/8
shihadeen martyr posters. Or maybe it was that our guts were too busy
squirming with a different feeling to care much about this tasty beef.
That sensation of knowing killers has faded a bit, replaced by the
memory of what it was like to feel that way. Mostly I fake it when people ask
me how my trip this summer was. I don't tell them about the martyrs, just
like I don't tell them about child soldiers from Uganda or decaying bones
left between the pews of churches in Rwanda. Instead, I just tell them about
all the amazing food.
8