My Tasty First Hour in Palestine

Leaving Israel I took a cab to the Security Barrier, then walked through the lonely no man’s land, which reminded me of the US-Mexico border between San Diego and Tijuana. Once across, I hopped into one of the many Palestinian cabs waiting on the Arab side of the wall for the quick ride into downtown Bethlehem. Jerusalem and Bethlehem are just minutes apart… except for the nasty border.

I checked into my Dar Annadwa guesthouse (run by the Lutheran Church and a great place to call home in Bethlehem) and within minutes met two of the three guides I’d hired for my week in Palestine (Hassam Jubran and Kamal Mukarker). Organizing my time in advance was tough because I couldn’t really know just how complicated getting around would be.

Hassam and Kamal took me to a tourist-friendly restaurant called “The Tent.” It posted a “families only” sign so they could turn away rowdy young men. I guess we looked harmless enough as they let us right in.

We sat down and an impressive array of Palestinian plates appeared. We enjoyed a great meal, and planned our itinerary. The Palestinian beer, Taybeh, was excellent. And I think I laughed more in my first two hours in the West Bank than I did in the entire past week.

If you can’t see the video below, watch it on YouTube.

Comments

10 Replies to “My Tasty First Hour in Palestine”

  1. Love the “appetizers” which could definitely be the whole meal they are sooo wonderful..even to the eye!

  2. Sounds like you crossed out of Israel with no problems. Will you be crossing that border in the other direction? Did you take a look at the people going the other way?

  3. As Rick is seeing in this series of blogs, the Israeli people and the Palestinian people have a lot more in common than they have differences. The main problem is that the leaders or those who purport to be the leaders of the Palestinians are openly committed to the destruction of the State of Israel. That does complicate matters a bit.

  4. Rick, in October my husband and I toured the holy land with National Geographic. Husam was one of our guides and our primary lead for the West Bank portions of our trip, especially Ramallah. Without his invaluable insights, we would have never gained an understanding of the situation. His personal history is compelling but most important, he’s incredibly funny!

  5. @ BernieDan – Hamas, currently governing Gaza, is still committed to the destruction of Israel, but Fatah, currently governing the West Bank, is not.

    If people had shown up in my country, taken over the land and treated me like dirt I’d probably want to get rid of them, too. And before you say that presence on the land 2,000 years ago confers the right to live there now, are you willing to hand the Americas back to the American Indians?

  6. @K – name calling isn’t an argument.

    Thinking that the Palestinians got and are getting a raw deal doesn’t make me a Nazi – far from it. I grew up in post-war Britain, with bomb sites and food rationing (yes, rationing lasted in Britain well into the 1950s). I have read widely on WWII and the horrors perpetrated by both the Germans and the Japanese (in the west we tend to forget about those, although the Chinese and the Koreans certainly don’t). I was reluctant to visit Germany the first time, and as I have posted elsewhere on this blog I have visited Auschwitz-Birkenau and found the experience profoundly disurbing. So your insult is mis-placed. Maybe you should consider how Israel’s behaviour in the West Bank would be regarded if the victims were Jews rather than Arabs.

  7. You have come at a very sad time for the family of Evyatar Borovsky. He was 30 & the father of five small children. He was standing at the bus stop when an Arab, who wanted to prove his loyalty to the Palestinian Authority, stabbed him to death. And rather than decry the brutal murder, the murderer has been hailed as a hero. If the Palestinians want to have peace, they need to stop glorifying the murder of Jews. Israelis cannot go back to indefensible borders of 1967. But they can make peace – we want peace. What we have now is an armed truce. Israel withdrew thousands of Jews from Gaza in 2005, as a gesture of willingness to make peace. What Israel got in return was thousands of rockets shot at Israel, until finally, with almost daily rocket attacks, Israel fired back. Twice we have had to fire back at Gaza to get them just to stop trying to kill Jews – in 2008 & again last year. Israel cannot & will not return the high ground to people who want our destruction. Because make no mistake – Muslims will not be satisfied until every Jew is gone from every inch of land – their battle cry is “from the river to the sea.” President Obama said it: “Israel is here to stay.”

  8. To Kathy:

    Before Zionism started in the 1880’s the land was under Ottoman rule for 400 years.
    It was mostly empty, desolated, barren. There was no prosperous Arab country that the Zionists have destroyed. There was Malaria and swamps and there were poor Arabs who lived in primitive villages and poor Jews who lived in holy cities like Jerusalem and Hebron.
    Funny that the Arabs (after 1967 the “Palestinians”) didn’t have any national aspirations to build an Arab “Palestinian” state during the centuries they lived under the Ottomans. Most Arabs in Palestine moved in and out of it from neighboring Arab countries and not all even lived there for centuries before the Zionists came.
    The Zionist didn’t take over Arabs’ lands. They bought every peace of land they settled on. They settled on empty land and built towns, villages, modern agriculture, medicine, industry etc. from scratch. They didn’t take anything from the Arabs because there was nothing to take. The Arabs haven’t contributed or developed anything in the land. the Zionists came with a focused aim to built a state for the Jews in the land and they tried to achieve this goal by diplomacy with the leaders of the powers in those days to get their consent to give the Jews the right to have a homeland on the land. That was before the holocaust. Herzl for instance came to Palestine to meet keizer Franz Joseph I of Austria 1898 when he visited Palestine.
    So the Jews actively made many diplomatic efforts to establish a Jewish homeland on the land.
    The question is – if the Arabs saw Palestine as their country why were they living under foreign (Ottoman) rule for centuries without trying to create an Arab Palestinian state in Palestine?
    Why didn’t they care that they live in a country that doesn’t have a national Palestinian identity for so long?
    The answer is that the Arabs who lived in Palestine did not have a distinct national identity until the Zionists came with their clear identity and national aspirations.
    The Jews didn’t take over the land by force. They had a greater desire than the Arabs to form a state on the land. They had a greater national identity and need for a state.
    The Arabs in Palestine moved from it to its neighbors naturally. There wasn’t much difference between Arabs who lived in Palestine to those living in nowadays Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt. Many have names that tell of their origin like Masri (Egyptian), Lubnani (Lebanese) etc. For the Jews, Palestine has always has been the only place where they had a national home and were safe, and it was the only place that they had any chance of getting a state and security because the historic (and I’m not mentioning the religious) ties they have to the place. And the fact is that when Zionism started the holy land was not someone’s legitimate state but a province of an occupying empire – the Ottoman empire, and after them the Brits who obviously don’t have ant legal claim on the land.

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