12 Welcome to Al-Quds

Ben-Gurion Airport is located near the “suburb” of Lod, Israel, once known as Lydda, Palestine. This is the village of my father’s and grandfather’s family, who were expelled that summer of 1948. My father has never been able to return. Lydda was the last town to fall during the Nakba. Perhaps not surprisingly, among all the “Welcome to Israel” signs in the airport, there is nothing to indicate that 700,000 Palestinians were driven away, and that death, displacement, or refugee status has followed them ever since their eviction from an ancestral home.

I could still remember how sick I’d felt arriving in Toronto as an Albertan Arab hick. It was the first time I had taken a long flight on my own away from Edmonton. Here, at the Israeli-managed customs control, I was nervous in a different way. It was as if I had “Up with Palestine!” stamped across my chest. Standing in line, I noticed that some people moved quickly through customs. Jews were asked a few questions and left to proceed; everything was calm, efficient, and dignified.

An African American and I were not so lucky. We were both interrogated by security agents as if they were being paid by the question. “Where are you going? What is the purpose of your visit? Where does your family live? Where does your family come from?” The minutes dragged on.

The officer continued to ask probing questions, and I kept telling her that I was going to be studying at the Islamic University of Gaza. Eventually, the ordeal stopped. As I gathered my belongings, I asked the security agent why she had questioned me so thoroughly. “You weren’t special,” she said, as if that explained everything. And in a way, it did. In 1995, Fatah, a Palestinian political party that was aligned with Yasser Arafat’s PLO, had supported the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, commonly known as Oslo II, which not only legitimized a Jewish state on the 78 percent of Palestinian land Israel had occupied since 1947, but had offered them an additional 12 percent, which left Palestinians with less than 10 percent of their original country. After the failure at Camp David, many Fatah factions had deserted the party and joined Hamas, which did not support the Oslo II Accord. In this destabilized environment between the Camp David Summit and my arrival at Ben-Gurion Airport, one or more of these factions had launched attacks on Israel. The additional scrutiny was part of Israel’s heightened vigilance in the wake of these attacks.

I finally got through customs and took a shuttle bus to downtown Jerusalem. After the thirteen-hour flight, I needed a meal. “I want to go to Old Jerusalem,” I said to the driver. “Ya, ya, ya!” he said over the cranked-up Klezmer tunes. He insisted on fifteen US dollars for the ride, when I had been told it should be only ten. I was not willing to pay the extra fee, so I turned away. One man on the bus said, “You know what you should have done to him—punch him.” All I could do was force a smile and wave my hand dismissively, as though it wasn’t worth my time.

I got on another bus and asked the driver if it was going to Jerusalem Square. I remembered those questions at the airport: “Why are you visiting? Why are you here? Where will you be staying?” I hadn’t planned the specific details in advance. I had only decided to go a week before I booked my trip, so I was lucky to have come this far after the security grilling. I knew only that I wanted to go straight to the Old City. When I got off the bus, I found a hostel close to the city gates, checked in, and went out to find some food.

My hostel was located almost in the shadow of the Haram esh-Sharif, right by the Masjid al-Aqsa. As I sat in a nearby café, a man came out of nowhere and began telling me story after story of people he had helped. My eyes were glazed with jetlag. I was not taking in much of what he was saying, but it did not take him long to discover that I came from Canada. That was when he began asking things like, “Can you help me go to Canada? How can I do it?”

“I can’t get you there,” I said, “but take this.” I gave him the contact information for the Canadian Arab Friendship Association and told him to talk to Yazan Haymour. I figured Uncle Yazan would know what to do.

Despite the masjid being just steps away, I missed the prayers at Masjid al-Aqsa on the first day of my time in Palestine. So I went to find some breakfast and figure out my next steps. I ordered coffee and stared at the shops and restaurants around me, the colours and motion blurring together. As I sat drinking my coffee, I heard two guys chatting away about Palestine in a mix of English and in Arabic. They saw me staring at them and smiled. “Won’t you join us?”

I spent the rest of the day chatting and arguing with Wael and his friend Michael, a Palestinian Christian lawyer who had been educated in the United States. When Michael left, Wael and I carried on talking. As I got up to leave to return to my hostel, I told Wael that he had convinced me to register at Al-Quds University as soon as possible to study Arabic and religion.

“No,” Wael replied, “you will stay at my place, and I’ll help you to register.”

Wael shared an apartment with a friend in Abu Dis, a suburb of Jerusalem. I began to refuse, saying it was too much trouble, but my resistance was half-hearted. I had heard about Abu Dis because it had been suggested as a potential location for the Palestinian capital. Wael was persistent, and it did not take long for me to agree to stay at his place for the night. I retrieved my suitcase from the hostel while he found a servees—a minibus taxi—to take us to Abu Dis. Fear came creeping back. He seemed like a good guy, but I began praying to myself, thinking of my mother and father. Would they be bringing my body back home, if I could even be identified, or if there was even a body to find? Would I end up one of those people who mysteriously disappears when far from home?

The ride to Abu Dis was a dark one, with the lights of Jerusalem fading away as we entered the Israeli-controlled Palestinian suburb. By the time the servees finally stopped at a four-storey apartment building, my mind was whirling, and my palms were slippery with sweat. Wael insisted on paying for the servees.

Wael and his roommate, Muhammad, showed me to my room. The barking and howling of wild dogs outside did nothing to settle my mind. I was exhausted but restless, thinking about how Israel had renegotiated a new deadline with the PLO, how the Palestinians were to be given their freedom by this day, 13 September 2000. What would the morning and the days ahead bring? I got up and prayed and asked God to take care of me. I also thought about how great it would be to be able to send home news about Palestinian freedom to my father. He—and others, like Uncle Faisal—said they hoped things would improve here as they said goodbye to me in Edmonton.

The next morning, Wael suggested I move in with them. I thanked him for his kind offer but told him I wanted to stay in the Old City for a while so I could be close to the masjid and get to know the place before making final decisions about where to live.

According to Israeli myths, the country of Palestine was mostly an empty desert, inhabited by a few struggling Palestinian villages, until the Israelis came along and, with their agricultural methods, redeemed the arable land before it was too late. What they were doing, they said, was superior to what the native farmers like my grandfather had done. Even during the British Mandate, Israel tried to convince the world that Palestine was an uninhabited desert, “a land without people for a people without a land.” This terra nullius concept has been used many times to defend colonization, including in Canada to justify the occupation of the Prairies and their transformation into the Canadian “breadbasket.” As I discovered the many historical buildings and sites of Palestine, I kept confirming that this story was the real myth.

Wael often came to spend time with me in the Old City, and we became good friends. One day, Wael and I talked late into the evening once more. It would be a struggle for him to find transport back to his house at that time of night, so I suggested he stay at a hostel with me so that we could continue our conversation. We found a hostel in the northern part of Jerusalem’s Old City and asked for rooms for the night. The manager looked at my Canadian passport and was happy to have me stay at the hostel, but he would not let Wael stay there. “No Arabs allowed,” he kept saying. Mowafa and Wael. Both Palestinian names, belonging to people who both look Middle Eastern. It made no sense, except in Al-Quds: Wael had grown up in Jenin, whereas I was from Canada. With a shrug, this manager told me to try other hostels, so we did. But it was the same: they would accept me, but not my friend, my fellow traveller, my brother. One meaning of the Arabic name Wael is “seeking shelter,” and yet that is the one thing that was eluding us.

Eventually, we did find a hostel. It was rundown and clearly needed the business. The person at reception reluctantly allowed both of us to stay for one night, but the reaction was still nasty. If this had happened in Canada, I would have given the person behind the counter a piece of my mind, but in in Al-Quds, things were different, I’d realized.

As I was getting into bed, I asked Wael, “How do you feel?”

“Oppressed. Hurt.” I could feel the pain in his gestures, his voice, and his eyes. He then turned over and we both went to sleep, or at least he did. I was fuming. I wanted to destroy my passport, that piece of paper that made me look as though I was better than my brother. I thought to myself, The worst thing he’s probably done is drink alcohol, and only God knows the trouble and havoc I caused as a teenager growing up in Canada. I swear, Wael’s little toe was worth four of me. I got quite worked up, thinking of him here, oppressed, while I lived a very different life in Canada, complete with freedoms and at least a superficial sense of happiness despite the threats, stigma, and displacement that strained my family. Across from each other in the hostel bunk beds, I was a world away from this stranger who was treating me as a brother. That was when I decided to ask Wael if the offer to stay with them was still open.