Dennis Fox’s Weblog

I moved this morning from the conference hotel on Ramallah’s northeast outskirts to an apartment a short walk from the center of the city. It’s a block from Ramallah CIty Park and the hotel where I stayed during my first visit to Ramallah four years ago with  a delegation from FFIPP, Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. This is a little closer to downtown’s Al Manarah Square than the hotel I stayed in two years ago, with a more crowded urban walk along the way.

The apartment building looks more institutional than pleasant. I’m on the second of three floors, which meant lugging my luggage up two flights of stairs. I’ll be glad not to have to move all my stuff for the next three weeks. This street must have a name but I don’t see a street sign at either corner and it’s not on my map. Maybe I’ll find a street sign when I walk up the street into the Old City, though steet names in general here seem relatively unimportant. 

My three rooms are furnished with everything I’ll need for a short stay, and after I buy some food I should be all set.

My Ramallah Apartment

The only real annoyance is the lack of Internet access, which I knew might happen, though I found an open wifi connection on the street a block or two away. If that becomes too weird to use regularly from the street, I’ll go everyday to a nearby cafe or hotel, and I’ve been told there’s a good library where I can work and get online. On the other hand, the apartment has a TV with satellite channels, and right now I have the BBC playing in the background. Most of the channels are in Arabic from a wide range of countries, and I’ve already noticed I can pick up more words than last time I was here. 

My landlady is helpful and talkative. Fortunately her English is pretty good. She and her family live on the next street, in a large, striking house with spacious rooms. She invited me inside yesterday when I came to see the apartment and again today when I came to pay, made me Turkish coffee both times (my choice rather than the ever-present Nescafe), and showed me around her house – nice tiles embedded in the floor, family photos, a needlepoint she did of Jesus.

Her family is Christian and she was born in Jordan. Her parents were refugees from Nazareth, where some of her relatives still own two hotels. Both yesterday and today she made a point of expressing dissatisfaction with the way things are going both here in Palestine between Fatah and Hamas and between Palestine and Israel. The family, she says, tries to stay out of political alliances, and she seems resigned to not much changing. 

Today she asked if I’d been to Bethlehem, and when I said yes, she asked if I was Catholic. When I said Jewish, she said she has no problems with Jews, that she has many Israeli friends from before Ramallah was closed to Israelis. She told me about getting offers of help from Israeli friends during the first Iraq war, when her husband was out of the country.

She had her TV on during much of our conversation, and flipped channels, stopping at a story about Barack Obama. She asked why people want to kill him, did it have to do with Israel. When I said the people they arrested the other day were whites who don’t want a black president, she seemed surprised, saying “But there are a lot of blacks in America,” which she knew because she’s been to California and a couple of other places. I explained as best I could. She nodded.

At the end of coffee and talk, I paid her about what we think the right amount is. Rents are given in dollars, but payment in Israeli shekels, so the amount varies depending on the daily exchange rate. The rent is $350, which as of this morning was 1313 NIS (New Israeli Shekels, the currency here as well as in Israel). I paid extra for the container of cooking gas. If I want another gas container for heat I need to tell her, but so far I may see if I can avoid it. I’m also supposed to pay for electricity when I leave; I assume she has a meter of some kind. All in all, this apartment will probably cost under $400, which is what makes it possible to stay for more than just a few hotel-rate days.

In a little while I’ll head out and combine coffee with Internetting, and do some food shopping on my way back. Otherwise I am almost completely without plans for my time here, which is how I wanted it. Most people from the conference came with pretty specific agendas, often with various groups headed in different directions. I’m glad this time I’m less rushed, at least now that the conference is over, and I hope to generate some version of a familiar routine  — long daily walks, which I haven’t been able to do as often as I’d like, wandering, working on my Arabic, writing, photographing. I’ll likely go out to Birzeit University, where I worked briefly two years ago, and I have some names of other people to get in touch with. I’ll also do a few short daytrips and overnights as things develop.

I do have two things in the works, so I’m not completely lacking an agenda. Three conference participants who work at a local psychosocial clinic (as I understand it), two of whom were at my presentation the other day, invited me to come by their office next week to hear more about their work and meet a few other people. I’m looking forward to it.

Also, a Boston-area therapist I met at the conference who’s going to Jayyous in a couple of days to stay with people she knows asked if I want to go see it. I said yes, if her contacts have room for me.  I’d hoped to go there two years ago, partly because it was then the target of Jewish settlers encroaching on their land and partly because it’s near Qalqilya, a Palestinian city almost completely encircled by the Separation Wall; I took photos of the Israeli side of the wall four years ago from Kibbutz Nir Eliahu, and want to see how things look from the Palestinian side.

And that’s about it, for now.

—–

Sitting in the park….

I caused some minor confusion early this morning when I told the taxi driver who stopped near my hotel to take me to Amman’s Seventh Circle. He looked at my luggage, asked where I was going. When I said to take the bus to Nazareth, he seemed to think I didn’t know what I was talking about. Partly this was a language issue – his English was actually worse than my Arabic.

But even once we got past my strained pronunciation, he still didn’t believe there was a bus to Israel. He kept saying “Aqaba?” because the location I gave him is where the Aqaba bus leaves from. That’s the other bus run by Trust International. He kept asking if I was sure I didn’t want to go to one of the regular big bus stations in town instead of basically this out-of-the-way place. I insisted, showed him my Lonely Planet book, but he remained pretty doubtful.

On the way he asked where I was going in Israel, still thinking he’d steer me in the right direction. When I told him Ramallah he became very excited, said he was Palestinian. When we got to the bus station – bus storefront, more like it — the Aqaba bus was outside. He pointed that out, and I told him I was very early for my bus, which wasn’t to leave until 8:30 (the hotel desk clerk told me the taxi ride would take much longer than it did, and in any case I was up for hours by then listening to the call to prayer).

My driver insisted on getting out of the taxi to ask someone in the office if there really was a bus to Nazareth. He was surprised the answer was yes. I gave him a great tip.

In the bus station, the clerk asked for my passport, typed something into the computer, told me to wait. I ended up leaving my stuff there and walking around the neighborhood, which was another new-and-expanding development filled with chain stores (the bus station is across the street from Domino’s Pizza, next to Seattle’s Best Coffee, and down the street from VW/Porsche). I was a little constrained with my camera – there were a couple of serious-looking police strolling around, I’m not sure why – but managed to get a few photos. This one was my favorite, on a coffee shop.

Seventh Circle Uncle Sam

While I was taking photos, near Uncle Sam, a man walked over and asked where I was going (he may have been a taxi driver). When I said I was waiting for the bus to Nazareth, he was as skeptical as my earlier driver. 

As it turned out, when the bus left I was the only passenger on a big modern bus, complete with bathroom, air-conditioning, and complimentary coffee. The driver was friendly, asked where I was going, told me that he too, of course, is Palestinian. We headed out past a sea of fast-food restaurants – KFC, McDonald’s, Subway – and other indications of Jordan’s globalization. We picked up two women waiting on our way out of the city, and after a while the driver stopped and poured us our coffee. I was alone on the bus again until the border crossing, and moved back and forth from one side of the bus to the other to try to get some photos through the window.

When we arrived at the Jordanian side of the border at Sheikh Hussain Bridge, things slowed down. First a Jordanian military officer of some kind came on and looked quickly through my carry-on, too quickly to do any good. Then we pulled into the border crossing area. After a wait to pay an exit tax and meander through the duty-free shop, a dozen or more people who had arrived by taxis got on the bus to cross into Israel. At least a couple of the young couples were Israeli, and also a few older Arab women who may also have been Israeli citizens.

Once we crossed over to the Israeli border crossing complex we got off the bus again, this time with our luggage to go through customs. The driver told me then that he doesn’t take the bus into Israel, that there would be a minivan waiting for me on the other side (which would explain some of the confusion about whether there really is a “bus to Nazareth” as opposed to the border). He also told me, for the second time, not to tell the Israelis I’d be going to Ramallah – “tell them you’re going to Jerusalem, Tel Aviv….” I thanked him, told him I knew how it worked because I’d been there before.

As it turned out, customs was a breeze. When they heard the long list of places I planned to visit where I have friends and relatives — all of it true — they waved me through. X-rayed baggage but didn’t open any. Got my visa – but the woman who stamped it apparently used the wrong stamp, because when I tried to leave for the parking lot where my minivan was waiting, the next security guard looked at it and said something was missing. I had to go back inside, but there were no more surprises. 

Well, one surprise, though it shouldn’t have been, was the sight of Israeli women in body-revealing clothing. Even the two Israeli women crossing over from Jordan had more skin and shape showing than I had seen in four days in Amman, but they seemed to lose even more clothing by the time they had left the border-crossing building. And once the van went through Israeli towns, people were dressed for summer. Coming from Amman – a pretty loose place as far as I could tell, with all those lingerie stores and alcohol freely available — the sudden contrast made me think about how difficult it must be for many people in traditional societies to tolerate what the West not only takes for granted but flaunts.

The driver of the van (which again carried only me) took me quickly into Nazareth, maybe 45 minutes. Along the way I was getting more and more tired, and was glad when he offered to take me directly to my reserved room in a Christian guest house. He had never heard of this one – Nazareth is filled with them – but knew the street, a narrow uphill one somewhere in the middle of Nazareth’s confusion. The driver lives here, and I got his phone number in case I need a ride around town in the next day or two. 

Coming into Nazareth, still an Arab city, I noticed lots of signs and billboards only in Arabic, with no Hebrew or English. The Sister who showed me to my room speaks no Hebrew and some English, and seemed pleased, as most people are, when I managed to use some Arabic in response.    

And here I sit, checking my email with the guest-house wifi (a far cry from my Internet complications in Amman). And just as soon as I finish this I’ll use the shower and take a nap, and hope the temperature cools down by early evening so I can actually get outside and maneuver my way down the hill toward Nazareth city life.

As for that email I checked when I got here, there will definitely be a demonstration on Sunday related to Israel’s refusal to grant permits for the GCMHP conference. Details to follow later, or so they tell me.

The transition to Hebrew here (at the border crossing, not in the guest house or apparently in Nazareth more generally) also comes as somewhat of a shock. Of course, getting closer to the border, the bus driver was flipping radio stations and came across an Israeli one – I heard “Chag Sameach,” Happy Holiday. The two languages have a lot of similarities. More on that another time.

My first two days here I wandered around downtown Amman, the city’s ancient core back to when it was called Philadelphia and even further, with its Roman ruins and cramped streets and busy working-class vibe. This is where my hotel is, and dozens of other cheap places to stay and cheap places to eat, a non-stop urban vista. Heavily Palestinian, according to what I’ve read, and heavily conservative, the scene here is similar to that in downtown Ramallah, in East Jerusalem near Damascus Gate, to my foreign eyes an exotic twist on ordinary life.

If the signs were English instead of Arabic (only sometimes with English translation), some streets could be Times Square without the theaters, or New York’s lower East Side, or any big city’s cramped vibrant heart.

Downtown Signs

Some things attract my attention, like the collections of similar stores — endless jewelry stores a block from my hotel, luggage stores around the corner, pet stores a mile away with birdcages lining both sides of the street. Some dress and lingerie shops showcase skimpy outfits, but many more storefronts have packages of men’s underwear prominently displayed outside. Some stores seem to just have perfume, which workers spritz on customers, or potential customers. Sidewalks are often narrow and broken, forcing walkers into the street to dodge speeding cars whose drivers mostly ignore signs and lights. Westernized smoking rules have not penetrated here, and it’s hard to take the cigarettes in restaurants, sometimes in the hand of the waiter. 

Today, my last full day here, I made my way out of downtown and walked a few miles to Abdoun Circle, billed as one of many hip centers in Amman’s much larger western side. As far as I can tell, most of the city’s two million people live in this new urban expanse, mostly built in the past few decades, completely modern, with Western-style cafes, shopping malls, and lots of people with money.

Luxury for Sale

At Abdoun there are lots of signs with English but no Arabic. After taking a few photos — of Pizza Hut and Subway — a cop called me over and told me I couldn’t take pictures there, so I didn’t get the shot of McDonald’s I really wanted. None of these chains exist downtown.

On my way to Abdoun, taking pictures of construction equipment digging out the side of the hill that Abdoun sits on top of, a man came over from his couch in the middle of a large expanse of diverging streets to talk about the new building they’re going to put there. I told him it seemed Amman was digging out the sides of lots of its hills, making room for more people. Of course, the Romans did the same thing, as with that amphitheater I posted a photo of the other day.

Amman Hillside Excavation

The guy told me he’s a bus controller, though I’m not sure what that means. He says he sits on his couch and keeps track of the many buses passing by, or leaving from nearby.

Nedal

Says he works from 6 am to 6 pm for 7 dinars a day, about $10. Not much, he pointed out. Then he told me that although his hat has a Jordanian flag he’s really a Palestinian, from Nablus. I told him I’d soon be in the West Bank, and he went into a brief political analysis, asking why Israel doesn’t want peace, that all peace will take is — and he wrote this on his pad of paper — “1 and 1″, two equal states. He asked again why Israel won’t agree. I didn’t have much of answer, especially since I wanted to get moving out of the hot sun, but along the way he volunteered that he likes America but not the American government. I agreed. 

When I asked if I could take his picture he agreed with a simile, then asked if it would be in a newspaper. When I said “maybe the Internet” he wrote down his name for me: Nedal.

Nedal, Amman bus controller

My flight from New York to Amman took 10 1/2 hours. The plane was far from full, so there was plenty of room to stretch out, but I still didn’t fall asleep. The night went through stages, with the usual share of families going home, cranky kids, young singles. The woman in front of me – a Palestinian born in Jordan, living in Florida for the past 15 years and now going home to visit family – was downing Delta’s wine, aiming to sleep for the whole trip but becoming super-friendly along the way with everyone in earshot. The flight attendants worked fairly leisurely; the one who was Lebanese – a man – did the translations into Arabic of the flight crew’s announcements. 

When the dog barked — at least I think it was a dog — I gave up trying to sleep and spent most of the rest of the trip reading my Lonely Planet tour book and reviewing yet again the bits of Arabic I’ve learned and lost so many times before. I spent the past month and a half going through Rosetta Stone Arabic lessons and then reviewed the book I used when I took an adult education class a few years ago. Between that, and the grammar I learned back in college, what I know today is a disconnected morass. I catch more words now when I overhear conversations than I did two years ago, but I can’t speak much. I can, however, read the alphabet when it’s not embellished, and I understand more words than in the past. If I could live with people for a while who didn’t speak English I think I’d forge ahead, but otherwise my memory is much too porous to hold on to much. Arabic’s complexities – mainly the departure of the many disparate dialects from the more formal structure I internalized 40 years ago – add to my frustrations.

Aside from the usual memory lapses of many people my age — I’ll be 60 in March, an age I no longer think of as ancient — my own situation is complicated by my underlying medical issues. My multiple sclerosis remains at the least troubling end of the spectrum, and hasn’t worsened since my diagnosis 14 years ago. I still have no motor problems, and function more or less the same as most people. But memory remains fluid, multi-tasking impossible, and fatigue fairly constant. My fatigue medication – Provigil – does wonders under my ordinarily non-strenuous existence, making it possible to go through the day more or less functional. But this trip, like most, is a pretty big departure from ordinary, and I’m trying not to push myself more than what I think my limits are. So I walk in the morning, retreat and rest and write in the afternoon, then venture out once more.

Jet lag doesn’t help. I thought I was over it last night, but woke about 4 am today, an hour before the nearby mosque’s early call to prayer would have woken me up anyway. It was actually pleasant lying there in the dark, listening to the melodic chanting on and off for 45 minutes, wondering how long I’d go today before crashing.

On my uphill walk this morning, the hot morning sun already making me wonder if I’d lost sight of my limits, the endless stream of taxis honking for my business were hard to resist. But I wanted to walk, knowing I’d miss too much in speeding traffic. I planned to take a taxi back downtown after the coffee I hoped to find in Abdoun Circle, but was determined to wait until then.

Between the heat, the jet-lag, and my usual fatigue and increasing sense of dysfunction, since arriving here three days ago I’ve been often out of sorts. I had a brief spell of stomach queasiness, and think I got dehydrated despite constantly drinking bottled water, but in general I’ve been eating very little even though what I’ve had has mostly been great. But being here on my own at the end of a difficult period back in the States sometimes makes my mind wander. Venturing out in my hot-weather clothing (but not shorts, in keeping with local custom), I think I must look and act pretty strange. The term “queer old duck” comes to mind, when “queer” had a different meaning. 

Walking around, I always have my camera, but I hesitate to use it when it feels too conspicuous, too intrusive. The camera pries, attracting suspicion, or at least stares. So I proceed inconsistently, walking down the street with camera in one hand, tour book and water bottle in the other, looking at what there is to see. Walking up hills that I suspect most people don’t attempt, sometimes through residential neighborhoods where I stick out even more, adds to my sense of out-of-placeness. I would do better if I was comfortable with strangers more easily, if I could to glares more comfortably. But I forge on as best I can. 

Tomorrow morning I get on the bus to Israel, moving around more than I’d like for the next week but ending up a week from today in Ramallah for the conference that was supposed to be in Gaza. Not getting into Gaza is disappointing, but I’m looking forward to settling in someplace in Ramallah for about three weeks, unpacking my things — I hate living out of suitcases, always packing and re-packing, never able to remember where things are (that memory/organizational dysfunction at its worst). I’ll make short trips out of Ramallah, around the West Bank, to Jerusalem, maybe further — but I won’t have to bring all my stuff. 

Or at least that’s the plan, which depends partly on finding a cheap place to stay and partly on whatever else comes along. If it works out, maybe I’ll find a short-term Arabic tutor – someone who doesn’t speak English would be good, though I doubt that will be easy.

Right now I’m back in my hotel lobby, cooler and more comfortable than my room. But soon I need to start (re)packing for my trip in the morning, and figure out where to find a taxi to take me to the bus — it leaves from someplace far west of downtown. By this time tomorrow I should be settled in my Nazareth digs for a night, or maybe two. The weather forecast is for 90 degrees Fahrenheit, way past my limit. A drag.

—–

I went to log in to the hotel’s Internet access (no wifi here) but all I got was a screen saying the hotel hadn’t paid its DSL bill. The staff says it should be back online soon. In the meantime I walked a few blocks to Welcome Internet, a place I used a couple of days ago. They had to twist their ethernet cable so it would work when connected to my laptop, and so far it’s holding.

Last weekend I took part for the first time in an annual local event, Brookline Artists’ Open Studios. My BAOS blurb said this: “Photography from abstracts to photojournalism, recent Israel/Palestine focus.” In addition to the more-typical art-lovers who wandered by, a number of visitors told me they were drawn by the Israel/Palestine mention. Some of them stayed a long time, talking about the politics behind the photos, asking about my impressions, and watching parts of a slideshow I set up alongside some of the prints. Those who stuck around seemed pretty much on my political wavelength.

Even those who came without Israel/Palestine in mind seemed to take the photojournalism in stride. I wasn’t sure how this would go, here in heavily-Jewish liberal Brookline where, as I’ve noted over the years, Israel’s faults just aren’t on most town residents’ radar. Indeed, a few BAOS visitors left quickly after glancing at my wall. Israeli soldiers tear-gassing nonviolent Bil’in protestors wasn’t what they were looking for.

I showed other photos, too, in somewhat separate spaces – abstracts, portraits, landscapes. Listening to two days of positive feedback about these was very exciting, especially since I’ve never shown my non-I/P work like this before. I even sold a few prints and photobooks, tempting me to try to do more so I can upgrade my camera equipment and software before my next Middle East visit.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestine, photography, photojournalism

In the past week or so I’ve added a dozen galleries of this year’s images to my photo site. Collections range from the Boston Sabeel Conference, Zionist counterprotest, and local anti-war rallies to less political subjects, including people, abstracts and macros, hummingbirds, and travel to Colorado, Vancouver and Denman Islands, and even Niagara Falls.

And these ants:

Technorati Tags: ants, photography

Today’s New York Times reports that this might no longer be legal in New York City, but I’m not sure:

According to the Times:

In a rebuke of a surveillance practice greatly expanded by the New York Police Department after the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal judge ruled yesterday that the police must stop the routine videotaping of people at public gatherings unless there is an indication that unlawful activity may occur.

Four years ago, at the request of the city, the same judge, Charles S. Haight Jr., gave the police greater authority to investigate political, social and religious groups. In yesterday’s ruling, Judge Haight, of United States District Court in Manhattan, found that by videotaping people who were exercising their right to free speech and breaking no laws, the Police Department had ignored the milder limits he had imposed on it in 2003.

As I read the article, it sounds like the cops can still videotape whenever they claim something illegal might happen, but they have to follow the rules to get higher approval. Not really much protection, when you think about it.

So I think this will continue, but maybe they’ll hide the cameras better:

These photos are from the 2004 legal protest outside the Republican National Convention in New York City. More photos of the event in my galleries.

I couldn’t get to Washington for today’s big anti-war rally, but I dig make it to the edge of Boston Common with a few hundred others who didn’t get to DC either.

It was pretty cold, but there was a lot of energy.

Most passersby were more or less on the same wavelength.

Or one of several wavelengths, given the multiple messages.

Even Superman came to help, but somehow he was pushed aside.

Guess it’s up to us.

Jessica Masse, the interfaith coordinator of the Islamic Society of Boston, writing in The Boston Globe:

The public has questions for Muslims in America and we have responded. We have opened our mosque to the public, taken part in  outreach efforts, and worked extensively to foster understanding of Islam and Muslims. We have been answering questions for years and we will continue to do so. However, asking questions and providing answers is a two-way street.

Here are a few  questions  of our own: What are the true reasons a political advocacy group decided to organize a media campaign and initiate a lawsuit against us? Why are Muslims in Boston, who are without a single structure designed and built as a mosque, sued and defamed when they purchase a vacant parcel of land from the city as part of an urban renewal program, even though 17 other such transactions were made with churches and synagogues? And why, when we have offered to sit down with those people asking questions over the past two years, have they refused to talk to us, preferring to hurl accusations without listening to our answers?

I don’t ordinarily find a full set of quotations someone else has gathered worth passing along, but these five all appeal to my intermittent efforts to seek political and intellectual clarity and commitment in the face of ambivalence, complexity, and comfort. They appear at the beginning of a blog entry at  Global Politician having to do with law and technology, which I will finish reading later, but so far these are worth repeating:

“The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make it its home for life.  For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system.  When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it.  (its rather like getting tenure).”
Daniel Dennet – Quoted in Paul Thagard’s Mind – An Introduction to Cognitive Science Test

“Everything in nature, in the inanimate as well as the animate world, happens according to rules, although we do not always know these rules.”
Immanuel Kant, Logic

“The fuzzy principle states that everything is a matter of degree.”
Bart Kosko, Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic

“When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also add that some things are more nearly certain than others.”
Bertrand Russell, “Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?”

“Most of us can learn to live in perfect comfort on higher levels of power. Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. It is evident that our organism has stored-up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon – deeper and deeper strata of explosible material, ready for use by anyone who probes so deep. The human individual usually lives far within his limits.”
William James