My Summer as a Potential Terrorist in a Conflict Zone

The picture above is of, maybe, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Before you accuse me of having terrible taste, allow me to defend my choice.

I sort of stumbled into spending the summer of 2011 in Israel. My suitemate in college grew up there, and she was Skyping me on a visit home one day. There was an elderly woman pacing back and forth behind her, and Addie introduced her to me as her safta, her grandmother.

“She says you’re welcome at our home any time.”

Now, I knew that was social politeness. But I also saw an opportunity.

“Addie, tell her not to say that unless she means it, because I will come.”

Addie translated, and Safta responded in Hebrew through a delighted, toothy laugh.

“She says yes, come whenever.”

“How about this summer?”

“Wait, really? Because we can do it.”

“I’m dead serious.”

I didn’t overthink that decision (clearly), but the people around me kept pressing me: “Are you sure?” “Have you thought this through?” “You know it’s pretty dangerous there, right?” “Are you scared?”

I would internally roll my eyes and chuckle at these questions. White Americans, so scared of everything, I’d think. “It’s fine, it’ll be fine, I promise.”

So when we approached the ticket desk at the airport, I was caught off guard by the woman’s question.

“Why are you going to Israel?”

“Oh, uh…for fun?”

“For fun?”

“Yeah, Addie grew up there, and I wanted to meet her family, and you know, see the country. It sounded…fun.”

“Are you with a tour group?”

“No.”

“Are you Jewish?”

“…not that I’m aware of?”

“How do you know Addie?”

“She was my suitemate my freshman year of college.”

“Your suitemate?”

“Yeah, we…shared a toilet?”

The woman clearly mistrusted my for-fun-trip to meet the family of the girl I shared a toilet with freshman year. She waved over a man who wore roughly the same expression as RoboCop. I would later find out he was a facial analyst expert who assessed micro facial expressions to determine if someone is lying or hiding something.

I have enough trouble with my macro facial expressions, so it did not surprise me when, after separating me from Addie and questioning me for two minutes, he decided I could be a threat to Israel’s national security.

This trip was escalating quickly.

The woman placed a fluorescent sticker with a Hebrew letter on the back of my passport. This must have labeled me as a potential terrorist, because each time someone saw that sticker (we would go through security five more times that summer), I would be separated from Addie and we would each be questioned.

They would empty my suitcase, and try to pry apart my sandals. (Joke’s on them, because I can barely afford double-ply toilet paper let alone double-ply sandals.) They would look through each picture on my camera, trying not to display any reaction to my horrendous selfies. I’m assuming they also took a few moments to judge my underwear.

I would also receive “escorts”, which is a polite word for two guards, in uniform and armed with assault rifles, who would walk me through the airport and onto the airplane. Quite the experience to have an airport full of people stare at you and wonder if they should be afraid.

On one flight, the plane stopped half-way down the runway, the stairs were let down, and another friendly neighborhood escort boarded the plane. With an assault rifle, of course. I craned my neck to see who was causing this delay, and quickly registered that everyone else was craning their neck at me. I looked up at the guard.

“Follow me.” I shot an apprehensive look at Addie, who looked just as bewildered. He led me off the plane and onto the tarmac. There were two nearly identical suitcases sitting side by side, dramatically lit by runway lights.

The man gestured to the suitcases with his rifle. “Which one is yours?”

Wait, what? What sort of psychological high-stakes gladiator test is this? What happens if I pick the wrong one?

The problem was, I didn’t know which suitcase was mine. I had borrowed the suitcase, and wasn’t familiar with its loose stitches and scuffs the way I would be with one I owned. But I had a feeling, by glancing the man holding the assault rifle, that I shouldn’t say that. So I played the most nerve-wracking mental game of eeny, meeny, miny, moe in my nineteen years of living and I guessed.

“Um, that one?”

That must’ve satisfied the guard, because he took my sweaty nervous arm and led me back onto the plane.

I can’t blame them for this level of security. I was told that the year prior they had stopped 365 attack attempts — one each day of the year. I can’t vouch for the truth of this as a statistic, but it was clear that they had reason to question why a non-Jewish person would go to Israel “for fun”.

It probably didn’t help that I arrived, unbeknownst to me, on Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day — which for Palestinians is the day their land was taken. It also happened to be the week Osama bin Laden was killed, and rumours were spreading that this confluence would start a “third all-out war”. Because my timing is impeccable, always.

My experience with airport security would be my first touch-point with the conflict in Israel, but certainly not my last. It weaves a continuous black thread through the fabric of everyday life for everyone there, Israeli and Palestinian.

When I first arrived at the home where I would stay for most of the trip, Addie’s family was lined up in the living room to greet me, one by one, with a kiss on the cheek. They said what I assumed was a greeting. Addie translated.

“They say they’re very glad you’re here, but they want to know why you would leave somewhere safe to come to a war zone.”

They were looking at me expectantly, as if this were not a rhetorical question.

“Oh…” It began to sink in that maybe I was the ignorant white American. “For fun?”

The neighborhood I was living in, Addie whispered to me, was technically in Palestine, if you looked at a map. “But don’t bring that up. Nobody likes to admit that. We all say it’s Jerusalem.”

It was a strange place to stay, straddling the line between Israel and Palestine. I could see the sun set over Jerusalem from my bedroom window, and at night I was woken up by the call to prayer.

The assault rifles carried by the soldiers, 19-year-old men and women fulfilling their mandatory service, who stood on the street corners and in front of shopping malls, who rode the buses and chatted with their friends, served as a constant visual reminder that the black thread might run through your section of the tapestry at any moment.

Sometimes we would be on our way to a certain neighborhood or section of the city when the driver would get a call and immediately U-turn. “There is word that there may be a bombing there today.”

At one point I had to literally jump into a moving vehicle to make a getaway, because in walking through a certain neighborhood I had crossed an invisible line that everyone else knew was there and I didn’t, a line that dictated who should and shouldn’t be there, and I shouldn’t have been there.

There were lots of invisible lines. For instance, an outfit totally appropriate for a bus that is taking you directly to the Dead Sea — bikini and a short red cover-up — might become suddenly wildly inappropriate when the direct bus turns out to be a bus with a 45 minute layover in one of the most Orthodox towns in the country, and your second bus stop is a 10 minute walk from where the first bus lets you off, and when the sunlight hits your cover-up you realize it’s see through. Just, you know, hypothetically…

Our drives regularly took us along a much more visible demarcation line. The West Bank barrier was tall and desolate, tagged with graffiti and topped with barbed wire. I couldn’t stop staring at it. It made my blood run cold, but it was as normal a part of the commute to them as cow pastures were to me back home.

Conversations with the people I met there, once past the five minute mark, would inevitably turn to the black thread. They would tell me of family or friends they knew who had been injured or killed in a bombing. Many I spoke with would insist Palestinians were the enemies, and spoke as if they were trying to convince me. “You don’t understand those people. Give them a thumb and they’ll take the whole hand.” “Do you know what it’s like to be surrounded by people who want to kill you?” “There are some conflicts for which there is no end.”

I made it a rule not to speak and just to listen, to listen and to learn as much as possible. It was difficult not to interject, because I was friends with the very people they were describing as enemies, and my Palestinian friends had told me this story very differently. They had described to me what it’s like to be trapped in your own country, the reality of lacking access to basic human necessities, the powerlessness of watching the Israeli Defense Forces take your neighborhood.

But did their fear and loss make the fear and loss experienced by the people in front of me any less real? Was their trauma less valid? Who were the good guys and who were the bad guys?

I struggled with these questions the entire trip. I had heard stories of immense pain and loss on both sides. Like the neighborhood I was living in, I was straddling the line between both worlds.

Over the weeks my jaw tightened and my shoulders crept towards my ears. Staying alert all the time was exhausting me. This whole region must be exhausted, I thought.

Then, in the middle of our trip, we decided to go stay with Addie’s aunt, who lived on the edge of the desert.

The drive was long and winding. On the side of the road were clusters of tents and the occasional camel. Her aunt’s house was on high ground overlooking the desert. There was a basketball court surrounded by a collection of houses, and what felt like peace. Addie told me about the neighborhood we were in. “People of all different religions, and varying degrees of orthodoxy, moved here to live together.”

“Wait, really?”

“Yeah, they don’t believe in the way things are, and they wanted to do something different, so they all live here in the same neighborhood. It’s really chill.”

The day after our arrival, Addie’s aunt told me she wanted to show me something really special, but to get there we had to walk a bit into the desert. What she showed me tucked in the sweeping folds of sand, was, maybe, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. The concrete circle of water in the picture above is the only natural water source in that area. The spring would rise up every ten minutes or so, and when it did, everyone would rush in to swim.

When I say everyone, I mean everyone: Orthodox Jews, non-Orthodox Jews, atheists, Arabs, even soldiers — their rifles were abandoned at the side of the pool. We all swam in the same water, together. The human need for refreshment existed in all of us. When you looked at our bare feet under the ripples, you couldn’t tell the difference. After weeks of skirting around the edges of conflict, I was participating in peace. I nearly cried.

On my final pass through Israeli security, Tel Aviv to La Guardia, the sirens went off on the luggage belt. My suitcase (of course) was removed from the belt. Guards quickly pulled Addie to one corner of the room. I was led to a screening area.

This felt different from the times before, more urgent. The woman who had my suitcase pulled on a pair of Terminator gloves, covered in wires. She looked nervous. It took her a full minute to slowly unzip my suitcase. She began gingerly removing the articles in my suitcase in between glances at a monitor out of my view. I stretched my neck around to try to see what she was seeing.

There was a heat map of my suitcase. It showed the clear outlines of a shotgun and a hand-grenade. My eyes bugged and my mind started racing.

This is it. I’ve been framed. Someone planted weapons in my suitcase. I’m never leaving Israeli soil.

I looked over to Addie, who was giving me wtf eyes. The guard stepped in front of her to block her from view.

Shit shit shit.

The woman examining the suitcase knit her brows together in confusion. She slowly lifted out a wedge shoe, then studied the scan. She carefully felt along the bottom of the suitcase with her Terminator glove. A look of realization crossed her face. She shook her head.

She pointed at the sole of the shoe, then at the butt of the shotgun on the screen. “Friction,” she said, then hopped the shoe along in the air as if it were walking. She pointed to the shotgun barrel. “There’s a hidden bar in the lining of your suitcase.” She pointed to the hand-grenade, then held up my squat metal canteen complete with twist-off carabiner lid. She piled the contents of my suitcase back in, took a few moments to judge my underwear (I assume), and handed it back.

My shoulders eased back down once we made it out of La Guardia.

My body had been stressed, but I don’t want to give the wrong impression of my stay there. After the initial jolt of being in a conflict zone for the first time, it became a footnote of my time there, like radio playing in the background.

What I hold onto more are the Shabbats we spent together, pouring mint tea from huge round vats covered in towels, sharing stories and playing games. I hold onto the flavor of fresh honeydew melon passed around in bowls — to this day the best thing I’ve ever tasted. I hold onto the way Sabba would eat parsley by the handful from a huge brass platter, and how when I caught him at it he would look up playfully and bleat like a goat. I hold onto the way the desert can overwhelm you with the physicality of emptiness, and the way markets can overwhelm you with their fullness. That whole summer tasted like dill. I learned that arguing can sometimes mean you love each other, and that bartering can engender respect instead of offense. I still can’t smell Nescafé without smiling.

Most of all, I hold onto that spring in the desert, and the belief that under the ripples, our bare feet are all the same.