I have been back to my homeland many times. My first long trip was in 1990 during the Intifada. I went back and applied for my right to a Palestinian ID in 1994, when limited self-rule began in Gaza and Jericho. I have made several short visits since then, my last trip a year and a half ago. Although I notice many changes every time I go, difficulties remain. Crossing the borders is still difficult. Even if it is just routine work, with no illegal documents or problems, the process takes at least four hours. Palestinians who have the right to citizenship in the new self-rule areas have been able to apply for their new Palestinian IDs. Once they have done that, the Israelis cease to recognise any other form of identification and can treat them as Palestinians -- that is to say, as badly as possible. I could no longer use my Egyptian passport; other Palestinians can no longer use any foreign passport they obtained during their years in exile. We are no longer allowed to obtain a visa to enter Palestine and Israel. I had to stay in Gaza: I was not allowed to enter Israel, or even the West Bank under Palestinian rule, except with a special permit that is very difficult to obtain, and only when I am in Gaza. My American husband, who accompanied me on this trip, was also treated differently. Americans are usually given a three-month visa at the border. This time he was only given a one-month permit because he was going to Gaza first, even though he mentioned in his application that he was a journalist on a two-month assignment. For this visit, we decided to drive to Palestine with his car, which has Cairo licence plates. Palestinian cars in Gaza have a new green plate, different from the blue plate numbers which begin with a different letter for each city in the West Bank, and also different from the yellow Israeli plates. Cars with Gaza or West Bank plates are not allowed into Israel. The yellow Israeli plates are not allowed into Gaza. I had been asked by the Swiss Cultural Centre to assist in two photography workshops in Palestine. I had to spend three weeks in Gaza, and three weeks in Ramallah, in the West Bank. A car with Egyptian licence plates and an American husband made it possible to move around the Holy Land. GAZA: After the long, tiring drive and the complications at the border between Cairo and Gaza, a good surprise was waiting for me. The garbage that recently filled the streets and beaches of Gaza had disappeared. There is a garbage can every hundred metres. Roads have been paved, and flower pots decorate the small tiled squares. Big colourful billboards and posters decorate the main streets. Street signs in Arabic and in English now lead you to where you want to go. The streets have names now: during the Intifada, Palestinians knew the houses only by the names of their residents in order to make it hard for the Israeli soldiers to get around. During the long years of occupation, Gaza was completely neglected. The first time I visited Gaza, in '94, garbage filled the whole strip. The streets were sand that turned into mud in winter. Graffiti, used instead of newspapers to express the ideas, politics, and concerns of the people, covered the walls. New schools, hospitals, recreation areas and parks have been built. High rises and tall buildings dominated the small, beautiful houses. I noticed more women going to work in fashionable modern clothes. They seem to enjoy a more open social life. Gaza's inhabitants seem more relaxed now that they no longer have to deal with the Israeli occupation forces on a daily basis. Now, the crime rate is almost nil. The newly built airport is beautiful: a Moroccan-style building, with tiles and arches, and white cornices. Hundreds of Moroccan workers have been working day and night on it for months. The Arab Contractors built the main edifice. It is almost finished, but will not be used until an agreement with the Israelis is reached. I visited the airport with my husband and Thomas, the Swiss photographer who was giving the photography workshop. Our trip coincided with two school buses carrying a hundred school girls on a field trip to the airport. The girls surrounded the flight engineer and bombarded him with questions ranging from technical issues to political comments. I was daydreaming about the day this airport starts working. It will be a more human solution than the land borders. It would allow us to go to the West Bank without having to cross the Israeli border. After their questions were answered, the girls recited poetry, sang songs, and took photos of each other in front of the control tower. PASSING THROUGH EREZ: We stayed in the Gaza Strip for the three entire weeks, since crossing the border between Gaza and the rest of Palestine is agonising. To go from Gaza to the West Bank one has to pass through Israel. That means you need a permit to pass through the Erez border (the border between Gaza and the rest of the country), which is an excruciatingly long, painful experience. To obtain such a permit I needed my valid ID and a security check from the Israeli authorities, a process that could take weeks or months to obtain. Even if all the documents are in order, the Israeli authorities still demand a "convincing reason" for your departure. Before Palestinian rule, since Israel controlled the whole area, the procedure was simpler and did not take all this time. Today, some Palestinians can no longer leave Gaza. We were allowed to cross over in the car: the foreign licence plates helped out here. Palestinians from Gaza who want to go into Israel cannot use their cars, which have green licence plates. They need to leave the car in the parking lot at Erez, and walk through a tunnel one and a half kilometres long. Then they have to look for an Israeli car with yellow plates to carry them on into Israel. If a Palestinian car manages to get the necessary permit to cross the Erez border, it has to go through a detailed inspection: every single part is searched. Our car passed through, my husband driving. I had to walk the kilometre and a half. Palestinian workers who work in Israel have to go through this process twice a day. During our whole stay, it was spring. All of Palestine was bright green, with flowers blooming everywhere. The road to Jerusalem starts out flat, then becomes hilly as you approach. On the way, you pass the green area the Israelis call Canada Park, where three Arab villages, Imwas, Bayt Nuba and Yalu, once stood. These villages were inhabited by around 5,000 Arabs in 1967. The day the Jordanian forces withdrew from Palestine, the Israeli army razed the villages to the ground. In three days they had shot all the inhabitants, and bulldozed the houses and their corpses into the ground. Except for very few survivors who managed to hide in the nearby monastery of Latrun, on the edge of the land occupied in 1948 and 1967, there is no one and nothing left. The Israeli government planted the park in 1978, with a donation made by Canadian Jews. The Latrun Monastery, founded in 1890, was built on a hill dominated by the remains of a Crusader castle where Richard the Lion-Heart took refuge. It is famous for its beautiful gardens and wines. The monastery itself is taken care of by Arab Christian monks; the land, however, is ruled by the Israelis. Once you reach Latrun, you know that Jerusalem is just beyond the horizon. RAMALLAH: We arrived in Ramallah by night. It was raining very hard. Though I had visited the city four years ago, nothing seemed familiar. I looked around for street signs or landmarks, but all I could see were new buildings and colourful billboards. We finally arrived at the Clock Square, which I recognised -- well, the clock itself has not changed. During the Intifada, this is where people gathered, forming groups to throw stones at the Israeli troops. I was completely lost. We had to ask for help. An old man was standing by the main road, a large plastic bag spread over his head to protect him from the rain. I asked him for the way to Manara Square. He started to explain, then asked us to give him a lift, since he was going to take a taxi from there. He then asked us the specific address we were heading to. When we said we were going to Al-Tireh, he sighed: it was two kilometres away from the square we were heading to. He insisted on coming with us to our final destination, even though we told him we had a very specific map once we got to the square. "What about the taxi you were going to take?" I asked him. "Oh, it doesn't matter," he smiled; "I'll catch a service taxi back to the square, then take my taxi." The next day we set out to search for the building where the workshop was to be held. It was as difficult as the previous night, but people were always ready to help: their hospitality and kindness have not changed. Ramallah has narrow streets and suffers from a huge traffic problem. The West Bank also suffers from the absence of a proper garbage tip and the lack of garbage collectors: garbage is in front of all the houses, piled up in the main streets. Ramallah, though, has a thriving social and cultural life. Before June '67, Ramallah was the summer resort of wealthy Arabs. It is on a high mountain and stays cool throughout the summer. During the years of occupation and the Intifada, everything closed down: the hotels, restaurants, cinemas and theatres. During the last year of the Intifada, there was only one pizza restaurant, which opened for two hours during the day because of the curfew. Since 1994, however, tens of new restaurants and cafés have been built, many old houses have been restored and transformed into cultural centres and art galleries. Al-Matal, Ziryab, Al-Sakakini and the Popular Arts Centre, to mention only a few, have year-round schedules of films, lectures and exhibitions. The photography workshop was held at the Arts Centre, where a good new film was shown every night. The Centre also trains young girls and boys of different ages to dance Dabka, the Palestinian national dance, so music filled the place all day long. My husband and I were about to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. We ended up bar-hopping, then met a couple of friends at Ziryab where we looked at a collection of fine Palestinian paintings by different artists and sipped mint tea as music played. AL-KHALIL (HEBRON): Where- ever you go in Hebron, you feel the lingering tension. There was always tension in Hebron during the occupation. The fact that the Ibrahimi sanctuary, sacred to both Muslims and Jews, is in the centre of the city, adds to the tension. Even though Hebron is officially under Palestinian rule, the Israelis, not satisfied with all the settlements they have built there, keep confiscating more Arab houses in the middle of the Arab city, and insist on living in them. After the massacre of Palestinians during dawn prayer in the mosque in 1994, some 100 Israeli families decided to reoccupy several houses that had belonged to Jews before 1948. Over a thousand Israeli soldiers came along to "protect them from the Arabs". As in all markets in old Arab cities, Palestinians sell their goods in small, Ottoman-style stalls. What is different in Hebron is that Israeli soldiers, fully armed, stand on the roof-tops of all the buildings. They patrol the narrow streets just in case the "Palestinian terrorists" attack the Israeli inhabitants. A new road, restored at great expense by the Palestinian Authority with money from USAID, is now closed to Arab cars, because one of the houses recently claimed by Israelis is close to the road. No matter how many Palestinians live there, and no matter how old or sick they are, they have to walk down to their houses while Israeli soldiers watch, and sometimes search them as they go. My husband and I visited Hebron on the second day of the Jewish Passover feast. No one besides Jews was allowed to visit the Ibrahimi shrine for a whole week. As we stepped out of a local restaurant serving falafel and fuul, we ran into one of my students and his wife in the street. They lived in Dahriya, a village near Hebron. While I was introducing them to my husband, a group of Israeli children, aged between four and six, came up to us and started calling us names. They held small pebbles in their hands, waved in anger, and then started spitting in our direction. Palestinian children use stones because they have no other weapon with which to defend themselves. Two Israeli soldiers, three metres away from us, watched these Israeli children with pride. BETHLEHEM: In Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, are the cave that held the stable where he was born, the shepherds' fields, and beautiful churches. Bethlehem is a sad city -- a city that thrives on visitors, and suffers from their absence. Palestinians from Bethlehem and neighbouring Bayt Jala are not allowed to leave their small cities. At the same time, they are not allowed to host tourists, or guide the very few of them that manage to come. As we drove along, we noticed that, at the entrance to every West Bank city now under PA rule, there is a huge Israeli billboard warning tourists not to enter because of the "dangerous Arabs". Another large sign prohibits tourists from entering individually. Organised tours have to check first and coordinate their visit with the Israeli army -- i.e. pay the fees to the Israelis instead of the Arabs. The sign is illegal and contravenes all the peace treaties signed between Israel and Palestine. During the Israeli occupation, there were 6,000 certified tourist guides in Palestine and Israel. Of these, only 39 were Palestinians. Even though Bethlehem suffers from all these handicaps, there is a sort of an excitement to the city, a breath of hope in the air. The Palestinian Authority, with the aid of the World Bank, the European Union, the UNDP, and UNESCO, is organising an international year-long festival for 2000. World-famous composers and musicians are scheduled to perform in Manger Square. The Palestinian Ministry of Tourism is also building a school of tourism and hotel management to increase the number of Arab guides. This will allow the Palestinians to tell their own history to the guests who are expected. Old sites, streets, houses, oil presses, wells, and Solomon's Pools are being restored in preparation for the occasion. People from Bethlehem are holding on to this dream. They talk with excitement about their plans for the millennium, and the benefits that will come with it. NABLUS: I went to Nablus with some friends on the second day of the Eid. We went with a very specific goal in mind: to eat the traditional, delicious kunafa made there. It takes its fame from the sweet goat cheese made in Nablus and named after the city. We moved from one pastry shop to another, only to find them closed for the feast. Most of the shops were closed, except for toy stores. We were desperate and disappointed, until one of us saw a pastry shop which seemed half open. We ran over and found a young man cleaning the place up. There was no kunafa on the big trays -- not a single triangle. We told him we had come all the way to Nablus just to have a portion of their heavenly kunafa. He called his father from the house, which was just upstairs. The old man smiled to us and told us that, if we waited for 20 minutes, he would prepare us our very own tray. It was worth it: the sweet cheese tucked away in the thin, crunchy brown pastry melted in our mouths. After we had accomplished our goal, we went for a walk around the old city. There were few women on the streets and most of them, even the younger girls, wore the hijab. I was particularly interested in the old Turkish bath with marble walls and floors. Old baths in Palestine are still functioning, and the three I visited in Gaza and Nablus were astonishingly clean. The bath in Nablus serves as a cultural centre as well: weekly concerts are well attended, even by people from outside the city. We went to Mount Sumara, where a sect of Arab Jews live. They claim to have the most authentic scripts and traditions. They are the most conservative Jews in terms of traditions and beliefs. The mountain was green, and high enough to afford a panoramic view of Nablus. The Roman city and two towers, said to have been built by Salaheddin, were spread out before us. This site is controlled by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism and barbed wire surrounds everything. Palestinian children who live around the area and who use the site as a playground and hiding place led us to a gap in the wire. We wriggled in. The view was much better. JERUSALEM: Every time you want to go to Jerusalem you have to cross an Israeli check point. Of course, you need a special permit to enter the heart of the Holy Land. West Bank cities are all less than an hour away from Jerusalem. Ramallah and Bethlehem are suburbs, a 10-minute drive from each other. The majority of Palestinians have not been able to visit Jerusalem for a couple of years now. Palestinians who live in other cities and used to work in Jerusalem have lost their jobs. The very few who ventured to continue working in Arab Jerusalem take the risk every morning of being returned home, or are forced to make a long detour. They also risk being shot by trigger-happy soldiers. While we were there, a minibus full of Palestinian workers returning from their day jobs in Israel was fired on at a checkpoint. Three men were killed, another nine wounded. Their supposed offence? Driving erratically. The Israeli government continues to confiscate Palestinian land to build settlements. Then they take over roads to secure the settlements, and forbid Palestinians from using these roads, built on their confiscated land. Palestinian land continues to shrink daily. Palestinians who live in different West Bank cities under PA rule cannot even visit each other because the connecting roads go through Jerusalem, and without the impossible permit you cannot come or go. Palestinians are imprisoned in their own small cities. My husband managed to go to Jerusalem for the Eid Al-Adha prayer. We were staying in Ramallah, and he gave three Palestinians a ride to Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Cairo licence plates, again, made it much easier to cross the checkpoint. He took his camera with him, excited to document this special day. An Israeli soldier, machine-gun slung across his shoulder, stopped him at the door of the sanctuary: no cameras allowed. The soldier informed him that the camera is an offence to the mosque. What about his boots and weapons? my husband wondered. My husband finally told him to keep the camera while he prayed, which was the main reason for his visit; the soldier refused. The argument went on. The three Palestinians who had travelled with him refused to leave him alone and waited until he was finally able to leave his camera with an Arab guard. Right after the prayer, the man slipped it to him, and he was able to take some photos of the Eid celebrations. Traditionally, West Bankers go to Jericho for the feast. We joined them. Although the city is very small, that day there were hundreds of children riding bicycles between the huge banana trees. Others filled the cafés as they enjoyed shisha and mint tea. The air was full of the smell of orange trees and the colours of the children's balloons. Many holidays were being celebrated: the Eid and two Easters, Orthodox and Western. In Ramallah, an old festive tradition that was impossible during the Intifada was revived. On both Muslim and Christian feasts, Scouts march through the main streets of the city, decorating them with Palestinian flags and beating drums. I was lucky that such cheerful days marked the end of my trip to Palestine. Palestinians are celebrating after long years of deprivation: happiness has been rare. Yet the suspicion and fear of what is to come overshadows even these joys. Uncertainty creates depression and tension. The euphoria and high expectations that existed right after the peace treaties have diminished. The final status of Palestine has to be more than a series of isolated enclaves. The daily complications, the hardships, the tension and violence have not made Palestinians forget: in a state of their own, life will be very different. Edited by Pascale Ghazaleh
