On these clear winter days, I can look West out the window of the shared van ride through the West Bank hills from my home in Ramallah to work at Birzeit University and see a distant city on the horizon. Only a 45 minute drive from Ramallah, those barely discernible little buildings might be Ashdod; or it might be Tel Aviv itself. And just beyond… blue. Somewhere in the blue expanse at the horizon, an invisible line divides the sky from the Mediterranean Sea. Sometimes there in the openings between two hills, if I try really hard, I can see it: the former Palestinian coast, now part of the state of Israel.
Westward from the Ramallah hills
With no Blackberry or Washington Post to bury my head in anymore, my travels to work are a calm, contemplative break in the day. Each day my gaze is drawn in the same direction: over the hills with white specks of Palestinian villages, over the boundary between the Palestinian West Bank and the State of Israel where a monstrous wall keeps us trapped on our “side,” over fertile farmlands, to these modern new Israeli cities which I, like many West Bank Palestinians, cannot access without permission documents from Israel. My relaxed mind often allows thoughts to wander to the imaginary lives of the people in these cities. There, they have skyscrapers, neat streets, warm beaches. Now, they might be grabbing a latte on their own commute to work, and over the weekend, the children will go to playgrounds and swimming pools. There, they have power and freedom. On clear nights, too, I can see the sparkling urban lights from my doorstep in Ramallah and then, too, I paint a quick image of their nice restaurants, nightclubs, neat modern homes, before I walk down the street to my very different life on what feels like a whole separate planet. It’s often strange to me that I can see right over to their world from my doorstep, and not just on TV.
Anytime I hear the often repeated Israeli complaint of how Israelis live in fear of violent Palestinian backlash against the military occupation oppressing them, these images stand out: they are afraid to go to their malls and swimming pools on the chance a Palestinian rocket will land there.
Maybe they don’t in fact know that most Palestinians don’t have malls, Palestinian children don’t have nice playgrounds and swimming pools. That here in the walled-in West Bank, not to mention the encircled prison of the Gaza Strip, there is not just fear but daily, constant reality of violence and oppression by military occupiers.
But for the past three weeks, I look toward those lights in the west with not just curiosity about the cities and nostalgia to see the coast. For also there, a little further south, is a 5 mile wide strip of land in which 1.5 million people are trapped in poverty and despair. Somewhere there in the distance I imagine I can see Gaza, less than 2 hours away by car yet inaccessible even to those standing at the border, with F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopters overhead, with the rubble of former cities and refugee camps burying hundreds of bodies beneath it, with thousands of military soldiers encircling the strip from land and sea, not letting anyone in or out either to flee or to see the carnage they are inflicting.
I pause even more these days to look west, to focus even harder on the shapes and colors beyond. I want so badly to go to Gaza, to help or to report, but there’s absolutely nothing I could do that would get me there. So instead, I imagine I can see Gaza from my doorstep so I can feel closer, so I can feel that I can absorb a tiny slice of their suffering and experience, so I can feel that by standing there and exposing my eyes and my being to the west, to the same sky and wind over Gaza, I am a part of them too.
-Lubna Takruri
