Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Gideon Levy, Twilight Zone / Free passage, Haaretz, August 7, 2008

She walks from the pool to the stylish portico of the Bethlehem Intercontinental, a bikini showing beneath shorts and a revealing shirt. There’s an anklet on her leg, her hair is dyed a reddish brown, and she’s holding a French Gauloise cigarette and a red cell phone. She has come for a weekend at the Intercontinental, for a wedding: When you drink you don’t drive, so she stayed at the luxurious hotel, five stars at $130 a night, which was bustling with vacationers - Israeli Arabs from Haifa.

She is not allowed to be in Bethlehem, where we met her; she is not allowed to visit Ramallah, where she has been living for years; she is not allowed to travel to the beach in Tel Aviv, as she does several times a week during the summer; and she is not allowed to go to Jerusalem for entertainment or work purposes, yet is there almost every day. She is in the north, but her heart and her family are in the south. A native of Rafah, she arrived 16 years ago to study at Bir Zeit University and has been stuck in Ramallah ever since, far from her loving family. She carries a “Gaza ID card” and despises the whole idea of it. It is supposed to be impossible for her to live in the West Bank and travel in Israel. At any given moment, at any checkpoint, she is liable to find herself expelled back to Rafah. That’s how it’s been for all these years.

Courageous and determined, she has built a full life for herself, between the checkpoints. “Anyone who was born near the sea can’t live without it,” she told me when we sat over coffee in the lobby of the Intercontinental. Her “passport,” she wrote me a few days ago, cost her $300 and was worth it: Elegant and confident, with her Giorgio Armani sunglasses, she passes through all the checkpoints.

Areej Hijazi lives without borders. But her longings for her parents, her siblings and her relatives, and for her childhood landscapes in Rafah, repeatedly arouse in her a sadness that is reflected in her eyes.

A few days ago she sent me an e-mail on behalf of a group of Gazans who are stuck in Ramallah: “As for Gaza, it is a one-way ticket; we can go back there without ever dreaming of coming back to the West Bank! … We missed the opportunity to have a normal life that all people around us simply had and still have, just because we hold [a] so-called Gaza ID (by the way I am sick of this term); to visit your family on holidays and school vacations, to attend your siblings’, cousins’, friends’ weddings or graduations, to welcome new members into your family or bid a warm farewell to those who leave, to grow up around your beloved ones, to have your family around you in your wedding or to make your parents, while getting old, happy to see their grandchildren, to benefit from a scholarship abroad and to advance your career, to enjoy times with your parents that you simply didn’t enjoy as a rebellious teenager before you left your family home … to have your mom around you when you’re heartbroken, to complain to your father about how crazy the world is getting, to share with your sister your love stories or to chat with her about life and men and success and failure, to visit your school or to pass by those places where you had crazy childhood encounters.

“Now comes the fun part. I have what my friends call ‘the checkpoint syndrome’ - you know, those times when you feel helpless and hopeless, and where all becomes meaningless, due to pure personal reasons sometimes. I go to one of the Jerusalem checkpoints and try to pass. Why, I don’t know. It could be that at those times you need to do something crazy to regain some of your internal balance, and in my case the craziest thing ever is to challenge the so-called ‘Israeli security and checkpoints system.’ Success is 100 percent: Each time I tried to pass, I passed not only to Jerusalem, but also to Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Haifa and Nazareth. My passport was my curly hair and the Giorgio Armani sunglasses that I bought only for the checkpoints, and guess what? I believe the $300 investment was worth it. It is so funny that I cannot see my family in Gaza for years, while I spend most of the summer swimming in Tel Aviv or having fun in Jerusalem. What a brilliant security system!