After recovering from her momentary confusion, the receptionist escorted me to Dr. Atawneh’s office.
“Welcome, Jennifer!” said Dr. Atawneh as he rose and came toward me, smiling broadly. “What’s your policy on shaking hands?” he said, referring to the widespread Muslim belief that hand shaking between the sexes is strictly forbidden.
“If someone offers, I shake; otherwise, I don’t shake hands,” I replied.
“Excellent policy, Jennifer,” he laughed, gesturing for me to have a seat across from him at his desk.
“Well,” he started, “I think we can probably help each other, but it will be up to the heads of the English Department to determine your suitability to teach a class or two. How does that sound?”
Within days, I was scheduled for an interview, first by the dean of the English Department, middle-aged and exuding a peculiar old-school ladies-man vibe, and with three other professors, who grilled me on teaching theory, writing styles, and the methods I used in my other teaching job.
Doing my best to feign confidence, I struggled to recall the nebulous memory of a distant, solitary undergraduate class on education. I focused on not mentioning my use of YouTube as curriculum, and did my best to answer most of their questions with a semblance of good sense. In all truth, it was a moment far removed from my timid-housewife days back home, and it actually felt good.
The next day, I got a call from the Dean, himself, offering me an open class section in advanced English composition, and I was in!
CHAPTER 27
Pretty Birds
I’m not denyin the women are foolish:
God Almighty made ‘em to match the men.
-GEORGE ELIOT
My mother-in-law’s general dubiousness about my work in Hebron meant I was very nervous to tell the family that I was going to be adding the class at the university to my schedule. Happily, I was surprised to see that she actually seemed impressed when I told her that I was going to be a “real teacher.” Palestinians are obsessive about education, and even though both she and my father-in-law are illiterate (forced to sign legal documents with a thumbprint like many of the older generation), she uses all her powers of grandmotherly guilt to push the family’s kids to cutthroat competition for the highest grades in the village.
So when I found out from Asya that she’d been bragging around Safa about her “son’s wife, the university teacher,” I couldn’t help but feel a sense of satisfaction. If my job at the university could accomplish that miracle, maybe it was a good sign.
When I showed up for my first class a few weeks later, located four floors above the cafeteria in one of the newer buildings on campus, I was dressed in the unofficial uniform of the university: a long trench-coat like jilbab—a new one in the season’s ultra-fashionable corduroy, and a carefully wrapped rectangular scarf.
At first, nobody seemed to notice me as they assembled in the large room, perhaps assuming that I was just another student, until I plopped down my laptop on the podium and started talking—in English. Jaws dropped and the class quieted to a shocked attention. There was no question that this class wouldn’t be what the students expected.
Most of the students in the university, somewhere around seventy-three percent, were female, but in my class I would have placed it closer to ninety percent. Like me, they all wore Islamic dress. But that was where the similarity ended.
Whereas I’ve struggled for years to arrange my scarf in a way that does not make me resemble a Russian nesting doll, the Hebron students seemed to have elevated Islamic style to a whole other plane of awesomeness, wearing scarves wrapped and folded like origami, with matching makeup, shoes and bags in hues bright as tropical birds. According to the dean, most of the girls were majoring in marriage, an idea that I couldn’t readily dismiss—especially since the majority of them showed up to writing class without pens or paper. Even the few male students were all polished and shiny, wearing pointy dress shoes, polyester pants and gelled coifs reminiscent of Saturday Night Fever. It was certainly a far cry from the flip-flops and sweats from my college days, and I felt positively frumpy in comparison.
Still, the first class began well, and once the students recovered from their initial shock at my rapid-fire English, they seemed to be quite interested.
I was most pleased that my worst fears—that I would stammer nervously, or forget what to talk about—seemed to float away on the little white puffs of my words in the unheated building. This might be easier than I thought.
Sadly, Murphy’s Law is in effect in the Holy Land, too, and my bright idea of having the class go around and introduce themselves (after all, advanced composition is a bit like a Writing 101 class back home) hit the brakes on my dreams of being Awesome Teacher of the Year.
“And you…what’s your name,” I asked, addressing one of the four male students seated at the rear of the room.
“Mahmood.”
“Okay, Mahmood, tell us about yourself and what you hope to learn in this class,” I said, looking down at my class list, ready to pencil in his response.
“I don’t want to talk,” he grumbled, staring me down like a stubborn toddler.
Confused, I was about to move on to someone else when another student, a tiny girl wearing a peacock-colored pashmina hijab and seated in the front row, interjected, “It’s common for the boys not to talk much in class.”
Now, I’m sure the girl (who became one of my top students) wanted to help by acquainting the new teacher with the lay of the land, perhaps diffusing the sudden tension that everyone in the room could plainly feel. But there was just something about the boy’s offended air, as if I had breached some unspoken rule against calling on the boys that raised my hackles.
Bullshit, I thought, this is an advanced university class—and it was my class. If it had been a few months earlier, I probably would have let it slide, but not anymore. This little shit is going to learn a lesson, I thought. So, after giving him one final chance to participate (which he again refused), I kicked him out of the class and spent the rest of the period mediating an argument between the rival Hamas and Palestinian Authority affiliated students, giving my first lesson in “keeping it on the page” instead of arguing.
After class, I decided to walk over to the dean’s office to make sure Mr. Non-Talker would be permanently removed from my section. It was something I found particularly important to do, given that he had refused to leave the room until I threatened to call security. That I wouldn’t let slide!
I’m not sure what I expected—acknowledgment of the problem, maybe disciplinary action (after all, I don’t remember a particularly high tolerance for student disrespect in the universities I’d attended). However, when I sat across from the dean in his office and explained the problem, all I got was a blank stare, a cloud of cigarette smoke, and a smile.
Leaning back, he finally offered, “Well, it’s a writing class. Is it really necessary that he speak?”?
After taking a second to process the Dean’s question, I managed to stammer out that, yes, I did prefer that my students speak during class. At this, the Dean laughed, shook his head, and told me that they routinely allowed male students to change class sections if they were outnumbered by their female peers.
It was an idea that left me literally speechless. After all, how many times have female students been outnumbered by men, especially in technical fields? This was ridiculous. There was no way I was going to play that game. Still, I thought, maybe I was missing something, perhaps some kind of sexist favoritism, a nod to male pride. This isn’t my culture, I thought. Maybe I just didn’t get it.
“Oh, and Jennifer,” the dean added, “Here is the key to your office. It’s in the new building, and I think you’ll like it. It is a bit small, though,” he continued. “But your body is nice and slim…It should fit just fine.”
Nice.
Exhausted and more than a little creeped out, I quickly took my leave of the Dean and hurried over to the administration
building to meet Beth in Public Relations. She was the only other American at the university, and I’d met her that first day in Dr. Atawneh’s office. She was a sweet American student studying Arabic and Hebrew in the Holy Land, but she’d never been to downtown Hebron. So I offered to take her.
What I didn’t know at the time was that the night we went would be when Hebron’s settlers decided to torch the city, and by the time we got to downtown we’d found ourselves in a melee—leaping flames, exploding percussion grenades, and intermittent gunfire. Together, we walked to the edge of the downtown market, and blinking through the remnants of tear-gas clouds, watched the neighborhood burn, hoping it wasn’t an omen of worse things to come.
CHAPTER 28
Murder in Bat Ayin
Terrorism doesn’t just blow up buildings; it blasts every other issue off the political map. The spectre of terrorism—real and exaggerated—has become a shield of impunity, protecting governments around the world from scrutiny for their human rights abuses.
-NAOMI KLEIN
My kids had mastered the art of using my newfound working-mother guilt to their advantage, and this time they talked me into taking them to Solomon’s Pools again. The April weather was warm and clear, and I decided to give them a rare pizza picnic (takeout from a Bethlehem restaurant called Milano’s) right across the road from the pools on a clean-looking platform in the abandoned, crumbling visitors center.
After they finished, the kids ran straight over to the pools, especially the largest one that they called “the slide” (where they all tore out the bottom of their pants against the rough plastered chute). As I busied myself packing up the mess and throwing away the garbage, though, I looked up to a balcony above me and saw what appeared to be the figure of a man, hurriedly darting out of sight. Realizing that we were being watched and possibly followed was enough for me to hurry up, gather the kids and head back to the village.
Once we neared the military tower at the mouth of the village road, we could see that a checkpoint had been erected and that a large, steel gate had been locked shut across the road. Not sure what to do, I parked the car on the edge of the road and approached the three soldiers at the checkpoint, two of whom raised their rifles to my chest. Addressing them in English (as I’d learned was usually the best move in uncertain situations with the Israeli military), I asked them why the road was closed.
“Go ask your friends. They will tell you,” answered a middle-aged soldier.
My friends. What the hell was he talking about? Ignoring the remark, I continued, “Well, how can we get through? I have to get my kids home.”
“The road is closed, and the town is a closed military zone. You go….” He said, turning his face from me and walking away as if I were too low to deserve a full sentence. His job was to close, not advise, whether there were kids in the car or not. I would have to find another way to get back to the village and find out what was going on.
I turned the car around and decided to try for home via an unpaved back road that was generally off the military patrol grid. I still didn’t know the details of the closure, so I hoped the soldiers hadn’t closed the back entrances, too. So with no other choice, I headed to the town of Halhoul, near Hebron, to start the slow, bumpy ride to the village.
Two hours later we were finally back home in Safa. There we were met with very unwelcome news: the village was closed because someone in Safa had infiltrated a neighboring Jewish settlement, called Bat Ayin, and murdered a thirteen-year-old boy with an ax.
Everybody was trying to guess who could have killed the child, and everybody started whispering their suspicions. So far, though, nobody I knew seemed to have any real ideas, which was surprising. After all, one thing I knew about Safa was that nobody in the village could keep a secret.
Without any information about the culprit, then, we all turned to mutual rumination, trying to make personal, moral sense of the crime. Then, arguments started to break out, and some—mostly young men—said that if the reports were true that one boy was killed and another critically injured when a young male attacked them with a pick ax on the lawn of one of the settlement buildings—then it was justified because of Bat Ayin’s history of attacks against the village.
Many others, though—most of them, parents (this parent included)—argued that kids, of all people, are off limits. No matter what.
It was a strange feeling that there might be a killer—an ax killer—in our midst here in small Safa, where basically everyone was related to everyone else by blood or marriage. Somebody had to know who he was—and that was exactly why the military decided to close the village. Squeeze us all and somebody will talk.
It’s a logical theory unless you happened to be one of the unlucky residents who didn’t know squat. Then, you were going down with the rest, baby. We could only hunker down and wait. Problem was, there was another layer to the situation that cast a dark cloud over us all, and this layer was much more insidious.
Everyone in Safa knew that they would eventually find the killer by closing off the village, searching and interrogating. That was going to be painful, yes. But the really dark cloud in all of this was the coming retribution from the settlement. It was only a matter of time, and if the village was closed and none of us could escape, we were going to be sitting ducks.
Although no one seemed to know who had committed this latest crime, everyone knew some kind of reprisal would be coming against Safa. That was just how it worked between settler communities and Palestinian villages—especially when the settlement was one like Bat Ayin.
The issue of settlements (communities built within occupied territory) is one of the main sticking points of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to international law, they are illegal, yet they not only remain throughout the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, but they are growing, both in population, land expansion, and in the number of new outposts across the countryside.
As for the settlers themselves, I couldn’t help but find them oddly fascinating. Most of the settlements were there for religious, nationalistic, or even financial reasons, and they built huge, modern, fenced communities that stood in sharp contrast to the Palestinian villages alongside them. These settlements even had lawns—lawns!—when most Palestinian villages were forced to ration the water they used for similarly frivolous things—like drinking.
Bat Ayin was another story altogether.
The settlement was considered so hard-core, it didn’t even need a fence. In fact, the settlers were famous for their assertion that “our fence is as far as we can shoot.” My father-in-law was unfortunate enough to confirm this when he unwittingly entered into that area while out grazing his sheep one day. Still, he was lucky. All he lost were a few hours, hunkered belly-down in the rocks, along with one lost lamb—shot straight through its neck by the settlers.
Unfortunately, the neighborly relations between the two communities had claimed much more than that in sacrifice over the years, including a 2002 attempt by a group of Bat Ayin residents to bomb a girls’ elementary school in East Jerusalem, and several tit-for-tat attacks and murders that left the two communities at dangerous odds.
Although we still didn’t know who’d done the crime, everyone knew that a reprisal was coming against Safa. After all, collective punishment was standard operating procedure in the West Bank, and the soldiers weren’t even shy to say it (despite the awkward fact that collective punishment is against international law).
One soldier, blessed with amazingly glossy, blond peyos pushed back under his helmet straps, expressed the “logic” perfectly to me at a checkpoint a few weeks before when someone threw a stone at their concrete guard tower: “If one of you throws rocks at us, we close your town…If you don’t like it, tell your kids not to throw stones.”
My kids?
“My kids are right here in the back seat,” I said, pointing my thumb at the three of them.
I never got the reaction I was looking for.
&
nbsp; Still, Safa had it easy compared to the main towns along the highway, where rocks and Molotov cocktails were more common. But even as far away as we were, we’d lost power and been “closed” (literally, a giant iron gate was permanently installed so it could be opened and locked at will by the military) because of boys throwing stones or Molotovs at passing convoys in a neighboring town.
This was based on a bizarre belief that “the others” (us) were a living, breathing entity, as if all every Palestinian within any given radius not only knew, but also controlled each other. That was the root of the problem and is similar to the thinking of a suicide bomber choosing to push the button in public, next to a stroller. After all, “they” are The Enemy, so no further thought is required. Now it was a notion that filled me with unspeakable dread.
An uneasy day passed until a report finally came from the neighboring town’s municipality that an attack was imminent, generating a wave of hysteria. For literally the first time in their lives, the village children were told to beware of strangers and were terrified. I didn’t let my kids play outside at all.
The army came in late the next night, along with a test attack by the Bat Ayin settlers. Flares lit up the sky and the house shook from percussion grenades and helicopters, leaving us to stay holed up inside our homes, talking to each other by cell phone.
By morning, the army had completely taken over the streets, broken into homes and made arrests. But in the light of day, the residents seemed to be braver, running between the houses, getting updates and exchanging supplies until dusk, when the activity again quieted.
But when darkness came and the army began patrolling again, the soldiers seemed to have something new in store. Again and again, they blared a message from their vehicles into the night: Every man and boy over the age of twelve must surrender themselves at the village crossroads.
All Roads Lead to Jerusalem Page 16
