Four years ago I experienced a traumatic day and a half that will forever distinguish the person I am now from my childhood. I write about it now because it has crept back to the front of my mind. I am living less than 30 miles from a place that I am not permitted to travel to, and it feels appropriate to write about why in this setting.
so close, yet…
At age 19, traveling alone from Cairo to Tel Aviv, I was interrogated for a period of 11 hours in Ben Gurion Airport and denied permission to enter Israel. I was fingerprinted, had my picture taken, and after 30 hours spent locked in a detention facility in the airport, I was put on a plane to New York.
To give a little context, after studying Arabic for two years I wanted to spend some time in an Arabic speaking place. I went to Palestine in the summer of 2008 to live with a host family, take Arabic classes, and intern at a news agency where I did reporting and translation. While studying Arabic was my initial motivation to go, I inevitably became immersed in the political reality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Always an outsider, I tried to understand my place there, a blonde American who embarrassingly had just recently learned the difference between Palestinians and Israelis in a Middle East history class the semester before. I acknowledged that my temporary experience of the Israeli occupation of Palestine was superficial by comparison to the perpetual trauma of Palestinians themselves, in the West Bank and Gaza as well as in the diaspora.
My introduction to the Arab world incidentally came through this lens, and my study of Arabic will forever be linked to the six weeks I spent in Bethlehem. What still sticks with me today from that fleeting summer is the unimaginable passion that I found in people to work (nonviolently) for their basic rights in the face of blatant injustice.
I remember a visual disconnect upon seeing 6 Israeli tanks and 40 armed soldiers facing a disproportionately small group of protestors sitting on the ground with their Palestinian flags and signs. I remember the children at that demonstration carrying a flag and chanting in English, “The wall is not good!” (Even they understood that it’s English speakers who need to hear that message more clearly…)
I remember my host mother, already in her 70s, making sure I knew all the Arabic vocabulary words in the kitchen, spending hours over a simmering burner making fig preserves, and teasing me for “becoming fat from all the bread.”
These snippets are a sample of what I never got to fully process when my time in Palestine was abruptly cut short.
that evasive visa (2 years later…)
I was immediately pulled aside once I got to the customs counter in Tel Aviv when I arrived just before 5:00 am. El Al security in the Cairo airport had given me a thorough run-down of questions and emptied my backpack multiple times. The security agent took away all of my disposable cameras as a “security risk.” I think my passport had already been flagged before the plane landed in Israel — I fit the profile of a typical western activist aiming to bear witness to the occupation in Palestine.
Running on no sleep when I arrived at Ben Gurion Airport, I fumbled through questions about my grandparents’ names at that caught me off guard, and was immediately pulled back to a waiting room where I waited with mostly Arab Americans, Turkish tourists, and a smattering of other individual travelers. On and off for the next eleven hours, I was called into smaller offices to be questioned about what I was planning to do in Israel, whom I knew, and why I had gone to Cairo. I would wait sometimes for hours and then they would call me in to answer the same questions from a different security agent, twisting their words slightly so it sounded like a different question. My nerves were on fire, my heart a palpitating mess.
One of them turned the computer monitor to me to try to get me to log into my email. I think I said something about how it was private and they moved on, but they clearly took note. They took my dead cell phone, charged it, and looked through my contacts, call register, and text messages (one read: “rock against the settlers!”) before returning it to me. I was allowed to go to the bathroom around the corner only if I had a guard as my escort. About 6 hours into being questioned I was brought a sandwich and a coke, the sight of which made me sick. It meant they were nowhere near done with me. I couldn’t eat or drink.
After many tedious sessions of invasive on and off questioning I told the officers I was no longer comfortable answering their convoluted questions about the elderly couple that was my host family in Bethlehem. The response was, “If you won’t cooperate with us, we’ll have to assume you’re associated with terrorists and we won’t let you back into Israel.” The absurdity of the statement initially provoked a laugh, followed by disbelief. “Are you serious?” I asked. “My government gives you billions of dollars every year.”
They were quite serious.
I was taken to another room to be fingerprinted. I stood in front of a blank background while they captured probably the worst moment of my life on camera.
I texted home in the states to let them know I had been denied entry to Israel and I would call back with flight information, assuming it would just be a couple hours until I was put on the next flight to New York.
I was put in a van with another American who had been denied a visa, not told where we were going. (I still don’t know what his story was.) We ended up at another building, still within the airport compound. I was brought to a room and told to grab what we needed for a shower and leave the rest of our stuff. (In my case it was the half-empty backpack I had travelled to Cairo with.) I was not allowed my phone, a pen, or a book — just a change of clothes and a toothbrush. Confused, and still thinking I would be brought to a gate in the airport soon, I obliged and was led upstairs, not knowing that I would be locked in a room upstairs for another day and a half.
At some point during this second phase of what all feels like a dream in my memory, it became clear that I was scheduled for a flight four days later. I had no way to contact anyone, left in the room with my terrified thoughts and the five other women with whom I shared it.
My family in Vermont eventually located me, after many frantic phone calls with our senators and state department employees. I was allowed to speak with them, and clarified with the agents at the detention facility that I could leave sooner if my family bought a new ticket. They just didn’t want to foot the bill. (I think the Israelis had switched my original return ticket back a few weeks as cheaply as possible, and this had meant four days after I was denied entry, instead of a few hours.) This meant I was on a flight that left at midnight the second day, 30 hours after arriving at the detention facility.
The vignettes that seem trivial to me as I reduce them to words remain vivid in my memory.
The sinking feeling in my gut after hearing the door shut behind me being shown into a room and realizing that there was no handle on the inside.
The utter boredom of lying on the plastic mattress on my top bunk, looking up at the ceiling and feeling completely powerless.
The angry tears that flew down my face when a female soldier laughed maniacally in my face through the tiny window on the door, yelling at me in Hebrew when I knocked on the glass.
The three Philippina domestic workers who were being deported after overstaying their visas holding me as I sobbed on their bunk while we all waited for our flights out of Israel.
The relief I felt with my passport back in my hands after being escorted up the steps to the plane and to my seat literally minutes before it was set to take off. (And the uncomfortable 13 hour flight back, me in a kufiyyeh surrounded by Israelis, wondering what could have possible happened.)
The poetic catharsis of meeting the Palestinian-American customs agent who greeted me when finally I landed in New York.
I was forced to acknowledge my vulnerability as an individual in a very concentrated way in the aftermath of those two days. Realizing that processing the experience was not happening at the university I transferred to a few weeks after returning from Israel, I decided to take 6 months off from school. That decision made me feel like a failure at the time but was probably the smartest thing I’ve ever done.
This was not a gradual “coming of age” experience. My whole core and sense of self was rocked by losing control over my surroundings, the limits to my innocence illustrated all too bluntly.
As I floated the other day in the Dead Sea, looking over at the all too familiar landscape of Israel and Palestine, Bethlehem–and unavoidably Ben Gurion Airport–resurfaced in my immediate consciousness.
it’s right there.
I never wrote about those awful 41 hours because I had a hard time finding the words to do my emotions justice. I am still processing how I feel about it, and how it drastically altered my worldview and my personal sense of self.
On one hand I didn’t know how to express how profoundly changed I was on a personal level. On the other, I didn’t want to feign ignorance of the fact that humiliation and trauma far beyond my isolated experience is a daily reality of the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.
Time has distanced me from the events of those two days, and at the same time they remain very close to my heart. But I write now because of how incredibly common stories like this are, but are often untold or unheard. (Like this one, which is all too reminiscent of my own experience.)
While for the time being I’m unable to go back to Palestine, coming to Jordan this year feels right, as full-circle as it could be.
alajnabiya 