Daily Life in the Middle East

By Natanya Epstein

I was in the middle of the desert with Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, Jordanians and a handful of North Americans. Back in the United States everyone speaks about the “Middle East Crisis” as if it were something to be dealt with. Let me start by saying that no matter how sure you are about your opinion on the matter, you would become confused after living in this region. Here are a few of the scenes that stick out in my mind after going to school for a year in southern Israel, just a kilometer from the Jordanian border and about 60 kilometers from Sinai, Egypt.

February 2003
Semester break is over, and I am happy to have returned to school in Israel without a problem. The kibbutz is so far south that its members and staff remember with humor how isolated they were from all the action during the Gulf War. Basically, nothing happens down here; other than a bunch of hippie environmentalists, no one thinks this area has a lot to offer. No oil, no settlements, not even any resources…just a few kibbutzim who pretty much keep to themselves. So I am fairly calm in the middle of this military country, having become accustomed to all the kids walking around with M-16s and regularly hearing target practice from the military base just six kilometers away.

I sat in my room looking at the Hebrew script on the cardboard box next to me for a long time. When I approached it, I felt great apprehension, as if touching this box would make the war in Iraq real. I walked out of my room and asked if anybody wanted to join me for a gas mask party. Five of us sat in a circle with our boxes and started going over the checklist, looking at these creations like they were the weirdest things we had ever seen. Now try to picture this: four Americans and one Canadian sitting on the floor of my room laughing and crying together, wearing masks that make us look like ants or Martians.
One of the Israeli students guided us, just like a flight attendant, through the tightening procedures and smiled at our ignorance. Finally, we took a deep breath and neatly folded our masks back into their boxes and stuffed them away, hoping to never see them again. But the night had just begun for me. My mom called with a tone of voice I had never heard in 23 years. There was nothing I could say to console her, so I promised that she could check in with me twice a day for as long as she felt necessary.
During one phone interlude with my mother, she asked if I was scared, and for the first time I realized how very scared I was.
It is scary to be in a warring country. It is scary to see guns on a regular basis. It is scary to know that people your age are killing and dealing with the possibility of being killed every day.
March 2003

I went to the West Bank last weekend. Most of the world seems to think that this is a really dangerous thing to do, but I believe in dealing with people one on one. I can’t avoid a place because the people who live there hate my country’s government. So I went, and although there were no fireworks while I was there, I did come across many scenes that most Israelis have never seen for fear of crossing the green line. I saw a lot of Christians, whom people seem to have forgotten, and I saw wealthy people with homes that looked just like those in American suburbs. People stared at me everywhere I went, because in my everyday American outfit I stuck out like a sore thumb. However, I never felt endangered—not as a female, not as a Jew and not as an American

I crossed through the Bethlehem and Ramallah checkpoints twice and had the opportunity to observe what happens there on a calm day. The tension level was fairly low and there were a lot of Palestinians trying to get to work and school, so I stood in line with my passport. This is what I saw: the young Israeli male soldiers spoke to the Palestinians in Hebrew (most Palestinians don’t speak Hebrew) and spoke to adults three times their age with complete condescension.
Nobody was shot. Nobody was blown up. Only the dignity of the Palestinian people in line next to me was sacrificed.

April 2003
I am staying in a spacious house in Bethlehem with my friend Alice, who is Swiss-Palestinian. In return for cleaning the house belonging to her aunt and uncle, Alice is going to live there for free. Gilo settlement is to my left on the other side of the valley, and we can see the guard towers surrounding it on all sides. The Palestinian people that I have met so far—whether they be Abu Mazen’s top hydro-geologist, Alice’s family members or our cab driver—are scared to death of the settlements and don’t even like looking in their direction. Most of the houses in this neighborhood have curtains only on the windows facing the settlement.

There are some little kids next door desperately interested in us, so we invite them over. After a few minutes of shyness, the oldest girl breaks the ice and reaches for my camera. I show her where the shutter button is and how to look through the viewfinder. Then, using hand motions, I tell her to take a picture. Before I know it, all the adults in the group are yelling and running over to us babbling in several different languages.
After a few minutes of confusion, I learn what just happened. The girl was pointing the camera toward the settlement, and although the desired subject was a field of yellow flowers, a guard on the other side might have mistaken the camera for a gun and shot her. I spend the rest of that day trying to figure out how I would have lived with myself if the girl had been shot.

I share these snapshots of my experience with you in an effort to illustrate the complexity and irrationality of the situation in the Middle East. Remember that no matter what you hear about in the media, most people here are simply trying to go about their lives in the hope that one day there will be peace. AV

At the time of this writing, Natanya Epstein was an environmental studies major at Mount Allison University, New Brunswick, Canada. She went to Southern Israel last year to attend the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies (www.arava.org). Contact her at natanya_22@hotmail.com.