On my way home, it was clear that the Israelis wanted to send me off with a bang. Maybe this is just the Israeli version of a goodbye party for Palestinian sympathizers. Except if they really knew I was a Palestinian sympathizer, I would have been in for much more...
It started when Karam and a friend of her family (I will not mention his name here) drove me to the airport in his "service" van. We drove the hour or so from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, and we began to see signs for the airport around 1:10 PM. I thought, "Great, my flight isn't until 4:35, so I'm right on time."
Not so.
There is a checkpoint placed right before the airport, and almost every car that passes through it gets passed through without stopping for more than a few seconds. Oops, correction: I should say every car with non-Arabs in it. Apparently, we were much more suspicious than most of the cars coming our way, because the soldiers took one look at Karam's and the driver's passports (as well as mine) and told us to pull over and step out of the car. Once we were out of the car, he opened the trunk and asked whose bags those were. They were all mine, and we told him so. Paging through my passport, he asked me why I was in Palestine. I told him I was a visitor, a tourist. He asked if I had family here. I told him no. He asked how I knew Karam and the driver. I told him Karam is the cousin of a friend of mine and the driver is just driving me to the airport. He looked at me suspiciously. Then he told us to take all the bags out of the car and place them on the sidewalk. We took all our (mostly my) belongings out and put them in a big pile on the sidewalk. Then he asked us for all of our cell phones. Now, there is a funny thing with cell phones in Palestine. So many Palestinians I know have more than one cell phone, as many of them have one for work and one for personal use or something like that. The driver had 3 cell phones, and Karam had 2. I only gave the soldier my Israeli cell phone and figured that if he found my American one I could just tell him I didn't even think of giving it to him because I don't use it as a phone here. (Luckily, I realized, I had spent much of the ride to the airport deleting the phone numbers of the people I had been with in Palestine, so there were no numbers actually saved on the phone. Whew!) Of course, the soldier unapologetically dropped one of the driver's phones as he walked away.
So we stood on the sidewalk next to a mound of my luggage while the soldier called us into an office, one at a time. At the same time, another soldier searched the entire van, using one of those plastic wands with the nitrates-sensing cotton swabs at the end to sweep every possible surface of the vehicle. In one hand he held the wand, in the other his gun.
Once the first soldier had worked on the driver and then Karam, he told me to bring my things and come with him. I couldn't carry everything at once, so I had to bring my bags in in two trips. Of course, he didn't lift a finger to help me. When I got in, he made me place each bag on a table while he searched it. I had packed my big hiking backpack as my checked luggage and my regular backpack, my purse, and a laptop case full of tiles and other fragile souvenirs as carry-ons. He unpacked all of the carry-ons, going through everything and even x-raying my backpack, and then he went through much of my hiking backpack as well. He used the nitrates-sensing wand on the whole shebang. Then, of course, he made me pack everything up again. I acted grumpy towards him the whole time, especially when I had to replace everything in my previously carefully-packed hiking backpack.
I was sent outside with my stuff once more (once more he did not help me with any of it) and told that I could put it all back in the van and that all of us needed to go in the van and stay there. At one point, I wanted to take a picture of Karam in the car, and I started to jump out of the vehicle to do so, but she and the driver quickly told me to stay in the van because the soldiers did not want us outside. They did sound a little worried, and, in retrospect, they were correct. Finally, the soldiers came back with our phones and IDs and sent us along our merry way, about 30 minutes after we had originally arrived.
Ok, so I still had a little less than 3 hours to check in, go through security, and get to my gate to wait for boarding. That didn't seem so bad. Boy, was I wrong!
They dropped me off at the airport, I paid the driver, and I loaded everything onto a luggage cart for easy movement. Karam and I said a sad goodbye and gave each other big hugs. I'll miss her a lot! Then I went into the check-in area. After about 10 minutes, I figured out exactly where I was supposed to check in (there is a miserable lack of signs in Ben Gurion airport), and it turned out I needed to wait in a long security line prior to checking in for my flight. So I called Samer and used up the remaining minutes on my rental phone, which I would have to return once I entered the area with the departure gates. As I waited in the security lines, I watched an aiport employee walking around from person to person in the line, asking questions, looking at their passports, and making determinations about who got checked by the security personnel. It was clear that most of the people were allowed to walk right through and check in without any additional security procedures and some of the people had to put their bags through an x-ray machine and then have them searched by a group of security officers to my left prior to checking in for their flights. I hoped that, against all the odds, I would be allowed through. Mostly, I was concerned about what they would find in my luggage. Besides having bought a bunch of kafias (sp?) from Jerusalem, I had a stack of books about Palestinian refugees (in Arabic and English) that I the folks at BADIL had given me. And I knew that if they found those books (the last guy hadn't found them) I'd be taken into a room for questioning and could miss my flight. In retrospect, it was pretty stupid of me not to just mail all of that stuff from Jerusalem to the U.S., but for a bunch of crazy reasons I didn't have time at the end of my trip to do this.
When the woman finally made it to me, she took my passport and asked me why I was in Israel. I told her I was visiting. She took up a very conversational tone, asking me if I had any family here. I told her no. She asked if I spoke Hebrew, and, again, I told her no. It was clear at this point that she was trying to get me talking, and the whole experience felt very different than the kinds of security questions that get asked in other countries, as this woman was almost sly and conniving in the way that she was talking to me. I was in an awkward position. Clearly, I couldn't go into all the people I knew and the work I was there for, but I also couldn't outright lie to her, as this would put me in a very bad position if I was found out (which was quite possible, given the existence of this blog). Even though I hadn't done anything wrong or illegal, just having visited Palestinians would have made me suspicious to the airport security personnel, and working to build playgrounds for Palestinian children would seem even worse to them. I settled on being intentionally vague and only answering the questions I was asked. For instance, when she asked me where I had been, I told her I had stayed mostly in and around Jerusalem (which, by my standards, was true, since Ramallah is really only about 20 minutes from Jerusalem, just like a brief ride from Philly to the suburbs). At one point, she asked if anyone had given me anything while I was there, and I told her about two olive wood boxes that Kathy had given me, as well as some books. Why I mentioned the books I'll never know. What a mistake. I guess I thought that books sound very non-explosive. Somehow, this led to her asking who I received things from and who I had visited or met in Israel. I only invoked the two most American sounding friends I could think of, Kathy and Susie. I told her that while I was there I saw my friends Susie and Kathy and met some of their friends. Again, this was true. She asked to see the boxes, and I took them out (they were in one of my carry-ons). I told her my stuff had already been searched and x-rayed by the guys at the checkpoint and that she could see the inspection stickers they had left on each of my bags, but she insisted that I take out the boxes and open them for her. She even asked me if there was anything in the boxes, to which I responded that there wasn't. She would not touch them until I opened them for her. I don't remember how it came up, but I also mentioned something about NGOs in all of my vagueness and she pressed on about this as well. We resolved that issue when I said that the person who gave me the boxes was working with the Quakers, and then I had to explain who the Quakers were. In the end, it was a very complicated conversation and I did my best not to get myself into too much of a knot. The woman took my passport and the notes she had been writing the whole time we were talking, and she walked away from me. A few minutes later, a male security guy came over to me and told me to follow him, saying, "this will get you through more quickly," which was apparently code for "now we will search everything you own."
This man had me put all my bags through an x-ray machine and then led me over to an area where a number of security personnel were searching through the luggage of about 9 passengers simultaneously. He directed me to one pair of women, who proceeded to go through almost every inch of each of my bags, one at a time. I was not happy, and I grumbled that this had already been done to me and that now I would have to repack my bags once more. One of the women said to me that this was for my own safety and that I could choose to go through this with a smile or with a frown. I told her that I will not smile through this and that it was not for my own safety, but if she wanted to let herself believe that, then this was her choice. They unpacked everything, putting my belongings into a tub on the countertop for all the world to see. I think they got a little grossed out when they came to my dirty underwear and socks, and, miraculously, they left the books from BADIL in my bag, untouched. Again, I had to repack everything before going to check in for my flight.
They sent me right to the check-in counter, where I had my bag checked in to be sent to Frankfort (I had planned to stay overnight in Germany with my friend Mattias). Then I went through to the next level of security. My ticket had clearly been marked with some sign for the security people, so I was doomed from the start. I arrived at the entrance to the gates and gave my passport and ticket to the woman in front of the area where they do the x-rays and security checks as people pass on to the gates. In front of me, there were about 16 (maybe more?) potential security lines, roughly 8 on each side. On the right side, the lines were significantly quicker. On the left side, most people were getting thoroughly searched. I, of course, was sent to the left side. After waiting and waiting for the people in front of me to get searched, I was put through the machines. I refused to take off my sweatshirt, since I had a relatively see-through white shirt underneath it, so they made me show them that my pockets were empty and they checked my hood before letting me through the metal detector. Then the metal detector rang as I went through, so they made me take off my shoes and walk back through it. Once they were sure that I was not carrying anything awful on my person, they sent me to the end of the x-ray machine, where I followed a male security officer to some tables so that he too could go through every inch of my bags, taking out all of my electronic devices (and everything else), x-raying everything multiple times, and, of course, making me repack everything once more. He too said it was for my own safety. They must feed this line to these idiots every day.
By the time I got out of security, I had to run through to the gates, quickly stopping by the cell phone rental desk to return my phone along the way. Though I had initially arrived at the airport almost 3 1/2 hours in advance of my flight, I only got to the gate with enough time to quickly buy a sandwich, have them wrap it up for me, and stand in line to board the plane. Most of the passengers on my flight were happily sitting in the waiting area, talking, reading, working on computers, or eating, because they had been at the gate for quite some time now.
The flight was relatively uneventful, and I got to Frankfurt and through the airport in enough time to make it on an earlier train to Stuttgart, where Mattias picked me up. I even got some free chocolates at the Frankfurt airport - you gotta love those Germans. Mattias and I had a fun evening. He put together a yummy but perfectly light dinner for us, and we just hung out and talked for a few hours before I crashed on the most comfortable couch I've ever slept on. We woke up 5 hours later, and I was off again for another 1 1/2 hour train ride back to the Frankfurt airport. Somehow, we left a few minutes too late, and I missed the train (I literally made it to the platform as the doors were closing), so I had to wait another 40 minutes for the next one to leave. By the time I got to the airport, I was running to the check-in, running to the security lines (which were surprisingly efficient, though long), and running to my gate. Again, I just made it to the gate a few minutes before boarding, but this time it was completely my fault.
Mattias and me in a last minute picture taken with his long arms (he never smiles in pictures):
My flight was from Frankfurt to Toronto, and I had about a 5 hour layover in Toronto. Unfortunately for me, my Toronto-Philadelphia flight was late, so I ended up waiting in Toronto for about 6 1/2 hours. I met a few really interesting people (Ute, I hope you're reading this!), but most of my time was just spent waiting and wandering. I almost missed the boarding of the flight, because I was so exhausted that I fell asleep sitting up at the gate.
When I got home, I spent a fabulous evening with Samer, my parents, and his parents. We ate take-out Chinese food and I told stories about my travels. It was loud and fun and just what I needed after a long trip. Then I just slept and slept.
1 comment:
Wow Sonia! You are the bravest person I know. I am proud to call you a friend.
What an adventure! Reading your blog was like watching a movie. Very intense. Glad your home and safe.
Be well!
-Elizabeth
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