Over the past few days, following the news coming out of Palestine has brought me back to when I was a 22 year old baby journalist, boarding a plane to Tel Aviv, hoping I would be let into the country to write stories about what life was like for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. I had no idea the baptism-by-fire education about borders—the way they are enforced, and the way that it can fuck with peoples’ minds—that I was about to receive.
At the time, I had secured an internship—and was told to lie at the border, to say that I was visiting a friend in Israel. I couldn’t tell the truth, and say that I was going to Ramallah, in the West Bank to work as a journalist because Ramallah was in the Palestinian Territories, and Israeli security would see acknowledging Palestine and Palestinians’ existence as a threat.
My lie crumbled as quickly as it was constructed, and I was escorted to a little room—a little room, that was, unsurprisingly, filled with people who looked like me. Upon talking to a few of them, I learned that they were also on their way to the country that—allegedly—does not exist.
One young man told me that he was there to visit his extended family for the first time. “But they don’t live in Israel,” he whispered. “They live in Nablus.”
He lived in Alaska—and had been traveling for a long time, even before he was detained for five hours, and asked extensively about his family, who they were, what he planned to do with them. Eventually, he was released.
“Maybe I’ll see you there?” he said, hopefully, as we said our goodbyes. I wasn’t quite sure I would make it out, at that point. Eventually (nine hours of interrogation later, to be precise), I was granted a two week visa, and with it, was able to take a shared taxi to Jerusalem, where I crossed to the other side of the Old City to find the buses bound for Ramallah, the familiar sound of Arabic filling the air. I’ll never forget seeing the separation barrier for the first time—or the Qalandia checkpoint, that warns Israelis that where they are about to enter is “far too dangerous”—yet another way the separation barrier keeps people from getting to know one another, a devious tactic to divide and rule.
Once I crossed, I never encountered any danger—instead, I met amazing people and made beautiful friends, whose lives had been all too constructed by the Israeli occupation, whether it was the separation barrier that separated from the land their grandparents had once tended or the inability to get permits, that would allow them to cross and pursue job opportunities or even just go to the beach for a day. I wrote stories about the ways that they lived, what it was like to have settlers dump sewage on their land and their general apathy in Israeli politics, when, of course, they couldn’t vote.
But simply walking around—simply living in Palestine, you could see the way that borders are so omnipresent that they were become a kind of obsession, both physically and mentally. Beautiful murals line the walls, imagining what it would be like to break free—evening conversations about how one could scale the wall, or dig a tunnel through it. Is it possible to sweet talk the soldier manning the checkpoint, to sleep on the other side of the wall when one’s permit doesn’t allow it, to outsmart the border regime’s bureaucracy. I couldn’t believe how much the people I was meeting had to think about this. How arbitrary it is to be told that you cannot go somewhere, when you can see it in plain sight—to spend all of your mental energy trying to outsmart a system that shouldn’t be there in the first place.
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