WEEKS 1 & 2                                             June 19, 2007

As of yesterday morning, I have been in Palestine for just two weeks; yet the variety and multitude of experiences I have had thus far make it seem as though I've been here for far longer. The last week in particular has been quite busy.

 

I arrived in Tel Aviv at 4 am Sunday, June 2nd, where I went through the typical Israeli border control hassle. They seemed to be particularly concerned with the origins of my last name and whether or not I had ever been to Lebanon. When they finally finished with me, I found my suitcase was the only one remaining on the conveyor belt. As the rest of the people on the flight were Israeli-Jewish, they passed through security with relative ease.  
 
From Tel-Aviv I traveled to Jerusalem by Sherut (shared taxi), and attended mass at St. George's Cathedral in Jerusalem, where I was greeted by many of my old friends. In the afternoon, I was taken to A-Ram (a suburb of Jerusalem), where I stayed at my former neighbours’, Im-Habib. I had spent four years of my childhood living in A-Ram. When I lived here, over ten years ago, my family and I frequently made the trip to Jerusalem from A-Ram along the same road. During my last visit, four years ago, I felt a strong familiarity with this road. I felt this same familiarity during this past week, as I traveled to A-Ram, but it quickly faded. The road, as we approached closer to A-Ram, became completely unrecognizable. There is now a giant concrete wall running through the middle of the main road in A-Ram, enclosing the town and the rest of the West Bank complete with a checkpoint just outside of the wall on the Jerusalem side. There is also a

massive steel gate which seals the entrance of the wall into A-Ram. This gate had been opened since my arrival, but today the Israelis closed it. Early this morning, Im-Habib received a call from her son Fadi, who lives in the Jerusalem area but works in A-Ram. He told her the gate had been sealed, along with the other gate along the wall in a different part of A-Ram. Im-Habib quickly notified him of another way in, far out of the way, narrow and winding. Fortunately, Fadi was able to make it to work this morning, but he heard the Israelis would be closing this other gate today as well. Im-Habib told me there had been rumours they would close all entrances/exits to the Wall once school was out for the summer. She turned to me and said, "We are in a prison". I, myself, needed to go to Jerusalem on this day to get to my workplace at the Edward Said National Music Conservatory. Now, however, there is only one way to get there: through the only opening in the Wall, the Qalandiya checkpoint. As the only exit from the West Bank for people in this area and the Ramallah area, I knew it would take hours of waiting in line just to pass through.  
 
Notwithstanding, my work at the Conservatory has been going well, aside from the difficult commute. On Wednesday, the Chorus will perform Faure's Requiem at the Latin Church in Ramallah. It is an adult choir with both Palestinian and International members. Last night we rehearsed in Birzeit. During a break, I joined several choristers for coffee at a local café. One of the women had just returned from a weekend in Nablus, where her family lives. She is an ethnomusicologist who studied at the Conservatory in Cairo, and who works at a Folklore Centre in Ramallah. She usually returns home, to Nablus, on the weekends to visit her parents and brother. However, on this weekend, for the first time in her life, she felt scared at home. She and her brother,

a devout Muslim, were harassed on the streets as they drove through the city because her brother wore the traditional Muslim beard. She told me, "He is not a member of Hamas. He loves God and the Prophet Mohammad, but he is not a member of Hamas."  She described the growing hatred between people as the struggle between Hamas and Fatah escalates.  
 
Last weekend, I went with a Sabeel youth group to Jericho for a conference and workshop where a group from Nazareth joined us. The weekend's discussions had an interesting dynamic as they incorporated the thoughts of both Christian Palestinian youth living under occupation and those living in the State of Israel. I became friends with a girl my age from Nazareth. She told me that the youth of Galilee are not as active in their churches as those in the West Bank. She told me that once a nun came to speak to her church youth group and told them that although Palestinians living under occupation deal with physical checkpoints, those living in Israel have checkpoints in their minds. They have a more acute identity crisis, for they cannot find a place or a sense of acceptance in the predominantly Jewish culture of Israeli society.

Kristi Assaly is a Canadian university music student who is traveling and working in a children’s  art therapy project in the Palestinian occupied territories with NECEF’s assistance.

Report From Palestine

Kristi Assaly

NECEF Report Fall 2007

By Kristi Assaly