Sweet Cheese and Prejudice
[This personal essay is the next chapter of a micro-memoir published by the International Museum of Women. Photo of syrup and kanafeh by Idit Keren]
We left Nablus’ ancient bathhouse. On the way to eat kanafeh, we somehow ended up at a Palestinian professor’s house. He was hosting a small gathering of international volunteers and a few men from Nablus, including teachers from the nearby school. The house sat perched high in the hills. The backyard balcony offered a sweeping view of the city below. The home itself was built with smooth stones and stretches of white marble with gray swirls. From the balcony, we gazed out at hills speckled with olive trees. The sunset draped the world in a blood orange glow.
I don’t know how the joke started, because I wasn’t paying attention to the group. I was busy nagging the school teacher with jowls and an untamed moustache. The one who brought us here.
“Let’s go, you said we were going to get kanafeh in the shuk,” I whined. He had promised we would just stop by this house for a minute to “say hi.” My host, a school teacher I met that same afternoon, told me the taxi would take us to kanafeh in the Nablus city center. I bit my lip when it drove us somewhere on the distant outskirts of the city instead. I had no idea where we were now. We entered a huge white home without any real furniture or shelves in the living room. Inside it felt like a skeleton without organs.
Over two hours later, after the ice cream and the coffee and the stories…the professor talked a lot. He said an IDF soldier murdered his mother on the front porch. The professor said he was thrown into Israeli prison and beaten.
He showed us bullet holes scarring the smooth white marble on the front porch. Tears welled in my eyes. I nodded. But I hate coffee and I was hungry.
My host didn’t ask if I wanted to hang out at this stranger’s house while he drank coffee and did evening prayers with his friends. I waited while he spoke to international volunteers. This handful of European activists came to volunteer at the local elementary school for a few weeks of “hands on” experience with the infamous Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
I asked: “When can I get out of here?” Then just behind me I heard a thud and a shrill cry, neither a scream nor a laugh.
I pivoted on my heels to find one of the bearded men from Nablus pinning an Italian volunteer up against the wall. The volunteer’s neck was caught between the Y-shaped ends of a wooden plank. The Italian’s feet barely touched the floor. His eyes bulged. The bearded man laughed.
“Stop, you’ll hurt him!” I wanted to scream. But the words got caught in my throat. The bearded Palestinian stepped away and released the Italian. “I kill you,” he laughed, making as if to thrust towards the Italian again. He stopped abruptly, still shaking with laughter. My host laughed too. “Yes, yes. We kill you.” They chuckled. The Italian walked away, towards the edge of the balcony overlooking Nablus. The cityscape bathed in the glow of the sunset. He coughed and chuckled awkwardly. My fists clenched. My throat constricted. The bearded man moved towards the Italian again, wrapping his thick fingers around the volunteer’s neck and mock strangling him. The volunteer grinned with a wild look in his eyes.
“We kill you too!” the bearded man giggled as he released that throat and lunged towards the other European volunteers, making as if he would bludgeon someone with the wooden beam. I watched the veins in his arms perk up, mapping the strain in his muscles when he swooped down with the wooden plank. He held it still just above one volunteer’s head. Everyone exhaled a stiff chuckle. I started quietly hyperventilating. The bearded man turned towards me, wooden beam slung over his shoulder like a baseball bat.
“The American don’t think it funny,” he said.
His lips slipped back into a boyish grin.
“The American wants to play?” He asked me.
“No!” I stepped back, pulling my arms in towards my body as if I felt a chill.
“The American does not want to play,” I gasped.
The group roared with laughter. My fear was hysterical.
That was the punch line.
I was already familiar with a similar kind of black humor from my Israeli partner. Although much less physical, his jokes about the army also had a gruesome undertone. “Occupation is cool,” he teased. “Of course Israelis kill Palestinian babies.” Reality was too extreme to take seriously.
In Nablus, I foolishly stumbled into the hands of strangers. Now they would decide when I could go where. Any illusion of security or agency was a game.
It was late by the time that we ate kanafeh in the city center. Afterwards, I made no secret of the fact that I was both physically and mentally exhausted. “We just say good night at my friend’s for quick coffee,” my host assured me. I sighed. We sat on the porch for what seemed like hours. The men chatted, smoked their cigarettes and drank coffee. I chimed in when I heard a recognizable Arabic word. “Wait…you have a son?” I asked.
“Yes, I do,” my host answered.
“Where is he?”
“In Israeli prison,” he looked wounded by each individual word.
“Why?” I asked.
“The Israelis said he with Hamas do something terrorist on the internet. He just go on the internet!” he exclaimed.
I didn’t mention that my current research at the media institute in Jerusalem focused on terrorism and digital media. I had spent hours that week cataloguing jihadist websites. At the time, that work felt important.
In university, I was taught that journalism is a public service. And I really believed I was helping promote peace by publishing the truth. My reports described how social networks provided new ways for extremists to spread their ideology and recruit prospective militants around the world. I had no idea what website my host’s young son visited, or if he was even guilty of anything at all. I didn’t dare pry with more specific questions.
“Ooh…” I said, the vowel stretched in a deepening pitch.
That night, I asked each Palestinian man from Nablus why he made certain choices, to resist with stones and flames or with nonviolence. Several of these men, including my host, spent time in Israeli prison for attacks against Jewish settlers. I asked these men what they were fighting for. I heard what they thought of Israelis, all the while hoping that the horror on my face did not give me away.
I loathed the way men in Nablus talked about soldiers as if they weren’t people, as if soldiers were only bloodthirsty beasts. Animals. For the first time, I consciously realized that nothing, not even ideology, could define a person. I spoke in a low voice, struggling to keep my tone casual. Hadn’t I also justified violence against “terrorists,” reducing strangers to solely their actions and beliefs?
A terrorist is a person who plots or commits acts of violence against civilians. Despite that cruelty, he is still a person. In the same way, the Israeli soldier waiting for me back home was more than a soldier. He was more than a Zionist IDF officer. He was also a son, friend, traveler, musician, student and brother. He was a B.B. King fan with a knack for making tasty mustard sauce. He was young and scared, a pawn in the politicians’ war game. When he put on his uniform and became a soldier, he fought for the hope of a peaceful future, not for any innate bloodlust.
These Palestinian men in front of me had similar brown eyes and firm convictions when they talked about their scars.
I don’t even remember walking through the maze of concrete to the schoolmaster’s home. I only remember collapsing on his imprisoned son’s bed and falling into a dreamless sleep. Deep and black.
It was a long and bumpy ride back from Nablus, without air conditioning, along winding desert roads. Two soldiers stopped our bus at a checkpoint along the road to Ramallah. There was one blonde guy and a dark-haired woman wearing thick combat gear. She had a ponytail and aviator sunglasses.
They came on the bus, semi-automatic weapons in hand. The female asked to see our passports. After she saw everyone’s ID, she nodded her approval and exited the bus. When the second soldier also left, my host hissed.
“Oh yea, seems like nice person, huh? Jews say they nice. Didn’t she seem nice?”
His words dripped with sarcasm. “Oh yea, Jews are nice, huh? Real nice,” the Italians chanted to each other in between snickers.
Emma sat up front by the driver, headphones blasting terrible trance music. She grinned and offered the others a silent thumbs up. When I didn’t smile along, the volunteer next to me nudged me with his elbow. “What do you think, huh? Still believe Jews are good people? Think they’re nice?” he asked. I wanted to scream: “I’m a Jew! What do you think of that? I’m Jewish!” I silently turned to face the window.
“Now we know the truth,” said an Italian from the front.
“It’s the Israelis that are really violent. The media never gives us the facts. It’s the Israelis that want this war. They won’t let there be peace.”
“We just want peace!” The teacher from Nablus cried.
“Israelis are murderers,” said the Italian.
The volunteers murmured their agreement. I fought back hot tears. I felt like a coward for saying nothing. Hiding behind my Mexican last name and American passport. My hands trembled. They would never feel the tenderness of a soldier’s kiss after nights in the field. They would never be able to see a man in an IDF uniform and still see that he was a man.
The friends that I loved were not beasts. The boyfriend waiting for me back in Jerusalem was not a killer, even if he has killed. Hadn’t they? I realized that even ethical journalism influences the outcome of events.
This war was half vendetta, half performance. English-language media became a weapon.
From volunteers to traveling correspondents like me, we fuel the industry of conflict. Nonviolent resistance and terrorism both require an audience.
Both sides were selling their stories to voyeurs rather than sharing them with one another. It’s easier to tell your pain, see someone else’s sins, harder to listen to the wrongs you and your loved ones have committed. Of course there were no Israelis or Zionists invited to the professor’s house in Nablus. Hadn’t my Birthright trip once served the same function, advocacy tourism? Only market stories to audiences that want to buy them. Nothing else. Ever.
As a young journalist, I felt my work was turning into someone else’s stage. I realized I could not watch this conflict without becoming a part of it. I, myself, had fanned the flames by reporting on radicals and victims, then selling those tropes to global consumers. Whose hands are clean? I once fantasized about what it would be like to work as an undercover reporter. I don’t anymore.
I listened to taunts and rants about the accursed Jews all the way to the border. Two tears escaped from one eye. I quickly wiped them away with the back of my sleeve. The stress of hiding where I come from, and whom I loved, felt like a frantic insect crawling beneath my skin.
