The hallway felt increasingly smaller, tighter. Every minute drew in the baby blue trimmed walls closer to one another compressing me and my breath in between their administration. I tried to distract myself in David Harvey’s analysis of neoliberalism—yes uneven geographical development in China, Deng like Reagan like Thatcher...accumulation of wealth or was it capital accumulation or does he mean all out theft? The theories couldn’t embrace my imagination which fought against itself as it flew to the outer limits of a horizon of worst case scenarios whose farthest tip was etched with a merciless stamp weighed heavy by memories of present absentees and refugees lined up along the most formidable expansive border all “DENIED ENTRY.” I stared at the landscape of Jerusalem, al Haram al Sharif painted in water colors, visual art’s equivalent to elevator music juxtaposed alongside Arabic proverbs written in Arabic – their display in an Israeli military facility hung like a Navajo feather and a turquoise plaque in Pheonix’s City Hall—a violent artifact made pretty aesthetic by the conquistador. The walls moved in closer and I began to frantically knock on the door facing me – no one came—so I started to pound—and I could feel my feet start to give, if I ran now, just left used the other passport I reserved for entry into Lebanon and Syria I could leave, I could try to come back again but I knew if I left I definitely would never be let back in –the door opened and, startled, I told the man with European features that I had to use the bathroom. He nodded and closed the door leaving me in the ever-shrinking hallway, these damned walls. I recognized the female soldier who passed and I nearly demanded to go to the bathroom. She mustered contempt to tell me she had something else to do leaving me again and the pictures, the Arabic, the futility of confidence and faith, they dissipated like neglected colors on a palette beneath a drizzling rain. The door opened, I could go to the bathroom. My feet swept me past my three escorts straight to the bathroom as if I knew where it was—as if I knew where I was going, as if I forgot the imminent risk that this may be my last encounter at the King Hussein bridge between Jordan and Palestine. I took refuge in a toilet stall—here the walls felt more expansive, their yellow hollowness and metal knob brought a warm familiarity to dozens if not hundreds of other bathroom stalls I had seen before-I could be in any one of them right now and when I leave I could be anywhere an autonomous woman and not a Palestinian at the Palestinian border. My youthful daydream collapsed upon sight of an Ethiopian woman with Hebrew script on her sleeve mopping the floor, she is the last rung on the Israeli racial ladder between the least desirable Jewish immigrant and the categorically undesired Palestinian. My dread was short lived when I saw Nir standing with my escorts, my passport in hand, “Now we know-you will use the photos for one of your lectures.”
Nir was the sixth interrogator to approach me to ask me where I worked why I came to Israel where I stayed why I came to Israel why I took a picture who I knew who knew me why I came to Israel if I came alone why I came to Israel so much. I smiled at first. I remembered what Haneen told me at the border between Bethlehem and Jerusalem the night before when the female soldier, upon hearing our conversation in Arabic, told her to pull the car over for inspection. Haneen refused and insisted that she worked for the UN and I was an American, for what purpose were we singled out—the soldier, probably contemplating her weekend plans with friends waved us by, and Haneen explained to me, “I would’ve argued with her supervisor too-never be scared with them, always be the one to fear.” And so I smiled—at the tall soldier who couldn’t speak English despite all my tax dollars, at Avi who watched me delete both pictures and still insisted what I found so interesting in the picture, at the soldier in the mustard polo who was filled with himself for speaking such fluent Arabic, at the soldier with hair to her waist who explained to me that she is mixed Moroccan, Iraqi, and Yemeni, even at the soldier who commented on my cute baby cousins and became indignant when I scolded her for violating my bonafide American privacy as she looked through my photo library. I smiled at each of them positive they were more agitated than me because they could not understand my amusement. And beneath my amusement was my gut yearning for a rope to drop from the sky to rip apart the confines of the terminal for Palestinians, which unlike the terminal for tourists was not adorned with pictures of a young King Hussein lighting a cigarette for a young Yitzakh Rabin.
I had walked into the Palestinian terminal by mistake—immersed in the story of a widowed 55-year old mother of 9, a grandmother of 4, headed for non-surgical treatment for her hyperactive thyroid in Amman. At the security gate, I removed my earrings, my bracelet, my belt, and I still eschewed the shrill beep of false security as I stepped across the gate’s threshold. A metal chain hung from my jeans and I couldn’t remove it so a soldier relegated me to the wall to wait for a female soldier to search me. I joined another woman waiting-she could not remove three gold bangles from her wrist, the seasoned woman tried in vain to explain to the tall soldier who couldn’t speak English despite all my tax dollars that they could not come off. Fixated on protocol in the name of security, he fetched her plastic gloves to help her remove them, but exacerbated she demonstrated that the bangles could not pass the width of her knuckle—they wrapped her wrist like a tattoo. Bored, he commanded in military Arabic, “Stani ya hajjeh.” Perhaps on her behalf, on behalf of all the Palestinians being scolded by adolescent and indoctrinated Israeli conscripts to stand in a straight line, on behalf of those Palestinians who fervently tried to pick the olives from their remaining trees spared by military orders this week in October’s olive harvest, on behalf of Samia’s father who at 82 braced for the worst as his home in Wadi il Joz might be the next one slated for demolition to make room for a public park for the encroaching Jewish colonial-settlers in Sheikh Jarrah, on behalf of the Palestinian bride with an American passport who reached her wedding in Nazareth at 10:30 pm to jubilant eruption because her entry was never guaranteed, on behalf of Majdi who yearned to be a filmmaker so that even if he could not catapult over Gaza’s sealed borders that he could transmit his voice to people he wished to meet himself, on behalf of Yusra—the two year old Palestinian toddler who was just becoming conscious of the soldiers who glared down at her in her car seat at the checkpoint fearful of the threat she posed—another Palestinian baby, another conduit of memory, maps, and keys, another generation of Palestinians who will not forget to the chagrin of Ms. Meir—perhaps on their behalf I removed my iphone from my purse as I stood waiting against the wall and I flagrantly scanned my convenient video camera across the queue of Palestinians for want of relief. Perhaps because of them, when the tall soldier who could not speak English despite all my tax dollars asked me what I was doing I quipped, “taking a picture,” and when he asked me to give him my camera phone I told him, “no” with a gutteral breath hot enough to blow away the flimsy shroud of confidence afforded by the paradoxical military prowess of a thief—protecting what is not his. And unable to respond to my defiance with English words he did not have, he called upon his supervisors and one by one they each came to interrogate me, to search me, to google me and my relations, to threaten me with a cavity search, to detain me for three hours on my way OUT of Palestine, because I took a photo of Palestinians waiting in line to pass the checkpoint erected by a foreign belligerent occupier at a border separating Arabs from Arabs, Palestinians from the rest of the world, an indigenous nation from its sovereignty, affirming Palestinians as the enduring exception for being the enduring security threat for being.
Nir handed me my passport. Knowing that despite being released, my ordeal with Israeli security was just beginning, I asked, “Tell me honestly, will I be admitted entry when I come next?” He shrugged his shoulders, pursed his lips and explained, “Maybe. You have a 50-50 chance.” But as it already stood, when I was seemingly beneath the radar I had a 50-50 chance if not an 80-20 one, without having been caught taking a picture, without having raised suspicions that I was a covert agent as Nir described me “the best type of terrorist suspect for being the least obvious,” without having a fresh new file created for me. As I threw my luggage onto the bus heading for Amman I inhaled the image of Palestinian travelers shoving past one another to board one of four buses in another act of passive resistance to apartheid—for better or for worse this may be my very last image of Palestine. Was it worth it? Of course not. Hardly any act is worth exile from home—Palestine may be a cause, but first it is home --and now I have in all likelihood become another statistic, 6.7 million + 1, to be labeled its “exile.”