My Army Service in the West Bank

During a patrol in Nablus, three of us were walking in a narrow alley when two large bricks suddenly dropped from the roof. One brick hit my foot. We quickly took cover and scanned the area. The first thing I noticed was the empty vegetable stand. The friendly, old vendor wasn’t there; he must have been warned, I thought. When we finally walked out, the old man slowly turned the corner and greeted us as he usually did. I slapped him in the face. No one said a word; it was as if it had been the natural thing to do, to randomly slap an old man in the face.

At other times, we would be told to search for wanted Palestinians. We were never told what they were accused of, and I suspect most of them knew even less. We were just given maps of the city and told to arrest individuals in specific addresses, usually about twenty a day. We blindfolded them, put them in handcuffs, and pushed them into a waiting van, where we would kick them in the stomach.

We were told this was nothing compared to the good old days, before the world media started covering the Intifada. In the good old days soldiers used to make Palestinians sing “My Golani,” the army brigade’s anthem. Soldiers used to paint Palestinians’ donkeys in green and yellow, the brigade’s colors. The good old days were a free-for-all of torture, theft, and humiliation.

We used to open doors to random houses and do a search. This meant putting everyone in one room with one soldier guarding the family with a gun aimed at their heads, with young children crying, grandparents pleading, mothers holding them tightly, and fathers sitting defiant to maintain what was left of their pride. The rest of us walked room by room, opening drawers and throwing their contents on the floor, emptying closets, throwing antique lamps on the walls and breaking them, stepping on beddings with muddy shoes and complaining about the smell. In one drawer I found a letter an eighteen year-old Palestinian wrote to a pen pal in Denmark. He wrote about his wish that one day the violence would end and a Palestinian State would rise alongside Israel. I thought he was trying to fool her into coming to visit him so he could use her to transfer explosives into Israeli cities.

One time we were walking in the middle of the road when a car turned a corner and immediately stopped. When we reached the car and moved to the side, one of us remained in the center of the road and simply climbed the hood of the car with his gun aimed at the driver’s face. He continued walking up to the roof, then back down, when the driver rolled the window down and asked in Hebrew, “What the hell are you doing?” Apparently this was a secret elite unit of soldiers who were dressed like Palestinians, infiltrating the city to find out information about attacks. “Oh,” said my friend, “I thought you were Arabs.” Everyone laughed.

Sometimes in Nablus I used to shoot pigeons out of boredom. Others shot mosque speakers.

The only Arabic phrases I know after three years of service in Nablus and in Gaza are “Open the door,” “Turn the car off,” “Give me your papers,” and “Stop or I’ll shoot.”

I talked too much

The vixens at italk2much finally reviewed my site.

I got my ass kicked by the brunette with the robot, who gave me an even 0/5, but for now I'm triumphing in the comment section, where the orange hair cutie wrote "I like this," and the one with the purple hair loves Buddy and wants to give him puppy kisses. I don't know how he'll react to that. After all, he's not a puppy but a 13-year-old Pit Bull who's always struggled with his sexuality.

Anyway, it was fun. I haven't had so many girls look at me since I dreamed of going to school naked. Now I can go back to the regular writing. Next time, What is it like to work for the State? (Hint in the picture below)

Moving to the US

The day before I moved to the US, a news program in England talked about how most Americans don’t believe in evolution. They showed a protest where one guy said, “I don’t want my children to think they came out from a bunch of monkeys.”

The first car sticker I saw: “She’s not a choice, she’s a baby girl.”

Now, in other countries, Americans are considered the joke of the world, culturally able to do nothing but produce extravagant shows (on ice). On my first visit back to England, an old friend told me about a new reality show where regular people go into an island and try to survive. I said, “In America there’s also a show like that, only there one person is voted off the island every week, and the one that stays at the end gets a million Dollars.” Men, did they laugh. America, turning every interesting concept—like the testing of human endurance—into a game show.

So it took me a while to understand.

It took me a while to understand that a place where people have a right to protest against evolution is not necessarily a bad place; just a funny place. And that some people stick their beliefs on their cars and it’s not for me to judge, even if they’re wrong. And that screw that other show; the first season of Survivor was great because a bunch of people fought each other to become millionaires, and who cares about people stuck on an island for no good reason. Simple endurance’s got nothing on greed and competitiveness.

So I ended up liking this place. So what if people watch O’Reilly? What’s that got to do with me? So what if people buy Coulter’s books? So what if Buchanan preaches xenophobia and Limbaugh is a racist? A place where people like that succeed must, by definition, also include the best of humanity, with people doing what they can to end the war, and people working in small communities to pull children away from crime, and people making great music and great art because half of their country is insanely conservative.

And it’s true what they say about the American Dream: it’s been only seven years since I moved here and I’ve already become Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. The land of endless possibilities indeed.

My Book of Poetry

There’s a notebook of poems I wrote when I was seven, which, to my eternal embarrassment, my dad insists on reading to anyone I bring home when I visit. The poems rhyme. They’re filled with speaking animals and even stranger humans. Surreal little rhymes about popular culture, my family, and my life as a struggling seven-year-old. They have colorful drawings.

“Oh, no, Dad. Please don't,” I say. We were having a good time, talking and laughing and drinking coffee, why did he have to ruin everything with the stupid notebook?

But when I hear him proudly read the words of the young poet I can recall the naïve expressions of an uncorrupted mind and the pleasing simplicity of a life without metaphors, and I know that no matter what I write in the future, I had already passed my prime by the time I was eight.

God

When I was about six, my dad gave me a Bible Stories in Pictures book. It was beautiful, with old engravings of biblical heroes and heroines fighting each other and prophesizing and conquering and building and destroying, and all the other stuff people did back then.

The relationship between the pictures and the text was straightforward. The story of Joseph was accompanied by an engraving of a young idealist blessing his youngest brother kneeling before him, the story of Sisra and Yael was followed by an image of the proud Yael standing outside her tent with the severed head of the evil Sisra, and Samson’s broken heart was evidently there as he declared himself the first suicide killer.

The first page told the story of God creating the world, daily blessing his creation, altogether pretty pleased with himself. However, the engraving on the opposite page showed dark clouds with scattered sun rays breaking through to shine brightly on a barren land.

And me, being a kid who believed everything he heard and everything he saw, looked at the picture of the breaking clouds and thought this was what God looked like.

I’m an unbeliever, and Atheism is a cherished part of my identity, but I just can’t rid myself of this childhood concept of God. You see, I can ask religious people to prove the existence of God in a logical, scientific world, and I can scorn them, asking, “With all the tragedies in the world, and the wars, and Bush, how can anyone say there is a God?” But maybe their view of the world is just as valid as my own. How can anyone look at the struggling rays of the sun and not see God?