I’ve had such a range of iftar experiences and it’s been so wonderful. From hotels to family homes to an evening last night with Sanabel’s friends from school. While the food is, of course, far better when Sanabel’s mother cooks, this was really fun to be around a couple hundred students from Bethlehem University at the Shepard Hotel in Bethlehem. The dinner was good, but after the break fast all the men began to dance and it was fabulous!
After the dinner Sanabel, Fida’, and I went to Ibdaa Cultural Center in Deheishe to see a film by Dominique Dubosc called Palestine Palestine. It was not the best film made because the narrative is not coherent enough. It begins as if it will be a film about refugees–using a powerful narrator’s voice to explain that the Jews came here to what they call “a land without a people for a people without a land” only to make Palestinians a people without a land. But then it became a film largely about Nidal, a pupeteer who travels around Palestine to various children’s schools. The main puppet show he performs is about a grandfather who wants to pick his grapes and then go to sell them in Jerusalem, but the soldiers at the checkpoint won’t let him through. There is a fight, and the grandfather is killed by the soldier. Later the film shows the beginning of the second Intifada in Deheishe, where I’m staying, and it was so upsetting to see all of the shooting and the curfew imposed here. I had just spent a lovely day eating, dancing, singing, with people from this refugee camp and I had been thinking: if only people around the world could experience Palestinians in their daily lives. Not only to see the tremendous hardships, but also the tremendous difficulties they face. And then I see this. People I love in a community I cherish being hunted by Israeli soldiers.
And tonight as iftar began, on Al Jazeera we heard that there had been a suicide bombing in Hadera, in northern Israel. I’m already on edge about getting Sanabel across the border in the morning so that we can go to the embassy for her student visa, and now this. I had hoped her being a girl would ease the situation, but I don’t know as the latest seems to be that the suicide bomber was a girl. It’s in retaliation for the Israeli assassination in Jenin this week. Now closure, supposedly more intense than earlier this week, though I wouldn’t know yet because I haven’t left the Bethlehem area for the past few days. Insha’allah we’ll make it through the day tomorrow, but it’s incredibly nerve racking.
Salam–
