Arrival

Dear Family,

This is the unofficial version of the Bethlehem Blog. Please visit the regular blog for more formal postings, and for most pictures. And be sure to subscribe (just enter your email address in the subscription box, and you'll automatically get updates sent to you).

Here we go.

My friend Peter was kind enough to drive me to O'Hare. As I left him and the US behind, I felt like I have when I've boarded a rollercoaster I wasn't quite sure I was ready to tackle--more than a little scared, and a little sick to my stomach. Fortunately, this feeling passed in a few minutes.

At the gate a few things caught my attention--some ominous and some benign.

In the first column: The Homeland Security Alert had been raised to orange (coincidentally, the same color worn by the first-class Royal Jordanian flight attendants); my gate was M-16; and a member of the ground crew got into a lengthy and heated exchange with some passengers about unattended luggage.

In the second: I noticed a man praying, and a woman in Western clothes teaching her lovely little boy (who gripped a DVD of Ice Age 2 in his chubby hand) to say "Marhaba" and laughing each time he did so.

When I stepped onto the Royal Jordanian flight, I felt as though I had already entered a different country. The head flight attendant was dressed in a bright blue modernized thobe and ruffled the jet-black hair of the boy as he passed her. Walking down the aisle, I saw turned up at me the amazing apple-doll faces of old women in headscarves (95% of the women were in hijab) who also wore thobes and lots of gold bracelets.

A few observations about the flight:

The flight attendants in orange suits and black pillbox hats worked only in first class. Ours looked like those you'd see on a domestic flight.

There weren't a lot of service-related announcements. Suddenly food or drink carts would appear without warning; and they disappeared just as quickly. Warm towels were handed out on occasion. When breakfast came, I was shocked to discover a sausage (!) on my plate. I assume it was made of turkey or beef.

For the first and last couple of hours of the flight, we saw the plane's position on a GPS on the screens. (Of course, I took a photo as we entered the airspace over the Middle East.)

When the plane landed, everybody applauded (as they sometimes do in the US after an especially difficult flight). When the intercom instructed us to stay in our seats, everybody just laughed and--to a person, including all the old women--immediately jumped up and starting rummaging around in the overhead bins. The flight attendants wisely didn't even try to intervene. (In contrast, in the US I've seen single passengers who dared to stand up get yelled at.)

The Amman airport was remarkable for a few things, viz. (1) the big duty-free shops, which specialized in perfume, liquor (!), and cigarettes; (2) the date pie I delightedly devoured (basically a honey-glazed tart with custard, dates, and cashews).

My flight from Amman to Tel Aviv was delayed by an hour. It was quite different from the first flight: the plane was smaller but far more modern; we had to walk onto the tarmac to board; the stairs were flanked by soldiers; while we waited at the gate, a man who appeared to be a plainclothes security officer was observing us closely.

The flight was mostly empty and took only half an hour. The Tel Aviv airport was big and very modern: quite different from the one in Amman. I walked up to Passport Control (one set of metal booths for Israeli Passports, another for Foreign Passports) and steeled myself. I had been warned that I might be questioned extensively, and this was the part of the trip I had most dreaded.

Unfortunately, the experience was pretty much what I had feared it would be.

I waited in line for about twenty minutes, watching as Israelis (including one wearing a Chicago Bulls baseball cap) sailed through their lines while foreigners crawled through ours. The women in the booths (they were all women) stared at computer screens and occasionally spoke on the phone. I noticed with some anxiety that every so often a guy in a uniform with a shaved head would come up to one of the foreigners' booths, take a passport from the lady behind the glass, and say brusquely, "Come!" to the hapless visitor--who followed him into what I feared was one of the infamous "interrogation booths" I had heard tell of. I eyed passports, looking for a pattern but not really discovering one: he pulled aside three Arabs, two Indians, and (incredibly to me) two Korean businessmen in suits. Some Italians got through; but a lady who looked Nordic was led away--perhaps because she was wearing a rat-tail hairdo.

At last I was called to a booth. I wiped the sweat from my passport on my pants, smiled, and tried to engage the woman behind the thick glass; but she wasn't having it. After examining my passport for a few minutes and asking why I was coming into Israel, she asked for my father's and grandfather's names. (Fortunately, I had been prepared for these apparently bizarre questions.) I answered her.

She then sat and stared silently at her computer screen for--and here I do not exaggerate--at least FIFTEEN MINUTES. I wasn't quite sure what to do with my eyes: look at her? look around? look at the floor? gaze up at the ceiling? turn around and look at those waiting behind me? look at the Israelis?

Finally I decided to pull out my copy of Vathek (the Gothic novel about a monstrous caliph who goes to hell that I'll be teaching here together with Arabian Nights, etc. in my "Fantasies of East and West" course) and read it while I stood there.

After a time she again asked about my family, but by then it was too late. The guy in uniform had come for me.

He led me to a waiting area/holding room where I found the other people I'd seen taken away. It contained about twenty chairs, a TV (which was broadcasting some steamy Israeli evening soap), and a Coke machine. I was pleased to see an Arab-looking woman in hijab (who spoke unaccented English) who was comfortable enough to walk up to the machine and get a Coke. (Alas, she was destined to be detained even longer than I was; I never saw her depart from the airport.)

We put our bags on a table (they weren't inspected, however) and waited under the watchful eye of a twenty-something man who was sort of rude. I hated to lose sight--never mind possession--of my passport; but I picked up Vathek again, inspired by the Coke lady. After about fifteen minutes I was led away to another, smaller waiting room. There were a few chairs filled with sad- and/or anxious-looking people, and two offices with interrogators sitting behind desks--one man, one woman.

The interrogation cubicles.

They didn't close the doors to these rooms, so I got to hear an African man questioned for a while by the woman (who seemed pretty fierce). "How much money are you carrying?" she demanded. Then I heard her ask, "Why come here? Why not Turkey?" I was pretty creeped out by this point.

Ten more minutes passed (more Vathek, though I couldn't really focus on my eighteenth-century eastern fantasy), and finally I was called into the room with the guy in it. He was in his thirties, handsome, with a shaved head. Kinda scary looking, all things considered. I sat down and smiled, doing my best to be relaxed.

For the next hour (?) or so, we talked about my family. I volunteered the name and birthplace of my mother, neither of which interested him. He wanted to know my dad's name and my grandfather's, and where they were born. I told him. He'd never heard of Lifta--which wasn't surprising. I mentioned East Jerusalem and explained that since my dad left in 1952 and never returned, he might well not be in their database. Nevertheless, he searched said database (in vain) for my father, grandfather, and grandmother. We even tried uncles (he had no interest in Amto Suhaila), again without success.

At one point he asked, "What's your family name?" "Mustafa," I responded. "No, I mean the name of the entire family." I think he was referring to something like a clan name, but I wasn't certain. "I was born in southern California," I said, smiling slightly. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

I want to stress that, despite his appearance and his relentless stare, this man was not unfriendly. At one point--when, improbably, it turned out that his dad and mine shared the same birthday--he even laughed. He seemed like a guy doing a job that he didn't particularly like doing. I was reminded of the time I was arrested for driving on a suspended license (if anybody hasn't heard that story, I can tell it sometime), and the cop reluctantly explained that I'd have to be locked up. Nobody's fault, just going by the book.

After a while he said, "I'm sorry, but I need to find this information. Until I do, I can't let you leave. This could take five or six hours."

I thought of the poor man waiting for me in the arrival area, Br. Neil. He celebrated his seventieth birthday some years ago, and he was Bethlehem University's Vice President of Academic Affairs, no less. No doubt he was wondering what had happened to me (BTW, he didn't carry a cell phone). I sighed. It was after 2:00 a.m. I had been detained for two hours.

Finally I thought to use my new global cell phone (only $3/minute) and try to contact Amto Suhaila. Surely she would know about Palestinian identification numbers and clan names and whatnot if anybody would.

Unfortunately, when I called her numbers there was no answer.

I finally got Amal on the phone. She told me that nobody was in the computer because they left so long ago, that when she herself went through Tel Aviv she had not been detained (lucky Amal), that Amto wouldn't know any more than she did, that nobody had any ID numbers, and that I should just explain all this to my interrogator.

I asked Amal to see if she could reach Amto anyway.

After a few more minutes of looking at the screen, the man abruptly left the room. Five minutes passed. Then I heard a mysterious voice (not his) say, "Come."

I walked out of the office and back toward the original waiting room--where I saw almost everybody who had been sent there over an hour before (including the poor Coke lady and the Korean businessmen, all of whom seemed very unhappy). Before I arrived, I was stopped by a young woman holding my passport.

"You can go now," she said.

That was it. Done.

By this point I was tired and perplexed. "Miss," I said with only a slight edge to my voice, "I'm traveling through this airport three more times while I'm here." (In October to and from Istanbul for a trip to get my three-month tourist visa extended, and again in January en route to Cairo and Chicago.) "Should I expect this to happen each time?" She looked at me with a mixture of displeasure and sympathy, shrugging. "Maybe not. But who knows?" "Should I plan to arrive at the airport a few extra hours early, just in case?" Another shrug. "Wouldn't hurt. It's different each time." I thought of my 8:00 a.m. flight to Istanbul, and my stomach sank. "Do you think my luggage is still at baggage claim?" "Should be."

And then I left. The airport was practically deserted by this point. I met poor Br. Neil (who understood completely), and we drove through Jerusalem and the checkpoint into Bethlehem--which looks just like it does in photos and videos: like the Berlin Wall, though perhaps a bit taller; and--get this--on the Israeli side there's some sort of sign about peace, while the Arab side is covered with graffiti.

Finally we arrived at the Bethlehem University campus and I got settled into the Christian Brothers' residence. I found a nice little sign on my room's door welcoming me, headed for the pantry (I was starving), and ate what I could find there: a can of tuna fish, some Pringles, a banana, and some M&Ms. To fight what appeared to be an oncoming cold (lots of coughing on those flights) I drank a glass of Airborne (pink grapefruit--unexpectedly tasty and refreshing), and I popped an Ambien my doctor had prescribed to help me sleep on the flight and deal with jet lag once I'd arrived.

Unfortunately, these didn't mix well. When I headed back to my room I felt dizzy, and the moment I entered my little bathroom I threw up all over it--and I do mean ALL OVER. It took me about an hour to clean up as best I could, and to pile up all the bathroom towels and rugs so that I could later try to figure out how to clean them using the Brothers' bizarre French washing machine--which is as cryptic as you'd expect a machine from France to be. By this point it was 5:00 a.m. and well past time for bed.

Speaking of bedtime, it's now 11:30 and time for me to wrap this up.

To be continued...

Love,

Jamil