Ramallah, 2005

Patrick Hilsman remembers two nights during the time he worked in Ramallah

When I describe Ramallah, it is a city in the clouds where it rained wildly for weeks in the months after Arafat died. Where I would imagine myself like Humphrey Bogart, sitting in the back of dark cafes where the candles have been replaced by the flickering computer screens after hours and where the gambling has been replaced by endless sessions of counterstrike. It makes me wonder if I will ever reconcile my blue jeans with my kafiah, my Gauloise Blondes with my Marlboro Lights.

New York and Ramallah are linked in my mind because they can make smokers out of anyone.

On a night in, I ran out of my room after hearing gunfire because I needed nicotine to fall asleep. I left my room on the campus where I was teaching, walked out the front gate, and told the security guards I was having a nic fit. The gate slide open with a hum of the electrical motor; it felt like the type of security reserved for government buildings and airports.

I walked away from where the gunfire had been minutes earlier. I asked two men in crude Arabic, "Where can I find cigarettes?" As I walked to the town square, I could see the lights of sirens going wild in the near empty square; something terrible had happened and I was in no mood to find out what. I paid for my cigarettes, paid the expensive Israeli price. The vendor and I try not to think about the Israeli generals and prime ministers on the coins and bills.


On the main drag of Ramallah/el-Behr I ran into the two men who had pointed me in the right direction for smokes and I gave them each three. They disappeared into the familiar scenery. I peered down the alley and saw a figure and heard loud pops. I could have sworn it was either someone setting off fireworks or shooting at stray cats.

***

When I lived there, Rahmallah was wrapped in a fog so thick that I felt as if when the fog finally lifted I would be able to return to the same hills and find that Ramallah never existed; that it was only passing through, like the countless olive trees uprooted by the army on "security grounds," like Carthage - a city younger than the oldest of the olive trees, like the Palestinians.

There are ghosts in the Holy Land. When I return to find Ramallah gone, I will still smell the nagilah smoke and body odor and jasmine and panic, the peeling paint. The Holy Land may be turned into some quaint little suburban hamlet for new immigrants from Russia and Brooklyn, but the secret the settlers will not know is that even in their spacious homes there will be no space to breath. The dead are everywhere, packed shoulder to shoulder and sky high.

On one of the few clear days I have known in Palestine, I planned to keep to my usual routine of tutoring at school in the morning, and drinking coffee, surfing the net, and watching pirated DVDs till 1am in the Internet cafes (my own private paradise, the VIP lounge of modern war). I often waited till one in the morning, because my girlfriend in New York would be finished with classes and online. Instant messaging is fucking magic in Palestine and I took countless unnecessary risks to use it frequently - dragging my white ass home across dark, deserted streets scattered with the occasional sketchy figure. I sat tending the flickers from New York, in row with people killing time on Islamist websites and Celine Dion websites; people talking to relatives marooned in Gaza, separated by 60 years of Diaspora, two Berlin walls, and countless checkpoints. Beneath the hostility towards America, people still bought me tea and snacks and gave me countless cigarettes and asked me if I had been to their cousin's falafel stand in Miami or their brother's college in Boston.

This clear day was to be different no matter what. An American friend had invited me to see a concert of what he described to me as "kind of Palestinian reggae." I would never make it to the show.

After school in the afternoon, I sat typing away on AIM in a cafe on third floor of one of the tall (for Palestine) buildings that ring Ramallah's central square. I struggled with an ancient keyboard that wouldn't pick up all of its keys and improvised by using approximate letters and symbols.

RAT A TAT TAT TAT TAT TAT

An unmistakable sound breaks out closer that I have ever heard it before.

fleance89: my g0d thy r sh00ting everywhere wh@t the fuck

I rushed across the floor and ducked below the window overlooking the square. I peeked out with a few other onlookers and my mind erased the stunning landscape, zeroing in on the crowd of people rushing about.

"Is it the army?" My weak Arabic kicks in. "No it's not the Israelis," a cafe employee tells me in English.

Machine gunfire sounds comically similar to what we are used to hearing in movies. Very ominous.I had to do a double take on the men in black jackets firing into the air three stories down. White fliers were being thrown in the air and swam about with the milling crowd. I noticed that the only people who appeared to have run were the police and the people with children. Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade had lost a comrade the week before. From what I could gather, it was rumored that someone (presumably the security forces) had killed a member because he had been collaborating with the Israelis. This was al-Aqsa's stand to refute that claim.

I was shocked to see some people run right up to the gunmen and grab fliers as the guns blazed. They were 50 times closer than me and I was scared to death. I literally froze in my tracks, I could feel the tendons in my legs tightening to breaking point. Someone patted me on the back. "It's OK no problem, we are OK," the stranger said to me in unstuttering English. The humanity and calmness in his voice brought me back down to earth and made me abandon the thought racing through my head that everyone in the room was about to rip me to shreds. The people in the cafe either paid me no mind or sought to reassure me.

To me, the face of terror had always been obscure. On September 11th, I was 17. It didn't seem real in the same way that houses and highways aren't real from 13,000 feet. The brutality was shocking, but it was never real to me or anyone around me. In New Jersey, Ground Zero was the scene of an accident we never saw happen.

That was all a billion miles away, but the gunfire was still across the street. Gunfire is one of the most obvious sounds, as obvious as the sound of someone having (or faking) an orgasm, as obvious as someone hitting a bong or farting loudly in church.

The people around me advised me to stay at my seat and away from the window until the madness cleared. The owner of the cafe told me "for future reference," that "when people run away from gunfire it is the Israelis, when people run toward it, it is the Palestinians."

That stuck with me and it is advice that I was smart to heed. The militants have such broad appeal because of their air of control, of doing something as opposed to nothing. The kafiah of the Palestinian militants below me would always be romantic when compared to bulletproof vest of the Israeli soldiers who man the separation wall. The inequity of power gives the militants a superhuman air. The mythos of the Maquis, fighting losing battle after losing battle, is still fresh in European minds. It is hard for many Americans to understand that this romanticism is often easy to separate from morality.

Actually looking at the gunmen, I was astonished by how young they were, how frail some of them looked. I asked around, "are they in the resistance?" The word "resistance" was awkward on my lips, but I knew full well that "terrorist" is a loaded word anywhere, in many ways it is not a word. "Yes," people answered.

By the time I was able to go about my business and go streetside it was already dark. The concert was on and I didn't even know where it was. The street was empty and the vendors were hawking their usual wears once again like nothing had happened. The bold stand by al-Aqsa had evaporated as quickly as it had materialized, but I felt uneasy for days. I walked home past posters for Hamas, Fatah, and Mustafa Barghouti. I arrived home exhausted and passed out. That night I slept like a baby; I was high on the thought that the whole
experience might have rolled off of me.

The next day at school I began to get a migrane attack. I still was handling fairly well, but I could tell it was a coping mechanism. My mind had no intention of letting go. It was perplexing: no one was shot, no one was even injured, some property was damaged, and I had spent a nervous couple of hours half-hiding. Then why did it stick so much?

It was 4 monthes before the images of men in black jackets with AK-47s would creep into my dreams.

(text and photos by Patrick Hilsman)