There was a “nothing prepared me” exchange on Mondoweiss this week –for example, see this post here, and an earlier one here.
Friends I know and other people who come here also have the same reaction — “I had no idea”, and “nothing prepared me” — despite the millions of words and hundreds of thousands of photos and videos which have been shot in East Jerusalem and the West Bank to try to tell the story.
Here’s another “nothing prepared me” story — a brief excerpt from a piece written for The Jerusalem Quarterly by American journalist Ellen Cantarow: “After 1988 I took an editorial job in the Boston area and didn’t return to the West Bank until 2002. A friend warned me that crossing a place called ‘the Kalandia [Qalandia] checkpoint’ would be a sordid experience. I’d read descriptions. But these hadn’t prepared me for the vast vistas of rubble, broken glass, jersey block barriers, trash, and snarls of razor wire that confronted travelers after vehicles dropped them on one side, leaving them to trudge the wretched expanse to the actual cement structures where the IDF soldiers waited. [n.b.- now, it is no less messy with trash and barbed wire, but it is closed, and looks like a factory, or even more like the entrance to a slaughterhouse, a terrible and immensely stressing people-processing monstrosity, through which many tens of thousands of people, if not more, must pass each day. It is impossible to know what will happen before on passes through. Tens of thousands of vehicles of all types must also pass through, or around, Qalandia, and sometimes become stuck by the congestion, making a real and dangerous living nightmare…] ”
The Ellen Cantarow piece continues: Nothing prepared me, either, for the vastly expanded settlements – a California sprawl of white identical prefabs with red-tiled roofs – whole cities and suburban towns. Nothing prepared me, either, for the disappearance of the familiar, narrow, simple road between East Jerusalem and Hebron, the one I’d traveled so often and with such certainty 22 to 30 years earlier. On my last visit in September 2009 I asked an interviewee in Bethlehem to point out the original road for me: he couldn’t … On my visits to Palestine since the second Intifada I have often been filled with feelings of instability and loss. Palestinian interviewees and friends told me they, too, experience constant loss of bearings. This is because Israel continuously gouges out Palestinian land, builds new highways and tunnels, and cuts off older paths in the space of weeks and months, creating ever-encompassing architectures of domination, imprisonment, and separation“…
This piece can be read in full here.