Standing Alone (22 page)

ON THE ROAD TO JERUSALEM
—Just before we left the United States, the State Department had issued a travel warning. “The Department of State warns U.S. citizens to defer travel to Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.” It cited “numerous civilian deaths and injuries, including to some American tourists, students, and residents. The potential for further terrorist acts remains high.” It warned Americans to stay away from restaurants, cafés, shopping malls, pedestrian zones, public buses, and bus stops in Israel. To cover any place it might have missed, the warning added “other crowded areas and venues” to the list of off-limits sites. It mentioned Jerusalem as a place in which travelers should be particularly careful.

CNN had reported that the White House raised the terrorist alert level because of the hajj and that the U.S. was pulling diplomats out of Jordan and Israel. To get to al-Aqsa, we would be going straight into the heart of the warning—Jerusalem—and we were going to be at public tourist sites and staying at a public hotel.

“Let's not go,” my mother said quickly.

“No, it'll be fine,” I said with no authority at all.

As we were leaving our hotel in Amman, war clouds loomed over the Middle East. Journalists from John Burns of the
New York Times
to the
Washington Post's
David Ignatius and ABC's Diane Sawyer had come through Amman to cover the impending war in Iraq. In Saudi Arabia the
Arab News
published a story with the dateline “Occupied Jerusalem” and the headline “War in Two Weeks.”

News reports said Israel had issued an emergency call-up for reservists to man Patriot antimissile systems. And tensions remained between
Israelis and Palestinians. The
Jordan Times
reported: “The Israeli occupation army pressed on with the relentless arrests of suspected Palestinian resistance activists, netting more than two dozen in swoops on Palestinians celebrating Eid ul Adha, the festival of sacrifice.”

The front page showed four young Palestinian boys on a donkey cart in the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, watching the funeral procession of two young Palestinian men who had been killed trying to infiltrate the Dugit Jewish settlement. While we were in Saudi Arabia, the
Saudi Gazette
had included a column from the government-appointed imam of the mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Dr. Abdul Rahman al-Sudais, that stoked the fires of hatred for Israel and Zionism, the movement that created Israel:

Without fear, my father had worked hard to make our trip happen. He had downloaded pages of information from the Internet, circling the number of kilometers from Amman to the King Hussein Bridge (thirty-five miles), underlining the biblical sites we could see (the Mount of Olives and Mount Zion), and scribbling down the e-mail addresses of guides. The two sides couldn't even agree on what the King Hussein Bridge was called. Israel rejected Jordan's name and called it Allenby Bridge, for General Edmund Allenby, who seized Jerusalem for the British in 1917 after attacking the ruling Ottomans in Palestine.

With politics creating such a divide between people, the question that plagued us remained the same: were we going to be able to get into Israel? We read and reread the visa and travel advisories. “Israel does not require advance visa issuance for U.S. citizens traveling on tourist passports at any crossing point.” I found a travelers' dispatch. It advised us that we could get a visa at the border. It was easy enough for us to get a bus across the Jordanian border, but when we hit a certain point it was obvious that Israel controlled its borders like a hawk. Inside, the border police studied our documents carefully. My father leaned in toward the immigration officer, a young woman, and asked her not to stamp our passports with an entry into Israel. Certain Muslim countries deny entry to anyone who has traveled to
Israel because they don't recognize its existence. “Please stamp another piece of paper,” he kept telling the immigration officer. She didn't respond. In the line beside us, the immigration officers were now interrogating a busload of Palestinian pilgrims just returning from the hajj. I watched a young female soldier turn an elderly woman pilgrim's Qur'an upside down, leafing through its pages to see if anything would fall out. I tried not to let my horror show on my face as I watched. It seemed like such an indignity. “Please stamp another piece of paper,” my father said again.

“Dad!” I yelled, tugging him away before he annoyed the officer so much that we would get our foreheads stamped with a big good-bye.

As it turned out, Safiyyah, Samir, and Shibli were our special visa into Israel. With the children, we didn't appear threatening. Finally, we were released and stepped into Israel.

It was parched with occasional trees, but mostly vast tracts of barren land filled the horizon. Immediately, I thought:
they can't figure out a way to share all this land?
I had thought the territory was jam-packed with settlements, cities, and other development. Quite the contrary—Israel was mostly empty. Granted, there were legitimate issues about irrigation and water supplies, but for all of the billions of dollars spent on defense, surely there was a way to make all of this land viable and share it. I felt downright defeated as I contemplated these vast stretches of territory, and no sense of celebration on entering this land. The modern-day cycle of violence, tragedy, and hatred, quite simply, made it depressing to be there.

Still, we had the small issue of a pilgrimage to make. A man told us our guide was waiting at the end of the road right past the security checkpoint. The Israeli military didn't let him wait for us at the border crossing. We took a taxi a few hundred yards down the road, where we stopped beside another car. From it emerged a Palestinian man whom our Jordanian travel agency had hired as our guide. My father apologized for our delay. Our guide had been waiting for hours on the Israeli side for our arrival. He wasn't bothered.

“What's a few hours?” he said. “I have been waiting three years for business.”

The scenes remained depressing. Barbed wire atop chain-link fences lined the road as we drove toward Jerusalem. The barbed-wire fencing surrounded Palestinian refugee camps. Everywhere we looked on the road to Jerusalem we saw Palestinians who seemed to be living in prison camps. Towering over the settlements in the hills were well-constructed townhouses facing Jerusalem. “They're the settlements,” the guide told us. “
Settlements?
” I asked. “The Jewish settlements?” I was stunned. They looked
like a tract of suburban living plucked right out of any town in the United States. The scene changed as we climbed into the Mount of Olives, a flattened series of ridges just east of Jerusalem and a place where Jesus walked. We stopped at a convenience store, where my father videotaped the scene. The guide coaxed the cashier to “smile.” “There is nothing to smile about,” the Palestinian cashier responded flatly. I saw the truth in what he said.

I wanted to go to Hebron, where Abraham supposedly had lived with Sarah and Hajar before taking Hajar into the desert of Mecca. “Impossible,” the guide said. The U.S. travel warning said that sections of the West Bank and Gaza had been declared “closed military zones.” It added: “The government of Israel may deny entry at Ben Gurion Airport or at a land border to persons it believes might travel to ‘closed' areas in the West Bank or Gaza or to persons the Israeli authorities believe may sympathize with the Palestinian cause and are seeking to meet with Palestinian officials.”

The warning didn't bode well for us.

JERUSALEM
—The prophet Muhammad arrived in Jerusalem on his winged creature. We pulled up to Lion's Gate on the northeast corner of the Noble Sanctuary in our guide's car. In a grim reminder of the politics of the day, a funeral procession passed by us at just that moment.

The sacred ground covers over thirty-five acres of fountains, gardens, buildings, and domes, or almost nine times the size of the grounds of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Al-Aqsa sits at its southernmost end, and the famous Dome of the Rock sits in its center. The entire area is considered a mosque and makes up almost one-sixth of the walled city of Jerusalem.

We went through one of the many security checkpoints Israel has set up within its borders, including in Jerusalem, to stop terrorist attacks such as suicide bombings. Israeli soldiers checked our bags. Safiyyah felt sad about all of the guns that soldiers around her were carrying. Samir stared at the soldier. He thought to himself,
He has a gun
. It was not a scene he normally saw in West Virginia. Samir was scared. What was he scared of?

He had heard about how Muslims and Jews were fighting over the land. He knew Palestinians who had lost their homes when the British remapped Palestine after World War II to create the state of Israel. “It's
wrong that the Palestinians lost their homes,” Samir said. He had watched CNN reports on Palestinian suicide bombers. He had thought,
They're so desperate they're killing themselves.

In Saudi Arabia the headlines in the
Riyadh Daily
had given me a reality check about the politics of the country. “Crown Prince Slams Campaign Against Islam,” one headline read. Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, the deputy premier and commander of the National Guard, said that there was a campaign against the prophet Muhammad. “In fact, only some spiteful people and the Zionist quarters don't like the prophet,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. Reading the article, I was reminded of the September 11 conspiracy theorists in Pakistan. “The Yahudi did it” ran like a mantra through conversations as Pakistanis from elementary school children to physicians blamed the attacks on New York and Washington on the Jews.
Yahudi
is an Arabic word for any Jewish person born after the fall of the ancient kingdom of Judah. Those born before that time, dating back to Moses, are Bani Isra'il.

This was the kind of rhetoric that had led to the painful clashes that erupted into centuries of world wars. I had learned the concept of “enemy image making” in graduate school, and it seemed to me that was what we were doing in every corner of the world. We created enemies of each other. “This is a cycle of hatred that just isn't ending,” I told my family. I turned to my mother. “Imagine if Sarah had just told Abraham, ‘Go take a hike,' and raised Isaac with Hajar raising Ishmael. The world might have been a very different place.”

We slipped through the stone archway and stepped into a vast open space where the golden-domed mosque loomed in front of us. In the sixteenth century, Suleiman the Magnificent, a ruler of the Ottoman Empire, had commissioned artisans to inscribe the Qur'anic verse “Ya Seen” across the top in spectacular tile work. Testifying to the prophet Muhammad and his teachings, it is considered the heart of the Qur'an.

We entered through the front door of the Dome of the Rock, together as a family, as we had done in Mecca. It was a wide, round mosque with an
expanse of space. There was no separate women's entrance, and no gender segregation inside. There were no women's hours to see the rock, which we immediately saw in front of us, from where the prophet supposedly ascended to the heavens. It was massive and solid. It was quite an impressive image in the middle of this building.

To avoid any distractions by human imagery, the interior included no figurative art. In
Islam: A Short History
, the scholar Karen Armstrong evokes an Islamic concept of monotheism called
tawhid
, or the oneness of God, to analyze the symbolism of the Dome of the Rock. She writes:

Our guide took us down a short stairwell to a lower-level view of the rock. Four elderly Palestinian men stood beside it in conversation. “As-salaam alaykum,” said one with a friendly smile. “Walaikum as salaam,” we responded. The interaction was ordinary but memorable to me. I realized that it felt welcoming to be greeted so cordially and respectfully both here and in Mecca. I wasn't used to such kindness. Back home the community had become so hard-core that men often wouldn't even greet women who walked right beside them at the mosque—when women even bothered to go.

We said a prayer; my father told me it was considered blessed to give a special prayer when entering a mosque. When we finished, we went across the courtyard to the second mosque, al-Aqsa. It was built on the site of the original timber mosque constructed at the time of Umar. Our guide told us that the mosque overflowed with worshipers on Fridays for the holy prayer. I found a quiet spot in the massive expanse of empty space inside the mosque and enjoyed a prayer alone.

It was surreal to realize that thousands have died because of this spot on earth. Around me were showcases that had bullets on display, shot from Israeli weapons at Palestinians.

With another prayer finished, we returned to the Dome of the Rock. Inside we prayed the sunset prayer together. My mother, Safiyyah, and I prayed in a section with a row of about six other women, about ten yards
behind a row of men and boys that included the guide and my father and nephew. Although we were behind the men, the trapezoid form of the mosque kept our position from feeling subordinate. Nothing felt separate. I lay Shibli beside my feet. It was so beautiful to pray there together.

After we finished our prayer, I absorbed the presence of this holy place once more. Then we stepped outside into darkness. The sky drew my eyes upward. The clouds swept past the moon—full and wide—in a glorious testimony to the divine. The rush of the clouds darkened the moonlight for just a moment, as if it were the divine breath itself that sent the clouds whirling through the night sky. I was spellbound.

“Look!” I exclaimed to my family, urging their eyes upward. They turned their eyes to the heavens and absorbed this celestial moment.

“Al-hamdulillah!” my father exclaimed. “Praise be to God!”

“Neat,” said Samir.

“Cool,” said Safiyyah.

“Let's go,” said my mother, always so practical. “It's too cold. Shibli will get sick.”

The golden dome was an awesome sight, stretching 66 feet across the Noble Rock and rising to a point more than 115 feet above it. We stood in the quiet and empty courtyard, staring at the heavens as we stood near the rock between earth and heaven. We had ascended into our own mystical journey. It took me where most roads lead—home.