“Don’t you have any better music?” Ten different things about that sentence caused me to do a double take. The unmistakably American accent. The unmistakably female voice. The completely comfortable English. The apparent distaste for the standard Arabic Top 40 cassette that usually thrills Palestinian kids, and the subsequent conclusions that this girl was passionate about music and about some different kind of music than her peers. The lack of “Sir,” “Mister,” or “Excuse me, teacher,” anywhere in the sentence. The direct, almost obnoxious tone. The simple fact that this mysterious young Gazan female had the confidence to ask this question at all, a brazen act with a total stranger. When I turned around to see who it was, I multiplied my double take. She had a bright face wrapped in a colorful scarf, and she was the first hijab girl to smash my stereotypes, and later, tragically, to break my heart.
It was midnight, the day before camp, June 1998. The 15 Gazan members of the new Palestinian delegation and I were cruising to Israel’s Ben Gurion airport in the modern ship of the desert, the Ford Transit van. We had successfully navigated the barbed-wire labyrinth that is the Erez border crossing from Gaza to Israel, in a record-fast time of just over two hours. Each Palestinian kid had already presented his ID to three different Israeli soldiers and turned his bags over for a thorough search; three more ID checks and one more exhaustive search awaited them at the airport. But this was routine. That sentence out of the back of the van came out of nowhere—certainly didn’t sound like it came out of Gaza.
Gaza was, back then, the most thoroughly sealed off section of the Palestinian Authority. Unlike the West Bank, which in the peace process days was only occasionally roadblocked in every direction, no one entered or left Gaza without an Israeli-issued permit, which was difficult for most and impossible for many to obtain. Gaza was consequently the poorest part of Palestine, the most religiously conservative, and the least likely to produce such a sentence.
I had grown accustomed on camp flight night to meeting Gazan Seeds who were especially excited about their upcoming trip to America, it often being their first time out of Gaza—but who were also shy and fastidiously respectful of their strange, over-friendly American escort. Until they got used to over-friendly Americans after a few days at camp, the girls often barely spoke to me at all. But this girl, wrapped in the symbol of Islamic piety—that despite my relatively extensive experience with Palestinians, clearly triggered a lot of assumptions in my mind—wasn’t just talking, she was initiating conversation, and she was pissed off I hadn’t brought anything from Pearl Jam.
She didn’t initiate conversations just with me; she was a smash hit at camp, a crack hitter on the softball field, a powerful Palestinian voice in the coexistence discussions, and especially popular with those Israeli girls who were fellow devotees of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She’s not your typical hijab girl—but she’s not alone. Several more such Seeds followed in her footsteps, leaving me and their Israeli acquaintances with eyes and minds more wide open. Alas, in the eyes of her parents, the original dazzling hijab Seed had indeed gone a little too far on her trip to America. Her parents discouraged and eventually disallowed all contact with Seeds of Peace and Israeli friends.
But next summer two new hijab girls with no previous American experience came and smashed stereotypes by simple force of personality. One of those is our famous fugitive from yesterday—we’ll call her Salma. She’s from the closest to Gaza you can get in the West Bank, a traditional Muslim family in a rural hamlet between Nablus and Jenin. She speaks remarkable English for someone from her area, the best in her school with no competition. She was the leading Palestinian girl in the third camp session of 1999, returning home proud of representing her people and having won the hearts and respect of many Israeli teens. Unlike our Gazan original, Salma didn’t break my heart either upon coming back.
Salma stayed in close touch and remained as active as she possibly could, even during the intifada when Israeli soldiers and settlers have repeatedly shot up and shut down her village, often cutting off electricity and water and imposing curfews. She described the events and her continued hope for peace in the Olive Branch, and appreciated the concerned phone call she received from an Israeli Seed, consciously distinguishing between her friend and the soldiers that afflict her and her family.
Salma is a fugitive because, as a West Bank Palestinian, she is not legally permitted in Jerusalem. But she has to take the TOEFL here, in order to apply to university in the United States. Her abilities and her aspirations are greater than what’s available to her at home, and we want to help Salma get where she could easily go if a million obstacles weren’t in her way.
Even to get the point where we could help her, she literally had to climb mountains. The Israeli army has encircled and separated all the Palestinian cities in the West Bank throughout most of this year, more tightly than ever after the assassination by Palestinians of an Israeli minister three weeks ago. Salma hiked one and a half hours over the mountains surrounding Nablus and crossed five checkpoints in three different taxis before we picked her up. Her car was the last one to pass between Nablus and Ramallah before a firefight on that road killed one Israeli soldier and three Palestinian gunmen and closed the road once again to any Palestinian transportation.
So, my moral of today’s story: It takes endurance, chutzpah, courage, cleverness, good luck, and the intervention of a major international organization for ordinary Palestinians to travel pretty much anywhere right now, and before the intifada it wasn’t that much better. For those who have concluded that I am radically pro-Palestinian, I’m just telling the story of one girl’s trip to take a test. And tomorrow, we’ll meet the Israeli teen from a settlement who declared in the most permanent possible way that she’s a Seed of Peace.
Read Ned Lazarus’ diary entry No. 3 at Slate »