This Is No Time For Silence

Fifteen minutes they say, not for the first time and most certainly not for the last. It is a Friday during Ramadan and we wait for the bus that will take us from East Jerusalem to the West Bank. Fifteen minutes extends to an hour and that hour slowly becomes two. Perhaps here where lives, like people, are separated by walls, time is just as easily divided and can only be measured in the smallest of increments.

As we wait, we watch as thousands of Palestinians descend upon the Damascus Gate in the hopes of arriving at Qubbat al-Ṣakhrah in time for the midday prayer as IDF soldiers with rifles held at the ready, their fingers only inches away from the triggers, flank them on each side.

When all have entered the city gates and the adhan wails from the muezzin and for once this world grows quiet, the buses begin to arrive one by one and I clamor aboard with my mother and take our place among other mothers and their daughters, men with and without their families, and children that in these moments are children no more, and drive in the direction of Bethlehem.

The bus lets us out steps away from the West Bank. The wall, just under twenty years old and just over twenty feet tall, rose before us in thick slabs of grey concrete punctuated with watchtowers, barbed wire, and soldiers dressed in riot gear.

My mother cries as we stand in front of the guarded gates. This is not what she expected. This is more than she feared.

When the gates finally open, with the flashing of red lights and the moan of metal separating from metal, we walk into the West Bank and are greeted by the shouting of men hoping to sell their fruits, their trinkets, their toils to the world outside of these walls and the arguing of other men hoping that they will be the ones chosen to be our guide within their city walls. It is here that we find Marwan, a young Palestinian taxi driver, and the three of us make our way to his car parked near the entrance to his city.

“Welcome to my big prison,” he says as we shut the doors to his black sedan, the windows rolled down, the radio low. I meet his eyes in the rear view mirror. They are brown like his skin and his hair and despite the anger in his words there is softness in his voice and in his eyes that now plead with mine: Look at me. Look at this. Holding his gaze I see that our ages are not far from one another and I sense that there is no distance in our thoughts. There is no difference in our dreams.

He starts the car and drives both towards and away from the madness, pointing to all of the tourist attractions along the way:

Here is where Bansky painted his first song of protest.

There is where the angels, they were heard on high.

Here is where Christ the King was born.

There is where they build the illegal settlements. There is where they have electricity. There is where they have clean water.

Here is where we sometimes have none.

He stops the car on top of the hill that overlooks the land beyond these walls and we climb out to take in the world in which we now find ourselves. We do not stay long, but before we shut the doors once again I imagine him here in the darkness waiting for angels, dreaming of freedom.

As the sun begins to hide behind the hills of Palestine he takes us back to the gates that remain locked not from within but from without. Bittersweet we say our goodbyes and he disappears into the gathering crowd and we, only there for only one day, are able to escape just hours after we arrived, leaving behind Marwan, leaving behind all who must spend their entire lives behind these walls.

We return to the city lost in thoughts that are thousands of years old. Thoughts like this: In Jerusalem there is no need to go to Yad Vashem to see just how cruel one man can be to another.

In the days that follow we travel to Haifa, we travel to the Dead Sea, we travel to Tel Aviv having cautious conversations everywhere we go for to say too much we might be accused of things that we are not guilty of and to say too little and we become guilty of remaining silent when it is this silence, like so many other things, that must be broken.

The week passes as slowly as it does quickly and by week’s end we say our goodbyes. She departs the day before I and I am left alone in a place that I might not have stayed had she not been there, had she not offered her lungs so that I may breathe, her hand so that I may still stand, and her heart because mine, for those days and the days ever since, had been broken. If it were not for my mother I would have left had she not given me life once again.

When it is my turn to leave I do not linger and although I might not ever return, I am now ready to return with my words and these words will cry out for freedom.

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