Work Camps: Seeing is Believing

By Roberta Coles

To explain how my views on the Middle East evolved, I must address both Middle East issues and feminist concerns.

I first began to learn about the Arab-Israeli conflict from a Jordanian who later became my husband. I was soon finding out just as much about prejudice and stereotyping in the United States, particularly among evangelical Christians like myself. Some of my friends didn't want me dating a critic of Israel, and a Muslim at that. One Japanese-American friend, whom I expected to be more sensitive to stereotyping than most, solemnly told me Middle Easterners "look deceptive." Jewish friends were suddenly no longer friends, and a Jewish relative said she "thought I could do better."

When I wrote my master's thesis on the 1979 US-Iran hostage crisis, one of my male advisors said, "You must be dating an Iranian, right?" The message I heard in that question was that women think only with stars in their eyes and a man feeding the information into their heads.

Even today, when male or female friends and colleagues learn that my initial interest in Middle East issues was awakened by my husband, the exchange of views often stops with a look that says, "Well, that explains it." I'm dismissed as no longer an unbiased source. All my research, and I have done a lot, becomes irrelevant.

I had always been interested in international and intercultural affairs, though mostly related to Western and Eastern European issues. I am embarrassed now to admit that I had thought Israel had existed "since time immemorial," not just for a relatively brief span a couple of millennia ago. All I knew of the modern Middle East was that little Israel seemed always to be battling for its survival, and that all these events were supposed to be happening "according to God's plan."

Shortly after I met my husband, he showed me a map of the Middle East and pointed out Israel. "Right," I said, "but where is Palestine?" I still remember the look of gentle amazement in his eyes. I soon discovered that Palestine was there, all right: Under the rubble, under Israel's Canada Park, and under the "blooming" desert.

After my first few discussions with my husband-to-be, and with other Arabs whom I met in graduate school, I still did not believe my country could possibly be a part of what had happened, and still is happening, to the Palestinians. So,I seized every chance in the international development courses I was taking to learn about the Middle East. I must have read at least 50 books by Arabs, Israelis, and Americans that first year alone. Because I still felt more trusting of familiar Christian sources, the two books most convincing to me were Frank Epps' Whose Land is Palestine? and A.C. Forrest's The Unholy Land.

In 1983, skeptic that I am, I decided to see first-hand if what I was reading was true. I traveled with a varied volunteer group to the Middle East to work in refugee camps in Jordan and the occupied territories. I was able to cross the border from Jordan to the West Bank uneventfully, but a Palestinian American traveling with us was not so fortunate. Everything she owned was dismantled, from clothes to toothpaste. She was almost held back because in her suitcase she carried a broken gold necklace in the shape of a map of Palestine. Only when a sympathetic Jewish American in the group made a ruckus did the Israeli officials allow the Palestinian American through.

We arrived in Jerusalem during a strike. Two Palestinian students had been shot in a demonstration, and all of East Jerusalem was closed. Steel doors rolled down over the storefronts made it look like a city of garages. At a roadblock on the way to Bir Zeit University, we, as foreigners, were pulled off the bus and questioned as to why we would be visiting a Palestinian educational institution.

At the refugee camps where I was to work, I met a retired Danish woman dentist who carried a letter of introduction from a Palestinian in Denmark to a refugee family living in Jalazoon camp. The Danish woman planned to spend a couple of days with them. The morning after she left for the visit I saw her walking back into our camp, looking as if she had been through a war. She had had a pleasant dinner and conversation during the evening with the family she was visiting, then retired to bed. (I speak loosely here. In a refugee camp, a bed frequently means a mat on a dirt floor in a crowded room under a sheet-metal roof secured by rocks.) In the middle of the night, Israeli military vehicles roared into the camp. The soldiers made all of the residents come out of their homes, line up in the street under the glare of the headlights, and watch while two houses were bulldozed. Her hosts, who were used to such intrusions, were able to go back to sleep. The Danish lady was too shaken to sleep, however, and at dawn decided to return to the relative safety of our work camp.

I had many experiences of my own that left lasting impressions of that trip: Meeting Bassam Shakaa, the mayor of Nablus, whose legs were blown off by a car bomb set by Jewish extremists who, when caught, were treated like heroes and given the mildest possible punishment; trips to the beach where Jewish "settlers," as well as Israeli soldiers, walked around toting machine guns; the demonstration in which two Israeli peace activists, one a woman in her 50s, were beaten and two of our European campers were held and interrogated; and the refugee camp with no sewer system, where I became deathly ill.

When it was time to return to Jordan, a friend and I haled a Palestinian cab, which is distinguished from an Israeli cab by its license plate, to take us to the border. This is a mistake if you're looking forward to an easy crossing. While the Israeli cabs are allowed to reach the Allenby Bridge swiftly, the Palestinian cabs may be waved to the side of the road to wait in line until Israeli border guards are in the mood to let them pass. When we made a fuss, our driver had his identification papers confiscated. He told me that if he was caught without his papers, he would be without work and in jail. After some begging by us and flourishing of our American and European passports, Israeli guards finally returned the driver's papers and let us pass out of the occupied territories and back into Jordan.

My first two trips to the Middle East were taken without my husband. He was with me on my third visit, because we were moving to Jordan to teach there. Last October, our stay was cut short by a car accident that took his life. Back in the US, I find old friends gently probing to see if I have buried my interest and views in the Middle East with my husband. They don't understand that now that I've seen the light, I can never again hide in the dark.

Roberta Coles is a Madison, Wisconsin-based free-lance writer and editor.