What Was I Thinking?

Three weeks in and I realized that a month-long journey to Palestine is inadequate. After spending time in the cities and talking to people on all sides of the Israeli-Palestinian issue, I see that three weeks is barely enough time to scratch the surface of things here. And with every sideways glance as I walk alone down the street, with every awkward attempt at communication, with every wrong turn I make, with every cultural faux pas and political misstep, I find myself asking What was I thinking?

What made me think that I could come over here from the United States, as green as it gets when it comes to Mideast politics and history, and in the course of a month understand the complexities of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict enough to write about it with any authority? What made me think I could adapt quickly and easily? What the hell made me think I could learn Arabic? Oh wait -- maybe I shouldn't skip class ... But my point is that three weeks here is only enough time to be humbled by the boot camp of culture shock that is Palestine. I've met journalists who've been here for years and now seem exhausted and disillusioned by the situation. I was so filled with hope and expectation when I arrived, and now I'm leaving feeling a bit more informed and a lot more connected to the conflict, but no less baffled in general. Maybe even more confused now that I see how many layers there are to the situation and how many opinions to untangle.

There are plenty of people willing to talk about it -- Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, Brits, etc. -- but who do you believe and how do you check the pile of facts unpacked in every heated argument? Hell, I've heard entire debates on the semantics and language of the conflict --where does a solution fit into all the talking about how to talk about it? Which NGOs have the right numbers? What is the political stand of a given news outlet, here or abroad? What is the motivation of every single person who opens their mouth to tell you their side of this obscured, tragic, amorphous story? What's mine?

I've been accused of being pro-Israeli by people here because I work for The New York Times. And on the same day I faced that accusation, I couldn't get a bus back to Bethlehem from Jerusalem because no Israeli was willing to tell me where the "Arabic" buses stopped. How can peace be accomplished when both sides are so very angry?

I was in Jerusalem talking to a member of ICAHD, when an acquaintance of his, a Jewish man from Chicago, sat down near us. We began to make small talk and I'd had just enough alcohol to ask him his views on the conflict. I asked him if he thought socio-political decisions (such as land rights) should be made based on religious texts. After a beat, he said yes. And there's yet another layer to the conflict. He asked me about my work, and I told him I wanted to make Western readers more engaged in the conflict by giving them context -- more facts and background info that are easily accessible from an article. I said I thought this format would be great for news in general as it moves to the web. He was incredulous. "Yes, but whose facts?" he asked.

And I know that's part of the problem: There are so many versions of the facts, so many subtle tweaks that make facts more beneficial to one group or another, that you constantly have to ask yourself how true any given fact really is. But I want to believe there are people out there (like me) whose primary interest is telling the truth in as unbiased and clear a way as possible. Because we believe that the facts themselves, when presented as a comprehensible whole, will help people truly understand what's at stake. And yes, no one is perfect -- no institution or individual -- so facts will always come through a kind of filter. But we can at least get very close to the absolute truth of the situation, right?

Then there's the question of how you make people see and believe a situation that invalidates a religious belief and threatens their whole way of life. How can you convince people that their way of life is destroying someone else's, and wrongly so? No one wants to believe that.

I was feeling pretty deflated by the whole thing. I realized that I need a lot more time before I can do any justice to this story, and before I can effectively separate the facts from the PR on either side.

My editor at PNN told me that there was a lot I didn't know about Palestinian politics. She said Hamas won the democratic elections and hasn't had a chance to prove if it could be effective. She told me that pro-Israeli language taints stories about Palestine. A Palestinian friend of mine told me that sometimes Palestine blames things on Israel that are actually part of internal conflict, because the Palestinian government wants to avoid embarrassment. Days like that, I don't even know where to begin.

Then there are times when it becomes more real. Like the night we were at Tent of Nations and heard the call to Muslim prayer in the valley below. A few of us lagged behind the others, standing for a minute under the stars to listen in silence. There was a breeze, but the world felt still, and I thought I understood a little better what it meant to belong to the land here.

All I know is that I have to come back if I'm really going to understand.
Submitted By: F.F