was visible. You said, “Oh, yes, that. It is visible at any high point in Jerusalem.” You waved your arm around at the houses, the hills. “But here is also the wall. I live with the wall on top of me. They want us to leave and I will just keep fighting to stay.” “Why do the Israeli authorities want you to leave?” “Because they say this site is close to a Jewish holy site. A cave. For years there is nothing in this cave but dogs and garbage and teenage boys having adventures, but now it is a Jewish holy site and all the Arabs have to go. Of course it has nothing to do with the cave. It is for the settlers to move in. Look, they are already here.” The house beside your house is inhabited by Jews from Eastern Europe who do not speak any language you speak: neither Hebrew, nor Arabic, nor English. Communication is almost impossible. They have put a giant menorah on the roof; it lights up every night.
D
ear Amal al Qasem, when I left Israel, the security people at Ben Gurion Airport took my bags apart. They said their sensors had detected something suspicious. I was carrying nothing untoward with me, nothing dangerous. I watched as the young women pulled everything out of my three pieces of luggage. All scattered on the tables, clattering, sliding, exposed. The security people huddled and conferred. They probed my toothpaste with a metal skewer, opened pill bottles, face cream, shook out my dirty laundry, asked me about the missing button on my keyboard. “Who took this button off your computer?” It fell off; it broke. “When?” Several years ago. It kept falling off. I just threw it away. “But not here, not while you were in Israel.” No. I was here for just over a week. “Are you sure?” That I was here only for just over a week? “No, that this button 14 Geist 92 Spring 2014
came off before you arrived.” Yes, it was broken. They huddled, conferred some more. A different young woman looked through my things. She picked up the lemon. “Where did you get this lemon?” I thought: that lemon is a Palestinian lemon from the house of an Arab Jerusalemite who is justifiably angry at the Israeli administration. It is a
seditious lemon. It is full of the sun of Jerusalem. I said, “I bought that lemon from a street vendor in Old Jerusalem.” The security person ran her hands over the lemon; she looked at it closely. It was smooth; it had not been filled with explosives. She left it in the pile of my underwear. I asked, “What is it like, this job?” She looked up to see if I was joking or making fun of her, but I was just asking a question. “It’s a job. But, you know, it gets into everything. Into the rest of your life. It’s stressful.” This answer both satisfied and dissatisfied me; it was an honest answer, but it made me more impatient than I already was. I wanted to say to her: Try being Amal al Qasem. Try that level of stress for the rest of your life. Try being evicted from the house you grew up in. I looked at my watch. Would I miss my plane and my connecting flight to north Africa? I have missed a lot of planes in my life. Though never for this reason. I was in a small room now, with a different woman, not so pretty,
more gruff. She had more experience, more years. Her hands were under my armpits. My trousers were on a hook on the wall. I was standing in my underwear. She put her hands on my breasts. Around. Lifting. Against my will? I had no choice, obviously. No one said, “If you refuse,” and offered me an alternative to the strip search. I am a practical person. This was, for me, a minor outrage in my blessed life. I was still hoping to catch my plane. I thought of the hours of your life, Amal, the hours you have spent being searched. The checkpoint and your husband waiting for hours on the other side. Stopped, held up. Questioned about the cheese, the bag of almonds, the olives. The car taken apart. The soldiers are often rude, brutish, emptying out the back seat, the trunk. They confiscate your son’s homework and rip out a few pages for no reason. He cries. Sometimes you see other people, often young men, being harassed, or beaten. But it is best to say nothing, best not to defend them, because when others intrude, the situation often worsens for everyone. There are thousands of young Palestinian men in Israeli jails because of checkpoint skirmishes, arguments, unproven crimes. The stern woman put her hands into my thin hair, scratched around. She asked me to bend over, touch my knees. I thought of you, Amal. Your daughter. Your neighbours. The search as a way of life, part of life’s daily possibilities. And I thought of that lemon. If they don’t take it, I will carry it with me and I will eat that whole lemon in the next country, swallow all the sour juice of Jerusalem. The agent told me to stand up straight. Her face was unreadable. But I tried to read it. As she searched my body, I searched her face. I looked at her nose, her eyelashes (no mascara). Her full mouth was held in, the lips photograph: karen connelly