It was nearly 2 a.m. when our battered taxi approached the checkpoint. We’d left my going away party in the West Bank almost two hours earlier, but I was not tired. The adrenaline made the blood in my arms and chest feel like ice.
We had not expected another checkpoint, so I had climbed into the front seat of the taxi to sit with my friend Yasser, an old Christian man from Bethlehem, a Palestinian.
At the checkpoint I handed my passport to the sentry shouldering an MP5 submachine gun. He wore khakis and a polo shirt, the “uniform” of Israeli Intelligence. He and Yasser exchanged words in Hebrew, and then the sentry asked me to step out of the car. My bags were searched. I was questioned.
This was the routine, but Yasser had not been this nervous at other checkpoints that night. He was scared, and that frightened the hell out of me.
My journey had started in Professor Phil Mikesell’s office during spring semester. He was mentoring my independent study on state-building in the Middle East.
Long before I began the course, a shelf of my library was dedicated to that subject and counterinsurgency. I was a proud novice of a sexy area of political science that Wabash did not teach.
But Dr. Mikesell had just retired after 40 years in comparative politics, and my studies with him quickly revealed how little I really knew about either topic. The more I studied and read, the more complex the questions became. Our meetings were frustrating and dismal, since I could rarely draw any conclusions. The only thing I knew for sure after mornings with my advisor was that the more I learned, the less I understood.
So when I graduated from Wabash, I left for the West Bank before I could unlearn anymore of my college education. In retrospect, nothing I read could have prepared me for what I encountered, and it was probably better that I was unprepared.
After all, if I could have seen it coming I would have closed my eyes.
“What is your business in Israel?”
Sentries do not show emotion. They have a very important, very dangerous job, and those in civilian attire take it more seriously than the rest, as uniformed Israeli soldiers are usually teenagers and often Americans.
“I am a tourist.”
This was true. I was a teacher in a refugee camp—but I was also a tourist. The brochures and souvenirs I held in front of the taillight supported this fact. He asked other questions I had heard at other checkpoints many times before. I stood beside the car and repeated the same answers, all true, but well practiced for fear of misspeaking.
“Were you in the Territory?”
I could not tell him that I’d been in the Territory. My plane was leaving in three hours, and his ensuing interrogation would not allow enough time for the questioning I knew to expect at the airport.
Fortunately, I had found that when playing the part of an American tourist, ignorance is your best defense, since the rest of the world has come to expect it.
“Is Old City Jerusalem part of the Territory?” I asked with a purposeful naiveté, knowing that it was not. The diversion was a success. He moved to another question, but we were not safe yet. I had known the moment we’d approached the checkpoint that I had made a rookie mistake. I was a young male, traveling alone, and sitting in the passenger seat of a taxi with an Arab.
It was the sentry’s move. He challenged Yasser in Hebrew. I could not understand what they were yelling about, and so the sentry’s trap was set. Motioning to Yasser to be quiet, he turned back to me.
“Where did he pick you up?” he asked. I knew Yasser could have told the sentry anything; we hadn’t discussed how to handle a situation like this. It was the scariest moment of my life, but I knew that I could not show it. The sentry had me in check and I had to give an answer, or at least another question.
“Do you mean where in Jerusalem?” I replied, annoyed and indignant as I imagined any American tourist would be.
“Where in the Old City?” he snapped in frustration, revealing that Yasser and I had picked the same city. It was luck, but we were only trading queens for queens; I still had not answered his question. Yasser was scared and stood behind the sentry trying to coax me to the answer with hand gestures that did not make sense, while simultaneously coaxing the sentry to lenience with Hebrew that went ignored.
It was a shot in the dark, but I remembered from my brief travels in Jerusalem arriving at the Damascus Gate outside the Arab district. While dragging my luggage through the streets I was harassed by a hoard of Arabic taxi drivers who deceitfully tried to convince me that there was no bus service to Bethlehem. So I answered with as much confidence as I could fake, “The Muslim Quarter.”
Checkmate. He handed me my passport and released us. My last battle in Israel.
Yasser was shaken. He kissed the cross hanging from his rearview mirror and cursed the Israeli sentry in English so as to let me know it was okay to be scared.
But I’d been more scared for Yasser than myself. If the sentry had known I’d been in the Territory, I might have been interrogated longer and missed my flight, or deported or imprisoned for a few days while I waited for the State Department to force my release.
But Yasser could have gone straight to prison in a military court. His family would never have known why he did not return that night. All of this because I, a humanitarian aid worker, needed a ride to the airport.
What did I with clean conscience have to fear? I worked with children in a refugee camp for a UNICEF-sponsored nongovernmental organization. I was a teacher of democratic values, citizen responsibility—and peace. A Republican at times, and a patriotic American on top of that. Certainly no enemy of Israel. After all, the sentry wore my tax dollars over his shoulder.
But none of that would have mattered, even if I was frank about my travels and he had believed me. ‘What did he fear?’ was a more appropriate question. If given the real reason for my visit, would he not realize that I too worked toward a safer Israel and Palestine?
No, he would not.
I had been warned by many humanitarian aid workers whose fellow team members had been deported and banned from Israel, imprisoned, or interrogated for hours without explanation—most of the time before leaving the airport on their arrival into the country. Humanitarian workers have only recently been allowed into some parts of the Palestinian Territory, though they alone provide nearly all the basic human needs in some areas of the Territory. Without them, millions of Palestinians would surely die.
Unfortunately, many right-wing Israelis consider even food and medical aid a form of support for terrorist causes, instead of recognizing the likelier supporters of radical ranks—famine and death.
But that is not the only reason humanitarian aid workers are looked upon with such contempt. It is the same reason humanitarian aid workers had not been allowed into Gaza until the international community intervened, or why they are commonly banned from the country without explanation on their way out of Israel. What makes them dangerous is what they witness and leave knowing.
By my senior year at Wabash, I owned nearly the entire classical canon on democracy and liberty from Machiavelli to Dahl, and like the typical, ambitious political science student, I had walked the halls of Congress during my rite-of-passage internships. I had lived in the shadow of the Washington Monument with flag pin on and a firm handshake. I thought I knew everything.
But, I did not know freedom until I watched the sun set from behind a 25-foot wall surrounding a war ghetto. I did not know injustice until I tied the shoe on a nine-year-old’s prosthetic leg, or heard the too common story of a mother who lost her baby while giving birth at a checkpoint. I did not know prejudice until I watched toddlers go thirsty beside a settler’s swimming pool, guarded by Israeli soldiers and American tax dollars. I did not know courage until I met teenagers who sneak across invisible, deadly borders just to attend school.
I know what the sentry would have feared that night—that I would tell the rest of the world that a man without bread will steal for his family, that if we truly want peace, 10-year-olds should be educated in schools and not prisons and garbage-littered slums, and that it is hunger and ignorance, and not hate for liberty, that empower murderous zealots.
These are the few things that I know about the world, but I do not think I will ever wholly understand it.
After graduating from Wabash in May, Kent lived for five weeks in a refugee camp in the West Bank, working for an NGO funded by UNICEF hat works to educate children and improve the position of Palestinian women. In June, he was one of six young Indiana leaders to earn the Governor’s Fellowship, a program giving recent college graduates experience with various state agencies.
Kent hopes to return to the West Bank to help some of the students apply to Indiana colleges.
