Guest blog from a visitor: Now you're stuck, just like everyone else in Palestine.

“Now you’re stuck, just like everyone else in Palestine” is the text message I received from K. once I discovered that I didn’t have the entry visa stamp typically given when entering any country. I had been warned about the evils of customs at Ben Gurion Airport: the hours of questioning, the strip searches, the long periods of waiting while having no information about why your passport was taken and what will happen next. However, this was not my experience. I sailed through customs, and even got a “I hope you really enjoy your time in Israel” as I left. I asked the customs official not to stamp my passport but in my nervousness at his reaction, didn’t notice that he didn’t stamp anything. Now this would not have been a problem if I intended to stay in Israel for the duration of my trip but I was out of Israel within 2 hours, coasting into the West Bank, crossing the border from a land that welcomes me as a friend into a place where that same land is very suspicious of me and my interest in their neighbor.

I didn’t notice I didn’t have stamp until long after I was in Ramallah. I’ve had a little experience with being stampless in a country. Just a few months ago in Mozambique my passport was lost and that was not the most pleasant of experiences (story here). I was expecting that experience to be nothing in comparison to this one which entailed two options: 1) Avoiding all check points for the duration of my trip and dealing with the problems on my way out, or 2) Going into Jerusalem to get a new entry visa.

When discussing these options with the American consulate, the first worker didn’t even want to advise me at all because he felt that this situation required an expert. His first comment to me was “I can see by this phone number that you are calling me from the West Bank so I’d really rather wait for my colleague to figure out how to proceed from here”. His colleague laid out my options in a way that was layered with “I can’t officially advise you to do this or say anything contentious but I’m really trying to prepare you for an unpleasant situation”.

Option 1: Avoid all checkpoints. Now this is an interesting way to go. I did this for the first day and it was really only possible by travelling with a seasoned Palestinian who has a long history of trouble with the Israeli authorities and therefore was quite familiar with bopping around the country while avoiding any checkpoints. I could not have done it on my own and as we travelled up north I learned that the checkpoints aren’t exactly fixed, but rather open and close depending on the activities of certain villages or the perceived threats. Thankfully the Palestinian who was showing me around was an activist and very tapped-in to these changes. However, avoiding checkpoints for my entire stay would really have been impossible. It would have meant not visiting most of the country and would have entailed giant detours to get to all other places. This is when K.’s text hit home. This avoidance-centered, detour-filled, and constantly-on-alert-for-military-presence sort of existence is exactly what a lot of the Palestinians live their whole lives. Can you imagine being prohibited from visiting the city next door (which is also a bustling market for your goods and one of the most holy sites for your religion?). I met the farmers whose land was on the other side of the wall and heard there stories of military capriciousness as to whether they could access their land on any given day and how when they’re sick their children can’t farm for them due to a lack of a permit. What was most mind boggling to me was even just trying to figure out which spots in this place “belong” to whom? Was I going to an Israeli or a Palestinian part of the Dead Sea? Would I have to go through an Israeli area to get to Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem? How do people navigate this polka-dotted, every-changing political map

Option 2: Go to the Ministry of the Interior in Jerusalem and get a new entry visa. So the first obstacle with this option is getting into Jerusalem without said entry visa. This is when the subtle messages from the consulate came in. They really couldn’t tell me what to expect on this journey but wanted to let me know that if Option 1 was at all possible, it might be the safest way to go. I tried to probe for “worst case scenario” and they would absolutely not give me an end-point and instead said things like “try really hard to ask for a supervisor if you have to deal with anyone” and “avoid Qalandia (the closest check point) as we’ve had some trouble there recently”. To my questions like “well could I be arrested” their response was a measured “the protocol is not to arrest you” and there tone left a lot of room for the subtext of “protocol doesn’t really mean anything at all”. The morning before it took K. 3 hours of waiting in a cage to get through Qalandia and she HAD a visa.

I decided to try my luck with Option 2 and we hired a taxi with Israeli license plates (which is key) and went through a settler check point and we just sailed through. The taxi driver muttered to himself as we approached “you don’t want to stop us, you don’t want to stop us, you don’t want to stop us” in an attempt to do some jedi mind trick on the officers, and it worked (or at least we got through) and then he yelled (once we were out of hearing distance) “this girl doesn’t have a visa, suckers!”

So entry to Jerusalem was achieved without a hitch (just costing a fortune to get the right car and the right check point). The ministry of the interior also went unbelievably smoothly. Now just as background, in my experience at such ministries in a lot of different countries, they suffer from a major lack of signage and require a lot of luck in finding the right person who can help you. I was lucky and the first lady I found, just sort of hanging out outside an unmarked door at the end of an unmarked hall had the ability to help me out and did so within 10 minutes. While K. was weeping in an interview room while a lady made her sign a statement swearing she wasn’t secretly working in Gaza, my bureaucrat literally said “don’t worry, we are friends” and printed me out a new visa and I was on my way.

It’s hard to reconcile the ease with which I floated through this system: customs, check points, the ministry of interior, with the horror stories I hear from everyone else around me. But I think that’s just the point- it’s horrific because it’s unpredictable. And I’m starting the game with a great deck of cards- white skin, blue passport (which thanks to my Mozambique experience, is now devoid of all my suspicious stamps), and the possibility that I could be Jewish (I’m not). It certainly is a different game for me than for most of the people here. Let’s see if my entire experience with the Israeli authorities maintains this congeniality… something tells me it might not.