Bethlehem and Dheishah Refugee Camp

After wrapping up Northern Israel, my man Noah and I set out for a three-day stint in the West Bank. We took an Arab bus (that's what they're called) from East Jerusalem to Bethlehem. In a moment that sums up part of what it is to be in the Middle East today, in Bethlehem we got falafel just feet away from where Jesus was born (allegedly). Strange in a different way, the hostel Noah and I stayed at was located inside a Palestinian refugee camp.

I don't know about you, but in my mind "refugee camp" evokes images of rows of tents and the absence of permanent structures. But this is a refugee population going on 40 years. A friend put it like this: "being a refugee just means you're not at home." That's certainly how many people there feel: the older generations of Palestinians are said to still carry around the keys to the locks of their homes in Israel, dreaming of one day going back and opening their old doors. Heavy stuff.

We also took a "graffiti tour" of the Dheishah refugee camp. Not that we needed to leave the hostel to see graffiti: the walls on each floor were painted with murals of people throwing rocks and molotov cocktails at tanks, along with less provocative paintings, like a Palestinian woman baking bread. Though it sounds like it could be unsafe, there were foreign tourists there from all over, and it's not like the people there were themselves violent. I actually hung out with a little with the manager and his friends, and I even tried to help one of the Palestinian guys there with his English application to a university in the West Bank, but we couldn't do much because the internet wasn't working.

A note about the concept of safety and "violence": I met people who said that throwing a rock or molotov cocktail at an almost-impenetrable tank is actually non-violent. It's an effect-centric definition. "No harm, no foul" kinda thing.

But back to the graffiti tour, which was very enlightening. There was some really deep art there, including by the British graffiti legend Banksy, whose work you should check out, period. His piece in the camp was of a soldier with his hands against the wall being frisked by a little girl. There was also one with a map of Israel coded with blue for "Jews" and Green for "Palestinians" over a series of years. In 1946, it's all green. By 2005, it's virtually all blue. "But there was no Palestinian state in 1946. It was the British mandate," I pointed out to our guide. He failed to see the relevance of that distinction.