CHAPTER 5 - Israel

The arrival in Tel Aviv in 1988 was at nightfall and the last vestigial memory, the imprint of impression that remains was the advertisements, and how they strived for everything Western. The cutting edge visuals. The immaculate model. The stark green and black. The way so little the image related to what was being promoted was the same, so that a foreigner had no hope of knowing what it was promoting, outside of perhaps a brand. The sense that the image was striving for that standard so hard it betrayed it did not have it, yet asserting this opulent identity. Israel was replete with such contradictions, back then more an amalgam of all the Jews who had migrated from mainly Europe and North America, transferring that mentality and lifestyle, yet stridently asserting nationhood based on a forged and historic identity. It carried the taint of the conquistador wave back towards the cradle of civilization in a fiercely militarist state.

After a two-day stint at a Tel Aviv Hostel (the memory from that was that they put out chocolate icing in the morning to put on your toast, which obviously pleased the kids), the entire travelling group complete with luggage was actually squished into a single minivan (seats had to be removed in order to fit), which managed to not break down on the mountain climb to Jerusalem. That provided the sense of the aridity of the landscape, and the noted attempt in places on route to re-establish pine forests. A one-month apartment rental was obtained very quickly on the basis of the deception that it would house only four adults. This very nearly backfired when the landlord appeared unannounced while the children, who luckily were still on the stairs at the time coming back from the park, managed to hide under the staircase and avoid him and disappear for a while along with the bulk of the group. Given the apartment constituted three small rooms, the entire floor space was covered by the group sleeping at night. Very quickly they visited a foam mattress shop and single narrow mattresses made of dense high-quality foam were bought for everyone in the group. They were 3 inches thick and had to be rolled up daily. The month gave them the liberty to explore Jerusalem, the Old City, and gain an impression of Israel. They managed to get through this living arrangement amicably with only one flashpoint argument near the end.

In the meantime the search was on to find a place in which the entire group could realistically live, which realistically was not easy in the least. Housing in Israel was at an absolute premium. The more they talked to people, the more they learned that in attempting to maintain that westernized lifestyle, people were living on their credit month to month and just managing to pay it off with their next pay check. Nothing was wasted. Anything put out on the curb was gone within minutes, which was nothing like Canada. Back in Victoria there had been a “garbage day” twice a year, which allowed people to put out all the stuff that was too big for the garbage can limit and any backlog they had just lying about. It had gradually become a family exercise to go out in the evenings searching these piles the day before pick up, and there had been quite a lot of pickings. It was recycling, and gradually more and more people were seen doing it. Their Dad would come back with a flood of stuff that it would be difficult to deal with back home, filling the driveway. Where to put it all?! There was no such thing here. It implied something about relative affluence.

They did most of their travelling by walking or by taxis. They had a laugh-in at the park one night. Their father took many pictures, including full moon sessions of the Old City with his tripod, a new learning curve. They saw that your typical Brinks truck security carried Uzi’s. They met their first soldiers patrolling around the perimeter of the Palestinian East side of Jerusalem in the Kidron Valley, who were delighted to capture the western children in a photo-op. They encountered the Jerusalem Post “news” story of a settler girl who had allegedly been “stoned to death” by Palestinian villagers, only to discover a buried retraction in the Post that related a far different story after Prime Minister Shamir had personally made an appearance at the 16-year-old girl’s funeral declaring the Palestinians would pay in blood. It turned out the girl had been shot by her own (of US extraction) Zionist security guard, who had taken it upon himself to parade the high school children straight into a Palestinian village carrying his uzi after opening fire and shooting a Palestinian farmer in the head on the way. The Palestinian villagers who surrounded the group had thought they were being attacked, and once there the security guard had again opened fire. The village paid a collective punishment penalty for this encounter with homes and olive groves deliberately destroyed. (web link of report with articles)

Israel had an interesting amalgam of good food products and bad. The chocolate in the bulk section of the main grocery store was amazing, because the learning of it had been exported from the Swiss. It was not uncommon to see shoppers rifling through the chocolate and eating it as they passed. The Jaffa oranges were different, delightful and tangy. The attempts at western imitations like ketchup, Coca-cola, mustard, margarine, cottage cheese and mayonnaise were dreadful. Ketchup was heavily sugared tomato paste. Mustard best not described.

The search was on for a place to live but proving fruitless, mainly because of the prohibitive rents. It was imperative to leave the apartment when the month was out. To give a sense of how high the rents were, an “apartment” in East Jerusalem, which was actually two rooms with an open air kitchen that had a dirt floor shared with two other “apartment” families, ran $1200 US per month. While anything in the Old City was especially steep in price, it gives you a sense of how high the rental rates were. They looked at a place in Ein Karem, where John the Baptist was born. This was a travel rental; the house would be left fully furnished as the family went to Europe. Over the course of the conversation they asked how the Jewish family came by the home. They responded that it had just been abandoned, left fully furnished, and they were able to just walk in and take it, and from then on it was theirs. The question that loomed uncomfortably in the travelling family’s perception was what had happened to the Palestinian family that had fled their home and why had they fled it? While Randy deeply desired to live in the town of John the Baptist, in the end he backed away from the ethical matter of renting a home that had been forcibly taken from some unidentified unknown family. Added to the exorbitant price asked for the rental and the impression of dishonesty having to do with the deposit, it broke the camel’s back.

Opportunity knocked one day in the form of meeting a Palestinian pair of young men who appealed to Randy to come and check rentals in Bethlehem, in fact they knew someone who had a house available. Bethlehem is in the West Bank, the Occupied Territories. So the crossing began driven purely by economic necessity. The first foray into Bethlehem Rahab took caused a joking parley where an icon shop owner’s son offered “200 camels” as a dowry price. The house in question was actually in the adjoining town of Beit Jala. The name means “Carpet of Grass” in Aramaic. “It is said that the people of Beit Jala can make the stone talk!” –such is the community skill at stone cutting. Bethlehem is central to two adjoining towns, Beit Zahur in the north and Beit Jala in the south. Beit Zahur is primarily Muslim, but Beit Jala is primarily Christian, being next to Bethlehem. St. George the Patron Saint of Great Britain, was also the Patron Saint of the town because historically St. George is believed to have had a Christian Palestinian mother. Beit Jala ascends the second highest mountain in Israel; its families had farmed on the summit. In a possible stab at humour the Israelis cockily named the mountain Everest. Its original name is Ras Jala. The view of the settlement of Gilo partially obstructed the view of Jerusalem, which while on a summit itself, actually lay below in the view from the upper reaches of Beit Jala. (When the land for Gilo was expropriated from the local Palestinians, the local stone quarry which produced a lovely marbled pale pink stone was taken away.) Jerusalem was only about six kilometres away. The settlement of Har Gilo now capped the summit of Everest. There was no public transit bus service in the Palestinian areas, but a transit bus served Har Gilo exclusively maybe five times a day. If they did not go down to Bethlehem to take a taxi, the family and travel group members would be permitted to enter Har Gilo in order to catch the bus there to Jerusalem. They could show their foreign passports to pass the guarded gate, which was locked at nightfall. The bus was not the most common scheduled transit to Har Gilo, rather it was a jeep with armed IDF soldiers that made the trek every half hour, up and down, with a manned sub-machine gun mounted in the back. As the patrol jeep would ascend the main street in Biet Jala, the soldier manning the gun would often swivel to aim the gun barrel at the heads of passing children. This would strike one as an allegation the Palestinians made in their ready list of commonly endured traumas, except that it soon happened to the children of the visiting family as well. If the jeep patrol encountered any Palestinian male walking alone at night, that person would be beaten on sight.

In a small twist of fate the primary school that lay closest to their new home had the same name that was taken for the second daughter, “Talitha cumi”. There wasn’t a language barrier to deal with for the most part because children were taught English as a second language all through grade school.

In complete challenge to the Jerusalem Post article that treated Palestinians like they would attempt to attack settlers on sight, Randy, who with his facial appearance and long hair and beard looked every bit the part of a Zionist settler, and in fact created that impression on the villagers before they found out about the family’s origins, never once encountered negative treatment of any kind, neither verbal or physical. And while any spoken encounter would lead fairly soon to the disclosure that the family was not Jewish, this usually did not happen until they were invited into Palestinian homes. The culture of Arab hospitality was such that if the children or family members ventured outside walking, they often suffered serious delays in getting from “A” to “B” simply because they were constantly being invited into the homes of anyone who saw them, either for customary concentrated coffee spiced with cardamom, or a sublime lemonade. The odd time someone would try to introduce them to Araq, the Arab variant of Ouzo. These invites nearly always resulted in prolonged conversation, and the Palestinians suffered repression of a sort that made them want to tell any outsider they had the opportunity to speak to the hazards of their daily lives under the Occupation. They rarely had the opportunity to tell foreigners of their lives. They could not phone internationally anywhere, their phone lines only operated within the West Bank.  The grievances they spoke of were voluble and long, and included children beaten with multiple fractures by IDF soldiers. The first Intifada was just beginning, and in the beginning it was a collective rebellion of stone throwing children. But anyone listening to the relation of Occupation history and the telling of the present, understanding how these children had been born into these conditions, could easily see why they were reacting so. The elders were not restive because they remembered Occupation under the Turks before that, which in the more “benign” ‘80’s, they were recollecting as the worse of the two. The Turks would severely punish anyone who took it upon themselves to learn to read. The IDF had not yet taken to deliberately sniping and killing Palestinian children for daring to walk to school, though there were years they deliberately cancelled school altogether simply to put the Palestinian children behind in their education, and actually they would deliberately do this just before the children had completed their school year, in order to waste it and make them repeat a year. The right to education was and is attacked constantly.

On the Jerusalem side, you learned about all the reforestation the Israelis were doing, about all the collective farms and agriculture, and how the Palestinians had previously neglected the land. On the West Bank side you learned that the Turks had clear cut “everything” upon their retreat to fuel their steam engines. You learned of the collective punishments exacted on Palestinian villages by bulldozing their predominant crop, their olive groves, which filled the terraces on Everest as far as the eye could see, plunging down, down, down those steep valleys. The valleys were so steep it was now easy to understand how Saul in pursuit could have had a shouting match with David and his men directly across the valley, yet pursuing him would have never caught him, for he would still have had to have gone down, then up again. There were trees easily estimated to have stood at the time of Christ or even longer. No matter. It takes an olive tree thirty years to produce just one olive. No matter. They were bulldozed. On the Palestinian side they not only learned to identify the fig trees they’d seen in Jerusalem, but the pistachio trees, citrus, and the askedinias, a pitted fruit like an apricot in appearance, but much softer, juicier, and redolent with tangy flavour that was an explosion on your taste buds, with multiple smooth pits all fitted together at the centre. After six weeks they all succumbed one by one to a combination of prolonged vomiting and dysentery apparently brought on by an optically undetectable yeast spore westerners were unaccustomed to carried on all native fruit, especially since once they crossed into the West Bank, they were eating locally. The butcher’s was full of live caged chickens that were slaughtered on the spot. Pick one. The family never quite got into the swing of it. They tended to frequent the most westernized grocer’s, run by a thirty year old man named Maher who had lived in the US for eight years while getting his business degree. He set his sights on Rahab immediately.

They could smell the baker’s baking bread at night in the wee hours; it was just in sight down the hill, and often they would walk down the road at night to catch the bread freshly baked, hot out of the oven. It was white in the Italian style, along with the customary pitas. The trip down the hill had to be made very quietly because many of the homes had a dog chained outside, which otherwise would be not quite feral. The Palestinians did not treat their dogs like pets, whereas the Israelis doted on their dogs, and the cats in Jerusalem were pretty much feral. Because the chained dogs had little other social recourse, they would communicate with each other by barking at night. It was also a matter of protection. If one dog heard something and started to bark, the whole valley of dogs could be set off. It was not a small thing to manage to get to the bakery without setting off the wary valley of dogs who were bored silly on chains. It’s readily understood why in the animation/documentary Waltz With Bashir an IDF soldier was commanded to execute the dogs before entering a village. During their stay, the family heard of the “Druse”, a Christian militia described in dark frightened tones, which was a mercenary band the IDF utilized for their overwhelming brutality; they were identified by their burgundy berets.

On the lighter side, the youngsters on the bread run took to arming themselves with water balloons so they could pelt the nearby dogs that tended to set the valley off when they passed to get bread. The water balloon tactic had been Randy’s suggestion. That pacified most of them, except for an immense irascible pit bull, named “Teddy” after the mayor of Jerusalem. (Teddy was kept on the roof, which made him harder to hit.) The two German Shepherds who lived at the US Consulate residence, which was also in sight of their home, never backed down. The home the family were renting in Beit Jala had originally been constructed as a US Consulate residence, but because of some aspects that were shoddily built, the Americans had built another one themselves. The structure they had rejected was immense, over 1400 square feet on each floor and built with top of the line materials, stone floors throughout and granite countertops, spacious bathrooms with bidets, but not quite top of the line construction. It had two floors and two balconies, and you could go up on the roof as well. The rent for this palace was $600 US a month. The difference in property values and the quiet (Christian) nature of Beit Jala, its slightly milder climate due to elevation (it actually snowed there the odd time), and its proximity to Jerusalem created a situation where there were several Consulate residences in the area, including the US one.

They live large but lived poor in this immensity, which to them was a palace. They tried to get by on a washer that was so small it took at least fifteen loads to do the laundry each week. It broke down often and Rahab lost patches of skin on her knuckles and palms every week she had to do the laundry by hand.

In the West Bank her siblings played on the terraces, and once got into a stone throwing fight with a neighbouring family. Jonathan nearly got into a stone throwing fight with children outside the Temple Mount as well. On the terraces at their new home they played tag and capture the flag, running all over the place, something none of the Palestinian children would do. Neighbouring families would have thought them crazy because they were always climbing the rock terraces using handholds, putting their hands in crevasses that the locals all knew could easily house scorpions, though it was a while before anyone told them that. A yellow snake hardly larger than a garter snake was bludgeoned to death by their landlord on the front porch. He told them its bite was fatal. The landlord and his family lived on the ground floor. A black centipede about six inches long caused screams of panic by the landlord’s children while the kids were visiting them downstairs. Because the landlord’s kids were so afraid of it and they were shouting for their father, the Canadian boys tried to accommodate by stopping the centipede from getting under the furniture by blocking it with little plastic building blocks. It turned out the bite of this centipede could also prove fatal. Strangely it was called a “44” for its legs.

One day Rahab and her brothers decided to try and circuit the entire mountain, which was partially wild and mainly terraced, just for the sake of doing it. They saw a falcon dive for a plastic bag. The oldest of the landlord’s four sons insisted on tagging along. They were fine until they got to the fencing of Cremesan (scroll down to see aerial map), which was a monk’s retreat, seminary school and a winery as well. Its entry was halfway down the mountain; it was also on the other side from the direction they were circuiting the summit. They were close enough to the summit to find that the winery’s walls met with those of Har Gilo; there was no way to pass. The wall of Cremesan was topped with cement stuck full of shards of broken glass, with barbed wire strung above that. It was still better than dealing with Har Gilo, which was strung with razor wire proper. They found a small section at the top behind some bushes that was only strung with barbed wire. They shimmied under it, simply for the sake of trying to get around; no one wanted to double back in defeat of their original purpose. Rahab tried to get them all to run across the property as fast as possible. When they were nearing the other side, she could see there was a dog patrolling midway up the vineyard. She got them to the fence and the landlord’s son was no longer with them. She noted the soil as they ran. Outside Cremesan the land near the summit was devoid of anything and harder than clay, almost like rock except without the density. Inside where they’d managed to break it for the vineyard it was powder, so fine it reminded her of volcanic ash. (She’d had a small canister of ash from the explosion of Mt. St. Helen’s, but one of her siblings had managed to dump it.) So devoid of life, how hard it must be to try and bring back this ancient land. When they jumped it poof’ed up over their ankles, wan, tan and pale. The mid-section of the mountain and the valley bottoms, the land graduated to a reddish hue. There was still life in it. All the soil was drained out of these lands by man’s use, exposure and time. So much time with man, the soil was totally expended. It reminded her of what they’d encountered in the south of Italy, where the land was reduced to a rocky waste. She was amazed the monks had managed to break the land, curious that it went from rock to powder. She made sure the boys were making it through the fence and ran back in panic searching for the one who was missing, all the while aware there was a dog patrolling. She found the boy wandering disoriented in tears. He had gotten afraid and tried to turn back. He had not been raised with the mettle they had, and the ability to coordinate and work as a group. She brought him to the fence where the others had crossed and they all made the full circuit safely. In fact when they eventually made it to the road and began that portion of the walk back, there were the customary invites for lemonade. A walk to the Cremesan winery to buy wine became one of their excursions. Women were allowed as visitors only. When the seminarians had a party, you could hear their carousing and laughter all the way up the mountain. One day on the walk they met an Italian monk who had lived in Cremesan since the Second World War and could tell them the history going back to better times.

They did tours circuiting the wall of Old Jerusalem, went through Hezekiah’s Tunnel, walked the Kidron Valley, toured the Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and saw Rachel’s Tomb in passing every time they went to Jerusalem and back through the checkpoint. At one spot outside the old wall, a natural cliff, Rahab felt such a strong sense of darkness she wondered if this was in fact the real site of the crucifixion, because part of their impression was that these were not the real places where these events took place but an assumed tradition. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was in neglect, but coveted and vied for by each Christian faction. Once passing through the Holy City they were accosted at night by a Greek Orthodox priest from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (which ironically stank of urine), and ordered to turn off their ghetto blaster immediately (which was playing Yes 90120), because it was an affront to the sacredness of the place, which prompted a pretty vocal debate on both sides. In the “basement” of the Church of the Nativity, they were told by their Palestinian “tour guide” that here were remnants of the crosses that had marked the massacres of the babies Herod killed when the Holy family fled to Egypt for fear of the messiah’s succession taking place as prophesied and removing him as King. Rahab mentioned that crosses would have been meaningless to commemorate graves; Jesus had not even been crucified yet, so when would they have been put in place? Leaving the Church of the Nativity Randy tried to position group photos so that he would get the soldiers stationed on the buildings all around the square in the pictures. There was a riot on the way back they did not see that was suppressed and they walked through the trace remnants of scattered rocks, not much to it. On the other side of Bethlehem, when they got to the road to Beit Jala, there was an IDF army jeep waiting for them. They questioned Randy on the reasons for his visit.

Their interior life in the West Bank was very much interior, they were heavily nocturnal, in part to escape the heat, especially since it was the hottest summer in 40 years. There was an insect with a loud blaring buzz that sounded incessantly throughout the day and the mosquitoes were clever and voracious, apparently genetically refined over eons of cohabitation with humanity. 

 

The thing they learned in speaking to people was that there was no civil law in the West Bank. They were governed by a military occupation, but that was illegal, since what is supposed to happen when you invade a country is that you’re supposed to annex that country. But Israel would not annex, perpetuating this military occupation limbo for 40 years. This way they could keep the population under military brutality. They did not want to annex the Palestinians since their population growth would outstrip the Jewish side of the Israeli nation and they would end up having a say in national concerns. Instead they maintained the population as menial labour for Israel without any rights or benefits. They were systematically oppressing them and driving them out. The forcibly taken settlements putting Zionist conservative Jewish enclaves throughout the Occupied Territories were illegally expropriated land, as was the water derived for them (coupled with their western patterns of water consumption), but thanks to the US Security Council veto in the UN, the settlements, despite being illegal, were never stopped. Dissension in the Occupied Territories was deliberately inflamed and then crushed, because the goal of the Israeli authority was total polarization between the respective populations so they could maintain the Occupation indefinitely and seek to justify it. The PLO was considered corrupt, and the Palestinians felt they were caught between a rock and a hard place. The Palestinians wanted to be the first Arab democracy; hence they had little support from Arab countries as well. Hamas was considered to have been fostered by the Mossad in typical divide and conquer method. The Israelis did not want to have an opponent who would negotiate with them, they wanted the conflict as prolonged as possible so they could continue to illegally expropriate as much land as possible. One night in 1976 the IDF had come and fenced the top of Everest using helicopters. The next morning the farmers going to the summit, who were presenting their deeds to the land no longer had access to their land again. It is this way with every settlement that is erected. Up went Har Gilo. Har Gilo now has a covered highway spanning over the valley on a bridge that is covered and serves the settlement exclusively. The pattern of illegal land confiscation has only escalated, becoming more and more pronounced.

Living in the West Bank was designed to be like life in a giant pressure cooker, Gaza much more so in the present day, but these are longstanding patterns since the inception of the Occupation. Or the IDF were like a stick continually poking at a caged bear, and when the caged bear reacted, that permitted them to punish the bear with disproportionate force. And disproportionate force was pretty consistent. The fact that there was no civil law exacerbated the situation greatly. The largest riot the family happened to witness, and the children saw right up front as they were nearly caught in the middle since they were walking to visit some children right next door, was a riot that broke out when two groups clashed in an attempt to evict a family that had not paid their rent for either their home or their shop for two years. With no courts for recourse a full on brawl with perhaps more than fifty participants broke out. A man was swinging stones on a rope above his head and just felling people. The people fighting the eviction were dropping stones off the balcony and cratered the hood of a car. The military intervened quickly but nothing was resolved. Later vigilante teams had to be formed by the community in order to catch a group of robbers that had been unleashed on the town. Eventually they managed to accost and stab two of them, but not before several houses had been broken into. The criminals were alleged to have been deliberately released out of Israeli prisons simply in the interest of causing trouble in a place that had no police force to arrest them.

On weekends when people would naturally sleep in, the IDF would send fighter jets above the towns deliberately breaking the sound barrier. They did this at such close proximity at times that the windows in houses would shatter. One night the family witnessed several explosions at a distance. They soon learned that the IDF had been blowing up people’s houses at night. One of the houses was said to have been demolished as a penalty because the family’s five-year-old boy had thrown a rock at an army jeep. For this the entire extended family, three generations, were made homeless. These actions have only escalated.

One night Maher told them that in the initial expansion of Israel before the ’48 invasion, the Israeli army (such as it was) had initiated their expansion by going into three Palestinian villages and massacring every man, woman and child. They recorded the screams. News of the massacres spread like wildfire among the villages promulgating fear. The army had then progressed onto the other villages using loudspeakers and blaring recordings of the massacres, which made every one flee because they thought a massacre was actually starting in their town as well. This is how the land was expropriated, brutality that was otherwise clever. No one was ever able to return to their homes again. And one is left to question how that Jewish family came by their home in Ein Karem?

During the family’s stay the entire town of Beit Jala was subject to curfew, meaning anyone seen out after dark would be shot on sight. The curfew was escalated so that no one was permitted outside during the day either except at permitted times when the IDF decreed there would be say, two hours to do shopping for food. This became a much more constant tactic for the following decades after the family left, to the point where people were starved for groceries, with children and elderly being sniped and killed for simply opening their windows. At the time, people had been shot for hanging their laundry on their roofs. What brought down the curfew was that an IDF soldier stationed on one of the buildings had deliberately dropped a concrete building block onto a Palestinian teenager’s head as he was walking with his younger sibling. The 16-year-old boy was killed instantly. This had caused a massive funeral to be scheduled in protest, and to prevent any mass reaction, a curfew was slapped on the town. In tandem a Palestinian man who was a known communist with five children was shot on his doorstep by the IDF. People exhibiting leadership qualities were systematically culled and killed.

During the curfew Maher was sneaking up to their house at night to visit. Randy and Maher kept talking to each other on the front porch one night when he was about to leave. A tear gas grenade was launched from the IDF stationed at the crossroads above. Maher came sprinting inside the house and shouted to seal all the windows tight, sealing any cracks with towels. While they escaped the gas, it wafted down the hill and into the windows of a house over 100 meters down. That family, which had five pretty daughters, was sick vomiting all night. The tear gas used in the West Bank was of a different variety. It ate epithelial tissue on contact and was known to have caused over 1000 spontaneous miscarriages at that time just with inhalation. Until quite recently all the discharged tear gas grenades had said “Made in the USA” on them. The rubber bullets were of a different variety too. They were the hardest rubber you could make; they felt like hard plastic, encasing metal. They could be fatal at under 60 yards if shot at the vital areas. First thing in the morning Randy dispatched the three youngest children to go and find the grenade that had been shot. Zur found it. Within minutes of his coming into the house with it, an IDF soldier was seen patrolling the terraces looking for the discharged tear gas grenade.

  

Their visit in Israel was wrapped up in a signatory way by a couple of cascading events. One, while the Israeli Embassy had told them they would be permitted to visit Israel for a full year, once in Israel that was a different story, and what was required of them was to renew their visas every two months. Randy and Sylvia would go in and speak on behalf of the family but the others in the group had to go in individually and speak for themselves. This included updating the authorities on where you were living. The group policy was that everyone was supposed to say they were living in Har Gilo, but when Mike went in, he made the mistake of saying Beit Jala, which brought them down on his head. They did not renew his visa, so that brought about a departure date for Mike at least and implied concerns about the rest of the group’s ability to continue renewing. The second mis-step was one day when Randy and Sylvia were walking up to Har Gilo in order to catch the transit bus to Jerusalem. They saw a bus coming down the mountain and because they didn’t want to miss it, they hailed it with their passports. The bus stopped for them immediately and let them on. What they discovered on board was that they were in fact on a tour bus that was showing American Zionist Jews the settlements. They had stopped for them because they thought they had lost a couple members of their group. Randy and Sylvia were literally cornered in the back of the bus with demands as to what they were doing in the West Bank. They thought they wouldn’t make it off without bodily harm. Randy had to demand to the driver that the bus be stopped immediately so they could get off.

In Israel at this time there was a computerized flagging system that could be used not just by the government to report you but also by any private citizens, basically a “three flags and you’re out” system. It would make sense that between the IDF questioning outside Bethlehem, Mike’s faux pas with Immigration, and these tourists reporting Randy and Sylvia for the impropriety of living in the West Bank and agreeing with the Palestinians, possibly our three flags were up. Randy began selling the stereo equipment because such high quality equipment was at a premium in the West Bank. Being hard to obtain it all commanded a high price in US dollars. He sold a camera to a photographer who was also interested in his walkie-talkies, which were good enough to be at the bottom of CB radio range. The buyer wanted to test them so he took one quite a distance and they tried transmitting, just enough to show that they worked. The house was completely surrounded by fully armed IDF soldiers in under half an hour. The IDF put the landlord in a complete panic by informing him they were after two Palestinian males who had been fleeing them; that they had seen them run into our house, and that if they found them in the house, they would blow it up. Randy knew what must have triggered them was the walkie-talkie transmission; he put the walkie-talkie he had been using out in plain sight on the balcony. Rahab was miked (with a microphone on a walkman, (as the details to this model point out, you could conceal the fact that you were recording by still wearing headphones)) to record events if anything took place with the soldiers, and Judah was told to try and sneak as much footage of the soldiers as he could. Before the journey began the camera, to allow surreptitious filming and to prevent it from being stolen, had a cloth sleeve fit around it; with the shoulder strap it looked like a carrying bag. The bottom was open though, so that all you had to do to film was lift it up. With this Judah was able to catch some very short shots of the soldiers outside and in the house. Randy was right in his deduction that the IDF had a radio transmission detection “blanket” over the West Bank that allowed them to catch even the smallest transmission, for when they saw the walkie-talkie in plain sight, they wrapped up the search pretty promptly. However, as this may have been the capping event in itself, it was not long after that the family’s home began to be watched by the IDF 24/7 in a big open canopy truck, with at least six soldiers armed to the extent of face shields (partial riot gear) as well as their weapons.

Their departure was smooth and uneventful; everyone was amicable and the perfect picture of jovial calm, though they knew they were carrying an expended flare shell, an expended tear gas grenade, and one of those fatal rubber bullets. As a family and substantially sized travelling group with 39 pieces of luggage, they were not searched, unlike John from their party who had returned singly and had the soles of his shoes split open. They escaped the scrutiny of El Al. They had to sleep overnight in Schiphol Airport under a staircase to catch their last plane. Back to the cold they came with skin peeling off in swaths due to their one and only visit to the beach at Tel Aviv, which gave them the worst sunburns of their lives.