Queues by me

I had never really lived in Israel proper until I moved back to Beer Sheva to attend medical school. Experiencing the negev with a mixture of Americans (Jews and non Jews), Israelis and the occasional Arabs (be it from the north, or from the negev) seems to have left me many a time in a state of wonder.

For example, I have long wondered what a bomb shleter is, where it is at. "The dancing class is at the bomb shleter in the neighborhood gimel...My room in the dorm is in the bomb shelter, it has a double door..." That is as far or as close as I dealt with bomb shelters. Of course, there is the occasional flight of helicopters, and shelling that I might hear accross from the not so far away border, Gaza.

Growing up in my neighborhood in Jerusalem, I somehow understood that to be respected, to be considered to have accomplished much in life, one has to be able to build. That applied to most Palestinians living in East Jerusalem or in the West Bank. And to build, one also had to have a land. Building a house, which takes time and effort, is a family event, a right of passage, of perhaps moving out of parents' houses, or of building more of a permanant house so that children and their spouses could move in some day. I dont remember any of the building that I had been to having to have a special or a certain room.

I do remember, however, the need for a permit to build in East Jerusalem. Permits are very hard to grant, and thus prices of lands, of rent and anything to do with building goes up. Of course, there is always the person who had been waiting for a permit for years, and then would finally give up on getting it and build anyway. Such a person was a neighbor once, and it was horrific to wake up one morning and realize that the building where he lived was gone while he was at work, with his wife outside, sobbing, and the army in its jeep also outside as rocks and bricks were now in no certain structure except for chaos. Of course, there also would be another reason for a building to be destroyed, as a punishment for an entire family if their son was found to be a suicide bomber. The family near us at the time said that they did not know their son was involved in such events, and only woke up to a man, knocking on the door, telling them to evacuate.

All this is say that I have never known what a bomb shelter looks like but only heard about it from people. I live in neighborhood in Ramot in Beer Sheva, on the third floor. The other day, with the windows open, the door of my office room was slammed shut while i was inside. The door knob for this door, which I had never paid attention to until I had to open the tighty jammed door, is different than the other door knobs in the house. It is metal, and can be turned up and so lock the door without having a key. I struggled to turn the door knob down, to come out of the room. Feeling sealed inside of my own room, wondering how i could reach someone to help me if I did not have a phone in my room, I finally thought, "Oh, I must have set up my office room in the bomb sheleter all of these years. This is why when I go study there, I cannot hear a voice, a sound or anything. I wanted to be the isolated when I was studying!"

Many a time I think to myself that I have preserved being Palestinian, my story and so on. And yet it is at times of discovery like these that I realize that by moving here, many parts of me are changed beyond awareness, beyond negociations, beyond a doubt, and beyond an argument. Yesterday, was Israel's independence day. I had gone out to have a meal with a friend that I had not seen for a few years. We went to Naffi's, and had to wait in a queue because of all of the people waiting to be seated. "Strange," I thought, "I had stood in queues, on this same day, but showing my papers to soldiers and policemen to allow me to pass, or trying to perculate through demonstrations back to my own house."

"Chag Sameah," said the waitress as I left with my friends. I smiled wondering how many more bomb shelters I do live in without knowing. Queues have mysterious reason and timing to be formed, to be joined and to be passed through.