i’ve been a different personality each time i’ve crossed the israeli border this year. i’ve been the student, i’ve been myself, and i’ve been the ~lets all coexist~ hippie. but whoever i’ve tried to be, and however harmless i’ve tried to come off, there is no hiding from my last name. which i happen to share with the syrian president.
last september, not long after the war on gaza ended, i made my first visa run. it was on the first day of the rosh hashanah, which for some reason made me think that israeli immigration might show mercy in the spirit of the holidays. maybe it would be more lax. i chose the furthest border to cross from amman, wadi araba, situated between the cities eilat and aqaba and four hours south of the jordanian capital.
in the days leading up to my visa run, i was anxiety-ridden as i tried to come up with a story that justified why my alias ‘needed to go back to israel’ just two weeks after having had spent three months in palestine.
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in june i went to palestine with a plan to spend two months studying arabic at birzeit university in the west bank. i crossed allenby bridge, the closest border to amman, and told israeli immigration the truth about the intention of my stay. after spending seven hours on the border with a number of baby faced children interrogating me, i was handed my three month tourist visa.
i ‘fell in love’ with palestine (cliché) so i ended up living there for nine months, on and off, over the course of year. every three months when my 90 day tourist visa would run out i had to make a journey to one of the three ever so hospitable, israeli-jordanian borders. tel aviv’s ben gurion airport was never an option simply because it scares the shit out of me.
i was told by a couple of friends and online reviews that wadi araba was the best border to cross. most people said they spent around 20 minutes total going through immigration on this border. they praised it for being empty in comparison to the chaos at allenby bridge and described it as ‘easy.’ i was convinced this was the best route to go, but still not naïve enough to expect exceptional treatment by any means.
i had spent a lot of my summer with activists who drilled my head with paranoia about the probability of me getting back into palestine. i knew that israeli immigration was unpredictable, racist, and they can refuse to give you a visa or ban you for up to ten years without any given reason.
my friends talked about how they never mentioned palestine or having arab friends when they went through security, and suggested i did the same. but the majority of them were white and never faced trouble getting in or out of the country to begin with. they fell into the category of people who fly into the ben gurion airport and get greeted with a smile. a loud and proud ‘welcome to israel!’ no matter what, our experiences with immigration would be different. but for some reason i let them get in my head. i was convinced that i needed to come up with an elaborate story if i wanted to get back in.
before leaving my families home in amman, destination israeli border, i felt as prepared as i could be. i chose a story and finalized it. i would say that I was meeting an old friend from new york and backpacking the country. i had looked up nature reserves, trails, and had a 6 page itinerary that panned out everything you needed to know about where i would sleep, eat, and shit for the next few weeks. i even booked a place to stay with an israeli through couchsurfing.com. i chose a guy named micheal, well he chose me, but ill explain that part later. if they questioned why I wasn’t able to do these little excursions when I was there two weeks ago I would say something about the war, hamas and their missiles. “it was just too scary to explore, sir.”
i loaded basic hebrew videos on youtube and articles with transliterations of holiday greetings. i was convinced i could win over their hearts with a little love and effort. i put a lot of time into thinking about my outfit. in an international solidarity movement (ISM) training i took part in that summer, i was told to avoid wearing all black – the type of detail that would sound off the “ANARCHIST!!! ACTIVIST!!” alarms for border security. i settled on my least threatening outfit after changing at least three times. loose fitting tie dye pants and a low-cut tank paired with a push up bra. if you know me, you know that im not a very booby person. i hate underwire. but i figured the outfit could help push me away from 'conservative’ and ‘threatening’ arab stereotypes. i was going for the ‘loooook! i’m just like you guys’ vibe.
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on the bus ride to aqaba i was assigned a seat next to an american exchange student, eric, studying arabic at a university in amman. jordan was the first place he had ever been outside the state of wisconsin. he talked my ear off about working at subway and how, over time, you can get really creative with making your free, work shift sandwich. i don’t think i said a word for 30 minutes. just nodded, threw in a couple “mhmms.” i kept trying to put my headphones in but he just didn’t pick up on cues. Blah Blah Blah. a man a few seats ahead of us sent a guy working on the bus to ask him to lower his voice (twice). he (seated man ahead) eventually approached eric to kindly suggest, with his neck veins nearly exploding from strain, he shut the fuck up.
eric got on my nerves a bit, but i was grateful for his way of effortlessly distracting me. instead of spending 4 and a half hours on the bus tripping about getting denied entry or intense interrogations, i was fixated on how annoying he was. when a window of opportunity for ‘me time’ would open, i would pull out my laptop and revise the hebrew i practiced at home. Shanah Tovah! Ma shlomkha? Erev tov!
when i arrived to aqaba i jumped in a cab to the border. the cab driver asked me about where i was going and i felt the need to clarify that i was heading to the west bank, that i wasn’t a clueless traveler. i briefed him on my plans to participate in the palestinian olive harvest, but as usual my poor spoken arabic made it difficult to communicate. so i gave up.
i looked out of the car and watched the palm trees pass by my window. i admired the highs and lows of the mountains forming walls around the city. for the duration of the 15-minute car ride i felt calm and collective. until i saw israeli flags waving in the distance. the border was near.
i dont mean to sound dramatic, but it really feels that dramatic.
i whizzed through passport control on the Jordanian side, which was relatively simple. the israeli border was about a 90 second walk from where i stood. i started breathing exercises. inhale, hold. exhale. inhale, hold. exhale. i was sweating my ass off at this point and it was something like 4:30 pm. fuck yeah! the border closes at 8 so they cant hold me for too long, if anything.
i approached the first Israeli security officer and muttered a weak ass shalom. i could barely hear myself say it. the 20-something-year-old man kept a straight face and asked what my intentions of coming to israel were. i told him i came to travel and hike. i felt like the walls of my brain were slowwwwwwwly being painted black. an experience i call ‘blackhole-ing.’ i couldn’t remember what i had planned to say, the fake places i planned to go, or the hebrew phrases i memorized on the bus.
‘hiking. realllllly? where?’ he wasn’t convinced.
‘i don’t know. to go see waterfalls and shit.’
i said this while shrugging, in a sort of ‘get off my case man!’ way. i hadn’t even clarified where i was going, just to see some waterfalls – exactly what israel is known for. not suspect at all, very casual actually. i don’t know where this response came from. it was not in the plan. i started analyzing what i looked like when i gave that answer. i probably looked like i was lying. i could feel my hands sweating and hear my own heartbeat. my mouth dried. i was waiting for him to pick up his walkie talkie and say ‘i got a good one for interrogation.’
the officer gave me a look of confusion and directed me to security for luggage screening. when i got inside the office i was alone with a handful of security officers and two older israeli women coming back from a vacation in aqaba.
i had just walked through the door and not even placed my duffle bags on the surveillance belt when i was approached by a female officer. she was attractive and looked like she had arab roots. in most cases around the world, i feel comfort or at least a bit of pull and tug with a brown security officer. if i was flying home to the usa, i would try to choose the line with an employee that’s a person of color. she wasted no time and started my second round of questioning.
i’m always more intimidated by female authorities in israel. whether it be at a border, checkpoint, or demonstration. i’ve happened to have worse experiences with them than their male colleagues. maybe its just by chance. who knows.
the woman spoke to me kindly. after reading my name from my passport, she switched from english to arabic. i pretended i couldn’t speak or understand, another stupid and embarrassing tactic to further detach myself from my arab identity. she switched to english and asked me ‘what are your roots?’ i told her i was half american and half jordanian. claiming to be jordanian would demonize me a little less than admitting i was half palestinian. some people will criticize that move, but the goal was to get in. not to try and teach a couple brainwashed individuals about the evils of discrimination.
‘why don’t you speak the language? it’s your mother language. you must know it” she lectured me.
her response surprised me. most israelis i had interacted with at borders and checkpoints were too nationalistic to ever push for someone to speak arabic. if anything, i’ve been barked at in hebrew and expected to understand what’s being said - even in the occupied west bank.
i told her my dad never spoke arabic with me growing up, which was partially true. she was more interested in how i spent my time in jordan than my trip to israel. when she asked me to describe my average day in amman i told her i spent my days visiting family and went out to bars with my friends at night.
‘they have bars? it’s liberal in jordan?’
i could have choked the thot. she had just asked me a serious question that sounded like a joke one of my friends would sarcastically make in a valley girl accent. but i took it as an opportunity to slip in a nice little pro-israel comment.
‘there are some bars.... but jordan is not as liberal as israel of course!’
she handed me back my passport with a smile and motioned for me to place my luggage on the surveillance belt. she was probably the nicest israeli border official i had ever dealt with despite her ignorance. not that I forgive her ignorance. my anxiety was gone at this point. i waited patiently while they swiped my belongings for residue that indicates possession of bombs, weapons, etc.
at one point security pulled a white crystal the size of two fists from the front of my backpack. i had completely forgot i’d left it in there, a tiny treasure from a trip to the red sea one-week prior. what an amazing accidental touch to play up my hippie-dippie act. the girl in her early 20s hand checking my backpack looked concerned and confused.
‘it’s my crystal. i use it for healing. it’s from the red sea actually.’
i started feeling ahead of the game. i had successfully disassociated myself from their racist stereotypes of Arabs being one collective primitive entity. i was a new-age free spirit, sort of like the young israelis traveling through india after completing their military service.
she ran my crystal through tests while another woman fiddled through my makeup bag. she pulled out my naked eye shadow palette and said ‘nice.’ i wasn’t used to israeli officials being nice to me. it felt confusing. it’s a lot easier to hate the people playing a role in the occupation when they are crude to you.
she zipped up my bags and pointed to the rows of empty lines outside. ‘you can get your visa out there,’ she said.
i was getting ready to send out selfies on snapchat about getting across the border. i started thinking about what photo i should upload to instagram or if i should go ahead and make my “immmm backkkk bitches!” facebook status – location set to palestine.
i shuffled to the line and stood behind an american couple who joked with the passport control officer. he let them through with ease after they waited at his window for around three to four minutes, what i imagine would be the amount of time it takes to print out a visa. no way they would be subjected to a background check in their bucket hats and knee length, tapioca colored shorts.
i approached the window with another one of my bullshit ‘shalom, happy holidays!’ the young guy behind the counter asked me, for what felt like the tenth time that day, about my plans in israel. he chatted me up for a couple minutes, maintaining a sleazy smile throughout our small talk, before he asked for my passport. he stared at the page containing my information for what felt like 10 hours before saying anything. he wasn’t smiling anymore, if anything he looked disgusted by the realization that he had just been flirting with an arab. he read my full name out slowly, butchering it with his hissing accent.
‘go take a seat over there, we’re going to need to do a security check.’ he pointed to a vacant outdoor bench.
i was thrown off guard. had i been naïve enough to actually think him and i were vibin’ for a minute? suddenly i just felt really stupid. the baggy tie dye pants from india didn’t matter. my cleavage wasn’t impressive. the yoga mat i fixed between the handles of my duffle bag went unnoticed. i don’t even practice yoga.
i took a seat and looked down at my phone. it was 5:30 and the border closed in two and a half hours. at least that meant the interrogation process would be quicker than last time. i fiddled with my phone but there wasn’t much to do without internet. first world problems. well there was open wifi at the border, but i knew better than to connect to that. that would be a hell no. my inner paranoia, with reason, told me it was probably some low-key sketchy snitchy surveillance shit.
i waited on a bench parallel to the passport control lines for 45 minutes. two israeli women from passport control sat on a bench across from me and chain-smoked. they didn’t acknowledge me, which i was fine with. the less people getting up in my grill about my travel plans, even in a casual sense, the better.
at least 10 people were handed visas during this time, each waiting no longer than five minutes when they reached passport control’s window. it was only americans and europeans passing through. i’m american too, but not that kind of american.
a door to an office behind the women opened. a middle-aged man stood in the doorway and called out my name, as if there were a crowd of people waiting with me. i moved my bags into his office and took a seat across from him, a desk in between us. the room was grey, claustrophobic, and could suck the life out of mary poppins. its only decorations were stacks of paper, an outdated desktop computer, and horrible vibes.
him and i go over the boring stuff for the 100th time. “why are you coming to israel?” “who do you know in israel?” “write down their names and numbers.” i had prepared for this. i jotted down talia’s name (a chick i couchsurfed with a month prior), my jewish friend kat who was on a one year work visa (but low key doing activism in the west bank), my friend from new york i was ‘backpacking with,’ and michael who i would be couchsurfing with in eilat. i was impressed by my list that seemed quite generous considering i had spent almost no time in israel before. he (man interrogating me) tells me to cross out any contacts who weren’t israeli.
kat was actually a main character in my elaborate, fake story. crossing her off the list felt like a knife to the heart. i had spent 45 minutes skyping with kat two days prior to develop her character and our friendship. kat and i were friends IRL, but we knew each other from volunteering in palestine, which simply wouldn’t fly with israeli border control. the plan was to say i met her at a bar in florentine, a hipster fucc boi neighborhood in tel aviv, and our friendship flourished from there. she gave me her friends address, the residence she claimed to live at for her work visa, to list as a place i would be staying. we even sent some emails back and forth to develop our fake friendship. the first one she sent me read: ‘Shalom! I'm so excited to see you again :) Israel is waiting! And I have a bottle of vodka with your name on it! We're gonna hit Florentine again and it's gonna be balagan, baby!’
i was now down to two contacts, talia and michael, whom i didn’t really know well. actually i had never even met michael. all the little details i had spent so much time obsessing over were overlooked. i was told to leave the room and go back outside to my bench.
i sit alone again and watch collections of white people get their visas from passport control. i silently curse them and deem them ignorant. i hate all of them. i hate when they laugh with the man behind the passport control window who had just racially profiled me in a no shits given manner. how can you even vacation in israel after the massacre they just committed in gaza?
i go back and forth between playing with my phone and staring into space. i can hear the man I just spoke with in the office talking on his phone. he goes in and out of the backdoor of his office to smoke cigarettes, for what seems like, every 15 minutes. sometimes we make eye contact, which makes me feel uncomfortable. he seems more like a person when he’s outside the perimeter of his office. inside his office, he feels like more of an actor. inside his office, he hardens himself. but his rudeness, i am sure of, is a real part of his personality.
he pops out of his office once to ask me how I know talia. “i couchsurfed with her in tiberias this summer,” I said.
with nothing left to distract me my mind is left wandering. maybe i shouldn’t have mentioned talia. i couchsurfed with her for one night and we got into a couple heated arguments about the war on gaza. she had a liking for me, and they were civil arguments, but at the end of the day she’s still an ex-idf soldier.
a few minutes later i’m alone again in the office with mr. evil. he slides me a blank piece of paper across the table and tells me to write down the full name and phone numbers of my father, paternal grandfather, and mother. he warns that if i don’t hurry up, he might not let me in because the border isn’t open for much longer. i can see the time on my phone and at this point the border is open for another hour and a half. he is really starting to piss me off.
i pass him the list i wrote out and, as expected, he tries to dig deeper into who my father is. they are always interested in knowing more about the male members of my family, because hey – maybe they are terrorists. he asks where he lives, where he works, how old he is, and where he was born. he’s actually more curious about him than he is about me throughout the entire on-and-off interrogation process. i ask him what the hold up is and when i’ll be getting out of this hellhole, in a polite manner.
‘well we might just have to turn you back to jordan. i don’t think there’s enough time to complete a security check on you.’
i’m over being polite. i’m over pretending to be a hippie. i’m over biting my tongue and i’m over this mans face. the type of pointy face that just looks untrustworthy. my body temperature is rising, along with my adrenaline. and i couldn’t keep it cool.
“i feel like I’m being racially profiled. i’ve seen at least 20 people pass through the border without issue. no security checks.”
Goddamit. Fuckity fuck fuck. why did I just try to prove a point?
“well, you can think what you want,” he responded with a blank face.
he obviously wasn’t amused or feeling threatened. all you needed was to lock eyes with him for 5 seconds to feel the weight of his evil. he loved his job. he was power hungry. he probably brings his work home with him – cracking jokes at the dinner table about how “pathetic” the people he dealt with were. feeling racially profiled gave me absolutely no reign in the situation. but for the sake of my sanity, it needed to be said.
in a pathetic plea to retrace my steps i said, “im a normal person, im open-minded.”
i’m sitting alone on the bench outside. again. tourists have stopped crossing the border and the only person who cares to interact with me is a man in his 60s. after passing by me 3 times over the course of my residency on the bench, he asks ‘they stillll got you waiting here?’ i humor him with conversation because maybe he can help me. we talk for a few minutes, i don’t remember what about, and he says he’ll go into the office and tell them to speed it up for me.
mr. evil comes out of his office and i’m thinking a) he’s going to tell me to turn around because i have been officially deemed a security threat or b) he’s going to hand me my passport with a visa. but its neither. he wants to know bloody more about my bloody dad. i’m told to write out a timeline of every place my dad has lived, and i follow suite. i don’t have wifi to send my dad a whatsapp and confirm dates, so i make a couple guesses.
when he goes back into his office i hear him speaking arabic over the phone. is he talking to my dad? my dad doesn’t know my cover story. i don’t think he even knows i’m at the aqaba-eilat border. if he asks my dad why i’m ‘coming to israel,’ i’m sure he’ll won’t hesitate to tell him i’m volunteering for the olive harvest – not completely aware that that would even be an issue. i’ve accepted that its over. i start calculating the costs of hostels in aqaba. i try to remember the time of the last running bus to amman.
there is nothing to do but watch the clock on my phone change numbers. it hits 8pm and the lights start turning off throughout the buildings at the border. staff members are going home. i’m left alone with the hospital lights from the office of the devil himself. i don’t even care if i get in or not at this point, i just want my passport back.
in this moment of frustration, i strangely learn to enjoy the silence. it was the perfect weather, something like being outdoors during the calm before the storm. during this time of day, the mountains became charcoal-colored outlines in the backdrop of the black sky. there must have been very little light pollution, because i think i could see every star in the sky. i really appreciated that moment.
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mr. evil comes out of his office and hands me my passport without saying a word. the border had been shut down for 30 minutes at this point. i open it up to find my golden ticket. i thank him ‘so much’ because i’m still scared that he could retract my visa and send me back to jordan. i walk toward the exit as quickly as possible just in case he changes his mind. i had spent 4 hours on an emotional roller coaster – well 72 if you want to calculate the time spent preparing and character development, overtaken by ups and downs of anxiety and paranoia while i waited for what was probably a premeditated decision.
on the word document i am writing this on, this story has somehow reached 9 pages in size 12 cambria font. you would think getting my visa would mean i had reached some sort of climax. as if fireworks were exploding inside of me. but actually i was just tired. and I know that people have experienced worse at the borders – more humiliation, more abuse, and more violations. even ive experienced worse.
as i near the pick-up and drop-off location outside the gates of the border, all i can hear is euro-trash music getting louder and louder. the generic, whack-ass techno beats were bumping out of a small empty car. i was in the company of a security guard in his early 20s who was wrapping up his shift and carrying out closing duties. he approached me and asked if he could bum a cigarette. after asking how long it took me to get through security, he tried to school me on how horribly treated israelis are at american airports. it wasn’t the time, not that it would ever be the time, for this one-upping bullshit. obviously i’m blocking him out – vibes are “hmm, mhm, yeah” get the fuck away from me.
i wait for michael, my couchsurfing host, to come pick me up. i don’t really know what to expect of him. i hadn’t thought about it really up until this point. hadn’t really had time to think about it. from his pictures i knew he had dreadlocks, so i thought that seemed like a good sign. and if he was horrible, worst comes to worst, i would jump on a bus to jerusalem first thing in the morning.
a noob to israel’s public transportation system, i didn’t have a clue that public transport completely shut down for the full duration of rosh hashanah. i would find that out after meeting the disaster of a human being that was michael. i quickly pieced together that, during my final moments on the bench, i had quite literally experienced the calm before the storm.
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