Najah knocks on the bedroom door. It’s time for the three of us to wake up. She’s probably slept for two hours at most, we’ve slept for about three. She’s dressed and ready to go, ready to begin her daily commute from Dheisheh refugee camp in
Najah has worked at an old age home in
Najah usually leaves for work around
We walk out the door into the night, and get in the taxi that is waiting for us. We drive out of Dheisheh, out of
We arrive at “Container” checkpoint. One large truck full of goods is stopped in front of us. We don’t see any soldiers. They’re probably sleeping, we decide. We sit and wait.
A number of shared taxis drive through from the other side of the checkpoint. It seems the soldiers have waved them forward. The truck in front of us goes through and we do too. The soldiers are inside a small building, laughing with each other. They barely glance our way as we drive past.
We arrive at our first destination, the taxi drops us on the street and turns around to go back for the other women. Several vans are parked on the side of the road, waiting to fill up and then veer off the road onto an agricultural path through the village’s olive groves. According to
A few drivers are hanging around. Most workers have not arrived yet. We sit and wait.
A car full of women and men arrives and the car we’re waiting in quickly fills up. Older women bring heavy sacs of vegetables that they’ll sell in the market of
The car drops us in what seems to be the middle of the path, on the outskirts of the village’s houses. We begin to walk. The older women on their way to the market pile their vegetable sacs on their heads and walk just a few meters before stopping at a place where they say another taxi will eventually come for them. They can’t walk further with all their goods. The rest of us continue on our way, seven Palestinian women, one Palestinian man, and three internationals. We walk on the path for a minute or two, and suddenly the group turns and walks down the stairs onto somebody’s porch, then out through their yard, down more stairs, and so on. We silently weave in and out of people’s porches and gardens, avoiding the checkpoint that is directly above us. We can hear the call to prayer beginning from the mosques in the distance. Najah tells us this is the place that soldiers often throw tear gas and sound bombs at them, that we’re lucky it’s not happening to us today, probably because we’ve come a little earlier than usual.
After about a half hour of walking, we arrive at the main road, where soldiers tend to patrol. The women and man run across the street and towards a bus that is waiting, engine on. They jump on the bus and it starts to move. The woman in front of me is whispering, “Come on, get on, hurry, we’re moving.” Najah and my friends are still behind me, so I tell the woman I’m waiting for them. The bus begins up the street, and suddenly people are emerging from all directions. They are running onto the bus from behind each olive tree, each stone, each house along the road. Within the span of 100 meters or so, the bus goes from nearly empty to overflowing with people. It speeds off.
I turn around and walk back to Najah and the others. She walks over to a nearby house, goes through their gate, and sits on the couch on their porch. The army drives by and we duck. Najah borrows my phone and calls the first taxi driver to make sure the other women had been picked up, dropped off, and are on their way to the spot where we now waited. We sit and wait.
I ask Najah if the people whose yards we sneak through know about it. “Of course,” she says. “Sometimes they take us in when the army comes looking for us.” She tells us that the army threatens them with a fine of 10,000 shekels (more than 2,000 dollars) for harboring “Arabs without permits,” but they do it anyway.
We see jeep lights on a road below and Najah tells me it’s the “security road” next to the path of the Wall. We see more jeep lights coming our way, and again we duck. It is clear that the army is not trying very hard to catch people. There is nothing sneaky about their patrol. We spot them from a distance and hide if necessary, and they simply drive up and down the road every few minutes.
Another bus leaves suddenly, completely empty when it starts moving and then quickly filling up with people emerging again from the trees. We have missed the bus. Two other buses wait, one large and one small. Najah decides to get in the bus, so as not to miss it when it leaves.
A jeep is driving down the road. Najah gets out to run back to the house where we’ve been hiding, tells us to stay because we have passports and it won’t matter if the army sees us. The jeep stops at the larger bus in front of us. We can’t see what they’re doing.
People begin to tentatively get on our bus, Najah comes back, and the bus starts to go, hoping to drive past the other bus and the jeep without being stopped. No such luck.
A soldier stops our bus and Najah quickly takes her ID out of her purse and hides it in her shirt. The soldier boards the bus and asks for IDs. There are only a few of us on the bus at that point. My friends and I have passports so we’re fine. Najah tells the soldier she left her ID at home. She doesn’t want it taken or her name recorded. The soldier tells her to get off the bus and go home. She gets off, and we start to get off with her. The soldier tells us we can stay. The people on the bus tell us we can stay. We wait a minute and then get off. We see Najah, and she says, “Get back on, hurry, I’m getting back on.” We’re perplexed, but we board the bus again, and she comes with us. She has just walked around the bus. The soldiers are still right there, right behind us. They choose not to notice.
The bus begins driving, and once again the people are running towards it from all directions. It becomes crowded, and people are yelling, “Go, quickly, let’s go!” “No, wait for those people who are running this way!” The bus drives slowly enough that most of the people who want to get on manage to do so. The door closes and we speed off.
We arrive at Damascus Gate in
A woman approaches us and greets me warmly, then turns to Najah and says, “I told her to get on the bus with me, I said ‘Come, daughter, let’s go’ but she didn’t come.” I smile and say, “I was waiting for Najah, I wanted to go with her, but thank you.” She turns to us and says, “I watch the news each night and I weep. Children are dying, Arabs and Jews, and I just weep.” We listen, I offer her the cake Najah bought us for the journey, she offers us the bread she just bought, and she continues:
“I am 70 years old and I have seen war all my life. In 1948 I was a young girl. My brother was four years old. My mother strapped him to her back, took my hand, and led us out of our village.”
She pauses. I ask her where she is from. Elar. A destroyed village very close to
Najah tells us it’s time to go, to walk up the street to catch the Israeli bus to where she works. We say goodbye to
Najah removes her hijab (Muslim head scarf) and replaces it with a Jewish head covering, to look instead like a religious Jewish woman.
The bus comes and we get on, riding out of
We get off the bus and we’re in the Bukhari neighborhood, a religious Jewish neighborhood right next to the even more famous religious Jewish neighborhood Mea Sharim. Najah tells us the Bukhari area used to be part of the Bab al Amoud (Damascus Gate) neighborhood of
We see a few Orthodox Jewish men on the street but it’s still too early for most. One market vendor is beginning to set up. Najah greets him and tells me that all the market vendors in the Bukhari neighborhood are Arab, and all the people who live here are Jewish.
She shows us the building where she works, but we don’t get too close because she says they won’t let us in and she doesn’t want to get in trouble. She shows us back to the bus because she has an hour before she needs to begin work, and thus an hour before she can even enter the building. We part ways and get on the bus back to Damascus Gate, where we will then take another bus to the
We have left the second bus and are walking towards the apartment where we’ll crash for a few hours. We are across the street from the apartment. I see Palestinian people and wonder if they live in this neighborhood or if they just work here. We are walking past a house and a Palestinian woman says hello. We look over and it’s Fatima, the 70 year old woman we have spent half of the morning with. She is washing the stairs of a building. “This is where I work,” she says. “This is where I live,” my friend says.
We are inside the apartment. We change into pajamas and get into bed. Our work for the morning is over. Najah’s is just beginning.
