Life Indoors- Palestine by Nancy Updike
(14:49) Life under curfew in Ramallah can be, among other things, intensely boring. Sam Bahour, a Palestinian who was born and raised in Ohio, came back to the West Bank in 1995, when peace seemed possible, to help build the Palestinian state. Now he can't leave his house. Premiered on "Give It to Them," PRI This American Life.
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Nancy Updike JOURNALIST'S NOTEBOOK:
Flak-jacket Wimps, Fools and Showoffs
Yoav Cohen, who rented me a flak-jacket and helmet in Israel, looked like a surfer -- if you can imagine a surfer with the unsmiling demeanor of someone who's had to use deadly force. He had that surfer's muscly, thin body, along with blond, tousled hair and blue eyes. He wore a gray CK T-shirt and jeans. And he was carrying a black nylon bag the size of a couch cushion, from which he pulled a giant navy vest. He put the vest over my head.
I was in a pink dress, at my boyfriend's aunt's house for Shabbat dinner, and over the dress I was now wearing a garment filled with 40 pounds of protective plates. I tried not to giggle as he explained that the vest had flaps that could be flipped up to cover my neck. My arms were bare because if I got shot in the arm I wouldn't die.
"When you hear shooting, don't be around," he instructed me humorlessly.
Before I got to Israel, everyone told me I needed a flak-jacket if I was planning on going into the occupied territories. The Foreign Press Association, other reporters, everyone. I was even told I'd need to rent an armored car at $20,000 per month. I couldn't afford the car, so the flak-jacket seemed even more important.
When I got to the hotel in Jerusalem, I put the flak-jacket in a corner of my room. It was night, and I went downstairs to have a drink and meet another reporter, a friend of a friend. She'd just gotten back from two days in Hebron, which was seeing more army activity than Ramallah, where I was going. She ordered a martini, lit a cigarette and told me, "Screw the flak-jacket."
She pointed to what she was wearing -- a sleeveless shirt and a light jacket -- and said, "This is what I wore."
The next day, I went to Ramallah wearing only linen. Through a series of events that are not worth repeating but did involve multiple taxis for which I paid way too much money, I ended up at a television studio in Ramallah. I was stuck there for hours because it was curfew and nobody was allowed in the streets. From the window of the TV studio I could see the building where I was supposed to be interviewing a Palestinian guy from Ohio named Sam, but I couldn't walk there. All I could do, said Qassem, the head of the TV studio, was wait for Ahmed. He shook his head and laughed to himself as he said this. "Ahmed is a little..." He searched for the word. "Unreliable."
Two and a half hours later, Ahmed appeared: a tightly wound guy in his 20s wearing glasses with dark frames. He looked like John Turturro. He had on a flak-jacket. He slapped hands and joked with all the guys stuck at the TV station. Then Qassem asked him if he could drive me to Sam's house. After some back-and-forth between them, he reluctantly agreed.
We went downstairs and got into the armored car that he used to drive reporters around. Mostly NBC reporters, he said. The car was white and wide, almost like a Humvee but not as squat, and it had the letters TV taped all over it. That way the Israeli army would know not to shoot at it. The door was so heavy I could barely open it. As I climbed up, Ahmed started in on me for not having a flak-jacket. Was I crazy? This was a dangerous place! Everybody wore flak-jackets. If you get hit without a flak-jacket on, your company's insurance will not cover your injury, he said. I said another reporter had told me not to wear one because I would look ridiculous. He snorted.
It went back and forth like this for two weeks: One person would say a flak-jacket was absolutely necessary, and someone else would say it wasn't. I hooked up with a translator who said, "Yeah, you don't need one now, but if you'd gone into Ramallah a month ago without one I would have been very mad at you." I talked to TV reporters who said they would never go anywhere without one, and print reporters who rolled their eyes and said the TV reporters just wear them to look cool on TV.
Some reporters said they refuse to wear a flak-jacket because then, when you interview someone, there's always this feeling in the air that your life is worth more than theirs, because you have a flak-jacket on and they don't. Others said they'd wear one only if they were going to an active battle zone.
I ended up never taking mine out of the bag, not because I came to any solid conclusion about the issue, but because it was just easier to leave it behind. The only thing I learned for sure is that flak-jackets have to go before normal life can continue. Even Ahmed, when he impulsively joined a game of curfew-defiant street soccer with some boys in front of the TV studio, could go only two minutes before he had to strip off the vest. He left it at the side of the road.
From LA Weekly: Columns September 20 2002.
Between Curfews & Checkpoints- Photos...
Audio/Text/Photos © 2002 Nancy Updike