Where do we go from now? A first impression of the Hashemite kingdom

9:45am. The plane from Casablanca, Morocco via Cairo, Egypt landed in Amman, Jordan. On time.

At a first glance, I would have not expected Jordanians to have blonde hair and clear eyes. Stupid thought... King Abdullah II looks like this!

Convenient currency: 1 Jordanian Dinar (JD) equals to 1 Euro. Indeed, the Jordanian economy is doing well. There is an advantage when you sign a peace treaty with Israel: you get economic and military assistance from the United-States to ensure stability and development in your country.

I get into a cab which charges me 19 JD to get around the University of Jordan. What a surprise to see two screens in the back of the taxi with commercials in English and pictures of the royal family. Welcome to the New York of the Middle East?

While I am barely handlingsurviving the extremely-arid weather and feeling my eyes getting drier, the cab driver offers me a Gaulloise cigarette. Where the hell did I end up?!

The taxi keeps going and I cannot help but witness all the large campuses of different universities with American names. After all, Jordanians are exceptionally highly educated. According to Rough Guide, over 2.5% of the population is enrolled at university. This rate is comparable to the United Kingdom¹.

The Rough Guide to Jordan introduced the travel book with the following statement: “Jordan is the safest country in the Middle East by quite a long way, and domestic extremism is virtually non-existent.”² Is that really so? Can education mitigate culture?

Of course, it is quite impossible to assess the level of religious conservatism in a country in twenty-four hours. However, a first impression is rarely entirely wrong.

When my sweet French roommate Charlotte gives me a tour of the amazing campus of the University of Jordan, I feel the look of several veiled girls standing in front of the dorms, tough I hid my shoulders and was wearing loose clothes. The looks are not insisting or aggressive though. I just sense that I could be entertaining, with my Western clothes, in a predominantly-Muslim country in which Islam permeates all aspects of the daily life. What is fascinating on this campus is that you can see all the different levels of religiosity. Some women wear a burqa that only reveals the eyes. Some others have a simple veil. Some girls wear a hijab with tight clothes, which emphasizes the schizophrenia inherent to Islamic societies, with a push for liberalism and pull from the traditions.

Of course, wearing the veil does not mean that you are religiously conservative. It could be the result of social pressures, like in Cairo, where about 95% of women are veiled but behave in a quite liberal way. Some are smoking. Others driving. Some are spending time with their boyfriend in front of the Nile, in the afternoon. Women can hold they male friend's hand in the street.

On the other hand, Charlotte tells me that, on a sunny day, she was laying down on the grass of the university, reading a book by herself when, all of a sudden, a veiled student came to ask her to sit appropriately. Such things happen in conservative Muslim countries.

Can a country whose modern queen is beautiful Rania can be conservative? Take a look at the first page of Queen Rania's website (www.queenrania.jo): Education = Opportunity, is the title. However, the voice of the street seems to disapprove such liberalism. According to Nadia, our Palestinian roommate, the queen and the king of Jordan are too modern. Thus, there are not representative of the population. There are some doubts about this issue also because both did not live in Jordan their entire lives. Queen Rania was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Kuwait and studied at the American University of Cairo. As for King Abdullah II, he studied at Oxford University in England and at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. The point is that their education seemed to have created a gap with the more conservative Jordanians.

Again, this is just a first impression of the Jordanian society. It would be quite pretentious to assert that I saw and understood everything in Jordan.

1Matthew Teller, The Rough Guide to Jordan, Rough Guides, September 2009

2 idem

The Time that Remains

A dark room at the Al Hussein Cultural Center in Amman, Jordan. Two young women late to a screening. Some whispering. We finally find two well-located seats. The movie? The Time that Remains.
The director? Elia Suleiman, a talented Christian Arab-Israeli. One hour forty-five minutes (minus fifteen minutes!) of absurdity begin. In Arabic, of course!

The movie deals with Elia Suleiman's observation of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 through the present day. It is inspired by his father's private diaries and his mother's letters to their family in Jordan.
Suleiman provides a down-to-earth account of the lives of those who decided to stay in the newly-established state and live as a minorty.

In the Arab village of Nazareth, in what is today Israel, Suleiman's family witnesses the absurdity of military occupation. The film is slow and powerful, such as the daily life of these Palestinians. Thanks to the director's sober cinematic style, we undertand that all is about observation. We observe the characters staring at life going on. Suleiman and his friends watch events that they cannot control or influence. A burlesque moment of the movie perfectly captures this absurdity: for about five minutes, an Israeli tank is targeting every movement of a random Palestinian man, who is talking on the phone, in the street, during the day. It obviously underlines Israelis worried about threats that could come from, according to them, any Palestinian in the most common situations. There is not any music. Just the strident sound of the war machine.

Throughout the movie, we observe beauty, when, on a balcony, Suleiman is looking at his mother who is staring at beautiful fireworks. We observe pain in the eyes of a seven-year old boy who cries when he hears on television the death of Nasser in Egypt, the proponent of Arab nationalism, who might have been a hope for the Palestinian people. We observe despair, in the gestures of a silent family. When nothing is left, the time that remains is devoted to the observation of hopelessness.

The Time that Remains also highlights Suleiman's deepest desire. In another sequence of the movie, we see him staring at the Wall, which divides the West Bank from Israel. All of a sudden, he vaults over the Wall with a long pole. Irrealistic? Maybe not. In a five-second sequence, the director puts an end to division, insecurity and hatred. This is an open path to reconciliation.

The music of the film also underlines Palestinians' hardship under occupation. We go from house music in a club, where Palestinians are dancing at night, to the sounds of Israeli soldiers yelling at them with a microphone. In the most normal situations, Arab-Israelis are brought to the reality of the conflict.

This sober movie is very compelling. Suleiman forcelly features Palestinians' meaningless life. He masters the combination of tragedy and comedy in this dark comedy. More dark than funny though.

Suleiman also explains that, in the Israeli-Arab conflict, all is about interpretation, in the same way Samuel Maoz's movie Lebanon proves it. Maoz's film brings the audience into the nightmare of four Israelis in a tank, during the first Lebanon war, in June 1982. It emphasizes young soldiers' doubts and fears in the chaos of war. We becomes more familiar with– perhaps more sensitive to, Israelis' perspectives.

Indeed, all is about the lenses through which we observe conflicts.

Aspiring to freedom: a journey in Palestine

The human right concept of Freedom of movement asserts that a citizen of a country "generally has the right to leave that state, travel wherever he is welcome, and, with proper documentation, return to that state at any time; and also (of equal or greater importance) to travel to, reside in, and/or work in, any part of the state the citizen wishes without interference from the state". Well, Palestine is the exception.

My arrival at Ben Gurion airport marked my first time in the Middle East and enabled me to experience what freedom of movement meant for the Palestinian people.

Very soon, my excitement and enthusiasm were crushed by one hour and a half waiting in an exclusive little room in the airport. Even though I was aware that I was privileged because I had only waited for one hour and a half, for a 22-year old student in International Relations, full of hope and willingness to change the world, I was a bit resentful. When, for the third time, a different Israeli officer – this one was doing a BA in chemistry at Tel Aviv University and was probably younger than I, asked me for all my documents, I just could not help it. One tear. Then another. I became very emotional and asked why I was subject to such an investigation. "Don't worry, this is a common procedure," he answered.

In the private room, there were four Palestinian-American students who were born and raised in Washington D.C. and had been waiting for four hours, and were obviously going to wait longer since I heard an Israeli officer telling one of them: "Oh come on, you have only waited for four hours." There was one young French tourist, Mehdi, originally from Algeria; two British who were going to Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid; and myself, a Moroccan girl with a French passport. Obviously, this was not a common procedure. This was targeting specific people: Palestinians, Arabs and all the others willing to help Palestinians. "Well welcome to Palestine. This is our daily treatment," James, the Christian Palestinian at the front desk of Azzahra hotel in East Jerusalem told me.

Experiencing the notion of restricted freedom of movement for the second time compelled me to open my eyes to an unpleasant reality. After going through the checkpoint at the entrance of Bethlehem, here it is. Overwhelming. Horrible. Real. Here is the Wall of Shame. Staring at an apartheid wall, right in front of you, is almost unbearable. Just as the naked truth is. In the Ayda refugees camp in Bethlehem, someone has drawn the nastiest pig I have ever seen and wrote “Cultivating:” For this Wall cultivates resentment and bitterness.

"What does freedom mean for you?" I asked. A silence. Some thought he had to translate into English. And he replied: "It doesn't mean that you have everything you need. It just means that you can have it. Nobody tells you 'No'."

It was a Saturday afternoon at Kalia beach, on the shores of the Dead Sea, a private place of entertainment full of tourists, laughter, and people covered with the sea mud, known for its benefits for the skin. Not that far ahead, you could see the breath-taking landscape of the Jordanian mountains. I was surprised to see just a few Palestinians and hear many people speaking Hebrew. Taoufik, a 25-year old Palestinian taxi driver from Bethlehem explained me that Saturday was a Jewish holiday so Palestinians were not allowed to go to the Dead Sea, unless they were taxi drivers bringing tourists. For there is a schedule for Palestinians to enjoy the freedom of spending a day at the beach: Sunday to Friday.

When Taoufik tells me his story, many of his sentences start with "in the movies I saw…" I am struck to see the extent to which you can be in contact everyday with people from all over the world, while being recluse in your own life. Since the construction of the Wall, he has not traveled to Jerusalem because he cannot get a permit. He is not allowed to work in other cities of the West Bank, such as Ramallah or Jericho, where the tourism business is more flourishing.

After giving me a tour of Hebron, Taoufik took me to his family's house in a small village overlooking the city of Bethlehem. "Eat! We have plenty of food," Taoufik told me. I was so embarrassed that he thought I didn’t want to eat because of the conditions this family was in – this was a four-room house for 7 people, that I replanted my fork in the maglouba, a very tasty Palestinian meal with chicken, rice, cabbage and potatoes. After lunch, Taoufik took me to his friend Oussama's narguileh shop. We sat and smoked apple chicha. A picture of Yasser Arafat and a Palestinian flag were hanging atop the bar. Taoufik and his friend were staring at the traffic in the street through the window, silent. This was a common day for a normal Palestinian.

Of course, it would be much easier if the reality was black and white. Of course, it would be more convenient if the IDF soldiers sitting in their jeep or at the checkpoints were the "bad guys." When you look closer, you can grasp all the different shades of gray, all the complexity of this conflict. These Israelis are just 18-to-21-year kids. I am sure that, no matter how much they are willing to defend their country, they would rather be with their family and friends instead of in the army. My point is that peace and freedom can only be achieved if there ceases to be a demonization of the Other. For the Other is just the mirror of our own self. Palestinians are just like Israelis. They do what nothing else can be done: They nurture hope. Both the Torah and the Koran refer to not doing to others what you would not do to yourself. With all the genuine compassion I have for Jewish people’s suffering throughout history, I cannot help but wonder: How can people, who went through such an awful past no more than 65 years ago, repeat History?

"Give them justice. They will reward you with peace" is written on the Wall.