Palestinian Mohammed Dajani's staircase in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina is a literal paper trail of his family and career, from an Ottoman sultan's decree that gave his relatives custodianship of David's tomb to the photos just behind him of then-Senator Barack Obama visiting his Al Quds University classroom. (Christa Case Bryant/TCSM)

Former Palestinian fighter now battles for a middle path

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 05.08.13

By his own admission, Mohammed Dajani was “extremely radical” as a young man working for the Palestinian militant group Fatah in Lebanon.

His family was forced to leave their stately Jerusalem home during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Following the example set by his grandfather, who ripped up the refugee card given to his wife, Mr. Dajani has refused to label himself a refugee: “We are citizens and human beings and we have to earn our way,” he says.

But as a young man he saw no other solution than taking back all of historic Palestine from the Israelis.

“I believed that it was us or them and that the only solution was to liberate our land,” he says. “And if we did not have the power to do that, we should do what Samson did and bring down the temple on everyone’s head,” he says, referring to the biblical story of a Hebrew prisoner who killed 3,000 people, including himself, when he removed the central pillars of a Philistine temple.

After that, however, he went to the US to get a PhD; getting some distance from the conflict changed his outlook dramatically and he began working for peace.

Those efforts crystallized into a new initiative after he witnessed a standoff at an Israeli checkpoint near his home. Palestinians who wanted to pray in Jerusalem amassed at the checkpoint, but Israeli guards initially refused to let them pass.  Eventually they worked out a deal – the Palestinians were allowed to pass in exchange for leaving their essentially indispensable identification cards at the checkpoint, virtually guaranteeing they would return. 

The 2006 incident showed him that despite the strong feelings and distrust on both sides, there is also pragmatism, and convinced him there was a need to a middle path for Palestinians who were devout and committed to pressing for their rights, but also willing to negotiate.

“They [were] not jihadi Islamic guys … because those people would have refused to negotiate with Israelis,” he says. “They were able to negotiate their way to go to Jerusalem, and to convince Israelis that they are not there to put bombs, that they are just going there to pray.”

“And the Israelis, because of the multitudes and the pressure and all that, instead of dealing with it with force, dealt with it more with the mind, with rationality,” he adds.

“Who represents those people? No one. So I started Wasatia.”

The movement, founded in early 2007 and named after a Quranic term for “moderation” or “balance,” aims to give a voice to what Dajani considers a majority of Palestinians who want to work for statehood through nonviolent means but get drowned out by increasing radicalization on both sides. It hasn’t gathered a lot of momentum; he has difficulty obtaining grants for his work, and he has been maligned by more religious Muslims who chafe at his ideas of moderation.

But his faith that the conflict will be solved remains strong and is perhaps best symbolized by the chess sets at the center of his Wasatia office and his classroom. He provides them, he says, to cultivate a skill he considers crucial to resolving the conflict: rationality.

“That’s why I feel that this problem will be solved … that rationality will prevail in the end,” he says. “It is stupidity to kill each other.”

Members of a Saudi female soccer team practice at a secret location in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in May 2012. Saudi Arabia’s official press agency says the Education Ministry has allowed private female schools to hold sports activities within the Islamic Sharia laws. (Hassan Ammar/AP/File)

Saudi Arabia sanctions sports for girls for the first time

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 05.05.13

A year ago, I was standing on the sidelines of a soccer game in Riyadh with a wave of screaming teenage girls swelling around me as their favorite team sprinted down the field for a goal.

Their shrieks of delight drowned out the local muezzin as he belted out the evening call to prayer from a nearby mosque.

It was perhaps the most memorable moment of my two-week trip, revealing a glimmer of opportunity for these girls to experience the same sort of self-reliance, discipline, and exhilaration as I had felt myself as a young female athlete – albeit on very different turf.

You can read my story here: Saudi girls find freedom in cleats.

But it also seemed all too ephemeral, as they were forced to play on a private field with no males in attendance. Not even their fathers were allowed to watch. Some didn’t even tell their relatives for fear of retribution, so frowned upon – especially in the conservative Saudi capital – is the idea of girls playing sports.

Since then, Saudi Arabia – one of the only three countries in the world that as of last summer had never permitted women to compete in the Olympics – allowed 800-meter runner Sarah Attar of California and judo athlete Wodjan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani to compete under the Saudi flag in London. (Still, they have a long road to producing champions: Attar finished second to last in the 800-meter heats with a time of 2:44.95, 48 seconds behind the gold-medal time, while the 16-year-old Shahrkhani failed to advance beyond the initial elimination round of 32.)

Today comes more good news for Saudi girls with a knack for sports, or a desire to learn. The government is sanctioning sports for girls in private schools for the first time, a move that is being interpreted as a test balloon for a possible expansion into public schools. Modest dress will be required and female teachers procured where possible.

"[This decision] stems from the teachings of our religion, which allows women to practice such activities in accordance with sharia," Education Ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Dakhini told SPA, according to CNN.

Another major boost for aspiring female athletes is that the education ministry has called for adequate facilities for girls’ sports. In a country where nearly all Saudi women wear a headscarf and the long cloak-like abaya outdoors, just having a place to exercise is no small feat. A super classy hotel I visited last year boasted a women’s “gym” which was really a stuffy single hotel room with a few exercise machines on the carpeting; other top-notch hotels didn’t even bother trying to create a place for women to exercise, despite catering to Western travelers.

For Saudi women, the issue is more pronounced. Only one female university in the entire country has sports facilities such as tennis courts, the Associated Press reports.

Women’s gyms do exist, but they risk being shut down over licensing issues, and often are affordable only for the elite.

Of course, the private schools that will now offer proper sports activities are also for the elite. But in an ultraconservative country that is at best inching toward reform, it allows aspiring female athletes in Saudi Arabia to move a little closer to the goalpost.

Abdullah Zhaeka leads Bedouin children on a sunset camel ride after bringing a group of tourists to his family's camp on the outskirts of Ubeidiya, West Bank. (Chelsea B. Sheasley)

Middle East nomads, lost in translation

By Chelsea B. Sheasley, Correspondent / 05.03.13

Abudllah Zhaeka is rarely far from his camel. It’s his economic lifeblood and his companion around the Bedouin camp he lives in, where kids often beg him for rides. The two are together so often that he thought some of the first tourists he gave rides to were calling him a camel when they tried to compliment the animal.

“I said what, have I not washed my hair enough? Why are they calling me a camel?” he recalls with a grin as he holds out a section of his tangled curly hair for evaluation.

That incident sparked Zhaeka’s ambition to learn English, which he did while working with an American tour guide. Now he boasts that he can speak English, Hebrew, and Arabic. His language skills have attracted a growing number of tourists to his village, many of whom are surprised that he dropped out of high school and worked as a shepherd before getting into tourism, instead of going to university.

“They don’t understand it’s very different for the [Bedouin] kids to go to school. It’s 1.5 hours away walking. They don’t want to finish [school]. They want to be outside,” he says as he squats in front of a tent he put up hours earlier for a tour group to sit in as they eat maklouba, a traditional Arab dish of rice, potatoes, and chicken.

The Bedouin camp where Zhaeka grew up and lives in today lies between the Israeli settlement of Kedar and the Arab town of Ubeidiya, a few miles outside Jerusalem in the West Bank.

Zhaeka and others in his camp, where roughly 200 people live in barebone tin and wood shacks, say they’d like to get electricity and maybe even build a school nearby. While the Bedouin are known for their nomadic ways, some in this camp have been there since the 1950s and the consensus is for staying put.

The Israeli government estimates that at least 70,000 Bedouin, more than one-third of the total Bedouin population, live in unrecognized encampments like Zhaeka’s – most in the Negev desert, disconnected from water and electricity grids.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet has passed two plans in the past two years to relocate 20,000 to 30,000 Bedouin into government-approved villages. But those plans have been controversial because of claims that Bedouin input wasn't solicited and that thousands of people will be uprooted unwillingly.

As for Zhaeka, he hopes the 100 to 200 tourists he brings to the camp a month for camel rides and traditional meals will start to bring a greater flow of capital into the area and translate into political support for the Bedouin.

An optimist at heart, Zhaeka speaks boldly of peace but insists that Bedouin land claims are just as important as Israeli and Palestinian ones.

“In 10 years I want every people to live on this land as brother and sister,” he says.

Abu Elias, a father of four, earns his livelihood by farming a small plot of land just outside the center of Jericho, West Bank, October 2012. (Evan Bryant)

A shortage of water, but not hospitality, in the West Bank's fields

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 05.01.13

Abu Elias is pretty much the man in Jericho, where he has raised his four children on the income he earns from growing cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. I met him in the town square on a dusty October day while reporting a story about water shortages in the West Bank; he invited me to come see his farm – after he visited the local barber shop.

After he was all spiffed up, he had another idea: taking us to visit a local “composting” conference at a farm on the outskirts of town.

It didn’t sound very useful for my story but we agreed to join him and I’m glad we did. It turned out that the Palestinian minister of agriculture was there, along with chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. Amid manure piles and fish tanks, he introduced me to both.

Afterward we headed back to Abu Elias’s tidy plot. He used to plant 20 dunams (about 5 acres) of land, but has cut back to half that due to a water shortage, which he blames on mismanagement by the Jericho municipality.

"The spring of Ein Sultan produces the same amount but the distribution and administration of water is very bad, it’s inefficient," he says. "I am being given less water than what I deserve in terms of what I pay."

He has compensated by implementing new water-saving techniques, some of which he picked up from Israel. Among them are grafting regular tomato plants onto the roots of wild tomato plants, which are hardier and better handle drought conditions.

As Israeli fighter jets roared overhead toward the Dead Sea, he took a swig of clear, cold water from a clay jug and then poured us hot tea before sending us off with a hearty invitation to return again soon. Water may be in shorter supply here, but hospitality certainly is not.

Read here to read more about Abu Elias and the challenges – and opportunities – of providing Israelis and Palestinians with water as both populations expand and a peace agreement has yet to be found.

Judith Bar-Hay works for the Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War, known as NATAL, in communities along the border of Gaza, the skyline of which can be seen from this picnic area near Sderot, Israel, April 18. (Christa Case Bryant/TCSM)

Israeli first responder searches for the good among Sderot's rocket-pocked streets

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 04.29.13

Judith Bar-Hay works on the frontlines of one of the most battered areas of Israel: Sderot, a blue-collar town that has been hit with more than 7,000 rockets from Palestinian militants in nearby Gaza over the past decade.

So when Ms. Bar-Hay, who works with Israel's Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War, known as NATAL, offered to give me a tour of the town, I was expecting somber tales.

Instead, I was met by a spunky lady with spiky hair and funky jewelry outside Sderot’s hip cinematheque where, for $9, residents can choose from “The good, the bad, and the ugly,” an array of French films, and the latest Israeli flicks.

Bar-Hay’s tour of Sderot featured more of the good than the bad and ugly. She was determined to show that there is much more to this community than pockmarked buildings and kids with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

To be sure, there are both of those in this town of 20,000, as well as memorials to the roughly two dozen Israelis killed by rockets – about half of them residents of Sderot. One memorial takes the form of a community meeting place built by the parents of a girl who saved her brother’s life by shielding him with her body.

“I think they did a beautiful thing to remember her, because it continues life,” says Bar-Hay. “This is very unique to the way Israel copes with tragic death.”

We visit Sderot's Sapir College, which has more than doubled enrollment since the rockets began, and drive down vibrant boulevards, which are punctuated by artwork fashioned from Qassam rockets.

Bar-Hay, who lives on a nearby kibbutz and is a veteran member of NATAL’s community department, knows the routes well. Her work as the coordinator of NATAL's mobile unit and a first responder in emergencies takes her to everyone from schoolchildren who have lost a fellow student to an elderly grandmother who was too scared to leave her front porch for a week, since only from there could she see the public bomb shelter that she would need to reach within 15 seconds when the rocket alarm went off.

“I think this is my coping – my helping others,” she says. “If I have to go home, I think I will go crazy.”

Things have been quieter in recent months. She takes me to a picnic area on the edge of the city with a clear view of Gaza’s skyscrapers, which was filled with locals on Israeli independence day in mid-April. As the smell of freshly cut hay wafts through the pines, she sounds almost wistful about the severing of relations between Israel and the Gaza Strip. Until 2005, Israeli citizens were free to live and shop there.

“If I want a good dentist, a good mechanic, the people in Gaza are the best,” she says, noting that many Gazans also used to cross into Israel, many for work. “I think, and a lot of people think, that everybody lose in this war because the people of Gaza want the connection with us.”

Shyrine Ziadeh leads one of her three classes at the Ramallah Ballet Center, which she opened in December 2011 with the help of her family. (Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor)

Dancing around the conflict in Ramallah

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 04.26.13

In a place as unpredictable as the West Bank, a reporter meets quite the cast of characters, from militants to grandmothers. But Shyrine Ziadeh is the first and only interviewee who has greeted me in ballet tights and a sheer skirt.

This young woman, who opened the first ballet studio in the West Bank in 2011, is refreshing in many other ways as well.

She has Israeli friends, and hope. Those are rare commodities in the West Bank these days, where there is increasing social pressure not to associate with Israelis until they end their occupation of this land where Palestinians want to build a state of their own. Most Palestinians don’t expect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to budge, and they’re not too enthralled with their own government, the Palestinian Authority, either. 

“I don’t know if they’re giving up … but they don’t have the motivation to continue defending or at least have an opinion about what is happening,” says Shyrine, who has both Arab and Jewish friends in Israel.

I actually don’t know what Shyrine thinks about Israel or the PA; we didn’t talk about it (another rarity).

The occupation does pose obstacles for her, of course; she mentioned that because she doesn’t have a permit to visit Jerusalem, 30 minutes away, shopping for tutus and tights for her kids can require an international trip to Amman, Jordan.

But on an afternoon visit to the Palestine Ballet Center, Shyrine didn’t express the cynicism has become part of daily life for many Palestinians.

“Sometimes it’s weird to tell people you have friends living in Jerusalem but we actually have many [Israelis] with us, with the Palestinian cause.

“I love to see how we could live together,” she adds, “because we’re living in the same area but we don’t know each other.”

Read more about her studio here.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men run down a street in Jerusalem's Old City, last week. Israel, filled with religious tourism destinations, is exploring ways to make pilgrimages sustainable. (Ronen Zvulun/Reuters)

Israel seeks another type of coexistence – between tourists and the earth

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 04.24.13

This week Jerusalem hosted its first green pilgrimage symposium, tapping the fledgling but growing interest in promoting local communities and environmental sustainability through religious tourism.

That’s a formidable task for a city where visitors have clashed for centuries, often ravaging the landscape. Suffice it to say that city officials are looking to improve on the Crusader model of pilgrimage. 

Mayor Nir Barkat seeks to leverage Jerusalem’s ancient brand, which for centuries has appealed to pilgrims of the three monotheistic religions. He seeks to triple annual tourism to 10 million by 2020. But to do that in a sustainable way, reducing the environmental impact and boosting local economies, requires the buy-in of a key sector.

“Nothing can be done seriously in Jerusalem without engaging the faith communities, because we’re not just any city,” says Deputy Mayor Naomi Tsur. Green pilgrimage “is a platform to work with our faith communities but also the best possible platform to work with other cities and faith communities around the world.”

Jerusalem was one of 10 founding members of the Green Pilgrimage Network (GPN), established 18 months ago. Among the initial group were Sufi Muslims from Kano, Nigeria; Sikhs from Amritsar, India; and Taoists from Lougang, China. 

Next year, Shinto followers in Japan plan to join, and Ms. Tsur announced today that Israel would form a national chapter as well.

Lougang perhaps best represents the potential scale of the movement. It has poured $1.5 billion into greening the city, building a new green spa complex, teaching organic farming, and initiating water harvesting. Now the city is trying to recruit 15 new cities into the network, says Allison Hilliard of the Alliance of Religions and Conservations, which oversees GPN. 

GPN is also working on a chapter for the hajj to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, which draws nearly 3 million Muslims annually – who leave behind 100 million plastic bottles. GPN seeks to tap into values of environmental stewardship across all faiths to cut down on such negative side effects of tourism.

But it can be a tough sell. Despite the fact that Palestinians – most of whom are Muslim – make up more than a third of Jerusalem’s population, very few attended the symposium. 

Some of the pilgrimage routes with the greatest potential, like the Kidron Valley ascent from the Dead Sea, crisscross numerous political barriers and strong political pressures act against those trying to reach across the divide.

Elsewhere in Israel, projects like the Jesus Trail have demonstrated the potential for Arab-Jewish cooperation.

Prior to the construction of the trail, “One million tourists were visiting [the Arab town of] Cana every year, and they only stayed for one hour,” says cofounder Maoz Inon. With it came the first guesthouse in Cana, an ecotourist goat farm in nearby Ilaniya, and more Christian tourists who are spreading their dollars throughout the struggling rural communities.

The trail head is in the old city of Nazareth, one of the most impoverished areas of Israel, at Mr. Inon’s Fauzi Azar Inn. Since he established the inn in 2005, five more guesthouses have opened in Nazareth.

“If we had 10,000 more of him, we’d be much further along in having a truly sustainable product,” says Deidre Shurland, a symposium speaker and coordinator of the United Nations Environment Program’s Global Partnership for Sustainable Tourism.

Arin Shaabi works at a military base on the seam of Israel and the West Bank, crossing just over the threshold each day to prosecute Palestinians from the territory. (Christa Case Bryant)

The trials of an Israeli Arab prosecuting Palestinians

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 04.22.13

Arin Shaabi walks a fine line between Arab and Jew every day. 

When she drives to work, she crosses from Israel into the northern West Bank, not far from Jenin. Just over the border, inside her small trailer office on an Israeli army base, a stack of folders awaits her attention – pink for criminals, green for terrorists.

All the files belong to Palestinians, who live beyond the maze of rusty fences, barbed wire, and concrete barriers that separate her from the offenders. Some are just kids, accused of throwing stones or Molotov cocktails. Others are suspected of transferring enemy money into the territory, or making contact with enemy agents. As a military prosecutor, it’s up to Shaabi to review the evidence and shepherd the cases through the military courts.

It's a sensitive task, especially because Shaabi is herself Arab. Very few of Israel's 20 percent minority of Arabs serve in the military. In 2011, Shaabi was one of only 94 Arab Christians in the whole Israel Defense Forces (IDF) (with another 155 Arab Muslim soldiers). 

While most Israeli citizens are required to serve in the military, Arabs like Shaabi are exempt. So the fact that she volunteered, and even fought against cultural and bureaucratic resistance to get a job in which she is responsible for prosecuting fellow Palestinians, initially earned her the hatred of Palestinian defense attorneys who work on the base.

“One told me that in the beginning he hated me because I didn’t have to do military service,” says Shaabi, a soft-spoken woman who joined the military out of a sense of responsibility to her country. “But when you work with them and they get to know you, it disappears.”

There have been tough moments in the past two and a half years, such as when she was exposed to the gruesome evidence of a Palestinian attack that killed a sleeping couple and three of their children in the Israeli settlement of Itamar in 2011. Worried about the effect the evidence would have on a fellow prosecutor, a Jewish woman, she forbid her from looking at it.

Shaabi admits it took extra courage to make it here at all, coming from the Arab city of Nazareth, where it’s strange to see any Israeli soldiers in uniform, let alone Israeli Arabs. She says she found strength in her mom’s support, and inspiration in the stories her maternal grandmother – who was born Jewish – told her as a kid.

With two Jewish uncles from her grandmother’s first marriage, Shaabi grew up with a pair of IDF soldiers in the family. And since Judaism is passed through the maternal bloodline, some would even consider her to be Jewish. But since Shaabi's grandmother converted to Christianity when she got remarried to an Arab Christian man in the late 1950s, her mother was raised Christian, and chose to raise Shaabi that way.

“At home we didn’t have any racism or anything,” Shaabi recalls, saying her grandfather was courageous to marry a Jewish woman just a decade after Israel declared independence and some 700,000 Arabs either fled or were forced from their homes. Her grandfather was among the small minority who stayed.

“I grew up with the idea that this is where we live, this is our country. And in the same way that we have rights, we have responsibilities,” she adds. “So I felt that even though it’s not mandatory for me to join [the IDF], it’s my responsibility to do it.”

Nader Abu Turki and Hamoud Salah, former Palestinian prisoners from the West Bank, prepare nablusi in their new shop. The sumptious version of kenafeh, a traditional Palestinian dessert, includes sheep or goat cheese and pistachios. (Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor)

Former Palestinian prisoners once jailed for murder, now dole out dessert

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 04.19.13

Nader Abu Turki and Hamoud Salah are accustomed to cramped quarters; they spent 13 and 12 years, respectively, in Israeli jails.

But since being released two years ago, they have carved out a tiny niche for themselves that has a much sweeter savor than prison: a kenafeh shop. On a recent afternoon, customers fairly mobbed the counter, waiting for a fresh batch of the traditional Palestinian dessert to emerge from the shop’s sole oven.

Mr. Abu Turki and Mr. Salah, who just opened their doors in March, are certainly not the only folks in Gaza making kenafeh, which combines rich cheese with a sweet, crusty topping. But they make the most sumptuous version of the dessert, called nablusi, that makes it more dense and rich. They say demand is so high they’ll soon have to open a second shop.

Nablusi comes from Nablus, a city in the northern West Bank. So does Salah, originally. But upon his release, he was exiled to the Gaza Strip along with Abu Turki – a native of Hebron – and nearly 150 other prisoners. They were sentenced to 22 and 15 years, respectively, for conspiracy to murder and planting bombs, among other things.

In 2011, they were among 1,027 Palestinian prisoners exchanged for a single Israeli soldier, Sgt. Gilad Shalit, who had been captured and held by Hamas for five years. They saw that as a great victory, since the release came about not through mutual negotiation but an act of “resistance” – the kidnapping of Shalit.

“We forced the Israelis to release prisoners,” says Abu Turki.

While he and Salah are now separated from their families in the West Bank, they have started new lives in Gaza. Salah found a wife from Nablus. Abu Turki, who was already married when he was jailed, has a wife and kids back in the West Bank, but has married a second woman in Gaza and just welcomed their first child.

How is life with one wife in each of the Palestinian territories?

“It’s like the political split,” jokes Salah, answering for his partner. In 2007, the two main Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, got into a violent confrontation and Fatah was ousted from the coastal territory. Hamas, the Islamist organization that Israel and the US considers to be a terrorist group, has run Gaza ever sense.

Reconciliation efforts have been under way for years, but have yet to unify the two territories once more. But the people still feel they are part of one nation.

“We as Palestinians consider ourselves as one family,” says Salah, plunging his hands into the mixer as he whips up another batch of nablusi.