When you’re Black in America, you spend your life getting used to being singled out. It happens with White friends, teachers, colleagues, bosses, business owners, employees, and law enforcement. But decades of experiencing the world as an outsider didn’t prepare me for the way I’d feel when I witnessed ethnic profiling strictly as an observer for the first time.
It happened in 2013 during my monthlong stint living in Israel. As the authorities paced the buses I took on my round trip from Jerusalem to the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, I squirmed in my seat and prayed I wouldn’t be one of the people they chose to detain. On both legs of the journey, the inspections seemed random at first. Specific travelers were asked to show their passports and sometimes ordered off the bus.
Eventually, I realized it was ethnic profiling in action. And for the first time in my life, it let me, the only Black person on the bus, slide. The detainees, though darker-skinned than the majority of the passengers, were all Arab.
For me, this twist was unexpected, and so was the reaction of those it affected. The passengers didn’t argue or protest as Black people back home did in the 1950s after centuries of humiliation. On that day at least, they seemed resigned to their status as second-class humans in a city that serves as the disputed and unofficial capital of both Israel and the Palestinian National Authority. But the Israeli majority controls who moves freely in and out of Jerusalem. That list doesn’t include Palestinian Arabs or, apparently, any person who is perceived as such. My decades of experience as a Black man in the United States made me an especially sympathetic and captivated bystander.
Until I visited the Holy Land in 2013, I was uninformed enough about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be more or less Team Israel. Years of media spin taught me to think of Palestinian Arabs solely in terms of the violent acts the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) sometimes committed on their behalf. Wasn’t the State of Palestine, established in 1988, basically a “country” filled with Arab and Muslim terrorists?
Though I wasn’t misguided enough to buy into the idea that Muslim equals terrorist, the truth was that I, like many Americans, didn’t know enough about the Islam religion, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. My next life lesson began almost as soon as I entered a taxi after traveling about five miles by bus from Jerusalem to the city best known as the birthplace of Jesus Christ.
The cab driver asked me, “Do you know the significance of Bethlehem?”
Maybe I hadn’t heard him correctly. Who doesn’t know the significance of Bethlehem? Was he serious? My driver, a 41-year-old native of Kuwait with a stern poker face who considered the State of Palestine (or what’s left of it) to be his home and homeland, definitely wasn’t trying to entertain me.
“Of course I do,” I answered, as we headed toward the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem’s most famous landmark and an emblem of Christianity in a predominantly Muslim city.
“You have the face of this guy from New York who is my friend on Facebook,” he said, changing the subject as if he was trying to put me at ease.
I gripped the edge of my shotgun seat, where I’d parked myself after he’d insisted I ride up front instead of in the back. I wasn’t sure where our conversation was going, but his mental route soon became clear.
“I hate George Bush, but I love Barack Obama,” he declared before ranting about the sins of the father (George H.W. Bush), which, in his eyes, went back to U.S. oil interests that led him to launch the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Once we arrived at the tourist information center, he pointed to a map that showed how the Palestinian homeland had dwindled to practically nothing between 1948 and 1967, as Israel claimed Palestinian territories.
By the time we reached the wall separating Bethlehem from Jerusalem, I knew what he’d meant by “the significance of Bethlehem.” The Israeli West Bank barrier kept Palestinian Arabs out of their capital city unless they procured special permission from the Israeli government to enter.
Encircling and, in a sense, imprisoning residents of Bethlehem, it made the birthplace of Jesus Christ a symbol of the ongoing tension between Israel and Palestine — between the Western world and Islam.
I listened as my taxi driver spent nearly an hour explaining why he was “a man without a country.” He said he couldn’t freely enter Jerusalem or key Palestinian cities like Hebron and Jericho. He said he hoped he’d live to see the dawning of a “separate but equal” peace, one in which the two countries and their religions, Islam and Judaism, could coexist harmoniously.
He waited for the day when Palestinian Arabs would be able to travel between the State of Palestine’s cities without having to deal with the checkpoints going in and out of the Israeli territory that proliferated throughout the patches of remaining Palestinian land.
My taxi driver compared the plight of Palestinian Arabs to Black Africans during South Africa’s apartheid era. He later called the Israeli-built blockade their own Berlin Wall.
At the time of my trip, the idea of President Trump seemed unfathomable. Still, from the moment Trump mentioned his plans for a physical wall separating the U.S. from Mexico during the 2016 presidential campaign, I connected it to the one the Israeli government began building in 2002, ostensibly as a protective measure against nationals with darker skin. As I faced the wall from the city it blocks off from Jerusalem, I saw it as a barrier intended to keep Bethlehem’s Palestinian Arabs in their place, both literally and symbolically.
It was a lot to process. I wanted to be sympathetic without naively letting the Palestinian side completely off the hook. I’d been conditioned to think of the only partially recognized state as one that, as Trump would later say, was “compromised by terrorism.”
Though I wasn’t misguided enough to buy into the idea that Muslim equals terrorist, the truth was that I, like many Americans, didn’t know enough about Islam or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In the end, my day in Bethlehem wouldn’t be all about politics. Walking through the old city solo was a highlight. It all seemed so ordinary, in the best possible way. Outsiders generally visit Bethlehem to cross the Church of the Nativity off their bucket list and then they leave. Once I moved away from tourist areas and entered the actual city, I got to experience everyday secular Palestinian reality.
As I strolled through the marketplace, I watched middle-aged Muslim women check out hoodies, some adorned with pictures of cats, others with the Fox logo — the sole evidence of any awareness of Western pop culture. I felt guilty taking photos, like an audacious interloper, a tourism paparazzo. After snapping a few shots, I put my camera away. I wanted to experience the moment, to live in it rather than just document it.
The people brushing past me were no more completely defined by their religion — or what fanatic factions do in the name of it — than the non-holy rollers back home. Their lives and deeds defined them.
If I could hear their hearts beating, they would sound just like mine.