On the Palestinian bus
joy in the midst of injustice
Your art strives to act as a conscience critical of society, unmasking truisms. You want to make people think, to be alert; you want to reveal reality also in its contradictions and in those things that it is more comfortable and convenient to keep hidden. Like the biblical prophets, you confront things that at times are uncomfortable; you criticize today’s false myths and new idols, its empty talk, the ploys of consumerism, the schemes of power.
— Pope Francis, Address to Artist in the Sistine Chapel, June 23, 2023
The Palestinian bus is the holiest place in the world.
In Jerusalem, the buses are segregated, and an Arab on the Israeli bus and an Israeli on the Palestinian bus are usually pretty noticeable. There are some exceptions, the light rail that goes from East Jerusalem, north of the old city, through West Jerusalem, is one.
The Palestinian buses are marked by white and blue coloring and they accept cash as well as Rav Kav transit cards. I appreciate this, having been thwarted in all three attempts to purchase a Rav Kav card, but having plenty of 5 NIS coins to spare.
My first or second ride on one, in 2017, I remember being pulled over outside the Old City, in the Valley of Gehenna, and soldiers boarding to do a passport and permit check. It was stopped again, yesterday, several of them, at the bus stop right outside Jaffa Gate. The police who pulled the buses over were four young girls who could be one of my sisters or one of the Gen Z young professionals who hang around the Worker. They seemed uncomfortable. And channeled that discomfort into being unkind.
I talked with a man from Bethlehem and a German student living in Beit Jala. The German girl asked—why are they checking their travel permits when the bus is leaving Jerusalem? If the concern is truly security, why aren’t they checking the buses going into the city?
Great question.
It makes one think that the concern is less with security and more like, as most policing is in the United States is, with making the lives of those struggling to make a living already more precarious and miserable.
Harassment like that is a sign that you are among Christ—Kurds, Arabs, Palestinians, Black Americans. Christ is those who are stopped and frisked for no reason but their skin announces them as easy prey for power. Their backs can be broken and their beards plucked, and none of the world’s principalities and powers will lift a finger to help them. That’s God—the least of these.
We (white Americans) don’t think a lot about the right to freedom of movement (Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). We travel the globe with the impunity of empire, thinking our embassy will intervene to help—we see back-door deals and interventions with Iran, Russia, North Korea, China. But there are limits to the value of protecting a human being, even for the United States of America.
The Department of State has no higher priority than the safety and security of U.S. citizens abroad,” says an official statement on the death of Omar Assad. But the US State Department has nothing to say when the “official review” has found no IDF soldier responsible for the death of the 78-year-old Palestinian American citizen who was bound, gagged and abandoned by the IDF last year. When Palestinian-American citizen and journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by IDF soldiers while she was clearly wearing a press vest, the U.S. State Department offered “thoughts” for her family. The U.S. response to the death Rachel Corrie, an American who was run over by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza, was essentially telling her family “good luck.”
You realize just how cheap a human life is—any human life—in the calculations of the levers of power.
Similarly, no nation-state cared about the case of Christ. We see a world full of Pilates—beaureuacrats who, if they take the time to encounter the humanity of the person they are charged with disposing of, are shaken by their humanity. And they don’t know why the powers-that-be have decided that person is disposable and why they have been tasked with disposing of them.
The Palestinian bus is the best image of Church—it is a place of joy in the midst of injustice.
During Ramadan, fast is broken at sundown with a makeshift iftar of juice passed around, “Ramadan Mabruk” and pita dipped in hummus shared—even with shy white girls.
Two nights ago, I was coming back from the old city and arrived at the bus stop at the exact same moment as the last bus before Shabbat. I could tell it was the last bus, because it was packed to the gills. I asked the lady closest to me—women talk to women and men talk to and sit by men on the Palestinian bus—for better or for worse—“Last bus?” A phrase I don’t know in Levantine Arabic, but thankfully is pretty universal. Yes, she responded, with a laugh, The last one. It did not look like there was a single square inch of room for all of us, but unlike in Manhattan, where the law of public transit packing is every man for himself, the task of everyone boarding was not to figure out how they could board at the expense of their neighbor, but how all of us, together, could figure out how to fit on board. Gina—my bus advocate—took personal responsibility for getting me on the bus, making sure I fit, and that I had a small bubble of personal space from nearby men, as we squeezed in the stairs by the driver’s door.
I tried to pay the Saint Christopher driving us my fare multiple times, but as we all alighted at Checkpoint 300, laughing, he waved us all away, not letting a single other soul pay.
As I write this at Patisserie Abu Seir, drinking my cappuccino, I am interrupted by a truck trying to get through the street leading to Bab al-Jadid. The men drinking coffee across the street arise to give him space, chairs are pulled in, the barista comes out to close the awning to let them through.
Jerusalem is builded as a city, just like Manhattan, with the both miniscule and fundamental shift toward helping one’s neighbor in the mess instead of trying to muscle through it by just staying in our own lanes.