Some Traveler’s Notes on Protest and Palestine

April 7, 2023

Made my way to 🌊’s and was dead tired when I got there, which I knew because I misplaced the cheese I was taking to her and couldn’t find it even though I spent about 20 minutes looking around for it. I always lose things when I’m underslept, but still haven’t learned how to rest properly after all these years. A couple days later, I found the cheese in my glove compartment, but today I’d given up my unsuccessful search and taken another round to share. I was cheese-rich, since I’d worked for my friend 🧄 a couple weekends before, sampling out pickles to wealthy wine country types from her booth at the Sonoma County Wine and Cheese Fair. It had been a busy day, and the six-hour shift passed in the blink of an eye. After all the customers had gone, I was in charge of going around and trading fermented vegetables for loads of good things. We ended up with a half flat of Mt. Tam from Cowgirl Creamery, several bottles of good olive oil, and lots of wine to split among the three of us working. And the cute guy behind the gin stand slipped me an extra bottle to keep for myself.

When I got to 🌊’s in Fruitvale, she had already boiled chicken with celery and bell peppers, and we quickly prepped the vegetables I had brought from friends at Riverdog Farm: carrots and turnips and garlic, tender purple-tinged mustard that was hardly bitter at all, along with thyme, oregano and parsley. There was still more than an hour left ‘til sunset, and I was fasting for Ramadan, so we drove over to Alameda Beach and walked along the ocean. We had the entire beach nearly to ourselves, probably because it had been raining all day. We dimpled the sand at the edge of the shore with our hands. The tide came and lapped at them, shallow at first, then suddenly rose.

The sky was all pale peachy tones and variable layers of clouds. San Francisco was slightly misted- over across the water, making it look vague and insignificant amidst the distant mountains strung low all around. Whenever I’m encircled by mountains like this, I think back to a hike in Jordan where I was told this formation is called an eswar, which means bracelet in Arabic, and imagine the land as jewelry, a treasure that adorns itself. Somehow neither the labeling presence of human language nor the land’s preciousness are inflated by this metaphor. 🌊 commented that Salesforce Tower was recently found to be structurally unsound. It has been slowly sinking into the ground. It could collapse at any moment. If we were its neighbor buildings we’d be fearing for our lives, we laughed.

Just as we finished making soup, 🌊’s cat got outside and 🌊 was very worried, though she tried to pretend she wasn’t. The sun had gone down and we waited outside with the door open while the cat darted and pranced past us for a while—to the courtyard, behind the bushes, towards the parking lot—then came back in. 🌊 was relieved and I think a little ashamed she’d been so worried. When we finally sat down to eat, she suddenly put down her soup spoon and declared, Let’s go get ice cream.

I’d commented on our drive to the beach earlier that maybe we could go to Tucker’s after dinner. It was an old-school ice cream parlor I’d gone to years ago with 🚲, who lived on Alameda Island back then, though he’d since moved to someplace in Oregon since it’s cheaper there. 🚲 and I had biked across the Park Street drawbridge and all around the island—which had bike lanes with protective barriers before anywhere else in the East Bay did—and up an accessibility ramp that took us all the way to the roof of a high school, where we watched the sunset. 🌊 checked the time: Tucker’s closed at 9:30 and it was 9:18 now—we could make it if we booked it. So, we decided to go.

Of course 🌊’s sunflower-printed hightops were refusing to let her feet in as we rushed out the door, and I was nervous driving across the bridge. I braked in front of Tucker’s and 🌊 hopped out of the car while I went to find a parking spot. The streets were packed but I wedged into an empty curbside spot—badly and possibly illegally—a couple blocks up then ran to the shop, where a guy was starting to shutter the aluminum grate outside its glass doors. My friend’s in there! I cried, and he let me in. 🌊 was still in line. I was starting to Google Phish Food because I know you like it but I have no clue what the fuck it is, and I figured I’d get you something similar . . . Of course the best thing about Phish Food isn’t the flavor itself but the little fudgy fish. I’d claimed I wasn’t eating Ben and Jerry’s anymore since they said they’d stop selling in “the Occupied Palestinian Territories” a couple years before because it was “inconsistent with their values,” but would somehow also “stay in Israel through a different business arrangement.” The legalistic vagueness and opportunity for loopholes made my head spin too much. Were they a tactful form of diplomacy, a shield against accusations of antisemitism as the company stood against Zionism? Or simply a way to make a political statement of sorts while protecting their bottom line? To clarify things, I declared a personal boycott. But I also had memories of walking to the grocery store with Baba growing up in the southern California suburbs and getting his favorite flavors, Cherry Garcia and Pistachio, Pistachio. We’d teem the ice cream into mugs so it rose above the rim like a castle complete with turrets and towers that sank into a soupy moat at the bottom of the mug if you ate it slow, which I always did.

🌊 tried to buy my ice cream in exchange for the ride, but I refused because I know how it is to be tracking favors all the time, weighing whether the pleasure of your company’s enough of an exchange, if you’re earning your keep in the landscape of someone’s life. Why don’t we drive around by the beach and listen to music while we eat our ice cream? I have to move my car anyway, it was such a bad parking job . . .

I put on “El Sobhiya” by Al Massrieen, which was constantly stuck in my head at the time. It felt delicious to be playing this music loud at night, driving with the windows down and the heater on and a giant ice cream cone melting in one hand because it didn’t even matter if I ate it. I felt sort of drunk, the feeling was so delicious. I suddenly remembered similar drives along Redondo Beach with Mama in her old Volvo, blasting the Fairuz cassette tapes her brother Sabah had copied for her before she left Baghdad for Amreekah. Sometimes white people—“Americans”—shimmied their shoulders to the beat that traveled to the boardwalk. They were pantomiming, and it was totally orientalist of course, but there was an edge of real infectious pleasure in their being caught by the music and moving to it that always filled Mama with a flush of puppet-master pride.

I told 🌊 this and she shared an echo from her memory: driving around Tel Aviv blasting Arabic music, one of the most subversive things you could do there as a kid. 🌊 put “Dammi Falastini (My Blood is Palestinian)” by Mohammad Assaf on next, and we coasted slow up and down the Alameda Beach boulevard, paying no mind to the cars behind trying to pass us, then swerved wildly around the parking lot of the mall where she used to work for some asshole boss, singing song after song like olive oil sultans. We both felt so present and happy and it was such an incredible release of everything we’d been feeling and guarding ourselves against feeling for Palestine.

This was the best protest I’ve ever been to 🌊 said as we wended our way home.

A couple weeks later, “Dammi Falastini” would be removed from Spotify, along with Apple Music, Amazon, Tidal, and other streaming services. Assaf, the Gazan Palestinian singer, would tell The New Arab that he received an email from Spotify telling him his song had been removed for “inciting against Israel.” Spotify claimed the song disappeared without their knowledge due to distribution rights. A public outcry ensued online, and the song returned to the platform in May. In my personal experience using Spotify, it remained unplayable for months after: appearing in a search, but greyed out, a dead-end link. I took some screenshots and sent them to the customer service chatbot who may actually have been an exploited Filipino laborer, as if I could dig up the truth that way. I considered asking 🤖, a startup founder, if he knew anyone at Spotify to whom I could speak directly and fake-casually about the issue, but we weren’t really friends anymore and it felt too awkward to reach out. On many nights as I lay in my bed, my eyes rolled around in my head, searching for other pathways to the song. There was YouTube, of course, but I wanted the song for everyone beyond me. I also wanted to pick a fight with Spotify, that vacant entity who had slowly overtaken my music-listening habits, and I wanted that fight to be personal. But the months after would bring too many other fights to fight. It would be many more months until I simply deleted my Spotify account, and in the meanwhile I would feel like a quiet coward.

***

April 6, 2023

The day before the protest with 🌊, I’d gone to an actual demonstration in the San Francisco Financial District, referred to as “FiDi” by its new settlers, and which 🤖’s sister 🐂 called the “SciFi” district. It felt useless, shouting the tired slogans in front of a bank’s headquarters. People chained themselves to the doors, but what for? All the workers were probably doing their jobs virtually. They had probably clocked in, then met their friends for coffee or gone shopping somewhere very expensive. On the BART ride back home, I boarded the train with a couple UC Berkeley undergraduate students,a Palestinian girl in a hijab and her Filipino friend. There had been a Filipino solidarity contingent at the protest. The BART car was empty except for the three of us and three guys at the other end, who were getting high. One of the guys lost consciousness and his friend started trying to shake, and then lightly slap, him awake. It wasn’t working. At the next stop, one of the men got off and pulled the car’s emergency switch, then wedged the doors open with his body. An alarm was sounding and a voice came into the car’s intercom repeatedly instructing passengers to stop blockading the doors, but the car wasn’t moving.

None of us were carrying Narcan, and I didn’t have my phone, since I never took it to protests. The hijabi girl didn’t want to speak to the police, but she called them and handed me her phone. I explained where we were and what was happening, and a young black officer arrived thirty minutes later. He’s cute, said the Palestinian girl. Meanwhile, the guy who had passed out had revived and promptly taken a swig of his brown-bagged 40 after coming to.

April 5, 2023

Back home in California from a visit to Tucson and the border, I read the news: Al Aqsa mosque was being raided. On the internet, I posted text over images of the landscapes at Gates Pass and Douglas:

***

December 2016

I was standing before a stacked tower of Qurans in Al Aqsa looking for a passage whose beginning had been ringing in my head over the last days traveling between Jericho and Bethlehem:

When I looked up, dazed by language and caught in a current of golden light dancing with dust motes, an old woman sitting on a folding chair in the middle of the mosque motioned me over with her hand. She told me she was surprised to see me reading the Quran because I didn’t look Arab. I told her I was Iraqi, living in Jordan, visiting the mosque, visiting Palestine, for the first time. Are you alone? My boyfriend was waiting outside, but I told her he was my husband.

🍆 wasn’t religious then and besides had visited Jerusalem with his mother some years before and didn’t feel a need to go inside again. He’d joked before we entered the mosque complex that he was so harami the mosque would explode if he entered, so he’d better not, which annoyed me. I was already annoyed by the fact that people always primarily addressed him as we traveled in Jordan and Palestine, even though my Arabic was stronger than his. They addressed him not only because he was a man but because with his olive skin and dark hair and beard he is more apparently Arab than I am. It wasn’t only among Arabs that he was shown this privilege. Even the IOF soldiers at the entrance gate to the mosque who asked us to recite the opening prayer of the Quran to prove we were real Muslim worshippers accepted his stilted recitation of Surat al-Fatiha, while chiding me for my modest pants being too tight.

The embankments around Al Aqsa where 🍆 waited while I prayed felt like a too-wide expanse, planar blocks no doubt mixed with so many other places in my memory. I was happy to have a private moment inside. With God, or whatever. Who turned out to be this woman. She told me she came to Al Aqsa every day to sit. Simply sit. To protect the mosque from the soldiers.

Suddenly, or suddenly in my memory, she began listing the seeds I needed to eat to bear a child: Sesame, flax, pomegranate, fenugreek, blessings-seeds . . .

***

We only had half a day or so in Jerusalem, since we were trying to get back to the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea, to the Marriot hotel where 🍆’s parents had a timeshare. After wandering around by the Weeping Wall, we decided we should find our way back to the bus station from which we’d traveled from the border to Bethlehem earlier in the trip. I asked a guy with peyyos for directions to the central bus station, which I later realized was a huge mistake. We thanked him and boarded the bus he pointed out.

It was the third or fourth day of Hannukah, and as the dusk-light dimmed, menorahs shone in every window. A city of flickering light, each house’s eyes mirroring one another. It was extremely beautiful. I understood why these people wanted to live on a land close together. I felt extremely sad. The brown faces with Arab features kept drifting off the bus. It was becoming clear that we weren’t going where we meant to go. Finally, we landed at the terminal stop, the Jerusalem municipal bus station. Fluorescent lights and clean white arches full of Israelis wearing Doc Marten Chelsea-style boots. I had noticed at the border a few days before that all the young IOF soldiers were wearing them, and thought to myself at some point during the nine hours we waited for a visa that, damn, now I could never wear a pair of those boots. Even with the long wait and questions and our cell phones taken at the border to enter, now was when it felt most dangerous. We were still in Jerusalem, but had suddenly found ourselves in a city where we didn’t belong. With my ambiguous features I felt a rush of concern for 🍆 that blended with the urgency to find our way to the border.

The border didn’t close ‘til nine p.m., but we’d been told we needed to get there by six at the latest to catch a bus across. Now we had no idea where we were, and it would be a race to the border. 🍆’s uncle had given him some money because he was coming to visit his special girl, and now we could use it to pay for two taxis, one to the border and another to the hotel. We kept joking about how we’d get room service when we arrived at the hotel, and we did. Neither of us remembers what we ate exactly—some vague memory of salmon and asparagus, cheese and crackers, fruit and nuts . . . whatever it was we definitely ate it in the bath. The hotel sheets were so clean and nice and it felt so good to be on Arab land.

***

March 2017
It is springtime and I am hiking with the Jordan Tramping Team. We are somewhere outside Umm Qais. Sheets of rain. And afterwards the sun, revealing a rainbow ending in Palestine. The border in sight. The grown men I’m with crying: they hadn’t seen a rainbow in 12 years. But how long had it been since they’d been across the border?

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Noor Al-Samarrai is the author of El Cerrito (Inside the Castle, 2018), winner of a 2019 Arab American Book Awards honorable mention, and named “about the best piece of literature I have read in a long time” by late Lithuanian poet and filmmaker Jonas Mekas. Born and raised in California to accidental-immigrants from Iraq, she is currently working on an oral history-based poetry collection documenting the emotional cartography of mid-20th century Baghdad. Noor is proudly d/Deaf and b/Blind.