The Morning Commute

The author of this piece, Ali Berlow, was a participant on the RHR-NA Human Rights Mission to Israel and the West Bank last November and wrote this piece, which was inspired by a coffee vendor at the checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, while on the trip.  

The Morning Commute

November 27, 2008

A man sells coffee and tea on the street. From under his moustache, a gold tooth glimmers in an easy smile. His makeshift shop lies at the base of a high metal fence that's laced with razor wire like icing on a cake. The fence protects a building whose very foundation was built on the fault lines of fear. Though devoid and sterile it still breeds like roaches more fear and its ugly offspring, hate. This stony ediface is a checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. While I stand inside I think this is a land of hard things, Israel. Softness is steam from the hot drinks the man outside pours and just as ethereal.

In the lost hours of pre-dawn mornings, he brews thick Turkish coffee in an elegant cone-shaped pot etched with exotic design. Its spout arches, opening up like a petal in bloom. The long straight handle is wrapped in duct tape meant to shield his calloused hands from burns. A few squat stainless steel teapots boil water like engines over a charcoal grill that's held up on either end by blocks of Jerusalem stone blackened from use.

His morning rush is over by the hour the dawn breaks into long shadows once the sun has finally risen high enough to begin to warm the coldest of desert nights. His customers come from the other side - from Bethlehem into Jerusalem, from Palestine into Israel. They've waited a long time and they are thirsty.

Starting at 3am, 4am, every work day, thousands of commuters stand en masse on the Bethlehem-side to funnel one by one, through this structure dedicated to the bureaucracies of security: paperwork, permits, magnetic id cards and the harsh realities of today's guarded zones: metal detectors, body searches, handscans and no toilets.

Everyday the most heavily-armed are ordered to hover and keep watch from up above, pacing on their paths of steel.

Everyday his customers are routed through the deepening abyss of separation in order to work, to go to school, to get health care, to pray at the holiest of sites.

Everyday his customers pass by a thick glassed-in booth and are spoken to in foreign tongue through muffled intercoms or loud bullhorns - dividing ever-more both natives by language and by culture, the Arab and the Jew.

Ali Berlow is also the author of A Cook's Notebook, Reflections on Food and Life, which can be found at http://www.cooksnotebook.com/