With the world’s attention focused on climate change talks in Copenhagen, where world leaders may or may not reach an agreement by the end of the week, a parallel gathering in Istanbul is exploring practical solutions to the climate challenge. At theEcocity World Summit, the answer to climate change and other environmental, social and even economic problems lies in how we design, build and live in our cities.

“Cities are important as solutions to the climate change challenge,” said Janet Larsen of the Earth Policy Institute. Larsen, who just flew in from Copenhagen, described the negotiations at COP 15 as “a process where every country comes to the table trying to concede as little as possible. We will not solve the problem this way,” she added.

In contrast, city designers (whether they be professional planners, policy-makers or citizen activists) are already addressing the challenge, she said, by changing the way cities function. As examples, she noted a plan to make new homes in EU countriescarbon neutral by 2020, and the Complete Streets movement in the US.

Representing the United States, Parris Glendening of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute exhorted attendees not to “imitate or duplicate what we have done in the US over the past fifty years,” which he described as half a century of subsidized sprawl.

Suggesting that gas prices in the US would spike once again once the minute the worldwide recession ends, Glendening described American suburban communities as place where “residents could literally not survive without their cars.” However, by designing for greater density and walkability in urban forms, Glendening estimated that up to a third of the world’s carbon emissions could potentially be eliminated.

Several of the Turkish speakers noted the enormous challenges facing Istanbul, including internal migration trends that add some half a million new residents to the city every year. And despite ambitious plans, laid out enthusiastically by Dr. Veysel Eroglu, Turkey’s Minister of Environment and Forestry, many of the local speakers expressed their frustrations about the pace of change in the country, pointing out, for example, that green building certification has only been attained thus far by five buildings in Turkey.

Originally published at TreeHugger.com. Photo by Jesse Fox.

An environmental justice organization and a Bedouin village are attempting to create a model of sustainability in the Negev desert.

Qasr Al-Sir: on the verge of momentus change.

After a volunteer accidentally burned down its office, Bustan, an environmental justice organization based in Israel’s Negev desert, decided it was time to make some changes. “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” says Bustan Director Ra’ed Al-Mickawi. With the help of a strategic planning consultant, the organization embarked upon an intensive soul-searching process. “We had to figure out what our role was in the community,” says Al-Mickawi.

To that end, Ra’ed Al-Mickawi conducted a series of interviews with people connected to Bustan’s work, in order to get a sense of the organization’s impact. He concluded that, while Bustan had been making headway, it needed to better focus its efforts. “The choice was between concentrating on one specific field, like agriculture or Permaculture,” he says, “or choosing one model village and working on a variety of projects there.”

Bustan chose the second option, and began looking for a community that might be interested in building such a model. The search led the organization to the Bedouin village of Qasr Al-Sir, an informal settlement in the process of being formally recognized by the state. With participatory democratic structures already in place and a population eager for change, it seemed like a natural fit. And, as the village was no longer considered an informal settlement, building there did not carry the risk of demolition by the authorities.

Today, Bustan and Qasr Al-Sir are planning to create a new model for Bedouin settlement in Israel, one that sets a new standard for sustainability while empowering the community to shape its own future. Their first major project will be the construction of a large community center, built using a combination of traditional and modern green methods. Construction is scheduled to begin later this month.

Kids playing in Qasr Al-Sir.

Qasr Al-Sir today still looks like an informal settlement. Located in a windswept basin, the village lacks basic services such as electricity, sewage, paved roads and water. However, the first signs of new development are already beginning to appear. A new complex of schools was built a couple of years ago, and other public buildings are also going up.

Ra’ed sees great potential in the field of green building. The new community center, he says, will be built by a handful of young people from the village, who have already attended workshops on green building methods. In the future, he hopes the villagers, who will all be rebuilding their homes as part of the redevelopment project, will chose to do so using sustainable materials and methods.

In order to help make that happen, he plans to set up a committee, comprised of a green architect, a social worker and an engineer, to advise residents during the rebuilding process. Green building, he says, will also be an economic solution for the villagers, providing at once a more affordable option for their own homes, as well as new employment opportunities for local youth.

Bustan hopes to leverage the construction of the community center in order to develop a series of additional projects, including attracting solar energy companies to the village and setting up an indigenous tree nursery, run as a women’s cooperative.

The people I met in Qasr Al-Sir, whom seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the changes planned for their village, said they hoped the process would help revitalize their society by restoring the place of the village’s elders and women, bringing back lost values and traditions and providing a positive horizon for the village’s young people.

Asked about the dramatic changes in store, Atiya, who lives next to the future site of the green community center, grinned. “I would be happy living out in the desert, but my children can’t tell the difference between a horse and a donkey. I’m looking forward to the future here. I think everything that’s happening here is for the best.”

Bustan, which defines itself as a Bedouin-Jewish Israeli organization, will hold workshops, tours and conferences as the project progresses to share the lessons of their work and spread the word about ecological initiatives in the Negev. Construction of the community center is expected to last between 3-4 months.

Originally posted at TreeHugger.com. Photos by Daniel Cherrin.

Defying drought, limited resources and occupation, Bustan Qaraaqa is building an ecological oasis in a wadi outside Bethlehem.

The farmhouse. All photos by Jesse Fox.

For a group of British ecologists working in development organizations in the West Bank, researching the sorry state of the Palestinian environment became, at some point, rather unsatisfying.

“We wanted to move from writing reports on environmental destruction and stagnating development to actually doing something about it,” says Alice Gray. Over two years later, the group, along with a handful of volunteers, is creating an ecological oasis in almost impossible conditions.

Doing More with Less

“When we first started building this place, a little over a year ago, everyone around here told us we were crazy,” says Tom, another resident ecologist. “How are you going to grow anything here without water, they asked us. But for us that’s exactly the point – using what we have to show other people what can be done here.”

Founded in April 2008, Bustan Qaraaqa sits in a quiet valley on the outskirts of Beit Sahour, a town near Bethlehem. Alice, Tom and a handful of foreign and local volunteers live here in a century-old stone house (the oldest house in the valley, according to their landlord, whose father built it), surrounded by 14 dunams of land.

Greywater system: water from the sinks and shower is filtered, then used to irrigate a vegetable garden.

It may sound idyllic, but the challenges are immense. Sparse rainfall, creeping desertification, lousy soils and rocky, sloping land, just to name a few. Making matters worse, the region is in the middle of a prolonged drought, and the past couple of years have seen record low rainfall here (although, to my astonishment, I woke up one morning to a light drizzle falling on the farm – quite an unusual experience during the dry Middle Eastern summer).

After just over a year of work on the farm, the place is beginning to take shape. A water cistern, meant to collect the winter rains for use irrigating trees in the summer, sits half-full at the bottom of the valley. Soon it will host a school of tilapia. Swales have been dug in preparation for trees and vegetable gardens on the slopes. A composting toilet, greywater system, and a compost heap are all functional. There was even a chicken coop for a while, until a pack of dogs managed to break into it and eat all the fowl.

Trees for the Community

In the dry heat of the late afternoon, I find Tom, a tall, lanky Brit, lovingly tending to his pet project. The farm’s tree nursery, nestled under a burlap overhang, contains some 120 species of native trees, as well as a few exotic species. Tom collected all of the seeds himself, during his travels through seven different countries.

The tree nursery.

Kneeling down to pick out a weed, Tom lists the benefits that the trees will eventually provide: improved soils, a home for wildlife, a source of animal feed, reduced erosion, medicinal uses, and the list goes on. The trees, among them oaks, carob, acacia, pecan and pistachio, are destined to be planted on the farm’s terraces, and on neighboring farms.

One of Bustan Qaraaqa’s primary goals is to engage and empower the surrounding community. The farm conducts tree-planting workshops, help local farmers during the olive harvest is always looking for new projects. One potential project would involve setting up roof gardens and greywater systems in refugee camps, where food security is a serious issue.

“Individuals and communities have more power than they believe,” says Alice. “The idea here is to turn our lives into an experiment, to explore what people can achieve using simple methods and the basic resources at hand.”

Another big plan involves building constructed wetlands for sewage treatment. As in most of the West Bank, sewage in Bethlehem is not treated in any way. Instead, raw sewage flows into valleys, eventually making its way to the Dead Sea – contaminating the land and water, and destroying the ecosystem along the way.

Bethlehem’s sewage happens to be dumped into two valleys not far from the farm. Using little more than a clever combination of purifying plants and graded terraces, Tom envisions a method of treating the city’s sewage without the need for treatment plants.

While Alice hopes a local farmer will eventually take over the farm, she adds that this is not essential. “The project is much bigger than this site,” she says. “Bustan Qaraaqa’s role is to serve as a demonstration site and to pass on knowledge.”

From the look of things, they are off to a very promising start.

**********

The other side of the story: This story was originally published at TreeHugger.com, where I am not supposed to delve into the morass of Middle Eastern politics. Understandably so, I guess, as even some of my distinctly non-political posts on that site can provoke an avalanche of politically-inflamed comments that often have little to do with the content of the posts themselves.

In any case, since this is my blog and I can write here about whatever I want, I will tell the other side of this story here.

The frame story here, which I could not mention in the original article, is the occupation. As of course we all know, things are exceedingly difficult in the Occupied Territories. This is now new – development has been actively stifled there for quite some time. Life in Beit Sahour, where 1,000 Shekels/month (around $250) is considered a good salary, is apparently made possible by the money sent back to their families by Palestinians living abroad.

(I was surprised to wake up one morning to the sound of a tractor working nearby. I rushed outside, certain I was about to witness a house demolition. Instead, someone was actually building a house. My hosts explained to me that the farm, located in Beit Sahour, is just inside the borders of Area A, where building is allowed.)

The way Alice explained it to me, the Olso framewok set up all sorts of obstacles to development in the West Bank. Sixty percent of the land there remains under full Israeli control, which means everything needs permits from the Israeli authorities. From my experience with the planning system in Israel (which I would say doesn’t exactly guarantee equal rights and adequate protection of the public interest), I can only imagine what it’s like to try to request a permit for something in the Occupied Territories, where the authorities are not accountable to the population in any way.  Thus $270 million, meant for investment in Palestinian sewage projects, is floating around looking for projects, while in practice all the projects are stuck.

Reminders of the occupation are everywhere: in the separation wall which cuts through Bethlehem, in the Bedouin village on the hill whose houses are demolished from time to time, in the raw sewage that flows through the wadis. Tom explained to me that the water system was designed such that the main lines run from Israel to the settlements, with secondary lines providing water to Palestinian locales. Thus, when the water pressure drops in the system, the Palestinians are automatically cut off. It often happens that people in Beit Sahour are forced to go for weeks without any running water. And some 200,000 Palestinians, mostly those who live outside the cities, are not even connected to the water delivery system.

However, as Tom argues in an interview in the Guardian, impossible circumstances make people more receptive to unorthodox solutions. Palestinians live in what is still largely a traditional, agricultural society. With the occupation making water and land scarcer every year, solutions like Permaculture are an essential part of helping Palestinians reduce their dependance on the occupation authorities and become as self-sustaining as possible. “The Cuban model,” they call it on the farm.

Of course, many would argue that you can also fight the occupation, and I don’t think the folks at Bustan Qaraaqa would disagree. Alice, acknowledging the dilemma, told me that every development issue raisies the same question: Do we deal with things as they are, or as they should be? Do we fight for better top-down water service, or collect rainwater and reuse greywater? For the return of land cut off by the separation barrier, or for more intensive agricultural models that make better use of the land at hand?

With the proper distribution of labor, society could probably manage to fight for both. But Bustan Qaraaqa’s ecologists are convinced that, without the clever solutions offered by Permaculture design methods, the West Bank will in short order come to resemble Gaza: a water supply made unusable by contamination, runaway urbanization, overpopulation, collapsed infrastructures and a shortage of agricultural land and open space.

For all their focus on sustainability, these foreign ecologists cannot even be sure that they will still be here in a few months. All are here on 3 month tourist visas, and they are entirely dependant on the goodwill of the Israeli Interior Ministry for their visa renewals. One member of the founding group has already been deported.

Still, their message seems to be slowly catching on. They are forming partnerships with Israeli organizations, such as Bustan, that are working toward similar aims. And ideas like constructed wetlands (which, by the way, may be Greater Bethlehem’s only choice as, requiring no heavy construction, it does not technically require a permit) seem to be catching on. Last month the Jerusalem Post reported on an initiative to build constructed wetlands for wastewater treatment in Palestinian villages.

One can only hope that the folks at Bustan Qaraaqa will succeed in spreading their message of concern for the land, wise use of resources, living modestly and making the best of what we have.

Follow their progress and adventures on Bustan Qaraaqa’s blog, Green Intifada.

Her latest book just released in Hebrew, the author discussed disaster capitalism, Israel and the growing boycott movement.

Naomi Klein, a Canadian journalist and activist and the author of No Logo, was in Israel-Palestine last week to promote the publication of the Hebrew and Arabic translations of her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Accompanied by her husband, journalist Avi Lewis, Klein spoke in Haifa, Ramallah and Jaffa, visited Jerusalem and Gaza and participated in the weekly protest against the separation wall in Bil’in.

Her appearance early on a Saturday morning at the Arabic-Hebrew Theater in Old Jaffa was somewhat low-key, apparently publicized only on a few leftist websites and blogs, as well as on Facebook.

Disaster Capitalism

Klein began by briefly discussing the idea behind the book. The Shock Doctrine, she said, is a book about “disaster capitalism,” a term which can be loosely defined as a neoliberal political-economic strategy that exploits a society’s sense of shock in the aftermath of traumatic events to push through a radical agenda of free-market capitalism, privatization and deregulation.

The book traces the origins of the strategy from Latin America’s military coups through Thatcherism and the post-Cold War era in the West to the aftermaths of more contemporary shocks, such as 9/11, Iraq and the Asian tsunami.

The idea for the book, Klein said, came to her during the invasion of Iraq. Seeing how the invasion paved the way for an avalanche of “blank slate” economic policies, hastily imposed by an unelected leadership, Latin American friends of hers were struck by the similarity to their own national histories. “They did this to us,” they told Klein, who was in Argentina shooting a documentary at the time.

“Our elites exist in a state of acute disaster preparedness,” Klein told the Jaffa audience. Not, however, the kind of emergency preparedness that would have been useful in the aftermath of, say, Hurricane Katrina. Instead, governments, corporations and power brokers worldwide, said Klein, lie in wait for crisis situations – situations in which they believe they can get away with things that they couldn’t under normal circumstances.

Take the “War on Terror,” for example. A lousy political strategy, says Klein, but an excellent business plan, the War on Terror leveraged the shock of 9/11 to create a new framework for tech companies, devastated by the dot.com bubble, to recast themselves as security firms. Often, this was possible with only minor changes to the technologies or services being offered. Indeed, the “homeland security” industry, which barely existed a decade ago, is today a significant and growing market, with ongoing wars in places like Iraq providing a host of business opportunities for the well-connected.

Israel as a Warning?

Israel, for better or for worse, plays a starring role in The Shock Doctrine. The final chapter of the book, ominously titled “Losing the Peace Incentive,” describes Israel as the prototype of a disaster capitalist state.

Not so long ago, said Klein, in the early 1990′s, Israel’s business and industrial leadership were still actively lobbing the government to negotiate some sort of peace with the country’s neighbors. The violence and chaos of the First Intifada were considered bad for business, so supporting peace was the natural alternative.

By the early 2000′s, however, Israel’s economy was in the dumps, reeling from the bursting of the dot.com bubble and the uncontrollable violence of the Second Intifada. The Israeli government responded by pouring money into the military, which then served as a kind of business incubator for Israeli communication, security and surveillance firms.

Once out of the military, many Israelis took the knowledge they had gained to create new start-ups, which were perfectly positioned to take advantage of the homeland security boom after the attacks of 9/11 made counterterrorism a top priority in the US. The Israeli leadership, seeing the opportunity, was quick to point out Israel’s long experience with such things, rebranding the Israeli security sector as the industry leader.

While this may seem like simply a clever business strategy, Klein sees it as a dangerous threat to the prospect of peace.

In every country where the population has eventually risen up against oppression, she said, it was because of two factors: the loss of a feeling of normalcy and prolonged economic hardship.

In Israel’s case, “bubbles of normalcy like Tel Aviv” substitute for genuine normalcy, and the hardships resulting from ongoing conflict are born by one side only, while the other side actually profits from it. In this situation, the worst case scenario for economic interests is for peace to break out (what will happen to our comparative advantage?). Or as a former businessman told Klein in Gaza: “For Israel, peace is a luxury.”

This extends to the production of culture, which according to Klein has been co-opted by the State for its own purposes. Israel has a new branding strategy that asks the world to get “beyond the conflict” and see the other side of Israel. As part of the strategy, the country has tried to create a different image for itself. Israeli models in bikinis posing for men’s magazines, for example, or the construction of a Tel Aviv-esque beach in New York’s Central Park.

The Boycott Movement

This is where the talk turned to the boycott (officially: Boycott, Divestment, Sactions), which Klein described as a non-violent Palestinian resistance strategy meant to isolate Israel in the international arena, similar to the boycott of apartheid-era South Africa. Klein supports the boycott, and tried to convince her Israeli audience to support it as well.

As she explained it, the boycott strategy does not mean ostracizing Israelis. The idea is to avoid contact with official Israeli institutions. Thus instead of publishing the Hebrew version of her book with a large, commercial publishing house, Klein found a small, activist publisher called Andalus, which translates works of Arabic literature into Hebrew as an “act of resistance.” Klein donated the rights to her book in Hebrew to Andalus, thus supporting a cultural project that she believes in while “boycotting the Israeli economy, but not Israelis.”

By supporting BDS, Klein wants to send the message that Israel is not a normal place, and should not be treated as one. In an interview with Haaretz ahead of her visit, Klein said:

“The State of Israel is trying to show that everything is fine in its territory, that it’s possible to spend a nice vacation here or to be part of Western culture, very Western culture. I don’t want to be a part of that. I am waiting impatiently for the time when I will be able to come for a vacation or a normal book launch in Tel Aviv. But this is a privilege that should be reserved for all the inhabitants.”

Klein, who presented the boycott as external pressure meant to help the Israeli Left bring about change from within, has found it to be a tough sell among Israelis. Israeli Jews are the “missing piece,” she said, yet they “are not accepting this in the spirit of cooperation and movement-building.”

The audience, some 100+ people, mostly Ashkenazi, very leftist-looking, and squashed into a domed, ancient Arab structure converted into a theater, showed no overt enthusiasm for Klein’s call to support the boycott. In Israel, a country where many feel that the entire world is against them in any case, convincing people to boycott themselves will probably take a bit more convincing.

Still, Klein’s books sold like hotcakes, and not just because they were being offered at a discount. The Shock Doctrine is a milestone in the intellectual effort to understand the neoliberal age, and its translation into Hebrew will make it accessible to an audience in a country where neoliberalism is still very much alive and kicking.

By putting Israel’s own sophisticated disaster capitalism complex in the international context, the book will hopefully lead Israeli readers to new insights about the political and economic policy choices made by their leaders. And if the concepts explored in the book manage to penetrate Israel’s cacophonous political discourse, Klein will have made a huge contribution toward bringing about internal change in Israeli society.

“You know, my cousin is from Gaza.” Really, I ask? “Yes, he was killed by an Israeli bomb last week.” I try not to choke on my pita. “He had 23 kids, from one wife! Four of the boys are commandos, Hamas.”

The flight from Tel Aviv to Amman lasts a mere 25 minutes. Worlds apart in the mental geography of the Middle East, in fact the two cities are astonishingly close. Familiar landscapes whiz by below, first the towns of Israel’s coastal plain, then Jerusalem, the West Bank and the deserts of Jordan.

I have an afternoon in Amman ahead of me, a stopover on the way to a conference in the United Arab Emirates.

My two traveling companions, a Yemenite Israeli and his Australian girlfriend, have an even longer stopover. They are on their way to do some backpacking in the Far East, and after that to Australia. They have a hotel room waiting for them not far from the airport, but they decline my offer to join me in Amman for the afternoon. “Now’s not a good time,” they tell me.

I have to concede the point. War has been raging in Gaza for weeks now, with plenty of civilian casualties. In Israel, people are mostly supportive of the war. But in the rest of the world, especially the Arab world, people are angry. I bid goodbye to the couple and wish them the best.

Driving into Amman in a taxi, my new fellow traveler is an Indian-Canadian real estate agent based in New York. He was in Israel drumming up interest in some residential project in Manhattan, and has also decided to spend his afternoon layover in town. He introduces himself as “Mike.”

“Eh, my brotha,” Mike strikes up a conversation with our taxi driver, Khaled, “how are the rents in Amman, eh? How much you pay here for a big apartment?” The driver responds, in spotty but understandable English, that housing prices in Amman are intolerably high. Hundreds of dollars a month for a large apartment, which are apparently in great demand here due to the size of the families, and a couple hundred bucks even for a small studio apartment.

I wonder out loud how much money they make here in a month. Not much, says Khaled, “No petrol in Jordan. Tourists – our petrol,” and begins a discussion on “good” American tourists (who take taxis to the Dead Sea and Petra and tip generously) versus “bad” Saudi tourists (who head straight from the airport to the bars and nightclubs and are parsimonious tippers).

“Apartments here very expensive,” says Khaled, returning to the previous discussion, and exits the highway. He offers to drive us through Amman’s luxury neighborhood, an offer which Mike enthusiastically accepts. The neighborhood looks like a pleasant neighborhood in northern Jerusalem, while the rest of the city more closely resembles East Jerusalem, its buildings covered in Jerusalem stone and framed by scruffy pines.

“Brutha, how many wives you got?” Mike asks Khaled, overflowing with tact. Khaled has apparently heard the question before, and he’s got a witty answer ready. “Only one, and look what I have from her,” he responds, pointing to his balding pate.

As we get further into town, the landscape begins to look vaguely familiar. I was here once before, several years ago. The only landmark that I remember from that visit is the enormous Roman amphitheater in the city center. Not surprisingly, Khaled chooses that very spot to drop us off. On my way out of the cab, he hands me his business card, which is textured and gold embossed, and suggests that I call him on my way back to the airport in a few hours. Mike and I part ways, and I head up the street in search of something to eat.

The streets here are bustling, and the shop fronts are full of color. Arab women’s clothing, water pipes, all sorts of belts, canes and dark men’s suits, all of which contrast starkly with the monotonous grayness of the buildings. As I make my way up the streets, scents waft out from the storefronts: za’atar, coffee, falafel, cashews.

Traffic here is also lively, with seemingly endless traffic jams clogging up the streets, which for some reason lack painted lanes. The drivers, however, seem relatively calm, and there is none of the obnoxious beeping of Cairo or even Tel Aviv.

On the recommendation of a young man working in a hole-in-the-wall kiosk, I duck into a restaurant in a narrow alley off one of the main streets. This is the oldest and best restaurant in Amman, a large middle aged man tells me. He is seated across from the cash register, doling out orders to a staff of Egyptian waiters, but keeping an eye on the television in the corner of the restaurant, where Al Jazeera is broadcasting scenes of bombs falling in Gaza.

“Where are you from?” he asks me. I tell him I’m American. “We don’t hate the American people,” he tells me. “Only the government. Because they help Israel.”

Everyone with whom I exchanged more than two sentences in Amman wanted to let off steam about the war in Gaza. My being a foreigner, and an American at that, made me the perfect address. My girlfriend made me promise that I would pose as a Canadian while in Amman. I should have listened to her.

The man introduces himself as Ibrahim, and tells me his cousin is the owner of the place. The King eats here often, he goes on, pointing proudly to an extensive gallery of framed pictures on the wall. Outside, King Abdullah’s pictures are everywhere – the King smiling, the King in uniform, the King shaking hands with someone – and so are pictures of his wife.

As Ibrahim continues to chat me up, my food arrives. This is one of those places where there is only one choice on the menu. Falafel balls, hummus, foul, a large warm pita, hot tea and some chopped onions with mint leaves, all drenched in olive oil, lemon and garlic. Quite the feast actually, and I’m starved.

I only manage to enjoy a couple bites, however, before Ibrahim begins talking about the war in Gaza. “One thousand, two hundred and three.” He reads me the Palestinian body count, according to Al Jazeera. “You know, my cousin is from Gaza.” Really, I ask? “Yes, he was killed by an Israeli bomb last week.” I try not to choke on my bite of pita. “He had 23 kids, from one wife! Four of the boys are commandos, Hamas.”

As it turns out, Ibrahim is one of those people, and there are many, many of them, for whom the abstract politics of the Middle East has had very personal consequences. While his friends and relatives in Gaza were killed by Israeli bombs, his girlfriend of 10 years, as he calls her, a young German woman studying in Jerusalem, was killed by a Palestinian suicide attacker.

Ibrahim spends his summers working in Aqaba, he tells me, where he works with tourists, and that is how he met and fell in love with a tall, blond German woman. He even went to Germany, to meet her rich father. Losing her made him crazy, he says.

The conversation goes from heavy to light. Down in Aqaba, they call me Adonis, Ibrahim says, a nickname from an old romance with a Greek woman. I used to have so many adventures down there, before I became a good Muslim, he says with a wink. He invites me to stick around after I finish eating, but I’m no longer in the mood. I ask for my check, which comes out to 1.5 Dinars for the entire thing, about two dollars. “Expensive?” laughs Ibrahim, and wishes me the best.

My flight is still hours away, but it’s starting to get dark and chilly, so I head back to the Roman ruins hoping to find Mike and maybe share a cab with him back to the airport. But he’s not there, so I catch a cab by myself.

Thinking ahead, I had asked Khaled, how to say airport in Arabic. “Al matar,” I tell the driver. He seems to understand me, and we have even settled on a price when the driver suddenly dials someone up on his cell phone. “Here, English,” he tells me. The voice on the other end: “Hello. You are going to the airport?” Yes, I say. “Where are you from?” America. “What do you think about what happens in Gaza?” I’m not happy about it. “My cousin, the driver, wants 20 dinars.” Ok, I tell him.

This driver, R., apparently loves Americans. Despite speaking about as much English as I speak Arabic, he is dying to chat. He keeps saying something that sounds like “babzi, babzi.” After seeing the blank stare on my face, he pulls up beside a kiosk. “Babzi?” he says, making a drinking motion. I politely refuse, but he disappears into the kiosk and returns, all smiles, with two Pepsis and two chocolate bars in his hand. With any doubt, I think to myself, this is the first time a taxi driver has ever offered me refreshments for the ride.

In my honor, he finds a radio station playing American music, bland easy listening tunes, and looks back in the mirror for my reaction. I smile appreciatively. From what I manage to gather from our conversation in broken English and Arabic, he loves Americans because he served in the Jordanian army with American soldiers, or something like that. Then again, I probably misunderstood.

During the long ride, a woman repeatedly calls R.’s cell phone, each time drawing agitated yelling from R. The phone rings again. “Madame,” he tells me, indicating that it’s his wife again, and rolls his eyes.

Back at the airport, it seems the restrooms are constantly in a state of being cleaned. Next to every restroom I pass stands a guy patiently holding a mop. After someone walks in, soiling the perpetually wet floor, the guy goes over it again with the mop.

At the entrance to the flight gate, a small roadblock has been erected in front of the x-ray machine. Four young men sit on the other side, drinking coffee. What’s going on, I gesture to them, can I pass? No passage right now, say their gestures, sit down and wait, which I do.

Men napping in the airport while they wait for their flight.

I am gradually joined by more and more passengers, all chatting in Arabic. I keep hearing the word “Hamas.” Apparently here too the prime topic of conversation is the war in Gaza.

I wander over to a café advertising free wireless internet. On the newsstand, a Jordanian newspaper displays an Israeli flag and a Nazi flag, with an “=” between them. Below this image is the word “Holocaust.” On closer inspection, the image is actually a photo of a banner carried by someone in a protest against the war in Gaza, but the message is clear. The editorial page actually features a cartoon of a senior Israeli politician drinking blood, and here too Arabic news channels broadcast harrowing scenes from Gaza in an endless loop on the café’s televisions.

After another surprisingly short flight, I finally make it to my hotel room in the UAE at around 3:30 in the morning, local time. I immediately check the news channels to see what’s going on back in Israel, which now feels quite far away.

Unilateral ceasefire to begin in half hour, read the headline.