9/11 Ten Years Later

9/11 Ten Years Later

Today is the tenth anniversary of 9/11. When I scanned the news online this morning, every website hosted a tribute to the fallen, remembrance slideshow, or live blog coverage of today’s ceremony at Ground Zero.  Like everyone else, I remember exactly where I was that Tuesday morning.

I was thirteen; eighth grade had just started and since our school was under construction, PE classes were bussed across town to play soccer at the Newport Recreation Society’s field. As we boarded the bus to return to school, I heard my gym teacher lean over us and say to the bus driver: “Did you hear? They bombed the pentagon! The terrorists.”

I hardly knew what the words meant at the time, but I knew enough that after school ended, I went straight home and watched planes fly into buildings for hours on repeat. That image has been burning in our collective unconscious for ten years now. I wonder if I will remember this day, ten years from now.

Today I came to Jerusalem. The two days I spent here as part of Birthright just didn’t seem sufficient, so I have come to spend two more.

Security seemed high today, but maybe it’s always like this when you travel apart from a tour. I’ve been through four metal detectors today. My backpack has been searched and X-rayed a half dozen times between Tel Aviv and my hostel here in the Old City. At the door to most of the nice restaurants and cafes, men with pistols stand guard.

Everywhere I go I am reminded that I’m walking around a city that has seen more terrorist attacks in the past ten years than anywhere else in the world.  It’s a fact that everyone here acknowledges, yet somehow they manage to go about their lives regardless. The prevailing attitude seems to be: You can’t stop living your life just because someone wants to hurt you, so just live. 

I just can’t stop thinking of what the U.S. would do if Mexican drug cartels started firing rockets into Houston day in and day out. Somehow I think we’d react stronger than the Israelis do.

But then again, we don’t live side by side with people who discredit our right to exist. That becomes clear this night.  I am spending the night on a rooftop. What at first seemed a romantic and cheap option: sleeping over the Old City, a beautiful view and the sweet smell of the night air with a sunrise alarm clock, turns out to be a little less than comfortable. The hostel gives you a mattress and blankets while you fight for floor space. I haven’t packed long pants or shirt, having been used to Tel Aviv’s heat and humidity. The dessert night wind rips through my thin blanket and shirt all night; I’m shivering before the sun ever sets.

I wake once, twice, a dozen times through the night. It seems that every time I shut my eyes a fresh blast of cold wind cuts through me to the bone. It doesn’t help that in the distance, across the clearly visible wall separating Jerusalem and the West Bank, I can hear shots ringing through the air.

It could be nothing, but I have the sneaking suspicion that hey are celebratory shots. A decade anniversary is not lightly considered, by either side. And with that word, I feel like I’ve touched upon the strand of thought that has plagued me this entire trip and throughout this entire long night. Whether I like it or not, I am on a side.

I was stopped three times today trying to walk towards the Dome of the Rock. I knew what I was doing, I knew that I wasn’t allowed that time of day, yet I some how hoped my dark skin and features could get me in. The Israeli police spotted me a mile away. I’m a Jew, not an Arab. “You’re not allowed on this side.”

Yet in the morning, it’s not the sun that wakes me, as expected. It’s a twin peal of religious zeal. The hostel is flanked by both a church and a mosque. At six o’clock they both go about calling their masses to prayer. The church bell rings once, twice, three times, the gong shaking the floor through my thin mattress. Simultaneously, a man in the mosque gets on the loudspeaker to start his chant. His overdriven, microphone distorted radio voice doesn’t stop for fifteen minutes.

It’s beautiful in a restless sort of way.