Meetings meetings and more meetings

My god, I’m tired. My project suddenly gained momentum this week, with the scheduling of two meetings for today, one with the refugee coordinator from the US Consulate, and the other with Azzam Al-Ahmed, the PLO official who is basically in charge of the case we’re working on.

The US Consulate appointment was probably the less important meeting out of the two, but it ended up being the more informative one. I think the best part was that she was being very candid with us, and not as ridiculously diplomatic as I expected. She emphasized that “the US is doing all that it can to help the situation”, but was also honest about what the political restrictions are that they face when trying to open resettlement options for the Palestinian refugees.

2 Geo-Political Side Note:
1. Unfortunately, due to US security restrictions she wasn’t able to meet us within the West Bank, so only the 3 students who live in Jerusalem were able to make her meeting. Just as a side note, the problem with my fourth student was that he lives in Ramallah and as a PA ID card, and no Palestinians are allowed entry into Israel. I’m still not sure how the rights of a Palestinian with an Israeli ID card works either, but as far as I know, there are parts of the west bank they aren’t allowed entry into either. More details once I ask around and figure that out.

2. O, so here’s another tidbit about Jerusalem I figured out today. I was constantly confused as to where the line was between East and West Jerusalem, considering that both parts are on the Israeli side of the wall. I was told before that the East was cut off bc of the Wall, but then again, it’s not like you literally see a wall going through the middle of the city. Yes, that’s what I was expecting to see. I should have known better, considering I highly doubt a wall in a middle of a city would be good for tourism.

SO Basically: Just like any other city, Jerusalem has neighborhoods and surrounding villages that are considered part of Jerusalem. The Wall cut off some of the outlying villages and separated them from the main city ie. Abu Dis (where my university is located), still is theoretically part of East Jerusalem. So, within the Israeli part of Jerusalem, East and West Jerusalem is still differentiated as well. Roughly, one can say that around the New Gate, the city switches from one area to the other. The East is more populated by Arabs, in a very nice Old City type of way, while the West is a bit more, well westernized, with the typical European type feel to it.

Now back to my meetings. In the evening two of my students (one was student who wasn’t allowed into Jerusalem) and I went to meet with Azzam. It was an interesting meeting to say the least. He automatically told our self appointed translator that he was going to be translating everything into English for me, because Azzam wanted to speak in Arabic and thus the interview turned more into a conversation between him and my two students. I tried really hard to keep it on point, we would have loved to sit and chat, but we did have some important question to ask him. Of which I have to say, a few were automatically turned back into personal questions against me, such as, “why do you care about a few thousand people there, when there are many more refugees living right here???” If you know me, you know I didn’t take to it very well, but answered it as PC as possible.

In the end, we still managed to get most of our questions answered, and heard a lot about how it’s my country’s fault the refugees are in as bad of a situation they are. Typical how just earlier in the morning we heard how it’s the PLO’s fault the refugees are still sitting around. Don’t worry, we expected this.