Seeking Palestine by Penny (ed.) Johnson & Raja Shehadeh

Author:Penny (ed.) Johnson & Raja Shehadeh [Johnson, Penny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781566569064
Publisher: Interlink Publishing Group Inc

REMA HAMMAMI

Home and Exile

in East Jerusalem

Sheikh Jarrah

For more than twenty years I’ve lived on a small stretch of the Nablus Road in Sheikh Jarrah, making the neighborhood my most constant home. I moved in a penniless graduate student in the late 1980s and found an apartment in a nondescript mid-century building that I shared with a series of grad students and solidarity workers who were as poorly dressed and penniless as I was. Recklessly, I had chosen Gaza as the place to do my fieldwork in anthropology, a year after it had exploded in the first uprising’s fog of tear gas and black tire smoke. The only way I could make it through a week of Gaza’s heavy mix of Intifada violence and social repression was by knowing that on my horizon were a few days in the little apartment on the Nablus Road where I could grab some oxygen, a few sips of Gold Star beer, and remember what it was like to have bare arms. Sheikh Jarrah was a haven, but a rather odd one.

A neighborhood of Arab East Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah ambles over two hills cut in the middle by a wadi with its three main quarters determined by this topography. The quarter on its southern hill is home to the American Colony Hotel and the mosque and tomb of the eponymous Sheikh Jarrah. In the wadi are the mythical tomb of Simon the Just (actually the resting place of Julia Sabine, a Roman woman) and the now infamous settler takeovers of Palestinian refugee family homes. My quarter, on the northern hill (sometimes called “upper Sheikh Jarrah”), is home to turn-of-the-century family mansions that mirror those lost to Israel when it took the western part of the city in 1948, as well as to a handful of foreign consulates that survived Israel’s arrival on this side of town in 1967.

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