A Canadian Architect in Ramallah

It is important to understand both sides of any conflict, but that doesn't mean being neutral.

I’ve been living here in Ramallah since October. My wife is a filmmaker and convinced me that a year off in the West Bank was just the break I needed from my job as an architect. She caught me at the right time. I had just finished a project in the urban metropolis of Innisfil, Ontario, spending my time making sure concrete was being poured in the right place, expressing my outrage at the lack of weekly progress on the construction site, and feigning interest in small town politics. I actually love architecture, but after 10 years of working architect’s hours (i.e. long), and three years of driving to Innisfil every Thursday, I was willing to be convinced to go anywhere.

I am not an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My wife is Jewish, but I am Mennonite. Mennonites are a small 17th-century Protestant sect very few people have even heard of, and if they have, they assume I am not allowed to wear clothing with zippers and my parents have a horse and buggy parked in their driveway. While the Amish are our distant cousins, my family in Winnipeg was fairly normal. I grew up in Winnipeg in the '70s like most middle-class kids, with a wood-paneled station wagon, a couple of cats, and neighbours who played ball hockey with us in our shared driveway. Yet while we happily lived in the world of processed cheese and Walt Disney on Sunday nights, we also went to Mennonite schools, shopped at the Mennonite grocery store, and carted off to Sunday school every week. Not only that, there were a few rules which ensured the fun factor stayed low, such as no dancing and no drinking. Besides discouraging us from "doing it," rules like these separated "us" from "them" and gave us a moral superiority to compensate for all the good times we were missing.

The one cool thing about being Mennonite, however, was the "no guns" rule, but as I learned, that had its own inconsistencies. Mennonites believe in pacifism and for this (and the heretical concept of adult baptism), they were kicked around Europe, landing in Russia in the 18th century where Catherine the Great gave them protection and land. Things were not always so wonderful in Russia, though, especially after the Russian Revolution when their lucrative land was turned into collective farms. My family hung in there until the Second World War, when the Germans briefly occupied Russia. Being ethnically German and never really embraced by their Russian countrymen, they were pretty happy to see this invading army. It’s at this point that the story becomes fairly complicated, especially when telling it to Jews. Although the Germans "liberated" them, they were really only interested in the men for their dwindling armies – the women and children were left to fend for themselves, and, as my grandmother tells it, this was no picnic in the middle of war-torn Ukraine (the Jews seem to agree). Despite being pacifists, both of my grandfathers ended up in the army – a matter of life or death they say – claiming they never killed anyone or fought in battle. Yet the unvarnished truth is that they probably had uniforms with swastikas on them. In the meantime, my grandmothers were trying to get the hell out of Dodge. My mother and grandmother were sent to the god-forsaken interior of Siberia, a move by Stalin to disperse the German colonies. My paternal grandmother managed to trek out of Russia and through Poland with her four children (and a lame horse). We know some of the things that happened on this trek and it is more than a long sad story….

But back to Palestine….

On my first trip to Israel/Palestine, Elle (the wife) decided we would combine a visit to the Holocaust museum with my first trip to the West Bank – otherwise known as a recipe for making one’s head explode. We had spent some time in West Jerusalem, which seemed pretty great to me – warm and golden, familiar but completely foreign-feeling. Subconsciously I assumed Ramallah was a day’s drive away, but in 15 minutes the world of mostly white people, European-style cafes, and organized traffic changed to brown people, potholes and barbed wire with plastic bags stuck to it. But for the wall, checkpoints and soldiers, driving to Ramallah from Jerusalem was closer than a trip to Ikea from downtown Toronto. For the first time I felt like I had reached the Middle East.

Yad Vashem, the holocaust museum, is built like a knife buried in the earth. Once you descend, you are led along a tightly controlled path, reading statistic after statistic and story after story of the horrors of the holocaust. In the end, you are left with a very complete picture of the enormity of this genocide, and emerge into what is a massive view of the hills and a beautifully framed view as the picture to end the story: Israel as homeland for the Jews. But in this picture of the land, if you look really closely, you can see Palestine. Having just come from Ramallah, through the wall, another deep scar in the landscape, the picture of the beautiful Jerusalem valley was now complicated by what I knew was in the distance and maybe even closer than I thought. Like all real stories, nothing is simple.

Living here now in the West Bank, we have heard lots of Palestinian sad stories: stories about refugees and invasions, prison time, home demolitions, and more. Not only have we heard the stories, we have our own now, about our landlady who can’t get a permit to visit her sister in Haifa, the new settlements we see under construction everywhere in the West Bank, how the Palestinian Authority seems to be doing Israel’s dirty work for them, and the baker whose six children were killed in the bombing of Gaza. Am I getting the full story? There’s always a story behind the story, and maybe even another one behind that.

But it is also impossible to not have an opinion….