‘Safe’ and ‘Unsafe’ in the Old City

At breakfast I was talking with a few students about the Old City. I said that I found the streets to be tense and the others were surprised at this comment.
‘Where in the Old City do you mean? Do you visit the Arab Quarters?’ one of them asked. I nodded.
‘Well that’s why: they want to kill you; that’s why you find it tense.’
After a moment of shock, I tried to explain that I had been there several times and I had never felt threatened, but I was repeatedly cut off with assurances that it was dangerous and we shouldn’t go there. They were not interested in seeing and experiencing the other side. For them, the Jewish Quarter was the Old City.

After breakfast, I decided to live dangerously: I took a bus to the Old City. There were several aspects of danger to my trip: (1) I was alone; (2) I was travelling on a bus; (3) the bus had several stops in Arab areas; and (4) my intended destination was the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. All these things we had been explicitly warned about. Needless to say, I returned to the campus (where I am staying) unharmed.

Like me, a number of the students are ignoring many of the warnings we have been given, but many are not. Several who had originally planned to visit certain places have rethought their plans, which had seemed so harmless yet now seemed full of dangers. I find this regrettable. I understand that there are reasons behind the warnings we have been given, and that things have taken place in the past which substantiate them, but it’s just another way to separate and alienate people. The barriers here are not just physical (in the form of the separation barrier that we can see from campus, cutting off the West Bank), they are also mental.

I went from Mount Scopus to the Muslim Quarter, I bought some mint and sage from a Palestinian woman, I looked through some of the shops, and then I left again – all without being stabbed or threatened. The only comment directed at me from anyone was ‘asalaam iw-alaykum’ (‘peace be upon you’).