This is the last installment of my Jerusalem Journal; I was there for a week and the discussions that have gone on here online have extended that experience for another week. However, having gone to the trouble of keeping the journal means my trip will remain for vivid for a good long time to come— barring fire or senility.

People take their politics very seriously here and not just because Jerusalem is the capital -- it's like the whole country is inside the Beltway. There has been much excitement about Sharon's latest attempt to pull out of Gaza and the possibility of a no-confidence vote as the settlers kick up a fuss and the right wingers rally around. The Palestinians we spoke to in the Old City were optimistic and skeptical at the same time; the jailing of one of their leaders a couple of days ago (4 consecutive life sentences) blunted any enthusiasm for the debate in the Parliament. One said, "Jews are so used to ghettoes that they can only see issues in terms of who's locked up behind which fence".

It's tragic that things have come to this. Sequestering the problems of Israel/Palestine behind fences. The Jews are penned between the fence and the deep blue sea; the Arabs between the fence and the River Jordan. It's a "Go to your room" sort of solution. No lessons learned, no compromises strived for, just lock down and shut up. They don't eat pork here and yet both parties can be quite pig-headed.
Meanwhile, we are eating a peaceful lunch in this garden restaurant on the road to Bethlehem: yogurt soup, eggplants and dumplings. There is no fence between my appetite and me.

Thanks to my mother's generosity with her sleeping pills, I have not been a slave to jet lag on this trip. My grandfather tends to go to bed at about 7:30 pm and we tend to follow his example before 10.
Soon after I dropped off on my last night here, the phone rang (an ancient phone that has been repurposed into a wall unit; its bell is unbelievably loud to pierce the old fellow's deafness): Patti calling from New York, fully expecting us to still be up and galavanting. I remained awake after that until almost 2:30 am.

Perhaps they'd read my journal. Or maybe my grandfather was right and my tan made me look Palestinian. When I got to the airport, the first security guy grilled me for what seemed like ten minutes (What were you doing in Israel? Do you speak Hebrew? Why? When did you live here? How many children do you have? Do they speak Hebrew?) Somehow my answers fell short for he put a yellow sticker on each of my bags and on the back of my passport. My bags went through an enormous X-ray machine and emerged with more questions attached. Several earnest young Israelis clustered about me: When did you live in Israel? What was your address? What was the name of the school you attended (miraculously it came to me: Brenner)? Why didn't you get an Israeli passport when you lived here (slowly the whole of my peripatetic autobiography unspooled and I was forced to explain my mother's motivation for taking us globe trotting through out our pre-pubescence)? Is your son learning Hebrew? Why not? Why haven't you been there since your grandmother's funeral twelve years ago? Why don't you visit your grandfather more often...
Then they unpacked my bag and scanned all my dirty laundry for bombs and weapons, unwrapped all my gifts, even wiped down my passport to see if it had come into contact with explosives. I was questioned by six new people (the oldest was maybe 24), then emptied my pockets, extracted my fillings, unscrewed my false leg and went through a metal detector. The man running it checked every inch of my J.Crew belt to see if anything had been buried in its leather.
When I was finally released, my yellow stickers stopped me at every junction. I noticed two Levantine looking boys and they had red stickers on their bags. (Red!) In the gift shop, the duty free, the coffee shop, I was convinced that various undercover people were following and monitoring me.
Finally on the American plane (strike one) flying out of Tel Aviv (strike two) to New York (etc.), I felt safe.