How resilient human beings may be.

Sam Bahour is a good example. The Youngstown, Ohio native now lives in Ramallah with his family. A hybrid American like so many of us, Sam was born to a Palestinian Muslim father and a Lebanese Maronite Christian mom. Mother’s milk was concern for the homelands; he was weaned from American news coverage of the region to the reality of on-the-ground experiences beginning in 1987. As Americans, he and the interested personal and business colleagues who came with him were free to move from the Golan to Gaza. There were none of the checkpoints and walls that cripple crossover and contact today. An IT professional he was particularly interested in opportunities for telecommunications as laid out by the Oslo accords.

Technology isn’t Sam’s only nightmare. When he came as a US
citizen on an Israeli tourist visa he had to leave every three months, turn
around, get a new visa and come back. This not only to maintain his economic
development enterprise, but also to be with his family. Because he married a
local Palestinian woman.
After 15 years of three-month visas the Israeli government
finally stamped “last permit” into his passport. Now it was time to get
residency. Details of that pursuit I’ll save for a documentary film. Suffice it
to say that finally he got his Palestinian ID – a guarantee as much as anything
is guaranteed in this world to remain with his family. But the trade off is a
new set of obstacles.
He pulls his wallet out for show and tell: on any given day
he needs to present up to five documents to go anywhere, conduct business, and
validate his presence. That’s a tough row to hoe for an American accustomed to
First Amendment rights.
“You can see the wall, the lines, the checkpoints, the
soldiers,” he told us in an airy café atop a Ramallah hill. During the evenings this place hosts poets
and philosophers -- a wanna-be French Left Bank and New York’s Greenwich
Village. “But you can’t see the restricted airwaves, aquifers, and
administration.”
Ramallah is a town of visible dual and triple narratives;
people finding, defining and fighting for identities; a town that’s hamstrung
by past and present realities that yearns for a future it is just beginning to
taste.
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