The bizarre power of Palestine

A week ago already I arrived back in Palestine. When the plane hit the ground I knew I was really back, I immediately felt the way I felt during my first visit to the holy land. It's hard to explain this feeling and I can not describe it other than the familiar feeling of Palestine.

It was weird to see that nothing had changed and that I recognized everything... as if I have two separate lives and I just took up my Palestinian life exactly the way I left it when I went back to Holland. The only thing that I needed to do was to remove the thin layer of dust it had collected in these two months. Everything just came back up, as if I have a drawer inside my soul with the tag Palestine on it. As if I just had to switch this button on to continue exactly where I had stopped. As if I hadn't had a life in Holland in the meantime.... that life immediately went into the background, to be shelfed and preserved for six months.

I've been telling many people that there's something magical about this country and I don't know why, when or how, but in the past week I've had so many little remarkable experiences that only underline this feeling.

Even the weeks before I went I had this. I randomly met a Palestinian guy in this bar in Rotterdam, in a very bizarre way and it turned out that his father lives in Nablus. It was kind of weird when I told this unexpecting guy that is exactly where I'm planning to spend the next coming six months. One of his friends is from Ramallah and when we began to talk it turned out that he used to live within a range of a 100m. from the place where I used to stay in Ramallah.

Then when I showed some facebook pictures of my previous trip the first guy recognized the girl that I tried to protect from haressment by Israeli settlers in Hebron. She used to work for his brother.

In Jerusalem this week I was looking at some books in a bookstore in East-Jerusalem when this woman started talking to my back in Dutch. At first I didn't even realize she was talking to me, or let alone that she was speaking Dutch. It turned out to be Meta Floor who had helped me out in Jerusalem during my first visit. Weeks before I had also seen her in Utrecht walking by the office of my internship organisation. At the first day of my arrival in Palestine last June, she asked me if wanted to join her for dinner with this local Palestinian family. I hesitated at first, because I had planned to call my classmate Elize to meet up in the old city. When we walked in to that house I was amazed to see Elize sitting on the couch of that family... apparently she was friends with the daughter of that family. In the weeks thereafter I managed to occassionally run into Meta twice in the streets of Jerusalem.

Yesterday I was walking in Ramallah when all of sudden I heard someone saying: Hey Nelleke. I looked up and it was Robert from the Dutch Palestine Committee, the organisation that has send me out to volunteer in Nablus. I even had no idea that he was in Palestine. He asked me if I knew this woman called Trees. I had just received this email of Olives & Tulips for Dutch people and Palestine and there was her name as well... but I had no idea who she was. He told me that it should be really helpful for me to meet her one day. All of a sudden he just ran across the street, just avoiding this car, to stop this woman. As it turned out it was the woman he had just been telling me about: Trees. She seemed familiar to me, but I couldn't place it. I assumed that I might have met her during my last stay. At the end of the conversation Robert mentioned that she is from Sahnin... and all of a sudden it rang a bell. A week before I went to Palestine I had seen this documentary about Palestinian people living in Israel and she featured in it. Quite remarkable.

Today I arrived in Nablus and one of the other volunteers immediately asked me if I knew Hammad. I did... Immediately I remembered that Hammad had told me that one of his friends from college in the U.S. was also going to Nablus, although he wasn't sure whether he would volunteer for the same organisation.

And there are even quite a number of other situations like this that I can describe, but I guess I made my point and I don't want to be boring. The extraordinary thing is that these kind of things used to never happen to me. In Holland I hardly ever meet people in the street, or people that know people that I know. Situations like these only happen to me in Holland when it comes to the subject of Palestine. Every weird, 'coincidental' meeting or experience directly relates to this country. It's mindblowing.... These little events convince me that going back is just something I had to do... as a sort of reassurance: small signs pointing in the direction of Palestine. For me it justs shows that this land exerts a strange kind of power on people.

It makes you wonder... why is this land considered to be holy land for three of the major religions of this world? Why has this land always been invaded by foreign forces? Why has there been so much fighting over this small piece of land? Why did the crusaders leave Europe in the Middle Ages to go conquer this far-off place they've only heard about before? Yes of course, religion and financial interests... but it doesn't really explain it all together. What ís the power of Palestine??