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I have always been fascinated by the occult. I was taking a break with my friend Deb at Dell Computer one day, and I mentioned that I had always wanted to have a past-life regression hypnosis done. Deb told me that I needed to meet her friend Tina, because she did that sort of thing. It sounded like fun, so I agreed. A week or so later, I went over to Deb's house one evening, not quite knowing what to expect. After about fifteen minutes of small talk, the doorbell rang. Deb answered the door, and a startlingly pretty redhead walked in. Deb introduced us, and we sat around for the next twenty minutes or so getting acquainted. We spent the evening talking about the paranormal and hypnosis. Tina didn't talk about her private life very much at all. All I was able to discern from our conversation was that she was married to a local businessman, and that he owned some convenience stores. Beyond that, there was no real information. The past-life regression did not work. She didn't send me into a trance in which I re-lived events from a past incarnation. She did, however, talk me into a deep state of relaxation unlike anything I had ever experienced. I melted into the sofa, and came back up completely de-stressed. I really liked what she had done. I went home that night and Tina was on my mind. I was really taken with her personally, but I had no idea what her life was like. I figured that she was either very secure in her relationship with her husband, or that it was something she didn't want to talk about. I went home and got the best night's sleep I have ever had. Over the next few months, we all got together at Deb's house almost every Tuesday night. We were just hanging out, talking about our different interests, and the evenings usually ended with a session of Tina's particular brand of "relaxation hypnotherapy". The group got bigger, growing to more than half a dozen. I gradually got the idea that Tina was not happy in her marriage. It started sounding pretty bad after a while, with stories of cruelty and indifference slipping out. She never gave any indication that she wanted out of it, but rather that she was looking for a way to save the relationship. I thought that this was an admirable trait, even if I didn't fully understand it. After about a year, Tina announced that she was going to move to a village outside of Jerusalem called Anata, and live with her husband and his family in Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. We were all very concerned, and spent a lot of time and energy trying to talk her out of it. We tried all of the obvious arguments, but they didn't work. She had her reasons for wanting to go, which mainly had to do with saving her marriage. Needless to say, none of us thought that this was a good plan, but we were powerless to do anything about it. Tina slipped away without saying goodbye in the Spring of 1998, and I thought that I would never see her again. She was gone for about a year and a half, and during that time Deb only heard from her a couple of times. The first time, she requested a care package. We scraped together a collection of music CDs, and other goodies that weren't available over there, and sent it to her. The second time, we learned that she had been hurt. She had fallen off a ladder, and shattered her kneecap. We never heard how she was, or if she was coming back for treatment, or anything. We had no idea what was happening to her. When Tina first arrived in the West Bank, she learned very quickly that as the wife of a Palestinian, her status as an American citizen meant next to nothing. She was a second-class citizen in a third world country, and she had nowhere to turn. She found herself caught up in a culture that placed her nine-year old son in a higher position in the family pecking order than she enjoyed herself. Her husband treated her worse than he had in the States. The local populus didn't take kindly to her blue jeans, or to the fact that she had the audacity to walk down the street with her long red hair blowing in the wind, for all to see. Some called her names, and some threw rocks at her. She was absolutely miserable. If all this wasn't enough, there were the Israelis. To live in the Palestinian State was to live under an oppressive military occupation. Life was a series of curfews, roadblocks, and the constant threat of arrest, or worse. Her two sons went to an exclusive private school for Americans in the Jewish sector, and to get there every morning, she had to go through two Israeli roadblocks. When you figure that she had to go through the two roadblocks to take them to school, and back through them when she went back home, and through them again when it was time to pick them up at the end of the day, she had to endure the indignity of having machine guns held on her, and of being scrutinized by hostile enemy soldiers eight times a day. She never traveled without her American passport. She used it as a tool whenever she had a problem. There were times she was told that she could not pass, which meant that her sons would not be picked up from school that day, or possibly for several days. She would argue with them, constantly pushing her passport in their faces, and threatening them with exclusive coverage on CNN if they were foolish enough to shoot her. Her arguments usually worked, and they would allow her to pass through, but on one occasion the situation got ugly. She was told that she could NOT pass through, and that they WOULD shoot her if she tried, American citizen or not. She cursed the guard, and pushed her way through the roadblock anyway, holding her passport over her head. Fortunately, the guards backed down and did not shoot her. Tina feared for the safety of her children. Living under Israeli military occupation is something that few Americans can imagine. Her sons Hussein, then nine years old, and Tarrick, then seven years old, had a habit that she found particularly distressing. They used to collect rocks. If they found any rocks with crystals in them, or any that they just thought were pretty, they would put them in their backpacks and bring them home. This would be of no concern in America, but in the West Bank, it had serious overtones. Palestinian children throw rocks at Israeli troops. Whenever the Israelis caught Palestinian children with rocks in their backpacks, they would treat them harshly. She told them not to collect rocks, but they did it anyway. She lost a lot of sleep worrying about them. On October 16, 1998, the day before her birthday, she was climbing a ladder in her kitchen, trying to put away some pots and pans, when she slipped and fell, shattering her right kneecap. She needed surgery, and she wanted to come back to America to have it done. Her husband would not allow her to come. She had to settle for the services provided by the local hospital, which were way below American standards. The hospital was the Makassad Hospital, in East Jerusalem. She spent ten days there in all. Needless to say, she did not receive "state-of-the-art" care. The doctors simply made an incision, and wrapped her kneecap in wire. The procedure effectively crippled her. Her leg muscles atrophied, and her leg looked like a stick with a big knot in the middle of it when it was all over. Tina's recovery was not pleasant. She had to wear a cast that came up to her hip for a month. They lived on the third floor of a building that did not have an elevator, and her husband still expected her to take care of the children and the housework. He showed little sympathy for her pain. On one occasion, he refused to get her a glass of water when she asked him to bring her one. She had to get up and get it herself, despite the fact that it was extremely painful for her to do so. She got help with her chores from her ten-year old niece Rava and her sister-in-law Naryman, but none from her husband. His indifference hurt her deeply. She desperately wanted to come back to America and have more surgery on her knee. It was clear to her that she needed a quality of medical care that just was not available in Palestine. She begged, but her pleas fell upon deaf ears. Her husband forbade her to go, and no one in the family would help her. She had always been a proud and headstrong American woman. Her ideas on human rights, and the equality of women had no place in the world she had chosen for herself. She wanted to go home. She wanted to divorce her husband and go back to America and find a new place in life. She sank into a deep depression. Her doctors all told her the same thing, which was to keep her mouth shut. Divorce was not an option. It just wasn't done. They gave her all the anti-depressants and pain killers she wanted, and told her not to discuss her feelings with her husband's family, because they would kill her if they knew what she wanted to do. They told her they would take her out into the desert and bury her in a shallow grave. Her depression caused the onset of alopecia. Her hair was falling out, and rumors were circulating in the village that she was suffering because a curse had been put upon her for wearing blue jeans, and not adhering to the rules of Islam. Early in November, 1998, two residents of Anata named Yusef Ali Mohammed Zughayar and Suleiman Musa Dahayneh conducted a botched suicide bombing in a crowded Jerusalem open-air market called Mahane Yehuda. The two bombers were killed when the explosives went off prematurely, but twenty-one Israelis were injured. The family of Suleiman Musa Dahayneh lived in the next block down from Tina. The standard Israeli response to such attacks is to destroy the homes of the bombers' families, and the soldiers arrived one night while Tina was out on the balcony of her apartment in her hip cast. This idea of punishing the families didn't appeal to her sense of justice. She leaned over the balcony and called out to the soldiers in English and told them she knew what they were doing and that she was watching them. Evidently, they didn't like the idea of an angry American woman witnessing their operation, so they put down their guns and left. They came back every night for the next three weeks, and when they did, she met them on the balcony with her video camera. They finally gave up and never came back. The camera didn't even work. By now, Tina had decided that her only chance at being happy again, perhaps her only chance at survival, was to escape. She had to gather up her four children and somehow get back home to America. She had no money, no sympathetic allies, and no realistic idea of what to do. In the months to come, she continued with her physical therapy, and she continued to go to the doctor and get her anti-depressants, muscle relaxers, and pain killers. As time went by, she plotted. There was only one day a year when she could expect to be away from her husband with the car, the children, the passports, the credit card, and a lot of cash. That was the day in August when she would take the children into Jerusalem to register them for private school. If she would ever have a chance to get away, it would be on that day. As the day approached, she began to slowly pack a suitcase that she had hidden on the roof. Her nine-year old son Hussein saw what she was doing, and discreetly confronted her. Fortunately, he was also ready to come back home, so he kept his mouth shut. She had to be very careful not to let anyone know what she was up to. She secretly made plane reservations with American Airlines. The only real danger that she faced was in arranging for a cab to take her and the children to Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv in the middle of the night. She couldn't drive the family car, because her right leg was still giving her a lot of trouble. She couldn't use a local cab company, because people in small towns gossip. The risk was too great. If her husband's family found out what she was up to, her life would be in danger. She made arrangements with a cab company in Bethlehem a few days beforehand. On the fateful night, her husband came home from work, and was relaxing around the house. He liked to drink coffee in the evenings, so she made him a special pot. She took out her secret stash of muscle relaxers and pain killers, which she had ground into a fine powder. She stirred it up in his cup with a lot of sugar and served it to him. Her heart was pounding in her chest as she watched him sip it slowly. He drank about a third of the cup, and went over and dumped the rest into the garbage can. He turned to her and apologized for pouring it out, but it was "the worst cup of coffee you have ever made me". It was getting late, so she urged him to go to bed. Soon he was out cold. She went up to the roof to get her suitcase, but she had over-packed. The suitcase was too big and too heavy for her to manage, so she repacked a smaller bag with only the barest of essentials. She grabbed a change of clothes for everyone, took her bag of jewelry, passports, and cash, and woke her children and told them it was time for school. She quietly herded them down to the car, and drove them to the next village. She parked the car in front of the Post Office, and looked for her cab. She was late, and the cab had already come and gone. Fortunately, she had her husband's cell phone, so she called for another cab. The first cab was too small for everybody, so they sent a larger one, for an extra charge. The ride to Tel Aviv took about three hours, and involved going through a half dozen Israeli military roadblocks. She had to lie to the cab driver and tell him that she was meeting her husband at the airport. Otherwise, he would have refused the fare. When she arrived at Ben Gurion airport she went to the American Airlines counter and discovered that her credit card would not cover the air fare. She tried her luck with another airline, but had the same problem. She broke down and cried. She told them that she could not go back. If she did, she would lose her children and she might be killed. They left her crying in the lobby for about fifteen minutes, then she was approached by a young Jewish woman who worked for El-Al, the state airline of Israel. This woman told Tina that she didn't have enough money to get to Austin Texas, but they had a flight to Chicago leaving in two hours, and "perhaps" she could get on that one. She told her that El-Al would work with her. She then took her credit card, and all of her money, and went back into the office. She returned a short time later and told her that she still didn't have enough money. Tina broke down in tears again and offered the woman all of her jewelry. The woman did not take the jewelry, but instead sent her and her children through the security line, on the off-chance that they could get on the plane, since time was running short. About halfway through a grueling security check, the young woman appeared again and handed Tina five plane tickets and five $100 bills. They all got on the plane, and it got in line to take off. Tina got on the cell phone and called her sister-in-law. She told her that she was in Germany already, and she just wanted to say goodbye. She was a close friend of her sister-in-law, and it was a very emotional call. Everyone in the house begged her to come back. The plane took off and the cell phone began ringing. She would not answer it, because she knew it was her husband. She finally just switched it off and looked forward to arriving in Chicago. She had been awake for more than 24 hours, and soon she was sound asleep. She was absolutely exhausted. Some time later she was awakened by the flight attendant, because her kids were having a food fight. She woke up, and kept them in line until they all landed in Chicago. Tina was very happy to be back on American soil, but she still had a long way to go. The five hundred dollars that the lady at El-Al gave her was not enough for her to fly everyone to Austin, but it was enough for train tickets. If you ever need to get somewhere quickly in America, don't take the train. The trip from Chicago, Illinois to Austin, Texas, a distance of about 1100 miles, took three days. I was sitting out on my deck the Wednesday night before the Labor Day weekend, 1999. The moon was full, and I was sipping on a Guiness. I was kicking back and relaxing after a hard day, before going to bed. The phone rang. I didn't realize it as I reached to pick it up, but my life was about to change forever. It was Deb, and she told me that Tina was back in town, broke, with no place to go. I went to see Tina that night, and I gave her enough money to stay in her motel room until Saturday, when I could come back and get her and the kids. We have been together ever since. Tina soon found an orthopedic surgeon in Austin who fixed her kneecap for free. Whenever Tina tells this story, she talks about the "angels" who came into her life when all looked hopeless, and helped her on her way. Among these she lists the woman at Ben Gurion Airport who got her the plane tickets, a stranger on the train who slipped money into her pocket while she was sleeping, a minister in a grocery store who walked up to her out of the blue and gave her several boxes of children's clothes, and others. It is a heart-warming list of good samaritans, but I have my doubts about the "El-Al lady". From the very beginning, Tina resisted the pressures of the culture clash she encountered when she moved over there. She was American to her very core, and she was not going to become a subservient second class citizen under any circumstances. She arched her back and fought like hell every day. She did not take kindly to the controls placed upon her by the soldiers at the roadblocks. On dozens of occasions, she pulled out her US passport, and stood her ground. That passport was her Excalibur, and she was not shy about using it. Soldiers report that sort of thing, and sooner or later the reports had to be attracting attention. When she leaned out over the balcony with the broken videocam and prevented the destruction of the Dahayneh family's home, she effectively interfered with state policy. I am sure that the Mossad, the Israeli Intelligence Service, had a file on her and considered her a nuisance. When she showed up at the airport that morning desperate to get out of the country, the representative from El-Al approached HER. She had not visited the El-Al counter. I have always thought that was strange. I suspect that when her credit card number was entered at the American Airlines counter, the Mossad immediately knew she was in the airport, and wanted to know why. To present a total stranger with plane tickets and $500 in cash is an unusual act of kindness. I think they considered it a small price to pay to get rid of her, and were eager to help her leave. |