My camera clacked repeatedly as I held the shutter button down, causing the mirror inside to dance.  The array of corrugated metal siding, plywood and blue tarps in my viewfinder was erected just over the guard rail that separated Route 1 from the desert hills of the West Bank.  I zoomed in to get a better view of the goats within the makeshift farmyard in the small valley below the shacks. 

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      My friend and former boss, Nathan, and I had been traveling the holy land for the past three weeks.  We were due to fly back to Washington State in a few days.  We had driven past these shacks two weeks earlier on our way to float in the salty minerals of the Dead Sea, stopping only a couple of miles west to pay a few shekels to ride on the back of a Palestinian boy’s camel.  It seemed like months had passed.  We had traveled east to west, north to south, border to border and back again, staying in hotels and Airbnb apartments across the country.  We even made our way over the border into Egypt to gamble at the casino in Taba – a pastime outlawed in Israel.  But it was hard to believe our trip would soon be coming to an end. 

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      The day before, we had made our way back down Route 1 to take a day trip to Ramallah.  We waited until the tail end of our travels to go to Ramallah – one of our key reasons for making this pilgrimage.  Almost three years earlier, before Nathan and I had met, he had traveled to Israel as a lone explorer.  After weeks of exploration, he found himself taking a wrong turn that would change his life forever. 

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      The way he tells it, he found himself in a line of cars with no way to turn around – slabs of concrete separating the directional traffic.  He wasn’t sure where he was.  The traffic led to a checkpoint that led to Ramallah.  After entering the city, the concrete slabs continued to stretch ahead.  When he finally got himself turned around, with Google Maps as his guide, he attempted to exit.  The locals will tell you to use a different mapping app; they know the 25-foot-high walls that surround the Palestinian cities aren’t mapped properly in Google.   The app led him down a narrow road to a section of the spray-paint covered wall several blocks from an exit.  He got out to find someone he could ask for directions.  With colorful tags and art before him – stories of the oppression the Palestinians face turned to art on the wall that cages them – he did what many tourists would probably do, took pictures.  He was taking pictures of everything he saw: the wall; the graffiti on the wall; the people near the wall.  There were about seven or so boys and men gathered around a ladder that was leaning against the wall, and one man on the ladder.  Maybe the ladder leaning against a wall that is supposed to keep people in should have been a hint that he had stumbled into an area he shouldn’t have been, but he didn’t think about that.

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       “I was taking pictures of everybody,” Nathan said. “I soon put my camera away because I realized it could be highly offensive.”

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      But he had already attracted attention; a boy came through the small crowd and pulled Nathan’s sunglasses from his face.  As he tried to protest, he felt a spray of liquid on his back – a liquid accelerant.  The boy lit a match and recited “Allah Akbar” as he set Nathan on fire.  The group began to stone him.

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      Nathan had spent his late teens and early twenties as a Muslim, and later converted to Christianity.  He says what saved his life was him repeating Arabic prayers he had learned a decade earlier.  One of the older men finally motioned to put out the flames. 

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      “They poured water over me, grabbed me by my collar and told me it was ‘war’ and to go,” he said.

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          In excruciating pain, he found his way back to the checkpoint.  As he sped to the exit, the Israeli checkpoint guards drew their rifles, unsure of his intentions.  He yelled that he was an American who had just been attacked.  After discussing his options, they let him exit to drive himself to a hospital in Jerusalem.  He spent the next few days doped up on morphine and on the phone with the American embassy and airlines trying to get an earlier flight home.

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      After being released from the hospital, the Palestinian government brought him back to Ramallah to meet with a high-ranked official.  He told Nathan that he was likely mistaken for an Israeli Defense Force soldier.  According to the official, IDF soldiers had been going into the city in plain clothes and coercing boys into throwing rocks, at which point the boys would be arrested.  He said the group with the ladder that attacked Nathan was probably waiting for Israeli soldiers to walk by on the other side of the wall so they could light them on fire.  They offered to fly his family out and hunt the perpetrators down and kill them, Nathan said.  He refused, most of them were only boys, and he just wanted to go home.

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      When Nathan did finally make it home, he threw himself into work to distract himself.  His scars healed – meeting him for the first time you would never know what he suffered, I didn’t.  But the emotional trauma left deep gouges on his soul.  For so long he had felt drawn to Israel.  But when he finally made it there, it nearly destroyed him.   He did his best to stay busy and forget about the place that had once held so much hope for him – until he hired me for a summer job washing boats for his detailing company.

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      During my teen years I traveled to Israel a few times with my parents.  They later converted to Judaism and plan to soon become Israeli citizens and spend the rest of their days in Israel.  When Nathan learned about my connections to Israel, something woke up inside of him.  We became good friends and over time we had many conversations about Israel.  After having a Shabbat dinner with my parents one Friday night, he suggested we travel to Israel together.  It was finally time to face his demons.  Three months later there we were, standing in the spot where it had happened nearly 3 years earlier.  Offerings of some form of closure – release of some pain, possibly. 

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      We didn’t stay in Ramallah long.  We spent that night in a hotel on the outskirts of Jericho.  I spent the night soaking in the tub of the posh hotel – the nicest one we had stayed in yet – while Nathan went to a barbecue with a guy he had met the last time he was in Jericho, and some of the guy’s friends.  I stayed close to my phone, waiting for updates on how things were going – Nathan was apprehensive about going out with a group of Palestinians, only one of which he knew.  He had nothing to worry about.  The group had rented the house of one of their uncle’s for the night, to celebrate the return of someone that only one of the men just barely knew – spending more money than they could probably afford.  They sent Nathan back to the hotel with barbecued beef and chicken wings to feed me.  The next morning, we were making our way back to Jerusalem when we found ourselves passing the Bedouin shacks that had interested us so much when we had seen them before.  We stopped to take pictures.

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      As my camera clicked away, an old man in worn out clothing appeared outside one of the houses.  We asked if he spoke English.  He didn’t.  But without a second thought, he waved us to follow him.  As we followed, a young boy circled on a Bicycle, and two women in colorful head coverings hovered shyly in a nearby doorway.   He led us into a room and sat us down on a flower-patterned couch.  He disappeared for a moment, and then returned and sat with us.  We tried to communicate; it was no use, none of us knew enough of the others’ language to make any progress.  Moments later, a young man appeared with three small glass cups of tea.  The old man offered Nathan and I each a cup and sat with us, drinking the sugary-sweet liquid, seemingly happy to have invited us in.   

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      Nathan called a friend from Bethlehem to translate for us.  We learned that this man’s name was Mohammed.  He often invites people in for tea or coffee. 

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      “He always loves to welcome anyone, it doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian,” our translator said. 

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      We discovered it’s a Bedouin tradition to host a person – feed them and care for them – for three days before even asking their name or where they’re from.  They’re part of several small Bedouin communities in the area that have become semi-nomadic, no longer having the freedom to graze their livestock in the wilderness.  Their paths have been cut off from fields and streams to make room for military training grounds in the open desert of the West Bank.  They live with uncertainty as to how long they’ll be able to keep the land they now hold.  The Israeli government is trying to relocate the Bedouins.  But they give what they can to visitors whenever they have the opportunity.  We thanked Mohammed for the tea and continued on our way.

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       The next day, at a vineyard in Bethlehem, a group buying wine in front of us was arguing over the bill.  It turns out the couple was being hosted by the lady with them.  She had paid for their wine.  The man said she never lets them pay for anything even though she can’t afford it.  He took the receipt, intending to work it out.  Later that night, we were told by a shop keeper in the city – one that Nathan had talked with a few times and had friended on Facebook – that the next time we come to Israel, he wished to host us at his home.  This is tradition – to give whatever they can, even when it is all they have, because Allah will bless them.  The tragic parts of life predominately stand out.  We are bombarded every day when we thumb through the newspaper, or watch the nightly news, with the horrors this world is capable of.   But for every tragedy, there are thousands of good deeds that are overshadowed.  This is tradition.