I had a funny experience yesterday. While on the way home from university, I had a pretty standard conversation with a cab driver, which goes something like this:
(1) Greetings
(2) Shock that I speak Arabic. Brief discussion about how I learned.
(3) How do I find Jordan and the people here?
(4) The Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Your average Jordanian believes that the conflict would be over tomorrow if Israel would finally just agree to a deal. Arab and Palestinian hands, they say, are extended in peace. Since Israel clearly does not want peace, they say, it is up to the United States to pressure them--but the U.S. refuses to do this because the Israel Lobby controls everything.
I always push back in these conversations, so I had a pretty spirited debate the whole way home with my cab driver. I argued that there are many problems on both sides of the conflict. Israel can't possibly agree to a deal now, because there is no unified representative of the Palestinian people--the division between Hamas and Fatah is too deep. My driver argued that the division would never have happened if the U.S. had respected the wishes of the Palestinian people when they democratically elected a Hamas-controlled government. He went on to tell me that he is a proud Hamas supporter, because Fatah is so corrupt and has done so little for the Palestinian people.
We went back and forth until we approached my house. Embassy employees all have certain security features at their homes (sorry, being intentionally vague here) that are strong clues we work for the U.S. government. As soon as the cab driver saw them, his entire demeanor changed. He fell silent and his hands started to writhe on the steering wheel. When I stepped out of the car, he was bumbling and apologetic. "I hope I didn't offend you," he told me, then drove meekly away.
That's how things go in a country where people live in so much fear of the all-seeing government intelligence service. The experience reinforced an important lesson for me: it can be a real challenge to get people to share their honest-to-god opinions. In cross-cultural situations, the information that reaches us--as Americans, or especially as representatives of the U.S. government--is usually heavily filtered. It takes a lot of discernment and effort to get at the truth. In this case, the process worked backwards. The cab driver was perfectly willing to talk to a university student, but the moment he suspected I was something more than that, the shields went up and the conversation was over.
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1 comments:
Perhaps you should have the cabbie drop you off at a neighbor's house that doesn't have security fixtures, assuming that your safety is not threatened. That way you will still get honest responses without tipping your hand that you are more than a University student. Isn't there an Arabic tale of some prince who dressed as a beggar to mingle with the common folk and elicit honest answers from them because he knew he wouldn't get an honest answer due to his status and rank?
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