PERFECT SYMMETRY

Taboon is a main type of bread in the Palestinian countryside.It is prepared by placing the doe on a round, slightly-pointy, hot plate for prolonged period of times. The final product would be a very large flat loaf of soft bread.

Kofir Thilith is the town where both of my parents grew up. It is a very small and rural village outside of the city of Qalqilia in the West Bank . My parental grandparents moved out of the village years ago to reunite with their relatives after being separated in the 1948 war. Most of my mother’s family stayed there. Back in the early 1990s, my parents used to take us there every summer for a week or so. The place was a living hell! There was no electricity, no paved roads, no water, no modern toilets, no TV. My parents used to drag us there. If that was not enough, the nights were unbearable. Heat and mosquitoes used to make surviving the night a very harsh challenge.  

            There was one thing that made these trips worth it.  The mornings at Kofir Thilith were amazing. The morning breeze was free of pollution, and filled with the sounds of domestic animals. I used to try to wake up as early as possible to capture that amazing phenomenon. On top of all of this, the smell of Taboon bread added a very unique flavor to the scene. I used to run to the Taboon (which is the device used to make the bread, usually located in a shack outside of the house) and tell my grandmother to make me a special loaf. My grandmother usually made us these without our request. Our ‘special’ loafs were small, round and had our names on them. After acquiring my valuable loaf I used to feed some of it to the chickens, rabbits, pigeons and sheep that lived in the shack on the side of the house.

            Since the beginning of the second Palestinian uprising in 2000, I was able to my grandmother only once. When we arrived there, I was surprised to find that the town had paved roads, electricity, running water, and toilets! The nights were a breeze because of the fans and the AC. However, there was a very sad trade-off. The mornings of Kofir Thilith lost their innocent glamour. The morning breeze was polluted. The quite serenity was replaced with noisy traffic. And the smell of Taboon bread did not stand out anymore. It transformed from being a morning sensation, to merely a breakfast ingredient.

            It seems that the advances of modern life have sucked the innocence out of my most cherished childhood memories. When I told this story to a close friend of mine, she said that this was a normal stage in growing up.  I guess there will always be a stage when magic is replaced with facts; romance with reality. Maybe the smell of Taboon was there all along. I just did not notice it.

I knew I was back in Palestine when I saw two guys smoking under a large glowing “No Smoking” sign. I was back in the land of contradictions; the land of the illogical. The taxi driver that took me from the border to Hebron put on his seat belt only when he was on Israeli controlled roads in fear of a ticket. When he was back in Palestinian territory, he removed it. So in the hour and a half trip from Jericho to Hebron , he put on and removed his seat belt five or six times. What I could not understand was the reason why he kept removing it. It would be more convenient to just keep it on. It did not make sense to me.

A guy on the taxi was talking about the dangers of smoking while he was sucking on a cigarette. When I told him that he was smoking, he said he tried to quit, but could not. Well, I guess his attempt to quit gives him the right to contradict himself so openly.

My brother-in-law, who is fairly educated, believes that god gave us the right to kill non-Muslims; that the purpose of Islam is to conquer the world. Yet he believes that Islam is peaceful; that the daily bombings in Iraq are carried out by the CIA. I have heard this ideological nonsense from almost everyone here. Ideology seems to define this region. Logic and objectivity have been forsaken.

I do not know if Palestine ’s problems can be fixed at all. There are too many variables. Every visit convinces me more and more that we have made the decision to collapse as a society. I try to think of solutions, but my decisions are clouded with anger and confusion. I am angry at everyone here for letting the situation deteriorate like this. I believe that any third world country can develop. However, such development cannot occur with a self-destructive ideology.

Symmetry fascinates me. I find in it a sense of order, discipline and dedication. A symmetrical object is the outcome of tedious effort. Any mistake would have resulted in chaotic asymmetry. Out of the limitless ways for creating something, there is only one that makes it symmetrical.

 It is rather ironic, that biological symmetry is abundant in nature (which is supposedly not governed by any laws). As a biologist, I understand the molecular justification for symmetry. However, it strikes me as amazing that nature’s chaos and disorder produced symmetry unmatched in its perfection. Nature might be seeking order after all.