![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/1*WN08UMHhAupPXh6B9EtiFQ.jpeg\")
Jerusalem: The holiest city on earth. Photo: Jeremy Helligar<\/p>\nWhen you\u2019re Black in America, you spend your life getting used to being singled out. It happens with White friends, teachers, colleagues, bosses, business owners, employees, and law enforcement. But decades of experiencing the world as an outsider didn\u2019t prepare me for the way I\u2019d feel when I witnessed ethnic profiling strictly as an observer for the first time.<\/p>\n
It happened in 2013 during my monthlong stint living in Israel. As the authorities paced the buses I took on my round trip from Jerusalem to the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, I squirmed in my seat and prayed I wouldn\u2019t be one of the people they chose to detain. On both legs of the journey, the inspections seemed random at first. Specific travelers were asked to show their passports and sometimes ordered off the bus.<\/p>\n
Eventually, I realized it was ethnic profiling in action. And for the first time in my life, it let me, the only Black person on the bus, slide. The detainees, though darker-skinned than the majority of the passengers, were all Arab.<\/p>\n
Jerusalem: The holiest city on earth. Photo: Jeremy Helligar<\/p>\n
For me, this twist was unexpected, and so was the reaction of those it affected. The passengers didn\u2019t argue or protest as Black people back home did in the 1950s after centuries of humiliation.\u00a0On that day at least, they seemed resigned to their status as second-class humans in a city that serves as the\u00a0disputed and unofficial capital<\/a>\u00a0of both Israel and the Palestinian National Authority.\u00a0But the Israeli majority controls who moves freely in and out of Jerusalem. That list doesn\u2019t include Palestinian Arabs or, apparently, any person who is perceived as such.\u00a0My decades of experience as a Black man in the United States made me an especially sympathetic and captivated bystander.<\/p>\n Until I visited the Holy Land in 2013, I was uninformed enough about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be more or less Team Israel. Years of media spin taught me to think of Palestinian Arabs solely in terms of the violent acts the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) sometimes committed on their behalf. Wasn\u2019t the State of Palestine, established in\u00a01988<\/a>, basically a \u201ccountry\u201d filled with Arab and Muslim terrorists?<\/p>\n Though I wasn\u2019t misguided enough to buy into the idea that Muslim equals terrorist, the truth was that I, like many Americans, didn\u2019t know enough about the Islam religion, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.<\/p>\n I couldn\u2019t have been more wrong. My next life lesson began almost as soon as I entered a taxi after traveling about five miles by bus from Jerusalem to the city best known as the birthplace of Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n The cab driver asked me, \u201cDo you know the significance of Bethlehem?\u201d<\/p>\n Maybe I hadn\u2019t heard him correctly. Who doesn\u2019t know the significance of Bethlehem? Was he serious? My driver, a 41-year-old native of Kuwait with a stern poker face who considered the State of Palestine (or what\u2019s left of it) to be his home and homeland, definitely wasn\u2019t trying to entertain me.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course I do,\u201d I answered, as we headed toward the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem\u2019s most famous landmark and an emblem of Christianity in a predominantly Muslim city.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have the face of this guy from New York who is my friend on Facebook,\u201d he said, changing the subject as if he was trying to put me at ease.<\/p>\n I gripped the edge of my shotgun seat, where I\u2019d parked myself after he\u2019d insisted I ride up front instead of in the back. I wasn\u2019t sure where our conversation was going, but his mental route soon became clear.<\/p>\n \u201cI hate George Bush, but I love\u00a0Barack Obama<\/a>,\u201d he declared before ranting about the sins of the father (George H.W. Bush), which, in his eyes, went back to U.S. oil interests that led him to launch the\u00a01991 Persian Gulf War<\/a>.<\/p>\n Once we arrived at the tourist information center, he pointed to a map that showed how the Palestinian homeland had dwindled to practically nothing\u00a0between 1948 and 1967<\/a>, as Israel claimed Palestinian territories.<\/p>\n By the time we reached the wall separating Bethlehem from Jerusalem, I knew what he\u2019d meant by \u201cthe significance of Bethlehem.\u201d\u00a0The Israeli West Bank barrier kept Palestinian Arabs out of their capital city unless they procured\u00a0special permission from the Israeli government<\/a>\u00a0to enter.<\/p>\n Encircling and, in a sense, imprisoning residents of Bethlehem, it made the birthplace of Jesus Christ a symbol of the ongoing tension between Israel and Palestine \u2014 between the Western world and Islam.<\/p>\n I listened as my taxi driver spent nearly an hour explaining why he was \u201ca man without a country.\u201d He said he couldn\u2019t freely enter Jerusalem or key Palestinian cities like Hebron and Jericho. He said he hoped he\u2019d live to see the dawning of a \u201cseparate but equal\u201d peace, one in which the two countries and their religions, Islam and Judaism, could coexist harmoniously.<\/p>\n He waited for the day when Palestinian Arabs would be able to travel between the State of Palestine\u2019s cities without having to deal with the checkpoints going in and out of the Israeli territory that proliferated throughout the patches of remaining Palestinian land.<\/p>\n My taxi driver compared the plight of Palestinian Arabs to Black Africans during South Africa\u2019s apartheid era. He later called the Israeli-built blockade their own Berlin Wall.<\/p>\n At the time of my trip, the idea of President Trump seemed unfathomable. Still, from the moment Trump mentioned his plans for a physical wall separating the U.S. from Mexico during the 2016 presidential campaign, I connected it to the one the\u00a0Israeli government began building in 2002<\/a>, ostensibly as a protective measure against nationals with darker skin. As I faced the wall from the city it blocks off from Jerusalem, I saw it as a barrier intended to keep Bethlehem\u2019s Palestinian Arabs in their place, both literally and symbolically.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/1*ak9LZH97N58YLxej26fbGw.jpeg\")
The Church of the Nativity. Photo: Jeremy Helligar<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/1*CIc23BHyUZAWdwSgGcm1Jg.jpeg\")
Photo: Jeremy Helligar<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/1*aFNoJ3Je03K_3zPYwNvykw.jpeg\")
Daily life in Bethlehem\u2019s city center. Photo: Jeremy Helligar<\/p>\n