Sarah, and a Trip to Ramallah

Sarah is a woman in her forties who comes to clean our flat. Claire, one of the volunteers also gives her English lessons. Her son is a bus driver who I give English lessons to. She comes from the village of Sawaheh, near here on the other side of the university. The separation wall goes through the village. Sarah has a blue id which means that she can live in Jerusalem and also travel in the Palestinian territories; her husband has a green id which means that he can only live in the Palestinian territories. In order to be together Sarah has to live on the Palestinian side of the separation wall at Sawaheh, because her husband, even though he is married to her, cannot change his status from green to blue. But if the Israelis find out that Sarah is living in the Palestinian territories she is in danger of losing her blue id. So she has to play a hide and seek game with the authorities, keeping a house going in Jerusalem, paying tax there, so that they think she is living in Jerusalem. Many marriages have broken up because the two partners have had different kinds of id.
The fact that Palestinians can lose their right to live in Jerusalem by marrying someone from the territories and moving there, but there is no reciprocal right of someone to gain the right to live in Jerusalem, seems to indicate that there is a deliberate policy by the Israelis to reduce the number of Palestinians living in Jerusalem, a policy of ethnic exclusion. Certainly the UN thinks this is what is happening.
Sarah also told me a story about her father-in-law's family who own property in Jerusalem at Jebel Mukaber. They are consistently refused permission to build on their land because it is overlooking a settlement, and poses a 'security risk' to it. She also tells me of attempts by settler organisations to get possession of properties in the Moslem quarter of the old city of Jerusalem by trickery. She says that people come to an owner offering to restore and repair it. They produce a contract in Hebrew, that the owner is not able to understand. Hidden in the contract is a clause making over the property to the organisation after the death of the owner. So when the owner dies, the descendants discover that they no longer own the property.
It is difficult for me to decide how much of these stories are truth and how much are rumours. There are so many things that happen here, unreported in the west, that I think that some of these things do happen. One thing that happens in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem where there is a demonstration every week, is that settler organisations turn up at the door of a Palestinian house claiming that it had been lived in by Jews prior to 1948. Sometimes they have a court order, sometimes not. But of course this is not reciprocal either. Palestinians have never been able to make similar claims in the Israeli courts.
I decided to find out more by going to speak to someone from the human rights organisation Al Haq in Ramallah. It is an organisation famous for the accuracy of its research and publications, and its advocacy work. It has just won an international prize. I fix up an appointment to talk to one of the researchers there. I take a taxi from Abu Dis, which normally takes 45 minutes, and I arrive there in just over an hour because of a hold-up at a checkpoint. Ramallah is lively, bustling, and there seems to be more money there, there is certainly a lot of building.
Wissam spends a lot of time with me answering my questions. He thinks that all the things that are going on: the wall, the passes, the settlements, are a systematic attempt to make life as hard as possible for Palestinians, so that in the end they will just pack up and go. I ask him about international law, the Geneva Convention concerning occupied territories. 'The Geneva Convention doesn't count for anything as long as it's not enforced. The International Court issued an advisory (opinion) about the separation wall, but it could not proceed because that is considered a political matter. As long as America uses its veto on the security council, nothing can be done. In practical terms Israel is not stopped from doing what it does, and as a result it is encouraged to continue'.
I read an Al Haq report written in 1990 which detail issues: imprisonment under administrative detention, torture, attacks by settlers, beatings, which are still current now. 'Since then the pressure has grown'. I ask him about how settlements are established.
'It can be done in a number of ways. Sometimes an area is declared Area C, military zone, 'for security reasons', and Palestinians can no longer go there. Then settlers unofficially appear in one or two caravans. Then within a few weeks they have access to electricty and water, all with the co-operation of the military, and the settlement starts to grow.'
He tells me that sometimes Palestinians don't have written documents proving their land ownership, even though they have been farming it for generations. Sometimes they have documents going back to Ottoman times, but they hadn't registered the full extent of their ownership then in order to minimise the amount of taxes they had had to pay. So it is open for the Israeli administration to claim that their ownership only amounts to what is in the document. Sometimes a piece of land is declared 'unoccupied' (but is only unoccupied because it is now in a military zone or on the other side of the separation wall and the villagers can't go there).
We discuss prisoners. Wissam told me that since 1967, 400,000 Palestinians had been in Israeli jails.
Is there any chance of a two-state solution at the moment. Wissam thinks not. 'Something could be set up in the territories that calls itself a state. But if it has no control over its borders, who comes in and out, what comes in and out, it is not a state in any meaningful sense'. It would be more like a local council. Netanyahu has a concept called 'Economic Peace', which means that Israel might be prepared to reduce the number of checkpoints in the territories, allow some movement of Palestinians from Israel into the West Bank and allow the Palestinian economy to develop. 'This would appeal to some of the business class, who care more about their bottom-line than having a state. It would also be a way of control the people. "If you behave and not be too much trouble, we will give you some prosperity"'. It would also maintain Palestine as an economic colony of Israel.
It is a gloomy picture. We agree that the most positive actions at the moment are non-violent demonstrations such as the ones at Sheikh Jarrah, which are attracting increasing amounts of international attention. 'Every time there is a demonstration or reaction in the west', Wissam says, 'it is encouraging for us, because we feel that we are not entirely alone'.
After Ramallah, I decide to go to Jerusalem to visit Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum. This involves going through a major checkpoint Kalandia. The experience, was stressful and humiliating, as it was last year. We have to get off the bus, crowd into pens and pass through turnstyles. There we have to put all our possessions in trays, take off our belts mobile phones etc, pass them through scanners, then walk through other scanners. Each time an alarm goes, we have to walk back, take off something else, and hope that we can pass through the scanner again without the alarm going off. I keep having to pass back and fore. I have bought a medallion in Ramallah which I struggle to take off. A soldier barks at me in Hebrew to show him my passport, not that page, the page with the visers in it. I am holding everyone up. The soldier gestures arrogantly, screams at me in Hebrew. I feel like shouting back at him that I don't want to be in his f...... country anyway. When I emerge from the checkpoint, I feel bruised. Also glad that I have tasted a little bit of what Palestinians have to experience every day of their lives.

x

Is it Systematic?

The question that I keep asking myself is whether the oppressive, absurd and cruel situations that Palestinians find themselves in are the accidental by-products of decisions that have been taken by the Israeli military and government to solve particular problems; or whether it is a part of a systematic and deliberate attempt to make their life so difficult that eventually they will leave.


Palestinians certainly think it is the latter. We went to Jenin two days ago, where there was a massive amount of fighting in 2003 when the Israeli army made incursions into the city and the neighbouring refugee camp in response to the second intifada. As in Hebron, the events of the last ten years have left a legacy in terms of anger and bitterness. Youssef, who is in charge of the Cultural and Creative Centre, tells us about 'the incursion', the numbers of people killed which he said was 65, the death of a British UN worker at the UNRWA centre in the refugee camp. There is some ambiguity about the facts. I try to think back to the report of the United Nations commission which was set up in response to the fighting. At the time Israel was condemned for initiating 'a massacre'. I remember reading the report which I think specified 22 deaths and some of soldiers.
I ask Youssef why the incursion happened. 'For security reasons', he replies. Everywhere people tell us of acts of oppression and brutality, but there is something missing. The events seem to take place in a contextual vacuum, as if the Israeli army / government just decided to be brutal.
I saw a poster of a young man in the city. Amna, our guide said, 'this boy got put in prison for 20 years'. 'What did he do?', I asked. 'He fought for his country', Amna said. But I want to know more than that, what he actually did. Did he kill a soldier, throw a bomb? It is not that I want to judge him, after all whether someone is a terrorist or a freedom fighter is often a matter of perspective, and I don't want to prejudge the issue. But I want to know more of the facts. The Israeli army went into Jenin, Bethlehem and Ramallah in response to the intifada and suicide bombings. Maybe those bombings were justified from the perspective of the Palestinians. But I want to know more of the facts, and the reasons.
I am being told a lot of what I didn't know, but I keep getting the feeling that I am not getting the whole story. But I was not getting the whole story when I was growing up in the North London Jewish community in the 1960s. I was not told how in 1967 after the 6 day war, Palestinians from the West Bank who fled into Jordan, were not allowed back by the Israeli army, were not counted in the Israeli census and lost their right to live in towns like Abu Dis. I was not told how people who tried to swim back across the river Jordan were shot by Israeli soldiers.
Youssef showed us a slide show which did not go down well with us. It claimed to show parallels between the Nazi holocaust of Jews and what happened in Jenin. There was a series of slides, one half showing Jewish men women and children brutalised by Nazis, the other half superficially similar images of men women and children in Jenin. Again the context was missing, just an assertion, that it was 'exactly the same, if not worse' in Jenin. The kind of thing I might accept as grafitti on the separation wall, or from a first year university student, but not from an information centre. This was not just me being sensitive. All the other volunteers: Simone, James, Mirko, felt the hollowness of the comparison. It doesn't help the Palestinian cause, people react against distortions like these. These assertions, I concluded, are a product of bitterness, and the bitterness is a product of ill-treatment and degrading treatment.
I talk to Amna about her life. She lives in a paradoxical zone, a strip of land near Jenin that is part of the Palestinian authority, but on the Israeli side of the separation wall. Claire, who works for an NGO and is studying law, says that this kind of territory is called a Seam Zone. Seam Zones were declared to be illegal under international law (as was the separation wall). They were created because when the separation wall was built five years ago, it did not always follow the route of the Green Line, the line dividing pre-1967 Israel from the West Bank. Large areas of the West Bank were placed on the Israeli side of the wall, including Israeli settlements, some Palestinian villages, areas used by bedouins. In the area that Amna comes from, there are Palestinian villages with a population of 17,000 people. Every day, they have to pass through a checkpoint in the wall to go to work or to see their family.
Claire told me about a Palestinian village in another Seam Zone near Ramallah. There is a village on the Palestinian side of the wall, and one house on the Israeli side. The woman in the single house has the wall separating her from the rest of the village so that she cannot even see or wave to her neigbours. Then there are two side gates, then on the other side of her house is an Israeli settlement. She is completely boxed in. She has a key that allows her to get through the wall to go to the village and go back to her house. But she is not allowed by the soldiers to have any visitors because that would be a security breach. Once when she had a visitor, soldiers soon after came to her house, and that was when she realised that cctv cameras on top of the wall were monitoring her all the time. She reported that the military wanted her to demolish her house, and she had refused, and she reckoned that this regime had been imposed on her as a punishment.

Dubke Class

We had been asked to give English classes at the local youth club in Abu Dis, which is near our community centre, but for the second time no students turned up. Instead there was a class in Dubke, the Palestinian national class. Having nothing to do, I decided to stay and watch it. I had already seen some Dubke being performed at a wedding party last year, but this was a well-attended class. It was mixed 8 teenage males and 7 females, and the people involved in it were clearly dedicated - there are about three or four classes a week. They are rehearsing for a performance in August. Often they perform at weddings.
Folk dancing in Britain and other European countries have a nerdish feel to them; they seem to be practised by people who would not be seen dead in an ordinary night club, people who are self-consciously excavating something archaic. It seems different here. I recognised some of our students from the centre. Ibrahim, who is into rap and makes his own tracks, was also here for the class, and a number of others are too. The dance consists of a complicated series of steps performed in unison, involving light backward and forward upward and downward movements, against a syncopated beat: da da-da da da, da da-da da the basic beat embellished with elaborate riffs. The speed is fast, every now and then the dancers throw themselves forward and down on to the floor on one knee. The dance is vigorous and physical also graceful exhilirating to watch. The dancers seem exhilirated as well.
The way the teenagers greet each other is interesting. There seem to be three overlapping systems. The teenage boys will sometimes use a traditional Arab greeting which consists of kissing a cheek, then the other cheek, then the first cheek again, then the second cheek again. Superimposed on this is the standard hand-slap right hand to right hand, which must be practised everywhere on earth, certainly my kids in Whitechapel do it. This must come from America via MTV, music videos gangster movies. Then there is also something that occasionally happens which is that someone will pucker their lips as if to mimic a kiss. There is an edge to this, a bit ambiguous, a bit aggressive. I have been in receipt of this a few times, once from a policeman in Bethlehem, and I notice that some of the kids occasionally do this to each other.
I have heard people say that Dubke is a way of asserting national identity and pride. I think of the sense of physical expansion for a people who are boxed in controlled, whose physical space has been taken away from them, who are restricted in where they can go, when they can go, who is allowed to travel where. (This has been an abiding sensation for me this time, the physical sense of restriction, the longing to get away). Watching the dance, I start to fantasise that this is not a dance but this is a magical form of stepping over and marking out a huge terrain. The dancers are like giants lightly and confidently leaping with gigantic strides over the earth.

Some Contradictions

There are a lot of contradictions about life here, and also about the nature of the occupation and Palestine's relations with Israel. Israel is not a totalitarian country, large parts of the society are democratic and liberal, the oppression of Palestinians is not organised from top to bottom in an organised and undifferentiated way. There are instances of friendships, esteem and respect between individual Palestinians and Israelis or on the level of human rights organisations such as Peace Now, and B'Tselem, Parents Circle, which is an organisation of Palestinian and Israeli berieved parents.
One of my students told me about how her uncle, who is a university professor, went on an exchange visit to a university in Israel. Did anybody think badly of it, I asked her. No, she said. But she told me another story about a planned visit of students from Al Quds university to
Tel Aviv. A group of Israelis came to the university to discuss details of hte trip with the students. As a result the students were labelled 'collaborators' by the other students and ostracised.
Palestinians from Abu Dis regularly attend the Israeli Hadassah hospital for emergency operations or childbirth, but sometimes there are bureaucratic delays in getting special permission to cross the checkpoints. Palestinians are given a limited specified time that they can be on the other side. When someone is about to give birth, this can be difficult to predict, and it is not uncommon for women to give birth while waiting to cross a checkpoint.
A few days ago I went to the Prisoners' Museum, which is on the university campus. It is a very detailed and graphic record of the experiences of prisoners in Israeli jails, since the start of the occupation of the West Bank in 1967. There a photographs of Palestinians who have died in jail, details of interrogations, prison conditions, resistence activities, letters smuggled out, art work produced by prisoners. Upstairs there is a library, where I found a report written in English in 1990 by the Palestinian human rights organisation Al Haq. This described the situation in the territories following the first Intifada, that is twenty years ago. It is amazing how many of the situations the study describes in detail are still current today: interrogation techniques amounting to torture, beatings of civilians including youths, attacks by settlers, brutality in prisons, the use of administrative detention (that is detention without trial).
At any one time, there are thousands of prisoners in Israeli jails, hundreds of them under 18, some no older than 16, which is a breach of international humanitarian law. There is no doubt from the detailed testimonies at the museum and the report I read, that techniques used by the Israeli security, the Shin Bet, to question suspects, amount to torture. This was especially true at times of hightened tension, such as during the two Intifadas. The conditions in the prisons themselves are often brutal: prisoners suffer from overcrowding, bad food, poor sanitary conditions.
On the other hand, this is not universal. Several people told me that some of the guards were humane, prisoners sometimes have a chance to produce works of art, learn Hebrew and study. Abid, who was in prison several times, told me that he enrolled in the Israeli open university, and that is how he got his degree. Another man that I met has just come out of prison. He was studying in open university and was about to submit his final dissertation when he was released.
One of my students told me the other day that the proximity of Palestine to an advanced technological country like Israel, has allowed it access to a lot of technology that it wouldn't have had otherwise. Palestine is not a third world country. Nobody is starving, shops sell the latest models of televisions, people have up to date mobiles and access computers, internet, facebook and the global village is widespread. Yet the infrastructure here is bad: rubbish collection, water, the tidyness of the environment, the general rundown look of the towns contrast with the high standard of some individual houses and blocks of flats. Building is a big industry here, the universities produce skilled graduates every year.
But there is a general lack of organisation here and a tendency to improvise, and things can fall over quickly. Today it took me a long time for me to phone a number in Ramallah on my Palestinian mobile and land line. This was because the final secondary school examination (tawjihi) results have just come out and everybody is phoning everybody else about them, causing the telephone network to collapse. I never know how many students are going to turn up for a class. Sometimes people express enthusiasme but fail to turn up next time, sometimes they dont't turn up because something else - a wedding, a party - has intervened. There is an attitude of making do and adapting. A lot of energy goes into doing this.

Palestine is an economic dependency of Israel. It gets some benefits from this, access to some technology, but it is kept at a subordinate level. Shops are full of Israeli food water and other goods. The roads reverberate to the sound of broken down Israeli cars. Palestine produces cheap basic goods oranges, olives, oil; Israel is high-tech, the business my cousin is setting up will produce robots that will tunnel through water and oil pipes, find hairline cracks and repair them. Palestine is held back by the cage it finds itself in, produced by the wall, the checkpoints, the restrictions of getting from a to b, the necessity to find a way round everything on a day to day basis.

In some ways it is a relief for me to go into West Jersusalem, which I have done since I have been here. The Israeli western half of the city is clean, efficient, everything seems to work, just as it does in a Spanish or Italian city. There are decent people there too, people like the orthodox Jewish man who came up to me offering to help when I was trying, with my characteristic disorientation, to find Jaffa Street. Israel is never a totalitarian brutal society. Parts of it, large parts of it are liberal. It is very accepting of lesbian and gay rights, the only country in the middle east to be. Ironically it will grant refugee status to lesbian and gay Palestinians.
But it has a savage symbiotic relationship with its downtrodden oppressed colonised brutalised other, which is also distorting and twisting its own self into a harsher form of being. It feels freer in Israel because you are not in a cage as you are here (Was it my cousin or an older friend in England who compared Palestinians to 'caged beasts' who had to be tamed? Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy, a road to nowhere?)
From the point of view of here, there is a pressure exerted by the Israeli other consisting of more settlements, more restrictions, more impossibility of living a normal life. This agenda is led by some elements of Israeli society: some of the settlers, the ideologically motivated ones; parts of the military; parts of the judiciary; some city councils like Jerusalem with an agenda to 'reunify' 'Judaize' 'create facts on the ground'; and of course large parts of this government coalition. Sometimes the system stands up for Palestinian rights. There have been court decisions, supreme court decisions that have challenged a military ruling or a settler agenda. For this reason comparing 'Israel' with nazism, as if the country was one thing, or even simply that it is Apartheid South Africa, are in my opinion over simple. Of course there are apartheid elements. Many Israelis accept this, there are also brutal elements common to all occupying regimes (Britain in Northern Ireland, US and Britain in Iraq, the British Empire, the French Empire etc).
I want to talk to my young cousin who I have not met yet. He has just finished his military service earlier this year. As part of this, he was on patrol around Jenin, where we are going tomorrow. I want to ask him what it is like from an Israeli soldier's point of view what it is like patrolling an occupied area, what are the fears, temptations, to what extent violence comes out of frustration, to what extent it is encouraged by peers.
When I was at the checkpoint on the way to Jerusalem, one of the soldiers who came on to the bus to check our ids was just a boy, with an MK16. Maybe he feels good about ordering around old men and women 'because he can'. Maybe he has no reflective thoughts beyond the intoxication of that realisation.

Description of Abu Dis

Abu Dis is in effect a village but has only become one very recently. Until a few years ago it was a suburb of Jerusalem. Bread used to be produced here and taken to the city daily. You can see the mount of Olives, and the Dome of the Rock quite easily from the street or our balcony. The construction of the separation wall has had a devastating effect on Abu Dis, which has as a result been cut off from the rest of Jersulalem and forced to beself-sufficient. One of my students Hiba came along to a class yesterday with her aunt Ieha, who lives in a refugee camp at Kalandria on the other side of Eizarieh (Bethany) near here. (Kalandria is a also a major checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem. If you want to travel from Ramallah to Jerusalem, you have to go through this checkpoint, get out of the bus, walk through a series of turnstyles, show your IDs or passports, and if allowed, you can rejoin the bus on the other side. Sometimes the process is quick, sometimes it can take an hour or more.)
Ieha says, 'My family was driven out of a village near here called Beer Ma'een. It was my grandparents back in 1948. I don't know exactly where the village is now, because the name has been changed, all record of it has gone. Until six years ago there was a market at Abu Dis each week. Everybody had a stall there, there were crowds and all kinds of merchandise. When the wall was built in 2004, the market came to an end totally'.
So now, Abu Dis has been thrown back on itself. There is a main road, which has just been retarmacked, full of 'minimarkets', greengrocers, and workshops. There are some pavements but sometimes you have to walk in the road. Delapidated cars and vans drive at high speed, I am amazed there are not more accidents here. Israeli patrol cars also drive through the roads at high speed. One of the first nights I was here, we were passed by a patrol car in pursuit of a terrified looking young man.

There is a crossroads in the middle of the town, with a road leading up to the university. This is the University of Al Quds - Jerusalem - which was based in the centre of the city until the second intifada in 2000 - 2002, when it was moved out here. The buildings are modern, owing to contributions from richer Arab countries, and there is a garden where it is pleasant to sit in the evening, to drink coffee or coke and smoke argila. There are numerous cafes along these two main roads, shops selling household goods, and a 'smoking centre' doubling as a musical instruments shop. There are a number of mosques, the calls for prayer sound out electronically at exactly the same time at certain hours during the day and night. The sound reverberates and echoes across the valley and up the hill towards Jerusalem. Occasionally you can hear church bells very faintly from the Mount of Olives. There are no churches in Abu Dis however, no cinema or hotel, and of course no bars, though I get the impression that alcohol is drunk here 'in secret', having been bought in Ramallah or Bethlehem or another area where there are Christians. Our community centre, supported by the Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association is at one end of the main street, near where it splits into two, and next to a cemetery and a mosque.

Almost everyone I have met here seems to be related. There are large numbers of children in each family (six and above are quite normal) and people marry young, men by twenty-five or younger, women by twenty or younger. There are two or three large families, which are like clans, and a number of smaller ones that are linked to them: Abu Hillel, Afani, Sabah. People are proud of their family history, their origins and the fact that even if they are poor now, they were wealthy landowners until relatively recent times (the 1948 war when Israel was established was for them the Nakba - catastrophe, also the 1967 war). Abid (Sabah) told us, 'in the past, we were big landowners. We had lands stretching down to the Dead Sea.

One of my students Ibrahim Afani, is nearly 17. He is a communist (Palestine is a part of the world where marxism is still very real. Che Guevara also means something more than a face on a t-shirt'. There are at least two marxist parties, the PFLP and the DFLP, that are important here. He tells how much he admired Lenin, not Stalin, and even more Marx and Engels. 'We came to this area - Abu Dis - nearly a thousand years ago. We are Kurds. We followed Saladin who was a Kurd. We are a family of fighters. My great-grandfather fought in the Ottoman army, my grandfather fought the British in 1936.' He tells us that one of his friends is just about to come out of prison after two years. He was 16 when he went in.
'What did he do?'
'He threw a Molotov cocktail at the Israeli army base near here'
I ask him how to make a Molotov cocktail. It turns out to be easy. You get a bottle, fill it with gasoline, stuff a rag in the top, light it and throw the bottle. Sometimes you can set yourself on fire. He says that he himself does not believe in that kind of action any more. 'It does no good. I prefer to express myself through my music and rap' (He is a skilled rap poet. He played me one of his pieces from his iphone. Some languages lend themselves to rap some don't. Arabic which is a very alliterative language does). He told me about his friend who was involved in the rioting that took place near the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem earlier this year. 'He got hit by a rubber bullet. He was lying on the ground. A group of soldiers came over to him, got hold of his leg, and snapped it like a piece of wood'.
You hear stories like this all the time here. Even allowing for exaggerations, it is clear that this occupation, like all occupations, is following a brutal path, one that has been present for a long time, since at least the first intifada of 1987. It is remarkable that there is not much awareness in the west of the day to day brutality of life under this regime. It poses huge ethical issues for anyone interested in human rights, and especially for someone like myself who is Jewish, partly for whose sake presumably Israel was established in the first place.

Visit to Al Sawieh Village near Nablus

It was last Friday, one of our days off. The centre in Abu Dis is closed for the Moslem holy day. Abed has organised a visit to a village near Nablus which lies in the northern part of the territory. We set off in a taxi early at about nine. The taxi speeds along the main roads skirting Ramallah and the major checkpoints. We go past numerous settlements, some with biblical names like Eli and Shilo, which contradict their recent implanted origin. After about an hour and a half we reach the village of Al Sawieh, which is in the district of Nablus. It is a burning hot day. All around us we can see settlements like Eli. There are olive trees, and goats, and concrete houses and sheds.
Our contact here is a man called Arafat who is, like all the Palestinians we have met on our tours, incredibly gracious and hospitable. He shows us around the village and introduces us to the cruel Kafkaesque absurdities of life here.
The Palestinian territories are divided into three types of zones, as laid down by the 1994 Oslo agreement which set up the Palestinian authority (supposed to be a staging post for a fully-developed Palestinian state, which has not yet happened): Zone A which is under Palestinian civil and police control; Zone B which is under Palestinian civil control and Israeli police / military control; and Zone C which is under reserved Israeli military control. Abu Dis is in zone B, which means that the schools and other departments are under the Palestinian authority, but there are Israeli military patrols running around all the time. (Abed says that the distinctions between the zones are more apparent than real, because the Israeli army can go anywhere anytime they want, even into Zone A places like the Palestinian capital Ramallah. When that happens, the Palestinian police have instructions from their own authority not to show themselves in public.)
Some of Al Sawieh is in Zone B, but it turns out that the Israeli authorities have unilaterlly declared some parts of the village Zone C (closed military zones) 'on security grounds' i.e. that they pose a security threat to the surrounding settlements, which have been build on confiscated Palestinian land. So the village has a Zone B core, but is criss-crossed with Zone C bits. The houses that have been newly-designated as being in Zone C can be demolished, even if families have been living in them for 50 years.
Arafat takes us on a tour of the village. 'You see those houses on the left, they are Zone B, the houses on the other side of the road (it is a narrow track) are Zone C. That house is Zone B, the one next door is Zone C. This house is half Zone B and half Zone C'. There had been a big effort by the Israeli authorities (military backed by court orders) to demolish the houses in the areas designated as C, but the efforts of peace activists, Palestinian and Israeli had put a stop to this, at least for the moment. Nevertheless we saw some houses which were demolished or now inaccessible or unusable.
A lot of peace activists come to Al Sawieh, international and Israeli. Arafat is friendly with a lot of Israeli groups such as Gush Shalom, the Israeli-Palestinian group Mothers for Peace, the international group Seeds of Peace which works in India Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as Palestine and Israel. They seem to be able to get here quite freely, which surprises me. Also their efforts have been quite effective in stopping house demolitions.
Arafat works for the Palestinian authority. All his human rights activities are voluntary. He has been abroad on several occasions on speaking tours. He shows us a tablecloth from Wales where he has been. He is amazingly positive about the future, which is a great relief after some of the apocalyptic visions of the past few days.
'I want peace with Israel, within the 1967 borders. If we have that, then there will be peace'
I ask him about the refugees of 1948.
'It is not my right to make a decision about the refugees. Neither is it the right of Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas the president of the Palestinian Authority). It is for the Palestinian refugees themselves who have to decide. You know how hard their life is in Lebanon and other places' (In Lebanon they have never been given citizen rights unlike in Jordan, they cannot live outside the refugee camps, they are barred from most employent, have been supported by UN handouts for the past 60 years).

I wonder about the way Israeli settlements get established here on Palestinian land. Is there any legal pretext or procedure? Some of the settlements such as Ma'ale Adunim and Ariel are very large and there are numerous smaller ones. It seems that Palestinians who have been farming on their land for generations don't always have any written document that says it is their land, or if they do, it is a document that comes from the era of the Ottoman empire ie. at least a hundred years old. These documents are not recognised by Israeli courts as valid, still less any title by virtue of their customary use. So Israeli settlements are put down often as part of a government or local government plan to establish 'facts on the ground' as in the area to the east of Jerusalem where the idea is to make the whole area undivided Israeli territory. Sometimes the initiative comes from religious settlers, convinced that they have a mandate from God, arriving often unofficially at first in their caravans, establishing a presence, which is then legitimised by their being there, given protection by the military, access to cheap water, electricity, roads for their exclusive use. The Palestinian villagers whose rights have not been recognised, are then seen as a danger and a threat to these settlements.
In the evening on the way back to Abu Dis we go to a demonstration in a suburb of Jerusalem called Sheikh Jarrah, near the old city. This is a Palestinian area, within the eastern part of hte city, which was occupied and annexed by Israeli in 1967. In recent years there has been a push by religious settlers / local government / government to reduce the number of Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and replace them with Israelis. Palestinian families get expelled from their houses, or their houses demolished on the basis of supposed prior Jewish ownership or a breach of building regulations. Sheikh Jarrah is one of the areas this is happening. Every Friday there is a demonstration by Palestinians and some Israelis against the expulsions and demolitions. Today there are a few hundred demonstrators. There are about twenty soldiers on hand. It is mainly noisy but peaceful, but there is an outbreak of scuffling between some of the religious settlers occupying a former Palestinian house and some of the Palestinians. One of the placards spells out the danger that this could turn into another Hebron.

Abid says that every Friday there are over fifty demonstrations all over the West Bank protesting against the separation wall, the settlements, and the policy of displacement. These are getting more and more international participation.

Going to Jerusalem; Meeting my cousin again

I take a Monday off so that the day I have in Jerusalem is not Friday, the normal day the centre in Abu Dis is closed, which coincides with the Moslem holy day or the start of the Jewish Sabbath. It is a normal day. The bus from Abu Dis to Jerusalem is slow, I have to change at al-Eizariya and the bus waits a long time before departing. I text my cousin that I am going to be late for our rendezvous at the Jaffa gate. He starts sending me back texts which are meant to be humorous, about the alleged inefficiency of the Arab bus service ('you get 25% discount if you get out and push'). The implication is that Palestinians (or 'Arabs' as he calls them) are inefficient, child-like, comical. The jokes are amusing in the sense that the jokes that some of my students in London tell me playing on Jewish stereotypes of meanness are funny to me. It is amusing that there still exist people who still see the world in those terms, or perhaps there again it isn't.
When I meet him, he looks older, his large bulk paradoxically giving him an air of uncertainty as he moves around the crowds. We go to a modern shopping arcade a few metres outside the Jaffa Gate. Department stores and cafes very airconditioned on a record hot day like this, but lacking any distinctiveness that would make them from Israel as opposed to from Dubai or Australia. I also notice the huge hike in prices when we stop for a coffee and a sandwich, here in Israel proper as opposed to the Palestine territories.
A year ago we had met here and we had argued for hours. There had been tears on my part because the experience of going into a Palestinian community was new to me and was an emotional shock. This time I was determined not to argue like that. We have met up several times over the past year, and the fact that both of us have suffered personal tragedies, both having lost brothers to cancer, has had the effect of bringing us close together. So our conversation is not a full-on argument about the occupation, soldiers brutality, settlements and the Kafka nightmare of passes, cruel administrative decisions and the nightmarish difficulties of doing the most elementary things in life. Instead we talked about reconciliation, how Israelis and Palestinians could listen to each other's stories, how there is a near-total mismatch between the two narratives, how people need a place where they could physically meet to learn to treat each other as human. I told him about al-Eizariya where settlers go unofficially to buy things from the Palestinians and hire labour. As a result friendships are not unknown. Palestinians I know say things like, 'there are good Israelis and band Israelis'. It is very different from Hebron, where there is a total cutting-off between the two sides, hostility, paranoia, no possibility of friendly contact. Peter admits that the situation in Hebron is crazy.
The two discordant narratives come down to quite small things. Palestine is full of rickety cars with yellow Israeli number plates, and a few smart cars with Palestinian number plates. Abed, who works for CADFA here, says that the broken-down cars with Israeli number plates are the result of Israelis 'using Palestine as a rubbish-dump for all the cars that they aren't allowed to drive on their own roads'. Unscrupulous dealers pass them off on to the Palestinians. My cousin's version of what happens is a bit different. According to him, 'Arabs' steal cars off Israeli streets on a large scale, strip them down and smuggle them into Palestine in a kind of organised scam. 'That is why I have an unusual make of car, so that they are not so interested in stripping it down for the parts'.
Once again I get a strange mixture of optimism and pessimism from him. He is an engineer, one of the founders of a very high-tech startup company designing robots which tunnel through underground water-pipes, detecting hairline fractures and repairing them. The potential seems to be enormous. Everywhere in the world waterpipes leak vast amounts of water, which if these could be repaired without digging out the pipes and physically replacing them, would save billions. His company has an opening in Britain, where 40% of the water is lost. Everything is hopeful he says. In a few years, the company will start to take off.
When we talk about Israel, he repeats what he told me last year. 'I don't believe that Israel will be here in two hundred or even one hundred years' time. It is impossible. The number of people we have here, compared to the number of surrounding people (He means 'Arabs' or 'Moslems') is just a drop in the ocean. 'People will say one day - there was this first temple, and then the second temple, and then there was this man called Ben Gurion - We needed to have Israel because it has given us time to recover from the holocaust'. His vision is very melancholic. In the meantime he continues to make plans cheerfully about the future. I am always amazed how people, especially very practical people can operate on two levels, making plans, pushing heir lives forward, unfolding their ambitions, but at the same time all within a surrounding ambience of gloom. I have found something similar going on with some Palestinians I have met: people who work hard and study hard to advance their personal ambitions and dreams, but at the same time without collective hope for the society, for Palestine.
One of Peter's sons left the army after his military service at the end of last year. He is about to go abroad with some of his army friends for an extended holiday in South America, something that young Israelis very often do after their military service. (A Palestinian I was talking to yesterday said, 'The friends you make in the army and in prison are the best friends'). I haven't met him yet but I want to ask him what his experience was like patrolling the area around Jenin what he did, what he saw, and what his friends did.

Peter asks me what I want to visit. I tell him Mea Shearim the ultra-orthodox Jewish neighbourhood, so that's where we go. We drive for a while and he parks his car on a side street in a poor inner city area. We walk down the main commercial street of Mia Shearim. Everywhere there are orthodox men and boys dressed in black, women in skirts and long-sleeve shirts. The day is boiling, pushing forty. It is late morning on a Monday but there are lots of men around, some pushing prams. Many of the shops sell religious articles. Once again I feel impelled to do something to fit into the distinctive environment, so in one of the religious shops I buy a kippah (skullcap), black with beautifully coloured embroidery around the edge, and start wearing it in the street. The area is poor so none of the stuff is expensive, there are blocks of small tenements, crumbling synagogues and religious schools. Everywhere there are notices warning people (specifically women) to dress modestly, that is no short dresses, bare arms.
The most interesting thing is that everywhere there are anti-Zionist slogans mostly in Hebrew, which Peter translates for me, some in English: 'No entry to Zionists' (at the gate to a religious building; 'Palestine yes, Zionism no'; 'Zionist pirates' (referring to the recent naval action off Gaza). I ask Peter if he is upset by any of this. 'No not upset, just amused'. He tells me that from the beginning Israeli governments have financially supported the ultra-orthodox, exempted them from military service, allowed them not to work so they can study. 'You can be sure that in a Palestinian state, these people won't get baled out like they do now'. He derides their backwardness, imagines how sexually hypocrital they are, wonders how healthy it can be wearing full-on black suits on a day like this.
But then, when we come back to the subject of Jewish survival, he says, 'at least these people are preserving Jewish traditions'. I think of the tendency of westernised Jews such as us to assimilate into the surrounding culture, their low birthrate, in contrast to the large number of children the orthodox and ultra-orthodox have. (All the time his thoughts keep coming back to demographics). The orthodox who used to be a small minority in Israel, are now becoming more and more important demographically and politically. Some are pro-Zionist, developing a religious form of Zionism in contrast to the earlier left-wing secular Zionism, some (it is impossible to work out how many on the basis of the graffitti) are anti-Zionist.
We go back to the car and he takes me back to the Damascus Gate where I am going to get my bus. We are going to meet again in a week or two. On my way back to Abu Dis, he sends me another text in questionable taste, about the people in the neighbourhood we have just visited.

Visit to Hebron

Yesterday we went to Hebron. It wasn't a long way, just over an hour over very winding roads. There was one particularly steep road that zigzaged up a hill. My friend Mousa who went with us said that it was the substitute Jerusalem Bethlehem road that was built when the older more direct one was closed at the time ofthe second Intifada (Palestinian uprising) in 2000. The road has lots of bends and on one side there are precipitous falls. When the road was first built with narrow lanes, Mousa said, drivers took the bends too fast and there were lots of accidents. Since then people have got used to it. The route is called The Valley of Fire. (It was more intimidating coming back when we were descending the steep slopes). So we go past Bethlehem, up the Valley of Fire and through a checkpoint guarded by bored-looking soldiers.
I have heard a lot about Hebron, how the city has a hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians, and five hundred settlers occupying the centre of the old city, settlers of the most extreme ideological kind, guarded by soldiers. I have also seen a dvd of ex-Israeli soldiers from the group Breaking the Silence talking about their experiences of being on patrol in Hebron.
The countryside around Hebron is quite fertile and green. There are some settlements and some fertile Palestinian land. The suburbs of Hebron look quite prosperous. There are industries here, a lot of glassware and pottery is made here. The bus takes us to meet our guide, an activist named Sharifa el-Sharif, who she tells us is the first woman to receive a tourist guide's licence in the history of Hebron. She takes us to the old city. It is very eery here. Bordering the old market streets is the settlement area which is separated from the old city by concrete blocks and barbed wire. The settlement area includes an ex-Palestinian school building which has now been converted into an Israeli school, a cluster of modern-looking flats, lookout posts and a road which is for the exclusive use of settlers. The settler area borders on the old market. In some places the settlers occupy the upper floors of the old buildings in the market, and the Palestinians are confined to the ground floor. In some places it is impossible to use even the ground floor areas and the entrances are kept permanently locked. Some old structures such as the Ottoman era hamam (baths) are now no longer usable. The main thoroufare of the market is poor, there a few shops, not many people around. This is partly because it is Friday (holy day for Moslems) partly because of the intimidating proximity of the settlement area. Fifteen years before, a settler had been killed in an argument in the street here. There is a memorial in Hebrew to him. As a result of the death, the whole market street had been closed for ten years, and only reopened five years ago. A few traders came back, but the situation is tense. When you look up you see that the street above the heads of the traders is covered by wire mesh. This is to protect them against the rubbish thrown down onto them from the settlers occupying the upper floors. One of the traders, who sells carpets and dresses shows us the results of eggs thrown down on his wares. Deep stains mark some of his carpets.
At certain points concrete barriers and barbed wire border the streets, but we are advised not to photograph there or get too close, because the barriers are being observed from the fortified blocks of the settlers. There is a possibility of being shot.
We walk up to the ancient mosque of Abraham through an army checkpoint. Sharifa shows us the tomb of her grandfather, who was mayor of Hebron. We are not allowed into the mosque. It is Friday, holy day for the Moslems, but this is not the reason why we are not allowed in. The soldiers have taken it on themselves, as they had when I was in Jerusalem last year trying to get into the Haram al-Sharif, to decide that non-Moslems were not going to be able to enter. There is a separate entrance to the mosque for religious Jews as the building commemorates Abraham, holy to Jews as well as Moslems.

Sharifa takes us to the flat of a friend of hers, also an activist. We talk about the events in Hebron during the last few years, especially the massacre that occurred in 1994 in the mosque, when a crazed gunman, Baruch Goldstein, open fire on the worshippers and killed 29 of them. Sharifa has a bullet in her knee from that day that she has been carrying around for the last 16 years. 'I went to an ambulance to help the injured. I was in the street. Some of the soldiers were opening fire. I got shot in the knee. This is my (she uses an Arabic expression) debt of faith'. The two women argue about numbers. Sharifa mentions the number of dead was 65, her friend says no it was 29. She says, 'I remember that day as if it was yesterday. There was blood all over the stones.'

I am reminded of a massacre of Jewish settlers that had occurred in 1929 by local Arabs from Hebron in which sixty-five Jews were killed. There is a long history of hostility in this area. Shortly after Hebron was conquered by the Israelis after the Six Day War in 1967, a group of settlers came to the centre of Hebron, to 're-establish the Jewish settlement', as they put it. That is the origin of the present standoff and the tense and depressing atmosphere in the centre of Hebron.
Later we go downstairs and talk to some volunteers from Canada and the US from a group called the Christian Peacemaker Team. There are a lot of NGOs working in Palestine and Israel. This group writes reports whenever there is any trouble between settlers or soldiers and local Palestinian farmers. One of the Americans tells us that he has been reporting on what had happened to some farmers who had been using water without permission. 'They had their water pipes cut, and their tomato plants ripped out'.

The chief impression I get from going to Hebron is that the Palestinians despite everything they have been subjected to, the danger, the daily humiliations, the pressures to move, are not going anywhere. They are determined to stay. That is why they moved back to the old market place in the face of open settlement hostility and regular attacks. You can see some of the videos that have been taken of these by going to http://www.youtube.com/ and and typing 'Hebron'. The chief weapon that the Palestinians have is their patience and stubborness. My cousin Peter acknowledged this last year when he said, 'the Arabs know how to wait', and they do. I ask Sharifa, as I ask everyone I meet here about the prospects of peace. She makes a wry pun as many Palestinians are very good at doing. 'We want peace (PEACE) but not what the Israelis want, which is Piece (PIECE), a piece here and a piece there. We don't want to push them into the sea, but we have to talk about the fundamentals. Even their activists don't want to do that. They have these wonderful slogans but they don't want to talk about basics'. Inevitably the question of refugees and the right of return comes up. There are different versions of history of what happened, and maybe at that level nothing will be solved. But I detect a certain level of reality on both sides. The Palestinians I talk to don't want to drive the Jews into the sea, Israelis like my cousin realise that a Palestinian state is inevitable. Intellectuals like Chomsky have stated that a solution to the conflict has to come by way of two-states.
It is Friday and a lot of buildings are closed. We go to a restaurant to eat, and then to a ceramics factory. All the time in the old market, the traders have been pressing us to buy things. I buy a Palestinian keyring decorated with the red black white and green colours. I realise that I will to take them through Ben Gurion Airport. I will have to present them to be scanned and the Palestinian flag will be like a red rag to a bull. So I will have to post it to myself in London from Israel.
We go back into the suburbs. Along the way we have picked up some other travellers: three German medical students who have been studying in Israel, and three women from South America, one from Venezuela and two from Mexico.

Football Semifinal

Last night I went to the football semifinal between Germany and Brazil, not something I would normally do, having very little interest in football. But we were invited by some of our friends to go up to the university gardens late in the evening where there was a big screen.


On the way, something quite disturbing happened. Simone, Mirco and I were leaving our flat with our young Palestinian friend Nadeen. The road leading from our flat to the cross-roads at teh centre of Abu Dis is narrow and winding with no pavement, so you have to dodge the traffic coming either way. Suddenly a frightened-looking young Palestinian rushed towards us and then past us in the direction we had been coming from. It was just on 9.30. And then a few seconds later, an Israeli armoured jeep drove towards us fast in pursuit of the man. In a minute or so, they had overtaken him and stopped somewhere near the door of our flat. Mirco wanted to go back and take a picture, but Nadeen urged us on. He said that the soldiers saw foreigners involved, he would be stopped and questioned for associating with them. What had the man done to deserve the pursuit? We didn't know. He could have thrown a stone at the jeep, or somebody else could have, quite a frequent occurrence in Abu Dis. I have seen several jeeps this year and last year, but this is the first time I have seen an 'incident'. Mirco and Simone have already been stopped and questioned.


Later on, there was something else. On the way up the road leading to the university, another army jeep passed. Mirco, who has quite a good camera, tried to take a picture of it, managed to get a snap of the tail-end. Just then, two young men came up to us, demanding to know who we were, what photographs we were taking, and why. It turned out the Mirco's photograph was fairly inconclusive. But who were the young men? They were Palestinians but who were they, and why did they want to know about our photographing? Nadeen was vague about the point. A little bit later, at the entrance to the university gardens, we met an older man, who told us that some Palestinians work for the army, carry out low-level observation, intelligence for them. The road leading to the university runs along the separation wall, so maybe they are checking to see that no-one is trying to climb over. They do it in exchange for advantages, maybe money, maybe in response to threats, maybe in exchange for permit to go and visit Jerusalem, which most Palestinians here don't have. Either way, they are compromised. They can be blackmailed by the soldiers or the Israeli authorities into doing more, threatened with exposure, and then they are in danger from their own side. I have read about this happening in Gaza, and the kind of revenge taken by Hamas, but this was something I have observed personally.


Sometimes kids are thrown into jail, some under the age of 16, where they are easily frightened and subject to any kind of physical and psychological pressure. It is also a fact that in anysituation of occupation (think of France during the German occupation, or Northern Ireland) there will be people who will be forced, or induced or pressured out of self-interest or fear to work with the occupiers. This corrupts the occupied as well as the occupiers. Simone was upset. She said that she had not been told about this kind of complexity in the situation here. I told her I thought it was inevitable, given the occupation, the imbalance of power, the resources an occupier can use to pressurise the occupied. One of Nadeen's friends has been in jail twice. He showed us a certificate issued by the Red Cross confirming that he had been in prison for 13 months when he was 20.


The covered area where the screen had been placed, was full of young men. One have of the space was pro-Germany, a German flag hung from a beam. The other side was pro-Spain. Simone was the only woman there watching. There were other women with children outside in the open area of the gardens but they weren't watching the football. The excitement built up, Spain one, huge euphoria and then within a few minutes of the end of the match the whole space emptied.


Tomorrow the volunteer teaches are going to Hebron, which I have heard a lot about - a quarter of a million Palestinians live there, and in the centre, in the old city, a few hundred fanatical settlers protected by soldiers.

Arrival

My flight into Ben Gurion airport Tel Aviv arrived late in the evening and maybe for that reason, the security was fairly cursory. I was a bit nervous because I was carrying an Arabic language textbook and remembered stories of trouble that previous visitors to Palestine had had on account of dictionaries. But my questioning was fairly brief. Maybe my name helped me again. The immigration control official took a look at my passport and I told them that I was here to do some travelling and 'to catch up with my family', a prepared explanation that I reckoned would lead my interrogator down a safe path. She asked me if I was an immigrant ('Are you making Aliyah'), not with suspicion as might be the case in the UK, but with the implied expectation that I should be, that I was somehow expected to be. On my saying no, I received a sullen look and my passport was stamped with a three month visa. And that was that.
The shared taxi I took from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was fast along the motorway until we reached the city itself and then meandered around different suburbs dropping off different travellers, through areas that I did not know, some wealthy, some more interesting because more down at heel but with more character, areas full of orthodox Jews dressed in black hats and frock coats, thin gaunt-looking young men, men with beards pushing prams. One of the last to leave the taxi was a young man listening to an ipod who I took to be an Israeli before he started talking to me and he turned out to be from England working for a human rights NGO in Jerusalem. He was returning from the UK for a holiday. He started to tell me about his work in Jerusalem which seemed to be connected with an international church group, and I invited him to Abu Dis. 'I will show you round Jerusalem', he said. He spoke of 'all this madness', meaning the situation, which is inescapable.
I was eventually put at the Jerusalem Hotel near the old city, just like last year, and waiting for me was a taxi driver from Abu Dis, not Sami like last year but his son Faud. We drove in darkness through the eastern part of the city, waved through a barrier and down a fast road that led to Abu Dis. I remember Azariyah from last time, concentrated rows of shops, ramshackle garages and warehouses, some smart shops, and the pervasive wall bordering the road. We reach the village of Abu Dis, one main road, crossroads and a rough side road leading to our volunteers flat. I have four flatmates this time, a young German woman who has been living in London, an Italian, an English woman who is working for an NGO in Ramallah, and her friend.
I start teaching the next day. A small but startling thing. Two young children playacting. One has a large stick. He pretends to question the other one, sitting him down on a chair, pretending to batter him with the stick, pretending to slap him across the face. The other kid enters into the game with incredible energy. I had arrived the previous night at 10.30. At 11.00 pm I was told, some soldiers had rounded up about thirty youths on the street and forced them to stand spreadeagled against a wall for two hours.
The community centre where I am teaching looks in a better state than last year. The rooms have been painted and decorated, there are more books, only one whiteboard though, and the photocopier is not working. Still, improvisation is the thing.
Today, we had lunch with a doctor. His wife is the headmistress of a girls' school in Azariah. He the head of a medical centre. There are no hospitals in Abu Dis. The nearest Palestinian hospitals are in Jericho, or Ramallah, or Bethleham an hour away. Otherwise people here have to go to a hospital in Israel. But to go there you need papers that can take five days to obtain. Women have been known to give birth at checkpoints here. 'We are like caged animals here', the doctor says.