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.