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.