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.