abudisvolunteer

At the Bedouin Camp.

2009-07-29T09:31:00.000-07:00

I must tell you about our visit to the Bedouin settlement today. It is the last day of our summer camp, and I am leaving for Jerusalem tomorrow afternoon. I don't know when I will get to write again. It will be a very different kind of blog, because I will be in Israel prior to coming home, and I will be sad at not being here, feeling my loss, feeling the contrast between my time here among the friendly Palestinians, and trying to come to terms with the very different westernised and not so very friendly Israeli culture.

But today, we visited a Bedouin camp outside Abu Dis. The reason was to plant some trees. It is a symbolic act because this land has been designated to be the site of yet more Israeli settlements. There is a plan to turn a whole sweep of land from here, near Jerusalem, down to the Dead Sea into a series of settlements. There is already Ma'ale Adumim, and Qidar. The idea I am told, is to create a ring of settlements around Jerusalem in a circle. That way, the Palestinian areas will be split up and separated from each other, and a state will become impossible. Somebody said yesterday, 'One day the wall at Abu Dis will be taken down because there won't be any Palestinians here any more.

So we go to the Bedouin settlement to make our point, to plant some symbolic trees - olives because they endure and last. These Bedouin people have already been moved here from Israel on to Palestinian land. They are going to be moved again nearer to Ma'ale Adumim and this will be turned into another settlement. All of us, kids and volunteers, load into a number of camper vans. We leave the town, leave the tarmacked road on to a rough track. The countryside becomes very barren. Bare dusty hills, and eventually we come to the Bedouin encampment - a group of corrugated metal shacks. It is very hot. Here and there are some corralled animals - some donkeys and goats. We scramble down and then up a hill and start to plant our trees. There is a crew from a local television channel and Dr. Abdullah gives an interview about what we are doing. Lots of photographs of the saplings. Focused energy from the kids who are digging holes in the ground under the furious heat.

Water or lack of water is a huge problem here, and another cause of bitterness on the part of Palestinians. Several people have told me that under the terms of the 1993 Oslo accords, severe limitations were imposed on the ability of Palestinians to extract water, and restrictions on how deep into the earth they can mine. They say that Israel gets the easily-obtained water and as a result they get a disproportionate amount. Israel is drawing water off from the Jordan river and as a result the Dead Sea is shrinking, may vanish altogether in a few years. Certainly my overwhelming impression of the Palestinian landscape, especially this time of year is of dryness. The hills where we are are completely barren. At the very top of a hill above us is part of the settlement of Qidar. From here I can see the edge of a garden which looks as if it has access to far more water than anything down here.

We spend an hour or so here, planting trees, photographing each other, swigging from our bottles of orange-juice and water. Then we load into our camper vans and start returning to the town. On the way back, the usual chanting from the kids. One of them leans out from the window at the front of the van into the wind. At one point our van runs out of fuel and we have to pull into the side of the road and wait for one of the other vans to return with some more in a bottle.

When we get back to the community centre, we all say goodbye to each other, because this is the last day of the summer camp. Tomorrow morning there will be a farewell party and I will be moving to Jerusalem.

Palestinian Time

2009-07-28T22:08:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I got talking to a young man who has been living in America, like many Palestinians. He grew up here but now he is an American citizen. Still, the Israeli government counts him as a Palestinian so he can't come here via Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, he has to come via Amman. I asks him about how he finds Abu Dis since he has been away. 'Life here since the wall is the best', he says laughing ironically. 'Before we have some freedom here, now we have no freedom'. We start to talk about American businesses, Starbucks in particular. He is sure, as a lot of people are here, that Starbucks contributes vast amounts of money direct to the Israeli army. 'It is a Jewish company', he says. 'David is Jewish', says Mousa, who is also part of the conversation. This doesn't stop the flow. 'For every cup of coffee you buy, 15% goes to the Israeli army'. I wonder about this, I am sceptical that money would be paid directly to the Israeli army, it might be possible to find the annual reports of Starbucks to find out whether this is true or false. Probably the Director of Starbucks contributes money to Israeli charities, but I wonder how 27 cents out of a cup of coffe costing $1-80 can possibly go to the Israeli army without it figuring pretty large in some financial report or other. Given the reality of life here and what people experience day to day though, it is almost impossible to cut through the tangle of truths half-truths, rumours inventions that wind around this whole issue.

One of the most exasperating things about life here from a UK point of view, is the casual attitude to time. People make appointments to meet and then don't turn up or are late. Arrangements are vague, can be changed at the last minute, there is often a lot of waiting around. It is jokingly called 'Waqt Filistinee' - Palestinian time. There has been a lot of that in the running of our summer camp and the other teaching I have done. There has been a certain amount of chaos, we have had to organise our activities on a shoe-string sometimes, people tell me they badly want English lessons and then don't turn up because something else has intervened - a wedding or a party. It is surprising that we have achieved anything, but I suppose we have. We have managed to get some funding to create a garden in the grounds of the 'Dar al-Saddaqa' - Friendship House - where our summer camp has been. Nadeen, one of our teenage volunteers went to Ramallah and came back with a huge amount of baby trees, as well as spades and other equipment. Yesterday the kids started to clear the ground. One of the major problems here is the lack of water. Not a trace of rain since I got here (the rainy months if they happen are December January, a bit of February) and the heat has been unrelenting. What I am afraid of is that we are going to plant these trees and then no-one is going to water them and they will die, that will be awful. But there is a well in the grounds of the house, apparently there is water underground, so hopefully it will be ok.

Today, the last day of the summer camp, we are going to take some of the seedlings and planting them on a patch of land somewhere in the town that has been confiscated by the Israeli army. Apparently they confiscated the land because they want to extend the scope of the wall. The tree-planting will be a protest against the land confiscation.

A couple of days ago I went with Sarah to dinner at the house of Abid who lives near our flat. Abid is the worker employed by CADFA (Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association) employed to document and report human rights abuses here. His reports are then used by CADFA in the UK and abroad, to put an international spotlight on what is happening here. He is meticulous in his work, his knowledge of the details of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its origins, the serpentine ramifications of the day to day events an injustices is huge. He has spent four years of his life in various Israeli jails, and is amazingly unbitter about it. He must have a huge file about him.

We sit on the balcony of his large family house. He occupies one floor with his wife and children. Downstairs on another floor is his father, a very dignified man probably in his seventies. It is coming on to night and there is a merciful cooling wind blowing on to us. The balcony faces east. Ahead of us we can see a water-tower from the Israeli settlement of Ma'ale Adumim. Like all settlements it occupies a hilltop position. Abid says, 'It is our misfortune that we have always occupied the valleys. That was where the best land is. The Israelis occupy the hilltops where they can command the countryside'. We talk about politics. He has been a member of the DFLP (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine), a left-wing party that used to be allied to the Soviet Union. He says that the Palestinian Authority is totally corrupt, and Fatah the main party is especially corrupt. The government officials in Ramallah want to hold on to their jobs, and the flow of money that comes in from Europe and other parts. It also suits the Israelis, he says, to have what amounts to collaborators there. If the Israeli army withdrew, the Palestinian Authority would be overthrown, just as other collaborating regimes - the king of Egypt in the nineteen fifties - were easily overthrown as soon as their foreign backers were no longer there.

I ask him, 'You have talked a lot about the history of this conflict and the day to day injustices and fights that you have. But what is your vision of the future? What is the best possible outcome that you can imagine'. He says that the best outcome, one that he believes will happen eventually, is for a single democratic state, comprising Jews and Palestinians. It seems unlikely

now he says, but look at Europe Britain France and Germany in one union. How likely did that seem in 1945? Abid is a socialist and he has a non-religious point of view which I warm to completely. He thinks that in a sense all nation states are illegitimate. The Palestinians are burdened by a corrupt Palestinian Authority. The Israelis are also burdened with a government that keeps them afraid of the other side. All these conflicts are in the interest of business, of capitalists to keep them going.

He is also incredibly generous. 'I do not believe', he says, 'that Israelis should get on a boat and go back to the countries they came from. Most Israelis are second generation, third generation and have no other home than this. I do not have this idea that the Palestinians lived here "from time immemorial" and that the Jews are totally different and alien. There have always been settlements and conquests, mixtures migrations, one people after another: Greeks, Romans, Crusaders, Kurds, Turks ...' (This seems completely born out when I look at some of my students. Some are very dark, some are as fair-looking as Europeans. Palestinians don't look very different or different at all from Israelis).

Then he tells me about his great-grandmother. 'In those days, in the time of the Turks, the Turkish government used to take children when they reached the age of 15 and force them into the army. They would be posted to another part of their empire and often they would never return. They would be sent to Europe, or Egypt or Yemen. My great-grandmother had six sons. Five of them were taken by the Turks into their army and she never saw them again.'

I realise that his vision of one demcratic state for Arabs and Jews is what I also really want here.

Preparing to Go Back

2009-07-27T22:17:00.000-07:00

I have started to prepare for leaving here. It is Tuesday morning, in another two dahys I will be leaving Abu Dis to spend two or three days in Israel proper as part of my 'alibi' cover story to tell officials at Tel Aviv airport who will want to know what I have been doing for the last month. They won't want to know that I have been in a town in the Palestinian territories. So I will have to post back to myself in London all 'incriminating' stuff such as friends' email addresses, telephone numbers and messages which I am going to delete off my mobile, anything in Arabic, photographs of course, which I am going to upload on to my email account and then delete off my camera. I hate and resent having to behave acting like a criminal. It just shows how much the Palestinian territories is not a state, has not been allowed to have the makings of a state, has no control of its own borders, who comes in and who comes out, even within its borders the Palestinian authority has very limited control.

I am sitting in the gardens of the university, we take the students from the summer camp up here sometimes, someties I come here by myself. There are shaded open buildings, grass sometimes fountains, and in sight of everything the separation wall. I can sit here drinking orange juice, listening to the beautiful Lebanese and Palestinian music coming from the speakers and think about the people I have met, what they have told me, and how much hope for the future there is.

Undoubedly the situation here is obscene and unjust: the wall, the pass system, the checkpoints, the settlements, the 'police' (army) presence with its raids, and brutalities, the prevention of people from coming in or leaving, the running down of services and essentials like the water-supply, has made this territory into a huge prison camp. Apartheid is not an inaccurate word for what this is, much as I disliked and feared the use of the term before I came here. The people I have met have developed a sometimes stoical, sometimes cynical sometimes good-humoured acceptance of the daily humiliations and difficulties of their lives, and still manage to have a good life in many ways - the wedding parties are amazing, people are generous and gracious and more friendly than anywhere else that I have known. They are crying out for their stories to be known, twinning organisations like the Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association are leading the way in publicising what is going on here and supporting the community.

I am amazed how little hostility I have had from people who know about my being Jewish. Given that the only exposure to Jews most people here have had has been to soldiers and settlers - both usually very negatve experiences - it is sign of how generous people are here that they are open and accepting of anyone who are open to them. Sarah my flatmate went to a Bedouin refugee camp near here a few weeks ago, which was in sight of two settlements Ma'ale Adumim and Kidar. One of the women there said, 'I have Israeli friends, they come to visit me sometimes. There are good and bad people in any group'. I had several people say similar things to me. A trader in Nablus, when I told him how friendly I thought Palestinians were, replied to me that there were good and bad among all people.

I hear people say that there will never be any accommodation with Israel, ('We are too different, our cultures are too different'). Palestinian maps of the region completely ignore the reality of Israeli towns and cities, just as Israeli maps completely ignore the reality of the Palestinians. But it is in the music here that I often find the most hope. The Lebanese and Palestinian music that floods over these gardens, the love songs that are so emotional and heart-rending, have absorbed styles from all over the world - jazz, Turkish, folk, romantic European piano riffs from the nineteenth century. There is an openess and inclusiveness to this culture despite all the injustices, and suffering which makes me optimistic for the future.

Returning to Abu Dis from Nablus

2009-07-25T21:33:00.000-07:00

The road north back from Nablus towards Ramallah and Jerusalem passes through barren landscape, bare rocky hills with some occasional olive trees, terraces hundreds of years old maybe. Everywhere there are scatterings of Israeli settlements. Maale Adonim is the main one near Abu Dis but there are others. The settlements usually occupy strategic settlements on top of hills. Once they are in place, they have special access roads. The existing Palestinian villages and towns then 'become the problem' for the settlements. New security checkpoints are put down, Palestinians have to drive around the settlements, they 'become a potential danger to the settlers'. Khaled tells me that the settlers have all kinds of inducements from the Israeli government to come and live here: lower taxes, free water, subsidised transport. I look up at the settlements crowning some of the hills - fortress like structures with neat modern houses. I imagine that life must be sterile and isolated there. Khaled says no, they have nice gardens. Who do the settlers socialise with I ask. He says they can drive to Jerusalem quite quickly. They don't mix with Palestinians apart from workers who are sometimes employed to work there, or store-owners in some transitional border towns like Al-Eizaria.

The taxi goes past the huge checkpoint outside Ramallah. This time because we are not heading for Jerusalem but going directly to Abu Dis, we are not stopped.

A few nights ago, I go and get my hair-cut in Abu Dis. While I am waiting, I get into conversation with a young student. He is 15 but looks older. He has spent some time in Chicago staying with relations. Like many Palestinians he has large numbers of family members living abroad, and he dreams of living somewhere else too. He speaks English well with the beginnings of an American accent. He tells me about things that have happened to him and his friends in Abu Dis. 'I live near the building where the soldiers' building is. One day when I was 13, they started hammering on the door of my house. They accused me and my friend of deliberately leaving a dead dog outside their barracks. I knew nothing about it. But they forced us to pick up the dog which was rotten and crawling with worms ......'. He pointed to a shop across the road from the barbers. 'My friend was walking past that shop late at night and he was stopped by soldiers. Forced to lie face forward against the shop front with his arms and legs spread out. While he was doing that, one of the soldiers ran up behind him and gave him a kick between the legs. They often do that. One of them kicks a teenager between the legs and the other soldiers just stand round and laugh. To them it's a game'.

I get talking to Abid, who is employed by CADFA (The Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association) to document human rights issues here. He writes reports which are then published in the UK and Europe, and highlight what is going on. The effect is invaluable because it shines an international spotlight on what is going on. The Israeli 'authorities' know that what they do is not going to remain invisible to the international community. As a result conditions here are probably better than in some other parts of the Palestinian territories. Abid says that it is amazing that 70,000 can live some kind of normal life under these conditions of occupation. He tells me about some cases he is investigating. In one incident two years ago, some soldiers broke into a class of a secondary school (the same school where our summer camp had our sports day last week) and started beating up the students. In another, a young man from Abu Dis on a trip to the Dead Sea, was stopped by two soldiers and asked for drugs. When he said he didn't have any, he was forced to drive into a settlement past the barriers, and then was attacked by the soldiers for illegal trespass. He was chained to a post and beaten. One of the settlers joined in. In this case, Abid was able to investigate, expose the lies of the soldiers who have now been given a prison sentence.

Abid works with some Israeli human rights organisations like B'Tselem, and it is possible sometimes with difficulty to get some kind of just outcome through the Israeli courts. That becomes more likely if there is the possibility of international attention. That is why the twinning movement (Abu Dis is twinned with Camden, Tower Hamlets is twinned with Jenin etc.) is so important. Abid says that in the past he had Israeli friends. 'We used to visit each others' houses, give each other advice. It started to change with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the 1980's. Now with the wall there is very little contact'.

Visit to Nablus

2009-07-25T03:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I went to Nablus in the north of the territory. On the map, it is a long way north of Abu Dis which is near Jerusalem but in fact it is relatively quick and amazinglycheap to get there. I had to get a shared taxi to Ramallah, the capital of the territory, then another shared taxi to Nablus. The time taken for the two journeys was about the same - 45 minutes - despite the fact that the distance from Abu Dis to Ramallah is far less than Ramallah to Nablus. This is because of the system of checkpoints which means that Palestinian vehicles from Abu Dis have to take a widely curving route to get to Ramallah, away from the wall that sweeps eastwards, and away from the settlements.

The taxis drive rapidly along the roads going through dry and barren landscape, and ancient terraced hills, past settlements, and through checkpoints. There are checkpoints everywhere, before and after big towns, and sometimes for no obvious reason. Sometime cars drive through, sometimes they are stopped and whole lines bank up.

Nablus, an ancient city (Shechem), is poorer than the other Palestinian cities I have visited. Ramallah is quite economically lively partly because it is the capital of the Palestinian territories, Bethehem gets a lot of tourists and pilgrims. Nablus is very down at heal. It has a large old city with narrow roads and markets. People are anxious to draw me in to buy things, they are very friendly. Not many foreigners seem to come here. I am drawn into a second-hand book shop. I buy a book about the intifada, called 'Childhood of a people without a childhood'. During the intifada, a lot of fighting occurred here. There are still bullet-holes in the walls of the old city from seven years ago. And everywhere there are pictures of 'Shaheed's - martyrs - young men who have been killed fighting the Israelis. You can see them, kids who look as if they should be studying for their high-school certificates or university degrees. Some of them wear bands around their heads indicating the party they are a member of . I feel very sad. Outside a mosque, I see an inscription outside a mosque commemorating the names of the people killed during the fighting in Nablus. I stop and start to copy it down laboriously for later study. Some kids interrupt me while I am doing it. They want to know whether I support Barcelona or Real Madrid. Even here the same old global village operates along with anything else. I talk to one of the traders in the market who sees me photographing the posters of the martyrs. 'Things are much better here now', he says. 'Things are the best'.

Later I discuss with Khaled, sixteen year old student who lives in Abu Dis, about the men in the posters. 'What do you think of the freedom fighters you might call them, some other people would call them terrorists'. I think what some of the men I had seen pictured may have done, there were suicide bombings in Israel outside cafes and cinemas at the time of the Intifada in which women and children died. My cousin would certainly call them terrorists, I am determined to try and imagine what they would look like from a Palestinian standpoint. Khaled says, 'I admire those men, it is wonderful thing to die for your country. I would like to do what they have done'. He says that many young Palestinians feel the same. He is unconsciously echoing a Roman saying about how sweet and honorable it is to die for your country, and also ironically a saying of Joseph Trumpeldor an early Jewish settler who became a hero in the Zionist movement.

Khaled tells me about a new word that has been invented in Arabic, which disturbs and fascinates me. It is 'Yuhowwad', to make something Jewish, to 'Judaize'. It is used to describe a process such as is happening in Jerusalem, which was annexed to Israel after 1967, and where Jews are moving into the East part of the city, outside the old walls. It used to be totally Arab. Now it is mixed. Khaled says that all sorts of strategems are used to make it hard for the Arabs to continue to live there. 'A group of residents had to move because the Israelis said they were going to build a park. Every time a Palestinian wants to build a new house or an extension to their old house, they have to pay a huge amount to get a licence'. He says the Jewish settlers here and in the Palestinian territories get preferential treatment, all sorts of inducements to encourage them to move in: tax breaks, free water, subsidised fuel and travel, which the Palestinians don't get. So the overtones of 'Yuhowwad' chills me in a way, with its overtones of old European anti-semitism, but I see the justice in the word. Palestinians are just describing what they experience.

Khaled tells me how shocked and disgusted he feels when Israelis use religion as an excuse to grab land. We talk about excavations in the old city. He is suspicious about these. I too am worried about the way that the Holocaust is being used as a justification of very dubious Israeli policies. I have found a recent example: Israel is planning a building project in East Jerusalem on the site of a hotel once owned by the Palestinian leader in the 1930's and 1940's Amin al-Husseini. The plan is being opposed by the UN. As part of an effort to counter this, Israeli embassies are being instructed to publish a photograph taken in 1941 of Husseini with Hitler. It seems to me that by doing this the Holocaust is being cheapened. Some people who see it being used in this way are going to be encouraged to minimise or deny it.

Summer Camp Trip to Bethlehem 2

2009-07-21T09:42:00.000-07:00

It is strange to hear American music at the pool. I am hearing everything through the filter of recent Palestinian music, all raw emotion. 'Hotel California' comes across to me as some plaintive lament.

We leave the resort after more than four hours. The landscape is very hot and dry. A few very mangy looking donkeys and bare hills with a few olive trees. Bethlehem is beautiful. We go into the Church of the Nativity where Greek priests are praying. They are strict about dress but very understanding and kind to the young students. There is a rule that women should cover their heads and men their shoulders. One of our students doesn't have a t-shirt, he is wearing a vest with his arms and shoulders exposed. The priest takes a cloth which is lying on a table and drapes it around the student's shoulders.

After the church, we walk into the old city. Some of the students buy cowboy hats and walk around looking incongruous. The wild east. At about six we get on to our coach and start to head back to Abu Dis. Dr. Abdullah is prevailed upon to sink. He sings Palestinian folk songs unaccompanied except for one of the students playing on tabla. Some of it is improvised, beautiful plaintive meandering melodies. The students join in the choruses.

When we get to the checkpoint, there are now four or five Israeli soldiers. Nadeem, one of the volunteers tells everyone to be silent, because if there is any shouting, abuse, or other 'trouble', that might be an excuse for the bus to be stopped and everything held up for hours. We all want to get back, it has been a burning day. There is a moment of tense silence as the bus goes through the checkpoint, and as it is clear that the bus is not going to be stopped, a huge cheer goes up from the kids. 'We went through your checkpoint! You couldn't stop us! We were not afraid of you!'.

2009-07-21T04:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, our Summer Camp went on a trip to Bethlehem: 26 students from the summer camp, 30 kids who weren't from the camp, and six adults or near adults. This was something that the students were looking forward to, the chance to go somewhere out of Abu Dis. We set off early at about 9.30 in the morning. The students shout, 'Yalla, Yalla' - let's go, let's go. Someone has brought along a tabla, so that rhythm and chanting reverberate through the bus. We go through an army checkpoint. One lone soldier, a bit older maybe in his forties, looking a bit sundrenched, looking as if he'd rather be somewhere else.

Normally Bethlehem would not be a very great distance from Abu Dis as the crow flies. But there are often delays because of the checkpoints. Today we are stopping at a holiday resort on the way to do some swimming. The resort is about twenty minutes out of Abu Dis. It is a kind of tourist resort for foreigners and also for Palestinians. It is quite westernised. There are some self-catering flats for people who want to stay there, a large swimming pool and and a Turkish bath. The luxury of being able to swim. Most of the students cannot go to the sea. They don't have permission to go to the Mediterranean because they have the wrong kind of passes, they could go with difficulty to Jordan and then to Akaba, or they could go to the Dead Sea, which isn't really a sea at all, but a hyper-salty lake. Some of the younger girls come into the main pool, the older female students with Sarah and some other volunteers look for the women's pool, which turns out to be closed. In the end they are allowed to use the Turkish baths. It is wonderful to be able to swim. It is the first physical exercise I have done in over two weeks since leaving London.

The whole atmosphere of the place is westernised, burgers and chips for sale and western rock and house music. My ears have become used to Palestinian, Egyptian and Lebanese music, the raw emotions and complex rhythms, and the music thumping out of the swimming-pool speakers sounds heavy and four-square - regular rhythms one two three four, sometimes syncopated. Music to get out of your head to, not to express joy with. I wonder what this kind of music feels like to young Palestinians. I ask one of the students. 'Do you like this music? 'Yes but it's very different'. We swim and sit around for about three or four hours. I'm hesitant at first about going into the pool because of the tattoos on my body, which are officially haram (forbidden) here. But Doctor Abdullah, who is on the board of the community centre and has come along, says it is ok. I get a lot of stares though. I swim, get dressed, talk, swim again, get dressed again. Doctor Abdullah asks me, 'Are you religious?' 'I have strong beliefs inside', I say, 'I don't practice everything, but my beliefs my values are inside me'. Then I throw the question back to him: 'What about you? Are you religious?' 'I am the same as you', he replies. He is a socialist or communist. He has already told me he is a member of a left-wing party here, not Fatah and not Hamas. He trained as doctor in Ukraine, speaks Russian, married a Ukrainian wife. Sarah told me that it has taken years for the Israeli authorities to allow her to come into Palestine to live with him here. He tells me about the values of the Soviet Union. 'It was good then, you had free health, housing and education. When I was in Ukraine, I could study cheaply. That was before capitalism. Now it is more expensive there than in London'. Apart from being a doctor, he is a well-known singer here with a band.

Interesting discussions in cafe

2009-07-18T21:21:00.000-07:00

I have been having some interesting discussions in the cafe where I have been going to meet my friends. The other day I went to Ramallah, the capital of the Palestinian Authority and bought an Arabic newspaper El Quds. In it was an article about a group of ultra-orthodox Jewish rabbis opposed to Israel who had been on a visit to Ismael Haniyeh, the head of Hamas in Gaza. He had been involved in a civil war among the Palestinians following the elections of 2007, and subsequently in the fighting against Israel this year.

We started talking about Hamas. Some of my students were in the cafe. I asked Jesus, a 15 year old student what he thought of Haniyeh and Hamas. 'He can f... himself', he replied making a graphic gesture. Who do you like? I asked. 'I hate all of them'. Jesus has a blue pass and lives in east Jerusalem. He tells me that in his area of the city, Jews and Palestinians live. 'Do they live together?' I ask (I wanted to know if they got on). 'Yes, together', he replied. I wasn't quite sure how well they got on. I have noticed that in the old city of Jerusalem, people seem to get on on a day to day level, as shopkeeper and customers or tourists.

Another student in the cafe disagrees with Jesus. He favours Hamas over Al Fatah the party of Mohammed Abbas the Palestinian President. He is younger than Jesus, has very good English his manner is very courteous and polite. His father is a doctor one of the most important people on the board of the community centre. He wants to be a doctor too when he is older. He asks me which Palestinian leader I like. I tell him I like Mohammed Abbas. He bridles at this. He doesn't like Abbas. 'Tell me one good thing that Abbas has done'. I tell him, 'Maybe he will be able to make peace with the Israelis'.

The young student objects to this. As far as he is concerned Abbas is a pawn of the Israelis, he does whatever they want him to do. Not only that but he has tried to crush Hamas and the Al Aqsa Martyrs brigade (the armed wing of Al Fatah). Hamas and Al Aqsa Martyrs brigade want to fight the Israelis - 'the bad ones' - but Abbas want to stop them.

The groups that this young student supports are the very people that are regarded in Israel and in the west as terrorists. My cousin last week told me about the suicide bombers in Israel, the explosions in cafes at the time of the second intifada, before the separation wall was put up. Everywhere you go you see pictures of 'Shahids' or 'Shahidas' - martyrs - on posters on the walls. They are people who have died during the different periods of fighting here. In Ramallah today, I saw a poster of a Shahid. In the picture he is holding an automatic weapon. He is a middle-aged man, looks like he could have been a shopkeeper or an electrician, and perhaps he was.

I talk to my friend Mousa about Arab leaders. The Arabs have only had three leaders, according to Mousa. Yassir Arafat the founder of the PLO, Saddam Hussein, and Abul Nasser the President of Egypt in the fifties and sixties. We talk about Saddam Hussein about his war against Iran and again the Kurds. I tell him about my student in London who was picked up off the street at the age of 14 and forced to join Saddam's army fighting the Iranians, and then later was tortured by his police before fleeing the country and becoming a refugee. Mousa said, that Saddam had made two 'mistakes': one was fighting the Iranians, the other was attacking Kuwait. Otherwise he was a very great leader. Why, I asked. Because he had stood up for the Palestinians. Arafat too was a great leader of the Palestinians. He had a vision and a strategy which Mohammed Abbas doesn't have.

He looks through the paper picking out stories. There is an article that says that two thousand Jews from France will come and live in Israel this year. Large numbers of Jews from Ethiopia have come to Israel. I have seen Israeli soldiers of Ethiopian origin in Jerusalem. Another article is about young Palestinian prisoners in Israel, under 18, who want to take their 'tarjihi', final school diploma while in prison. The Israeli authorities won't allow them to. There are about 1,800 of them.

I ask Mousa what he feels when he reads that Jews can from abroad to live in Israel, while he himself can't live there, can't go visit the see, or visit Jerusalem. He says he feels angry. 'What does the word Haq mean?' 'Justice', I tell him. 'There is no justice'. Then he asks me a question, which I have never actually thought of until now. 'If the Israelis invited you to go and live in Israel, would you go?'

I am surprised how definite and quick my answer comes out. 'No, I will never live in Israel as an Israeli'. Although I could. By the Israeli Law of Return, any Jew has the right to go and live in Israel. But it would be like spitting in the face of my friends here. I tell him, 'I will be a Palestinian. If you invited me to live here I will come. If you don't want me to come, then I won't come. I will be a Jewish Palestinian'. 'You are welcome', he says, with total charm.

Then he asks me, maybe the question was inevitable, 'Do you think you will ever become a Muslim?' My flatmate Sarah has been virtually asked this too. It is a sign of acceptance, because if people like you they wish you well, and to want someone to become a Muslim is to wish them well. I tell him that we believe in the same God but I like my own traditions. He tells me that all my traditions are already in Islam: the prophets like Moses and David are respected. He comes out with an argument that I have heard before in London many times. Islam is the true religion because other religions change, but Islam does not change. With Judaism and Christianity you have the old testament and the new testament, but Islam is the unchanging truth. I reply that God does not change, but human beings do, we are part of history and culture our understanding changes and develops, change is not a bad thing, it is inevitable. Yes, he says there are many cultures.

Conersations like this force me to think about what are my own values. I tell him, and this is what I do believe, which is that no one religion has all the truth, all religions have some parts of the truth but no single one has an absolute truth from which they can judge the others. It is difficult to have conversations like this in Britain. Many people are embarrassed to talk about beliefs and God. Here it seems natural. Sitting in a cafe, smoking Turkish tobacco, drinking coffee. In the corner a television screen playing Lebanese music, someone is praying on a mat on the floor.

There is a story about almost everyone I meet.

2009-07-16T08:54:00.000-07:00

Almost everyone I meet either tell me a story or somebody tells me a story about them. There is a volunteer who also works in the community centre, she does painting and drawing with the students. Sarah said to me one day, 'Have you heard the story of H.?'. I had actually, from the CADFA (Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association) website. H. lived in a house with her aged mother and other family members. One day, soldiers raided the house because they were looking for students from the house next door. During the search, H.'s mother 'fell' hitting her head on the stone floor of the courtyard. She was suffering from a medical condition and she started to suffer a brain haemorrage. H. wanted to call an ambulance but the soldiers stopped her, holding a gun to her head. Her mother died.

I don't want to imply that the Israeli army is uniquely wicked. I have heard other similar stories which came out of the British presence in northern Ireland, and I am sure that when the Americans went into Iraq, at least some of them had the best of intentions. But the effect of occupation seems always to be corrupting and brutalising. There is a straight line leading from the initial presence, to Abu Ghraib or someone being beaten to death, or an 'accident' like this.
This was something that my cousin and I agreed on last week, the brutalising effect of the occupation.

There is a student at the centre called K. She is a very spirited woman, just completed her degree at the local Al Quds university. She writes articles in international Arabic newspapers, like Al-Quds Al-Arabi which is published in London. She writes on the human rights situation here. She has just been awarded a scholarship to study anywhere she wants in Europe. She has been asking my advice about where she can go to do a Masters on international human rights. I suggest going to SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) in London. Only some Israelis don't like the fact that she has been writing articles in an international newspaper (Sarah says that if it was onlhy a local newspaper, 'they wouldn't give a hoot'). They summon her to a questioning session at a checkpoint. They tell her that if she continues to write the articles, they will put her on a black-list, which means that she will not be able to leave the Palestinian territory (Israeli army controls all the entry and exit points both into Israel proper and also for people who want to or have to cross the river Jordan to get out via Amman). She goes home and writes an article about the interrogation.

At the cafe I go to the other night, I start talking to two kids. One is sixteen, the other is eighteen. The sixteen year old has been to our community centre. He has already been in an Israeli prison for six months, the eighteen year old has just come out of prison after two years. There are at present about 10,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel, some of them women, a large number of them kids, sixteen years old or younger. ('Ah', but my cousin says, 'They never tell you what they've done, do they?') I ask the younger one, what he had done. 'Just defending Palestine', he replies. It could have been throwing stones at an army truck, it could have been something else. Difficult to say, but it doesn't seem right, that young kids at that age should be put away for lengthy periods, and put in overcrowded cells, suffering bad food and all sorts of bad treatment, and then have to come out and pick up the threads of their lives again.

Last night, I run into Ahmed, a man I know who has a job in Ramallah, a town that normally is not very far away from here, only the other side of Jerusalem. Last night he is very agitated. On his way back from work, the road goes through a checkpoint. On this occasion, the army decided to close the road, no explanation given. The cars have to line up and wait until it opens again, several hours in this case at the end of a working day. 'What do you do when that happens?' I ask. 'We listen to our car stereos, get out of our cars, talk to each. The coffee sellers do very well'.
'Does it happen often?'
'Quite often on a Wednesday or Thursday night (the days leading up to the Friday holiday). On those days people are coming back to their houses from Ramallah. They do it to make our lives difficult, to rub it into our faces that they can'.

There are stories about everyone and everything, even car number plates, which I will talk about another time.

Second Pre-Wedding Party 4

2009-07-16T08:32:00.001-07:00

The man top left who is dressed in the red coat and turkish looking fez, is job is to pour drinks for the guests. The drinks, hot black coffee or a sweetish cold drink is stored in the strange metal looking container. That is his job for the whole of the evening, and of all the people at a party like this, they have the grimmest expressions.

This is a very male type of social gathering. Sarah my flatmate has gone to a number of the female equivalent (called Hennas, which are like 'hen parties'). There the women do abandon themselves, dancing around in a circle and crying out. But they don't have the luxury of a live band or a famous singer as the men do, or an acrobatic troop of Dubke performers. The nearest the women are to the action on this occasion, is to sit on balconies and walls well back. Amidst all the men and boys there is one young girl aged about 10 who has decided that she wants to be up front close. And she does, braving the obvious disapproval of some of the boys there. She looks very nervous very harassed but determined at the same time. I admire here very much. I don't know if this sexual separation will ever change in this society. So many cultural things are built on to it. And it extends to religion here too of course, men and women praying separately, which is also the case in orthodox Judaism. In fact a lot of what I see is very similar to traditional orthodox / conservative Judaism.

Second pre-Wedding Party 3

2009-07-15T10:05:00.000-07:00

At one stage the dancers form a tower, four men high and on top is the singer Naser Al Fares. The bridegroom, for whom all this is being done, is on the raised platform as well, and before they finish their performance, each member of the Dubke group stand in front of him close up and do their own dance for him. They are literally shaking trembling with the feeling of it all. Then the troup dance off the platform and out of the square. The music slows into a drone and Naser Al Fares gives an improvised praise song (long chords on the keyboards and the oud, his voice weaves beautifully melodically), a praise song in honour of the bridegroom, the family, Abu Dis and Palestine. The crowd shows its appreciation by clapping and cheering.

The music the band has been playing for the Dubke group has the rhythm I have heard before but has some modernist elements, some free-form riffs on the oud almost jazz like, but now another Dubke group runs on, and this group is more traditional. They are not dressed in elaborate silk shirts and kaffiyehs. They are dressed in what looks like traditional peasant smocks. And the music at this point is also more traditional. It reminds me of Greek or East European (Romanian, Macedonian) folk music, even a little bit like Irish. This must be an older more traditional form of Dubke. The leader of the group is holding a stick which he uses to direct the group. You can see the origins of this dance in folk music, peasant music.

Second pre-wedding party 2

2009-07-15T09:17:00.000-07:00

There is an open square with the backs of houses and broken down walls all around. In the middle of the square there is a space where men are dancing frenetically. At the back is the band and the singer.

One of the things, the sad things, about occasions like this is that the sexes are separate. In the first party I went to there were no women there at all. They were having their own party with the bride to be. In this party, because of the fame of the singer, there are women here, but they are sitting well to the back of the square, on balconies and walls. They are listening to the music, clapping to its rhythm but not getting close up and certainly not dancing. The men dance in the central space, with each other, in circles or up close by themselves. As I walk in, a young student leads me to the central slightly raised area and I start to dance to the frenetic music, together with the one or two hundred men already there. There are also other men sitting on chairs watching. The music is fast with the same syncopated rhythm I had heard before. In front of the band, is Naser Al Fares himself, a tall rather gaunt man in his thirties or forties, singing with all his power, something he keeps up the whole night. He is incredibly charismatic. Some of our students are there, and the bridegroom, who is bearing carried on the shoulders of his friends.

Then there is a pause and the central space is cleared. A lot of anticipation people looking towards the entrance. And then then the Dubke group comes in, there are about ten of them, each one carrying flaming torches. Most of them are wearing black tunics with kaffiyehs round their waists, but this time there are others with white tunics. These are the acrobatic soloists. The Dubke group dance in circles, and the soloists do some amazing things: climb on to the shoulders of other dancers, spin somersaults in the air.

Another even more amazing pre-wedding party

2009-07-15T08:09:00.000-07:00

If the first pre-wedding party was amazing (partly because it was my first one), this one that I went to last night - Tuesday 14th July - was absolutely overwhelming. The bridegroom's family must have been well-off because they hired one of the most prominent Palestinian singers in the whole territory Naser Al Fares to perform, with his band which apart from keyboards and drums included an amazing viruoso Oud (lute) player.
Just as before, my student friend Khaled came to collect me and walked me to the place where the party was going to be. He took me there but he didn't go in himself, because he is going to take his final school certificate next year (on which the future of every Palestinian student depends), and he is already working hard for it, even though it is the summer holidays. He has given me a wrist band, with 'I', a heart, and the Palestinian flag printed on it: 'I love Palestine'. I tell him it is a great honour to be able to wear it, and decide I am going to have it on my wrist. It will create some more problems for me coming back to UK through Israel. I cannot risk going through Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv with many of the things I have got here: names, telephone numbers, email addresses, photographs, anything Palestinian, or to do with the situation. I will not only get myself into trouble, get myself strip-searched and maybe barred from ever coming back here (which would be the worst case scenario for me), but I could get my friends into trouble as well. So I will have to behave like a criminal or a secret agent, even though I am neither of these things. I will have to email my photos to myself so I can download them to myself in London, then delete them from my camera, email contact addresses to myself and then destroy physical records, delete phone numbers off my Palestinian sim, and post anything that I want to keep to my address in London via the Israeli postal service. And then make up a fake itinerary to tell the people at the airport, which does not include having been here in Abu Dis (all assuming that no-one 'in authority' has been reading this blog).

...... Anyway Khaled walks me to the open courtyard where the party is happening, which happens to be near the community centre where I work, and then he goes home.

A sort of Stag Night: Pre-wedding party

2009-07-13T09:31:00.000-07:00

Weddings are very frequent at this time of year. Everybody wants to get married in the summer, and every time there is a wedding there are pre-wedding parties. Since socialising is very sex segregated here, there will be parties for the bride attended by women only, and parties for the groom, for men only - a kind of stag night. Except that 'stag night' doesn't do justice to the party I was invited to last night. It was elegant, beautiful, joyous, not at all gross, and I was going to say all done without the aid of any artificia stimulants, apart from Arabic coffee, music, and the wonderful exuberant atmosphere

(I have in fact since found out that some people had been drinking in their houses. My informant, one of my students tells me that alcohol, which is officially haram here of course, can be obtained 'in secret' - so many things here are done in secret. You can get alcohol in Jerusalem if you have a pass to get there, in Ramallah where there are Christians, or there is also a place to get it in al-Eizaria next village along.)

Anyway it was a beautiful evening. The party is taking place in an open square which is part of the university complex. There is a stage on which there are amplified musicians: an Oud (Lute) player, keyboards, drums of course and a singer. An open space for dancing and then tables and chairs. Most of the students from the community centre are there. They all want to talk to me which we do in a mixture of Arabic and English, they pull me from one table to the next. There is an atmosphere of great excitement.

There is going to be a performance of the Dabke, the Palestinian national dance. Students from our community centre are going to perform. Before that the band starts up. Very frenetic and off-beat rhythmical. The basic rhythm is 4 in the bar: a quaver, crochet, quaver, and two crochets. da - daa - da - Da - Da da - daa - da - Da - Da. That's the basis of it, the rhythmic elaborations, the melodies, the words are built up over that. Some of the boys get up and dance, they stick out their stomachs and swivel their hips. I know what is going to happen. They are going to ask me to dance. They do of course, and I get up, they are in a circle around me, I let go of my inhibitions and dance with them clapping in rhythm around me. They are over the moon that I am doing this.

Suddenly some of the crowd rush towards the entrance. 'Al Aress, Al Arees', the bridegroom is here. A crowd of the grooms friends come in carrying him on their shoulders. They come to the front of the square in front of the stage, dance round him, still on the shoulders of one of his friends. The band singer sings a song of welcome. We sit down and watch. A gloomy faced man comes round giving each guest a cup of Arabic coffee, then throughout the evening another man, ornately dressed in red with a Turkish looking fez and a strange device on his shoulders (which looks like a shisha pipe but in fact dispenses drinks), comes round pouring out from the container a sweet tasting drink.

Then our student Dabke group comes on and does a performance that lasts for over twenty minutes. They are dressed in identical black shirts, and round their waists are tied a different coloured kaffiyeh - Arab headscarf. They do this dance and it is beautifully co-ordinated. The dance is led by Nadeem, one of the chief volunteers at the centre. The dancers link hands, sometimes they are in a circle and sometimes in a line. The lop-sided syncopated rhythm of the music seems to force their bodies outward and sideways. They kick their legs out and then sideways, first the left then the right in unison. They swivel their waists. Everything is beautifully choreographed. They surround the bridegroom, dancing round him. At one stage, Nadeem takes off his kaffiyeh and wraps it round the shoulders of the bridegroom. The dance is very physical very athletic, but not aggressive.

It is really hot tonight. When they sit down, the kids are perspiring heavily. There is more dancing. People do their own individualised versions of the Dabke, it is not like the beautifully co-ordinated performance we have seen, but there is fantastic energy and joy. Most of the music is up-beat, but there are some occasional slow romantic songs. I leave at eleven o'clock and walk down the hill back to my flat.

Next day, I talk to Sarah about it. She has been to the female equivalent, pre-wedding party for the same wedding, this time attended by women only. Their one has taken place inside a hall, with no live band, only recorded music. They have also been dancing. Sarah, who studied dance at university and is a dance teacher in London, thinks that the Dabke is similar to Irish dance, both have been used as ways to express national identity in a situation where people are occupied or oppressed.

In a way, I feel sorry that socialising is so segregated by sex. It is very different to the west. All men together and all women together create a particular kind of solidarity, strong emotional ties. It would be easy to misinterpret this, it is not the same as in the west, it is a different system. I am also sure it is very different in Israel too.

Pictures of Abu Dis 2

2009-07-13T09:08:00.000-07:00

This is the main street of Abu Dis by night. The road you can see goes up the hill towards the next village of Al Eizaria and on towards Jerusalem. At night the streets are crowded with teenagers hanging out and quite young children until late. The temperature at the moment is baking in the day and also hot at night. There is no rain. The rainy months are December, January and a bit in February. Only, Khaled who goes to the community centre to study extra mathematics, told me that it hasn't rained much this year. He thinks it's global warming. 'Every year it gets a bit hotter and rains a bit less'. Global warming will either create hardships - water shortages for example - that will drive both sides together or will be the grounds for new conflicts.

One of the things that is most remarkable about this town is how safe it is and how little crime there is. I can wander back to my flat down an empty side-street at eleven or twelve at night and feel in no danger at all. That would be impossible where I live in Stepney London, and in most western cities. It is to do with the fact that everybody knows everybody else here, it really is like a village, and if someone starts breaking the law, their family would soon hear about it. Sarah says that as a western woman, she gets a bit of wolf-whistling from cars, but she still feels pretty safe. I tell my friends how safe it is here, and they say, 'Yes, but we've got the soldiers'. I still haven't been caught up in a military search yet.

Pictures of Abu Dis

2009-07-13T08:13:00.001-07:00

This is Abu Dis taken after nightfall. There is quite a lot of variation in living standards here. A lot of building goes on, new blocks of flats, a lot of people seem to work as builders. Some of the houses are quite large. Someone pointed out a spaceous house that belonged to the head of the local council here. If you own a shop or a business or a farm you will be quite well off. Many of the people I have met are university graduates, and have either got a fairly good job (like the man who works for Jawwal mobile company) or have expectations in that direction. When you consider that universities are not free here, this creates a gulf between the people who can and people who can't afford it. My flatmate Sarah told me that when you go to university you get a loan which you have seven years to pay off. You don't get awarded your degree until you have done it. There are lots of poor people. If you don't speak English, your chance of getting a good job is diminished. There is no social security or social safety net as we would know it in the UK, but family life is very strong. People I meet turn out to be cousins of other people I know. There is a tremendous sense of mutual help, people support each other materially and in the things that happen to them. That is the social safety net. That and Islam which is very strong here, creating a sense of social solidarity, and as I have been told a way of asserting their Palestinian identity. Several times a day (the first being well before dawn), the recorded call to prayer sounds out from the mosque near our flat, and this is echoed at different pitches and volumes from the other mosques across the town. The effect is very eiry.

The town is full of internet cafes, pharmacies and mini-markets. Lots of people have mobiles, and dress fashionably in jeans. But there is a general look of delapidation about many of the streets. The roads have got holes in, stones litter the roads, rubbish is not collected and decays in the sun, which produces a very powerful smell in some parts of the town. There are lots of cafes. Most of the women above the age of sixteen wear the hijab - which might be a head-scarf - and occasionally the nikab, full face covering with slits for eyes.

Back in Abu Dis and a Problem with Pronunciation

2009-07-11T10:03:00.000-07:00

When I come back to Abu Dis, I am exhausted from the heat and my experiences in Jerusalem. I am also anxious about what to say about what I have been up to. A few people know that I am Jewish - not everyone - and that seems to be alright. But if they find out that I have an Israeli cousin, and I went to see him, that might be another thing altogether. They may think that I am some sort of double agent or spy. After all, there are stories of Israelis using people here as spies. And I am particularly worried about hurting my friends like Mosa. But if I don't tell them, that will be betraying them too, and if they then find out, they will be not only hurt that I hadn't told them, but will think that I am hiding something. I decide that I need to be honest, and trust that my sincerity will be accepted.

I find Mosa in a barbers shop being shaved. Some of his friends are there. There is one quite funny man. He tries to convince me that everone drinks in Abu Dis. 'Everyone here drinks and everyone smokes marijuana'. 'Don't believe him', says Mosa, 'He is a bad man'.

I say, 'But alcohol is Haram (against Moslem law)'
'In Lebanon and Syria it is Haram, but here it is not Haram because we have such a hard life, we have to take it to forget'.

I have to work on improving my Arabic pronunciation. I made quite a big mistake on this occasion. One of them asked me, 'Why have you come to Abu Dis?'
I wanted to say, 'I came to Abu Dis to be a teacher'. Only, instead of using the word Mudarris (teacher), it came over as Mutaharis. I couldn't understand why they almost fell on the floor. Apparently, in the Palestinian dialect, Mutaharis means male prostitute.

Later on in the cafe, I talk to Mosa alone. 'I have to tell you something. You know that I am Jewish. In Jerusalem today, you know that I met my cousin who is an Israeli. I am a friend to Palestinians but he is my cousin and is my family. We talked and we argued for five hours'.

Mosa seemed to accept it. I say, 'I hope you understand this'. He replied, 'Yes, but don't tell the others'. I am touched by his efforts to prevent people finding out who might take a less friendly view. He asks e if I went to my cousins' house. 'No', I tell him, 'we met and talked in a cafe in Jerusalem'. We talk about religions, what we believe in. I tell him that I believe in God and it is the same God as the God of the Moslems.' We drink coffee and smoke shisha (Turkish scented tobacco), which I have become very partial to.

His friend Mahmed, who works for the mobile company Jawwal in Ramallah, comes in.
'Speaking English is the most important thing here. If you can speak English well you can get a job here easily. In Jawwal, we speak English to each other all the time'.

I realise that being an English teacher, I have in my hands an important commodity which can change peoples' lives here. I am determined to use my time to help people like Mosa improve their English to help them in their future lives. When I decide to go back to my flat, he refuses to take any money again.

A note about Crying

2009-07-11T09:53:00.000-07:00

When I broke down in tears talking to my cousin Peter in Jerusalem, this was a reaction to six days of unremitting intensity. Life is so intense here, there is no let up from it, nowhere to go. People are talking about the Situation all the time: the wall, soldiers, detentions, prisons, roadblocks. There is absolutely nowhere to go to escape it. I wonder if they feel this in Israel too? But at least there they have the kinds of escapism also available to people in Europe and the US: shopping, getting drunk, going to nightclubs, taking drugs, the beach, the sea. Here most of these things are not available, except of course sociability which is on a very high level. As I have said, this is one of the most friendly places I have ever been to in my whole life. My flatmate Sarah told me that she had also broken down. Apparently it was indirectly to do with me. I didn't realise it but there had been an issue about me sharing this flat with me. Some people she knew didn't approve of it, and there was some pressure on her not to let me stay. In the end she had burst into tears over it, just as I did talking to my cousin. It is all settled now anyway. We are still sharing. People in the town seem to accept it as far as I can tell.

Meeting my Cousin 2

2009-07-11T08:52:00.000-07:00

...... and we talk for four or five hours. We sit in a cafe in the Moslem quarter, drink Arabic coffee and talk about Israel and Palestine, the refugees, why I am in Abu Dis., the prospects for peace, Hamas, Gaza. I tell him, 'I don't want to do tourism. I just want to talk to you'. 'Go on then', he says drawing back is chair. I realise he is quite a decent sensitive person, and that my picture of him as a kind of authoritarian bigot, which I had got from the email, was wide of the mark. I get the impression that the impression that he doesn't like me being in Abu Dis, he doesn't like it, but beneath that in a weird way he respects me for it.

It is amazing how for everything I report to him of what my friends tell me, he has a different corresponding point of view. He says the wall was necessary to stop terrorism. 'We had incredible amounts of terrorism. Now everything has changed'. He says 'the Palestinians' complain about road blocks but do not get up and condemn terrorism. 'If they did that, we would demolish the checkpoints and the wall tomorrow'. I told him how most of the people in Abu Dis can't come to Jerusalem. He claimed not to know this, or seemed not to believe me ('I am going to look into this and find out'). His main point is that there is no-one to negotiate with. 'We make concessions and we get nothing in exchange except more violence. We withdraw from Gaza in 2005, uproot 17,000 settlers with incredible difficulty and Hamas starts to fire rockets at our cities'. I talk to him about the blockade. 'We will let things through under inspection. But Hamas don't want that. They want to build up their strength again' to attack us.' And it goes on round and round. I say, 'You can start by talking to Mahmoud Abbas (the Palestinian president). You've got to start somewhere'.

'He is like you', he replies, 'If I was talking to him we could reach an agreement in an hour. But he is a captain without a crew. He can't deliver anything.'

All the time it is chicken and egg. That happens because that has happened. That has happened in response to something else. I can imagine what the Palestinians I talked to would say to each thing he says. I tell him about the prisoners. One of the men I had talked to the previous night had been in an Israeli jail for two years. He had told me that Israel was holding 10,000 Palestinians in prison. Peter says, 'If they will only release the Israeli soldier they kidnapped near the border with Gaza (3 years ago), that would have such an effect on public opinion here'. He thinks Palestinians complain but they don't want to admit responsibility for anything that has happened. 'If only they admitted that they were even 20 percent responsible, then we would have something to talk about, but they think we are 100 percent to blame. You can see there are some good things about Israel, it is not such a totally bad country. We have freedom of expression, lots of political parties, left wing and right wing. But in Palestine where is the freedom of expression, where is the left wing, where are the people who will getup and say that terrorism is wrong?'

I can see some of his points, he is quite decent and thoughtful, but at the same time static and suspicious. In a strange way what he is saying is a mirror image of what some of my Palestinian friends have been saying, down to the last phrase. 'Maybe there will be peace in two or three hundred years'. That is exactly what my flatmate Sarah's friend had said the day before.

At one point he said, 'You know everybody here recognises that there will be a Palestinian state sooner or later'. He says that some refugees will be taken back, a token number, but they can't all come back because otherwise if they all come back, Jews will be swamped. I kind of agree with that. People won't be able to repossess the exact houses their grandparents lived in. But they will have to be compensated for all the wretchedness of their dispossession and what they have had to suffer (I have yet to see a refugee camp. I am going to ask Mosa to show me one). All the time there is the fear of being overwhelmed, being driven into the sea.

At one stage, he says something that absolutely amazes me. 'You know, I don't think Israel will exist in a hundred or even fifty years'. He talks about demographics, how Arabs are able to wait and wait to get what they want. Maybe Israel was necessary, he says, to give us a breathing space, to allow us to recover from the Holocaust.

We talk about communication. I want to convince him that talking and human contact can overcome hatred and fear. I tell him about I have known in London, who have changed their minds about Jews as a result of me engaging with them, of not closing the door on them. I break down and start to cry. I sit there covering my face with my hands, and can't continue. He is very good. 'Drink some water', he says. I tell him I am proud to be Jewish. I think he has been afraid, judging from his email, that I was going to go over 'to the other side'. I told him that the side of Judaism that I was most proud of were the prophets, the philosophers like Maimonides. That is why I was doing what I was doing. At one point he leaves the cafe and goes out for about 10 minutes, whether to have a cry or not I don't know. He has always been more macho than me and he wasn't about to do it in front of me.

He admitted that building the settlements on the West Bank was a mistake, which is close to what Amos Oz the writer and peace activist has said. He said that building the settlements post-the 1967 war was 'the Devil's pact'. I told my cousin, 'even if you had to build the wall to stop terrorism, why the hell didn't you build it on the Green Line (the 1949 armistice line between Israel and the West Bank)? Why did you use it as an excuse to make another land grab? That only fuels the suspicion among Palestinians that you want to drive them out of the whole West Bank'.

I feel ok about him now. Before we left each other, we came to a conclusion of sorts. I tell him, 'You don't need to talk to me. You need to talk to Palestinians'. I tell him I know am man he can talk to. The Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association employs a man named Abid in Abu Dis, who documents and reports on human rights abuses here. He is educated and well informed and more importantly would be willing to talk to him. Peter says, 'I agree Palestinians and Israelis have to talk to each other, and for peace to come, something has to shift'. 'What is that something?' I ask. 'I don't know', he replies. And I don't know either.

Later on, when I get back to Abu Dis, I realise that there are huge practical difficulties about Peter and Abid meeting up. Peter as an Israeli citizen cannot go to Abu Dis, which is in the Palestinian territory (I have been told this recently - the Israeli army stops Israeli citizens from coming to the West Bank, will stop him at a checkpoint, or prosecute him if he tries to come here. It also meas that he can't come to towns like Bethlehem). And Abid, who has a green identity pass, cannot go to Jerusalem. My friends and I have worked out that there is literally nowhere where they can meet up to talk except the Dead Sea! Either that or in another country. That just sums the whole thing up. Maybe there will only be progress if Israelis and Palestinians meet up in Switzerland say, or somewhere like that.

Meeting with my cousin in Jerusalem

2009-07-11T07:46:00.000-07:00

This was always going to be a difficult day. I have an Israeli cousin, who apart from an evening when we met up in London last year, I have not seen since 1968, when I stayed with his family near Tel Aviv. Since I was coming here, I wanted to arrange to meet up, but my email describing my intention to stay in a Palestinian town rather than Israel proper met with a very definite response:

..... The authorities discourage these initiatives for a very good reason. The organizers such as the Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association and others have a deeper political intent than you may realize. This is not about teaching English (they already have excellent teachers who have studied abroad) it is about using volunteers to spread the word about Israeli "repressions"; i.e. to undermine the already tarnished Israeli image abroad. All you have to do is read their guidelines in "encouraging" these volunteers to "share their thoughts". They forget to mention that from these villages suicide bombers have blown up countless innocent Israeli citizens over the years. Israel has a right under these dire circumstances to exercise security measures ....

So this left me wondering how the meeting was going to go, what we were going to talk about, whether it was possible or desirable not to talk about 'the situation', or how we would get on.

Lots of buses run from from Abu Dis into Jerusalem, even on Friday which is the day of rest in the Palestinian territories (because of Islam), as opposed to Saturday in Israel proper. It is interesting how the area (a short distance as the crow flies: the hill I can see from our balcony is the Mount of Olives, on the other side of it is Jerusalem) changes as we go along the road. The shabby and run-down streets and buildings of Abu Dis, the more upmarket stores of the next village of al-Eizaria (Bethany), and then a strange transitional area on the other side of al-Eizaria where Palestinians and Israeli settlers both go (I have heard stories of Palestinians going to work for Israelis on the settlements, just one other thing that is done in secret here because it is on the one hand taboo and on the other necessary life if you don't have any other work). If this town, the landscape changes, the road takes on the look of an up to date motorway just like in Italy, Spain or Australia. Then we come to a checkpoint. The bus slows down and pulls over. Two armed Israeli soldiers come on board, a man and a woman both young, and start going through people's ids. They look at my UK passport flicking through the pages in a bored way, and inspect the passes of the other passengers. One man, in his forties or fifties, overweight with a walking disability, is chucked off the bus for not having the right coloured pass. I get into a conversation with the elderly Palestinian man next to me. 'Bad', he says, 'these checks are bad'. We talk about the UK. He has a son that lived in the UK some years ago.

The bus starts off again and arrives in Jersusalem outside the 16th century walls of the old city, at the Damascus gate, which is the entrance to the Moslem quarter. My cousin Peter doesn't want to meet there. He prefers the westward facing Jaffa gate, which is 90 degrees round the wall. I walk round the wall and get there in about 10 minutes. He is older looking than I remember him, older looking than me I think although we are almost the same age (this gives me quite a lot of gratification because when we were both 16, he already had a black belt in judo and karate, and I was a neurotic insecure teenager with major feelings of inferiority. Now he is a bit overweight and I am quite slim and fit).

The Jaffa gate looks modern, cleaned up sterile, a sort of Walt Disney version of biblical Jerusalem. I start to feel angry and upset already. The whole thing feels awkward. I don't really know what to say. He starts telling me about the history of the place. We tag on to a free tour, which is being led by an American or an Israeli talking American English. I cannot bear it, I don't listen. The shops inside the Jaffa Gate sell all kinds of tourist tat. This could be Brighton or Southend. Eventually we decide to leave the tour. Peter wants to take me to see museums but I don't want to go to any of them. We are deliberately not talking about the 'issue', my being in Abu Dis, Palestine, the Palestinians. Everything becomes fraught. I realise I have left my hat at home and the sun is very hot. He thinks I should get a hat. But the only hats I see have Jerusalem printed on them. I don't want to rub it in the faces of my students and friends in Abu Dis that I can go to Jerusalem and they can't. And still worse, other hats have 'Israeli army' printed on. Everything is becoming a minefield. I notice that we are skirting around personal issues. The Jewish quarter, which when I last visited it in 1968 was a ruin, is now full of apartments, parked cars, shops selling tourist rubbish. We go to the Wailing Wall area but that is horrible as well, everything clean and sterile with neat ramps for the worshippers, lights stages, an underground prayer area with air conditioning. I want to visit the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque. Peter says it is out of bounds to non-Moslems on Fridays, but I wonder if he is just putting me off, and if I was here alone I could go there, or whether it is a rule of the soldiers rather than the Moslems.

We go to the Moslem quarter, which is the only part of old Jerusalem that has any sort of authentic atmosphere. We find a cafe and then we do start to talk. I suppose I have been afraid, I didn't know what was going to happen whether it would become a shouting match. I also have my old feelings of inferiority to contend with. Peter has been telling me about his work. Apparently, he is involved in a start-up company that is going to manufacture robots that will explore gas or oil pipelines, find hairline cracks and then repair them. Peter has always been involved in technology and our side of the family - my brothers and I - have studied humanities. There has always been a suspicion that what we have done is airy-fairy, less important and worthy of attention by comparison.

I start gingerly and then as it goes on, we talk more and more. 'You know the people in Abu Dis have a hard life', I begin.

Cafe 3

2009-07-09T09:00:00.001-07:00

I get talking to three men at the bar (when I say 'bar', I don't mean that alcohol is on sale. I am drinking coca cola and thick Arabic black coffee). One of them Mahmed, works for Jawwal which is the main Palestinian mobile company here. He is in his twenties, dressed very neatly in white shirt and tie. He works very hard, as everbody seems to here just to put food on their tables. In his case he has got a good job, but he has to show his commitment by doing two days of unpaid overtime a week. This is not in his contract but is somehow expected. He studied electronics at university, then got a job in a call centre run by Jawwal. He was picked out to work directly for them because of his enthusiasm. He lives in Abu Dis, but his job is in Ramallah. He leaves his house at six, drives to work getting to Ramallah by seven, that is if there are no extra delays at checkpoints. He works for twelve hours and then drives back. Now he is in the cafe. It is gone 10.00 pm. He will have to get up again in less than eight hours. 'How many hours sleep do you get at night? I ask. 'About five', he replies. I wonder how he can take it. He doesn't look particularly tired. 'I am in my twenties, I can do it at the moment'.

The other man's name is Abid. Both he and Mahmed speak very good English. Mosa is there behind the bar and we talk. The conversation gets intense, political. 'Do you think there will be another intifada?' I ask. 'Not for the moment', one of them replies, 'We have been through this last one since 2001 (officially the Intifada, the uprising of Palestinians against Israel, is still going on - Intifada means 'shaking off'). We talk about Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister who has been in a coma for several years since suffering a stroke. They tell me the Arabic for coma, which means something like 'half death'. They hate him of course, because of Sabra and Shatila, Cana, Jenin etc. I asks them whether they think there will ever be peace with Israel. 'Never', Mosa says, 'because their culture and our culture, their way of life and our way of life are completely different'. I am quite saddened by this because this attitude seems to leave no room for change or compromise. I don't know whether they think that Israel will one day go away, will be defeated or wiped out that all the Israelis will just leave or be driven out. It seems like an apolcalyptic vision which is the other side of the coin from an acceptance of the inevitability of things. They all of them have have green ids, even Mahmed who otherwise has a very good job with good prospects for the future, and they are as a result, like caged beasts within this small area.

I ask them whether Israelis, apart from soldiers, ever come to Abu Dis (thinking maybe then some human contact is possible). Abid says, 'No. They are afraid of us. They think we are all terrorists'.

It is eleven o'clock and I decide to go home. I leave with Abid. Outside, there are still people about, and shops are open including the very large general store on our corner, run by the man whose son is in Finland. I tell Abid I am amazed how hard people work here. He tells me that that shop is usually open until one in the morning. I tell him, how kind hospitable and caring people are here. 'It is the hard life we have', he replies, 'we have to be'. And then he says something that sticks in my mind so strongly. 'If we are not for each other, then who is going to be for us?'

Because without realising it, he is quoting the first century Jewish rabbi Hillel: 'If I am not for myself then who is for me? And if I am only for myself then what am I? And if not now, when?'

Cafe 2

2009-07-09T08:36:00.000-07:00

There are no raids by soldiers that night, and slowly the cafe fills up. Everybody is incredibly friendly as usual, and we chat in Arabic and English. People sit around playing cards or pool. Since I am not very good at either of these, I sit and watch them, write in my notebook and chat to Mosa and his friends. Mosa is incredibly generous. He won't let me pay for anything I have, although it is his job, it is his livelyhood. 'Tonight you are my honoured guest', he tells me.

I talk to a man in his thirties or forties, who is wearing a t-shirt with a Nike tick logo on. He is a taxi driver and has a blue id. Or rather he is a taxi-driver because he has a blue id, since it means that he probably lives in Jerusalem and go back and fore through the checkpoints, between here and Jerusalem and so on into Israel. It turns out that he can speak Hebrew as well as Arabic, and some English. He has probably learnt his Hebrew and English over time through talking to his passengers. He seems very easy going. At one point we are talking and I say something about 'Sunday', and I accidentally say Yom Ichad, which is Hebrew, instead of 'Yom Wachid' , which is Arabic. 'Do you speak Hebew?' he asks me. I hesitate and reply, 'Not really'. I ask him how many people in the bar (there are about 15 by now) have blue passes. 'I am the only one', he replies. Everyone else has a green Occupied Territory pass, which means that they cannot go to Jerusalem a few miles away, certainly cannot go into Israel, and cannot go to Ben Gurion airport if they want to travel abroad - they have to make the long arduous journey to Amman in Jordan crossing the river Jordan and passing through 3 border checkpoints.

I am wondering whether his easy-goingness has something to do with the fact that he has relative freedom of movement and that he gets to meet a lot of different kinds of people in his work - Israelis, tourists from the Europe and America. Which means that for the others who have no such freedom of moment, they are going to be bottled up, frustrated, and will have no real social meetings that will modify the negative images they develop of Israelis on account of the occupation. I must try and explore this theory a bit more, because it is just one more argument against the existence of the wall and the pass system.

Soldiers, a Visit to a Cafe and Zones

2009-07-09T07:47:00.000-07:00

Two nights ago I went to the cafe where my friend Mosa works. The cafe is about five minutes walk from where I live, on the main road which goes through Abu Dis then into the next village (Bethany) and then on to Jerusalem. Mosa works there every evening from the time it opens at six until it closes at one.

When I get there at about eight it is empty, only Mosa and one other friend of his. It is a large space, lots of tables, stone floor, television in the corner showing satellite tv - a program about Michael Jackson. There are people talking about him in floods of tears etc. I ask Mosa why there are so few people here tonight. It is because of the soldiers, he said. Earlier, an Israeli military vehicle had pulled up outside the cafe and had been stopping people on the road, demanding to see their ids. It is very frequent for soldiers to come into cafes, line everybody they find including staff outside and inspect their papers. Usually the process is very drawn out and can take an hour. Of course, during that time the cafe does no business at all. These cafes, where men especially young men come and socialise are particular targets of the soldiers, perhaps because they see them as centres of subversion, danger, resistance etc. Mosa told me that this week the soldiers had been particularly active in his cafe, coming in every day. He of course is bundled out with the rest of them and the cafe takes in no money during the process. I ask him how many soldiers come. 'About 20', he says. One day the captain remained behind and sat down at a table. 'I just want to see how you work', he told Mosa. 'I don't work', Mosa replied. I have taken my passport with me just in case. If I am caught up in a search I am going to have to produce it as id. Everybody else will have green or blue passes. I am wondering what difference my UK passport will make, or the name in it Solomon, whether it will make things 'better' or 'worse' for me.

A digression on zones:

If this is part of the Palestinian Territory which is supposed to be self-governing, how is it possible for Israeli soldiers to be here?

As I have mentioned before the West Bank - the area of Palestine occupied by the Israelis since the 1967 war - is not a single unified territory. Under the terms of the 1993 Oslo accords, it is divided into 3 zones A, B, and C. Zone A is the part under the control of the Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah, which was set up to be the first step towards a Palestinian state. Zone B is under the control of the Palestinian authority as far as ordinary government is concerned, but policing is under the control of the Israeli army. Zone C is off closed to Palestinians completely. Then there are the Israeli settlements, which are scattered all over the territory. The main settlement near here is Ma'ale Adumim which bends around Abu Dis to the east. And there are also checkpoints all over the territory that can make even a short journey as the crow flies lengthy or slow, if there are tail backs, or if the soldiers there decide to take their time. And also roads for the use of settlers only.

Abu Dis is in Zone B, which means that there are Israeli soldiers here who as I have said, carry out raids of cafes regularly. My housemate Sarah told me a story about the brother of a friend of hers, a teenager who was hit by a soldier for not having his id on him. Khalid, the young student I befriended also told me that if a kid throughs a stone at a military vehicle (apparently this is quite a common thing - young male teenagers tend to do this quite often), soldiers will catch and beat a teenager even if it not the one who threw the stone, to encourage the others I suppose.

Outing for the students from the Community Centre

2009-07-08T08:17:00.000-07:00

Today we went on an outing with the students from the Dar Al Sadaqa Community Centre. They enrol for what is called Summer Camp, which is a program of activities taking place six days a week from 9.00 am to 1.00 or 2.00 pm throughout July and into August. Volunteer teachers teach them English, Dabke (a Palestinian folk dance), Drama, sometimes video-making, and sometimes we go on outings.
Actually we are very short of money. Students pay 25 Shekels (Israeli money is used here) for a month, which equates to about to about £4 from each student, and that is the amount of money we have available. A lot of creative thinking is necessary. Our excursion today was to a Fire Station, which was an open space with one fire engine, and a fireman who demonstrated how the engine and the hoses worked. Then we walked to Al Quds university to a park and cafe there.

Goats at Mousa's Grandparents' House

2009-07-08T08:09:00.000-07:00

When I visited Mousa's grandparents' house, they had a shed full of young and old goats.

Amazing griffiti on the wall

2009-07-08T08:02:00.001-07:00

Here is an example of some of the graffiti left by townspeople, volunteers and other visitors here.

2009-07-08T07:48:00.000-07:00

This is another picture of the wall that dominates everything in this town. I don't know if I have already mentioned this but Khalid, the student I met on Monday, told me that when the wall was being built four years ago, the people of Abu Dis and the neighbouring town of Eizaria were confined to their houses for two or three days, only being allowed out for a couple of hours each day to buy food, so that the construction enginers could finish their work.

Something else that the Mousa's cousin said.

2009-07-08T07:31:00.000-07:00

There was something else that Mousa's cousin said that I forgot to mention, that was interesting. Although he initially indicated that he thought that all Jews were bad, later on in the conversation, he started to say something different:

'The Israeli soldiers behave differently to each other. The ones from Europe or America, they don't care about anything. They think nothing about hitting an old man or a child. The Israelis from Morocco or Iraq are different. They have a heart, they have more respect'.

Which reminded me that behind even an apparently granite-like generalised judgement, there is something else going on. People are also differentiating, they are being more subtle than they appear, it is possible to talk about better or worse, maybe those others are not all demons ...

So much has happened in the last few days

2009-07-08T06:04:00.000-07:00

So much has happened in the last few days. It is only Wednesday and I have been here since Sunday only, but it seems like I have been here for weeks, such is the intensity of my life here.
One thing is the incredible friendliness of people here. I can be walking past someone in the street, and they will come up and want to start a conversation, or in a shop or in a cafe. Last night I was walking out of my flat and a teenager started talking to me in English.

'Are you a student?', I said.
'No I just want to practice English. I learn by talking to people'.
He wants me to practice with him. I agree to do it. 'You can always see me around here. Come and talk to me when you are passing'.

I have a friend here, a university graduate called Mousa. He studied Geography and Urban Planning at Al Quds university here, but the only job he can get is in a cafe where he works every night from six until twelve or one. Yesterday he came round to the flat that I am sharing with Sarah the other teacher from England, and he brought some lunch - rice wrapped in vineleaves, a Palestinian speciality - that his mother had made especially for me. We sit and chat for a while, in English and Arabic, and then we go out and walk towards the neigbouring village of Bethany. He takes me to his grandparents house. The house is in a quiet sidestreet of the main road. It is quite large - apart from his grandparents he has some cousins living there - and there is a small yard and a shed which is full of goats. The yard backs right on to the wall, which is extremely tall at this point, over nine metres high covered at the top with barbed wire, overshadowing the house. Just before we reach the house, across a field there is a building that looks like a block of flats with the windows blown out. Mousa says, 'that used to be a hotel, now it is used by the Israeli soldiers.' 'How many of them are there?' I say. 'I don't know, about ten'.

In the house, I talk to Moussa's grandfather, who is lying on a couch in the living room. Then a cousin of Moussa comes in, a middle-aged man, quite large wearing a vest. And the first thing he says, is the thing that I knew was going to come up sooner or later, and which I hadn't made my mind about what I was going to say in reply.

'Are you Jewish?'
'Yes', I say immediately without pausing.

He then launches into a long talk about how evil Jews are. 'Jews are taught in their book to hate and kill the Moslems. It is written down in their book. They have succeeded in turning the Christians against the Moslems, but I know that the Jews are laughing at the Christians'.

All this in a very good humoured even friendly way, in no way personal against me. I have come across this before in London, people who say that they hate 'the Jews', who know I am Jewish, but they don't hate me, but feel they can be free to tell me this. In a weird way, I find it a privilege that they can be as open as this, and find I am not really shocked or upset. I decide that I owe it to him to listen to him, whatever he is saying is coming from his life, maybe years of humiliation, the wall, soldiers god knows what, things that I can't even imagine. I try and piece together bits of his life from what he says. His English is quite good. He has worked in Israel, I think as a builder.

'I have worked for Jews in Israel. I have been in their church (he meant synagogue). One thing about Jews is that they will never attack you to you face, they will stab you behind your back'

While I am listening to him, I am trying to work out what sort of response I am going to make. I try to tell him that not all Jews are the same, that many including myself are not happy with what Israel is doing. Some of the things he says are quite thoughtful. 'Every country has a youth, an adulthood and an old age, and then they die. Once long ago, Britain was young and strong, now it is old and weak. The same thing is happening to America. One day, those countries will be dead, and Israel will be alone, and there will be so many Arabs and they will be able to kill one Jew each and ......'

I quite like him actually. He is quite good humoured and friendly with a twinkle in his eye even as he is coming out with all this stuff.

He has some weird ideas about Christianity. He thinks that what is called Christianity is not the original Christianity, which was written down in a secret book and buried deep underground in Rome. One day the book will be discovered, and 'Christianity' will come to an end, the whole world will becom Moslem, and then there will be perfect peace and justice throughout the world.
That gives me a handle about how I should respond. I say, 'I think justice and doesn't consist in our all being the same, but in our all being different and respecting each other's differences'.

Mousa has a very good-humoured attitude to his cousin. He keeps teasing him. For example, when his cousin says that all smoking is haram and is forbidden in the Q'uran, Mousa says, 'but you smoke, you smoke shisha too'. 'Yes, but it is forbidden'.

We part on friendly terms. Mousa says, 'I want you to know that I do not share his views. He has his opinions and I have mine. I do not agree with him, but I listen to him with respect'.
'Yes', I say, 'I do respect him. I am here to listen to what people have to say, because of the lives that they have lived'.

I tell him I am going to see him at the cafe where he works later that evening.

My First Day of Teaching.

2009-07-06T12:10:00.000-07:00

Today was my first day of teaching at the Abu Dis 'Dar al Sadaqa' (Friendship House) a community centre that has been set up by the Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association (Abu Dis has been twinned with Camden Town). Sarah, the other English volunteer teacher and I are part of a program called summer camp for local children between 10 and 16. There are other volunteers too: Nadeem a young Palestinian man who is going to teach dance, and there will be a drama teacher as well. There are 34 children involved. There is not very much money at all and we have to organise a lot of things ourselves at short notice but I think, I hope, we will manage to achieve something. Sarah has been here longer than me, is a dance teacher at a secondary school in Camden Town who has taken six weeks off teacher there to be in Abu Dis. We did two double lessons today, which is quite a good way to teach. We can play off each other. Sarah's strong point is in games / activities involving physical movement, and I can do the standard ESOL type things. Today we were teaching two large classes, and the problem was that we had students of different levels in the same class. Tomorrow we are going to try and group the students by age. They have all been learning English at their schools, but they all need more speaking practice. The children are extremely behaved. They are also very friendly as is everybody here. People you meet in the street, people in shops, students, are so gracious, kind and helpful. Khaled told me that that happens when people lead hard difficult lives. It brings people together, makes them look out for each other.

The owner of the local grocery shop round the corner where I live, is anxious to practice his spoken English, and I said would come and do some with him. He wears a t-shirt that says 'Finland' on it. His son is living there, has completed his masters in engineering and is going to take a doctorate. Many of the people here have relatives in Europe, the United States or the Gulf States. In a way it is a sign that younger people do not see a future for themselves here and will want to go and live somewhere else if they can. Ironically that is also the case with young Israelis.

I am determined not to be shocked by anything I see or hear while I am here. The friendly shop-owner with the 'Finland' t-shirt has a picture of Saddam Hussain on his counter. Sarah tells me that he is very popular here. I am not surprised. They see him as a hero because he stood up to the Americans and raised the issue of the Palestinians (although, as I pointed out, for his own interests not theirs). I have heard more than once that people think that the world does not care what happens to the Palestinians. But any foreign visitor can come here and see what life is like, talk to the people. All they have to do is to get on a number 36 bus from Jerusalem.

At the friendship centre today, I met a very gracious elderly man.
He said to me, 'You see, we live a very wretched life here'
I replied, 'You have a hard life, but this is a beautiful place'
'No we live a wretched life'
I said, 'But you all behave with such wonderful friendliness'
'That is our Moslem religion', he replied.

I do think that for all the hardship that people live, all the day to day humiliations and sorrows, that this really is a beautiful place.

Some pictures of the Wall 4

2009-07-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

You can see the wall sweeping off into the distance. Israeli governments have justified building it on security grounds i.e. that it stops terrorist bomb attacks. But if that is so why doesn't the wall follow the original line of demarcation between the state of Israel pre-1967 war and the West Bank (the so-called Green Line)? In fact the wall takes in great chunks of extra land, and Israeli settlements which have been made, contrary to international law, in the West Band over the last 20 years at least. The result is that the West Bank, which is supposed to be the core of a new Palestinian State, is broken up into fragments, separated by checkpoints and roads for settler use only. Abu Dis is surrounded on three sides by the wall. People here are cut off from land that they own on the other side. In the northern part of the West Bank, villagers are cut off from olive groves which they own, and can't harvest them. I have heard about a volunteer movement for people from abroad who come and pick the olives for them.

A student told me yesterday that at first the wall was only one metre high and was easy to climb over. They could still get to Jerusalem. Then they built it higher till it was impossible to climb over. He reckoned it was a deliberate policy to get people used to the idea of having a wall by degrees so that in time they would accept it. I think that used to be called 'salami tactics'. You cut a bit off then another bit, then another. Each bit is very small and you hardly notice it. In the end though, it is all gone.

Pictures of the Wall 3

2009-07-06T11:33:00.001-07:00

While I was photographing today, I met a student called Khaled, who took me to this part of town quite near to where he lives. He told me that when the Israelis were building the wall about 4 years ago, they imposed a curfew on the whole town for two or three days, allowing people to come out only for a few hours a day to buy food. This was to allow the builders to get on with the construction uninterrupted. On the other side of the wall you can see not far away the Mount of Olives, and the Dome of the Rock in the Old City of Jerusalem. Abu Dis is really a suburb of Jerusalem but has been cut off from it completely. If you don't have a blue id card (most of the people here have green West Bank cards) you will never be able to get there. Khaled's mother has a blue card because she originally comes from Jerusalem, but his father comes from here and has a green card. Khaled himself has 'inherited' his father's green card status. I think he told me that the last time he went to Jerusalem was six years ago, before the wall was built. He doesn't know if he will ever be able to go there again.

Some Pictures of the Wall 2

2009-07-06T11:27:00.000-07:00

There are visitors here from all over the world, and many of them write draw or paint something on the wall. So you can see graffiti in Arabic, English, Spanish, also Hebrew sometimes. This bit of the wall is about 9 metres high.

Some pictures of the Separation Wall

2009-07-06T11:19:00.000-07:00

I have been taking pictures of the separation wall this afternoon. The wall dominates everything in Abu Dis. People wake up to it every day, see it wherever they are. It cuts them off from their families, their friends, their workplaces, their land, and their places of worship. Sections of the wall are covered with the most amazing graffiti, such as here, which shows how much pride spirit dignity and humour the people have here

Sunday afternoon 5th July

2009-07-05T07:56:00.000-07:00

I am not going to record events chronologically. It would take too long and anyway it is better if I record impressions and thoughts that are uppermost in my mind at the time.

The town of Abu Dis which I photographed in the last entry is quite large. It consists of narrow streets, houses and shops made of yellow / white stone and concrete some of which are old sme recent. Then there is the separation wall which the Israelis built about 4 years ago. I can see some of it from the balcony here flanking the Mount of Olives. Some of it runs close to El Quds university, which is a major Palestinian university based in Abu Dis, and runs along the next village whose old name is Bethany, which I am sure appears in the bible. I have just been shown around the town and the neighbourhood by a group of ex-students of the university. They told me that the military authorities wanted to run the separation wall between the university and their sports field, and it took a lot of demonstrations to persuade them to change their mind.

The bits of the wall that I have already seen are horrific. They are great concrete strips up to nine metres high. There a lots of grafitti all over them. I am going to be posting photographs of it over the next few days. If you have a green id card (i.e. a West Bank id card), it means that you can't go to Jerusalem or anywhere else on the other side of the wall, including visiting your relations, or working the land that you might have had on the other side but you can't reach now because you are separated from it. The only exception is if someone is seriously ill and they have to get a permit from the military to cross at one of the checkpoints. If they are lucky they will get permission to cross for one day only, and they have to be back within the time, or else they won't get another permit. Some Palestinians however have got a blue id which covers people living in Jerusalem, which means that they can get in and out whenever they want. That includes my taxi-driver this morning who can come and go between here and Jerusalem for his work without any problems. And of course it also includes people like me with foreign passports who can just jump on a number 36 bus, and be back at the Damascus Gate within 20 minutes. In addition, there are no checkpoints for people leaving Jerusalem, so on the taxi-ride this morning the road from Jerusalem to Abu Dis was very fast, but in the opposite direction for people trying to get into Jerusalem, there was a long tailback.

So there is a superficial feeling of normality at very first glance, but the network of passes, checkpoints and restrictions draws in and affects everyone in its tentacles some more seriously than others.

One of the students told me, 'It is far easier for me to get to London then to Ben Gurion airport (the airport in Tel Aviv through which I got here yesterday).' Usually someone with a green id will never be allowed to go to Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. If they want to go abroad, they have to go through Jordan, which means going through an Israeli checkpoint, then a checkpoint of the Palestinian National Authority (the authority that is supposed to be in charge of the West Band), then a chekpoint of the Jordanian Government.

Another of the students said to me today, 'In the west, politics is just an activity for a few people, for us we are all involved in politics every day'.

I will try and record as many of the stories that people have been telling me as I can.

Some pictures

2009-07-05T07:29:00.000-07:00

These are pictures I have taken from the balcony of the guest house I am staying in. It is a very large flat with a beautiful tiled floor. There is another teacher from England here apart from me, and her mother Linda. She has got a computer with WIFI which is very convenient. At the moment the door to the balcony is open, which means that despite the fact that it is very hot outside, a nice breeze is blowing through the flat. To the right you can see the oldest mosque of Abu Dis. To the left of the pointed tree in the foreground is the Mount of Olives, which normally wouldn't be that far away, but because of the system of road blocks and restrictions on movement would take a long time to reach, even assuming the people have the right kind of id card, which most of them don't, which means that they can't get there at all.

First Post from DAvid

2009-07-05T03:37:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone, I've arrived. It is 1.40 pm local time Sunday 5th July, which is 11.40 am London time. I have just been sleeping off my jet lag.
The journey was smooth and without the hassle I was expecting. At Heathrow there were two heavily armed UK policeman guarding the line at the El Al (Israeli airlines) counter. A lot of questioning of each traveller before we checked in our luggage, which was quite friendly but was the kind of questioning you usually get when you arrive somewhere ('What is the purpose of your visit?' 'Have you been in Israel before?') It is easy to see that security is high priority in this part of the world. I didnt have any trouble though, even though in my luggage I was carrying an X box that was given to me by the son of my friend in London to take here and give to one of the children here. I also got through security at Israel's Ben Gurion airport amazingly without difficulty. A couple of questions and that was it. Maybe my surname Solomon helped and was always going to mean I was going to have less difficulty than some others. The only thing the immigration officer was surprised about was that I hadnt been here in Israel since 1968, when I was 16.

Outside the airport, I took what is called a sheroot, which is a kind of shared taxi. The taxi waits until it is full and then sets off towards a particular town or city and stops at different places agreed by the passengers. The smallness of the country is amazing. I was heading for Jerusalem which is less than an hours journey away, the distance between London and Stansted. From what I could see landing in the plane (it was 5.00 am local time) and driving through the suburbs, Tel Aviv is a modern and prosperous city, as developed as anywhere in Europe. The road to Jerusalem is hilly and the countryside is very dry. Reminds me of the landscape of Australia, a kind of washed-out green very dry rocky and hilly. Most of the buildings are built of a pale yellow sandstone brick. The official language of Israel is Hebrew and Arabic is the second language, so you see street signs and notices in Hebrew and Arabic and sometimes in English.

There is a sort of motorway that leads up from the coast to Jerusalem. The taxi went through suburbs. Historically there were three parts of Jerusalem: the ancient city, which has got all the religious sites and has got a wall around it with a number of gates pointing in different directions (the Jaffa Gate, Damascus Gate etc), very much in the way that all cities had in the past; the new city in the west that was built by Jewish immigrants during the twentieth century, and the modern city in the east that was originally mainly Arab. After the 1967 war, Arab new Jerusalem was incorporated into Israel proper, an action whose legality is very disputed, and there has been some Jewish settlement there, making the area more mixed. I will talk about the politics and the day to day living conditions in the area in a later blog as I get to learn more about it. All I can say at the moment is that it is incredibly complicated: what is known as the West Bank or Occupied Territories, is a mixture of different legal zones, types of authority and settlement, where people have different rights or lack of rights, restrictions and freedom or lack of freedom of movement. This is only my first day after all and I want to stick to what I know and what people tell me.

I noticed that the first suburbs of Jeruslem the taxi went through are largely Jewish, with secular Israelis and religious Jews. As we went East towards the old city, there are Palestinians. I was put down at the Damascus gate, one of the gates of the old city, where there are a lot of buses that go to different parts of the west bank. I was due to meet a taxi driver there who would drive me to Abu Dis, the village where I will be teaching.

More Later