Back in Britain

Dear friends

Thanks to those of you who have written to me. I'm now back in Britain.

It has been a challenging time getting back here. All sorts of things went wrong from day one! The worst was that the funds I had set aside for my return were mostly suddenly whipped away from me - a loan to a friend unrepaid, and two other amounts owed not paid, and little I could do about both. Also a major breakdown on my car. That was all a shock - the worst bit being that I could not get the time of rest and vision-questing that I needed after the Palestine trip. But there we go, that's life!

In addition, in late August, my mother, 93, was struck down with an age-related illness, and went to hospital for a month or more. So, immediately on arrival back from Palestine I went to look after my father, 92, in the Midlands of England. That worked well, and my mother is now back at home from hospital, and they're both ticking over as well as can be expected, for their advanced ages.

When adversity strikes, I always ask myself how I can turn things to positive with what I have. Since arriving back I have used the 'down time' enforced by the above challenges to start rewriting my Palestine blog as a book, tentatively called 'Pictures of Palestine'. I've completed about 25% of it, and 40% of it is half-complete as of now, and I'm beavering away at bringing the manuscript to completion by early November. I hope it will be published, and before too much happens in Palestine to render it out of date! I'm crafting it to keep it from losing currency.

But it's difficult telling what will happen next in Palestine. Events seem to be accelerating at present - mainly because elements within Israeli society - the more assertive Zionist 10-20% plus the right-wing government - are pushing hard to make more 'facts on the ground' before the world comes down on them with a restraining hand. The problem with this lies with the international community, which has so many vested interests and untruths to keep covered up, which permits Israelis to get away with things they shouldn't.

The problem for the Palestinians is that they now just want and need normalisation and a fair deal. The vast majority want no more conflict or hardship, and they badly need Israelis to match that feeling. Problem is, the Israeli majority keeps its head down - rather like reasonable Americans during the Bush period or openminded Brits during the Thatcher period, feeling as if there's not much they can do. As I quoted once in this blog, "For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing" - and this is the situation here. Even dear Mr Obama is caught in a web of complexity, concerning USA's embedded relationship with Israel, together with other Middle East and domestic considerations which constrain straight and simple action.

This dicey situation for Palestinians makes them vulnerable to provocation - currently especially over East Jerusalem and Harim al Sharif (the Temple Mount) - where hard pushing from Zionist settlers is freaking people out and bring a risk that they'll overreact - not least because they feel unsupported by the international community in real terms. Sure, there's talk and there are statements made, but this is all hot air, and it gives cover for Zionists to get away with more land-grabs, occupations of property and holy sites and other 'facts on the ground' ploys.

Zionists know that the game will soon be up, and they're trying to create as many 'facts on the ground' as they can before the chopper comes down,and the international community is trying hard not to be precipitate or to provoke the full wrath of the Zionists in Israel, who are still partially successful in denial and pointing out how terribly unfair the world is, as if Israelis are the oppressed. This won't work in the longterm, and a storm is coming in anything from three months to three-our years, unless something changes.

As for me, my main agenda is twofold. I've committed to returning to Palestine twice a year for about two months - next visit in March-April - so I need to raise support for this. Secondly, I need to find a new income-source in Britain (or somewhere) to make life work here more easily. My old line of business in Britain - websites and book-editing - tended to involve far too much work and yield far too little benefit to support my Palestine and other work. My main aim is to secure an income to support what I really do - nowadays mainly but not solely Palestine-related - and to get out of the overwork routine I was in during the last ten years (it was a killer).

So Paldywan's on the warpath yet again, for a publisher, for Palestine support (especially something solid and ongoing) and for a new half-life in Britain. Leads, contacts or tips are welcome! Last week I applied for a job in Bethlehem, just to push the limits and see what happens, as an English-language editor for the Palestinian Ma'an news agency, and this week I'm working on the book, hassling agents and publishers, winkling out work and support and, oh, I forgot, trying to stay alive, catch up on mundane details and retrieve money owed! Oh, and sorting photos for selling or giving to charities and agencies, and carry on with the online work for the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem. What a life!

But I had a lovely walk with Suzy on the cliffs at Zennor Head in Cornwall. We ate sandwiches overlooking the waves, and had a remarkable encounter with a peregrine (a big, quite rare hunting bird), which caught a pigeon for its dinner in mid-air, and then had to fend off two ravens to keep its prey.

Finally...

I shall post occasional Palestine-related posts on this blog, for the interest of you who have followed the story. Thank you for coming along! Greetings from me!

Palden

A History of Palestine

Introduction

Palestine is a country that doesn't exactly exist. It might one day gain independence, in connection with the 'two-state solution' with Israel, but only some believe this will happen.

Part of the reason for this is that the Palestinian-controlled areas which would make up such a state are not joined together, and Israel disputes the amount of territory Palestine should have - in particular the capital of the proposed nation, East Jerusalem. So a viable state is not yet visible as a possibility.

At the moment, the administrative capital of OPT, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, is Ramallah, north of Jerusalem.

Much of the Palestinian West Bank is split into parts separated by Israeli settlements and separation walls, and many towns are like islands without independent access, liable to be closed off anytime. Getting from the south to the north is difficult: to avoid Israeli territory and checkpoints one must drive along a circuitous switchback mountain road which indeed is scenic, but it doesn't look like 'Route 1' at all.

There is Palestine, the state which isn't, and there are the Palestinians. There are roughly 10 million Palestinians.

About half of them are refugees, living in Jordan (2.7m), Syria (600,000), Chile (500,000), Lebanon (400,000), Saudi Arabia (250,000), the Gulf States and Kuwait (200,000), other Arab states (200,000), Europe (250,000) and North America (220,000).

The other half live in 'historic Palestine', the area now comprising Israel and Palestine, once unified in the time of the British Mandate of 1920-48. Of these, 2.3m live in the West Bank, 1.4m in Gaza and 1.3m in the state of Israel. Palestinians make up 20% of the population of the state of Israel.

If the population of Israel and Palestine are added together, Palestinians and Israelis make up 50% each, but the Palestinian population is growing faster, and immigration of Jews to Israel has declined to a trickle. This means there is a demographic problem ahead for Israelis who, with or without democracy, will become the minority.

From 1988 to 2007 the West Bank and Gaza were under the same jurisdiction, the Palestinian National Authority (PA). During the first intifada or uprising of 1987-93, Yasser Arafat's PLO declared an independent Palestine in 1988. The PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) became the PA.

The PA has been recognised worldwide as a government, but it does not have sovereignty since its lands and many of its affairs are controlled by Israel as a military occupying power. Some sceptics regard the PA as a kind of overgrown municipality, in charge of policing and social issues only, covering the things the Israelis don't want to do.

The signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 was supposed to bring proper Palestinian sovereign independence within several years, but this did not happen. The lack of progress on the peace process, plus the continuation of Israeli land-seizures, settlement building, roadblocks, checkpoints and military control led to the second intifada of 2000-2004. During the intifada the building of the Israeli separation wall started, preventing contact between ordinary Palestinians and Israelis. The matter of independence remains unresolved today - Palestine is a de facto nation without legal and political status.

National unity was complicated by a civil conflict in 2007 between the two main Palestinian political parties, Fateh (a nationalist, secular party) and Hamas (an Islamic social reform party). It followed the electoral victory of Hamas in 2006 when, to everyone's surprise, they gained 60% of the vote.

This result was not accepted by Israel or the international community, despite their much-avowed belief in democracy. An economic blockade was enforced to try to force Hamas out of office, causing great hardship to ordinary Palestinians. It was a kind of foreign-inspired coup d'étât, seeking to divide the Palestinian people - and it succeeded. In 2007 Hamas took control of Gaza and Fateh of the West Bank, and this situation persists today.

Control of Palestinian territory - particularly land where Palestinians are a majority - is complicated by Israel's security arrangements. Under the 1993 Oslo Accords, three areas of control were established: Area A, with complete Palestinian control (containing the main Palestinian cities except East Jerusalem), Area B (Palestinian control with ultimate Israeli military control, mostly around the edge of these areas) and Area C (Israeli military control of Palestinian-majority land).

Hope Flowers School is in Area C in al Khader on the edge of Bethlehem, and Hope Flowers Center is in Area A near Deheishe in the Bethlehem built-up area.

So it is all very complicated, but people live with it - they have limited choice in the matter and they're tired of fighting. They just want to get on with life.


A Brief History of the Region

The history of Palestine is complex and long. People were here from the very beginning, since this area is a crossing-point between Europe and the Mediterranean, Africa and Asia. The earliest human remains in the area come from 1.5m years ago at Ubeidiya in the Jordan valley. Neanderthals and humans lived alongside each other here from 250,000-40,000 years ago.

In Ramallah and Bethlehem tools and remains have been found from the Natufian culture of 14,000-12,000 years ago. Early agricultural communities grew up here from 12,000 years ago, and the world's longest known inhabited city is Jericho, founded as a village around 10,500 years ago. But mostly, ancient people were nomads and horticulturalists.

In 3000-2200 BCE independent Canaanite city-states grew up here, trading with Egypt, Sumer (Iraq) and Phoenicia (Lebanon). Biblical tradition has it that Abraham or Ibrahim came here around 1800 BCE with a group of Habiru from Mesopotamia, buying land around Hebron from the locals before later moving on to Egypt due to famine. Ibrahim's tomb is at Hebron, and he is seen as the ancestral father of the Arabs through his son Ishmael, and of the Jews through Isaac. Various peoples migrated into the area around 1200 BCE, including the Phoenicians and the Hebrews who by then returned from Egypt (in the Exodus). Migration was common around the Middle East in those days.

At times the area has been quite a central place, for example during Greek and Byzantine times and in the first Muslim centuries. Much of this centrality revolved around Jerusalem. At other times it has been peripheral and relatively quiet, for example during late Roman, Mamluk and Ottoman times.

Biblical tradition has it that the first proper Israelite kingdom was founded in the highlands of the West Bank by Saul or Solomon around 1020, with its capital at Jerusalem, formerly a Canaanite town, once famous for being ruled by the wise magician Melchizedek. This kingdom split into Israel in the north and Judah in the south around 930, while other states such as the coastal Philistine city-states (Gaza), Moab (southern Jordan) and Ammon (Amman) surrounded them. The whole area was multi-ethnic, and it has been consistently so throughout history, with different villages, areas and quarters of towns occupied by different tribes and peoples. This is its natural condition, to this day.

Around 720, Assyria (in today's northern Iraq) destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and its inhabitants were dispersed far and wide - as far as India, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, SW France (Septimania), Britain (Wales) and Ethiopia. Judah was later conquered by the Babylonians in 586 and its ruling classes were carried off to Babylon, where the foundations of the Jewish faith and scriptures were laid down. Some returned after the Persian takeover of Babylon by Cyrus the Great, who liberated them in 538, while others stayed or progressed eastwards along the Silk Road.

Hereafter, the area was dominated by and largely united under foreign empires. The first was the Persians for two centuries, 538-333 BCE; the next was the Greeks for two centuries, following Alexander the Great's whirlwind invasions of 333; then came the foundation of the century-long Jewish kingdom of the Hasmoneans, 140-37 BCE. Then came the Romans for over three centuries until CE 330, during which time the Jewish revolts of CE 66-73 and 132-135 led to the dispersion of many Jews around the empire. Most 'Romans' in the area were actually Greeks or people living Greek-style lives, and the East Roman empire was predominantly Greek.

As Rome declined and the empire divided, the Greeks revived as the Byzantines, who ruled the area from 330-640. Here came the expansion of Christianity as a formalised institutional faith: many of the old Christian churches and communities of the region, originating in CE 60-100, grew in stature and power. Byzantine Palestine prospered for centuries.

The culture of today's Palestinian Christians has its roots in this time. Many of their ways are Greek-style, even though many Palestinian Christians claim ancestral descent from Yemen. They are generally more European in character and, in recent times, a greater proportion of them have left for the West than Muslim Palestinians.

There was hardly ever conflict between Christians and Muslims or, until the 20th Century, them and Jews - they all rubbed along in a multifaith environment.

Then came the Muslim invasions of 630, leading to 1,300 years of Muslim predominance. Christians, Jews and other minorities had rights and protections and, while they were not pressured to do so, many gradually became Muslims because Islam, with its thought-through legal, philosophical and religious codes, was regarded as an upgrade of earlier faiths and cultures.

Older traditions had become very complex, and Islam had a reforming, modernising influence. There were social advantages to conversion too - a bit like the advantages conferred by buying into Western ways today. There were also variations within Islam, accommodating minority ethnic groups such as the Druze and the Bedouin. Many Byzantine patterns were followed by the Muslims, in administration and trade.

In 691 the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem was built by the Umayyad dynasty centred in Damascus, Syria, followed by al Aqsa, making Jerusalem Islam's third most holy place after Mecca (Makkah) and Medina (Madinah). By the 700s-800s, under the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad, the area prospered, enjoying a peak, cosmopolitan culture.

In Europe, these were the 'Dark Ages', but in the Middle East, India, China and Mexico they were an Age of Light, a zenith of world civilisation.

By 1000 the Muslim world was ossifying and dividing into regional dynasties, though they nevertheless shared the same basic culture, faith and language. New foreign dynasties arrived such as the Central Asian Seljuks.

Then came the European Crusaders in the 1100s and 1200s: this was Europe's first colonial adventure, driven by a desire to retake Jerusalem for Christianity. They did this murderously in 1099. The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem roughly covered today's Israel and Palestine. Some Crusaders melded into the local population and some kept apart, asserting distinctly European values and feudal rule. There was always rivalry between these two Crusader camps and eventually it felled them.

In Europe, it was in this time that periodic persecutions against Jews started, setting a pattern of oppression which was later to permeate the 20th Century and bounce back on Palestine. The Palestinian Jewish minority, living largely around Galilee, customarily lived in peace, playing their part in the multi-ethnic Middle Eastern world. Neighbouring Muslims coexisted with the Christian Crusader kingdom, but occasionally power-hungry European Crusaders sailed to the region, gaining the upper hand over their local-born fellows, behaving badly and annoying people.

Eventually, by the time Saladin, Sultan of Egypt and Syria, came along, tensions were high. Salah-ad-Din summoned the Muslims and beat the Crusaders at the Battle of Hattin in the northern West Bank in 1187, exploiting the Crusaders' own arrogance to trap them. Then he laid siege to and took back Jerusalem, bestowing far more mercy on his enemies than the Crusaders had 88 years before.

It was not the presence of foreigners with a different faith that troubled him: it was their behaviour. This we see today with Palestinians: most accept Jews and the existence of Israel, but what troubles them is what Israelis tend to do to them.

Salah-ad-Din offered a power-sharing arrangement in Palestine if the Crusaders controlled their more virulent members, but the latter rejected it. Eventually he penned them up in the coastal town of Acre. Later, in 1270-91, Sultan Baibars finally got rid of them. But some Crusader families stayed peacefully, merging with the population, and some Palestinian Christians thus have Crusader ancestors.

So the question of sharing power in the Holy Land has ancient and repeating precedents, including in the time of Joshua, the Assyrians, the Babylonians and Romans, to the time of the Crusaders and up to today. It has been a story in which narrower nationalism and religious feeling have vied with multi-ethnic tolerance.

During the Egyptian Mamluk period of 1270-1516 the Mamluks, anticipating another European invasion, destroyed many of the coastal harbours and cities. Life was centred mainly in the inland highlands of what's now the West Bank. Palestine was more peripheral during this period, its Mediterranean connections lost.

Then came the four century Ottoman Turkish period from 1516-1917. The Ottomans had taken the Byzantine city of Constantinopolis in 1453, renaming it Istanbul, and expanded outwards from there. The Holy Land was taken by Suleiman the Magnificent, an engineer and builder of many works (including Solomon's Pools, near the Hope Flowers School). Palestine was a relatively neglected, rural area during this time, peripheral to the Ottoman centres of Istanbul, Egypt, Syria and the Balkans.

But life carried on all the same. The Ottoman world slowly declined in the 19th Century as Europe came to dominate the world, and the empire fell in WW1. Then the trouble really started for the Palestinians. Westerners came and broke up the Middle East.


The Early Twentieth Century

The Middle East was taken by the British and the French in WW1. They split the region into small countries and drew lines across the map, introducing the idea that security and territory went together - divide and rule. Before this, different ethnic groups coexisted in the same territories, often taking on different social roles and niches. Palestine went through a period of British rule during which its economy modernised and trade grew.

A new influence was arriving, a part of that modernisation: European Jews, subjected to pressure and persecution in Russia, Poland and Germany, started immigrating and buying coastal land. About 30,000 came in the 1880s-90s. This largely wasn't problematic. Numbers grew by another 40,000 by 1914, many of them business-oriented townspeople and socialist idealists, founders of the communal kibbutzim.

The British Balfour Declaration of 1917 supported the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The British Mandate, formalised by the League of Nations in 1920, stated that with the establishment of such a homeland, "...Nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine".

That bit became problematic: many Jewish immigrants were incorrectly told by Zionists back home that this was 'a land without people waiting for a people without a land'. Zionism can be defined as a belief in the primacy and priority of founding and expanding a Jewish state of Israel.

Jewish immigration grew in the 1920s-30s as pressures on them in Europe increased. They brought with them European ways, money and values. Jewish economic growth at this time was around 13% while Palestinian growth was around 6% - largely agricultural. Roads, railways and infrastructure were developed with the British, and Palestine changed, being pushed into the 20th Century.

Then came the Palestinian Revolt of 1936 against British rule and what Palestinians by now felt was excessive Jewish immigration. By 1938 the Jews formed their own militias, Haganah and Irgun, which nominally supported British rule. But they started retaliatory attacks on Palestinians in response to Arab attacks on Jews. Things intensified. One outcome of the revolt was an increasing separation of Palestinians and Jews. Patterns were forming which were to define the future.

The Zionist thinker Ze'ev Jabotinsky mapped out an 'iron wall' policy in which he stated that the Jews would have to use superior force to contain the Palestinians and favour Israel - though he also stated that a day would come when this would have to stop, and Israel would need to accept and befriend its neighbours. This bit was later ignored - some thinkers argue that Israel should have softened up from the 1970s onwards, having established itself and made its point.

In WW2 the Jews sided with the British, in reaction to the German Nazi persecutions and Holocaust in Europe and the threat of a German invasion of the Middle East. Palestinians were divided, some disliking the occupying British and some fighting against the Germans (such as in Bosnia, to protect fellow Muslims). The British restricted Jewish immigration, seeing trouble coming. Rommel's panzer divisions invaded North Africa, scaring Jewish immigrants in Palestine. The British trained Jewish fighters in response, but the Jews were losing faith in the British.

By 1944 some Jews planned to get rid of the British. British control of Palestine loosened after WW2 as its empire in India and the Middle East was failing, and as it was devastated at home. Britain sought to reduce or stop Jewish immigration as a way of keeping things under control, offering other destinations for Jewish refugees such as Uganda or Mauritius. But it was too late. The Jews, after Hitler's Holocaust, were desperate and determined - they just needed, in their way of seeing things, to 'go home'. Home was what then was British Mandate Palestine.

In 1947 the newly-established United Nations voted to divide Palestine into two states with an internationally-controlled, neutral Jerusalem and Bethlehem. An Arab state was to have 43% of Mandate Palestine, mainly in the highlands, and a Jewish state was to have 56%, mainly in the coastal lowlands and desert (the desert Bedouin were conveniently overlooked). At the time, the population of Palestine was 67% Palestinian/Bedouin and 33% Jewish.

A civil war started in 1947, growing into the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. It was a desperate conflict, with Jews fighting for their lives and Palestinians and Arabs quite unprepared for what was happening. By its end the state of Israel was declared by David ben Gurion and Israel was on the map. 2,000 people were killed and 4,000 wounded.

The British decided to support the annexation of the West Bank by the new state of Transjordan (Jordan), to protect the Palestinians, which Jordan did. At least 700,000 Palestinian refugees fled, most expecting to come home after the war but, when they tried, they couldn't return or they found their homes occupied by Jews or destroyed.

In the three years following 1948, 700,000 Jews immigrated from Europe. 10,000 had also lost their homes in what became Palestinian areas, moving to what became Israeli areas. There was an enormous population transfer, many Palestinians becoming refugees in the West Bank. By the end of the war, Israel controlled 78% of the former land of Palestine, not the 56% they had been allocated. The UN drew a ceasefire line, the Green Line, to formalise the new boundary. The Jews now had a nation and the Palestinians didn't.


The Late Twentieth Century

In 1949, Jordan controlled the West Bank (the East Bank being Jordan itself) and half of Jerusalem. Egypt controlled Gaza. Israel controlled the rest. This remained the situation through the 1950s as Israel established itself and grew in population and vigour. Gradually, it grew from small, vulnerable beginnings into a regional economic and military power, backed by international Jews. The main local event of that time was the Suez War of 1956 in which Egypt took control of the Suez Canal, removing British and French control, after an ill-starred war involving Israel, Britain and France.

Palestinians and neighbouring Arab countries fought an ongoing resistance against the Israelis too, against which Israelis fought doggedly, developing the military strategy of hitting back hard, to teach a lesson and to assert military superiority - this strategy, which in more recent years has arguably become overkill, has characterised Israeli strategy ever since. Despite the efforts of both sides to deliver knockout blows and deter further aggression, the conflict escalated in scale and violence, with neither side backing down.

Meanwhile, refugees in Gaza, the West Bank and neighbouring countries lived a life of poverty and hardship, first in tent cities and then in slums that replaced them. UNRWA was founded to provide basic services and humanitarian aid, remaining one of the largest of the UN organisations for decades and still operating today.

The situation suddenly changed in the 1967 Six Day War when Israel, anticipating an Arab attack seeking to remove Israel from the map, pre-emptively attacked its neighbours. This was a dramatic military action: the world raised its eyebrows as Israel spectacularly wiped out its neighbours' air forces and occupied the West Bank, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula (later returned to Egypt in 1979-82). The West saw Israel as a bulwark of Western interests in the oil-rich and strategically important Middle East - these were the times of the Cold War when many Arab countries were forging connections with USSR.

The causes of the Six Day War were various: rivalries over water rights in the upper Jordan valley; the porous and troublesome frontier between Jordan and Israel; the vulnerable narrow strip of land separating northern and southern Israel; the shelling of northern Israel by Syria from the Golan Heights; the removal of UN peacekeepers from Sinai by Egypt following the Suez Crisis of 1956; and the blocking of Israeli sea traffic in the Straits of Tiran in the Red Sea by Egypt, affecting Israel's Asia trade.

This war initiated the long Israeli occupation of what became known as OPT, the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Palestine had no political status except as a destination for international humanitarian aid. Golda Meir, Israeli prime minister around the time, denied that a Palestinian people existed, and some Jews even came to believe that Palestinians immigrated into the area after them. Israelis set about colonising parts of the West Bank - what they saw to be biblical Judaea and Samaria.

Israel's move was claimed to be temporary and strategic, but Zionist elements in Israel sought control of all the lands from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river, pushing their case and winning through. Israel also had security concerns over the narrow coastal neck of Israel joining its northern and southern halves, just above Tel Aviv, about which it could not obtain security guarantees from Arabs.

After 1967, the Arab nations agreed to 'the Three Nos': no recognition of Israel, no peace and no negotiation. Israel, meanwhile, found new self-confidence. But it was in for a shock. In 1973 Syria and Egypt, armed by USSR, staged a surprise attack on Israel - the Yom Kippur War. This conflict was complicated by Cold War geopolitics, and there was risk of global-scale proliferation. From this time on US military and economic support of Israel was consolidated, lasting to this day. Israel, after initial losses, staved off the attack, but a tide had now turned.

International involvement in peace negotiations became increasingly important from now on. But this involvement frequently erred on the side of Israel, dominated by US policy and vetoing in the UN, or went little further than declarations, conferences and peace processes under the cover of which Israel continually built new 'facts on the ground'. This process continued until today, apart from a glimmer of hope in the 1990s during the Oslo peace process.

Peace negotiations made slow progress: Israel usually refused to budge on most substantive points and Palestine and the Arabs didn't always play their diplomatic cards well. But by 1979 Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty: Israel returned the Sinai in return for passage rights through the Suez Canal and no further Egyptian attacks. Gaza stayed in Israeli hands - and here began the long isolation of Gaza and its sidelining by the international community, which continues today. Sometimes it is called the world's largest prison.

Later, in 1994, peace came between Israel and Jordan. The PLO, with Yasser Arafat as its president, was recognised by Israel as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. In 1970 Jordan had expelled the PLO, which had attempted a violent takeover of the country. The PLO had then moved to Lebanon, where it staged raids into Israel, stirring an already delicate situation in Lebanon and playing an active and bloody role in the civil war there between 1975 and 1982. To deal with the PLO Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, as far as Beirut.

Many atrocities occurred, including the well-known Israeli-sponsored massacres at Shatila and Sabra, and atrocities also by the now-desperate PLO. Eventually defeated, the PLO escaped to exile in Tunisia. Israel later partially withdrew into southern Lebanon in 1985, finally leaving long after in 2000. Its Lebanese invasion cost it high and lasted long, leading to further repercussions. These were caused largely by the Israeli tendency to overdo its aggression, believing itself to be defending itself when, in fact, it causes far more damage than it incurs.

Reaction to Israel's Lebanon invasion gave birth to the Shi'a Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in the early 1980s. Hezbollah, by sheer determination and ferocious guerrilla tactics, gradually pushed Israel back. Thereafter Hezbollah grew in strength as a militia and social reform party asserting a strong role in Lebanon. Later, in 2006, it engaged in a further war with Israel, costing Lebanese Shi'as dearly in death and destruction. But it checkmated Israel, ending Israel's ongoing threat of reinvading south Lebanon. Hezbollah also shattered the apparent invincibility of Israel's army, the IDF.

In late 1987 the first intifada erupted in Palestine, an uprising against Israeli oppression in the West Bank. It included civil disobedience and street-level violence - including, famously, rock-throwing by children. The PLO was heavily pressured by the international community and blocked from entering talks until it recognised Israel and renounced warfare, which eventually it signed up to in 1993.

In the 1980s-90s, Yasser Arafat (Abu Ammar) led the PLO, an umbrella group of Palestinian factions. He had founded Fateh, a nationalist political party, in 1959, and Fateh dominated the PLO. Islamists tended to believe Arafat was corrupt and handled the Israelis too softly in the 1990s but, regardless of belief, most Palestinians looked on him as their leader and father. In 1988 he underwent a change of heart, turning from a fighter to a statesman, engaging in negotiations in the 1990s and subscribing to a 'two-state solution'. He moved to Gaza from exile in 1994.

This period represented a big act of faith by Palestinians, fuelled by a growing hope that negotiation would work and the international community would guarantee a fair deal. This led to the Oslo Accords of 1993-95, in which Israel and the PLO recognised each other and ended open conflict. Palestinian nationhood was to come to pass in five years, as various conditions became fulfilled. Palestine was to control the so-called Areas A and B, with the prospect of expanded control later on, and many West Bank settlements were to be removed. Much rebuilding took place in Palestine. The international community, particularly the EU, invested heavily in development aid. But there were two major snags: the PLO couldn't fully control violent factions and suicide bombers, and the Israelis didn't ease up their control, actually accelerating settlement-building and establishment of 'facts on the ground'.

This had been affected by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's peacemaking prime minister, in 1995, by a right-wing Israeli, followed by the 1996 ascendancy of the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu, who had little interest in making concessions to the Palestinians to guarantee peace. Disappointment set in on both sides. In 1999 Netanyahu was replaced by the leftist Ehud Barak, who wanted to revive peace negotiations.

Around 2000, in negotiations at Camp David chaired by Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat turned down an offer by Barak to return 73% of the West Bank, all of the Gaza Strip and part of the Negev Desert, an offer which Israelis saw to be generous. But it did not include East Jerusalem, the Palestinians' sought-after capital and the site of the Muslim holy places in the Old City. Arafat would not negotiate without Jerusalem being included, and without the removal of many key settlements. So he walked out. This was the last serious negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians to this day. Arafat died in 2004 after undergoing a punishing Israeli siege at his HQ in Ramallah during the second intifada.


The 2000s

Significant improvements failed to happen after Oslo. Yet Palestine was changing and settling, becoming more of a functioning entity under PA rule. Palestinians were tired of conflict, increasingly seeking just to get on with life. But there were frustrations at the lack of progress, and this was the time of suicide bombings by Palestinians, hitting at the Israeli public to try to make them pressure their leaders to sue for peace. Israel had failed to relax checkpoints, its military and economic stranglehold and its building of 'facts on the ground' such as settlements and settler by-pass roads. This entrenched Palestine's non-viability as a potentially independent state. Palestinians began losing heart.

Israel's position represented a hope held by influential right-wing Zionist factions in Israel that, somehow, Palestinians would just get up and 'transfer' out of the country if life were made difficult enough. This was hardly a likely proposition for 4m people with historic ties to the area and nowhere to welcome them. This tension culminated in Ariel Sharon's provocative incursion in 2000 into Harim al-Sharif in the Old City of Jerusalem - what Jews look on as the Temple Mount.

This and other factors sparked the Al-Aqsa or second intifada, lasting about four years. During this time there were Israeli troop incursions and sniper attacks all over the West Bank and in Gaza, tanks on the streets, house searches, demolitions, curfews, arrests, assassinations, imprisonment of Palestinian leaders and also a violent response from Palestinians.

Palestine was in turmoil again, undergoing immense hardship, trauma and insecurity from the Israeli occupation. The intifada petered out by 2004. Israel tactically withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and pulled back its incursions in the West Bank. Things remained unresolved for Palestinians but their exhaustion with conflict was now pretty complete and their terror attacks and suicide bombings died down - and the Israelis kept winning, with the help of American support and European acquiescence.

The occupation involved a high level of control of Palestinians' lives, making life very difficult, giving young Palestinians no sense of future and preventing economic development. Many Palestinians, especially Christians, left, often just to study or get a job abroad. Meanwhile the international community behaved with double standards: it was said that buildings in Palestine were built with Euros and destroyed with Dollars.

The current peace plan on the table is the 'Roadmap' outlined by US president Bush in 2002, to be overseen by the Quartet - USA, EU, UN and Russia - the envoy for which is Tony Blair. The Roadmap was a checklist and timetable of actions for peace.

These include an end to Palestinian violence (mostly done); Palestinian political reform (mostly done); Israeli withdrawal and freeze of settlement expansion (not done); Palestinian elections (done but scuppered by Israel and the West); international conferences (hardly done); the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with provisional borders (not done); revival of multilateral engagement on water resources, environment, economic development, refugees and arms control (partially done); a second international conference to establish a permanent status agreement and final borders, and clarification of the future of Jerusalem, refugees and settlements (not done); and Arab states' agreement of peace deals with Israel (proposed by Arab states but not done).

Nothing much has happened: the Roadmap and talk of peace processes have increasingly been seen by Palestinians as a PR stunt, or cover for Israel, more than a matter of substance. Palestine's problem is that it has effected many of its Roadmap agreements but Israel has refused to stop settlement expansion, and the international community failed to proceed with the necessary conferences, or anything really, except for the signing of cheques to keep Palestinians quiet.


Where Things Now Stand

Palestine has a government, the Palestine National Authority (PA) in Ramallah, responsible for domestic affairs in the West Bank and Gaza. It is not a sovereign government with control of its territories or external relations. In 2006 there were national elections to the PA parliament, declared free, fair and exemplary by international observers, won with a 60% majority by Hamas, the Islamic social reform party. This upset things - it wasn't supposed to happen.

Contrary to US and European democratic ideology of the time, they did not accept the result, asserting that, since Hamas had used terrorism and had not renounced it, it could not be recognised as a legitimate governing party. Aid and grants were stopped and an economic embargo was placed on Palestine - mainly an American and Israeli initiative. This struck Palestinians as incomprehensible. As with many agreements of the 1990s, they had conformed with much (though not all) of what had been required of them. Some requirements were not doable and some were delayed until matching agreements were carried out by Israel.

The embargo placed great strain on Palestinian society, creating increased friction between Hamas and Fateh. At least partially, Fateh was supported by Israel and USA, and Hamas by Iran and Syria. This tension led to a nasty civil conflict between Hamas and Fateh in 2007, resulting in the separation of Gaza, ruled by Hamas, and the West Bank, ruled by Fateh. Hamas representatives in the West Bank were arrested or had to go into hiding, and vice versa. Fateh, supported with Western arms, was then given aid and development funds to alleviate the hardships brought about by the economic embargo. This tilted West Bank support or acquiescence in Fateh's favour, while also making Fateh look to some Palestinians as if it was collaborating with the Israelis. This schism in the Palestinian body politic is ultimately harmful to all Palestinians' interests.

Fateh and Hamas represent two contrasting approaches to politics, each representing, on balance, about half of the electorate. Fateh is rooted in the PLO resistance movement of the 1960s-70s, a nationalist movement which once was a formidable fighting force, but which transitioned around 1990 into a political machine willing to negotiate with Israel. Some Palestinians have reservations about the patronage system built up by Arafat, which continues today, leading to preferment and corruption in the PA. Fateh represents the 'establishment', led by Abu Mazen, an Arafat loyal and the grand old man of Palestinian politics. Its first party conference for 20 years in Bethlehem in 2009 has started a renewal of Fateh, but whether it can shake off corruption and nepotistic behaviour is a moot point.

Hamas is rooted in the political-Islamist movements of the 1980s-90s and the two intifadas, advocating resistance to Israel, basing its ethos on Islamic social and welfare reform principles and its economic ethos on anti-capitalism. An estimated 80-90% of Hamas revenues fund health, welfare, religious, cultural and educational services. The official sticking point with Hamas for Israel and the international community is that it has not renounced its founding 1980s ethos of violent resistance to and elimination of Israel. But it did crucially transition toward democratic political practices around 2006 and arguably needs more time to complete it - some concessions and lenience from Israel would help.

Western anti-terror ideology and interference have slowed or blocked this transition, particularly by conflating the freedom-fighting resistance ethos of Hamas with the destructive terrorist ethos of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and elsewhere. In fact, al Qaeda has declared Hamas an enemy, because Hamas is a pragmatic popular movement with a following and a threat to al Qaeda, which has little popular following within political Islam. However, shifts in the EU approach and the election of president Obama in USA have led in 2009 to a recognition of the importance of Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and 'talking with terrorists' is now becoming acceptable. Like them or not, they are after all a force to be reckoned with.

This quest for dialogue was prompted partially by Israel's bombardment of Gaza in December 2008-January 2009, in which grave destruction was wreaked and 1,400 Gazans, many of them innocent citizens and children, were killed. This aroused international revulsion at the disproportionality of Israel's action. Israel's aim was to bring down Hamas by pressuring Gazans to withdraw support for it, and to stop the firing of rockets from Gaza into its territory, for which it saw Hamas to be responsible. Most rocket-firing has stopped, but Hamas is unweakened. Ironically, the founding of Hamas in 1987 was secretly part-funded by Israel to help turn Palestinians against Fateh and the PLO. What goes around, comes around.

But the main harm done is the destruction of full and proper democratic dialogue in Palestine, and its division into two separately-ruled entities. There is thus no unified entity representing the Palestinians or representing the full spectrum of their beliefs, able to negotiate their future. Other outstanding issues are international acquiescence, largely because of American influence in supporting Israel, EU disunity and weakness in its foreign policy, reliance of many 'moderate' ruling Middle Eastern regimes on American aid and favour, and the overall confusion of the world's public.


The Main Demands of the Palestinians

To achieve a lasting and genuine peace, Palestine needs to establish a fair deal which will genuinely satisfy its people. If it cannot do this, each new generation will grow up with grievances, facing hardship and seeking correction. Conflict will in some way thus continue or rekindle unless genuine accommodations are made. Since Palestine does not control its own fate, concessions by Israel and solid guarantees from the international community are needed.

The key demands of Palestinians are these:

* a state of their own, with control of its borders, economy, defence, trade and all the other appurtenances of a sovereign nation - there are alternatives to this too, noted below;
* East Jerusalem as the capital of such a state;
* borders at the Green Line of up to 1967 (22% of former Mandate Palestine) - some negotiating leeway can be allowed for land-swaps where advisable.
* most Palestinians, including Hamas, would accept Israel's existence if its behaviour changed toward that of an equal partner in determining the big questions of the area;
* proper arrangements for Palestinian refugees, including rights of return and visiting for those who seek it and to the extent that it is practical. This would apply at least to the Palestinian territories, and would need to include decent compensatory arrangements for those who do not return from abroad and for internal refugees who lost property in what became Israel;
* removal of the separation wall, an end to building West Bank settlements and removal of many of them, removal of roadblocks, checkpoints and other mechanisms of Israeli occupation, and a joining-up of separated segments of Palestinian territory to make it a viable, contiguous state;
* proper cooperation over water resources, trade, environmental issues and international relations;
* overall equality between Palestine and Israel.

What is on offer to Israel is peace and security, multilateral recognition and treaties with Arab states, greater economic security as the tectonic plates of world prosperity shift West to East, a 'peace dividend' and thawing of ill-will toward Israelis, plus cooperation over all vital regional concerns.

The big, ultimate goal that hardly anyone talks about is the longterm building of a future Middle Eastern Union. The seeds of this process have already started with the formation of the Gulf Cooperation Council and common market in the Gulf States.

If agreement and a two-state solution are not achieved, two further alternatives are visible: a single, non-democratic Jewish-dominated state with a Palestinian majority under occupation; or a single democratic state, either federal or integrated, with a growing Palestinian majority and full Jewish rights. The former is seen to be likely by realists in Palestine, acting as an economic and security liability to the Jewish people. The latter is unlikely to be accepted by Israelis under current conditions since, although democratic, it would eliminate the idea of Israel as a state for Jews.

However, the former option would also undermine the original raison d'être of Israel, to provide Jews with a safe, democratic homeland, while the latter option would represent an historic shift in Jewish values, in which trust for and cooperation with their neighbours would be a core issue.

Peace is possible, but it must come with justice and a fundamental shift of feeling on all sides, as new generations move forward from the past to face a 21st Century in which global, not national, issues are the primary concern. In such a world, conflict and competition need to be replaced by consensus and cooperation, if climatic, environmental, demographic, resource and survival issues are to be fully addressed.

In the end it rests on a change of heart on all sides. This looks unlikely, but the conflicts in Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Chechnya and between Greece and Turkey ended this way, whether through collective exhaustion or, in Greece's and Turkey's case, events such as major earthquakes in both countries.

Another possibility which no one would wish on the people of the region is a crisis that outsizes the conflict, such as the disappearance of both Tel Aviv and Gaza under rising seas, or a climatic, economic or public health crisis.

A factor which dampened the conflicts in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Kosovo was the rise of a prospering union surrounding these lands, making them realise they were missing out on something big.

We shall see. This being known as the Holy Land, something extraordinary is perhaps due, for God is too great to be attached to just one people or one faith.

First Great Western

It’s been rather a long journey. I got up at 5.20 in Amman (3.20am here in UK) and got a taxi to Queen Alia airport southwest of the city. It’s a bureaucratic country, though not as bad as Egypt, and the guy examining my technology bag stared at the small bottle of Arak I had in there, destined for my father – Arak is the Palestinian version of Greek Ouzo, an aniseed spirit. Of course, it’s Ramadan. I could see him debating whether to confiscate it.

His colleague examined it. “Comes from Beit Lahem. Wherre you get thees?”. “Beit Lahem. That’s where I’ve been. I’ve been working there.” “What you been doing there?” “Webmaster to a peace and democracy school.” Long discussion with his colleague. “If you take that bottle from me, my 93 year old father will be disappointed. I bought this from Christians in Beit Lahem, and my father is not a Muslim. Besides, I am leaving your country, not entering it.” He looks at me, and I eyeball him full-square. To save face, he starts rooting through my bag.

“What thees?” “Computer.” “Thees?” “An ethernet cable, for Internet.” We go through a comical list of ingredients in a wired-up multimedia techie’s bag. Sound recorder, telephoto, card reader, camera chips, spare batteries, two mobile phones, flashdrives, DVD recorder, transformer – it went on. Eventually his mate chips in, in Arabic – I knew he was telling his colleague to give it a break and let me go.

“D’you want me to show you what’s in my computer? The Israelis often like to take a look.” Now I was taunting him – to be likened to Israelis is not a happy thought for a Jordanian security official. This jogged him sufficiently to end this silly charade. Eventually I was upstairs drinking a cuppa. But, guess what, nowhere in this airport could I buy a newspaper. I’ve been looking forward to getting a good newspaper for weeks, and surely a modern airport would have a fine choice. Not a chance. If I wanted to buy a Givenchy handbag for a few hundred dollars, no problem, but a newspaper? That’s an excessive demand.

So I spent the next five hours on the plane daydreaming, doing mindfulness meditation and drifting into a woozy semi-sleep. The same went for the lengthy wait at baggage claim at Heathrow, a delicious 45 minute wait for our luggage which thrilled the pants off me.

Then came the biggest rip-off of my whole three-month trip. I had ordered a train ticket online from Bethlehem, from Heathrow to Falmouth in Cornwall. Now, theoretically this should be easy: you just book and pay for your ticket and then collect it from a machine at the first station. Except that, having booked, I found out there is no such machine at Heathrow. On the website it boasts 600 machines around the country, and how easy it is to collect your ticket. But you can’t do it at Heathrow.

I had e-mailed the train company to complain, reminding them that long-distance travellers just wanted an easy time, and that this gives a poor impression of Britain as a country if such a thing happens. I received a classic case of corporate arrogance for an answer: first, I ought to buy a ticket on the day (thanks – at a much higher price) and, if not, then I should order it online, then get it posted to my home (great – despite that I had explained that the post to Bethlehem is totally unreliable).

In the end I had booked to collect my ticket at London Paddington station, working on the basis that I would cajole my way through to Paddington from Heathrow, showing proof that I had paid. Well, I get to Heathrow, only to be told that I cannot do that – and anyway, I should go over to Heathrow Terminal Five to catch a different service, the Rail-Air Link to Reading. “What happens about collecting my ticket at Paddington – it’s already paid for?”. The man looked nonplussed.

“So does this mean I have to pay double for my ticket to Paddington?”. The man starts waffling. “Listen, I’ve had a long journey from the Middle East, and I’m not interested in all this timewasting rubbish. I’ve paid for my ticket, I want a train, I’ve had enough.” He starts repeating I must go to Terminal Five – I can catch a train there for £2.50, and the next one is in ten minutes.

“Do you understand this is embezzlement? I have paid for my ticket!” Well, to cut a long story short, I had to buy a ticket to Paddington for £16.50. Now, the Israelis are pretty good at obstreperous obstructionism, but the British rail system and its appointed Heathrow minion and apologist crowns the lot. Railtrack is going to get a well-put letter from me, to which, if they’re going to satisfy me, they’d better give a decent answer and a refund after robbing me of 98 shekels.

Later, I sat at London Paddington, drinking a coffee, to stoke me up for the six hour train journey to Cornwall. This cup of cafe latte cost me five times the price I would pay in Bethlehem – though the black woman who served it to me was gracious in the act, serving me coffee and cake for just under £5 (30 shekels), the price of a filling meal for two people in Bethlehem.

Ah, welcome back to Britain. At least the sun is shining. And the fields and trees are green and verdant. And there are no separation walls, checkpoints or settler roads, no sub-machine guns – and everyone sits wrapped in their own little thought-bubble, saying nothing to anyone else, and individual privacy, hardly existent in Palestine, is restored. Not sure if I’m happy about regaining privacy – it’s a lonely place to be.

But at least we have trains here in Britain. In a recent speech, Salam Fayed, the rather staid but internationally well-respected prime minister for the Palestine Authority, made a statement threatening that, if peace talks made no progress within two years, Palestine would consider declaring unilateral independence. Interestingly, Palestine is legally within its rights to do so. But in doing so, he posited two characteristics of an independent country: secure borders and its own railway.

A fine idea. Except I cannot figure out how on earth the Palestinians would manage to build such a railway, since the West Bank is seriously hilly, even mountainous, and such a railway would involve so many tunnels and bridges it would be prohibitively expensive, even with voluminous EU grants, or it would be so twisty and tortuous that it would probably be quicker to travel by donkey. Oh, well, good idea, Salam, but I don’t think that’s one of your better ideas.

“The Jenin to Hebron express now standing at platform four is due to arrive at Hebron the day after tomorrow. Coffee, foul and falafel will be served in the buffet car without end until we get there, except at Ramadan, when a small fee will permit you to sit secretly with fifty other people while you break your fast with no one else knowing.” Somehow I don’t think rapid rail transit in Palestine is likely. But Palestinians are entitled to their dreams.

My Palestine trip has reached an end. I returned to Cornwall for two nights, then proceeded to the Midlands of England to look after my father while my mother is in hospital.

This blog is reaching an end too. I'm converting it into a book, hopefully for publication in 2010.

Thank you to all my readers for your interest and encouragement. It has been a good experience writing this blog, and feeling you all reading it and making comments has been wonderful, encouraging.

To finish, I'm going to give you a long article I wrote in early August, about the history of the area and the conflict. I hope you'll enjoy it.

Bless you for being with me on this journey.

Palden

The Right of Return

I met a Palestinian refugee in Amman called Oroub. She wouldn’t conform to your classic image of a refugee – she’s a jet-setting academic researcher who hangs out in Geneva, Oxford and New York as well as Amman. But in so doing, she still embodies one aspect of the refugee mentality: for those who can, they go to great lengths to get ahead and achieve great things. So she does social research for foundations and NGOs amongst other Palestinian refugees.

She took me around Amman, which is a tricky city for an outsider to see because it is very decentralised, difficult just to walk around. It is built on a series of hills overlooking what once was a river valley – today’s downtown area, and one of the world’s few downtowns which actually is downhill from most other places. Downtown is the nearest to a city centre that you get – it’s the traditional shopping area, dense with small shops and alleys, in distinction to the modern, American-style malls and car-based shopping areas in other parts.

She told me something of the history of Amman. Though it dates back to ancient times, it is not one of the traditionally great towns of the Middle East like Damascus, Jerusalem or Baghdad. Much of its growth has been in the 20th Century and actually in the last 30 years. One of the things which made Amman prosperous and increasingly impressive was the immigration of many rich Palestinian refugees from the Gulf States, such as Kuwait and Dubai, in the 1990s, who had gone there in the 1940s-70s, generated wealth by working in the oil trade or its derivatives, then moved to Amman in the 1990s because it is as close to home as they can get.

Jordan is made up of a Palestinian majority – and those whom we’d call ‘Palestinians’ were originally spread across Jordan and Palestine before 1948 – they were separate countries under British rule, long related to one another and populated similarly. When Israel was founded in 1948, Jordan took control of the West Bank and ruled it until 1967 when Israel occupied it – and this was a pretty natural thing for Jordan to do. At the same time, Egypt took control of Gaza. In both cases, this wasn’t just territorial expansion but a natural tendency to take over areas these countries had had ties with for many centuries – not least to stop the Israelis taking them over, which eventually in 1967 they did.

Both in 1948 (the Nakba) and in 1967, refugees flooded into Jordan. As the 1970s-90s unfolded, some took control of their lives and made progress, while others remained victims of poverty, disadvantage and the debilitating psychological effects of dispossession, loss and exile. The refugee camps of today contain those who were left behind – plus some who landed up there whether or not they were refugees. They aren’t camps but slums or areas of high-density communities.

The problem of refugees has been exacerbated by two big factors. One is that Palestinian refugees have clung to their status on the basis that, one day, they will be able to return to Palestine. This hasn’t happened, and it has become embedded as a factor of identity – a reluctance to fully identify with and integrate into the society in which they have found themselves. Many of them keep the keys to their old homes in Palestine as a symbol of going back – even though, in many cases, their villages have been razed or occupied by Israelis.

But also, host countries such as Lebanon, Kuwait, Egypt and to an extent Jordan have also striven to retain refugee status as a way of, they hope, eventually getting rid of them. In Lebanon’s case, giving full residency to Palestinians would have tilted the already volatile ethnic mix in a direction which would have disadvantaged the Christians and Shi’a Muslims who have been resident there for centuries – so they have not been granted full status as Lebanese.

Organisations such as UNRWA have reinforced this pattern too, by catering for refugees and thereby keeping them in that position. As with so many NGOs, it has built a culture of dependency, and many people depend on UNRWA, which acts like a massive sub-government specialising in education and social services in a variety of countries.

But there’s a problem, and this is now beginning to be addressed in Palestine. Israel has always refused to countenance the idea of refugees returning, whether to reclaim their properties in Israel, many of which no longer exist, or whether to populate the West Bank and Gaza, swelling the populations there and tipping the demographics in Israel-Palestine in Palestinians’ favour. Now, the Palestine Authority is being obliged quietly to look again at this big emotional issue.

For the fact is that, even if only 10-20% of refugees or their descendants return to Palestine, it wouldn’t work well. The area is already densely populated, the country is not inherently wealthy, it has a big resources and environmental problem and it would introduce new social dynamics into the Palestinian equation which might not be easy to reconcile –especially since many returning refugees would be bringing money and advantages with them, and many others would be buying property in Palestine but not living there as their primary home.

In other words, it is not only the Israelis who don’t want the refugees to return, but also, without yet stating it, it’s also many of the Palestinians – even though many refugees are relatives. But no one ever broaches the subject: they hang onto the right of return as a fundamental equalising and redemptive principle – and there is some justification to it, in terms of the unresolved issues of the past. But in terms of dealing with the future, even the return of 100,000 of the 5 million refugees, or 2% of them, would have a big impact on Palestine.

The matter remains unresolved because the conflict is unresolved. So people hang onto the principle of return because to change that would imply a surrender to the Israelis and a legitimisation of what the Israelis have taken and occupied – which cannot be done, except perhaps in exchange for a massive concession from the Israelis, which Israelis will not do.

But the right or return is already a thing of the past. This is becoming crucial because the Palestinians are considering the option of declaring UDI, a unilateral declaration of independence. At present, Salam Fayad, the Palestinian prime minister, has recently said that if peace agreements fail to make significant on-the-ground progress in the next two years, the UDI option is likely to be taken.

There’s a case for it too, because in international law, UN resolutions support Palestinian independence, there are precedents to it in places like Indonesia, Zimbabwe and even Israel itself, and legally they are entitled to do it because, on the whole, Palestinians have conformed mostly with peace agreements made with the Israelis while Israelis have not, particularly over the matter of West Bank settlement building.

Tactically, if Palestine declared independence unilaterally, the international community would be obliged to support it, and yet the right of return would probably ruin it – both by invoking Israeli ire, possibly war, and also by putting a burden on Palestinian society at a crucial moment in its development. So the right of return must somehow be got rid of. This is complex.

Crossing the Jordan River

It’s very hot down here in the Jordan Valley, 600m below sea level and a humid 34 degree heat trap – a fine place to live if you’re a fly, of which there are lots. But I’m not complaining: I’ve just got through Israeli border control, which was quiet and rather lax today. It’s run by people the age of students – except for the odd ex-military man in leisure clothes with a sub-machine gun over his shoulder. You get used to that. Now I’m waiting, swatting flies, for the shuttle bus that takes us the 2-3 miles over no man’s land to the Jordanian border.

Yesterday was a day of goodbyes. I kept repeating the same thing over and over to so many people who were somehow shocked I was leaving – even though they know I have family and a life in England, and even though I had told them repeatedly I was here for three months. My hope is that I can return in March – though this depends on funds and the health and welfare of my aged parents.

There were the usual last-minute favours to do: people suddenly wanting me to take photos or fix things because they had suddenly realised I was leaving. This seems to be one of my life-patterns – busy up to the last moment, and the last item of packing to do being my computer. Perhaps, if I land up in a hell after I pop my clogs, it will be filled with computers all wanting to suck on my eyeballs and brains. This last-minute syndrome is also a product of the firefighting mentality of Palestinians: if they’re not yelling “Yala, yala!” at you to do it now, things can be left to the future, but if it’s yala yala, then you go at it with gusto.

Yesterday evening Hind and Ibrahim Issa invited all the teachers to come up to the Everest Hotel above Beit Jala for a goodbye get-together for me. The Everest is on one of the highest points in the West Bank, with views, when it’s clear, from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, and on the border of the West Bank and Israel proper. It was once a watering-hole for British officers in the time of the Mandate in the 1920s-40s. Now it’s a haven for Bethlehemites – and though it’s now officially in Israeli territory, they consider it dangerous. Terrorism, y’know.

The teachers are such a wonderful bunch – well-chosen, a really dedicated team, friendly toward each other. I gave them a talk about the wider significance of what they’re doing, and what a wonderful group they are. I talked of my family and my country, where it is possible just to jump in a car and drive anywhere, with no checkpoints or restrictions – apart from money, of course. I talked of the high cliffs of Cornwall and how I will think of them when I’m there at my favourite clifftop haunt, Carn les Boel, which looks west out into the Atlantic to the Isles of Scilly.

At least half of these people have never seen the sea, even though they’re not far from the Mediterranean or the Red Sea, because of Israeli travel restrictions. It’s so incomprehensible, this situation – these perfectly respectable, well-behaved, decent people being treated as if they are criminals and terrorists. But that is the bizarre nature of this land and this dormant conflict. Totally bizarre, thoroughly unbelievable – except, of course, when it’s a fact of life surrounding you, conditioning your life. As a visitor, I’ve got used to the security walls and checkpoints – they’re much less common and blatant than they were when I last visited four years ago, and things are now more relaxed. But it’s all still there, and the Israelis aren’t about to dismantle it all unless a miracle takes place.

Today the angels were with me - no doubt with the help of loved ones who are praying for me. Crossing through the Israeli controls was uneventful – not a single question asked about where I had been or what I had been doing. Which was a relief since, though I had my stories prepared about all the Jews I had been hobnobbing with and all the places in Israel I had been to, I don’t really like to tell falsities. After all, I'm not actually doing anything wrong. The two young Ethiopian ladies who checked my passport and entered its number in their computer came up with nothing, which slightly amazed me. I had my gentleman-tourist look and smile on my face, and they were duly charmed.

That’s the best technique, just charm them, look at them straight with friendly, calm eyes, and chatter a bit with a calm-sounding voice. If your conscious and unconscious are out of sync with each other, or you’re nervous, you’d better watch out, but if they’re conveying a unified and relaxed message, suspicious minds gain no traction and I find things usually go well, even in hair-raising circumstances. My bass voice conveys a certain ease and confidence, and I consciously use my hazel eyes (in this dark-eyed land) to let them see my soul and the light there. Or perhaps to give them a feeling of being gently x-rayed, which usually makes them let me go quite quickly. It’s all a matter of taking control of the energy-interaction and also of brightening up their lives.

The shuttle bus isn’t in a hurry. But then, we are a captive audience, and they’re not going to lose our custom, so why should they bother? It’s Ramadan, and the border guys in Jordan are probably taking a break. I’m looking forward to the long climb up onto the plateau on the way to Amman, out of this sticky heat into the thinner upland air, 1,000m or 3,000ft higher up.

I travelled from Bethlehem with Hamed el-Hawa, a taxi-driving son of Ibrahim Abu el-Hawa. A nice chap. He has driven for so many peacemakers over the years. As an Israeli Palestinian with permits to enter both the West Bank and Israel, he took me through Jerusalem, avoiding two Israeli and one Palestinian checkpoints en route, each subject to delays, dropping me directly at the Allenby Bridge border crossing.

The road down from Jerusalem through the Judaean Desert is just lovely – dry, barren, yet impressive in its heights, valleys and contours, and populated only by Bedouin in small shack-encampments along the route. This ‘peace road’ from Jerusalem to Jordan was financed by the Japanese government as its contribution to the ultimately abortive 1990s peace process. Down and down you go from the heights of Jerusalem to the depths of the Jordan Valley, and the heat rises as you go down, ears compacting one stage further every few miles.

In the Jordan Valley itself the landscape is lunar. I didn’t take photos because this is a security area and my camera is too conspicuous. It’s a landscape of solid sharp hillocks carved out in remarkable and otherworldly shapes by wind and water. No wonder Jesus came here for his baptism with John – it’s like another world, hauntingly and heat-shimmeringly atmospheric. So barren that it is almost lively.

On the Israeli side it is largely desert, though if you look back you can see the date palms of Jericho, located at its oasis, cradled in the bare rock mountains behind it. On the Jordanian side it is agricultural, with irrigation ditches, plantations, vegetable growing and greenhouses everywhichway – with its own backdrop of the high escarpment bordering the valley. The escarpments on both sides are dramatic, and down south you can see the blueness of the Dead Sea in the mirages downvalley. The Jordan River itself is disappointing, a diminutive, shallow river which has had much of its water siphoned off by humans on both of its banks. That bridge with a history, the Allenby Bridge, nowadays called the King Hussein Bridge, is undramatic too, a border bridge that you expect to be bigger and more memorable.

The Jordan Valley is a continental crack, the top end of the enormous Rift Valley which progresses down East Africa to Tanzania. The continents are still cracking open by small amounts, and the Jordan Valley, when seen in geological time-spans, is getting lower. It does have a very close-to-the-earth feeling, uniquely low. This is the ripping-point of the ancient unitary continent of Pangaea, and the ancient, geological feeling of this landscape, indifferent to the realities of modern humanoids, is clearly felt.

I found myself reflecting on this dry, brown, barrenly beautiful landscape and the green, cloud-covered and rained-upon landscape of Britain that I am stagewise heading towards. The upstanding, rock-peaked tors of the west of Cornwall are very different – volcanic granite eroded and shaped by water and bedecked with greenery. I have mixed feelings about returning home, especially to the subtly restrictive environment that pervades British society, unbeknownst to many of its members.

I like Britain and it is my homeland but, in my experience, I don’t find it as welcoming or nourishing as the Middle East, and neither can I give of my true gifts so easily there. It’s quite a bottled-up country where everyone very much lives their own lives, artfully navigating around each other. I don’t seem to cream off the rewards of many of my fellow countrypeople, perhaps because I don’t conform with the well-regulated conventional compliance that qualifies people in Britain for ‘success’ and a slice of the cake. Either that, or I’m just plain useless at turning my labours into rewards – ‘a philanthropist without funds’ as my friend Alan once called me. But tomorrow is another day, my stay in Palestine has loosened me up, loosened up my patterns, and something might change. That would be welcome.


I shall be ending this blog soon – probably shortly after arriving in Britain. My intention is to re-work it into a book, adding some bits, re-editing other bits and giving it the wholeness a book needs. Then I must hawk it around the publishers – what fun! I know the book will work, as long as the marketing boys agree. But the tragedy with books about Israel and Palestine is that their success is very much a matter of timing: if there is blood and tragedy in the Holy Land, sales go up. That’s just one little detail in the many-faceted way in which we have become strangely addicted to perpetuating this conflict.

If peace came, lots of people in the Middle East and internationally would lose their livelihoods. Other people would gain livelihoods, but that’s not as factual as the loss brought on by change and peace – and we tend to cling to the devil we know. Yes, war is a wonderful way to make money, billions of it, and peace has been stealthily elbowed into a corner, re-framed as if it might imply the loss of something. We humans are well-addicted to hardship, and perhaps one of our greatest fears is the fear of love, inclusion, happiness and abundance.

Human Rights and Wrongs

It is very noticeable to me that Palestinian families are generally more integrated, protective and wholesome than British families. This is a sweeping generalisation, but there seems to be something in the psychology of families in Palestine which brings them together and causes them to work together more than in Britain.

In Britain many families are pretty dysfunctional or even seem to work against one another, and the old and the young bear the brunt of it – though of course there are warm, supportive families too, and those that rub along well enough. But families' smaller, nuclear-scale size in Britain and the pressures of life there constrain their survival and mutually-supportive potential.

It’s by no means perfect here in Palestine, and I have seen instances of fatherly authoritarianism, for example, which contradict my observation. I’ve seen examples of child upsets and tantrums too, which seem to me to arise from genuine accumulated distress, probably social and conflict-related. But overall, people seem to get on and work together, and this is sound. I have never seen any signs of violence or harsh words uttered toward children during my visits here.

This relative harmony is exemplified in Najah’s family. They all cooperate in cooking, cleaning and running the house, with rarely an instruction and zero nagging from Najah herself. It seems to be a mutually-supportive household which functions well – six of them in three rooms, and it’s fine for guests to stay. I stayed with the ‘boys’, four of us in the room, and I felt very much part of the family. Sahera slept in Najah’s bed while Najah slept on the sofa. I haven’t seen a single bit of interpersonal stress in this family. Life isn’t easy for them, but holding together is, for them, a source of strength and survival.

It is the social structure of the Palestinians which seems to keep them going through thick and thin. This was visible in the showdown yesterday in the souk in Hebron. Some Orthodox Jews had descended into the souk, presumably to assert their perceived right to be there, and they were surrounded by Israeli troops guarding them. This is a trick settlers often pull off: they make bold, provocative moves and then the army justifies supporting them by saying it is protecting them from danger. But self-created danger?

In the souk a crowd of Palestinians, fresh from Ramadan prayers at the Ibrahimi Mosque, surrounded them, quietly and in an ordered fashion. It was clear that no violence was going to break out, at least from the Palestinian side, and there was no anger, just a serious atmosphere. It was stern, a quiet showdown, and it was being made clear to the Israelis they were unwelcome and out of order in being there. No one amongst the Palestinians broke ranks: they simply stood there facing the Israelis until the Israelis blinked and moved on, led and followed by the soldiers, pointing their guns at the crowd. It was a well-contained piece of collective conflict-management. As soon as the Israelis had left, there was consternation in people’s talk, concerned looks and shaking of heads, but people then went on their ways and the matter evaporated.

It is the binding effect of sheer hardship which has created this kind of peaceful facedown situation, which happens quite regularly at some stress-points in Palestine. A well-known stress-point is Bilin, in the northern West Bank. Palestinian society has made a deep moral choice to hold together under strain. Well, largely.

There are of course instances where this is not the case – the success of Israel’s security forces in finding informers and collaborators amongst Palestinians is one example – the informers are well-bribed for it, and sometimes do it only because they are in desperate financial straits, or because the Israelis offer them reprieves from other trouble if they do it. I met one former informant a few weeks ago who had done it to pay for a hospital operation for his sister, poor chap. He wasn’t happy about it.

Another, bigger example of broken solidarity is the civil strife between followers of Fateh and Hamas, especially around 2006, in which the two parties should perhaps have considered the overall benefit of the nation more than their territorial dispute over power. Though they were in a despicable situation, inflamed by foreign manoeuvrings, subsidies and weapons from, in Fateh’s case, Israel and the West and, in Hamas’ case, from Iran and Qatar. It was partially a proxy war – the West against the ‘Axis of Evil’, in George Bush’s eschatological terminology. But it was also an internal conflict which might have led to very different and less damaging outcomes if foreign intervention hadn’t been happening.

Despite this, in general amongst Palestinians there is an atmosphere and ethos of holding firm under pressure or duress, and this is impressive.

But what are the weaknesses of Palestinians? These weaknesses are partially connected with the solidarity mentioned above. One problem is clannishness, which is both a strength and a weakness. It has been a strength inasmuch as Palestine had virtually no government from 1967 to recent years, so the clans and communities of Palestine kept the nation rolling, maintained law and order and social support systems through two intifadas and built an underlying consensus on national behaviour.

But the body politic of Palestine suffered a serious schism in 2006, sorely undermining the wider interests of the people. Interestingly, the election which sparked the problem in 2006 was not one where clannishness predominated. It was genuinely democratic not just in terms of observance of the rules of a good election, but also in terms of the genuine exercising of freedom of choice amongst the electorate – rather rare in the Middle East where allegiances can overpower the exercising of electoral choice. The shock result – a 60% win by Hamas – indicated a clear exercising of choice, made on the basis of the perceived relative virtues of the two main parties.

But when the results became known, propagandists and manipulators, generally on the Western side (this was still the Bush era), set to work to foster clannishness and rivalry, and it eventually worked. Despite their democratic choice, Palestinians were dragooned into a ‘with us or against us’ scenario leading to an eventual shoot-out between Fateh and Hamas. Although Hamas acted first, and therefore are duly blamed, they did so knowing that Fateh was going to try to eliminate them, and that there would be a battle for Gaza – where the majority support Hamas.

Key elements in this encounter were a Fateh leader, Mohammed Dahlan, security chief for Fateh in Gaza and a very divisive man. Then there were the Israeli secret services and Western propagandists who accused Hamas of terrorism, threatening to withdraw foreign subsidies and aid money to Palestine, and forcing Palestinians to face a choice between money and principles. If they stuck to their democratic choice, foreign money would dry up, and if they wanted the money to continue they would have to take the side of Fateh, the losers of the election. Money and Fateh won. But not without some bad feeling from many Palestinians. This matter has not yet gone full circle.

So the political spectrum of Palestine is now split and hobbled, the Israelis and the international community can rightly claim there is no truly representative body to speak for the people – perhaps they wanted this – Gaza and the West Bank have been separated, and there are few prospects of a healing in view. The tendency to lock step with the clan and to hold firm with ‘our people’ won the day in this case. Collectivism was at work, but it was exploited by divisive influences and it failed, in the fearsomely polarised atmosphere of the time, to stretch to the ultimate clan, the Palestinian nation. The Palestinians scuppered their future this way. They pay a large price for it and the Israelis exploit it mercilessly.

The Palestinians have another characteristic which is both a weakness and a strength. Their grief and anguish is buried deep in their hearts, and they show it only when pushed. Otherwise they keep a bright and breezy countenance. I saw this today when talking to Taleb al-Harithi, a peacemaker who visited us at Najah’s house. He is normally a cheerful, chatty person who takes a positive approach to everything. But his car had been stolen a week or two ago, and this gave him problems. We were trying to decide about attending a meeting not far from Bethlehem, and we had no transport.

When talking about this he showed an angst I hadn’t seen in him before. He had bravely concealed his feelings of frustration over losing his car, complaining that, to survive and pay his way, he has to work six jobs, working every day of the week without break.

To add to his troubles, the Israelis had issued a demolition threat to his house some months ago, and he had gone into debt to pay the enormous property-registration fee they charge – all because his house was deemed illegal in Israeli law, though in fact it is an old and well-established house. To save it from demolition and to conform with Israeli building regulations he had to make house-improvements, borrowing heavily to do so. So the combination of this, plus the loss of his car, was clearly putting him under financial and psychological strain, and he showed it.

This man runs the Palestinian Peace Society, which promotes dialogue and cooperation between professional people on both sides of the conflict, and I could not help but observe that, just as in my country, one of the best ways to hobble the activities of a change-bringer and social activist is to give him or her a big pile of bills to pay. Whether intentional or not, it’s a very good way of weakening them – and I myself have had my fair share of this in Britain.

This is why many Palestinians can be philosophical and easygoing about many of life’s travails but, when their bravado breaks down, they can become quite emotional and impulsive, almost desperate to do anything which will break the spell or remove the problem. Here comes another of the Palestinians’ weaknesses: in battle and under duress, they can at times be calm and collected, and at times they start firing off indiscriminately in any direction. This creates tremendous military and diplomatic problems because they create a lot of noise or gunfire but only marginal real effect.

This is shown in the rocket-firing from Gaza: it has an unsettling psychological effect for those Israelis on whom the rockets rain down, but the actual military outcome is not significant. The main military outcome is that it causes the Israelis to bombard and lay siege to Gaza, at great cost to the Gazan people. But does it achieve anything much for the Palestinian cause?

In this regard Hezbollah demonstrated a contrasting sense of strategy and organisation in their fighting of their 2006 war against the Israelis. They operated in a very disciplined and energy-efficient way and, though far outgunned by the Israeli armed forces, they made a big psychological impact on the Israeli people, to the extent that, arguably, they won that conflict – on points rather than by a knockout blow. This arose from sound leadership, strong motivation and clear rules of engagement. Palestinians, even under Yasser Arafat in the 1970s-80s, do not usually show such a sense of strategy and order – they are much more chaotic.

A combination of their innate character and the disturbing effects of generations of conflict have made Palestinians live in the present as much as they can. It has a redemptive effect, enabling them to survive each day and keep their spirits up, but in another sense it causes them to live in a perpetual crisis-management mode which unconsciously creates crises in order to force them to focus on particular things. If it is not a crisis, it gets set aside until there is one – then they go at it hammer-and-tongs.

This ‘firefighting’ approach makes Palestinians’ relations with the West tricky since, in the West, planning, timetables, forecasts and arrangements are a priority – sometimes neurotically and dishonestly so. It also affects their relations with Israel, which has a master-plan and clear longterm strategy in its conflict with them – Israel simply wants all the land from the sea to thee Jordan River and it wants the Palestinians to leave or somehow disappear. The Palestinians do not have a plan: they seek independence and wish to live their lives their way, but the shape and purpose of a future independent Palestine is not clear. The Palestinian agenda is framed on an anti-Israeli premise, not a positive Palestinian dream.

This is typified in their demand for the right of return of refugees. This is a legitimate and noble negotiating point seeking to establish a fundamental right, and the Israelis give a similar right to all Jews worldwide, permitting them to migrate to Israel without question. Problem is, the right of return is practically unworkable – and this is a pretty taboo thing to say. There are 11 million people in Palestine-Israel, roughly 50-50 Israelis and Palestinians, and the return of even one million of the five million Palestinian refugees would cause a tremendous problem affecting the fortunes of existing residents and returnees alike. There is a shortage of space, water and resources in this land, and even the existing population is arguably unsustainable and living on borrowed time.

Another issue is self-interest versus national and collective interest. This is common to all countries but critical for Palestine. Many people err toward self-interest for perfectly good reasons, but it’s the proportionality that counts. In the PA, commercial and NGO worlds there are those who earn very well, tending to put their own interests first, to the great detriment of the Palestinian people. There is great resentment amongst some toward the foreign-funded NGOs, whose professionals milk off a lot of the money in salaries and perks, only some of which gets down to the ground where it was intended.

Some weeks ago I gave an instance of a minister in the PA who was clearly out after his own interests and fighting for his patch more than wider considerations, and he was prepared to block good projects to keep things that way. Many regard Fateh as being a party of self-interested empire-builders and, while there is truth in it, there are good people in Fateh. Self-interest is a problem which undermines the nation, and the Israelis and the West exploit it too, by placing contracts, incentives or bribes with those who will play their game.

In July we were visited at Hope Flowers by a researcher from Oxford University who was part of a research team looking into the broader effects of the NGOs and international funding of Palestine. Shesaid that they have been shocked at their own findings. They were debating how to find a constructive way to report that the overall effects are more negative than positive. One of their problems, she explained, was that the funding body financing the research project will itself not want to hear this news, and her team has had a lively internal debate about the extent to which each of them wishes to retain their job or research grant if they speak the truth.

The culture of industrial-scale charity and billion-size humanitarian funding has itself become systemically tarnished. In my estimation this is connected with the professionalization of this sector and its takeover by managements brought up in the business world – the old-style charitable altruist and philanthropist with human values is long gone. Now this sector is run by graduates with aid-and-development, accountancy and business degrees, who in my judgement have lost the plot. They are theoretically good at mapping out strategies, managing resources, doing research and reports, but they know little about the issues on the ground. They stay in hotels, fly business class, boss people around, favour their own kind, fail to see what’s actually happening or needed on the ground, and they cost the earth. I have a bee in my bonnet about this. A humanitarian like me doesn’t tend to qualify for the handouts: I can’t do the office-work, don’t have a relevant degree and I don’t conform with the culture – I’m just a good humanitarian worker with experience, the right gifts and motivation and a magic touch, that’s all.

There are many altruistic and well-motivated people in Palestine who don’t get the grants and support they need – or who don’t want to conform to the requirements that will unlock such support. Or perhaps they are people such as teachers, nurses or social workers who get fired first when foreign funds are cut back, because foreign-run NGOs tend to retain management, office workers and security guards more than the actual people on the ground, who do the real business for which the agency or NGO exists – such as helping people and tending to their needs.

Management makes these decisions, of course regarding itself as the most important ingredient – and such an attitude is of course embedded in the cultures of international organisations run largely along Western lines. This is not corruption as such, but more an institutional mission-drift and professional preferment that protects people at the top more than those at the bottom of the pile.

There is an example in Hope Flowers School itself, not of its own making. International funders require transparency and accountability. Fair enough, theoretically. But to do this, international accountancy agencies have to be hired to oversee accounting and auditing, and the price for Hope Flowers is equivalent to two or three of its educational projects added together – about 30,000 Euros per year. The school is obliged to contract with an organisation like KPMG to oversee their books, in order to gain or retain eligibility to receive funds from foreign sources.

Hope Flowers has had to hire a new qualified internal accountant too, to do accounts in the Western style, fully computerised and in two languages. Would that we could spend that money on the children! Would that foreign funders could realise this is an organisation with integrity, where the money is cleanly and well dealt with – and it’s also rarely enough and should not be wasted on paying people in suits.

The matter of addiction to foreign funding is a big problem. It distorts the Palestinian economy and society. Ibrahim Issa calls it morphine, in distinction to medicine. Like the oil industry in neighbouring countries, it puts large amounts of money and power in very few hands, who have little economic accountability to ordinary people – their accountability is to international organisations and corporate structures in other places.

When someone proposes a project, many people are looking at the jobs and the euros in it, not necessarily at the social value of the project itself – and international funders tend to encourage this by imposing professional standards of ‘accountability’ and ‘efficiency’ on Palestinian organisations. This has a very corrupting effect on society. Naturally, graduates from Palestinian universities want good jobs, especially if they choose to stay here rather than leave the country, and they have learned of international standards for graduates which they wish to measure up to. But this tendency is insidious, not necessarily best for the nation.

When you’re new to town, and before you’re known, many of the taxi-drivers and traders do their utmost to get your business because they can charge more. They have a sense of social obligation to fellow Palestinians not to make excessive profit out of them, so they sting ‘rich’ Westerners to make up for it. Fair enough, but this double-charging rests on an assumption and an image that isn’t entirely correct: that of the rich Westerner. Many Westerners who come here are not the ‘rich’ kind – they are Palestine sympathisers and altruistic types who themselves are running on economy, or who seek to help in other ways than spending.

It can be upsetting when you’re a volunteer who has come at your own expense or even at personal loss, to find people looking just at your pockets. It even reaches down to the kids, some of whom follow you shouting “Money, shekel-shekel...” – though this doesn’t happen very much. But it’s not healthy for Palestinians: it reinforces a psychology of inferiority and dependency.

This said, many Palestinians are very welcoming to volunteers and genuine non-tourist visitors, they honour and respect the reason why a large proportion of the foreigners come here, and they can be very generous to foreigners, so grateful are they that we come at all. Palestinian Christians tend to be more money-grabbing than Muslims – or should we say ‘enterprising’?

Having written about the weaknesses of Palestinians – particularly concerning money and power – the general level of these problems is not excessive, in my observation. But they are problematic. I tend to agree with Ibrahim that it might be better in the long run for the money to be stopped and for Palestine to send the NGOs packing – and also for Israel to be forced to take full responsibility for the country it is occupying.

It is a shameful scam for the Israeli government to dictate heavy terms on Palestine while letting the international community run social and humanitarian services at foreign expense, then telling the international community that Israel won’t respect or respond to international law or opinion. It is a scandal that the international community buys into this – in effect relieving Israel of its responsibilities as an occupying power. The distortion on the economy of this foreign money is unhealthy for the Palestinian nation.

But of course, no one has the guts to say so. They will lose their job or face opprobrium both locally and internationally if they do. So the rot spreads.

God's Friend

Hebron is a lively city, with plenty of colour and character. In Arabic it is known as al Khalil, the Friend, after Ibrahim al Khalil, or Abraham, God’s friend. It is 3,000ft (930m) up in the southern Palestinian Highlands. Since far fewer foreign visitors and influences reach here than Bethlehem, it has a stronger Palestinian character.

I’m fascinated at the way that traditional and modern elements rub along closely in this town. There are thoroughly modern plate-glass shops of a kind you would see in any city worldwide, yet outside it you’ll see an old man on a donkey-drawn cart trotting along carrying a load of pomegranates – and here there seems to be little contradiction between these. Palestine is like that, quite kaleidoscopic.

This is a city of contradictions in a country of paradoxes. Hebron’s population is over 95% Muslim, though the Jews control about 10% of it. It has a very ancient Jewish tradition here, dating back to Abraham himself, who settled here with the Habiru, the proto-Jews who followed him from Sumer, some 4,000 years ago. There was a Jewish presence here right up to 70 years ago.

Jews have been here for millennia, and there was rarely a significant problem with it until the 1920s-30s. Hebron is a very ancient city, and the legacy of Abraham’s life here has kept Jews here almost continually ever since. They’ve always been part of the Middle Eastern mosaic.

The problem started when Jewish immigration started growing in scale and intensity after WW1, particularly as a result of pressures and persecutions in Poland, Russia, Germany and Ukraine. The Jews of Europe, the Ashkenazim, were very different from the indigenous Sephardic Jews, bringing with them modern European ways and problems, and increasingly changing the face of Palestine as time went on. They made it increasingly a Western place, a foreign culture in the Middle East. Many of the indigenous Jews shared with Palestinians strong reservations about the incoming migrants from Europe, with whom they did not identify and from whom they saw potential trouble looming.

Not that the incoming Jews were troublemakers – they were just modern Westerners who were freaked out by European persecutions and pressures, especially from the 1880s onwards. They were very different from the local Jews. They caused immense concern to Arabs too, since land was being lost, frictions were taking place and these newcomers were changing everything. Revolts started across Palestine. It boiled up as a massacre in Hebron in 1929 in which many Jews died. There were many stories of Arabs sheltering Jews since they had been friends, fully integrated in local society for centuries. It was this massacre which set a trend for events to come.

The British, who ruled Palestine from 1920 to 1948, moved out the remaining Jews to safety in Jerusalem in the 1930s. Hebron was now thoroughly Palestinian. Time passed, and then came the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel occupied all of the Palestinian Territories. Soon after, Jewish settlers moved to Hebron. But these were different Jews from those who left the town decades earlier – they were immigrant, Orthodox Jews with a point to make and a strong agenda, led by a certain Rabbi Levinger, a man with a mission.

Hebron has since attracted settlers of a very assertive kind – supported by soldiers to protect them. Only a few hundred live in the city, yet they control a substantial chunk of it. They often occupy the upper floors of buildings, over the Palestinians. In the old souk, the narrow streets are covered with wire fencing paid for by the European Union to protect the Palestinians below from rocks and rubbish thrown by the settlers. It’s a tragic scene.

Today we went to the Ibrahimi Mosque through the souk. The Mosque is situated on the border of the Jewish and Muslim sections of the city. Walking back through the crowded souk, busy with Muslim faithful at Ramadan, we suddenly came upon a group of soldiers with sub-machine guns who were encircling a collection of Orthodox Jews who were down in the street, clearly making a showing – though looking frankly rather nonplussed as well.

Palestinians were standing around them, clearly unhappy about the incursion but unaggressive. The Jews were just standing there in a group, guarded by the soldiers. It was a standoff where one wondered what might happen next. Eventually they moved off. One wonders why this kind of thing needs to happen. I didn’t have time to get my camera out before they had gone – it’s not cool to be flashing cameras with all these young, rather nervous soldiers around, tensely brandishing their sub-machine guns.

In a city of 150,000 there are 600 Jewish residents, controlling 10% of it – with the help of the army. This 10%, called H2 in diplomat-speak, used to house 10,000 Palestinians, but many have now moved out as a result of pressures, harassment and danger. H1 and H2 are separated by barbed wire, roadblocks and junk piled up by the Israelis to segregate them. There are a few Israeli settlements outside the city, including the notorious Kiryat Arba, home of the Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who walked into the Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994 and killed 29 Muslims at prayer. These settlements have a few thousand settlers in them.

So Hebron is on the frontline of the conflict. Yet it’s a spirited city and people are very welcoming – especially of foreigners, of whom they see only the braver and more adventurous kind. I came here with Sahera, and we’re staying the night with Najah Qaqour and her family. We went down to the Old City, walking through the souk, which was far more crowded than last time I came. Then, much of the lower part of the souk had been empty, but this time the centre of town and the souk were heaving with people for Ramadan.

We went through the winding narrow streets of the souk to visit the Ibrahimi Mosque but, not being a Muslim, I wasn’t allowed in. Bizarrely, it was the Israeli troops manning the checkpoints on the approach to the mosque who barred me from entering. It surprised me that they cared about Muslim rules during Ramadan – Najah wanted to inveigle me in by using her charm and asserting that I’m a Muslim. But the Israeli soldiers were having none of that – they could see that I was a Westerner. They love obstructing people.

So I sat on a stool by the main exit from the mosque, as hundreds of Muslims streamed out of the mosque after prayers. I folded my hands on my lap and went into meditation. After all, this was my birthday, and I had come to talk again with my old friend Abraham. While I wasn’t able to enter the mosque, I was actually quite close to the underground Cave of the Patriarch, under the mosque, which had been Abraham’s home when he lived here. His tomb lies above it in the mosque.

Sahera went in with Najah and her son Yusef. I’m happy she got in – after all, she is a Muslim. But it’s important too. Last night she went to visit a friend in Jerusalem and they went to pray in the Dome of the Rock, one of the chief shrines of the Muslims – which was apparently a crowded and stuffy experience. And today she’s able to pray in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. Wow – not bad going.

Not that Sahera is exactly a devout Muslim. She’s sincere, but also seeking more answers than she has thus far. She’s born of Kashmiri parents in Birmingham, England, and she’s a thoroughly modern Brit. As with many of her age, she experiences a deep debate within her as to whether she’s mainly a modern Brit or a Muslim, and how they interact. It’s meaningful to her to come to Palestine, and to be surrounded with Muslims during Ramadan. These prayers in major mosques are, I guess, a kind of experiment for her, to see how it feels.

But the Islam she sees here is different from that in Britain. Here, people roll in and out at will during prayers, some people fall asleep in the mosque and there’s a general hubbub going on. In Britain they all arrive and leave on time and it’s all very tidy and disciplined. So she’s on a journey of discovery, a twentysomething globo-Muslim, today at the Tomb of Abraham, and brought here by an infidel heathen, me.

I meditated outside, centring myself in the Ramadan pandemonium going on around me, and tuning into the presence of Abraham and the ancientness of the place. Before it was ever a mosque, synagogue or church, which it has been at different times, it was a Canaanite and Hittite holy place – so Abraham clearly came here because it was already an interesting, energy-charged place. Just as Jesus was born in Bethlehem, already an ancient site of many thousand years antiquity in his time.

I was gone for a while. Eventually I slowly opened my eyes and readjusted to the notion that I was sitting outside the Ibrahimi Mosque in an Arabic street-maelstrom when Najah stepped right into my line of sight, with a quizzical look as if to say ‘wonder where he’s been?’. I opened my eyelids a bit more and noticed Yusef and Sahera too. I smiled beatifically. They looked ready to go, but I was rather ‘out of it’, beaming, and not quite ready to jump up and go back through the checkpoints again.

But I managed to instruct my legs to engage proactively in pedestrian activity, got vertical and started rolling down the hill. The Israeli officer who had rejected my entry into the mosque had clearly been watching me with some bequizzlement and I smiled at him. He managed a grin back. He had assumed I was a Christian. “I’m not a Christian, y’know...” I said to him. “If you want to call me anything, I’m an aged hippy eclectic contactee psychic and a spiritual humanitarian, and you’ve got blue underpants on”.

He stood there with his mouth open. “See you next year. Remember, if you’re still here then, I’m a Muslim, okay? By the way, I’m old enough to be your father, and don’t you forget it. Shalom.” I walked away, down through the lower checkpoint, and followed Najah and company, down into the milling souk.

I completed my present-buying process, getting some nice headscarves and a couple of lovely Arab rosaries. I even treated myself to a birthday present – a Hebron rug – though I might by now have overdone it on my luggage weight. The law of gravity strikes again, even at Ramadan.

Concrete Achievements

An almighty racket was going on. I got up, made tea, had a shower and went down to the source of the noise to take photos – Ibrahim had asked me to record each stage of the building process. The men were pouring concrete, building the foundations of a new cistern for the school. This process has been going on for ages – over the last two months there has been digging-out of rock and preparation of the site. The crushed rock was trucked a few hundred metres down the road to make a new road and flattened area for a neighbouring farm.

Now the crucial bit is happening – the foundation-building. The foundations are being laid not only for the cistern but also with a view to constructing a new building on top of it sometime in future. The school’s classrooms are all filled up now, and some new facilities will be needed in future years to cater for the school’s expansion.

They’re amazing workers, Palestinians. They really go for it, unafraid, hell-for-leather, getting the job done. The workers have been labouring through the night for the last few nights, putting all the metal rods and frames in place in the trenches that have been dug.

The reason why they’ve done night shifts is that it is Ramadan, and it’s difficult doing physical work while fasting. The Ramadan fast includes avoiding both eating and drinking, so working in the heat makes a good Muslim thirsty and weak. This year it’s extra tricky because Ramadan, which shifts to an earlier date each year, being based on the lunar calendar, falls in summer where the days are longer – so the fasting period from sunrise to sundown is longer too. So, as soon as they’ve broken their fast at sundown, the workers crank into gear and get working.

Now there’s a bevvy of trucks bringing in liquid concrete, and they’re squirting it in volumes into the trenches at a rate of knots. Good teamwork and cooperation.

It reminds me of a time in the 1980s when I was organising the OakDragon camps. Palestinians have some similarities to hippies and alternative types in Britain: somewhat averse to being too organised or thinking ahead but, when they’re on form and feel motivated, they go at it like the clappers, with remarkable teamwork. One year we were going in to a new site to set up a camp, with a small convoy of trucks carrying our gear – marquees, domes, kitchen, sanitary equipment, tools and the works. Approaching the site in Dartmoor, going down a country lane, we came up against Her Majesty’s Army, who were, it turned out, moving into a field next to us for an exercise. But ours was the real thing.

They were entirely choked up, ground to a standstill, blocking us. It went on for a while. Eventually, we all got onto our respective fields and began setting up. Well, guess who was completed with the job and sitting around their campfires supping tea, while the other lot were looking over the hedge, agog, wondering how that had happened? It was us, the ‘hippies’, whom everyone loves to look down on as an inefficient bunch of time-wasters. We outstripped the army.

This is ‘flow-management’. When your team is on form and in gear, with teamwork and good motivation, and if people are well-chosen and everyone knows what to do, and there is no complex, top-heavy management getting in the way and imposing itself, then the magic really moves. Miracles can be performed. There’s a job to be done, and everyone knows they can’t sit down until it’s done. In our case, up went the marquees, in went the kitchen, the latrines were dug, the domes were assembled, the fire was lit and the food cooked, and we just went for it.

Meanwhile, over the hedge, they were all obeying orders, working according to a well-worn system about which whole manuals had been written and long training sessions had been done. But it was slow and clunky, with no magic, no flow. Guys were standing round, all stuck in their allotted roles, and everything had to happen in the proper order and the proper way, as per the plan. Yet it was we who were sitting around drinking tea long before these short-haired, uniformed, organised, trained warriors of the free world had finished. What a way to win a war! The British army of the 1980s probably relied on the fact that the Soviets were even worse. But nowadays, up against the Taliban in Afghanistan, they’re getting nowhere. The Taliban work on flow-management principles.

The reason I am mentioning this is to point out something about paradigms and civilisation, and Palestinians and Israelis. Over the years I’ve written articles and a book saying, amongst other things, that the West’s day is done. The reason the sun is setting on the West is that, as a civilisation, structure has overridden energy, and rules and vested interests have overridden vibrancy of culture and human spiritedness. The West established a successful formula, then rested on its laurels replicating that formula in the belief that it was the only formula that really works. A fatal error. The Oxford historian Arnold Toynbee had a lot to say about that – but his wisdom was largely rejected by other historians who thought they knew better.

A civilisation is made of these two elements, structure and energy, and they must be in balance, able to fluctuate as circumstances demand. In the 1960s, when I was young, people like me brought forth a new energising impulse which sought to reframe and restructure Western civilisation. It was a seed of cultural and social transformation with a spiritual impulse at its heart. The West has foot-draggingly adopted a few of these transformative elements, but only those which fit with the old paradigm, which allow the ancient regime to keep control and, of course, make money.

The Western system permits a change in the lives of women only as long as they adopt men’s ways, professionalising everything and everyone and forgetting the human sensitivities and community-building women are so crucial for. It builds wind-generators or adopts organic farming methods only when large corporations can generate bucks from them, to keep their voracious shareholders happy. It mouths noble words about human rights and democracy only when suitable to itself – the West is happy to befriend dictators when it’s profitable or advantageous, happy to annul democratic elections if it doesn’t like the winning party and happy to kill people for peace as long as the military-industrial complex gains from it. These are strong words, but it’s true. Our civilisation needs a shake-out. It’s heading for derailment.

Material profitability is a driving force which once built the West but now is destroying it, eating it out from inside. The West’s structures and vested interests are killing it. Its refusal to change, to examine its weak, pudgy, flatulent underbelly, to overcome its risk-aversion, is costing the Earth all because of a fear of rocking the boat, of losing control. As a result, control is being lost anyway. People still believe it’s okay to continue as before, but we’re heading for the proverbial waterfall, ready to tip over it.

Palestinians aren’t perfect by any means, but they do have energy, and change is more welcome to them than to Westerners. The past has been so bad that anything different is an improvement. They pile enormous energy into anything resembling change and progress.

There’s an old lady down the road who has started a new grocery shop. Her daughter is in an Israeli jail – though I’ve never found out what for. Her shop is sparsely stocked at present, but she’s anxious to please. When you’re there, she goes round the shop getting things out and offering them – with some success. If you ask for something and she doesn’t have it, it’s there in a few days. She remembers what you wanted, what you bought last time, and it’s there, specially placed where you’ll see it. She’s trying hard. By doing so, she augments her family's income and plays her part in its survival - she's not dependent.

The kids who hang around her shop help her. One boy has worked out that, if he carries some bags for me, he’ll get a shekel. He used to blag shekels from me, but now he’s got wise and earns them. He’s doubled his income as a result. And, guess what, it’s not just for sweeties for himself – he took his mum a wee present. So, he’s twigged something that protected modern Western kids do not: if you make yourself useful, you earn something, you’re recognised for it, you gain wider rewards, and everyone benefits. Kids here are not passive recipients of grown-ups’ beneficence and control – they’re actively engaged in the social process. They know more about what’s involved in staying alive.

Meanwhile, Israelis are Westerners, relying on a Western rationale which, unbeknownst to most of them, is running out of steam. They did have a lot of collective energy in the first 20-30 years of building their nation following 1948 – it was a matter of collective survival – but then, by the 1970s, they omitted to re-examine their national purpose and the best method of pursuing it. Instead, they bought into the 1980s Western capitalist game, tearing apart the ideals with which their nation had been founded, all in the name of increased profitability and economic growth. The kibbutzim and moshavim, and the socialist and collectivist ideals of the nation lost their leading edge, and Israel was privatised.

They omitted to realise in the 1970s that Israel had reached completion of stage one, the establishment and embedding of Israel as a country, and that a reassessment was needed. This would have involved making friends with their neighbours and assessing the full implications of being a Middle Eastern country where the neighbours were Arabs. It would have involved learning something from Arabs, deeply embedded in the history of Jews as well: they’re in it together, and their family, community and social life are all-important. This community integrity is what the West has swapped for material prosperity, and the results are in the end disastrous.

Israelis maintained the idea that they are an exceptional case, justified in their actions by the horror of the Holocaust or by the sufferings of their long ethnic history. But history in the end justifies little: it is the present situation and the needs of the future that more genuinely define what should happen next. The Holocaust is history, and the Holocaust-survivor generation is dying off. The Roma of Europe, also decimated and terrorised by the Holocaust, regret that it happened, but they look to their current situation, not to their past, for guidance and identity.

Instead of re-examining Israel’s national purpose and its basic tenets, Israelis have maintained a mindset based on a Zionism developed in the 1880s-1950s, which was an understandable ideology of survival and national redemption at that time. It was a time when national liberation movements were common for many formerly oppressed peoples. Zionism was a philosophy aiming to create a safe homeland into which Jews could immigrate, which would make Jews more able to walk tall, to be like other humans.

But the immigration that built Israel has pretty much stopped – all those who needed to immigrate have done so. Israel is not as attractive a proposition as it once was – except for American Orthodox Jewish adventurists, set on conquering the West Bank, what they call Judea and Samaria.

The ‘iron wall’ philosophy advocated by Zionists like Ze’ev Jabotinsky, David Ben Gurion and Menachem Begin, intended to fight off all threats to Israel by establishing military superiority, morphed from a defence strategy into a vehicle of oppression, not only for the Palestinians, Lebanese and other Arabs graced with its dire effects, but also for Israelis, whose society was hardened and militarised by it. This philosophy now causes Jews to leave Israel because they don’t want to subject their children to prolonged military readiness and repeating outbreaks of conflict.

It has alienated Jews from each other. They are united only by the demands of a continually-perpetuated state of threat, where the neighbours are seen as dangerous terrorists intent on driving the Jews into the sea. Actually, few Arabs feel that way, and most of them do so only when the Israelis are misbehaving themselves.

The policy of settlement-building had some logic when the Israeli population was expanding, up to the mid-1990s, but now it represents the extension of an outdated mindset. Actually, the Palestinian population is expanding faster. One third of the buildings in Israeli settlements lie empty. Settlements are being built for strategic reasons, to break up the Palestinian Territories and retain dominance – and also to go along with religious Zionists who believe God gave them all of this land. Without the infusion of American money, settlement-building would be uneconomic. It is ideologically hyper-charged, this matter of settlements, yet increasingly it is becoming a millstone around Israelis’ necks.

Israelis have landed themselves with a number of irresolvable dichotomies: either Israel is an occupier of the Palestinian people and territories, or it is not and it should thus get out, withdrawing to the 1967 borders. If it remains as an occupier, continuing to control all of the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, it must choose either be a democracy in which Palestinians will be 50% of the electorate, entitled to full and equal rights, or it must be a Jewish state dominating a population of Muslim, Christian, Druze and Bedouin subordinates. But it cannot do both.

In other words, Israeli expansionism has undermined the nation’s core purpose. Set up as a haven for Jews, it has pushed at its neighbours so hard that still, 60 years after its founding, they feel uncomfortable. Right now, the PA refuses to enter into peace negotiations until settlement building stops – and fair enough since, to them, settlement building is an act of war without the gunfire. Israel’s indecision over these issues is a weakness which undermines it, and it survives with this only by denying that there is a problem. But this can continue only for a time.

Just yesterday, the UN and a group of NGOs pointed straight at a looming problem which needs fixing now. As a result of its blockade on Gaza, Israel is risking a major outbreak of disease in its own country. This is classic. It blockades Gaza in the hope that Gazans will rise up against Hamas, which rules Gaza. What actually would replace Hamas in such an event is anybody’s guess – Hamas has large-scale support which itself is strengthened by the pressure Israel applies to Palestinians. It is the party of resistance, and Israel’s pressuring increases the urge to resist.

Surely, if Hamas fell, the Israelis would get either chaos or a resistance party that’s even stronger than Hamas. So the blockade does not achieve its purposes. Every time Israel has tried to weaken the position of its ideological opponents – whether the PLO, Hezbollah or Hamas – it has achieved the opposite. Then Israelis wonder why people seem to be against them.

As a result of the blockade, vital supplies cannot enter Gaza, and these include public works and sewage materials. The Gazan water and sewage system, already crippled by Israeli bombing in recent years, is unable to process the waste of 1.3 million Gazans. As a result, raw sewage is pouring into the Mediterranean. Guess which direction it mainly flows, with the sea currents? North, to the beaches of Ashkelon, Tel Aviv and Haifa.

Israelis are bathing in Gazan sewage. This is bad enough. But if a disease such as cholera should break out in Gaza – and the Israelis, throttling supplies of medicines, medical and public health equipment, are making this more likely – then infection will simply move up the coast and affect Israelis.

This is one small example of the risk Israelis take by ignoring the many signs and symptoms that things are wrong. Arguably, they are blinkered by a narrow mindset which doesn’t actually take account of their own full self-interest. Peace is in their own best interests. But peace is never achieved by imposing facts on the ground and solutions that are unsatisfactory to those with whom peace is being made. Peace is an agreed, mutual thing. Otherwise there is no peace.

Conflict has become such a habit here that many Israelis and Palestinians have developed a vested interest in maintaining it. It brings in lots of money from abroad. It permits the evasion of many other issues. It requires that people be controlled by a dominant elite. It allows both Israelis and Palestinians to believe that their lands are more important to the world than they actually are.

Meanwhile, Palestinians, as losers in the conflict, are undergoing change whether they like it or not. To some extent it is forced on them by circumstances imposed on them by the Israelis, the West and the complicit Arab states of the Middle East. To some extent change in Palestine is also self-motivated, a strategy aiming at making life better.

Hence the building of the new cistern at Hope Flowers. It will collect rainwater from the school building and playground, filtering and storing it for use by the school. For water is rationed here, controlled by the Israelis, who have tapped into the local underground water sources and diverted them for use by the settlements in the area, such as Har Homa, Gilo and Efrat. Then they re-sell water in limited quantities to the Palestinians, at a price. Good business, huh?

The local water mains flow with water only once or twice a month and, when they do, everyone must fill their houses’ cisterns while it lasts. If they use too much water, there is no more until it comes through the pipes again. Or until it rains. If, that is, they have rainwater collection and storage facilities. The school is building such facilities now, ready for the coming rainy season, December to March. All at great expense, but it’s worth it. Hence the noise this morning down below the school.

I’m full of admiration for the way Palestinians work. They work all hours of the day. I used to think my own country, Britain, had a strong work ethic, but now I’m beginning to wonder about it. Certainly there is a guilt-driven need to be seen to be working, as if to justify one’s existence, but the extent to which things are actually achieved is another matter.

So much energy in Britain is tied up with compliance, keeping bosses, superiors and authorities happy, and in inspections, verification, reports, research, taxpaying, keeping shareholders fat and staying out of trouble. A lot is wasted in the process. It’s a sign of a society increasingly losing its way, a society where distrust and a dearth of collective solidarity and cooperation have taken root.

That’s why I like being in Palestine. Here, people look at you, realise you’re useful and make use of anything you can offer. If you have a degree, that’s fine, but it’s your personal qualities that matter most. That’s why I’m coming back whenever I can: I feel productive, taken up, as if my input is achieving something. I like that. I feel there’s a place for me here in this society, even though I’m a foreigner.
But I’m returning to Britain with hope in my heart too. In recent years I haven’t felt greatly appreciated or supported there. But change is the only constant in life. And perhaps it’s time for a change.

Tomorrow (Saturday 5th September) it’s my 59th birthday, and Sahera and I are going down to Hebron for an adventure, and to meet Najah Qaqour and Taleb al-Harithi, tow peacemakers.

It’s now less than a week until I leave Palestine. Sorry, folks, but this blog will end soon. But I’m submitting book proposals to a number of publishers, and I hope it will become a book. We shall see. It's in the hands of Allah, my future. The same goes for all of us.

Light and Presence

While I’ve been here I have quietly been doing my psychic-spiritual work. I’ve got into the habit of not talking about it very much – many people switch off, make judgements, disbelieve, debunk or degrade it. Whether one is in a secular, Christian, Muslim or Jewish environment, there’s a taboo, and even in spiritualistic and new age circles there can be anything from wide-eyed wonder to an attitude of entertainment or skepsis. But some people understand and know, and I persevere anyway, because this is important stuff. I was reminded of this yesterday.

I felt an angelic presence around the school on the first day of the school year, and it made me aware that the Hope Flowers School indeed is a blessed project. Not just for the locals in Bethlehem, but globally – an incubator of a new set of ideas and possibilities. Those who run the school are not knowing esoteric workers, yet their protective, nurturing, human approach toward education and looking after the kids creates a strong energy-field around the school. It generates light.

It’s so poignant too, and the location of the school on the outer boundary of the West Bank is significant, right by the separation wall – a wall between the very different worlds that are Palestine and Israel – and overlooking a new Israeli settlement. The sharp line, the consciousness- and reality-barrier between these worlds is stark: I look out on the physical manifestation of it every day from the window of the volunteers’ apartment atop the school.

Spiritually speaking, I particularly feel two people overlighting this school from the ‘other side’, though there might be more. Hussein Issa and Pam Perry, who are two unsung heroes of the struggle here on planet Earth, of the battle for the hearts and minds of humanity. Both of them died early, Hussein at 50 and Pam at 56.

Pam, in her last twenty years, was disabled, having lost the use of one lung as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning earlier in her life. She used her situation creatively: in her last years she would lie in bed with her oxygen tank, her phone and laptop, organising and motivating people to support peace in the Holy Land, and she had a special place in her heart for Hope Flowers. She gave out the orders and reminded us of our priorities, and everyone heaved to. “Spirit has a plan”, she would always say – especially when incomprehensible things used to happen.

I knew it, the moment she died. I was in Portugal. I knew she was struggling – she had had a lung transplant operation some weeks before. I was feeling unsettled – something was going on. Suddenly I had a strong feeling of Pam, and I knew. A few days later, on returning to England, I heard she had died at that moment I had felt her.

Hussein died just at the beginning of the intifada. From the viewpoint of life on Earth, he died of heart problems, quite suddenly, of overstrain, overwork and of carrying too many burdens. In one sense it was tragic. But seen from an inner viewpoint, he was handing over the task of running the school to others because it was now possible to do so, and he was moving over to the Other Side to marshal the troops there and work from that side. He still supports, even runs the school, through is family, the Issas, and it is important that it is this way – they hold true to his guiding vision and embody his dream.

I felt these two yesterday, in my reverie while looking down on the kids at school and feeling the waxing of the lively energy-field of the school. I had one of those bursts of multiplex insight, where all sorts of things become understood in one moment, in one flash of seeing – a slight shift of awareness that reveals significances beyond our normal perception.

I saw the significance of my having been alone here all summer. At times it has been challenging, lonely, an uphill grind. Here I must thank Suzy and Faith in Britain, for staying with me on this journey, for holding the rope tethering me to the reality from which I have come, and for listening to and advising me.

Yet being alone here it has allowed certain things to happen which wouldn’t otherwise have happened. I’ve been an unwitting protector, maintaining a presence here while the inhabiting presence of the kids and the staff is absent. But also it’s as if the angels manoeuvred me into this position. In retrospect I now understand why the delays in my coming to Palestine: I was needed here when the school was empty during the summer holidays, to make sure it was safe and protected.

While here, I’ve done my psychic work. I do this through a mixture of meditation and ongoing rumination, visualisation and heart-work. When I’m alone the divides between doing it and not doing it become thin, and my attention to it is stable and sound. It was focused particularly in late July when the Israeli army served demolition notices on the 25 houses around the school: this gave a clear nexus of attention, coalesced by the threat to the school’s future that the demolition threat brought.

So I embarked on strengthening the spiritual protection around the school and building up an ‘exclusion zone’ for roughly half a mile around, enclosing all the threatened houses. Having established it, I wove a shield around it, through which only people with wholesome intentions could pass.

Into this I wove an invisibility spell too, making the school and the area invisible to those who have acquisitive and controlling designs on it – I worked on helping the military land-grabbers forget their plans and the reasons why they felt they needed to carry them out. Whether or not I have succeeded, no incursion or demolition has happened yet, and may this continue.

But also, over the months, I have worked on the energy-field of Palestine, particularly with the aim of helping build its internal strength. This came upon me when I was writing in this blog about ‘cultural resistance’ in July. Resistance is not a matter of opposing those whom one perceives to threaten one’s reality – this has but a narrow protective effect, focusing on the ‘other’, not on one’s own internal strength and immunity.

Resistance is a matter of building up the creative vibrancy and aliveness of a people and a nation, internally. It involves drawing centrality, vigour and health to a society. This addresses the causes rather than the symptoms of ‘attack’, building up a state of being which increases immunity and strengthens a society’s innate capacity to ward off all that would weaken, undermine or challenge it.

The Israelis have, during the 20th Century, demonstrated this and also the loss of it. As a result of the traumas that Jews sustained in Europe, especially from the 1880s onwards, they built up a field of consciousness which united them in manifesting a big, historic objective – the creation of a homeland. They made errors – taking more than was wise – but they had a unifying cause which made them move mountains, creating an impressive country of their own and changing the face of the land. A dream of many generations became manifest and, while they fought with guns, their real strength lay in their social vibrancy – embodied especially in the kibbutzim and solidarity between themselves as a nation.

But as they progressed they lost something crucial too – it happened in the late 1960s around the time of the Six Day War. Even Ariel Sharon, whose autobiography I have been reading while here, talks about this. They became overly self-confident, inconsiderate of those whom they were increasingly oppressing, embedding a sense of victory, superiority, military force, insensitivity and entitlement in their own culture, and this began to erode their national consciousness.

This ‘iron wall’ mentality, seeking to teach others a final lesson and impose Israeli solutions on people who are very different from them, has got stuck. At the time when Israelis could have been softening up, making friends and making peace with their neighbours, from the 1970s to the 1990s, they failed to do so. In doing so, they created an Israel which is a tragedy waiting to happen. It will catch up with them when their strength is exhausted, in a moment of weakness.

Israel has rather lost its way: it has lost its sense of why it needed to create a safe place for Jews and how actually to do it. It fell for the idea that safety means a fierce warding off of Palestinians and others, excluding and ‘transferring’ the Palestinians. In his autobiography, Sharon states that Palestine used to include both Jordan and what became Israel, until the British drew a line between them along the Jordan River, and therefore the Palestinians ought to move over to Jordan to allow the Jews to fully occupy the land given them by God. How mistaken he is.

Israelis fell for the idea that the land was theirs to do whatever they wished with. In doing so, tragically this has made Israel increasingly unsafe for Jews to live in, and it has lost its sense of what such a home should look like. Not only have the Palestinians not ‘transferred’ out of Palestine, but an ecological crisis has taken shape, and inherent weaknesses in Israeli society itself have become more pronounced – for example, it has the greatest income disparities in the Western world, greater than those of the USA, and in such a small, compressed country.

It has become capitalist, beholden to America, isolated from its neighbours, and it approaches becoming a pariah state – reproducing and reinforcing conditions in which Jews feel the world is against them, and giving ground for the world to feel reservations about them. Not because of historic anti-Semitism, though its shadow is a factor, but because of people’s feelings about what Israelis are now doing to their occupied subjects and their neighbours.

The blatantly ruthless bombardments of South Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2009 exposed Israelis’ lack of proportion, wisdom and foresight, their unawareness of the subtle consensual conditions with which peace, security and progress are genuinely built. They fell for the notion that the only way to be strong is to impose, to take, to control and to apply force. In the longterm, this weakens Israel, since it applies also to its own people, who are walled-in by a wall they have built themselves, nominally to protect themselves but actually to isolate themselves, not least because of an addictive habituation to quarrelling and fighting.

The threat to Israel’s survival comes no longer from Arabs and Palestinians: it comes from within the psyche of the Israeli nation. There is a worm eating at the core of the Israeli apple and, no matter how tough the skin has become, danger is looming from within. There is a risk that Israelis start fighting amongst themselves.

Meanwhile, for Palestinians, the ongoing experience of the Nakba – the Disaster of 1948 – and the occupation of 1967 and onwards has had an effect which has been weakening in the short term and strengthening in the longterm. Palestine indeed has its weaknesses – particularly a conflict between self-interest and collective integrity and solidarity, embodied in the current conflict between Fateh and Hamas – but the net effect of its suffering has been to strengthen its society in its human dimension, whatever the politicians do.

There is little crime here in Palestine, the streets are safe, the people are generally mutually supportive and there is an unusual vibrancy and meaning of life to Palestinians’ lives. Palestine, to many foreign visitors, is marginally happier than Israel, a very special place. Something has been gained through the conflict and its associated hardships.

This is genuine immunity on a psycho-social level. No matter what the Israelis do to them, the Palestinians not only survive but get stronger – not militarily but socially. This is encapsulated in Gaza, the world’s largest prison: despite its hardships, shortages and isolation, it is noticeable that no one is starving, there is no cholera, and life is continuing, regardless. It is hard, but the Gazans are surviving and, one day, we shall see the positive results of this: something is being incubated there, and it will become visible in the future.

Strangely, the quarantining of Gaza has also excluded many of the insidious influences of modern, materialistic ‘progress’ and ‘development’, to the eventual gain of its inhabitants. Meanwhile, in neighbouring Egypt, whose people technically have greater freedom, the nation is beset by ills of another kind, and poverty and unfreedom are strong there too – and that has nothing to do with the Israelis.

The strength Palestinians have developed concerns survival and facing hardship. Meanwhile, in the wider world, hardship is on its way in some form or another: the prosperity, the development frenzy, the ecological exploitation, the corralling of billions of people into an unsustainable techno-economic system is propelling the world toward a crisis we are ill-equipped to deal with – we have left too much too late. The Palestinians know about facing hardship and crisis. They have personal, real-life experience. We will be calling on them in times to come.

I’ve been working on the spirit of the peoples, that Israelis and Palestinians may both awaken to their true purposes and the essence of their identity as different people. That the controlling elements in their societies – Israel with its ruling families and Zionist mindset, and Palestine with its hierarchy of sinecures – might loosen up, allowing the wisdom and true needs of the people to come forward. I’ve been working on cleaning up and releasing the shadows of the tragedies this region has seen from ancient to modern times, and raising the light within the soul of each people and group in this area.

Who knows whether this has any effect – especially since this is a land where so much praying has been going on for so long, at times with prayers seeking the strangest and even perverse of outcomes, such as the death of the ‘enemy’. But it feels good and right to do this innerwork, and it has been good for me.

The secret lies in our emotional connection with the heart of the matter. It lies in listening to the underlying, hidden messages within the situations and events of this place. It lies in open-mindedly penetrating the hidden recesses of meaning and overall significance in things. It is through feeling that all people are connected, and connected also to the land and the spirit. It is through e-motion that mountains are moved, and the spiritual and the physical are connected.

I’ve gone through so many contrasting emotional states here, exploring every one and feeling it as fully as I can. I’ve sought to connect them with a higher ray of truth within. Not my truth or your truth, but abiding, overall truth, a truth which cannot easily be defined or expressed in words. “God is too great to live within just one religion”, as my friend Sheikh Bukhari has said. Truth is too great to be squeezed into one interpretation of things. It abides and it moves through in the end. It's not 'the truth' - it is just truth. And that’s where the basis of peace, of conflict-resolution lies. For we’re all in the same boat. We’re all flawed, struggling, lost and mortal, and the only constant is change.

Hope Flowers is a school for me too. I hope that, in sharing many of the ins and outs of this experience, I’ve been able to share some of its lessons. When I leave this place I shall continue to work on maintaining its protective field and encouraging its soul to shine, and I invite you to hold it in your thoughts too. Because, if this place is harmed, it will be a loss to all of us. It’s a little enzyme in the redemption of our planetary home – there are many more too – and it needs our attention and support. For, as I have quoted several times in this blog: for the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing.

School starts

I’ve developed a habit of being rudely awoken from sleep by the phone. I tumble out of bed, slip on my jalabiya (an Arabic long shift) and dash for the phone. It’s Hala, the lead teacher of the school. She’s standing at the gate, and they’d forgotten the keys. I look out of the window, and there are Hala, Hind and a few other ladies. “I’ll be down – just a minute!”.

I dash into my room. Off goes the jalabiya, on go the trousers and shirt, and I stumble blearily down four flights of stairs, struggle with the lock on the door at the bottom and step out into the sun to admit the waiting ladies. More people are arriving. I mumble greetings in Arabic and English and retreat back upstairs. My blood hasn’t started circulating properly yet, so my customary anti-gravitational stair-climbing act is not activated yet. I go for a cold shower – the sun hasn’t yet moved around to warm the solar heating system. Aah, that wakes me up. On goes the kettle, for my oh-so-British early morning tea ceremony.

Then the glorious pandemonium starts. Kids are pouring in, flooding down into the playground. Teachers are milling around too, gravitating down into the playground with the kids. A lovely scene unfolds below me as I gaze out from the top floor of the school. It would gladden any educationalist with a heart.

The kids are running up to teachers to shake hands and give them a hug. Boys screech past on their scampering trajectories, waving and skimping the skirts of the teachers, who giggle and chatter between themselves. Teachers hang around in the school yard as the kids mill around them, and everyone is chattering, gathering in groups.

It’s a reunion. Parents mill around and say hello, then wander off home, and the numbers of kids gradually grow. This goes on for a half hour, as the yellow school bus arrives, disgorges another gaggle of youngsters and disappears off for another load from another area.

It’s funny. I have worked with this school for some years but I have never been here during term time, so this is a new experience. It’s good, because I’ve laboured away for years on web-pages, grant applications and outreach materials, and here they are, here are the kids, the ones I’ve been doing all this for. Tears come to my ears – it’s as if a connective completion is taking place, somewhere deep down in my soul.

All that work, those late nights, and the heartache of having grant applications rejected, and the complexities, and Pam Perry dying. But today they’re tears of joy, tears of humanity, tears from the little child within me. This is what it’s all for, Palden – this is what you’re doing it for.

I think of England. My former partner was a teacher and is now a trainer of school governors, intimately involved in the implementation of educational policy in Somerset, so I know some of the inside secrets of the educational world in Britain from her. In my country, teachers may not touch and show affection to the kids, for fear of accusation of paedophilia, favouritism, lack of professionalism or a host of other regulatory and socially paranoiac ghosts. Yet here, in Hope Flowers School, affection is central to its educational ethos: to work with traumatised children, closeness, trust and emotional sensitivity are crucial.

In my country we wonder why young people are so disaffected, why there are so many behavioural issues at schools, why academic standards are slipping, why everything is falling apart in schools no matter how much money you throw at it and however many commissions of enquiry make reports.

It’s really rather simple, and you don’t need a PhD to know it: it’s all about love, social love, community love, caring, tenderness. That’s what binds a society together, and that’s what stimulates a young human to grow toward its full potential. It gives sensitive humans a ground to stand on.

In Britain there are plenty of good teachers with a good heart and motivation, but so many of them are constrained by the education system itself. Here, in this school, where government intervention over the years has been low level – army intervention has been a greater issue! – the teachers are able to shine as humans and really teach. They’re quite an impressive lot.

There’s no status here either, in this playground. The teachers are in amongst the kids – they’re all friends, all part of the same Hope Flowers brood. Or, at least, there’s a qualification I must honestly insert here. Later, downstairs in the office, I was talking with Ghada Issa, who said, yes, it’s lovely on the first day of term, but later on, well...

But I know that, with such a start, such an approach, things will be different here from many schools in countries like Britain. Hope Flowers respects the inner feelings of children. It draws in parents and the wider community. Its aim is remove the causes of violence from children and families living in a country where hardship levels are high, where tough stuff has happened within the very lifetime of most of these kids. In this very decade, tanks have ground along the road leading to the school.

One day in 2002 the school was engulfed in a gun-battle, and when Ibrahim phoned the Israeli commander to insist on evacuation, the school was given a twenty-minute ceasefire to get the kids out. They just about managed.

But now, there’s a magic to this playground, a feeling of light and presence. Life has returned to the Hope Flowers School.

Hope Starts Flowering Again

Tomorrow, 1st September, is the beginning of the school year. So today the school has been a hive of activity. The teachers and staff are all here, together with the last of the parent applicants seeking to register their children at the school, plus workmen doing the finishing touches to things. Plus Sahera and me.

Sahera is a new volunteer who has come to stay here to work for some months. She arrived on Saturday. She’s a British Muslim from Birmingham, of Kashmiri origins. She embodies an interesting cultural mix: brought up in a Muslim family who have lived in Britain since the 1960s, she has both the hang-back quietness of a Muslim woman plus the bold confidence of a modern Western young woman, each of which emerge at different times.

I know this time at the school will be important for her. It’s her first big trip away from England for a longer period, to a country where she’s no longer part of a somewhat embattled Muslim minority, as in Britain – she’s in a Muslim-majority country, yet these are also not her people. She’s come here as a political, humanitarian choice and personal challenge, inasmuch as Palestine is on the frontline of the tricky interaction between the Islamic world and the West. This intercultural paradox is encapsulated in her own life and upbringing too.

She also embodies that emergent role Western Muslims are playing in the updating of Islamic culture. This updating is no longer a matter of adoption, acceptance and deference to Western ways: it is a filtration process where the best of the West is accepted – some of its relatively free-thinking and newly-evolved social patterns – and the rest is modified or discarded. It’s also a thorough review of traditional values and their relevance in the modern world.

For we live now in times where the Rest are increasingly setting the global pace and agenda, and the West is in retreat, increasingly aware that it has erred, that its time is passing and, yet, it has made a big difference in the world, some of which is good.

So this cultural interaction which, in Islamic culture and its relations with the West, focuses on social relations, values and beliefs (in distinction to gizmos from China, ideas from India, politics in Latin America or the essence of humanity in Africa) – and of course money and power – comes to a meeting point here in Palestine. And it is embodied in young 21st Century people like Sahera. Also in people like me – Westerners who question the tenets of our civilisation and culture, who ‘go native’ and adopt or bridge with the ways of other cultures.

In this school too. It is so poignant that the school is located not in the heart of Bethlehem, surrounded by its own local culture, but at the edge, literally a few hundred metres from the separation wall. Looking out from the school we see small Palestinian farms down in the valley, then the separation wall and an Israeli hilltop military watchtower overlooking al Khader, and then, beyond, the new, expanding Israeli settlement of Efrat, with its new constructions creeping towards us year by year. The frontline, the faultline, the threshold of this friction is right here. When you cross that separation wall, if you're permitted, you move not just from Palestine to Israel but also from the Middle East to the West, in the space of 100 metres.

Hope Flowers, a Palestinian school in an occupied country from which many of its inhabitants cannot easily leave and travel, emphasises cultural openness and understanding. In the 1980s and 1990s Jews and Christians attended the school too, but most of the Christians emigrated and the Israeli government, around year 2000, barred Jews from interacting openly with Palestinians (who of course are dangerous terrorists). Technically, if a Jew comes to the school they can be fined by the Israeli government or get into trouble – but it’s possible to sneak in anyway, as did two Israeli friends last week. Nevertheless, the school teaches its children about interfaith and intercultural understanding, and it teaches spirituality and human ethics, not religion and moral codes.

Another person is staying here at the school. Bernard, from the Netherlands, is a teacher of Transcendental Meditation – and he will be teaching TM to the schoolchildren, as a method for developing inner calm and self-regeneration, and of developing a relationship with the spirit within which is not squeezed inside the confines of a doctrinal faith. The children are also taught Compassionate Listening – giving complete attention to others – and ways of understanding themselves beyond the framework of their own culture and society.

Term starts and the kids are coming in tomorrow. It will be a big change after the quiet months of the summer, when I have been alone here in this enormous building much of the time. Today there has been drilling and banging, coming and going, the hubbub of people, and the teachers have been preparing classrooms and having meetings.

They’re lovely people, the teachers. They are led by Hind Issa, educational director and widow of the founder of the school, and Hala Issa, to heads the teacher team. The Issa family have assembled a fine team of staff, who are all dedicated to what the school is doing and the approach it takes. They’re certainly not in it for the money – the wages are poor and, unless a miracle happens, in November the school will have a problem paying teachers’ wages.

The reason for this is that grant applications get turned down, the application process is long-winded, the school management, such as Ghada and Ibrahim Issa, are often too busy to do everything necessary, and the funding stream is erratic and currently affected by the global economic downturn.

I’m impressed with the teachers. Their hearts are in the right place, and the unique training they’ve had from Hope Flowers, and the experience they have accumulated, makes them leaders in their field, globally – unbeknownst to them. They aren’t fully aware of the significance of what this school has developed over the 25 years since it was founded.

As a visitor who was involved in the ‘free schools’ movement of the 1970s, started two holistic educational projects in the 1980s, and who has seen so many educational nightmares unfolding in my own country, I am well aware of the significance of Hope Flowers’ approach to the psycho-spiritual aspect that is so often ignored, even suppressed, in schools systems in the West and worldwide.

Then there is one new, young teacher who faces an interesting problem. He’s the only male teacher in a henhouse of females! He’s a nice chap, young, anxious to please, and he faces a new situation many Western males have themselves had to face in recent decades, but it’s newer in the Middle East: how to work as a man in a female-majority work-situation. I clap him on the back every time I see him and give him words of encouragement. Poor guy, I hope his colleagues will be inclusive and gentle with him! He’s standing on another frontline, this time of the gender revolution, as a sensitive male who wants to teach young kids – and in Palestine he’s a pioneer. But it possibly doesn’t feel like that. He’s probably wondering how on Earth he landed up in this situation!

I met and interviewed the school social worker today - Shirouk. She participates in classes to watch the kids and identify those who have learning or behavioural difficulties. Teachers have been trained in dealing with this, and in referral of some cases to specialists such as she. When kids with problems are identified, she quietly takes them out, works on their confidence in her, offers them counselling, visits their parents, participates in leading courses the school provides for parents and particularly for women, and deals with the knottier cases of behavioural and learning difficulties.

Here they don’t take the disciplinary, psycho-pharmaceutical or finger-wagging approach that is common in the West for misfits and problem cases – they strive to understand, get inside the psyches of the kids, heal them and help them be themselves. Shirouk is one of the key people in Hope Flowers’ strategy, as is the school psychologist. I’ll publish a podcast of my interview with her soon.

Meanwhile, there’s a new podcast available here with Hind and Mohayed. Hind is an occupational therapist at the school and her husband Mohayed works in a medical supplies company. A while ago they took me on a tour of Bethlehem, reported in an earlier blog. In the podcast these two give us an insight into life as a young couple in Palestine, their hopes and their realities. They live in Deheishe refugee camp. Enjoy the podcast.

Meanwhile, my stay here is coming toward a close. I’ll be sad to leave. I have to complete too many tasks, see a lot of people and wrench myself out of this scene, in less than two weeks. I’m now reconciled to the challenge of caring for my parents as soon as I return to England – I just pray that I’ll be able to take a break sometime, before too long, to ready myself for the next hurdle after that.

There’s a lot to digest from my time here. A lot to get to grips with in Britain. I’ll have the double task of earning a living – I have no job to return to – and raising funding for my next trip out here. Then there’s the British winter, but I’m not going to think about that!

I must complete the grant application I’ve been working on with Ghada, and with Rebecca and Shirley in California. It’s an application to the US Institute for Peace for a $120,000 grant for a learning difficulties program here at Hope Flowers. It’s dead meticulous, this application, with rationales, explanations and accounts to weave together into something that looks credible and interesting to a funding committee in Washington DC. I do hope we get it. But the thing I admire so much about this school and Palestinians in general is this: whether or not the funding comes, they’re going to do it anyway. But the funding makes such a difference.

I’ve always been like this too – one of those mugginses who does things because they need doing, whether or not there’s support for it. In the longterm it’s very wearing, and it involves an ongoing process of supplication to people in the funding business, with a lot of letdowns and very few rights and entitlements. But the advantage has been that I’ve proven over and again that it’s possible to do things anyway, whether or not support is there, and rewards come to heart and soul instead of pocket. I’m glad in my heart about what I’ve done with my life, and I’m so glad I came here.

A Crowded Psyche

The matter of going straight to my parents’ house to look after them, as soon as I return from Palestine, has knocked me off balance. Of course I shall do it, because it is something that needs doing, and they are my parents, who brought me into life nearly 60 years ago. My brother, himself 64, needs relieving from looking after them and there is no one else to do it.

But it has thrown me into confusion. The image that came up this morning was that of swimming across a river, where I am tiring and fighting hard to get to the other side. I have stored up enough energy to do so as long as I pace myself well. But then the bank recedes further – suddenly the river is wider, and suddenly I have to think about so many of the things I must attend to when I reach the shore, before getting there. Which weakens me and impairs my capacity to swim.

So, for the last two days I have been floundering. This has affected my work, because I have several issues to clear up before I leave Palestine, and suddenly they too are in doubt. My capacity to think clearly and sort out all these factors has gone into chaos. I’m doing my best to ‘let go and let be’, but something doesn’t feel right and I can’t figure out what it is. I think my instincts have gone into a kind of panic mode, wary that something else will come along to hit me at a wobbly moment.

I need a rest, quite profoundly. My plan was to return to Cornwall, rest and recuperate, and then go at things hammer and tongs once restored. I have a lot to sort out in England. But this is not going to happen. This is okay, in principle, but I’m concerned.

What’s rattling me is a niggling doubt in my capacity to handle things, a drop in confidence, a feeling as if I’ve come up against my limits and that I risk screwing up. Something in me trusts that everything will work out, but I don’t know how. There’s an inner tension between that feeling of trust and a feeling of doubt, that I might fall down and collapse. All I know is that I need a rest.

But still, life goes on. I have to finish the grant application I’ve been working on for the school – and yesterday I discovered I had made some mistakes and forgotten some details. This is typical of what happens when one feels overloaded. There’s more. I must get Ibrahim and others to help me get information and photos for the Hope Flowers website before I leave, so that I can work on the Hope Flowers Centre section of the site when I’m back in England. Without it, the new site cannot be launched.

There’s more. I need to visit Hebron and see various people around Bethlehem (but I’ll have to drop Jerusalem), to round out my relationships and activities with them. I also have guests coming to stay, here at the school – I don’t even know them. I need to sit down with Ibrahim and sort through several questions. And I must prepare myself for border controls, Amman, my flight, London and going to my parents. All in two weeks.

Step by step, Palden. Just do your best – that’s all you can do. You’ll manage. Have another cup of tea.

Today, after doing the grant application, I’m off into town to meet Adnan, to sort out the text of the small website I’m doing for him, to help him improve his trade. He runs a crafts and souvenir shop near the Church of the Nativity. Since the building of the separation wall between Jerusalem and Bethlehem seven years ago, tourism has collapsed.

The Israelis have organised it so that pilgrims to Bethlehem arrive in coaches from Jerusalem, are led into the church, then to refreshments, then to an approved souvenir shop, then they are taken back to Jerusalem. They are told that it’s dangerous to wander alone around Bethlehem, and that they’ll get ripped off. The truth is the opposite - it's far worse in Jerusalem than here.

The consequence is that visitors do not wander around Bethlehem, and many of the traders have lost business – Adnan amongst them. What the tourists aren’t told is that the ‘approved’ souvenir shops are more expensive, approved by dint of quiet profit-sharing deals made.

Adnan is seriously upset about this. Life was already hard. So I am making him a web-page to display his goods, to see if we can attract customers to order from abroad. Overseas trade is Adnan’s way out. But he himself is in a depressed state. He does his best, but he struggles day to day.

A few days ago I visited him and he was feeling down – he hadn’t had any sales at all for two days and he was broke. I engineered it so that I bought a dress from him for 200 shekels, and also gave him 200 shekels toward his son’s school uniform (a worry he had). He just lit up. It made his day. This guy has five children to feed.

This evening he’s taking me to his own village for a Ramadan feast. I hope the fact that I’m a vegetarian isn’t going to prove to be a problem. It vexes people, since saying no to their generosity (meat, in this case) is not quite proper. I explain it as a religious matter, which they can understand, even though it is really to me more a moral matter and a habit – I haven’t eaten meat for 40 years and my stomach doesn’t have the chemistry to deal with it.

If pushed, I explain that humans treat animals like Israelis treat Palestinians – and this really gets them. They suddenly understand what my moral qualms are. A while ago, one person said, with great honesty, “No, we treat animals worse”.

I shall be honoured to go to Adnan’s village. I shall be taking with me a new volunteer who is arriving at the school from England – Sahera, a British Muslim. I don’t know much about her, but we have connected well by e-mail, and I am taking responsibility for easing her in to Bethlehem and the school. She’s arriving today from Tel Aviv, where she has stayed a few days after arriving from Britain. This is her first visit to Bethlehem.

I know that, as a young British Muslim, this is going to be a significant pilgrimage for her. It’s a journey of the heart, a journey to give and to contribute, a journey made in the hope of making a positive difference. It comes from a deep place inside ourselves, a place of hope, faith and creativity.

The friction between the hope and the reality is profound, and I haven’t quite digested it yet, in my own case. I’m really not sure what difference I have made, though I am sure I’ve done something. Many things have not worked according to plan. In particular, I wanted to complete the Hope Flowers website, and it is two-thirds done. I came here during the summer vacation at the school in the hope that staff would have sufficient time to attend to their side of the website-building process – providing me with the necessary material and discussing the detailed PR issues involved. If you wish, you can have a sneak preview - but remember, it's not finished!

But Ibrahim and others were too busy and distracted with other things, and I have chiselled away at the matter on my own most of the time. There’s a pile of 20ish e-mails from me in Ibrahim’s inbox, listing all the things I need him to write, review, think about or provide me with. There came a stage a month ago where I realised he was shutting off from me, because each request increased the workload for him, and he was already overloaded.

This is the way of things here: it’s a perpetual process of crisis-management and ‘firefighting’, and anything that is not immediately urgent gets cast aside until it, too, becomes a crisis – but that comes later. It gets cast aside until later. And later is now, and I am leaving soon.

So I’m not sure how much value I have brought to my supporters back in England and USA, how much I can say I have completed, or what actually to give for an explanation. Before I leave I must write a report for those who have put in money for my trip. This is important, for I must raise more money for the next trip. Things have been achieved, but Westerners do love ‘closure’, results and completion. But there is no closure – many things are not yet done. I shall have to work on them back in England, just at the time when I’ll need to work on such irrelevancies as staying alive and dealing with British reality.

But I do know that the Palestinians here appreciate what I’ve been doing, and they would prefer if I stayed and became part of their landscape. I know that my presence has been valuable. They appreciate my constructive, steady, patient, realistic approach to things. I cause no trouble and bring mainly benefit. A while ago Ibrahim said that this made him feel doubly guilty for ignoring me, beset as he has been with other problems – he expected me to make him feel bad, but I don’t. There’s no point in making anyone feel bad.

There’s one matter I have not talked about much. This is mainly because people don’t want to believe it – they don’t think it’s quite real. I get a lot of silences over it. That is the psychic and spiritual work I have quietly been doing, not only with situations here in Palestine, but also with things and people in Britain (not least my mother in hospital) and world issues too. I’ve been doing this work for many years, quietly. To me, when I reach my own death and review my life, I think this will be one of the most effective things I have done.

I have thrown a protection around the school and the surrounding area – and this is one reason it has been necessary for me to stay here alone. My prayer is that the Israelis will not come to demolish the area, as they threatened in July. I’ve built up and reinforced this ‘exclusion zone’ for a half mile around the school, to keep the area intact and healthy for its people. Palden versus the Israeli army!

I’ve worked with individuals, doing remote healing work: Maram with her excruciating back-pain, Adnan with his worries, Jack’s mother with her grief, teachers with their concerns, my mother with her illness. I’ve worked with earth energies and the genius loci or ‘spirit of place’ around the school and in Manger Square in the centre of Bethlehem, and with opening the ancient energy-channels between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, closed by the wall and the polarisation of the conflict.

I’ve worked with the soul of the Palestinian people and the Israeli people. I’ve worked to infuse the psyches of both Palestinians and Israelis with the idea that they must look after their land far better, without taking for granted that it will support them and obey their every wish, whatever they do.

I’ve worked on the redemption of the shadow on this land of the Crusades. I’ve worked on Sri Lanka and the effects of the civil war there (not dissimilar in character to that of the conflict here), and on the heart of the ‘clash of civilisations’ between the West and the Muslim world.

I’ve been busy! But how can I write this into the concluding report of my visit to Palestine. Who will believe me? Or will this simply press their buttons, or prove to them that I’m a nutter unworthy of further support? I shall keep quiet about it, as I have done for many years, just beavering away at it myself, whether or not anyone cares. It’s the outcomes that matter.

It’s time to get going. Before doing so, I wish to thank you. I wish to thank you for being an audience to write to, and for your kind and thoughtful words of feedback. Your presence with me on this journey has made a big difference, imbuing it with an extra layer of purpose. You see, as a writer, it’s my readers that pull the material out of me, drawing out my creativity. It has been a pleasure sharing this journey with you, bringing to you insights into the situation here in Palestine.

I thank you for that and bow down to you – in the gracious and sacred way my Korean visitor a few weeks ago bowed to me each morning and evening in gratitude for giving her an anchorage and a place to stay, bless her. Thank you for being my readers. I hope this blog will become a book, and that a publisher will see fit to publish it. That’s another matter to attend to.

So, on for the day. I’ve got things to do.

The Enemy Within

I woke up this morning feeling lost in space. Where am I? Who am I? It took a while to get back into my body and orientate. Perhaps I’d been somewhere far away. Or perhaps I’m feeling unanchored. Perhaps I’m genuinely lost.

In two weeks’ time I leave Bethlehem. In some respects I’m sad about that, because I could quite happily make Bethlehem my home, and my work here is unfinished. In other respects I am glad to leave, because I long to see my loved ones and to do certain familiar things back in Britain – particularly stomping the cliffs of Cornwall with Suzy and having the space to talk with my soul.

There are some frustrating aspects of living in Palestine, which at times get to me and erode my patience and perspective – so it will be good to get some distance from those. Not least from the barking dogs around here, who sometimes go on all through the night – they don’t utter a word during the day!

Part of me is reluctant to return to Britain because I don’t see much of a future there – not a future that gives me a feeling of promise. In Britain I feel like a prophet unheard in his own country, and where I get far more asks than offers. This might change, but that’s the feeling I left Britain with in June, and I don’t yet have clues of anything that might change that. But who knows? Inshallah, this world is wondrous in its surprises.

One thing that slightly excites me is the book proposal I’ve just written. I’m submitting it to various publishers in the coming week. I’m turning this Middle East blog into a book and, if accepted for publication, I’ll be re-editing and adding to it in the next few months for completion by year-end. Authors always hope they’ll strike a mother-lode of interest and sales, and the hopes of most are dashed, but you never know – it’s worth a try.

When I reached this point in writing, my phone announced the arrival of a text from my brother in England. My aged mother is in hospital, and both parents need extra care – this has developed while I’ve been here in Bethlehem. My brother has been valiantly managing the situation. But he has a crunch coming up, with an important matter to attend to. So he asked if I could look after our parents as soon as I return.

Well, er, yes. I just needed a break, to acclimatise to Britain again and decompress from being in Palestine. But I guess that’s just got wiped out. Oh well. Of course I’ll look after my parents, but I’m concerned about going straight from one thing to another with no break.

Getting out of Israel is one of my forthcoming tests. When you leave, that’s when the interrogations happen. For this reason, I’m leaving Palestine two days early so that, if I have a problem leaving Israel, at least I don’t miss my plane from Amman to London. This is not uncommon for activist types like me – it’s a neat way they have of increasing your bills by a few hundred dollars, just to remind you what’s what around here. I’ll be rather relieved when I pass through the passport-control to enter Jordan.

There’s an innate tension here in Palestine because, although the West Bank is safe and friendly, access and departure is controlled by the Israeli occupiers, who regard almost everyone as a potential threat – especially if they have spent most of their time in the Palestinian Territories, which makes them instantly suspect. Yeah, me, a terrorist.

This is all to do with the tectonic grating between two mindsets or ‘memes’. One says “You’re with us or you’re against us” and the other says “We’re all in this boat together”. One presumes hostility and threat until proven otherwise, and the other presumes mutuality and friendship unless proven otherwise. It’s a global issue, but Israel suffers a big dose of the ‘with us or against us’ syndrome, and it’s only Jewish blood that really makes the difference.

That’s strange, really. I was today reading an interview with an Israeli, Dr Uri Davis, resident in East Jerusalem, who is married to a Muslim West Banker and has recently been elected to the Revolutionary Council of Fateh – its policy-making council. (I recommend reading the interview. Fateh, for newcomers, is the ruling party of Palestine, so Davis’ election, as a Jew, is both sensational and risky for him.) I wrote back to Keren Dar, who sent me the link, that I hope this man lives to see old age. Because, dedicated as he is to what he calls ‘anti-Zionism’, this man can be regarded as a traitor to the Jewish cause through his involvement with Fateh, so he risks standing in someone’s crosshairs.

This is the problem with ‘with us or against us’: mere suspicion implies guilt in the eyes of whoever is judging, and there is little defence once accused. Davis says, for example, that the only difference between South African and Israeli apartheid is that Israeli apartheid is better disguised. Israel claims to be the only true democracy in the Middle East (true for Jews) where the rule of law operates (true for Jews) – and the Western world duly believes it. Davis might get away with serving in Fateh – he is ‘of Jewish origin’, which places him within the Israeli concept of ‘us’, even though he’s now part of the government of ‘the enemy’.

This might be alright for now, but what happens if there’s a return to war, or even if the temperature simply rises and things polarise? He could be in for trouble. He’s a brave man. Interestingly, he is greatly respected in Palestine since, here, people don’t care whether or not you’re Jewish – what matters to them is that you’re a ‘good person’.

There’s a lot of talk about ‘peace processes’ and ‘progress in talks’ reported in the media right now but, in my assessment, this is a deception. Whether or not it is deliberate I cannot say. But the issue is that, as we speak, warlike acts are being committed today. Guns aren’t firing, but land is being taken, an occupying force is consolidating its iron grip, people are being chucked out of their homes, teenagers are getting arrested in the middle of the night, Palestinian public figures are being assassinated and – here’s the latest – foreign visitors’ visas are now being stamped with visas for Israel only or Palestine only, so that, from now on, it will be difficult or impossible to visit both.

C’mon Israel, is Palestine part of Israel or not? All of these things have been in the news in the last two weeks. I don’t call that a ‘peace process’ or ‘confidence-building measures’ – I call that a mounting pile of precursors to the next outbreak of conflict. So, are Westerners’ hopes of peace vain? Are they deluding themselves, being lulled into false hopes or chanting the wrong incantations?

For an Israel visa, one just turns up at the border and receives a three-month stay, but for a new Palestinian visa pre-application will now be necessary. The Israelis haven’t even announced it – they simply started doing it, just after I entered the country. They hoped, presumably, that the international media wouldn’t get hold of the news – and most have not reported it. This measure is of course rationalised by Israel as protection against security risks. Yeah, Christian pilgrims to Bethlehem, most of them old ladies – a serious security risk. Yeah, people who are tourists or who have genuine and legitimate friends, contacts and business both in Palestine and Israel.

Apparently, people landing at Ben Gurion airport (Tel Aviv) to travel to the West Bank are getting sent back to where they came from, required to fly at extra expense to Amman and enter Palestine across the King Hussein Bridge from Jordan. What a wonderful way to stimulate good relations and the tourist trade! Even visitors to Palestine bring profit to Israel, since all trade passes through Israel using the Israeli currency – so this measure is rather counterproductive to Israel.

Yes, the Israeli currency Palestinians must use, shekels, has pictures of Jewish heroes and public figures on the back. If that were the British Queen or the Duke of Wellington, people would soon shout out “colonialism!” – even Americans would do it. But not here. This is a special case.

In a recent blog I pointed out how Israel shoots itself in the foot and scores many own-goals, and this is another example. (Later, I'll write about how Palestine also shoots itself in the foot.) For every one person who might conceivably be a security-risk to Israel, a hundred will be inconvenienced by this visa measure.

But that’s what Israel wants: it wants foreign visitors to stop visiting Palestine, friend or foe. It wants to suppress and control every aspect of Palestine’s interactions with the outside world. So that the world doesn’t know what’s going on. In doing so, as a side-effect it discourages friendship and support for Israel itself, and whatever benefit it gains from the measure costs much more in loss. Is that ‘acting in the national interest’?

By keeping itself on a constant war-footing, Israel justifies itself in maintaining its ‘with us or against us’ mindset in which everyone who isn’t Israeli or Jewish is a potential risk to the nation. The problem with this is that, sooner or later, someone gets angry with it, at the sheer frustration of it, all because of suspicion and feelings of insecurity projected at them. Individuals like me hardly matter, officially, but when it gets bigger, there’s trouble, even war – and also, the small individuals like me number hundreds of thousands.

This is where Israel creates a self-undoing loop, where its belief that everyone is against it is so strong that people do turn against it. Israel believes it is a special case, where normal rules don’t apply. But ‘exceptionalism’ charges a high price. Even the great United States has realised this in recent years.

I support Palestine and I support Israel, each for their own reasons. Both have a legitimate case, and there is a just solution to their differences, however existential these differences may be. The biggest risks to both are not actually war, but water-shortage, toxicity, public health issues, isolation and a kind of mental illness of a nation.

So, before crossing the King Hussein Bridge, I’m going to prepare myself so that my aura is clear, the angels are with me and hopefully I create no hassle. Or if there is a hassle (more than the back-breakingly long wait), I intend to have the calm patience to respond in a good way. For the truth is, I’ve been consorting with ‘the enemy’. Worse, the pen is, in the end, mightier than the sword. Does that make me an enemy of Israel? Does the state of Israel want me to be an 'enemy'?

I’ll be returning to England and to no break, so it will be a keen exercise in managing my energy and coping with a constant stream of challenges. I’m looking forward to walking those cliffs of Cornwall and restoring myself, but perhaps that comes later. Or perhaps it’s just my own paradox: after all, being with and looking after my parents is no problem.

It’s my 59th birthday on 5th September. On that day, I’m off-duty, okay? Dutiful Virgo or not, I’m unavailable for responsibilities, whatever anyone says!

That said, God bless my dutiful Capricornian brother Paul, and what he’s doing to keep our family intact. God bless my parents too: they were born during WW1 and they’re still here, five historical periods later.

If I live to be their age, the date will be 2043. My aim is to hit the armchair and retire at 85 - in 2035 - if I last that long, inshallah. Until then, there’s stuff to do. With an attitude like that, it’s no wonder I’ve manifested no break.

A Monday, and it's Ramadan

The phone was ringing. I had been up working late. I staggered out sleepily to get the phone. It was Ibrahim, announcing that the women’s empowerment course was starting at the Hope Flowers centre in half an hour. I had forgotten about this – it was one of those arrangements that didn’t happen a month ago when it should have done, so it had been pushed to the side of my mind, crowded out by other things.

Then, the rub. Ibrahim was busy and couldn’t take me. Now this wasn’t just about a lift – it concerned a proper introduction and explanation for the women on the course. I had explained this to Ibrahim ages ago: I needed one of the key people in the school to introduce me to the women and translate for me, as I explained to them why I needed the photos. By hearing the sound of my voice, the women would be convinced – I knew it. If not, I wouldn’t get the photos.

Problem is, many of the disadvantaged people of Palestine are also politically ‘persons of interest’ to security services, either Israeli or Palestinian, for different reasons – this is part of the reason why they are poorer. But also, poorer people tend to support Hamas, the social reform party, or other radical leftist or religious groups, and these are currently out of favour with the ruling Fateh regime. Palestine isn’t exactly a dictatorship or a classic one-party state, but it has dangers of becoming so – though Fateh has a benign side.

Also, a proportion of religious people don’t like being photographed – and Ramadan has just started. This is why I needed this photographic session set up properly. I needed to explain that the photos are not just a case of the usual old Western photographic money-grabbing prurience or of intelligence-gathering for the authorities, but that they are necessary for Hope Flowers and its work. Without these photos we cannot raise money to support these courses. Now this isn’t the usual marketing for fundraising either – the photos, explanations and budget spreadsheets one endlessly provides organisations during the fund-scrabbling process.

In this case, the people funding these women’s empowerment courses are Quakers in UK with a genuinely enlightened, personal interest. They are interested in the course and its true value to Muslim women, and they fund it because they believe Hope Flowers is doing a good thing. So they need photos and a report from me, to inform them, as humans, how it’s going. I’m happy to do it – this is one reason I am here, to bring Palestinian reality to people in the West, and to help facilitate support from the West.

Not quite so easy. I do now have some explanations to provide for the funding trust. The course should have started earlier – so what has happened? They need to know. Here we come to a classic Palestine problem, with a few interlocking pressures applying. The first is that the course is Western-funded. Although the funding source is in this case quite enlightened and understanding, they still need reports and photos – it keeps them on board, giving them a feeling that something good is happening with the five-figure sums they have given. Perfectly reasonable from a Western viewpoint.

But things don’t quite go according to plan here. This reflects three other issues.

The first is that disadvantaged women here often need some persuasion that such a course will actually bring them some benefit. They need sufficient persuasion to convince them to prioritise it. They are accustomed to being let down and lied to, told what to think by people in suits and uniforms, shepherded around on things that cost money, and dumped at the end – so they don’t necessarily take these things too seriously.

With these streetwise ladies, the proof lies in the pudding, but you’ve got to get them to the course first, to show them that it’s worthwhile, to overcome their natural scepticism. This can be problematic, and there have been some false starts where, in a course for 25 participants, six turned up. Hence the delay in starting the course.

The third issue was selection and self-selection. Hope Flowers had asked UNRWA to select a group of women for the course, but the UNRWA officials were unclear about Hope Flowers’ genuine intentions to help and empower women. Many of the women they thus selected were of the go-getting kind, who already had education and wanted self-improvement, particularly computer training. These are the ones who get ahead in Palestinian society, and they are specifically the kind that Hope Flowers is not seeking. Hope Flowers seeks those women, especially from refugee camps, who in the ‘sink areas’ of Palestinian society – amongst the people who, for whatever reason, not least a large family of children, cannot or do not help themselves.

Here lies a social divide in Palestine, which applies also to most developing countries. There are those who have set themselves on material self-improvement, and those who stay in the traditional mould. It’s not that the latter are wrong, for self-improvement involves releasing many of the securities and ways of the large family and the community – it involves striking out on your own. This is a matter of confidence, encouragement and momentum, perhaps some money and certainly a wish to make an extra effort. It also concerns perceptions: some people genuinely believe that staying in their peer group is better and safer – and in many cases it is.

Refugees and the dispossessed have bonded with one another in ways that people living modern lifestyles have lost or rejected. They stick together, raising the quality of life and the level of everyone’s collective security when there is little else to rely on. They focus on raising a large family, which itself becomes a security, operational system and a pension-provider of its own. Or they tend their crops or herds, or play their part in their community, which itself is a security mechanism.

Then there’s UNRWA. Thanks to the world recession, where propping up banks is held to be more important than propping up people – who should of course look after themselves – the staff at UNRWA in Bethlehem has been cut, to economise. It’s the money-boys at HQ who determine this – the salaries fund must, of course, be reserved particularly for the executives, administrators and security guards, and the social workers, teachers and nurses get the chop.

The Americans and Europeans demand this – they give it names such as ‘accountability’, ‘transparency’, efficiency’ and ‘delivery’. You have to keep those who inspect, verify and report on the staff, otherwise the funding will be withdrawn. It is secondary that the staff who do the real business, and the aid projects themselves, continue to exist or not, as long as the right people are there to file the reports and accounts.

The outcome of this is that the overworked UNRWA social workers, detailed with selecting participants from the course, didn’t have time for the meeting with Hope Flowers, didn’t read the specifications and took shortcuts. So they selected women who weren’t right for the course. This led to many weeks’ delay, as women were personally ferreted out by members of Hope Flowers, through their contacts.

So the upshot was that the course was delayed in starting, I didn’t have the necessary photos, and the report I am to write for the fund-providers in UK is delayed. Everything is backed up and delayed. But today a course was starting. So I had my breakfast, got ready, got my equipment together, phoned Khaled the taxi-man to take me to the centre in town, and at last arrived, thinking I was late.

People were milling around. Nothing had started. Maram Issa, the organiser, Ibrahim’s wife, was looking flustered – many of the women had not come. It’s Ramadan, during which Muslims fast from dawn to dusk, and people are taking it easier than usual. I don’t blame them, since Palestinians are busy from dawn till night, and they put Europeans to shame with their work, family lives and full-on living. Not only were many women not there, but those women who were didn’t want to be photographed. “Sorry, Balden, I ring you another day”, says Maram.

Okay. This is Palestine, inshallah – here’s another exercise in acceptance. Except it’s getting urgent – I’m leaving before long, and I need the stuff. So I sat down at a desk to use my time productively, working on my computer. Secret number one: don’t let these things get you down. Plans and arrangements? Well, they must be flexible. I settled into other work.

Suddenly Maram comes into the office. More women have come – and it’s okay to take photos. Ah, right. Off I go, camera slung on shoulder. An explanation is given to the women. This time I get the nod from them – even some warm smiles. After all, Palestinians are emotionally very intelligent, and they can spot a genuine person from a mile’s distance – but they still required the explanation from Maram. They took her assurances well, scanned me for my humanity, and gave me the nod.

So I then lurk in the back of the room, waiting for the right shots to emerge. I’m the subject of rapt attention from the five young children who have come with their mothers – this Westerner with his big camera that makes such a seductive noise when he presses the button, and with all sorts of other buttons to press and things to twist and fiddle with.

Eventually I get my photos and sneak out to continue writing. Later, Maram comes to tell me even more women have arrived. I go in again and the course is at last in full swing. The women are visibly enjoying it, asking questions and making points, sitting on the edge of their seats – not a yawn or a sullen look in sight. The lecturer is enjoying himself. The women aren’t used to this: this course is actually interesting and relevant to them. They’re not being lectured at. We have lift-off. The feeling is palpable.

When the word goes around, these course will be flooded with applicants. It’s just that this is new stuff, and it has to overcome the scepticism barrier. Once Hope Flowers has a quorum of satisfied customers, and once their friends and neighbours see what’s happening to the women, they’ll want to join too.

What are the women learning? Well, it’s knowledge about improving one’s life, about running a small business, working in cooperatives, about craft standards, food hygiene, money-management, computer use, finding your market, dealing with family issues, talking over the questions involved with changing one’s life.

Not least, it involves personal counselling and sharing groups: these women have had a hard life, and they have been brought up in tough circumstances where rights, opportunities and progress are seen to be things that happen to other people only. Their husbands and brothers have been carted off, they’ve had little education, they have parents and children to look after and hassles to face.

They’re poor. They survive, with an acceptable small-scale life, but they have none of the advantages or surpluses that stimulate progress, and their willpower needs encouragement. That’s why Hope Flowers runs these courses, and why a Quaker trust in UK chooses to finance them – this way, conflict is transformed and genuine human development set in motion.

For me, another lesson. Today I was going to be slaving at the computer over a grant application. But I was hauled off on another mission which turned out to be a false alarm. So I did something else – no panic. Then it worked out after all. Such is the way of things. Take each day as it comes, Palden.

I don’t feel like going back to the school to do the grant application – the right day will come for that, inshallah. You do have to be patient and persevering in Palestine.

The women later emerged for a break. There was much excited chattering in the hallway of the centre. I feel privileged to sit at the desk, with half an ear listening to the tones of their voices. This course is lighting them up. This is frontline stuff. I’m happy to be here, playing a part in it. This is what I came for.

Proportionality

It might be an instance where Israel needs to practice a little humility. I’m referring again to the spat of venom that has arisen between Israel and Sweden, over Swedish newspaper allegations of Israeli army trading in transplant organs extracted from dead Palestinians.

You see, Israel needs Sweden more than Sweden needs Israel, but it doesn’t want to recognise it. To close IKEA in Israel, as Netanyahu threatened, would cause IKEA to rise in the esteem of millions of consumers worldwide – an own-goal for Israel, little loss for IKEA. Israeli politicians need to learn the consequences of throwing their weight around: Israel is a small country, and its people pay a price for this bombast.

So a Swedish tabloid newspaper struck a nerve. There has been little mention in Israel of the actual allegations themselves, and whether the government will transparently investigate their possible factuality. There has just been affront at the very expression of the allegations, whether or not they are true. The accusations thrown back at Sweden by Lieberman, the foreign minister, and Netanyahu, the prime minister, have been pretty heinous and offensive as well – overkill. They’re behaving like snarling dogs.

This resentful reaction exposes the nation of Israel: if Israel is reacting this way, it must have something to hide – this is the subconscious conclusion many people will form. By levelling ‘anti-Semitism’ at Sweden, it weakens the very notion of ‘anti-Semitism’. In the eyes of much of the world, such a strong judgement needs reserving for genuine, incontrovertible cases, otherwise such cases will receive little justice. Israel is here seen to be crying ‘wolf’, but Sweden is no wolf, it’s a sledge-pulling husky-dog – if anything, reliable, perceptive, knows its way around, and susceptible to occasionally digging holes in the snow.

There are two different things: anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli feelings, and conflating and confusing them is ultimately to Israelis’ loss. Feeling unfairly treated still does not remove the possibility that there might indeed have been organ-harvesting going on in the Israeli army over a number of years – it needs serious investigation.

This fuss has probably stopped the trade though. So something is achieved. But Israel doesn’t only lose fairweather friends over matters like this, it also embarrasses its allies like the Americans. Americans have recently had Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, so they can imagine things like organ-harvesting happening in Israel. If it happens in America, it can happen in Israel.

It’s difficult, this. Eruptions like this need to calm down before they damage too much. If there are truths to be spoken, they need not come in the form of accusations and angry responses. This betrays something deeper on both sides, a clash of two countries with contrasting ethics and views.

In their deeper national culture, each of these two countries feels confident in its own rightness and exceptionalism: Sweden is quietly right and Israel assertively right, in their national demeanours. Sweden looks on itself as the haven of justice, good sense and humanism, and Israel sees itself as the embodiment of Jewish entitlement to Jewish rights. Neither of them can quite own up to this self-certainty. So they have accidentally locked horns.

From the Swedish viewpoint it is of course correct that such a matter as organ harvesting needs investigation. This conforms with Swedes’ sense of justice and uniform application of law and system, internationally. From an Israeli viewpoint, whatever the veracity of the claim, how dare another country snoop into Israel’s affairs and pass judgements – we must teach these Swedes a lesson.

Both nations are embedded in different senses of rightness which, in this instance, have clashed – almost accidentally. But it was an accident waiting to happen. So let's no see how each of them climbs out of the hole they've fallen in.

Except there’s a problem. Israel needs Sweden more than Sweden needs Israel. There are probably more resident Jews in Sweden than Swedes in Israel. There will be more people worldwide cheering for Sweden than for Israel. This cheering is not anti-Semitism: it is an expression of people’s views about what Israel has done, recently and for a long time. Such views would be expressed in regard to any country, Jewish or not. Many Israelis have grave reservations about this too, but most of them don’t feel they can do much about it.

So some basic issues have been conflated with bigger issues. In the last 20 years in Europe, a picture has been building up of Israel being barbaric and insensitive, militarily in particular. So the organ-harvesting allegation fitted that one nicely.

Then some Israelis have residual feelings about what happened in Europe 60-80 years ago: the Swedish saga in WW2 is something Swedes prefer not to talk about – they turned away many Jews seeking refuge, in order to avoid trouble with Hitler. Yet one of Sweden’s national heroes from WW2, Raoul Wallenberg, was one of the greater Jew-rescuers of history. So there’s a lot of conflicting stuff here that has been stirred up.

Swedes are often slow to respond, with the haste of a lumbering old elk, but they will indeed look at the issues Israel’s angry politicians have shouted out about. Great ruminators, Swedes are. They might have their quiet prejudices, but they’re one of this world’s least troublesome peoples. Much less troublesome than Brits or Israelis.

But it’s an open question whether Israelis will look at what has been thrown at them from the Nordic direction. To bluster back rather than acknowledge one’s errors might cover one’s tracks in the short term, but people get wise to it. It just so happens that Sweden holds the rotating presidency of the EU at present, so this flurry could easily be conflated with wider European issues. Ooops.

Here Israel gets big for its boots. Europe has 370 million people and Israel has 5 million Jewish Israelis. The one million Israeli Arabs just keep their heads down, with no say in foreign policy, and today’s government in Israel seems to be inclined toward racial purification and exclusion, so non-Jewish citizens seem to count as only half-citizens in Israel.

There’s a difference of scale here. Ireland, Hungary and Finland, with similar populations to that of Israel, themselves experience this within Europe. It means you need to play your cards carefully to get noticed, get your way and avoid getting crushed by a slight shift in the bigger partner’s position. If the big neighbour farts, you can get blown away, hardly noticed.

Israel’s doggedness served it well during its earlier struggle for survival, from the 1940s to the 1970s. But it fails to notice that the struggle has died down and the landscape has changed. Time has moved on and people worldwide, including the Arabs, are now accepting things they once didn’t. At times, in such a climate, it is best to be flexible or to step back rather than lash out, going on defensive attack – this isn’t a war situation, and Sweden is not setting out to crush Israel as Israel seems to feel.

So, some possible truth leaked out in a far-off place? There are other ways to deal with this – not least to serve one’s own best interests.

This is where Israel shoots itself in the foot. Whatever legitimacy there was to Israel’s attacks on South Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2009, its case was lost through overkill and ‘disproportionality’. Whatever its case for continuing to build settlements in the West Bank, the sumtotal of what Israel has done to Palestinians over the years has morally outweighed this case. In trying to force issues, Israel undermines its longterm, wider interests, risking a fate worse than war. It risks the prospect of simply being shunned and isolated, regarded as an awkward pain in the ass.

A more friendly, cooperative and less strident Israel is what the world needs of it. Things can be done another way. My own country, Britain, found this out over the last 50 years. It lost its greatness and its empire, and it has at times risked isolation by pushing its point too hard, by punching above its weight. But we get knocked into shape and we’ve learned the value of pulling back when necessary. Our great army is even getting licked by a bunch of cheeky Afghans. But there’s one difference between Britain and Israel: Britain is bigger, with more real-life muscle and weight. But we also have learned to recognise when other guys are bigger than us – we kowtow to China nowadays, when a century ago we tried taking her over.

There are advantages to being nicer in one’s behaviour. People like you, they do you favours, they think leniently of you. If they’re bigger than you, this matters – they can exert a squelching influence on your fate. So some realism is needed. When people build up feeling about someone else, it’s often because they are not feeling heard. In this case, the organ-trading allegation reflects a Nordic, European popular feeling that its messages to Israel are not being heard. So perhaps the Swedes are a good sparring partner for Israel to have a fight with – because, whatever their faults, they’re pretty reasonable, and they generally don’t throw bombs around without thinking carefully first.

Israel needs to step back here, and Sweden to stand up. This would create helpful dialogue, not a winning or a losing. Israelis and Swedes need and like each other, actually, and they have things to teach each other. But Israel should remember that Sweden has a lot of what Israel needs. It needs Sweden’s friendship. This is where Israel fails to act in its own best interests. This is where a big wave is stacking up against Israel – prevented from breaking because Israelis react so vigorously, so snarlingly. They go to war too easily, destroying their own best interest in the process.

Another Jew-rescuer of history, the medieval Kurdish sultan Saladin, used to say that every drop of blood spilled charges a price. Perhaps he ought to mediate here. This is a ‘soft power’ issue, and Swedish fighter jets aren’t bad, but they don’t use them much. They have plenty of soft power. It’s soft power which decides things in the 21st Century, and Israelis would do well to get wise to it. For this is the age of majorities, and at least five Chinese cities have bigger populations than the whole of Israel.