My neighbour’s fourteen year old daughter had written a pretty good letter to me in English, asking me to give her a hundred shekels (£20) so that she could go on a school trip to visit the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, and then to Tel Aviv and Haifa. It was her first trip into Israel, and I knew it would be important to her. So I agreed to support her – she and I have been friends for six years and I have watched her growing up. She has spark and potential.
But I needed Aisha to help me explain that I’m not a rich Westerner, and they can’t lean on me repeatedly. This is a delicate matter and important to communicate: it’s common for Palestinians to assume that Westerners are all rich when, in fact, those of us who come to Palestine are toward the lower-middle end of the Western income spectrum. If Palestinians sting us for money we’re less likely to return. In the end it is more important to return than to blow money around, since the best gifts we can bring are psycho-social, not financial – and it’s important not to reinforce a culture of dependency amongst Palestinians.
It’s also important to divest Palestinians of the idea that most Westerners are rich and free or that we’re some sort of superior race. Conversely, it’s important to divest Westerners of the stereotype of ‘the suffering Palestinians’. Some Palestinians do suffer immensely, but the majority are kinda middly – life has its hard aspects but it is generally manageable. In fact, life is harder in Egypt than here in Palestine, economically. This said, Palestinian GNP is at the same level as it was in 1999, thanks to the effects of the intifada of 2000-2004, the building of the separation wall from 2002 onwards and other throttling devices applied to them by the Israelis and Western countries, Britain included.
Some Westerners are shocked to see my photos, showing amply-built houses, streets dense with cars and well-stocked shops, with real people doing ordinary things – where’s the war and suffering? They’re surprised to learn that Palestinians are one of the world’s most highly-qualified ethnic groups. Sure, an average employed Brit might earn £25,000 per year, which sounds like a lot of money, but such people aren’t necessarily rich and fat – they’re chained to a treadmill of payments, taxes, rising prices, debt and keeping hungry corporate executives and shareholders alive. Richer, yes, but members of the Palestinian elite, mainly around Ramallah, are financially better off than most Brits.
There are poor Palestinians who do have a hard time, there’s no social welfare system and the Israeli occupation does have oppressive effects, especially for some people in some areas. The oppression is mainly psychological: the experience of being controlled by another nation, with its soldiers, obstructive bureaucrats, walls, checkpoints and the sheer inconveniences involved in living here are what are most degrading. Yet, paradoxically, depression is more common in Britain than here.
So my young friend is now able to go to Al Aqsa and Israel next week. That’s good. Aisha and I stopped at their house and had the customary tea with them – and I was given some home-made flat-bread, a wonderful gift. We chatted. Through Aisha I was able to ask a question I had wanted to ask for a long time: here was a mother with four children, but what had happened to their father? I had never seen him.
It turned out he was upstairs. Some years ago he was imprisoned by the Israelis and, while in jail, he was obliged to wear the same clothes all the time and was disallowed even from washing for over a year. As a result he has skin diseases which have not gone away after nearly ten years. This prevents him from working and gives him a lot of agony and shame – he is marked for life. He has probably lost his self-esteem too. This family is poor, subsisting on the meagre earnings of the mother who, amongst other things, is the cleaner at Hope Flowers School. A bright personality, she buzzes around the school doing her cleaning. But life is tough for them.
So, despite what I wrote above, life for many Palestinians isn’t easy. Even those who are better off often have painful stories to tell. These people are traumatised. But the good news is – and his is what I like about being here – that they seem to deal with it quite well. They have the right attitude. Unlike people in the West, Palestinians know and acknowledge that they have a problem, and they do what they can to overcome both the problem and the psychology of resignation and depression. In the West there is still a lot of collective self-delusion and denial going on.
A couple of days ago I looked out of the window and, on a neighbouring house, there was a rather large, elegant flag flying. I looked at it, wondering if this was something about Palestine that I didn’t know about – do they have another flag that means something special to them? The Palestinian flag is quite a good one, but this one had genuine panache. Eventually, today, I found out. I asked a young boy, Mahmoud, the son of the family we had visited, who comes out to see me every time I walk past. He told me it’s the flag of Barcelona football club. Oh well. Palestinian men are football crazy. When they hear I grew up in Liverpool, they assume I must be a great footballer. Well, I can manage a few tricks – the standards were high where I grew up – but frankly football does not interest me. They can’t understand this. I seem to be a heretic in more ways than I originally thought.
There are lots of things they don’t understand about me. For example, that I’m a man who is perfectly capable of running a house, washing my clothes and feeding myself – to them, this is weird. There have been times when I’ve done the washing up and almost offended the lady of the house. But hang on, it’s good for me to do this – it’s a way of grounding myself. I wear quite colourful clothes too. The most incomprehensible thing is that I’m a vegetarian – and I’m still alive! Last June I was thrown out of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron because I was silently meditating in a corner. Do I say prayers to Allah? No, I simply work on mindfulness and reverence, to me, is a state of inner quietness where the still small voice may be heard.
But recently I’ve been a bit frustrated too. I’ve wanted to buy a few clothes, but men wear really boring Western clothing here, and there’s nothing available that suits me. The less-modern women, on the other hand, wear lovely dresses which are embroidered, colourful and graceful. I decided to come out with it to a shopkeeper I know, who sells such dresses. He smiled, thought for a moment and then rummaged around in the back, emerging with a lovely man’s waistcoat, embroidered all over, looking proud as punch.
Well, that was a step in the right direction. I told him what I was really looking for, a warm jacket to replace a lovely felted Tibetan jacket which after many years I have worn almost to shreds. So we arranged to meet up on Monday and he will take me to a lady dressmaker to get measured up and have a bespoke job done for me. Fingers crossed that it’s going to be alright. This might cost me a bit, but hopefully I might get my dream jacket. It will give her some work too, and he’ll no doubt collect his cut.
Then there was the taxi-driver who drove Aisha and me back from town. He picked me up at Manger Square, the centre of the Old Town of Bethlehem. It’s getting festooned with lights and Christmas paraphernalia right now. He was really unhappy about it. A big Christmas tree has been erected in the square, decorated with gaudily flashing lights, which apparently cost $70,000. It was paid for, I understand, by donors from Italy. The old taxi driver remonstrated about this at length, just about missing other cars as he waved his arms around. He has quite good English, having been born during the last years of the British Mandate, which ended in 1948.
What angered him was that Westerners can be really generous with dramatic gestures like the Christmas tree but, he said, look at the holes in the road and the dark places round Bethlehem where there’s no street lighting! As if to prove his point, he had to swerve to dodge a dead cat in the middle of the road. Indeed, he’s right. This big-gesture generosity sadly pleases Italians more than Bethlehemites.
We went to the Hope Flowers Centre in Deheisheh to pick up Aisha after her English class. She introduced me to her two star students, one from Hebron and the other from Yatta, just south of Hebron. Suddenly these guys had struck the jackpot: they had two well-spoken English in their midst, and launched into a discussion in English. Well, for a while. The taximan was waiting outside, smoking and still fuming about the Christmas tree.
“Wanna go in the front?”, I said to Aisha, when we came out and approached the taxi. “Better not”, she said. “It’ll be too weird for the taxi-driver having me in front and you in the back.” So, in true Palestinian chauvinist style, I sat in the front. Aisha calmed the taximan down by chattering to him in Arabic. She’s Gemini and very good at it. It’s going to take me a while to get to her stage – I’m still trying to decipher syllables and words, and the problem is that Palestinians jabber at great speed, and only some of them enunciate their Arabic clearly enough for an ignoramus like me to disentangle. Looks like Aisha is coming to Bethlehem not only to teach English at the Centre, but also to explain Arabic nuances to me. I’ll probably have a load of notes and questions for her when she comes next week.
She explained one problem I had had earlier in the day. I had gone to an Arabic perfume shop, looking for rose-scented oils to take home. They’re useful small gifts for the various ladyfolk in my life. The man didn’t understand what I sought, so he hauled in another guy who spoke passable English. They kept on giving me a variety of scents to try, some of which were lovely, but they weren’t rose. Eventually they got fed up with me and I beat a retreat – this is tricky, because they expect you to buy something if you enter a shop. Later, Aisha told me that the word for ‘rose’ is the same as the word for ‘flower’ – anglicised, it’s warrd (with a hard, trilled ‘r’). Aha. But I still haven’t quite figured out how to convey that I want rose, not flowers. Well, this is not the greatest of challenges life can throw my way.
I learn a new word or phrase and then my rusting brains forget it within an hour. But somehow there is an absorption process going on, and one day I might start uttering Arabic intelligibly. At present I’m reluctant. If, for example, someone says keif halak? (how are you?) and I answer hamdulillah (thanks be to God, or ‘fine thanks’) they immediately start rabbiting at me as if I am fluent, and I don’t even yet know how to say ‘I don’t speak Arabic’. Is it possible to have an intravenous injection of Arabic? Or perhaps I could install an Arabic flash-drive behind my left ear. Well, the great patriarch Abraham didn’t speak Arabic either, so perhaps it’s alright.
Olive-wood carvers in Bethlehem
