Palden in the Middle East: Inshallah - if, that is, it is the Will of God

Night falls over Al Khader and, apart from the howling of a distant dog, all is quiet. The calling to prayers sounded out as the sun was setting, coming from at least five different mosques and clashing rather badly, but you get used to that, and I hope Allah has done so too.

I don’t know what proportion of Palestinians actually go to the mosque for prayer, but I’d guess it to be 20% or so around here. Yet it’s a salutary thing, this matter of prayer, five times each day – it represents a pause in life, an alignment to something higher and greater than ourselves. Busy Westerners, even if secular, might do well to incorporate something like this into our own lives. It changes the subject and reminds us of a dimension of issues beyond our own little lives.

I find myself observing the prayer times too. I use the moment to pause, clear my psyche and reorientate to the next chapter of the day. The timings of the calling to prayers break up the day into practical segments – times for work, for family and community and for rest. This is important here because Palestinian lifestyles are pretty frenetic. It also adds some order to an otherwise rather disorderly life.

This disorder has two main components. The first is the ‘earth energy’ and situation of this Holy Land – it’s an energetic place, lying at a fulcrum-point of the Old World, between Asia, Africa and Europe, and a crossing-point, a meeting-point for people over many millennia. When, as we are told by anthropologists, humankind moved out of Africa, they came this way. The second is the fact that Palestine is an occupied country. The effects of this are not as marked as they were about 7-10 years ago during the second intifada, but they are still here. The effects of occupation take two main forms, external and internal.

Two bored young Israelis doing their army-slavery at Gilo checkpoint

The external effects used to involve roadblocks and checkpoints, troop incursions, administrative controls and other forms of mayhem imposed by the Israelis. These have lightened up considerably, thanks mainly to international pressures, but they still have their impact. I have written elsewhere how, for example, getting from Bethlehem to Ramallah, once a 25km trip through East Jerusalem, is now an 80km trip circumnavigating Jerusalem, up and down and across quite dramatic landscape. Most official impositions are by now quite settled and predictable – when you go through many checkpoints, the soldiers are quite bored, performing but cursory searches and checks, and there is no longer much delay. If you want to build a house outside Areas A and B, the chances of getting permission are random and few. If you are the President of the Palestine Authority, you don’t even know whether the due tax receipts, collected by the Israelis, will be delivered, so that you can pay people’s wages.

But there are unofficial impositions too, and one form of these is increasing – settler incursions and attacks. We had one in our area last week – I was away at the time, up in Al Aqaba. But I did notice an unusual group of hikers that morning before leaving, as reported in an earlier blog – perhaps they were connected. Some 200 armed settlers, apparently from Efrat, got into the area just down the hill from the school toward Al Khader, around Solomon’s Pools. They were claiming that Solomon’s Pools – a major local water-source already tapped by the Israelis – should be under Jewish control. They claim that the name refers to King Solomon. It doesn’t. It refers to the Ottoman Turkish invader of this area in the 1500s, called Suleiman (Solomon) the Magnificent, a great monarch living at the time of Elizabeth I in England. An engineer, he brought about many great works as a way of consolidating the Ottoman empire, and he rebuilt the pools just down the hill in Al Khader. The water-source was first built during Roman times, but not in Solomon’s time.

The settler invasion last week was not very important – most locals just shrug their shoulders and look heavenwards. However, back in 2007 some settlers invaded and burned down the 700-year old and biggest mosque in Al Khader – a serious intentional damage to local society. But the recent incursion is ominous inasmuch as it announces future trouble – and the more extremist settlers in the West Bank indeed are building themselves up to create more trouble, not only for Palestinians but also for Israel.

They are increasingly defying the state of Israel. This has been permitted thus far because the initiatives of settlers are a useful way in which right-wing Israeli interests have been able to promote their agenda of extending Israel into the West Bank, through exploiting the proxy activities of settlers. But settlers are now beginning to fight Israel and its soldiers, to impose their ways on Israelis and to cause trouble which, bizarrely, is getting to be more of a threat to Israel than to Palestine.

The settlers left after making their point, but we expect them to return. If they return and the Palestinians in Al Khader – normally a very peaceful place – start resisting them, the Israeli army will come in and start firing at the Palestinians. Well, that’s what has usually happened to date, but something funny is happening. As I mentioned in a previous blog the Israel Defence Force is now being reduced to the dubious role of being a defender of Palestinians against Israeli settler incursions. This means that, although Israeli soldiers are unlikely to fire on settlers, they certainly want to stop the settlers from carrying out incendiary actions against Palestinians, because it is upsetting the apple-cart.

Israel has realised that it is scuppering its own chances by generating bad PR. It did this in 2006 with its war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, against Hamas in Gaza in 2009-10 and in its stupid over-response to the Freedom Flotilla in 2010, driving ordinary people worldwide against them and causing diplomatic pressure from the wider world. It nearly got dangerous. Now this: Israeli extremists carrying out ‘price tag’ attacks on Palestinians, establishing new settler outposts where they shouldn’t be, and even fighting the Israeli army. The settlers are bad PR for Israel – especially since the Palestinians are doing nothing to upset anyone. International diplomats and jurists are thereby realising at last that it is the Israelis, not the Palestinians, who are the main obstacle to peace.

Yes, we have real shops and real shopping here in Palestine
- hardly any corporate crap or hypermarkets in sight,
though lots of cheap'n'Chinese stuff

What’s worse is this. There are many centrifugal forces in Israel – it is not a united country and, being a young country (just 63 years old), its population’s basic consensus is weak. So it has to build a consensus by artificial means. Israelis come from many different countries – when I visited Tel Aviv earlier this week, I was amongst Jews of Romanian origin – the main sources being America, Russia and various European countries, together with Middle Eastern and Maghrebi Jews, as well as the small population of Jews who always lived in Palestine. Israelis also have a wide range of beliefs: there are various kinds of orthodox and ultra-orthodox Jews, together with liberal-religious Jews and seculars, and all shades in between. Israelis tend to emphasise their differences and disagreements more than they emphasise their commonalities. This happens in a small, walled-in country with just six million Jewish inhabitants, whose main way of entering or leaving the country is just one airport, Ben Gurion airport outside Tel Aviv.

What unites Israelis is their visceral fear of the enemy – Arabs. To reinforce this, the idea of anti-Semitism is pumped to death, reinforcing the idea that the whole world is fundamentally set against Jews. But there’s a problem, since Arabs, Palestinians amongst them, no longer want to play enemies. This changed in the second intifada, nearly ten years ago. Even Israel’s greatest enemies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, don’t want to invade Israel – all they want to achieve, whatever their tub-thumping rhetoric at heated moments, is the good behaviour of Israel and a fair deal for them. Though many Israelis believe Arabs want to overrun them and throw them in the sea, even Hamas is willing to accept Israel’s existence as long as it ends the occupation, withdraws behind the Green Line and vacates East Jerusalem.

An empty checkpoint, kept in case of need

So Israel has lost its enemy – except in its head. This is problematic, because fear of the enemy is what unites Israelis. It means that the centrifugal (pulling-apart) forces in Israeli society are overreaching the binding forces. They are beginning to weaken Israel, and it is the extremists settlers who constitute the greatest threat to Israel today. It’s ominous. The president, Shimon Peres, recently called it a ‘battle for the soul of the nation’. An Israeli friend I talked to recently downplayed this, saying it was just the kind of thing Peres would say. But I wouldn’t be so sure – one of Israelis’ biggest dangers is the hubris they have fallen into.

Earlier I mentioned that Palestinians suffer an internal effect of the occupation. I go into this at some length in my forthcoming book Pictures of Palestine. It’s a collective psychological condition which some Palestinians suffer more than others – what I call ‘Palestine Syndrome’. I’ve had a case of it recently. It arises from living in perpetually-disrupted living conditions. The Israelis use disruption and unpredictability as a tactic, militarily, administratively and politically. It was at its peak ten years ago, but it’s still around. It reverberates around Palestinian society, and everyone is at it, co-disrupting each other. But the source of the problem is Israel.

It’s a deliberate strategy to make planning and regularisation difficult for Palestinians. Some years ago, when I first came here, if you set out on a journey from Bethlehem to Hebron or to Ramallah, you’d never know if or when you would get there, as a result of flying, closed or queue-infested checkpoints and other restrictions. In a more generalised sense it still hovers around because Palestinians just do not know what will happen next – they’ve pretty much given up on both war and peace processes, and on the support of the international community. What next? Will Israel go mad, or will it suddenly get a yen for peace, or will something else happen?

They don’t know whether, if they start a project or make a plan, it can be completed, or whether some official, colonel, judge or settler will come along and scupper it. Even for Palestinians who have lived in the same place for 300 years, it’s impossible to know whether trouble is going to come your way and cause your house to be demolished. Though paradoxically, they build very solid buildings, made to last. Nevertheless, unpredictability has just fallen on Al Khader, where I live, a peaceful town where people just get on with their lives. Settler incursions have started and no one knows where this will lead next, or when, or how far it will go.

So Palestinians have a ‘firefighting mentality’. That is, instead of making plans, they just deal with whatever is in front of them today, or whatever shouts loudest to be done right now. If you want to succeed in anything, you must out-disrupt all competing disruptions and respond instantaneously to whatever is called for. This has its magic too – it’s an honouring of the good old law of unintended consequences – but it leads to an unfocused psyche, a tendency to run anywhichway, a propensity to give up quickly, or to act in quick-fire ways before something comes along to stop you. This is why Europeans like me are valuable to many Palestinians: we help them think through what they seek to achieve, go through the logical steps to do so, and evaluate the results afterwards. Well, sometimes. The rest of the time I’m never really sure what’s happening or what benefit I bring – but I love it anyway.

Even though many of the objective pressures on Palestinians have died down, this mentality still prevails because no one knows what will happen next. I make an arrangement with Ibrahim and he doesn’t turn up because something else happened. I call for a taxi and the man forgets. I try to get to a place on time and, well, all sorts of other things happen. So, inside, part of me gives up trying to work to plan, and I resort to doing whatever I can do in that moment to progress things, anything. This leads to a long list of unfinished things, pending issues, dropped threads, forgotten agendas and goals unachieved.

I’ve even forgotten what I was intending to write about. But magic happens anyway. There’s something to learn from this. Back in Britain, where Brits believe they have things under control and where things are supposed to go according to plan, they don’t actually. But Brits and other Westerners still live under the lie that life is orderly and organised, going according to plan. At least Palestinians, faced with chaos, are honest about it. Meanwhile, Brits and Westerners – Israelis too – still labour under the methodology of planning-execution-result and, here we are in 2012, where the forces of change and chaos are accelerating, still harbouring this belief. Yes, everything will return to normal. Yes, this is just a recession and things will pick up again. Problems? – well, hopefully they’ll go away.

In a sense Palestinians are thus better kitted out to face the future than Westerners are – they’re well used to improvising, making do, accepting what they’ve got and living in the moment. They’re also pretty good at staying happy under difficult circumstances – it’s vital, as a Palestinian, never to lose heart or give up. But it isn’t easy. Nevertheless, inshallah, it’s the way of things here, and this is one of the things that a foreigner like me has to learn and master if I’m to succeed here in my mission. Whatever that was. For the benefits that people like me actually bring are not the same as the benefits we thought we were bringing.

Here's the view from where I sit at my desk:
Palestinian farms below, the Israeli settlement of Efrat behind

I wasn't even sure that I'd be able to upload this blog. On Friday nights the internet slows to a crawl in Palestine. It's because the 'pipes' get blocked. To go online to any foreign site, the signal first goes by radio from Palestine to Jordan (fibre-optic cable not allowed by you-know-who). Then it goes down to Dubai, then to Saudi Arabia, then Egypt, and then it goes under the Mediterranean to the internet backbone in Europe. The Israelis have direct, high-speed lines to Europe and America of course. Even so, with patience, the blog has appeared in the cloud, and it worked.

Now, what was I going to do before I started writing this blog entry? Ah yes, I was going to have dinner. That’s why I seem to be feeling hungry. Better get on with it before something else happens.

Before we go, here are some pics of where I live. Salam alekum!