Palden in the Middle East

Gimme Shekels

2012-02-01T15:39:00.000+02:00

A few times I’ve mentioned two things about Palestine: aid-dependency and the discomfiting habit of some Palestinians (mainly those in tourism in places like Bethlehem) to treat Westerners like walking ATMs. Well, I’m going to risk getting into trouble with some Palestinians and Palestine activists by unpacking this issue – I don’t toe the party line on this. I’m concerned about Palestine’s future in a changing world, and this is important.

Let me clarify. Some think that, since I work for Palestine, I’m anti-Israeli (even anti-Semitic). That’s incorrect. I believe Israel’s current policies and behaviour run against the longterm and full interests of the Israeli and wider Jewish people. Some might think that, because I’m occasionally critical of Palestinian ways, I’m letting the side down here. Incorrect: I look further ahead toward the full longterm interests of the Palestinian people. It’s the human condition that preoccupies me.

I’m also critical of British and Western foreign policy, which doesn’t serve anyone’s true interests – not even, if we look far ahead, the ultimate interests of the fabled 1% at the top of the pile. Despite all the gumph we’re given about democracy, foreign policy is not decided by anything resembling democratic means – ‘national interest’ is firmly in the hands of people for whom government is simply an agency for executing their preferences. But, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’. As a sixtysomething I am glad that, when young, I didn’t pursue the option of working as a career diplomat – my soul would by now be deeply tainted with guilt and regret.

Anyway…

For at least a century, Palestinians have lived with the idea that the West is rich. Britain had the wealth and power ninety years ago to invade this place and take it over. Europe has been big brother to the Middle East for 3-4 centuries, playing a ‘great game’ for which Middle Eastern people have paid a huge price. In the last forty years, USA has been the bounteous main foreign funder of the Israeli project and a big funder of the Palestinians too.

So Palestinians and Israelis have got used to foreign money coming in, without having to earn it in the usual way. There have been good reasons: Palestine has had a very hard time, and the West, because of its complicity in giving them a hard time and its inability or unwillingness to correct the situation, has been paying guilt money to appease its own conscience. Until the 1970s, Israel too was a country that needed help to stand on its feet – and that was guilt money too.

There has been genuinely-motivated compassion and support from the West but it’s still true that, since the West has pillaged the Earth and exploited its peoples, it has felt a semi-conscious need to pay this off by providing aid to cover the rough edges and cultivate business markets and strategic allies.

USA and Europe subsidise Palestine to keep it quiet and compliant. In the 1990s Yasser Arafat and his gang were financially incentivised to stop fighting and causing trouble for the Israelis, and it has continued since then. Peace wasn’t really the issue since Israel has never really wanted a final peace agreement until its control of all of the area from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River is safely and permanently secured. As Ibrahim Issa once said, this money isn’t medicine, it’s morphine to stop the pain. The Palestinians accepted it – they sorely needed help.

In the 1990s most of them hoped peace was coming, following the 1993 Oslo Accords. The deal was that, if the Palestinians made a preliminary agreement in 1993, they’d get a better deal and more land and concessions later on, with independence by 2001. It didn’t happen. During the 1990s, the Israelis accelerated their ‘facts on the ground’ settlement-building strategy and carried on with their control of the Palestinians – not part of the bargain.

There were extra, incendiary events such as the mowing down in 1994 of lots of Palestinians by a settler in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, the assassination by a right-wing Israeli of Israel’s peacemaking prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and the later incursion of Ariel Sharon into the main Muslim holy site in Jerusalem, Haram al Sharif, in 2000. These convinced Palestinians that the peace process was a cover for subtle warfare against them.

Nevertheless, during the 1990s, money from abroad poured into building projects, and the Palestinians, while needing and welcoming it, were caught in a moral dilemma. But part of them still hoped for the best. Hope Flowers School’s current building was built around 1993 and, down in Al Khader, a big, plush conference centre was constructed so that Bethlehem could host international conferences. All that crashed in 2000 with the outbreak of the second intifada, starting as a series of spontaneous protests and ending up as a full-scale conflict, with shoot-outs, suicide bombing and all-out suppression of the Palestinians by the Israelis. It lasted four long years.

At times people were really hungry. The economy tanked. Foreigners left. People were carted off or left the country. Kids saw family members getting killed or maimed. Family homes were bulldozed and dynamited. It was horrific. The last major armed encounter in the West Bank was a long siege of the Nativity Church in Bethlehem, the ending of which was finally brokered by foreign negotiators.

Then came the death of Abu Amar (Yasser Arafat) and the arrival of Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), with his promises to negotiate for peace. We had Roadmaps, Quartets, and the money came in again. Palestinians were so devastated and burned out that the world just had to chip in to help them. The Palestinians did most of the right things to comply with the terms and make a success of this inflow of aid. They worked hard, got educated, built stuff, organised things and gradually pulled themselves out of the mess. It’s not over yet, but times are better now than they were in 2004 when the intifada subsided. The World Bank has certified Palestine as nation-enabled and ready for sovereignty.

But there’s a problem with aid and development money. Like oil income in other Arab countries, it distorts things, artificially flushing an economy and magnetising all activity toward it. It puts vast sums in the hands of an elite who become the disbursers and power-holders. They themselves become client dependents on the donors – they’re agents or compradores for the subtle new aid-imperialism which everyone slavishly believes is good.

Division is a many-splendoured thing:
foreground, Bethlehem, background, Jerusalem -
painted on the wall, 'Open Sesame'!

It gives tremendous power to foreign donors who, if they don’t like what Palestinians are doing, can withdraw those funds for any reason – the Americans particularly like doing this. This happened in 2006 when Palestinians elected by a 60% majority a government which Israel and America didn’t want, so the money was withdrawn, Palestine stumbled, some of the money was then given to the losing political party to disburse, the democratic experiment was scuppered and a fight later broke out, causing the separation of Gaza from the West Bank. Democracy was killed by the Americans and Israelis, with Europe and the Arab states as accomplices.

Hamas, the governing party, accused of terrorism, was blacklisted and aid was withheld until it left office. It landed up as the government of Gaza. One country that offered Hamas aid was Iran. Hamas wasn’t really happy about that – they were being used by Iran as a geostrategic proxy against Israel – but since hardly anyone was helping them, they desperately needed the money. Others, such as Syria, Saudi and Qatar, came in later, but times were hard and Gaza was under Israeli and Egyptian siege. Beggars can’t be choosers.

Another problem with aid money is that it causes all those who wish to plug into it to orientate their activities in such a way that they maximise their chances of getting it and keeping it coming their way. This leads to project design that isn’t necessarily best for real Palestinians and real life – but it reads well in project proposals and meets the need for the right statistics. It’s politically correct.

Metropolis Ramallah

It builds an educated elite of NGO, government and business professionals in suits or without headscarves who become the agents of foreign organisations, driving around in 4WDs and living Western lifestyles, nominally to satisfy their bosses. They then tend to favour their own kind, gradually building an overclass living in its own world – most of them live in Ramallah. Just like the West, really, with its own professional overclass nomenklatura which, as in the former Soviet Union, has its own language, economy, culture, membership rules, insider dealings and self-preservation interests.

This means that things don’t get done because they need doing. They are done because they attract the money and fulfil the criteria, as laid down in offices and conferences in faraway high places, according to the recommendations of a phalanx of experts, researchers and consultants. It incrementally sets up an artificial economy geared that way, and the remainder of society lives off the spillage. There are ample jobs for security guards, accountants and administrators, and for teachers, civic and social workers – though these are less important and, when there are cuts, they’re the first to go, even though they’re the ones most needed. The highest-paid jobs go to foreigners, who are amply compensated for the inconvenience of living in a dodgy country.

Ramallah. "Peace and freedom can be defined as
the peace that makes traffic jams possible
and the freedom to sit in them" - Martin Bell

A psychology of dependency thus infiltrates society through this elite. You have to suck up to people and do the right thing to get the grant, job or contract, fix a university place for your kids, get permits to enter Israel, have trips abroad, feed your family or stay out of trouble. You get used to the lifestyle, status and steady income.

You’re accountable not to the people around you but to people above you, to head office, trustees, officials, diplomats or foreign businessmen – and to accountants, lawyers and auditors by the dozen. You shake off your wider family and community and become a smart, competitive proxy Westerner, attending all the right restaurants, trainings and meetings.

The real economy

Then shopkeepers, gas stations and all manner of traders cultivate you as their customers, and they get hooked in too, prioritising some people over others, stocking snazzier stuff and imitating the elite in ladder-climbing. Before long there’s a dual economy going on: one dependent on development money, tourism and corporate business, and the other a more ‘natural’ economy generated through local production, trade and services for ordinary people.

The gulf between these gradually widens. Ramallah and Bethlehem thus do quite well, as it goes, and Jenin, Hebron and Tulkarm get forgotten. But even there, people start projects which manage to draw in some funds, just enough to keep going, but mostly ‘with little more than good intentions and hard work’ – as it said at Hope Flowers on a plaque which has now, symptomatically, fallen down.

Many of these settlers (in white) and soldiers
in Hebron are Americans

So there is a big, big problem. To punish Palestine for its accession to UNESCO in 2011, USA withdrew funding and Israel stopped remitting due tax receipts. The Palestine Authority nearly went bankrupt and many teachers, health, civic and social workers nearly went without wages – but the situation was saved at the last minute.

Most payments are made in Dollars or Euros, and these currencies are declining – meaning a tough-luck funding reduction for Palestinians. Western institutions and trusts have seen their own funding diminish, their requirements have tightened and they’ve actively sought excuses to cut funding. But there’s a bigger issue than this. It’s historic.

The West, the rich world, is deflating, subsiding. The finger is in the dyke but the flood is rising. Apart from the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia, who have their own agendas, mainly to do with buying off and silencing the Arab Spring, the rest of the non-Western world isn’t in the business of giving aid. So this dependency – or, I should say, interdependency, since the West relies on aid as a way of gaining trade and influence – is beginning to look shaky. This will affect Israel too, with its dependence on American military aid and support for the settlement project, and on European money for all sorts of other reasons, not least atavistic guilt from WW2. The period of dependency is coming to an end.

This process happens in my life too. All sorts of people, mainly those involved in what’s left of tourism, look to me for loans, gifts and custom, a few of whom I say yes to. Yet I’ve reached my limit and the loans must now come back to pay for other things. I’m not the ‘rich westerner’ people want me to be, here to save them from the latest cash crisis. I come here to offer my gifts and abilities, presence and involvement – these are my true wealth and resource. My initials are PGJ, not ATM.

Much of the Saudi aid to Palestine goes into
mosques, not housing - this is Deheisheh refugee camp

My role is changing: I must teach people how to adapt to what’s coming, though most don’t want to hear it. They want the morphine and cocaine of aid money to keep on coming. But the money from the West is drying up, the world is heading into troubled times and the Palestinians could well get kicked into thirty-fifth place on the global needs table, much to their horror. Cruelly put, just as Jews want the monopoly on genocidal suffering, the Palestinians want the monopoly on victimhood. On the positive side, the Israel-Palestine conflict could also be rendered obsolete and invalid, simply by force of changing world circumstances, force majeure. But that still brings new challenges.

Israeli and Palestinian societies have become dependent on conflict, entirely geared to it. The Israelis have a pathological need to maintain a high state of armed threat-preparedness and pump-primed artificial affluence and hubris, and the Palestinians have a pathological need to remain victims who need saving, even though they don’t like it. It’s that tango-dance again.

Whatever will be the case, things are going to change, and dependency, as a state of inflexibility, inadaptability and self-imposed incapability, will have to end. It will be hard, but in the longterm it will be the best thing. People will be forced to get real, sort themselves out and heave to.

Palestinians are hard-working people and not unused to crisis – Israelis will probably have a harder time. 20% of the Israeli population, the Ultra-Orthodox Haredim, live on benefits and refuse to work; the nation’s youth is corralled into unproductive long military service; many settlers depend on subsidies and quite a few Israelis live lives of leisure. Things are going to get leaner and meaner from now on.

But in Palestine the new middle class will have a hard time too – they are the ones with the salaries and advantages that are most vulnerable. Poor people and refugees know how to stay alive and they’re used to shit happening – and they still have cooperation-based families and communities. For them, what’s new? But the folks with degrees and higher aspirations will need to change fast.

In the end this will be good, and I hope to be able to keep returning to help ease that change-process. It will make Palestine into a more natural and solid economy and society, and it will stop the deteriorative rot that aid and development are bringing to this place. It’s a psycho-social prison as bad as the separation wall. It eats at the soul of the nation, surreptitiously, almost invisibly. But the change will be hard.

There isn’t really any alternative. In future Palestine could even survive better than many countries, not because it has valuable assets but because its people are resilient, crisis-toughened, innovative, essentially cooperative, and they have a lot of faith. They have the human qualities to survive what gets thrown at them – the occupying Israelis, British and Turks gave them that gift, perversely.

On the balance of historic probabilities, in comparison to other peoples, they’ve had so much bad luck that they’re due a bit of grace and release, inshallah. Who knows? But things are going to change. As Buddhists would say, the only thing that lasts is impermanence.

Fruits of their labours

Messengers in the Sky

2012-01-29T23:24:00.003+02:00

Pathological altruist workaholic that I am, including on Sundays, I was sitting at my desk practising keyboard-slavery when something caused me to look up. There, outside the window, was a mid-sized raptor – perhaps a hawk or falcon – doing that characteristic alternating wing-quivering hover that only raptors do. Now, as every photographer knows, the best shots appear when you don’t have your camera at hand. Yes indeed, by the time I’d dug it out, the bird was gone. Sorry, I can’t show you a photo! But it felt like a visitation.

Eileen in Warrington has asked me about birds in Palestine, and I discuss wildlife a lot with Suzy in Falmouth so, thank you ladies, in response to your promptings I’ve pulled together some pictures of Palestinian animals! I haven’t focused on animal photography while here but, like any self-respecting hunter, a photographer shoots anything interesting that presents itself and I’ve caught a few interesting animals over time.

Photography is in a sense harder than hunting: a hunter just has to kill the poor thing, but a photographer needs to shoot it at exactly the right moment and from exactly the right position to get a good picture. Often it’s luck or a kind of lens and shutter magic. The poor thing survives the experience too – it even perhaps thrives psychically from the positive attention of faraway people like you, dear readers.

People in Palestine sometimes ask me why I’m a vegetarian – as if I’m slightly bonkers, missing something, or another example of the weirdnesses of Westerners. I simply tell them, “Well, humans treat animals like Israelis treat Palestinians”. They get the analogy immediately, and you can see them thinking that one through.

Though to be fair, there are fine Israelis who don’t abuse and even help Palestinians, sometimes accused by Zionists of being self-hating Jews or even traitors, and there are good humans who not only avoid harming animals but also go to great lengths to help them.

Yet there’s one thing Israelis and Palestinians don’t do. They don’t hunt. All the guns around here are for using on humans. Compared with France or Italy, even peaceable Sweden, this country is a haven for animals – at least regarding hunting. There’s tremendous habitat destruction, yes, but the only hunters around here, apart from cats, are oddbods like me with telephoto lenses – also usually aimed at humans – who have this crazy habit of photographing animals. So conflicts do have their positive unintended consequences – in this case, animals are spared the dubious pleasure of being hunted down by voracious killer humanoids.

During this trip, I seem to have been focusing on cats. This might be the good influence of Polly, a Cornish cat who died last July, who clearly tugged at my heart and made me more aware of cats. But it also has something to do with the character of Palestinian cats – they’re not pets, and they have to fend for themselves, so they have some zing and character to them. Some of the town cats are pretty scraggy though – country cats seem to do better than they.

I also like photographing donkeys. Perhaps they remind me of myself, silent load-bearers who occasionally bray plaintively to remind everyone they’re still here. People still ignore them, but at least they try – a bit like fundraising for Hope Flowers school. Or perhaps, having been born next door to Winnie the Pooh’s Hundred Aker Wood in the Ashdown Forest, part of me adopted the persona of Eeyore. It matters little, in the grand scheme of things. But donkeys are another subject that has been sucked into my lens and digitally exuded onto your screen.

I get into trouble occasionally with some ‘proper’, politically-correct Palestine activists because I don’t bellyache about all the bad things the Israelis are doing to the poor, suffering Palestinians, and how we must stop this, ban and boycott that, and how we must see Palestine as a terrible field of horror, injustice and genocide with no redeeming graces at all. Sure, there are terrible things here. But cats and donkeys are part of reality here. Donkeys happen also to be a wise reserve mode of transport in case oil supplies break down or the Israelis impose a total shutdown of normal economic activity. They haven’t done this for a few years, but you never know, the Israelis like to keep everyone guessing, including themselves.

Besides, what really engages me is not railing against bad guys but building the foundations of the future and helping Palestinians see where their strengths are. Seeing your strengths and the advantage in your situation is the beginning of a change for the better. Moaning about what’s wrong and what’s gone is simply a recipe for depression, defeat and victimhood. Growing up in 1960s Liverpool, a failing city and home of many a comedian, made me aware that humour, even as wry as mine, can be just as sharply political as righteous tub-thumping.

What are Palestinians’ strengths? Perseverance, resilience, adaptability and spiritedness. This puts them in a strong position to meet the future. We’re going to see some tough, exacting and tumultuous times ahead, worldwide. The astrologer in me says watch out for a wave of precipitous events in June-July – the buildup is surreptitiously beginning now. The people who will best ride out these times are those who are most practised at doing so, who have developed the psychology and values within themselves to enable them to handle whatever comes and turn it to advantage. In this, Palestinians are in a strong position.

As I mention in Pictures of Palestine, they will have a lot to contribute to the aid teams of the future. It won’t be food and building materials they’re dishing out but knowledge and experience – psycho-social input. They’ll show people how to take things by the horns, tough it out and find their own solutions. This is the aid and disaster-relief of the future. It is a strength Palestinians have. Meanwhile, many people in Europe and America, and in the Dubai, Mumbai and Shanghai belt – the people who have been ‘successful’ in recent times – will be lost if the electricity and internet go down, or if it all boils down to making a feast out of a bag of potatoes.

There are lots of positive things about Palestine, many of them arising from the conflict – I mention them in my book. Palestinians have a strong society. If something goes wrong, they improvise and cooperate. If a crisis is afoot, they don’t stand around expecting help. They’ve even learned how to stay calm and restrain themselves if their houses are raided by Israeli soldiers.

Talking of which, as I write, late at night, two helicopters are hovering around, about 5,000ft up and a mile away. They have that deep thumping sound of military helicopters and, guess what, the Palestinians have none, so it’s not them. They’ve been hovering and circling around for twenty minutes over the southern edge of Bethlehem. Doing surveillance, I’d bet. They might be after someone. They plant a device on a car, or connive a collaborator to carry a specially-fixed mobile phone, and they track people. One helicopter has now come over this way, with the other remaining where it was. It’s doing a loop to go round the north edge of Bethlehem, and there’s another one coming in from the west, quite low. Any advance on three?

Well, some people would panic at this, starting to wonder whether their time had come. It prompted me to put the kettle on. Other people round here simply note the intrusion and carry on with life. Which sums up the attitude of resilience Palestinians have: you can eat your heart out, year after year, over all the atrocities big and small that happen here, or you can get on with life. If you get on with life you’ll live longer, achieve more and be happier. Never mind what ought to be, what shouldn’t be, what might have been or what wasn’t – this doesn’t help at all. After all, it’s the Israelis (or American taxpayers) who are paying thousands to keep those helicopters afloat, and it’s the pilots who are sweating more than the people underneath them.

Meanwhile, the kettle having boiled, I made myself some Saudi Arabian cocoa with honey in it, to help generate a few endorphins. I could swallow a mugful of endorphins right now, if I could, but cocoa will do. One of the helicopters is now window-rattlingly close. The pilot’s kids back home are probably experiencing a gap in their lives where their father ought to be standing. It’s all so farcical, so tragi-comic.

Over the wall, just over there, are some smug, hubristic settlers who think they’re winning their war to retake the land that God allegedly gave them. Yet, the social subgroup in this land with the highest incidence of family violence is the settler community. I don’t get the feeling that was part of God’s design. Meanwhile, on this side of the wall, these losers, these Ay-rabs, who’ve lost five wars and a thousand small battles, are sitting at home with their grannies, kids, cousins and in-laws, watching Arabiya TV. They’ve lost, so they’re making the best of it.

We humans are really mad, but at least we have the capacity to explain things to ourselves. We can say, “Ah, that’s a helicopter”, and then go about putting the kettle on. But animals cannot do this – they don’t know what the hell these noisy monsters are. Even the wild dogs over around the separation wall must be cowering under a rock, fearing the worst and hoping these fearsome dragons will fly away.

Little do they know, these dragons each cost 10,000 shekels (£2,000) a minute to keep afloat up there – and, in the end, for what? For sovereignty over someone else’s land? To fulfil a covenant with God? To create happiness and security for the Chosen People? No, it’s human illusion at its worst. It frightens the animals – even ants will feel the thudding resonances of these choppers deep in their anthills. I bet a few of the settler kids over the wall have been woken up by it too. “Dad, is this what God meant the world to be like?”

If my friends and I have anything to do with it, in our future lives we’ll be living in a very different world, where military helicopters are as distantly incredible as medieval Crusaders on their steeds are to us now. Palestinians will be amongst the creators of that world. The people at the butt-end of the ‘progress’ we’ve had in recent times will probably be the people who save the day, even saving those who have so generously given them a hard time.

Yes, Palestinians could one day rescue Israelis from a sorry, partially self-created fate. It happened in a small way just recently, down south of Hebron – an Israeli settler bus caught fire, and guess who rescued them? Just today I saw a bumper sticker on someone’s car: After all, we’re all humans, it said, in English and Arabic.

I’m off down to Egypt in a week’s time. I’m going for a break, to warm up, to hobnob with some Germans and, hopefully, inshallah, to renew my visa until spring equinox. If, that is, they let me back in, alien hazel-eyed goyim that I am. So you might get a week’s break from your blog-reading obligations, bless you. Then again, you might not.

It was that hawk who prompted this particular blog entry. Wisely, the hawk doesn’t care whether it’s Palestinian or Israeli. It’s not worried about apartheid either – it flies where it wants, with no official papers. Today it was either enjoying itself, or doing a much more discreet surveillance job than those helicopters, or it was hunting for its dinner, or all of these combined.

While a raptor has far superior weaponry to its prey, just like Israeli soldiers, it uses far more strategy, skill and subtlety than Israelis employ. It doesn’t demolish its prey’s homes or devastate their habitat. Raptors and their prey are symbiotic, and if one side goes down, the other side suffers too. Same with Israelis and Palestinians: if either gets rid of the other or treats it too harshly, they themselves will suffer. I wish everyone would realise how symbiotic Israelis and Palestinians are. In conflicts of relationship, it always takes two to tango. However, what’s disturbing for many Israelis is that most Palestinians want to change the dance music – hence that Israelis are getting het up about Iranians instead.

“War isn’t about who is right, it’s about who is left”, said Bertrand Russell. And humans treat animals like Israelis treat Palestinians. And in the end, we’re all sentient beings, with an equal right to live on this Earth. Would that we had more equanimity. Equanimity would lead to greater social and global equality, also known as sharing.

The helicopters are now four in number. They’re busy burning money to keep the world safe, to save us from terrible terrorists in places like Bethlehem. Really, we should support them – they’re fighting for God at all hours of the day and night, protecting democracy and freedom. They’re keeping the peace! Protecting civilisation from barbarians! Creating much-needed jobs in the arms trade! Just obeying orders!

Nonetheless, something suddenly happened to drive them away. After a lovely sunny day and a crisp evening, a mighty cloud rolled over the hill from the west and it started hailing! The hail battered at the windows, wanting to get in. Must’ve been quite a squall, up there where the helicopters were. They scarpered. God must have had enough noise for one evening. Or, if the helicopters were tracking someone, perhaps it was their lucky day.

For a complete collection of these animal pictures, click here.

Meet the Grandmothers of Bethlehem

2012-01-27T01:23:00.000+02:00

In Bethlehem's Old Town there are old ladies who sell herbs and vegetables. They come in from the outlying villages. Sometimes they're dropped in an old pickup truck, and sometimes they come into town with their husbands leading a donkey, carrying the produce, which is grown in their villages.

Then they wend their weary ways back home again as darkness falls, bless them.

I find these ladies a study in human nature. They are all old enough to have been young people in the time of the Nakba, the Catastrophe of 1948, when Palestinians lost 78% of their land, with many massacred or turned into refugees.

Then they were at the butt end of the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel invaded the West Bank and Gaza (and Sinai). Then they've been through two four-year intifadas in the late 1980s and early 2000s.

In other words, they've seen and faced some mighty stuff, in the way of human experience. It's reflected in their faces.

But they have an active role in society, which is more than can be said for many old people in the West. Back home, they are at the centre of their families - which might be 10-12 people in one house and four other house-loads nearby.

That's called social security, in the real meaning of the term.

The problem I get with these ladies is that they don't understand anything about living alone - they've always been in big families and communities, mucking in together. But I only want one bundle of mint, one of thyme and one of salad greens please! They throw in more, so that my family doesn't starve!

But this is excusable. I came away from them this morning with a big bag of herbs and greens which cost me just ten shekels - £2 or nearly $3. I'll give the surplus to some of the staff at Hope Flowers School.

I thought you might like to meet the herb and salad-greens ladies of Beit Lahem!

Walking on Broken Glass

2012-01-23T20:31:00.000+02:00

I woke up this morning with mixed feelings about what I’m doing here. It’s really cold here at present, and my usual positive attitude has walked away somewhere! But it’s also a nagging question of whether this visit to Palestine is productive. Over the last year, here at the school, we have spent a lot of time and energy working to comply with Western donors’ escalating standards of accountability – using up time, money and energy we don’t have – and sometimes I’ve found myself wondering whether I’m here to help improve life-conditions for Palestinians or whether actually I am simply working, at personal expense, to satisfy the needs of Westerners.

Perhaps my feelings around this are confused, affected by a number of factors which I haven’t yet sorted out. One is my own perplexity over where my home and allegiances lie – Britain is not very welcoming to me at present and Palestine cannot itself grant me residence (that’s an Israeli decision and I’m not Jewish, so the answer is no). But there’s more.

Okay, now guess what part of this picture
is the Israeli settlement

Here I’m going to get political because the politics affect the way Palestinians perceive a Westerner like me, a local representative of the Western powers that give them a lot of problems. Mercifully, they distinguish between ordinary Westerners and their governments and they know that, although we have democracy, that doesn’t mean we have much influence – so they don’t blame folks like me for what our governments do. But they sometimes wonder what side I’m really on.

My feelings about my visit here are highlighted by the strategies the West is engaging in right now over Iran, Syria and Palestine which, in my view, are sorely counterproductive and will lead to trouble, causing grief and hardship for Arabs and ultimately loss for Westerners too. It’s all about oil and geopolitical power, and the prospects aren’t good.

Another Israeli settlement - picturesque!

The West talks about freedom, human rights and democracy but it doesn’t practise what it preaches. Here’s the list. It scuppered the Palestinians’ democratic choices back in 2006-07, when they voted in a party the West and Israel didn’t want; it has supported regimes around the Middle East that are neither democratic nor rights-oriented nor acting for the common good; it has propped up Israel in its wars, its occupation of Palestine and its Western-financed settlement-building project; it has flooded the region with arms and money to support ruling elites who act as proxies; it has failed to deal with nuclear disarmament over the last 60 years and now contemplates waging war against one country, Iran, over Iranian nuclear ambitions while quietly supporting Israel in its own nuclear arms monopoly in the Middle East; it has wrecked Iraq and Afghanistan and recently intervened, with mixed results, in Libya; and, worst of all, it will not desist from this century-long habit.

Meanwhile, Middle Eastern people want to sort out their problems without foreign intervention – everyone knows Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy are more interested in their election prospects and clubability than the welfare of paltry Arabs. Since the fall of the Ottomans around 1920, this region has been under Western dominance and it’s time for this to end. Actually, it is gradually, painfully ending, and Western world hegemony is declining, but Western countries still retain a grandiose belief in their right to call the shots, even when things are going wrong at home and the West cannot afford such dominance. It has lost the plot. But it has arms, influence and vested interests, and dying dragons, thrashing their tails, are dangerous, desperate and deluded.

The Israeli separation wall and an electronic
surveillance tower above Beit Jala

Here in Palestine there have been many good peace-building projects, and I have been involved with a few and told my readers about them. I am deeply involved with one, the Hope Flowers school and centre. But there is a problem. These worthy efforts have little effect while the people at the top in the West, the now-famous 1%, are blocking change and pursuing self-interest. Dear reader, please do not fall for the belief that Western countries are altruistic, concerned for the welfare of others – except when it is in their narrow interests to do so. The Palestinians are ready for peace and coexistence, they want to get on with life and build their future. But this is stoppered not just by Israel but by Western countries too – advocating peace processes, justice and democracy while actually creating the opposite.

Palestinians make up nearly half of the population of this land but we see no democracy here. Someone once said, “Israel is democratic for Jews and Jewish for Arabs” but even the ‘democratic for Jews’ bit is inaccurate, with 80% of the nation’s resources controlled by sixteen families. In 2006 Palestine had the cleanest and most genuinely democratic election the Middle East has seen for years, as verified by international observers, while in Israel’s last election the party getting the most votes didn’t even get into power.

But in 2006 Israel and the West decided to intervene and scupper the Palestinian elections (more here). Twenty parliamentarians elected then are still in Israeli jails, five years later, together with ‘Palestine’s Mandela’, a man called Marwan Barghouti, who has been ten years in jail. Hamas, the winning party with a thumping 60% majority, whatever its merits, is still deemed a terrorist organisation when, in the experience of the majority of the people of the Middle East, the terror actually comes from the over-armed West. Hamas is a social-reform party and, like any political party, it has its plusses and minuses, but it didn’t deserve this. It is the ‘party of resistance’, yes, which in previous years fought Israel, but if another country were invading yours and killing your citizens in thousands, wouldn’t there be a similar party in your country? Yes. Britain’s great hero Churchill took the same line against Hitler as Hamas has done against Israel.

It’s happening again in Syria. I don’t support the Assad regime in Syria or what it is doing. Any regime that indiscriminately kills its own people is heading for demise and disgrace. However, the fact is, as discovered by a British polling institution (YouGov), a majority of the Syrian people wish to retain the current regime – this has not even been clearly reported in the West. Many Syrians support or accept Assad because they have seen the new governments that have taken power in countries like Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, even Egypt, and they don’t see progress there. They don’t support the Assad regime as it stands, but they believe that there is a greater chance of reform under Assad than they would get from a Western puppet regime.

Syrians look at the Arab League, led as it is by undemocratic governments in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Sudan, and they don’t want to submit to its pressures. They watch the two biggest Arabic satellite TV stations, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, baying about human rights, but these stations come from the undemocratic oil sheikdoms of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, hardly the home of human rights.

A street in Bethlehem's Old Town

There’s some wisdom in their perception, and they want to sort out their problems themselves without foreign intervention. It is precisely this which the West and its Arabic proxies do not like. The West doesn’t like independent players: it wants control. This was what lay behind the West’s war against Saddam Hussein who, though a thorough asshole, has not been replaced by significantly better men, leaving Iraq in a mess.

But Syria has a big problem: its people are divided, the regime has lost legitimacy and it is firing on its own people. This issue is not easily solved, and putting a Western-supported regime in its place is a naïve solution – as we are now seeing in Libya. Funding and arming the Syrian opposition is a geopolitical strategy which isn’t necessarily best for Syrians. This is business. The West also wants to keep China, Russia and India out of the Middle East. It wants compliant, business-friendly regimes.

For the last twenty years, since the fall of the Soviet Union, the West has been railing against Islamists, calling them terrorists. This has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and to untold hardship. The Western development model feeds rich elites, binding increasing swathes of the world into capitalism, but it doesn’t really benefit ordinary people or bring the justice, democracy and other goodies that are promised.

Yet now, following the Arab Spring, Islamists are gaining power across the Middle East, and generally by democratic consent. They are becoming the new establishment here, and the West is getting into bed with them, to try to stop Arabs acting too independently. Why so, when the Islamists were recently the enemy? It has nothing to do with justice, peace and the needs of the majority. It has everything to do with money, oil and geostrategic considerations.

The Islamists will prove in coming years that they are mere politicians with the usual flaws, and the promises they have made, to bring justice, fairness and prosperity to all, will come up against hard reality. Within ten years, the Islamists, like the socialist parties of Europe in previous decades, will prove to be a mixed bag, and not the Big Solution. However it is the people of the Middle East who must decide on this: this is the core principle of democracy. The West doesn’t know best, the results of its previous interventions have been bad for ordinary people here and it has no inherent right to entrain everyone to its own ways. Imperialism is a thing of the past.

The crucial indicator here is Palestine, which has experienced the effects of forty years of Western-sponsored peace processes. Twenty years of aid and development money in Palestine, since the Oslo Accords, has simply bred a new elite in Ramallah, softening the blow of the Israeli settlement project in the occupied Palestinian territories. Aid has acted like morphine rather than medicine. British JCBs have demolished Palestinian homes, American arms have besieged Gaza, German guilt-money has supported Israel and Israel’s nuclear bombs were developed with the help of France. Thanks, guys.

Palestine has been one of the causes of the Arab Spring: the people of the Middle East have grown tired of living under puppet regimes that fail to deliver the goods because of their fear of stepping out of line in the West’s eyes, and these very regimes have failed to solve the Palestinian question. This is a core issue for Arabs: Palestine symbolises the treatment they all have received over many decades.

Three resistors of Western dominance have been Libya, Syria and Iran. These have not been good regimes, yet they all came into existence as a result of earlier Western interventions in the Middle East. Now, the West doesn’t want them, and it is willing to impose hardship and war on ordinary people to get rid of them. Because of oil, because of money, because of geostrategic control, not because of justice, peace and human rights.

Arabs - disposable

Yes, Westerners do genuinely believe in justice and human rights, and this is good, but Western governments do not practise what they preach – they bomb people and wreck countries, and Western electorates generally do not hold their governments to account over foreign policy issues. Western electorates want cheap oil and steady supplies of it for their cars, so anything goes, and Arabs don’t matter much – they’re only primitive, stupid, dangerous Muslims, after all.

It would be easy right now for someone to say that I support bad regimes in the Middle East – I don’t. But I believe the West should go away and attend to its own problems, leaving the people of the Middle East to sort themselves out. Most of all, the West needs to cut its support for Arabic puppet elites and for Israel, both of which constitute a big problem for ordinary people in the Middle East right now.

If Western support for Israel were cut, then the playing field would be levelled and Israel would have to make some big decisions. Peace would come closer, for simple, realistic reasons. The Israeli economy, propped up by Western money and favour, would weaken and the West Bank occupation and the siege of Gaza would be less viable. Israel would be obliged to trade with its neighbours and make friends with them, for its own survival. Most Arabs don’t want to drive the Jews out – they just want some normality, equality and justice. The separation walls must come down, the five million Palestinian refugees need restitution, Israeli control over Palestinians’ lives must end, and the outrages of the Israeli army and settlers must be curtailed. That’s what needs to happen. Oh, and the return of East Jerusalem.

Even more disposable

But it isn’t happening, and that’s what affects my current mood. Someone like me cannot do much to help Palestinians get a decent life unless something changes at the top, with the regimes and vested interests in Israel and the West. It’s as simple as that. I’m getting futility feelings.

It impacts on this very school. I work here not only because the school helps Palestinian refugee and disadvantaged families. I work here because I have worked for peace for forty years and this school is a world leader in dealing with war trauma and the psycho-social causes of violence, and I think that’s worth working for. Also the Palestinian people are world leaders in dealing with hardship and the effects of conflict, with ninety years of experience as an occupied, stunted country.

This morning, Mahmoud, a child from a neighbouring house and the son of Amal, the school cleaner, called me downstairs and handed me a letter. The letter was written by his fourteen-year old sister, who has quite good English. It asked whether their mother could borrow 100 shekels (£5) until the end of the month. There are two reasons for this. First, their father, imprisoned by the Israelis, was not allowed to change his clothes or clean himself for over a year, meaning that now, as a free man, he has a skin disease preventing him from working and thoroughly undermining his self-esteem – and they cannot afford treatment. He hides away, hurting. So the family is poor. Second, Hope Flowers School has had recent funding problems necessitating serious financial cuts (with staff reductions and a cut of kids at school from 350 to 150). Amal’s hours have been reduced (though she still works as hard as she did before). So she has less money. So they don’t have enough to get them through the cold weather. So they needed to borrow from me.

Useless, lazy, unproductive Arabs

Of course I lent them the money. I expect repayment will be difficult, so this will probably be a gift. I do so wholeheartedly because Amal and her family have been friendly and helped me over the years. Mahmoud returned two hours later with some home-baked bread. Bless these folk. But it presents a dilemma: here am I, a ‘rich’ Westerner, reinforcing the aid-dependency Palestinians experience. They are dependent thanks to the Israeli occupation, which deprives them of the capacity to build their own economy and support themselves. Westerners support Palestinians because they do not want to force Israel to stop what it is doing, and Israel fails to carry out its duties as an occupying power by providing social, health and educational facilities on an equal basis to its own Jewish citizens. Bluntly put, Western aid to Palestine supports the Israeli military regime by keeping the Palestinians quiet.

So today I had 100 shekels-worth of dilemma - what in economics they call 'moral hazard'. I’m happy to help Amal – she’s a fine lady. But in doing so I implicitly absolve others of responsibility for the crimes they are committing. That’s not what I am here for. I am here to work toward the ending of war and military oppression. But I land up implicitly supporting it.

Which is why I wonder what I am doing here. Yes, I know my presence here is bringing benefit, and it’s worth it. But it is compromised. I do not like this.

Bottom of the apartheid pile - the Bedouin!

Meanwhile, I’m trying to decide whether to go back to Britain when my Israeli visa expires on 10th February, or whether to go to Egypt and try to re-enter, grovelling suitably, to stay until late March. Back in Britain, I have no home, no job, no partner to return to, and arriving back to nowhere and nothing much will be quite a challenge. I’m doing my best to resolve this, but no positive answers are as yet forthcoming. So I have a few humanitarian issues to sort out with myself.

Liz, my visitor from Glastonbury, left for Egypt today. Aisha and her English brother are staying two nights with me, and they’re off tomorrow. A friend in Europe skyped me for help with some personal issues and I felt rather clueless to help. I have work to do, but I’m struggling over it. I could do with a hug. Well, life goes on. After all, if one chooses to be a tightrope-walker, it’s to be expected that things will get wobbly!

But I must remember something I got clear about years ago, when I first entered into this Palestine business. Not to expect results. If you hope for results, you inevitably get disappointed. I think I’m being tested on this now.

Oh Palestine, what's coming next?
Photo taken from just under the separation wall in a photo above -
that photo was taken from the bump on the horizon on the right, the Herodeon.

Ancient Sights

2012-01-19T23:00:00.003+02:00

Today we went to see some ancient places. Ismael picked us up, with one of his delightful daughters in tow, called Duha. I had invited him to bring a member of his family because we had a spare seat and one of them was sure to enjoy the trip. Ismael had thought, for some reason, Liz needed the company of a woman because she was afraid. This doesn’t fit Liz at all – on a journey alone through five countries, she has hardly batted an eyelid at Palestine’s rougher edges. But the daughter had a fine time with us anyway, and it was the first time she had ever visited the Herodeon and Mar Saba. We went first to Irtas, down the valley from the school.

Irtas is a tranquil Catholic monastery village, though populated mainly by Muslims, and it’s a verdant centre for market gardening. The statue of the Virgin Mary still had Christmas lights draped around it, making her look vulgarly tied up. The best bit was a visit to the spring at Irtas – the springwater was slightly warm and very clear. Ismael told us that, when he was a boy in the Six Day War, his family and many other refugees living in Deheisheh came down to Irtas to shelter from the Israeli bombing. They would collect water from this spring. I think that war deeply traumatised him.

We progressed then to the Herodeon, through Hindaza, Assakira and the countryside south of Bethlehem, populated by a large population of settled Bedouin. The Herodeon (or Herodium) is dramatic. It is a natural, geologically anomalistic, human-shaped hill with the ruins of a dug-out palace in the ‘cone’, dating back mainly to the time of Herod the Great – the final heyday of ancient Israel before its dismemberment by the Romans. It compares with a British hill-fort, except the stone buildings inside the cone are far more developed. Around its base was a town until it was destroyed.

What a location: the 360° view from the hill is outstanding, and the hill is militarily unassailable. You see a wide sweep over the Bethlehem conurbation, the Bedouin countryside southwards, two Israeli settlements (Tekoa and Nokdim) and many Palestinian villages, the Judaean Desert, Dead Sea and Jordanian mountains – a landscape photographer’s paradise. Down inside the hill is a series of tunnels leading down to the internal water system in the hill.

As a student of ancient sites and earth energies, despite the bitingly cold wind, I could sense an ancient power here which must have made this hill important long before Herod’s time. Its Arabic name is Jebel Fereidis or ‘the hill of paradise’. The hill dominates the landscape, drawing the eye toward it from a distance – much like Glastonbury Tor but more so. With internal water springs higher than the surrounding plateau, it has levitational or upward-vortical energy properties which are uncommon.

Traditional descriptions say it is ‘like a woman’s breast’but, frankly, it is far bolder than that, more thrusting and masculine. It was the site of a last stand of the Jews in the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132-136, after which many of the remaining Jews in these parts were driven away by the Romans, ending the ancient story of Israel. No wonder two strategically-placed Israeli settlements now lie just below the hill.

The Israeli settlement of Tekoa, just below the Herodeon

Then we progressed to Beit Sahour on the eastern edge of Bethlehem, turning right along the main road through Dar Salah to Ubeidiya, and turning right again along a winding road into the desert hills to Mar Saba.

Mar Saba is a Greek Orthodox monastery perching on a cliff overlooking a deep gorge through which a river flows. It’s the Kidron valley, which begins at Jerusalem – the valley that separates the Old City from the Mount of Olives – and it flows down to the Dead Sea. This place has an intense stillness that easily explains why the early Christian hermits came here to live in the caves – some of them have been expanded, and some have walls and doors at the opening. I went down into the gorge and inside one of the caves and it was quite warm, very quiet and a wonderful location for a meditative life.

The caves are similar to those at the Mount of Temptation above Jericho –the kind of places where ease of access to and from the wider world is definitely not the intention. These guys would live on a flat-bread cooked on a stone and a few dates each day. The gorge hosted perhaps some forty hermits by the look of it, about 1,700 years ago at the very beginning of the monastic period.

We were all quite spaced out after an hour or two here. It transports you to another world. The high desert location is somehow purifying, stilling, enclosing yet starkly wide-open. Back along the road at Ubeidiya is the St Theodosius monastery, which must have been related to Mar Saba, overlooking a dramatic valley 2,000ft below – Wadi Nar, the Valley of Fire. On the other side is the Mount of Olives, a seriously high mountain, and Jerusalem, with the desert and the Dead Sea in the other direction. It’s an otherworldly landscape – the kind of stuff that people write things like Bibles about – and it’s now quite densely populated with Palestinians.

We went back to Ismael’s family home in Deheisheh camp for tea and home-made Arabic sweets. The whole family sat with us – a warm family circle. One of them remarked that I’m bringing a stream of English through their home. “Yes, actually it’s a secret invasion. We’ve decided to reoccupy Palestine, to give you a slightly better occupation than the Israeli one.”

Reoccupying Palestine is a war Her Majesty’s armed forces wouldn’t fancy. I’m here to ferkle around in the background quietly pulling the few strings I have available to jiggle. Well, good try. Meanwhile, it has been good having a break with Liz, seeing some sights and filling another few gaps in my advancing collection of pictures of Palestine. Tomorrow I must sit down and write a report. And she's off again in a few days.

And here are Ismael and Duha

Visitations

2012-01-17T23:00:00.013+02:00

I went down to Jericho to meet Liz, an acquaintance from Glastonbury. She’s on a trip in search of clues about Byzantine icons. She had travelled by train from Britain to Romania and then Istanbul, then made a quick visit to a Sufi sheikh in Cyprus, then back to Istanbul, then a flight to Amman in Jordan and over the border to Jericho.

When she emerged off the bus we stood there chatting, waiting for the taxi driver I had befriended, who was coming in five minutes half an hour ago, as they do. We talked to a policeman too, who told us of his Bedouin boyhood as a shepherd and who seemed rather uncharmed by the job of a policeman, even though Palestinian uniforms are pretty smart.

Then we went to Tell es-Sultan (the Hill of the King), the site of the world’s oldest city, founded in 8000 BCE. I still haven’t found out how the world’s oldest continually-inhabited city happens also to be in the lowest place on Earth (1,200ft or 400m below sea level). Perhaps I never will.

We stopped for tea and a munch at an outdoor cafe and then went up onto the Tell. The atmosphere is palpable – the place-memory of souls who have lived here for countless generations since just after the end of the ice age, right up to modern times before the city sprawled around it. The view was spectacular: here we were in the world’s lowest place, looking over the flattish floor of the rift valley to the majestic mountains of Jordan on the other side. Looking the other way are the cliffs of the western side of the rift, with the Judaean massif rising at least 2,000ft before us. Around us it is green, with palm, banana and date trees, watered by the copious springs here.

One segment of the cliff above Jericho is called the Mount of Temptation, where Jesus went through the temptation after forty days and nights in the Judaean desert. An Orthodox monastery is perched up there, together with caves in which the earliest Christian hermit monks lived, in the centuries immediately following Jesus’ life.

Our taxi-man took us up there. It was stirring. The limestone cliffs and a canyon cutting into them, with ancient caves up its sides hollowed into the rock, were high and daunting. Just to spoil the fun, the Israelis have stuck a thoroughly uncaptivating surveillance station on top of the mountain, to keep their eyes on Jericho and the border.

We milled around amongst a group of Greek pilgrims, drank fresh orange juice and then spent ten minutes dissuading our taxi driver from taking us on a tour of tourist sites. Though he did show us one historic site of a recent kind. It was the compound to which Yasser Arafat had moved when he first returned to Palestine in 1994 following the Oslo Accords, after his decades-long exile in Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia.

In the Accords the PLO recognised Israel, a two-state solution was agreed and the ‘peace process’ began, which was supposed to lead Palestine to independence by about 2001. It never happened. But the compound is significant to Palestinians because they were at that time regaining control over parts of former Palestine, which was a step forward from the total military occupation they had lived under for twenty years since the Six Day War of 1967, when Israel took the West Bank from Jordan and Gaza from Egypt. The bit that went wrong was that they were supposed to receive more of the West Bank and to have independence. Twenty years later, we’re still waiting.

Our taxi-driver was convinced there was no direct service taxi to Bethlehem but I knew he was incorrect. I wanted him to drop us at the terminal where the buses come in from King Hussein Bridge but he wouldn’t have it, dropping us at another place and declaring that a bus would go from here in one hour to Hebron, via Bethlehem. I had my doubts but we didn’t complain, got some coffee and cakes and sat talking. It’s much warmer down here in Jericho, 3,500ft lower than Bethlehem, and I was rather enjoying it. But we got restless and a taxi driver agreed to take us to Al Azariya (Bethany) on the way to Bethlehem for 40 shekels each (£8 or $10).

On the way, convinced like the previous driver that all Westerners do tourism, he swung off the main road to take us into the desert to Nabi Musa, and it was worth it. Stuck out in the desert hills amidst utter silence, this monastery-like Muslim shrine, dating back to at least the 1200s, had a hospitable numinescence to it which was surreptitiously uplifting.

For centuries it had served as a travellers’ hostel and a hospice for the infirm. It claims to be the mausoleum of Moses, though I thought he was buried over at Mount Nebo in Jordan or even in Kashmir. Whatever, it’s a power place, and clearly pre-Muslim in origin – its placing makes it obvious that this site was significant from the very first time humans trod these parts.

Eventually we arrived in Al Azariya and, after a wait followed by a virulent argument between two service-taxi drivers over who should take us, we went by a round-about route to Bethlehem, had tea in Manger Square and returned home with a taxi-driver who had been looking for me for two weeks. On my last trip to Jerusalem I had bought a pipe for a Palestinian friend and I had lost it on the way home – I’d guessed in this man’s taxi, but wasn’t sure. He had kept it for me and now proudly returned it to me. The next day I gave it to the gentleman I’d promised it to. This was a boon for him because, when he entered his cafe, where I was sitting with Liz waiting for him, he was in a foul mood, and he chirped up immediately. “Until you came along, Mr Balden, this was a bad day.”

That wasn’t the only heartening compliment. Another man called me wise and a true Palestinian. Another said that it was good that I didn’t fall for all their appeals for money, because it taught them to see Westerners as people. And when Liz and I were strolling along Milk Grotto Street, round the back of the Nativity Church, looking at olive-wood carving workshops, one workshop owner told us to go up on his roof, adding, in a Australian-Palestinian accent (if you can imagine that), “It’s alright, you don’t have to buy anything!”. That wasn’t a compliment, but it took something full cycle for me – after all, I’ve moaned in previous blogs about being treated like a walking ATM and buying-machine.

We struggled up the steep Ottoman steps to the rooftop and beheld an impressive sight. The day was clear, with soft golden light and patches of light and shade under a part-cloudy, part-sunny sky – a photographer’s gift. In one direction, two church towers and the Omar Mosque minaret stood upright over the town, with the hill of Beit Jala behind, making a perfect shot. In another direction the Herodeon towered majestically over the countryside, and in another we could see over the Judaean Desert to the Dead Sea and Jordan. All around the fine buildings of Bethlehem, with their softly light stone, practised architectural relaxation under the afternoon sun. Bethlehem was glowing.

Later in the Nativity Church it was the Armenian Christmas (celebrated on 18th January). In a lightly layered mist of frankincense, the priests’ singing was superb, almost operatic, enchanting, echoing something anciently reminiscent somewhere deep in my soul or in the history of this place. I remarked to Liz that, although the deep interiority and devotion of Muslims is impressive when you see hundreds of them praying together, the Christians certainly put on a remarkable show, with candles, bells, robes, incense, chanting and ritual. Though my spiritual preferences are simple and I prefer the rustling of the leaves in the trees to ceremonial drama and high religiosity, as an historian with a nose for cultural depth, human roots and deep memory, this stuff fascinates me.

That day we made progress seeking out an icon painter for Liz too – this was one of her quests while here. I took her to see John, a Christian in his sixties who runs one of the better souvenir shops in town (don’t tell my other shop-owning friends I said that!). At first, with a mystified look on his face, he thought we sought an expert on coins. After tea he took us to the municipal tourist information centre. Hmm, I thought, we’re just going to get an official answer. But no, the husband of the Polish woman at the desk was Bethlehem’s top icon painter. Good on you, John! An arrangement was made to meet him and another icon painter from near Ramallah and, inshallah, it might even work – watch this space.

Green Intifada and the Witches of Beit Sahour

2012-01-15T19:42:00.000+02:00

Rain falls on saints and sinners alike -
question is, who is which? Or is it both?

The weather has been dreadful the last few days – windy, rainy and cold. As my Anglo-Palestinian friend Aisha says, it has been Scottish weather, not even English. But today the sun appeared and the air is calm and benign, and it’s like emerging from a rather long tunnel. On Friday it was one of those days where you had to run for it because you’d be utterly soaked, top to tail, if you didn’t. That day, I went up to Beit Jala with Ibrahim to a follow-up meeting of the Centre for Emerging Futures, and it was bucketing down. Torrents raged down the streets and people just stayed indoors shivering – not that their heating is much good either. Ismael said he stayed in bed with his wife all day, mooning. Days like that can make the birth rate rise in nine months’ time.

The CEF organises get-togethers for people on both sides of the wall, first to meet and build relationships, and secondly to start joint projects – some of which are one-off or small in scope, and some of which develop into something quite significant (see my blog Emerging Futures). But there is a problem, a big, delicate problem. It concerns normalisation. In the 1990s, when it looked as if peace might be coming, normalisation projects grew and, after things broke down in the intifada of 2000-04, they revived afterwards, but now we have entered a new, problematic phase. Let me explain.

That darned wall snakes everywhichwhere -
Palestinians are in the foreground, an Israeli settlement back-right

In peace-building, it’s necessary for people of goodwill on both sides to meet up, building foundations on which future peace and social reconstruction can be built. This is critical in Palestine and Israel because, since about 2002, the Israelis have built the separation wall and reinforced the apartheid control system, to enormous and intricate proportions. This means that people don’t actually meet. Even if they pass each other in the street, as between ‘Arab Israelis’ (Palestinians) and Jews in Israel, they don’t interact. Most Palestinians meet only soldiers on duty – mostly psyched-up, propagandised, fear-driven, over-armed youngsters in body-armour. The wall serves as a mirror in which people on both sides see only a reflection of their projection of the people on the other side, which is so often based on their own state of being.

Establishing contacts across the great divide is often called ‘normalisation’. This sounds like a good thing but, for Palestinians, it isn’t necessarily so, because there is still a war going on in which they are perpetually the losers. It isn’t open war (except at times in Gaza): it’s a furtive war where people get killed and injured in ones and twos, land gets taken dunum by dunum, trees get uprooted and land defiled, and Palestinians are humiliated and driven over by the relentless bulldozer of Israeli progress.

Mostly it doesn’t hit the headlines, internationally or in Israel – and that’s why it’s designed this way. Many Israelis are not aware of much of what’s happening in this war, even when it’s just 10km away from them, and a proportion of them don’t want to know. Most westerners don’t want to know either – they live in peace-loving, democratic, civilised countries like Britain, France and America, haha.

An Israeli settlement between Ramallah and Nablus, built on Palestinian land

In recent years Palestinians have given up fighting (they lose and are punished horribly) and also on negotiation (they lose, or they’re easily blamed for obstructing peace when, actually, most blocking comes from the Israelis). These aren’t one-sided, biased statements: the documented, videoed, photographed evidence statistically and factually backs this up, even when studied by international bodies like the UN or EU, or by reputable NGOs such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or Christian Aid. To give one small example, there’s a massive joint military exercise happening right now and in the coming months between US and Israeli forces, and the low-flying jet activity happening today over Palestine is part of that – they’re noisily flying over us as I write this.

This ongoing loss by Palestinians can happen in friendly normalisation-oriented activities too. Israeli participants are generally alright – materially comfortable and secure – while Palestinians have genuine hardships and grievances applying to them as we speak, so there is an asymmetry of relationship where the Israelis grant permissions and concessions and do favours while the Palestinians are largely powerless to do much. Even amongst enlightened, friendly Israelis there is an unconscious tendency to welcome Palestinians to their way of seeing and doing things but not to stretch themselves or, they fear, endanger themselves, to fully cross the threshold to the other side’s way of seeing and doing things. With some notable exceptions, and the CEF arena is one of them.

So one of the offshoot projects of CEF, the Hackathon, was supposed to hold a conference this weekend at Beit Jala – a get-together of computer programmers from both sides to engage in joint programming and web projects. But it didn’t happen. A proportion of Palestinians believe that such contacts aren’t helpful and, as part of their current non-violent strategy of resistance, they are pitching against normalisation and projects like the Hackathon. For more information about the issues around normalisation, see here. From now on, for Palestinians to attend wall-crossing meetings, they must obtain a permit from the PA in Ramallah. The hotel where the meeting was to be held was threatened with retaliation if it hosted the conference, so it pulled out and the Hackathon was postponed. But not killed.

It's for these guys that over-the-wall meetings must happen -
politicians and diplomats won't deliver them justice and peace

In many cases avoiding normalisation doesn’t mean rejection of all contacts with Israelis, who have built their nation at the expense of Palestinians and other Arabs, since in the longterm contacts must be made, not only to give Palestinians some eventual peace and security, but also to begin integrating Israel into the Middle East – an inevitable process which must happen sometime. It doesn’t mean rejection of the existence of Israel (largely an outdated and emotive idea), but it does mean that Israel must make serious adjustments to accommodate to the facts of where it is located and what it has done to its neighbours, and it must be held off somewhat to stop the incremental process of forcible colonisation and oppression it currently practices. In other words, it must at minimum withdraw behind the 1948 Green Line (the internationally-recognised border between Israel proper and the West Bank), come to an acceptable deal over Palestinian refugees and East Jerusalem and stop the settlement-building project in the West Bank – these are the basic positions Palestinians now take regarding any peace deals they will agree to.

This anti-normalisation campaign, which is related to the boycott and disinvestment campaign you might have heard of, is affecting all grass-roots contacts between the two sides and the organisations that promote them, including CEF and Hope Flowers School. It personally affects Ibrahim Issa, who has been accused, as was his father, of collaborating with the enemy, as a result of building joint projects. There are those who think this issue through carefully and discerningly, and there are others who are more extreme and emotive about it, and in the heat of the moment the latter can gain the upper hand.

The rain brings benefits too - our school playground collects rainwater
which is filtered, then stored in an enormous Japanese-financed
water cistern for use during the long, hot dry season

So various projects of CEF are affected. At the meeting we discussed this, as the rain monsooned down outside and the owner of the Everest Hotel fluttered around fixing coffee. The general consensus was that we must act carefully but never give up, since the real war isn’t between Israelis and Palestinians but between those who promote conflict, division and oppression and those who work for multicultural interchange, peaceful coexistence and humanity in relationships.

This was a gentle, firm and agreed consensus between all of us, respecting the principle of the anti-normalisation campaign but begging to differ on the full extent of its application. We’re quietly carrying on, in other words. The two project groups for whom this follow-up meeting had been planned – a group arranging two-day trips for people on each side to visit the other side, and a group arranging family get-togethers for parents and children on both sides – would continue their work. These joint projects are at least as important for the Palestinian resistance as banning them is.

But there is another interesting asymmetry that we discussed, concerning CEF. The core of the Israeli side is made up of former Israeli soldiers who have seen the light and decided to work another way – many of them in their forties. One of the CEF leaders was a senior IDF officer for twenty years – and a very likable guy who takes considerable risks for CEF. But the energy from the Palestinian side comes from younger people, many of them students. Even Ibrahim, a CEF leader on the Palestinian side, is only in his late thirties.

Here's a hint of what comes next: an old wind-pump in Jenin
left over from the British Mandate period and now increasingly relevant

These people are driven by the ethos of the Arab Spring, which overstretches the old political divisions of their parents and the past – it’s the mobile-phone, online generation, who have a lot of willpower and clarity but less political ideology, personal influence or experience than many of the Israelis. This asymmetry is something we cannot really change, but it adds a challenge which must still be overcome. The organisers of the above-mentioned trips, for example, said that they had to do more work than the Palestinians – though this is to be expected, since it is the Israeli authorities who issue the permits for people to cross the checkpoints and the wall, and it is only Israelis who can really fix such permits.

I returned from that meeting fired-up. I sat alone at home working as the rain swilled down outside and got inside too, in various places, with the wind howling ferociously, and there was even a four-hour electricity cut at one stage. I wrapped myself in my big blanket, sitting at my desk and warming my fingers on my hot water bottle, which sat on my lap. It was a hunkering-down day. Bethlehem was quiet. Even the over-flying jets stopped.

Modernity and ancientness: Bethlehem and, behind,
the ancient site of the Herodeon

Then on Saturday I went to a talk at the Alternative Information Centre in Beit Sahour about the Green Intifada. This was given by a British expat, Alice, who helps run a permaculture farm down below Beit Sahour called Bustan Qaraaqa. This is one arena where the British and European alternative movement plays a significant role in Palestine and Jordan. It’s one of my interests too, since I’m fired up about alternative development – not the ruinous economic-growth frenzy the world is being steamrollered with at present, but a social, ecological, intercultural and spiritual development of a new kind.

Alice talked about the historic deforestation of the Middle East. It was recorded even in the Epic of Gilgamesh of 300 BCE, but it has been seriously rampant in more recent times – Jordan’s forests were decimated a century ago to build the Hejaz railway, for example, and Israel has focused on disabling Palestinians’ farming and food security for decades. Israel’s strategy has been to drive people off the land, especially in Area C, 62% of the West Bank, into the cities, ripping Palestinians away from their rural birthright.

Modernity and ancientness: a Bedouin encampment
in the Judaean desert, aside an Israeli main road

This is happening right now in the Negev area of Israel, where the Bedouin are having their villages and lands destroyed and appropriated, and they’re being herded into townships to ‘civilise’ them and rip them away from their cultural roots. One Bedouin village has been destroyed and rebuilt by the Bedouin, helped by Israeli and international supporters, thirty times.

Palestine’s natural forests included oak, olive, cedar, pistachio, almond, fig, pine and meringo trees. Many trees have been domesticated and farmed – figs in 9000, olives in 4000 and almonds in 3000 BCE. Sylvicultural products included frankincense, balsam and other medicinal extracts and woodland-dependent herbs. The rise and fall of cultures in the Middle East has been intimately connected with the health of forests.

We do have woods and forests here,
but they struggle to survive

What’s necessary is not just a revival of farmed trees but also a propagation of shade-inducing, humus-building, land-regenerating, soil-fixing trees. This is difficult because the Israelis deliberately oppose and destroy such work – they often plant pine and eucalyptus plantations over old Palestinian villages and farmlands to judaise and ‘redeem’ the land, happening also to kill the sub-soil and render land useless to further farming by Palestinians.

When forests disappear, the water table sinks and rainfall declines, increasing desertification. Israeli settlement-building, often on hilltops, many of which were previously wooded, destroys water-sources, leading to rapid run-off and soil erosion lower down and causing rain to fail to infiltrate the ground and the water table. They take water from the West Bank highland aquifers for irrigation and modern urban water-usage, charging Palestinians high rates when they re-sell it back and using the money to subsidise water prices for Israeli settlers. The Israeli offensive focuses systematically on disabling farmers and driving them off the land into the towns or, preferably, out of the country.

Israeli settler artery in the West Bank
- Palestinians permitted to drive along it (thanks)

Deforestation thus represents dispossession. But it started long ago, and one problem has been that, when armies have rampaged over the land – as in Roman times or during the Crusades – wrecking the land and destroying farming and village security, people stop investing effort in the longterm, practising sylvicultural methods which would sustain the forests and farmland. Much of the hilly West Bank is festooned with ancient terracing which, if not maintained, falls apart, leading to soil erosion, land-defertilisation, loss of trees, lowering of water tables and agricultural decline.

So the revival of Palestine is intimately connected with a green intifada, a new resistance movement which builds sustainability and re-fertilises the land. Except there’s a problem: Palestinians are hardly aware of the need for it. They tend to think that ecological action is superfluous to their more pressing human rights and material problems. Ecology is something Westerners go on about which is irrelevant to them. Yet they suffer cancer from toxins, dense urban populations, land-loss, dependency on imported food (much of it from Israel), psychological damage arising from loss of emotional contact with wilderness and open space, a preponderance of litter and rubbish and a general social disempowerment which re-ruralisation could ameliorate.

Permaculture farm in Marda, northern West Bank -
Palestinian village at bottom of hill and
the Israeli settlement of Ariel at the top

So, somehow, it’s necessary to spark a new green awareness in Palestine, an awareness which gets incorporated into the resistance movement. By resistance I don’t mean warfare and polarisation but social-cultural revival amongst the Palestinian people, a strengthening of society such that, whatever is done to them, they have an increased resilience, adaptability and survival power. Ecological revival is a core, not a peripheral issue: the whole world needs to understand this, but Palestinians in particular, with their special problem as an occupied, colonised people, need really to become leaders in this field. It is strange yet karmic fact that British people and Palestinians who have lived abroad and returned are crucial catalysts of this. This is the next level of the resistance movement in Palestine, the agenda for the coming generation. So good on you, Alice, for articulating this issue so clearly and doing your bit to spread the word – not least through the exemplary work they’re doing down at Bustan Qaraaqa.

Yes, this is relevant too: subtle energy -
the lunar eclipse of Dec 2011 over Bethlehem

Before and after the lecture I met two delightful English ladies, the witches of Beit Sahour – though, frankly, Alice, a ‘green witch’ from North Wales, if ever there were one, made a third. This was great, because many of my beliefs I have to keep quiet about, and suddenly I was with people with whom I could be open. Most Westerners and nearly all Palestinians don’t want to hear about my psychic work, about my being an astrologer, healer and political mystic, an alternative radical powered by vegetarian food, meditation and holistic attitudes, with a pedigree and a bunch of perspectives that are right off most people’s map. Not to mention the curled-copper, phi-ratio, anti-gravity energy-harmoniser I wear round my neck, tucked under my shirt!

One of the witches asked me how I had started my involvement with Palestine. I thought a bit before answering and then came out with it. It was ETs and cosmic beings, the ‘Council of Nine’ to be precise, twenty years ago, that started the process. This was followed by the late Pam Perry, a disabled fellow Glastonbury astrologer who campaigned for Palestine by phone and laptop from her bed, who benignly tricked me into pursuing this game, bless her. It was also a calling from my former lives in this region, a jiggling of the soul and a grinding process in my heart which caused me to cut out of the bill-paying, treadmill duties of the typical Westerner and to get involved with this mess.

An old olive tree, the sacred tree of Palestine

They lit up when I told them this, and suddenly they came out with their own secrets about the consciousness and healing work they do. One of them is married to a Palestinian (a nice chap) and the other works as a legal advisor and researcher for a rights organisation in Bethlehem called Badil – but even there they keep quiet about their core beliefs. Neither from the Western-rationalist viewpoint, nor from a Muslim viewpoint, with its strict rules about esoteric issues which have grown tighter in recent decades, neither from a modernist-Palestinian viewpoint are these activities and beliefs credible or supported. So we keep quiet. But we had a profound sharing together, like a secret cabal, and it was refreshing.

We had a fine time in our corner at the AIC until it was time for me to go home – Bethlehem closes down early, and the chances of finding a taxi back to Al Khader decrease rapidly after 10pm. Nevertheless, as I wandered out, steeling myself for a long and chilly wait, a taxi drove past and stopped for me. It turned out, as is nowadays increasingly the case, this taxi-driver had carried me before in a former year, and we chattered on the way back, he in his broken English and me in my patchy Arabic, until we reached the school. The lift to the top floor was defunct, thanks to the recent electricity cuts, so I climbed the stairs. There was another electricity cut while I was writing this piece, and I gave thanks for being on a laptop with a good battery!

Ugliness and beauty, atrocity and grace
exists closely side-by-side here -
we do live in a strange world...

Hot water bottle time, and the customary shivering as my bed warmed up. Ah, I love living on Planet Earth – well, sometimes, at least. Other times, my guardian angels watch me fascinated as I struggle and persevere through the facts of worldly existence, striving to see the whole wood while mostly just seeing the trees, and wondering what’s to come next.

Well, inshallah, I have a visitor from Glastonbury coming to stay, and a report to write, and a load of other issues to get to grips with. But I’ve almost finished the website I was building, to market my forthcoming book Pictures of Palestine, due out in May, and if you want a sneak preview, click here! Now it’s time to put the kettle on – classically bloody British. Would you care for a cup of tea in Bethlehem?

Ooops, the lights have just gone out again. The mobile phone network goes down too, at the same time. Well, one thing is for sure: it’s probably not the Israelis – it’s crummy power equipment, suffering a hangover after the wind and rain. A funny consequence of this is that many of my neighbours emerge from their houses when this happens, because their electric heaters and TVs have gone off! We really do need a green intifada, and pdq.

Alternative Information

2012-01-11T21:09:00.001+02:00

Dusk over Al Khader, from my kitchen window

I’ve just been sitting with a Czech, a Dane, an Austrian, two Italians, a German, a Basque, two Palestinians and a Hutu refugee from Rwanda living in Denmark. Yes, even in walled-off, quarantined countries like Palestine it can get quite cosmopolitan. In particular at the Alternative Information Centre down in Beit Sahour, where many of the internationals in Bethlehem gather on Tuesday and Saturday nights. Most of them are in their twenties and thirties, doing internships, volunteer work or non-violent direct action. To them I proved to be an interesting oldster – my formative years in the Sixties, in Liverpool and the LSE, are ancient history to them, just a bit more recent than the Roman empire.

Pensive in Manger Square

The Rwandan was fascinating. There wasn’t opportunity to prise the full story out of her, but her family had been accused of involvement in genocide and, her life being in danger, she found refuge in Denmark. Now she’s in Palestine volunteering as an X-Ray technician at the Beit Jala hospital. A roundly bumptious Hutu, she had a lot of character, zest and courage.

At the end of the evening I asked her how she would get back to Beit Jala – 4km, and a climb of 1,500ft from Beit Sahour – and she said she would walk. “But you said you start work at seven in the morning…”. I hoiked her out and insisted on her sharing a taxi with me. We got a lift from one of the Palestinians up into Bethlehem – a 500ft climb – and flagged down a taxi there. Not easy at eleven at night – life shuts down quite early in winter in Bethlehem.

The taxi driver, learning I was British, asked whether Cornwall was near Newcastle on Tyne, where his son lives. Er, not exactly – about 10-12 hours’ drive. His eyebrows rose. Now, I’m not used to thinking that I come from a big country – Britain is diminutive by most standards – but by Palestinian standards, a ten-hour drive is pure fantasy, since one could drive up the long axis of the West Bank from end to end in three hours. This is a journey few Palestinians would bother to make – most movement is between neighbouring towns, the longest stretch being from Bethlehem to Ramallah.

Thinking heads in Al Faraheih Street

We dropped the Rwandan at her home in Beit Jala and wove down to Al Khader. There were a lot of Palestinian soldiers at the Palestinian checkpoint tonight – we have to pass through it to get to the school, since the school is in Area C (a Palestinian area under Israeli control) and the checkpoint is at the boundary of Area A (under Palestinian control). Though, to be honest, the checkpoint exists mainly to intercept people smuggling goods between Israel and Palestine. But they might also have been there to keep a look-out for further settler incursions.

The taxi-driver gave me his card, asking me to ring him and give him my British phone number so he could visit me in Cornwall when he visits his son in Britain in five months’ time. Well, Cornwall, to a Palestinian, would be a wonderful place to visit. He has a daughter in Sweden too, so we had another connection there (I lived in Sweden in the 1970s).

Chestnuts

Having sat slaving at my computer for a week, I was glad to get out and about. At the AIC the weekly lecture was about black Palestinians. Yes, there are some. The speaker came from Jerusalem, where the small black community goes back to the 1700s, started by African Muslims from the Sahel (around the Sahara, where the population is mostly Muslim). They made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca (a major journey in those times), then proceeding to Jerusalem and getting sucked in there, marrying into Jerusalem society. This was possible in the days of the Ottoman empire, since travel around the Muslim world was open and free. More Africans came in the 1930s at the time of the British Mandate, since colonial passports gave them freedom to travel, some coming there to serve the British as policemen and guards and, again, getting stuck there. In those times Jerusalem wasn’t as vexed and tense as it is today.

The Jerusalem black community isn’t big but they stick together. Most have African fathers and Palestinian mothers and they were born here in Palestine, slotting into the multicultural landscape of Jerusalem – Tajiks, Armenians, Syrians, Turks, Persians and sundry Europeans have grown into the local landscape too and, a century ago, Jews were one of those minorities. Now they are the dominant race, and the speaker talked of how the Africans have shared the tragedies of the last sixty years with Palestinians and thus feel very involved with them – besides, they have nowhere else to go.

The Omar Mosque in Manger Square

He spoke of identity issues. Palestinians aren’t exactly racist with blacks, since they’re such a mixed bunch themselves and their Muslim values discourage discrimination, at least toward fellow Muslims. But they can be parochial – people from Nablus and Hebron look on each other as distant strangers. So while Palestinians are not unfriendly, black Palestinians can nevertheless gain the feeling they’re different. I heard this at another lecture at AIC six months ago, this time from a young black woman from Jenin, where she reported that the poorer Palestinian refugees there, notably conservative in their values, distinctly disallowed intermarriage between Africans and Arabs – this gave her a problem finding boyfriends. But in Jerusalem, with a history of being visited by foreigners for 3,000 years, it’s not like that.

There’s another identity issue too – and in this respect the life of an Israeli Arab is more difficult than that of a West Bank Palestinian. When the Israelis took over West Jerusalem in 1948 and East Jerusalem in 1967, they offered two alternatives to Palestinians, to take on Israeli nationality (anathema to most) or to retain their Jordanian nationality, receiving residence papers but no passport. Most Palestinians hoped the nightmare would end and the Jordanians would return, so they stayed Jordanian, but the Israelis had other ideas. In recent years this has turned nasty, since indigenous Jerusalemites now have few rights. They are regarded by many Israelis as foreigners, even ‘infiltrators’, even though they’ve been there far longer than Israelis. Many Israeli settlers in Jerusalem are themselves quite recent immigrants, particularly from USA.

Technically Jordanian, arising from the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank from 1948-67, most black Palestinians haven’t been to Jordan and don’t want to live there, and Jordan doesn’t want them – Jerusalem is their home. But they are pressured and squeezed – including by settlers deliberately moving into every area of the Old City and East Jerusalem, carrying out an incremental takeover of the place. The Old City of Jerusalem is being staked out by security cameras – to protect the settlers of course.

So this small community, having had some status as police and guards for the British, now have near-zero status as anything. But as a community they have decided to identify with the Palestinians they have shared the horrors of the last sixty years with, and they consider themselves Palestinian. They’re in for the long haul.

Dusk over Irtas, as seeen from my kitchen

The stories one hears from Jerusalem are not good. Arab areas, ruled and dominated by the Israelis, do not receive the same civic services as Jewish areas. They’re being pressured from all sides by Israelis, who are pursuing a deliberate policy of isolating Palestinian communities to decimate their political power and outnumber them with Jews. There's speculation that, if there's another intifada, it will be centred in Jerusalem.

As the speaker said, the occupation takes two forms, physical and psychological. The humiliation, belittlement and disempowerment of Palestinians in Jerusalem is an occupation of the psyche, an apartheid psychology, and he told of his own struggle as he grew up to break free within his own mind of the inferiority complex and perpetual uncertainty of being a Palestinian growing up in this environment.

In a sense West Bank Palestinians, separated from their Jerusalem kin by two security walls and an apartheid pass system which makes short distances seem like a thousand miles, are more secure in their identity. Jerusalemites are not even permitted to call themselves Palestinians – they are ‘Arab Israelis’, and those without Israeli passports are technically stateless. When they travel they receive a travel document accepted by most countries, but it still denies the right to full status as the national of a country, and if they encounter difficulty abroad they can’t go to the Israeli embassy for help.

West Bankers and Gazans know they are Palestinians. Though they have diminished status as residents of an occupied non-country, they know who they are and, while Gaza and the West Bank suffer their own pressures, at least they can call their hometown their own – well, sort of, though even that is not clear or secure.

The speaker said that, while he breathes a sigh of relief when he enters the West Bank (I do too), he didn’t want to move here because he’s a Jerusalemite – that’s his identity. It is after all a special city. Here the Israelis have succeeded in atomising the Palestinians, boxing them into small areas not only geographically but also psychologically. Nowadays, a West Banker from Abu Dis, once an outskirt of Jerusalem, rarely meets people from East Jerusalem, even though the distance involved is just 3km. Most Bethlehemites cannot visit Jerusalem either, 10km away.

On the left, the top end of Al Khader, then the wall
and a settler bypass road, and on the right is Israel.

I have become something of a Bethlehemite, psychologically. I have freedom of movement as a foreigner – more even than Israelis – but going the 80km to Tel Aviv is, psychologically, almost the same distance as the 2,500km back to Cornwall. So I have imbibed some of the psychology of apartheid myself – the mental barriers which, in Jerusalem, mean that a Jew and a Muslim can pass each other in the street without acknowledging, let alone noticing, each other. But as a foreigner who can go home, I can maintain a certain perspective too.

Even when I visit Tel Aviv to hang out with Israeli dissenters who distinctly disagree with their country’s actions, I find them looking hard at me, almost as if they’re thinking, “He’s living in the West Bank – and he’s still alive? He seems to be quite happy with it too”. They question me about what’s happening over there, and what it’s like. For while they sympathise with Palestinians and carry out actions to support them, they rarely meet them. They get a Brit instead, doing some alternative ambassadorial work.

Yes, I am happy being in Palestine, as you might have gathered. The idea of living in Israel just doesn’t occur to me. But I cannot stay – visas – and if I overstep the mark, I’ll be chucked out, never to return. Which would break my heart. So, bizarrely, to be able to return I mustn’t stay long, and I must prioritise staying under the Israelis’ radar by looking innocuous, an innocent, stereotypically eccentric, semi-retired English gentleman traveller writing books – that’s my ruse. I hope only the right people read this!

Even this simple matter is risky to write about. I regret to tell you that there are other things I don’t say in this blog. Sorry about that: my need to be able to return outweighs your need to know, at least for me. No one pays me, so it’s my choice. I can hint that what I don’t say concerns settlers, ferkling on computers and other quiet agendas, and that’s all you’re going to get. It’s non-violent though, so benign it could be threatening, and entirely consistent with the ideological preferences of most of my readers. Well, perhaps.

In my forthcoming book Pictures of Palestine I mention at various points about late nights sitting up blogging – and the groggy mornings that follow. I’m at it again. It’s one in the morning and my eyelids are drooping. Not quite enough though to stop me informing you that I’ve been constructing the website for my book, and while I’m really pleased with it, it’s not ready and uploaded and the book is still with its designer, so you can’t see it! Yet. Except for the sneak preview here. When I say ‘Pictures of Palestine’, I mean it, and those of you who know my web-design style will know that you’re in for a generous helping of eye-candy. Time for bed. Goodnight!

Wings and Prayers

2012-01-10T18:00:00.002+02:00

As the sun went down, a wonderful atmosphere prevailed in Bethlehem. The town was in a genial mood – people chatting and hanging out in the streets. At Cinema, a busy intersection with taxis and taxi-vans, I saw a six year old girl standing on some steps simply singing out loud to the street. This was not only touching but also rather refreshing because, for some reason, Palestinians tend not to sing.

Aisha, an English friend who teaches English at the HopeFlowers Centre and stays at my place one night a week, uses the large, empty, echoey conference room in the school for practising opera – she’s an accomplished singer but, living in Ramallah and surrounded with people, doing her scales and practicing her arias doesn’t quite work easily. So she loves practising at the school, where she won’t be heard too much.

Nevertheless, a neighbour discretely enquired of me what was happening. I explained and he smiled. He’d seen opera on TV, and was interested when I said that opera were like plays sung out loud, with stories to them. I asked him why Palestinians tend not to sing, and he said back, “Since the Nakba we haven’t had much to sing about”. Well, true, but I know that’s not the real answer, which I am yet to find out.

The Nakba, by the way, was ‘The Disaster’, the 1948 war during which the Israelis staked out their nation militarily, by ethnically cleansing and murdering the Arabic inhabitants of hundreds of villages and towns in what became Israel. In the space of a few months, the population of Bethlehem quadrupled with refugees and they have never gone home. As a symbolic act, refugee families keep the keys to their old, lost houses, like a family totem, proof of having torn-up roots in your own land.

This afternoon was one of those benevolent times when people set their cares aside and enjoy the moment. That’s one thing I like in Palestine: people do their best to keep their spirits up and enjoy life. There is no alternative. Or at least, the alternative, dwelling on your problems, is far worse.

As Ghada Issa once put it, at a time when she was feeling pessimistic a few years ago, “In Palestine we don’t have up days and down days, we have down days and worse days”. She was at that moment manifesting symptoms of the strange collective bipolarity Palestinians live by, thanks to their circumstances: generally they keep their mood positive in spite of everything, but when they lose their strength and fortitude, they plummet into deep despond. That was where she was when she said this.

Palestinians wear their emotions inside out: love and sadness, friendship and disgust, humour and anger, they share them openly, men perhaps more than women. Their feelings spill out liberally. Mercifully it’s their positive emotions they show most. I have never ever seen a sign of violence except on a couple of occasions when Israeli soldiers are around, acting provocatively as they do, but even then Palestinians suppress it because they usually don’t feel like getting shot, beaten up, arrested or hounded. They got tired of that in the last intifada ten years ago, and it doesn’t achieve much.

But on a lovely, tranquil afternoon like today, there was still a problem – in parts, on the way home passing through Deheisheh and Duha, there was smoke everywhere. People were setting fire to the skips in which they put their rubbish. They do this because civic rubbish disposal is patchy at the best of times, and the skips were full. It’s not only smoky but dangerous, since so much of their rubbish contains plastics and other toxic materials, and the slow smoulder of the rubbish makes it worse. They have a blind spot around this issue. When Westerners like me raise the matter, they shrug it off as if it is no problem. But it is a problem and a big one.

Before you disapprove of these apparently backward people, let me remind you that we in the West started seriously addressing issues such as this only 20-30 years ago, when it was already too late for us. Before that, we trusted in modernity and slavishly paid the price in smog, toxicity and ugliness. Even today, when I speak to Westerners of the dangers of mobile phones, microwave ovens, wireless internet and electro-smog, people smirk or frown, as if to say “Oh no, he’s one of them”, since this is a current blind spot. One day an enormous scandal will erupt about it and people will yell “Why weren’t we told? Who is responsible for all this?”. We are responsible. We know. But we don’t want to face it.

So blind-spots – areas of life that people deliberately ignore, ultimately to our cost – are not unique to Arabs. In fact, Arabs look on Westerners as backward because they turn their backs on God – Europeans by becoming increasingly secular and Americans by making God into a heavily-armed, consumptive patriot with conservative politics. Every race and nationality covers its insecurities by looking on others as inherently deficient. The less contact they have, the stronger the projection – this is one reason the separation wall, so that each side could protect its fantasies about the other onto a concrete screen untainted by reality. This is why Iran is currently a bogeyman – no one goes there to meet the people.

This said, Palestinians must still address this issue of rubbish – creating less of it and disposing of it properly. Battery recycling, vegetable waste composting and plastics disposal? Forget it, it doesn’t exist here. But probably it will exist in 10-20 years’ time – Palestine is at a similar stage to the West in the early 1970s. Yet regarding social values, sharing and human warmth, Palestinians are at a stage I hope the West will reach in a few decades’ time.

I went into town to do my shopping today. I’ve been sitting slogging away at the computer for the last week or so, so I don’t have many events to report. The trouble with computers is that people hardly see the results of your work because it’s digitally concealed on a quartz chip, distinctly not in-your-face. Much of the work is for people far and wide, so that people around you see little significance in what you’re doing – you’re just anti-socially sitting at a computer, twiddling fingers and looking serious. I’ve been building a website, dealing with issues for Hope Flowers, doing bits of work for my living and answering questions online – many questions, from many people.

It's the lady on the left - must get a better picture of her sometime

When shopping I went to an old lady I visit regularly. She has a small stall on the streetside in the Old Town. By stall, I mean a stool and a few boxes and bags. She sells herbs and figs. She’s a lovely old lady, clad in her embroidered traditional dress. She walks into town daily with her husband, who leads their donkey, which carries the herbs – then he returns home to work on the land.

Palestinians are big on herbs – they have mint or thyme in their tea and they eat parsley, sage, coriander, spinach and chillies copiously. I buy my herbs from her – big bunches of them, far too big to use on my own, for 1-2 shekels per bunch (20-40p in British money). She likes her pet Englishman. She eyes me closely when she thinks I’m not looking. I think she knows intuitively that I’m roughly the same age as she, except she’s an old woman and I look younger – apart from that rather wrinkly face which has clearly seen some things. She hasn’t figured me out yet. Life wears out Palestinians and Westerners have a longer life-expectancy.

Then I went down to the market to get vegetables. Two stallholders were trying to steal me off the stallholder I usually go to, but he has the best vegetables. One thing many Palestinians don’t quite understand is this. They tend to think one is obliged to shop with them out of a duty to support them – after all, fair’s fair, isn’t it? Well no, I’m a Westerner, and I go for the best stuff and the best deal. Sorry about that. Also, annoyingly, I buy things only when I need them.

The souvenir shopkeepers down in town think similarly. I’m a Westerner, therefore I have money, therefore I ought to buy from them. Not so. I buy presents only because there are people I know and love to whom I wish to give things, and I buy specifically for them. There’s also the question of how to get it back to England, so I cannot buy much. I’m not a buying machine – well, at least, not in my own head.

Dear reader, this might seem elementary, but it’s not so for Palestinians. This is a walled-off cooperation and mutual-support economy, an economy where everyone depends on everyone else for keeping each other alive, so the emphasis here is on supporting your fellow citizens by trading with them, to some extent whether or not you need what they’re selling.

Nevertheless, when one of the traders, a young chap of seventeen who helps his elder brother run a shop, moaned to me today about having no money to buy schoolbooks, I took pity on him. He had said there had been no business today, and he needed 50 Jordanian Dinars (250 shekels or £50) for the books tomorrow. He was worried and depressed. So I wandered off to do other chores, including raiding a bank machine, and slipped him 50 JDs on the way back. He lit up and hugged me, shedding a tear.

I told him that this is a life-lesson we all need to learn: solutions often come when you’ve given up. When you give up, it means you’re opening up to Allah, handing over your problems since you couldn’t solve them yourself. This money is a gift from Allah, through a random Englishman. So give thanks to Allah.

“You are a good man, Mr Balden. I pray that Allah, he will pick you up when you have a need.” Well thanks, I might need your prayer to come true one day. This young Palestinian, poor yet intelligent, has better English than some of the 17-year old Brits I know. Good luck to you, mate – I sincerely hope you get a future.

Inshallah - if, that is, it is the Will of God

2012-01-06T21:36:00.000+02:00

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!

This is where I work - with a big blanket on the seat for when it gets cold

If I look to my right, this is the view - see above

I have a nice view looking ahead too

This is it, down to the monastery village of Irtas, south-eastwards

This place isn't particularly plush - modern Palestinian
buildings have a simple elegance and spaciousness to them

Here's my vast bedroom

Here's the kitchen. But to see the toilet you'll have to come here!

Joyriding and other journeys

2012-01-02T18:36:00.000+02:00

[All pictures in this blog entry are taken in Al Aqabah in the northern West Bank.]

Al Aqabah is a really nice village in a lovely landscape. I took a wander around before the others woke up. It was misty and dampish – not very good for photography. I noticed the flocking birds in the area, and the blossoms on some of the nut trees – it’s different up here in the north. Yes, here, blossoms come in winter, which is wetter. In a way summer serves the same purpose that winter serves in many lands including Britain – a time in which nature rests and pulls back – except it’s the dryness and heat which kills everything off rather than the cold. But the two-month winter, which this year seems quite mild, serves the same purpose here as the European spring, and then spring, which is rather like the European summer, is the growing season. Then many things die off for summer, and the birds migrate, the cats stay indoors in the cool, and the land rests under the glaring sun.

I waved to an old gent with glinty eyes who was going about his farming tasks, and sat on a rock watching a family in a shack going about their morning routines – I found out later that their house had been demolished by the Israeli army, and they were awaiting an opportunity to rebuild in a place where demolition, inshallah, would not happen.

I returned to the village centre and encountered Haj Sami, the mayor, wheeling along in his electric wheelchair. He invited me into his office, where his assistant was busy doing admin. Tea was brought in by a midget of a man, and Haj Sami asked for my help with an e-mail. Two of the wheels on his wheelchair needed replacement, and he needed me to look underneath for a serial number, which I duly did and wrote down. Bless him, Haj Sami works dedicatedly for his village, and he’s up against quite big odds, what with his disability, the Israeli army, foreign funders and the realities of life in Palestine.

Al Aqabah community centre

By the time I left and returned to the guesthouse, the others were up. We went down the road with Haj Sami to look around the village lands. A tractor passed. A flock of birds wheeled past, doing pre-mating rituals.

A little boy about two years old was called by his mother in the shack, and then he came out bearing a freshly-baked flatbread, which he took to Haj Sami. (A friend in Cornwall, to whom I had sent the photo of the child at the top of this blog entry, wrote back to say “Can you kidnap that child in the photo for me? Pleeeease!!”)

The bread was duly broken up and passed around. Regarding the kid’s parents in the shack, Haj Sami told us how they were concentrating new building close to the mosque, where demolition was less likely, inshallah, and about his long negotiations with the army to stop them using the village for military practice. We spoke of solar powered street lights and the greenness of the hills at this time, then wandered up the road, only to be intercepted by the old gentleman bearing a tray of tea in small Arabic tea glasses. We duly stood around in the middle of the road drinking tea, and his old wife, with leathery skin and equally glinty eyes, came out to join us.

We went to see the village clothes factory, a large room in the communal building where villagers run a clothing cooperative to earn an income for themselves and the village – another fruit of Haj Sami’s labours. Then we saw the council circle where meetings are held, and where Haj Sami takes visitors for discussions. Then, after tidying up the guesthouse, it was time to leave. Three of us were going to Nablus, two to Ramallah and I to Bethlehem. It turned out that a serrveese was coming to pick up the administrative assistant, so we all piled in, out of the village to the neighbouring village of Tayasir, then on to Tubas.

Here we transferred to another serrvesse to Nablus. When we arrived, three of our friends split off and Morgan, Marjorie from Switzerland and I walked down through the streets to the other service station in town, dropping into a sweets cafe on the way – Nablus is well known for its kanafe, a cheesy sweet cake. When we reached the station, funny stuff started. There was no serrveese for Ramallah – most strange.

Now at serrveese stations there are no timetables, bays or signs. You just stand there in roughly the right area and then wait for someone to come along recruiting passengers for his serrveese. Eventually a guy came promising a serrveese to Bethlehem, offering to swing by Ramallah on the way. This turned out to be inaccurate.

Actually, he went to Qalandia, a godawful place where the main checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem is located – worse, it’s a major intersection where traffic jams are common, since the Ramallah to Bethlehem main road passes the checkpoint without going through it. It is a ripped-up, unsightly area, overshadowed by Israeli watchtowers and littered with rubbish and traffic jams. The driver flagged down another serrveese to take Morgan and Morjorie into Ramallah, muttering something to me in Arabic that I didn’t understand and driving me to another intersection a few miles down the road, suddenly to stop there and get me out of the van. He tried flagging down serrveeses heading for Bethlehem but, no, they were all full.

It took a while, and it as getting dark. Cars were speeding around everywhichway. He eventually found me a car to travel with, saying it would cost nothing, but actually it cost me 50 shekels (£10) – usually the serrvesse charge from Ramallah to Bethlehem is 20 shekels (£4). I had the dubious fortune to travel with four young Palestinian soldiers, whose English was as bad as my Arabic. They showed me pictures of themselves on their mobile phones, bearing guns and looking tough – riding with them was like a teenage joyride, with the music volume going up and down, mobile phones ringing – at one point all four of them were yelling down their phones. I was glad we were in the Middle East, because if they had been drunk they would have been obnoxious and dangerous, but the only things people get out of their heads on here are coffee, religion and a kind of bipolar energised excitability.

Half way through our journey, when we approached an Israeli checkpoint, I could see them shrinking into their seats – Palestinian soldiers are not allowed to fight with Israeli soldiers. I think they were hoping that, if there was trouble, I as an older international might be able to save them. But the Israeli soldiers were in a bored, slightly jocular mood, and there was no difficulty.

The trip was entertaining. I landed up showing them the way to Bethlehem. On mixed Israeli-Palestinian roads, of which there are a lot in the West Bank, the road signs almost all point to Jewish places only, so there were no signs to Bethlehem until we reached Al Azariya, where the road becomes Palestinian-only.

I couldn’t figure out how these guys could be Palestinians in such a small country, and soldiers too, without knowing their way to Bethlehem. But it was true. They were fascinated to have an Englishman show them the way – for all these youngsters knew, I could have been a British remnant of the Mandate period before 1948, the old days that their grandfathers talk about.

We eventually reached Bethlehem and I bundled out of the car into sheer pandemonium. Bethlehem was filling up with people for New Year. Suddenly my phone rang. It was Maram. Ibrahim was experiencing his heart complaint again and had to rest, so please would I not come for the New Year celebration they had invited me to? Ah, that was what I had come back to Bethlehem for. Otherwise I would have stayed an extra night at Al Aqabah or I would have headed straight for Tel Aviv, my next destination.

Oh well. What next? Get something to eat. I wandered over to Manger Square and tumbled into a falafel restaurant, rather weary. I had falafel and hummus with freshly-squeezed orange juice to drink, followed by Arabic mint tea. The boy helping the man chop onions over on another table was suffering with smarting eyes. I went over and showed him not to bend over the onions but to sit down and slice them from the side. He was chuffed finding out about this solution, and slightly proud at the attention he was suddenly receiving from this rather avuncular Englishman, and we chattered together in English. His elders suddenly discovered that he had the best English in the family. The grandfather looked on with amusement.

Then I went to visit Adnan and his family members, who were all sitting around moaning about the lack of business from tourists. Who wants to buy souvenirs on New Year’s Eve? Being New Year’s Eve, I told Adnan with some force that he really ought to get out of the tourist business – he was complaining about how he had made a loss guiding a group of Chinese around Bethlehem, and how they hadn’t wanted to visit many of the places he wanted to take them. They just wanted to visit the Nativity Church and someone else’s souvenir shop. I told him many foreigners don’t have much money any more, and neither do they have much room in their luggage, or will to explain to officers at Ben Gurion airport why they are carrying Arabic souvenirs. He listened, but I could see he was reluctant – he kept wanting to believe that the tourist trade would suddenly, magically, change for the better and he would at last hit the jackpot. No, my friend, forget it.

Eventually I went home. Bethlehem was packed full with revellers, and I didn’t feel like being a part of it. I found a taxi-driver who knew me from a few years before and he took me home, dodging the traffic jams. Guess what, I spent New Year working, catching up on some website tasks. I noticed midnight by the banging of fireworks and celebrated with a lump of chocolate. None of my British friends or family were on Skype, so I wound down and went to bed. Tomorrow is another day, and I’m off to Tel Aviv, for a change of scene and a couple of days in the West.

Not only that, but I feel that 2012 is going to be a crucial year for the world, a turning-point year. It could be that times get harder before they get better. Things are going to loosen up, and an avalanche of overdue inconvenient truths is waiting to fall on humanity, methinks. But I’m good at dealing with times of change and hard truths: I’ve spent my whole life training for a big change, and it might perhaps now be coming, inshallah.

Besides, I’ve had a varied, eventful and experientially-rich life, so if I died tomorrow that would be alright with me. Not that I’m expecting to die right now, but it’s good to be flexible. This is not a morbid thought but a feeling that the universe will take me wherever I am most needed. I’ll go where I can serve best. Being a pawn in the great cosmic chessgame is where I seem to get my kicks. I wonder whether they serve good tea in heaven, and whether the trains run on time?

Neapolis

2011-12-31T22:30:00.000+02:00

I was eating my breakfast and suddenly noticed something strange. Over by the separation wall, 400 yards away over the valley, about sixty people were weaving their way along, following the course of the wall on our side. Where the wall ends, just below the settlement outpost of Givat HaGadan, the cut up to the road by the outpost. They weren’t soldiers – they were hikers of some sort. Out came my camera on full telephoto.

I couldn’t tell whether they were Israelis on a gloat tour – sometimes they come to espy the land in the valley, possibly to size up what they might hope to be the next land-acquisition – or whether they were Europeans on a conflict tour – groups touring Palestine to visit the conflict hotspots. Either way, they had a purpose, for if you wanted a pleasant hike you’d walk somewhere else, such as along the top of the hill. The only non-political reason for walking alongside the wall would be lizard- or ant-spotting, since the area adjacent to the wall serves only as an unintended nature reserve. This world, and this Holy Land, is run mostly according to the law of unintended consequences, if only we could acknowledge it.

Just a few weeks ago, the land just over the wall from the school was designated for settlement-expansion – houses will presumably be built in the next couple of years. Our land on this side of the wall is, I suspect, next on the list. This, I think, is one of the reasons the wall has not been completed over the valley, in order not to fix the border. Though, some years ago, the Israeli government stated that the wall would not constitute a border – I guess they really meant they intended Palestine not to exist as a nation – it does establish facts on the ground, no matter what the international community might say about its legality or acceptability. But then the Israelis aren’t exempt from the law of unintended consequences either.

Nablus

Anyway, I didn’t have time to pursue the matter further, and perhaps it was harmless. Ismael was coming to pick me up at 9.30. I was on my way to the village of Al Aqabah in the northern West Bank, and it would be a three hour journey, inshallah. But first I had to go into Bethlehem to confront a classic problem. More unintended consequences!

I had asked for an embroidered coat to be made for me and the price had sky-rocketed. I had anticipated this and set a price above which I was not prepared to go. The shopkeeper arranging it with two ladies living in a village close to his own, south of Bethlehem, had rung me to ask for a second down-payment to help the ladies pay their bills. Okay, fair enough. Then he added in passing that the price had nearly doubled. He insisted that very special work was being done, and the ladies were working very hard. Well, okay, that might be true but I wasn’t happy about this and told him so, in my firmly diplomatic way. I didn’t want to sour or stall the project, but I needed to speak my truth. He didn’t get it. It was a delicate situation: one must never cause shame in a Palestinian. I needed to speak to him about it some more.

This highlights a classic Palestinian problem in interacting with the rest of the world. The idea of working to an arrangement and to a budget is alien to them. What they tend to believe is that, if they do a good job, the buyer is almost honour-bound to pay for it – not least if they’re a ‘rich Westerner’. What matters to Westerners is to make an arrangement and stick to it – or to negotiate in advance if there is to be a change. I had been clear with him but he hadn’t understood. He didn’t want to understand. Westerners are walking ATMs, and it’s the deservingness of Palestinians which matters most. Well, the problem is that this kills future business, and Palestinians then wonder why Westerners give up and walk away.

I arrived in town and my friend the shopkeeper wasn’t there – his brother was standing in for him. I presented my case carefully and he looked unsettled, defensive. I had to turn the tables round, to help him understand. “Look”, I said, “If you order a Volkswagen for a certain price and the man comes along with a Mercedes at double the price, telling you it’s a better car and you’d better pay for it even though you don’t want it, you won’t be happy, will you?”. He got the point. I spoke on the phone to his brother the shopkeeper. He understood, but I have a feeling it’s too late. This is going to be an expensive culture-clash. I’m hoping the coat will end up being worth it.

Off to the north. I walked through Bethlehem’s Christian Quarter to the service (pronounced ‘serrveese’) taxi station and took a service to Ramallah. Off we went along the dramatic main road to Ramallah, swirling, dipping and rising along through the Judaean hills and valleys for an hour. Ramallah means ‘Hill of God’, though frankly this town is probably the most profane of all Palestinian towns, being the PA capital and the main sink-hole for foreign funding and influence.

Nevertheless, when I got out the Friday prayers were in full swing, with a full-scale sermon going on in the nearby mosque, which was packed out. Hundreds of men were crowded around in the streets outside too, listening to the sermon blasting out over the town through the mosque’s loud speakers. It’s moving to see hundreds of men in the street praying together, and listening intently to the sermon. I’d have loved to have photographed them, but there are some things it is disrespectful to photograph, so I didn’t.

Eventually I found a service to Nablus, ready to go. I sat in the wrong seat. A service taxi has two front seats, one of them for the driver, then a middle and a back row of seats for three people each, and the guy in the middle row by the sliding door has to get out every time someone else wants to get in or out. The seat I was sitting on pulled up to let people out from the back row. Oh well, good exercise, and I performed it at As Suwaya, Huwwara and two spots in Nablus.

The scenery north of Ramallah – the region called Samaria by Israelis – is lovely, and this time of year it is relatively green. The hills are high, the valleys deep, and the ancient terracing on the hillsides speaks of centuries of occupation and farming. I can see why the Israelis want Samaria – not only do they see it as a Jewish heartland from 2-3 millennia ago, but it is far more scenic and lovable than lowland ‘Israel proper’, which is relatively flat, urbanised and unexciting. Except Samaria is the Palestinians’ home, and they still form the majority there.

The road winds and pitches tortuously along the valley-sides, and service-taxi drivers cannonade along in a most freestyle and artistic manner – they’re good drivers though. The taxis are powerful six-gear VW vans. When they’re driving along mixed Israeli-Palestinian roads they scare the hell out of some Israeli drivers – the conflict doesn’t always go in Israelis’ favour!

I had learned something from Aisha about these drivers a week ago: I had always wondered why most of these guys seemed to be around the same age, in their early forties. Her answer was that most of them were students around the time of the first intifada twenty-plus years ago. Their universities were closed by the Israelis (as hotbeds of revolt) and many of them got jobs in the then new business of service-taxi driving. As time went on they stayed in the trade – it’s a bit like being a boat skipper in a maritime nation, with some kudos attached. They get you to your destination fast too.

In an hour we arrived in Nablus. I was on my way to meet Morgan, the American who had visited me at the school just before Christmas, at Al Aqabah, where she works. I rang her from Nablus to check out the details of getting from Tubas to Al Aqaba. “I’m in Ramallah!”. “Aha.” “We’re coming up soon!” “Oh yeah? Who’s we?” “I’ve got some people who are couch-surfing at Al Aqabah tonight.” “Okay, so shall I wait for you in Nablus?” “Yeah, okay – see you soon!”.

So I took the opportunity to introduce myself to Nablus. I’ve never been here before, though the place has always tugged at me. It was founded as Neapolis in Roman times just west of an ancient Samaritan village, located in a deep valley between two ancient holy mountains, Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal. The town is long and thin, with a population of 130,000.

Today’s city is less prosperous than Ramallah and Bethlehem, not least because it is frequently blockaded and roadblocked by Israel. Though religious Israelis claim it as an ancient Jewish birthright, there is no evidence of early Jewish settlement there – if anything it is historically more important to Christians, though few Christians now live there. Jews and Samaritans were quite numerous a thousand years ago.

However, Jews claim it as the site of the ancient Jewish city of Shechem, and two sites, Joseph’s Tomb and Jacob’s Well, crop up periodically in the news when army-backed settlers enter in coaches, officially to make their prayers. There’s a provocative aspect to it, including desecration of mosques. Perhaps this is retaliatory, since Nablus was a centre for militant actions in the second intifada, during which 522 residents were killed and 3,000 injured. In the last municipal elections in 2005, 13 out of 15 representatives were from Hamas, and only two from Fatah.

Nablus is quite unpretentious – it reminds me of Swansea in Wales – and it receives few foreign visitors. Yet its valley location, with buildings clinging to the edge of the mountains, makes it special, a city to remember and rather pleasantly unmodernised. One rather nice aspect of it is that foreigners are treated as objects of friendly surprise rather than as walking ATMs.

There’s a lovely Ottoman old city in the centre of town. I love Ottoman architecture. They were big developers, the Ottomans, whose 300 year rule ended during the First World War. What’s so nice about Ottoman urban areas is that they’re human-size, built for pedestrians. They have lovely arches, domes, courtyards, alleyways, buildings, nooks and crannies.

So I wandered around Nablus taking photos, having some food and enjoying the ambience of the place – helped partially by its being Friday (the equivalent of Sunday in the West). Then I rolled along to the service taxi station for services heading north, bought some Arabic sweets (small, sticky cakes) to take to Al Aqabah, went to a coffee stall where I received a lecture from the man about how bad Britain is – though he accepted that this was one reason I was here sitting with him in Nablus – and finally I sat at the bus station watching doves and waiting for Morgan & Co to arrive from Ramallah.

When they came we didn’t have to wait for the service taxi to fill up because we filled it! Morgan had four people with her, and the driver’s friend and I made a full complement. So off we went, screeching along the winding roads through the inspiring landscape of the northern West Bank, this time to Tubas. When we got there the driver asked where we were going and agreed to take us there for an extra five shekels each, and there we came. Al Aqaba is in inspiring hill landscape with a big gap to the east, where the land falls away into the Jordan valley, the lowest place on Earth.

Photo by Morgan (not in the picture)

We met the mayor of the village, Hajj Sami, a staunch campaigner if ever there was one – he’s in a wheelchair after having been shot in 1971, when he was young – and we had dinner with him. At least, the others did – it was chicken and rice. The usual looks of horror appeared on villagers’ faces when Morgan said I was vegetarian. I ended up eating just rice and salad. Well, I’m used to it.

I spent the evening with five lovely twentysomethings from Chile, Switzerland, USA, England and the Czech Republic, chattering, watching videos and playing cards. We watched an instructive video about Jews’ perception of anti-Semitism, called Defamation, by an Israeli called Yoav Shamir. To me, the most important statement in the video was an observation by a Jewish lady who definitely felt the world was against her and other Jews: she said that, since the Jews had suffered so much, the suffering of others was of less consequence. Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Unfortunately, contrary to this lady’s belief, it justifies nothing in terms of the way Israelis now treat Palestinians.

More pictures of Nablus

The Christ Mass

2011-12-27T00:57:00.000+02:00

The Nativity Church, Beit Lahem

The day following the trip to Hebron, Morgan went home and Aisha and I went into Bethlehem. The town was crowded, mostly with Palestinians, Christian and Muslim, who come from around the West Bank, Gaza and in Israel, but also with a much larger number of foreigners than usual. Eventually 100,000 visitors hit Bethlehem by Christmas Eve, the largest turnout for at least a decade.

We went to the Nativity Church but it was packed with visitors and we didn’t stay long. There are two halves to the church, Orthodox and Catholic, and the place was crowded mainly with Italians, flashing their cameras and forming long queues to visit the shrines. We didn’t stay long. I don’t think Jesus would have done so either – though I can’t really speak for him. I reflected on the strange fact that, whenever I come to this church, I seem to be brought here by Muslims.

Aisha had to go home to Ramallah, so we had hummus and falafel at a friend’s cafe and then trogged up through the Old Town to Bab-al-Sqaq where she caught the 21 bus to Jerusalem. She was trying out this route because, though it requires passing through two major checkpoints near Bethlehem and Ramallah, it’s shorter and cheaper than going along the circuitous Palestinian main route around Jerusalem, staying within the West Bank.

I walked back as darkness fell toward Manger Square, taking photos and chatting with people. The square was heaving by now, with people streaming in from all directions. I spent much of the time with an enterprising young coffee seller, Mahmoud, who places his big charcoal-fired coffee pot on a concrete pedestal and does a roaring trade, selling coffee for a shekel (20p). We have an ongoing dialogue, and he likes his pet Englishman – except that I don’t support Real Madrid, but no one is perfect. I somehow doubt that Jesus supports Real Madrid either, or Barcelona for that matter, and told him so. “Ah, but Mohammed the Prophet supports Madrid!”, he joked.

Bethlehem has many beautiful mothers with even more beautiful kids!

And this guy is probably a father of at least six children

Here come de sheikh... Sheikh Yabuti?

O Little Town of Bethlehem

Soon a weird and very loud concert cranked up, by an Indonesian Christian rock band. The concert was sponsored by an Indonesian evangelical foundation. I heard the best rendering of the Lord’s Prayer that I have ever heard, quite tastefully done. One of them gave a lovely rap about harmony between Christians and Muslims, and everyone cheered, even though there was an embarrassing moment when he asked Christians, then Muslims, to stick up their hands, and the Muslims outnumbered the Christians by three to one – oops!

Before long I had had enough of harking the herald angels, soon degenerating into Santa and sleighbell songs, even though the music was rocking and rolling with vigour and aplomb, Indonesian style. Do Indonesians, or Palestinians for that matter, actually know what sleighbells are? I took refuge at my friend Alaa ad-Din’s shop, sitting people-watching as the endless crowds streamed down the narrow street. An old taxi-driver I knew drove past and I asked him to return in twenty minutes to pick me up.

I’ve never been one for Christmas – usually I go quiet and into retreat. This year I have felt more sociable about it but, suddenly, I realised that Bethlehem was becoming a nightmare. Why, in this source-point of the Christmas tradition, do they have to import all the Santa razzmatazz, all the commercial crap that has so ruined the spirit of Christmas, burying peace and goodwill under a mountain of consumptive blindness and artifice? After all, this is Bethlehem, the home of Christmas – it doesn’t need to import anything, and in fact it should set the tone. When I had mentioned this to Aisha, she had said I was welcome to come to Ramallah to escape. Suddenly I knew I was going to Ramallah tomorrow, on Christmas Eve.

The taximan never came. After an hour of waiting – allowing for Palestine Inshallah Time – I waved goodbye to my friends at the shop, who were duly worried that I wasn’t enjoying myself, but I was just fine. In truth, if they stopped deluding themselves, most people in these crowds didn’t seem too happy to me either. But then, as someone aptly wrote recently, if you live inside a myth it looks like reality – though the gentleman in question was referring to the growth-economics of recent decades. Yet this rendering of Christmas, in my judgement, has more to do with growth-economics than Jesus, peace and goodwill. Or perhaps I’m just being Scrooge-like and grumpy?

It took a while to find a taxi, and then we had to weave around backstreets dodging the traffic-jams. People were nominally enjoying Christmas perhaps because they felt they had to, but really, something else was happening. It’s tragic too that the majority of people here were Muslims. This in itself isn’t a problem – it’s a blessing, saving the Christmas celebrations from moribund decline. What’s sad is that the Christian presence is so thin. Most of Bethlehem’s and Palestine’s Christians have emigrated.

I had an image of Jesus coming down the street ranting at the desecration of his memory, vaulting onto the stage in Manger Square to unplug the amplifiers and tell the privileged visitors in their allocated seats in front of the stage to yield them up to the poor and needy. Or perhaps just to go home and get on with the job of building Heaven on Earth and acting on His teachings. I’m sure there are spiritual moments for many people here, when they contemplate the tender meaning of the Christ Mass, of the shepherds who came up from Beit Sahour to see the newborn babe and of the Holy Mother and Child, but this… this is something else. I was glad to get out.

So, to all my dear readers, my apologies for omitting to give you a warm and toasty image of Christmas in Bethlehem! I’m sure it has its finer side, and it certainly puts this walled-in city on the world map, at least for a few days each year. It’s good to make a bit of a fuss about peace and goodwill, but why don’t we do this all year?

Next day I pottered around the apartment tidying up and exercising my fingers on my computer keyboard, then I rang Ismael and left with him for the service-taxi station, to go to Ramallah. Ismael was a happy man – his son Tareq had just been released early from jail, thanks to Hamas’ clever politics in exchanging a thousand Palestinian prisoners for one woe-begotten Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. This says something about Hamas’ strategy: they doggedly hold out for their principles without budging an inch, and this time it worked. Israel, which desperately believes Hamas is a bunch of terrorists, did the deal and paid the price. Ismael’s son was free.

Ismael had driven with his wife to the prison near Ramallah to meet him, but the Israelis kept everyone waiting until late into the night, to prevent an outburst of celebration and protest – though it hadn’t worked. There had been a near-riot outside the jail, and Ismael and his wife had beaten a retreat until things calmed down. Ismael is a respectable gentleman, by profession a surveyor but now redundant and a taxi-driver, and quite poor. But they found Tareq and brought him home at last. Their house had since then been busy for some days as people came by to congratulate the son and family, bringing gifts and partying. Released prisoners are heroes in Palestine. Tareq had been jailed for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers who were raiding Deheisheh refugee camp, themselves breaking the rules of the Oslo Accords. But of course, Israelis always have to be right, and Palestinians, the UN and much of the rest of the world is wrong, so that’s that.

Ismael is trying to get Tareq into Abu Dis university. But he’s worried because the jail term has delayed his son’s entry into university, meaning that one of his daughters has reached the age for university too. He can’t afford to pay for both of them. This is deeply vexing to him, because Palestinians value education very highly. A while ago I had given Ismael 400 shekels toward the 8,000 shekel (£1,600 or $2,000) fine he would have to pay for his son on release in about nine months’ time, except the Hamas deal had cut this short and saved the fine, so I told him to put it in Tareq’s self-help fund. He was so grateful, it was touching, and we both cried a few tears together.

Bethlehem was choked with traffic. The place was crawling with armed security men too because Abu Mazen, the president, and Salam Fayyad, the prime minister, were on their way here to deliver annual Christmas speeches – a tradition started by Yasser Arafat. There were loads of big SUVs everywhere, the cars of privileged members of the PA hierarchy – people who have got rich from the Western and Gulf subsidies that support this nation. Unfortunately these subsidies support the hierarchy more than the nation. There’s no crime in Palestine except for this.

Eventually we reached the service-taxi station. I bundled into a van and we were soon off, down through Beit Sahour and onto the main trunk road northwards. Most of the traffic was coming the other way – not least the armed motorcade of the president and prime minister, with flashing blue lights and a swarm of big motorbikes out in front and in the rear.

This is a trunk road not because of its quality – in British terms it’s a bumpy old ‘B’ road – but because it’s the only road from the southern to the northern West Bank, from Bethlehem to Ramallah, avoiding Israeli controls. Most Palestinians are not permitted to enter Israel proper or Jerusalem, which would be the shortest route – 25km instead of 70km – so they have to go round Jerusalem along this convoluted mountain route.

Looking over toward East Jerusalem

This road is dramatic, a tremendous ride. At first it weaves along the top of the limestone plateaux east and north of Bethlehem, where there’s a view down into a deep valley and then, on the other side, high up, the walled-off outskirts of East Jerusalem. This is vivid enough in itself, but then it suddenly plunges dramatically 1,000ft (300m) down a steep switchback into Wadi Nar, the Valley of Fire, where it changes from a winding old road into a new USAid-modernised dual carriageway heading north to Abu Dis and Al Azariyah, through more wild semi-desert mountain landscape, and winding tortuously through Wadi Nar until it eventually joins the Israeli east-west Route 1 from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to the King Hussein Bridge and Jordan. This is a full-scale modern dual carriageway, financed in the 1990s by the Japanese government as a peace road linking Jerusalem and Amman – except peace never came. As far as I know the Japanese never asked for their money back.

The new road along Wadi Nar

We cannonaded down this road, past the Ma’ale Adumim Israeli settlement, perched on a hilltop to the right, then we turned left toward Ramallah. More dramatic landscape, and a few impoverished Bedouin shack-villages. This certainly is a memorable trip, this road. It weaves around hither and thither, and the service-taxi drivers do it at breakneck speed – mercifully they seem to be good drivers. Eventually we reached Ramallah – and it suddenly started raining! This was the first rain for over a month. It was tipping down. I waited to meet Aisha at Manara Circle, the centre of town – a funny bi-directional roundabout with a monument in the middle, dating back to British Mandate times. The British used to come here to get out of Jerusalem and enjoy themselves – rather like a hill-station in the Indian Raj.

Aisha took me to a Latin (Catholic) church for the Christ Mass. It’s the first time I’ve been to a church service for, er, well, must be over a decade, heathen that I am. The service was in Arabic and the church was packed. I floated off into another world, standing up and sitting down when required, looking as if I knew what I was doing. I had been in rather an altered, spaced-out state during the day – I think my ET angels are probably operating on my psyche – so it was rather nice to let myself drift along with the choral singing.

Again, I had been taken to a church by a Muslim. I didn’t understand a word of the sermon, but the priest, dressed in white robes with lovely embroidery on it, spoke quite clearly and slowly – useful to listen to, picking up Arabic words I’m beginning to recognise. I hadn’t realised until now that Christians also use the term ‘Allah’ in Arabic. But then, he’s the One God, so why shouldn’t they? For your interest, Allah means ‘The God’ – it has a slightly different nuance to the Western personalisation of ‘God’ as a name, while the Arabic term is a noun.

We emerged from the church into the pouring rain, dodging torrents of water, and found a taxi to take us to the village outside town where Aisha and her husband Ahmed live. He’s a web-designer and film-maker, and we had lots to chatter about. They’re moving to England in a few months’ time to work and study (inshallah, if the British do the right thing with his visa, at a cost of £800). Ahmed likes the relatively high educational and intellectual standards of the English. The idea of living in London gives me a sinking feeling, but they’re excited about it. Perhaps I’m just a provincial country bumpkin with moss in what’s left of my brains.

Next morning, Christmas Day, I sat writing my blog – I was falling behind – while Aisha went out and Ahmed updated websites. It was raining hard – not a day for sightseeing or footling around outside. It was a slow, do-nothing-much day. The calling to prayers at the local mosque was particularly tuneful – though Aisha later told me that, unlike Bethlehem where it is sung by live singers and therefore quite variable in quality, this was pre-recorded by star muezzin from Mecca or Medina, and subsidised by Saudi sheikhs. Then we had a chat and a late lunch, and I bade them farewell to return to Bethlehem. I was still feeling rather wobbly inside, and wanted to get home to be in my own space.

At the service-taxi station I had to wait some time for the taxi to fill up – it has space for eight passengers. The driver thought I was German, but when I told him in German that I wasn’t, and came from Britaniyya, he didn’t understand, so I stuttered it in Arabic. He was fascinated when I stood outside smoking my pipe – around here, the only pipe-smokers are wizened old Bedouin out in the hills. Eventually people came and we started out.

The fatal switchback above Wadi Nar

It was still swilling down with rain and progress was slow. Palestinian roads aren’t built for handling rain, so there were massive pools and floods around, and we had some great moments of aquaplaning. Heavy rain in a desert landscape is quite paradoxical. When eventually we reached the steep, winding switchback at the far end of Wadi Nar there was a big traffic jam. People had ground to a halt on the 1-in-3 hill and, the road being covered with a film of rubber and oil from the customarily hot weather, they couldn’t get up. Neither could they back down because of the traffic jam behind them. But Palestinians are good at crises, and it sorted itself out in due course.

When we reached Bethlehem the taxi-station was closed. Since it was still bucketing down the passengers nagged the driver to take them up toward Manger Square, which he duly did, and we tipped out into the monsoon, running everywhichway. By now I was not just wobbly and vulnerable but cold and wet too and, being a thin pile of bones with a few hairs growing on top, I decided to run for the nearest shelter to ring Ismael, to ask him to come and rescue me. The nearest shelter was a coffee bar called – wait for it – Stars and Bucks, a Palestinian chain that has taken the name to dig Starbucks in the ribs for avoiding setting up in Palestine. Some global corporations (such as Coca Cola, Wall’s ice cream or Nestle) come to Palestine and others don’t, and the Palestinians do their best to let the latter know they’re getting things wrong. So it looks like Starbucks has lost its chance for business in Palestine – though they probably don’t care.

Whatever, Stars and Bucks had a heater on and served a good cup of tea, and I waited for Ismael. The guys there interviewed me about what I am doing in Palestine: Palestinians are so interested in foreigners, especially the ones who stay a long time and return repeatedly. The usual questions came about my family, my (non-existent) wife, the customary expression of surprise when I said I had grandchildren (to them I look young), the questions about my work, where I was staying, and then the riveted attention watching me lighting my pipe.

Ismael arrived at last and off we went, weaving around the Old Town, slowing for the virulent speed-bumps, stopping at a shop to get a few provisions and then water-skiing back to Al Khader. I promised to come to visit his son soon. We waved goodbye. Ismael and I are getting like brothers of the soul – he looks my age but he’s ten years younger. I’ll miss him when I go back to Britain, since it’s so good having someone who thinks of me and rings me up regularly to make sure I’m alright. He also knows that, as an old revolutionary and dissident who has had his own problems with police and authorities, I understand his son and I have a few survival secrets to share with him.

The apartment was quiet and cold but, once I’d had a bite to eat and a cuppa, I put my hot water bottle on my lap and wrapped a big blanket around myself, finished and uploaded my blog about Hebron, processed my latest photos, did a few e-mails, did my meditation and then staggered off to bed.

Next day was quiet and I didn’t even change out of my jalabiya – a long, flowing, dark red robe with gold embroidery. This means I’m off-duty. This is what Ibrahim Issa needs to learn – how to be decidedly off-duty and unavailable. I found out that, while in Germany, he had had heart problems, and again on Christmas Day after his return he was in hospital. He has worked and shouldered too many worries and responsibilities for far too long, and now his soul is telling him to stop. He came round today and I hugged him. He had a troubled look. Yet he’s getting the message. He doesn’t know what to do about it yet. The trouble is, people turn to him for answers and he never says No. But he must, or Allah will take him away.

Ibrahim Issa - currently a disheartened visionary

I told him that it’s no longer a question of whether he should either pull back from his duties or resign. It’s now a question simply of how and when, and he has little choice. I said that the universe holds back with solutions until we’re 100% clear about what we need to do. It does this to oblige us to get to 100%, without reservations. But once we get there, once we make the commitment, the solutions come. He understood. Bless him: Ibrahim is a hero, an altruist Piscean who now must attend to his own interests, or die. I told him I’d stand by him, whatever happened. He went away feeling a tad lighter. Hope flowers even in the darkest of times. The name Ibrahim Issa means 'Abraham Jesus'.

So much for Christmas. Next comes 2012.

Visiting Abraham the Patriarch again

2011-12-22T23:37:00.048+02:00

To me, this picture pretty much sums up the situation in Hebron

All the service taxis were full. We were standing on the main road at Al Khader, trying to wave one down for a ride to Hebron, 25km away. But service taxis wait in Bethlehem until they are full and then set off so, of course, they were full! Eventually a guy in a car stopped and gave us a lift. But he had a motive. I was standing there with a fanciable blond.

He saw a marriage opportunity in my friend Morgan and, while travelling along Route 60 toward Hebron he tried her out, asking her hand in marriage, in Arabic – she speaks better Arabic than me – but he was polite with it. She’s used to it, but I guess she must be fed up with it. To many Palestinian males, marrying a woman from Amrika, Britaniyya or Allemanni means a passport to heaven, where they can get rich and feel free. I try to disabuse them of this belief, but they don’t want to know – anywhere must be better than here!

Morgan is a young American who lives in a village called Al Aqaba, near Tubas in the northern West Bank. She has been teaching English there and has evolved a plan, with the village mayor, to develop the village guesthouse to welcome guests and parties from abroad so that they can have a genuine Palestinian village experience. It’s a noble plan. She had outlined it at a meeting at Beit Jala of the Center for Emerging Futures, where we had met more than a month ago, and a load of us are going to go up to Al Aqaba soon to act as an inaugural group – and we’re promised a shadow-puppet show!

We were off to Hebron. Morgan had never been there and I felt it was time to visit my old friend Ibrahim the Patriarch (Abraham), father to the Arab and Jewish peoples, who lies in his tomb in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron – Islam’s fourth holiest place. Eventually we arrived in Hebron, Morgan remaining thankfully unmarried, and we walked the streets down toward the souk, the old centre of town.

Hebron is the West Bank’s largest city. A full-scale city it indeed is, friendly and bustling. Historically it has been a great trading city, where in ancient and medieval times traders from Egypt and Arabia met with traders from Mesopotamia and the Levant – but nowadays it is relatively isolated because of the appearance of Israel 60 years ago, and the subsequent forced insulation from the surrounding countries, as well as the insulation of the West Bank within Israel. But Hebron still bustles – it’s the West Bank’s main industrial and business city, where they do engineering, glass-blowing, food-processing, crafts, textiles and ceramics.

We stopped for a falafel sandwich at a cafe, a very friendly one but certainly not complying with British-style health and safety regulations – though the payoff was that our meal cost less than most British cafes would charge for a mere cup of tea. Then we headed off down into the souk. This is an edgy, tragic place, the historic heart of the city, now besieged by soldier-protected settlers of a particularly aggressive kind, notorious amongst Palestinians.

Jews lived in harmony with Arabs in Hebron for centuries. They eventually were moved out by the British following a massacre in 1929 which arose partially from Britain’s own colonial policies. In Jerusalem there had been a bloody dispute over access by Jews to the Western (Wailing) Wall in which people on both sides were killed. This unrest overspilled to Hebron, where 67 Jews were killed – though another thousand Jews were sheltered by Arabs too. They had been friends and neighbours for generations. The British moved the Jews to Jerusalem for their safety, ending an ancient Jewish presence there and also increasing the social separation between Jews and Arabs – a trend which was to lead to the eventual creation of two sundered peoples with a high wall between them, decades later.

Ultimately moving the Jews out was unwise because it led to a situation long afterwards, shortly after the 1967 Six Day War and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, where Israeli settlers moved back, led by a mad rabbi and backed by the guns of the IDF. They occupied the main hotel in town and started spreading out from there. But these people were different. The original Jews in Hebron had been Palestine’s indigenous Misrahi Jews who for centuries had played their part in its multicultural landscape and were integral to it. The settlers who moved in were immigrant Ashkenazi Jews from France and America, led by a ferocious radical rabbi, Moshe Levinger. They had no intention of coexisting in a mixed community: they wanted to reclaim Hebron and drive Palestinians out. Had the British left the original Jews in Hebron, this might not have happened – or at least, not in the same way.

There are only about 600 Israeli settlers in Hebron yet they control 20% of the city, with the help of the IDF (the army). Just outside Hebron lies the settlement of Kiryat Arba with around 6,500 inhabitants, swelling the numbers. Meanwhile, Hebron’s Muslim sector, taking up 80% of the city, has nearly 200,000 people. The areas were formally separated as part of the Oslo Accords of the 1990s. They are divided by urban roadblocks, most of them barred gates, barbed wire and piled-up rubbish. But some Palestinians still live in the Jewish area, doggedly refusing to be ousted and going through significant humiliation and insecurity for doing so.

An Israeli urban settlement with army watchtower

It’s a heart-rending situation. It’s not exactly the presence of Jews that is problematic: it’s their attitude and approach, one of arrogant certainty, provocation and hard-heartedness. Their technique is to provoke incidents, drawing in the IDF to protect them and do their dirty work, then to occupy properties as if justified by the incident to do so.

I find it hard to understand how people can live like this and raise children in such an atmosphere. But they do, and one thing that happens in Palestine is that people are regularly faced with a choice: you can eat your heart out over what’s happening, or you can get on with life and make the best of what you’ve got – and survival is best furthered by getting on with life.

Quite a lot of the souk has been closed up by the settlers, who have a nasty habit of welding shut the metal shutters in front of the old Arabic shops. The whole area has a distinctive Ottoman architecture. The souk follows a covered lane passing down a valley leading to the Ibrahimi Mosque.

As you walk down you pass people who are exceptionally friendly and welcoming to visitors, though what’s distasteful is that, as a Westerner, if you get money out of your pocket to buy something, others swoop in on you demanding you buy from them too and, since you visibly have money, you’re duty-bound to support them by buying something. This is sad, and sometimes it’s necessary to be firm in drawing a line and shaking them off.

What affects me most about this is that this happens on the way to a holy place. I find that, once I have been to the Ibrahimi Mosque, I’m in quite a sensitised state, and encountering these guys on the way back is a bit like psychic attack. But there are other Hebronites who recognise this and assist – they know that if foreigners get hassled, they won’t come back.

Returning later from the mosque, one guy affixed himself to me and wouldn’t let go – they’re not violent but clingy, trying to convey the idea that if you don’t support them they will die, and tugging hard on your heart-strings. In fact this approach is more a mental state than a fact, since some of them aren’t desperate. They can suffer a limpet-like victim approach which is a sad effect of the deprivation and loss people have been through, and the feeling of helplessness some Palestinians feel.

At one point a young chap came along, leading us along a side-street to show us the empty shops and then a roadblock – an unsightly tangle of barbed wire and rubbish preventing access to the Jewish zone. Then he showed us an urban Israeli settlement through a gap in the old Hebron buildings, resplendent with Israeli flags. Then he led us up some old stairs into a house, up some more stairs and out onto a roof with a view.

Down on the next building was an Israeli soldier – he looked as if he might be a Druze, used by the IDF in sensitive areas where the Arabic language and the conflict-management skills of the Druze are useful. Further down in the street a situation was developing – a soldier was searching a few Palestinian youths while other soldiers looked on, guns trained. Here it was before us, a normal day unfolding under military occupation. It wasn’t even tense – it was just boringly routine. A bit like British police on a Friday night, searching hoodies and young Muslim men.

Eventually we reached the checkpoints preceding the mosque, but it all worked quite well. At the first you go through a turnstile where a soldier with a machine gun eyeballs you, saying and doing nothing – I’m not sure why he’s there. It must be a killer to wear those helmets all day and every day. Then you come to a checkpoint where usually they examine your bags and the contents of your pockets. I readied myself to open my camera bag but, no, the female soldier just smiled and asked whether I had anything sharp. The soldiers were quite friendly this time – I had a nice chat with the woman, who was more interested in us as people than as potential security threats. Then we progressed up the steps to the final checkpoint at the door of the mosque, where the soldiers, one Russian, one Ethiopian, were just plain bored and waved us through.

Then came a surprise. The Muslim warden at the door, usually cagey and nervous about non-Muslims entering the mosque whenever I’ve come here before, was very welcoming. I think he recognised me. He produced a light hooded cloak for Morgan to wear, to cover her head and the profane jeans and sweater she was wearing, then he took us through to the place where we remove our shoes. He was smiling and seemed happy to have foreigners visiting.

We entered the vastly carpeted main hall and wandered around. The arched ceiling is lovely, and the tombs of Isaac, Rebekah and others of Abraham’s family are there, containing remains thousands of years old. It’s a bit like a carpeted cathedral.

Then we went into Abraham’s tomb. I find this place stirring – the energy here is so dense with holiness and power that it makes me feel weak in the knees every time I come here. Two other guides were watching, fascinated at how this (they thought) tourist had obviously gone into a deep meditation, standing quietly before the tomb, transfixed.

I stood there awhile, losing track of time. I love the Ibrahimi Mosque. It’s deep, profound. The sense of presence is captivating. If you want to experience true holiness, come here.

Before long we were out. Time was actually pressing. We needed to get back to Bethlehem because Aisha was coming to stay the night and I needed to let her in. I collected a camel-hair rug which, on the way down, I had bought from a trader who has become a friend. He’s a Palestinian with the nickname ‘Manchester’ because that’s where he lived before returning to Hebron. He has lovely, colourful traditional hand-woven rugs and hangings made in the villages south of Hebron – I’d love to buy a truckload of them to distribute around my friends. But I bought just one for 350 shekels (£70), which I shall treasure. We continued up through the souk, emerging into the crowded main streets of lower Hebron and soon to sit in a bus for Bethlehem.

I feel I have a past-life connection with Ibrahim the Patriarch. Having taken Morgan to see him felt right – almost as if ordained. She has been really taken by Palestine, and this event will be a highlight, methinks. An old friend from Glastonbury is coming to the Middle East in January, visiting Jordan, Palestine and Egypt, and I think I’ll bring her here too. I have sent out so many signals to old friends, offering a place to stay for free, and a memorable adventure, and she’s the only one who has acted on it thus far. A ‘new age Christian’, she’s a dedicated community activist in Glastonbury, and I know in my bones that this will be a pilgrimage of the heart for her, a journey of reconnection with something deep down. Perhaps she’s starting a new chapter in life. I feel privileged to pay my part.

When we got back to the school, two of Aisha’s English students were there in their car with her. Though many Westerners think this is a male chauvinist place where women are controlled by men – not entirely true because many of the submissiveness patterns in Arab women are actually passed down from mother to daughter and chosen and reinforced by women – there’s a touching side to it. Women are very much protected by men. Apart from the fact that it gives them an extra half hour of informal English-language chattering with Aisha, these guys go out of their way to save Aisha taxi-fares and getting around alone. Palestine is not at all dangerous for a woman on her own but it is haram, sacred, to protect and support women, and there’s a touching and honourable side to it.

That evening I was honoured and blessed to cook for and look after two ladies. Morgan visited Palestine a year ago with her brother, returned to the States and came back here as soon as she could, and she is thinking seriously of finding a way to stay here longterm. She has fallen in love with her village of Al Aqaba. It was valuable for her to meet Aisha to find out more about the ins and outs of marrying into Palestine. Aisha (pronounced Ay-ee-sha), English, seems happy to have done so. Whether it’s right for Morgan I cannot tell, but she’s not entirely American, having grown up in Japan, Hong Kong and India. It’s a big decision to make.

Whenever I go to Hebron, my soul gets rumbled, shaken and quaked. Something is going on inside me. I don’t know what it is, but it feels alright. Perhaps my angels are rearranging my inner circuitry. Or perhaps I’m making a deep decision I’m yet to become aware of. Or perhaps I have a case of immaculate concussion. Whatever it is, 2012 is starting soon, and I don’t think this is going to go away.

Bethlehem, capital of the Christians

2011-12-22T12:53:00.000+02:00

Bethlehem is an ancient city going back to the time of the Canaanites, first mentioned in the Egyptian Amarna Texts from the time of Amenhotep III and Tutankhamun, around the mid-1300s BCE. It is located on a hill 2,700ft (800m) up in the limestone highlands of the West Bank, watered by wells which go back thousands of years. It was already a holy place before Jesus’s parents ever got here.

Its first claim to fame was that it was the birthplace of King David, king of the Judaeans who first ruled from Hebron but then, on uniting the Jewish tribes of Judaea and Samaria, took over Jerusalem as his capital from the Jebusites, who had themselves been ruled by priest-kings, the most famous being Melchizedek.

I’m not sure whether the story of the census, which caused Mary and Joseph to come to Bethlehem, is true – it might have been a convenient item in the narrative which portrayed Jesus as descended from the royal line of David yet born and raised in humble circumstances, distinguishing him from the priesthoods and nobles of the time and creating an image of him as a religious reformer and holy man who stood outside the elites and the more constraining traditions of the time.

Of course, much of the Jesus story was written down and re-edited by the early founders of the institutional Church, in the decades and centuries following his life. But there’s one thing which I have observed here (having a lifelong interest in power places and earth energies): the energy and archetype of the mother and child is strong here, and I don’t think it’s just a manifestation of Christian faith-building and tradition. I get the feeling Jesus was born here because of that atmosphere. I say this because today, though the town is now predominantly Muslim, the matriarchal nuance of the place is good and strong, and children have a strong presence here too. It’s a nice place, friendly, nurturing and familial. As soon as you get off the 21 bus from Jerusalem you notice it: someone comes up to you saying welcome, asking your name, where you’re from and how long you’re staying. There is plenty of room at the inn. People’s hospitality and generosity is at times overwhelming.

Bethlehem is now a small conurbation of, I’d guess, 80,000 people. It is made up of the joined-up ancient towns of Bethlehem (Beit Lahem), Beit Sahour (Shepherds’ Fields) and Beit Jala, plus several expanded villages such as Al Khader (St George’s) where I live, together with refugee camps such as Deheisheh and Aida, with infill building everywhichwhere which has occurred since the influx of ethnically-cleansed refugees from what is now Israel around 1948, and because of natural population growth. Then there are many surrounding villages – to the north, many of them are separated off by the separation wall or they’re being encroached on by settlements or cleared by settlers and the Israeli army. But to the south there are lots of villages in what is still Palestinian territory.

Bethlehem used to be 90% Arab Christian but no longer, populated by members of the Syriac, Melkite, Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran and other churches of Christianity. Now it’s around 10%. This is not the fault of Muslims except inasmuch as, around 1948, they flooded in as refugees, tipping the demographic balance of the place.

There’s another reason the Christian population has declined. Being culturally and ethnically more closely connected with Europe and the West (many of them are descended from ancient Greeks, Romans or medieval Crusaders), more of them have left Palestine than is the case with Muslims. Many of the Palestinians you meet or hear of in the West are Christians. They have been Christians far, far longer than people of European stock.

It’s also the case that churches and Western NGOs have helped and encouraged Christians to leave. There has been a tendency common to many emigrants whereby, once an enclave is established somewhere in a host country, members of the wider family and clan follow them there. Nowadays Christian families in Bethlehem have networks of relatives abroad, and young emigrants get passed around the family overseas and protected by them, even entering businesses owned by them. But the churches have played a key role in this emigration.

It has been motivated no doubt by compassion and care but, in my judgement, there has been a regrettable side to this inasmuch as the Palestinian Christian community has thus been weakened and, slightly more sinister, it frees the churches from feeling responsible for supporting their members in the Holy Land. This is a political issue, rooted in historic frictions between the Church and Jews and, nowadays, between the Church and Israel – the Church seeks not to confront Israel.

This is, to me, questionable. It frees the Church somewhat from walking its talk – Christianity is after all a religion of peace – and from incurring economic and political expense. But it also renders the Israel-Palestine conflict into a two-sided rather than three-sided situation where the Christian element could conceivably act as a balancing and mediating force between Jews and Muslims.

Jews, if they think about it, are fine with the Christian defection, and have helped it. Muslims regret the emigration, though they understand it and many of them wish they could follow. There is no conflict between Christians and Muslims here. Not that, usually, there is inherent conflict between them in other Middle Eastern countries, except inasmuch as ruling elites or factions in places such as Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon have created friction between them for their own ‘divide and rule’ ends – Christians and Muslims in the Middle East have, throughout much of history, got on just fine, at least at street level. But the 20th Century and even the last decade have seen conflict increasing, but not in Palestine.

There have been scrapes between the Muslim and Christian communities here. But it has largely taken place during periods of conflict-intensification. One example took place in Beit Jala during the first intifada in the late 1980s, when Palestinian Muslim Tanzim fighters fired at the Israeli settlement of Gilo from near a church, knowing that the churches worldwide would make a fuss if the Israelis shelled it back. Beit Jala Christians naturally didn’t like this.

Israelis accuse Palestinians of using ‘human shields’ – even today in Gaza – as a military tactic, as if to demonstrate what barbarians the Palestinians are, but Israelis have used a similar tactic too. They site settlements in Palestinian areas and, when Palestinians have resisted or threatened these places – hardly happening nowadays – Israel uses it as an excuse for massive retaliation. Extremist settlers have used this tactic a lot: they invade a Palestinian area or stage attacks, whether or not this is supported by Israel, and then, when they come under pressure or resistance from Palestinians, the army comes in to protect them. However this is now coming under strain because extremist settlers are giving Israel bad international PR as a result of their incendiary ‘price tag’ attacks, and the Israeli army has even started defending Palestinians against them.

But Muslims get on fine with Christians in most circumstances and, at Christmas, they happily swell the diminishing crowds of Christians simply because Christmas is a phenomenon where Palestine comes into the spotlight – and Jesus is also a prophet of Islam. It brings some energy and fun to Bethlehem – and they need it. They accept Christian ways – even such things as drinking alcohol – and interact freely.

Don’t believe people such as the Archbishop of Canterbury who, unwisely, has recently placed some blame for the Christian situation in Palestine upon Muslims. It’s not true, he should know better, and he should not confuse the Christian-Muslim conflicts in other countries or in the West with Palestine. This has been offensive to Palestinians both Muslim and Christian.

So Bethlehem needs its Christians back, in my estimation, but they are now living on faraway shores, and many of their young, born in Europe and America, no longer have personal memory of Palestine or inherent links with it. And there’s not much future here. Bethlehem has become predominantly Muslim, though the Christian presence and holy sites here are under no pressure from them. It’s rather sad, actually: the Christian quarter in Bethlehem is notably empty and quiet, and the Muslims have not moved in and settled it as Jews might, if they had the chance.

It’s sad also about Christian pilgrims from abroad. Many ignore or are under-informed about the situation in Bethlehem. Some erroneously believe Bethlehem is in Israel – this is even reinforced to some extent by such things as Google, which plays down the Israel-Palestine conflict in its online maps, tending to give greater cartographical attention to Israeli settlements than Palestinian towns and villages – yes, the conflict even plays itself out in maps, which are supposed to be objective and authoritative.

The Israelis have also captured the pilgrim trade, discouraging Christians from visiting Palestine. The two other main Christian sites, Jerusalem and Nazareth, are in Israel. Christian pilgrims come in on luxury coaches from Jerusalem, to be shunted through the Church of the Nativity in large guided groups, then they are taken to approved souvenir shops, perhaps to an approved café, and then they are taken back to Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, pilgrim-related shopkeepers such as my friends Adnan, Mohammed and Alaa Din get hardly any business, and the ordinary townsfolk of Bethlehem are prevented from having any meaningful interaction with pilgrim groups. The pilgrims are fed stuff about the Palestinians and their streets being risky and dangerous. It’s criminal, just one part of the throttling strategy Israel carries out.

Another is the wall and settlements. Bethlehem has been encroached upon by the wall, which at one point at Rachel’s Tomb stretches right into town, and by settlements such as Gilo, Har Homa and Efrat. The main road from Jerusalem to Hebron, which used to pass through Bethlehem, has been bypassed by a road protected by walls and tunnels and sealing off Bethlehem’s northern edge. As a result, property prices in Bethlehem have shot up, making life more difficult economically, and population density has increased. Just next door to the school a three-storey house is being raised by an extra two storeys to accommodate new generations of the family, simply because there is no space to spread out.

Peace and goodwill to all. This message emanates from this place and, at Christmas, people sing of that Little Town of Bethlehem lying sweetly in the peaceful landscape of the Holy Land. Silent night, holy night… well, it does happen, sort of. But Christians worldwide should come here to take a look and see what has happened. It’s tragic, and the capital of the Christians, while still alive, is not too well. That Christianity is a faith advocating peace has led to a sort of indifference, a turning away from the awkward facts that have arisen in the Holy Land.

I have a lot of respect for the ‘true’ Christians who come here to carry out humanitarian work – some of it courageous, such as the work of the Christian Peacemaker Teams who accompany and assist Palestinians in dealing with settlers and soldiers. But it is also Christians who are supporting Israel in its invasion and oppression of Palestine, either actively amongst Christian Zionists and Neocons, or passively by simply turning away. Jesus needs to have a word with them, and they need to listen.

Meanwhile, many of the humanitarian volunteers here in Bethlehem aren’t Christians – they’re people, many of them young and secular, with a clear sense of justice and human rights, and oddbods like me, an aged hippy peace-and-love citizen diplomat with a compassionate heart. So be it.

Here’s wishing you all a very Merry Christmas from Bethlehem. Please put in a prayer for these people. Please come over here to visit sometime – it’s not dangerous, and more women tend to come here to visit and stay than men. For even if you just talk and listen and give people a little business, and even if you’re on a budget, you’re bringing good to these isolated people.

After all, Jesus’ granny was a Celt from Brittany, St George (who lived here in Al Khader) was a Greek living in what is now Turkey, and European pilgrims used to spend years journeying here a thousand years ago… so in these days of cheap flights, it’s not difficult. And you might find it’s the best trip you ever made.

Peace and Goodwill to all People, regardless

2011-12-20T15:40:00.000+02:00

Today I woke up with the intention of writing a lowdown on the position and role of Christians in Bethlehem, but I got diverted onto dealing with important enquiries and other work. So that will have to wait.

It was prompted by the interesting fact that, although Bethlehem is nowadays 90% Muslim, Christmas is quite important here for the Muslims too. This is not just because Jesus is one of the prophets of Islam and because Christmas has been globalised, or because Bethlehem is the epicentre of Christmas – Bethlehem’s worldwide name-recognition is important to all Bethlehemites, walled in and abandoned as they are. It’s also because Christians and Muslims here get on in a salutary way, and they care about supporting one another.

Of course they have their tiffs – it’s not just that they have different faiths, but there’s also an ethnic and social-economic difference between them – but the overriding atmosphere is one of tolerance and harmony. This is one of the wondrous aspects of Bethlehem and its atmosphere. I wish more people would come from round the world to experience it – Christians or not.

So the majority of people at the daily concerts being held down in Manger Square every evening this week are Muslims. Last night we had a band from Ramallah, a Palestinian-American singer from New York, and an Austrian rock band. You’re missing something, and it’s all for free!

But today I’m going to share with you extracts from a long e-mail I wrote to an Israeli friend who had picked me up on something I had written in my blog. He’s a good guy, and he does his best to step over the divide between Israelis and Palestinians, but the issue here is that there is such a difference between the Israeli and Palestinian narratives that, when a European like me comes along writing a blog about them both, someone somewhere is bound to get upset.

I’m writing for Westerners, and I am a Westerner – albeit a dissident one, critical of my own country too. I’m not writing for Israelis or Palestinians, though I hope my modicum of influence on the perceptions of Westerners might ultimately help them both. If I worried about what Israelis and Palestinians thought of my writings I would be moved to silence, confounded by the balancing act and contradictions involved.

Also, in this polarised area, just because I write primarily to elucidate the Palestinian side of the equation, it doesn’t mean I’m anti-Israeli. This, for me, highlights the difference between two kinds of Israelis: those who believe I’m against them, and those who see my position and judgements, even if they upset some people, are thoughtfully expressed and ultimately helpful to them too.

I wrote an e-mail to reply to my friend, and it moved into my feelings about the ‘peace process’ in this land. So I’m reproducing most of it here (minus the more personal bits), for your interest. Here it is.

1947-48 (the date of the Palestinian Nakba or disaster and the Israeli War of Independence) were very bad years - a ruthless carve-up in which my own country, Britain, played a significant role in terms of setting up and permitting the conditions by which it happened, in its policies and practices back in the 1920s and 1930s. We could have done otherwise - it was a manifestation of our errant sense of superiority.

From the British side of things, this was a policy of hubris which is instructive for today, since there’s a lot of hubris around nowadays, particularly in the West. [That is, Westerners believe that since the West is so great, it cannot fail or go down and everything will continue as before, regardless of the current signs.] The Establishment in Britain, not least Churchill, believed the British empire would last forever and saw things through that lens, so they failed to set up colonial structures in such a way that, when independence started happening from 1948 onwards to the 1960s, systems and social values in the decolonialising countries were not appropriate for supporting what came next.

Particularly the ‘divide and rule’ philosophy the British used, and its effects, has cost the Middle East vastly (India-Pakistan too). Although the French ruled Syria, their own version lies at the roots of what’s happening there now with the Assad regime. The overarching power of rich, military-backed elites in Middle Eastern countries, being fought out now in the Arab revolutions, has a lot to do with that colonial period too, as is the fact that the Middle East is carved into individual small countries. In this sense it is true that the ‘Palestinians’ are an invented people (as stated by Newt Gingrich in USA and by some Zionists in Israel) – though I don’t agree with the political implications that advocates of this idea are implying, that Palestinians thus have no inherent right to nationhood.

I found the conference in Beit Jala to be interesting in this regard – to see people sincerely working on alternative political solutions for Israel and Palestine (see Blessed are the Peacemakers). Most solutions I judge to be well-meant but probably not doable. I don’t think a two-state solution is doable – and if it were, I’d still only see it as an intermediate step toward something else. If it were doable it would have been done by now – its time was in the 1990s.

A one-state solution looks more plausible at present, but I’m not optimistic about this either, because I don’t think the Palestinians would get a good deal, even if the deal were a diplomatic triumph, and I don’t think the Zionist aspect of Israeli society and politics would sit back and drop its agenda anytime soon to render all peoples in this land more equal.

Besides, given the current state of capitalism, I think a one-state solution, even if politically quite fair, would nevertheless lead to an economic imbalance allowing Israelis more financial power to take over and control the nation’s assets than Palestinians, and I don’t see Israelis easily accepting Palestinian or Arab investment, ownership and influence in what is now ‘Israel proper’.

In my own country, we’ve had a significant capital takeover of the country by London-based big investment sources, making Britain into a sort of parkland and estate for city-dwelling London English to exploit according to their values and needs, and this is happening worldwide as part of the current ‘development’ frenzy, focused as it is on an economic-capitalistic definition of development to the exclusion of many other aspects of life and society. Capitalism is good at takeovers. Britain is by degrees an occupied country too – occupied by corporations, bankers and bigwigs who treat it as their territory and who take it upon themselves to define for all of us what our ‘national interest’ is.

My feeling is that it’s going to take longer because the issue at stake is larger than questions of national independence. We’re faced with multiple planetary issues which are overriding the interests of individual nations, and the primary issue here is global governance and worldwide coordination to deal with global issues – unpopular though this notion currently is. In effect, this renders historic nations into regions (this is what’s developing at present in Europe), and it brings into question the borders which have been established in newer nations, often cutting across ethnic and more ‘natural’ geographical and social areas, leaving some ethnic groups nationless.

So in the end I see the solution to be a combination of the psycho-social healing of deep hurts of the nations of the Middle East, plus the eventual reuniting of the whole region into some sort of union – which puts the whole question of Israel and Palestine into a different context. One of the outcomes of this would be a loosening up for Israelis themselves, who are penned up in quite a small territory, and yet who have had a long history of involvement in wider affairs in historically Jewish-strong cities such as Baghdad, Alexandria, Damascus and so many other places. The Middle East is multi-ethnic, always has been and always will be, and in this context and the wider global context, nations can be obstructive.

After all, if we do have such a thing as significant sea-level rise, then this will affect Tel Aviv and Gaza equally, and they’ll need to cooperate to deal with it. Water-extraction issues in this region also cross boundaries and walls, as do the risks of earthquakes, toxic, climatic and public health disasters, and many other possibilities. If the relative reconciliation between Greece and Turkey a decade ago, arising from two earthquakes, is anything to go by, we have there an example of how ancient historic connections between regions can be revived through plain old evolving facts – Greeks anciently ruled much of what’s now Turkey, and Turks more recently, in the Ottoman period, ruled Greece. Reconciliation there, around 2000, was not prompted by peace talks but by hard facts – the damage and loss caused by earthquakes or ‘acts of God’. The outstanding question of the division of Cyprus, still dominated by politicians and political issues, demonstrates how leaving things to politics and diplomacy doesn’t heal issues on the ground.

I do think there are openings to a resolution here, but they lie in psycho-social shifts and changes at ground level, which will resolve and ease things on a de facto basis. I was recently taken to a Rami Levi supermarket in the Etzion settlement bloc to demonstrate this point (see Gush Etzion settlement bloc). Consumers everywhere, regardless of politics, share roughly the same needs, have similar diets and consumption patterns and have little reason to pursue separate development and ‘apartheid’ patterns. In this you are right that the settler movement is, perhaps unwittingly, prompting a change and a funny sort of reconciliation by moving in amongst Palestinians – though, for this to work fully, it needs to operate in both directions, with Palestinians enabled to settle in West Jerusalem and ‘Israel proper’, and leading to a more widespread integration of peoples.

I think one thing people get wrong in this question is the idea that, if people cooperate, they will lose their identity – and I don’t think this is necessarily true. Thus people feel threatened with strangers in their midst. Identity is not a frozen thing: in Britain 10% of the population is of non-British origin in the last 2-3 generations, but it is actually morphing the notion of ‘Britishness’, and many of Britain’s high achievers are of foreign origin yet they have adopted forms of Britishness, sometimes even more than the British, while also transforming British society and still remaining quite uniquely themselves.

We now have more practising Muslims than practising Christians in Britain – though this is largely to do with secularisation, which is the British people’s own choice, not a foreign import. Actually, the unspoken statistic is that Britain has become a place where ‘spirituality’ and not ‘religion’ is the biggest force – we now have more people practicing yoga, meditation, neo-paganism and a spectrum of self-defined beliefs than either Christians or Muslims, and British society is transforming thereby – but it is still very British! Yet the minorities within Britain are also still very connected with their home cultures – in this sense Britain’s connections with places like India and Pakistan are finding a new meaning in a newly-globalised context. One of our flagship corporations, Jaguar-Land Rover, is owned by an Indian (Tata), and all is well.

Anyway, in the end, it will probably be evolving facts that decide these things. I’m a great believer in the influence of defining moments and evolving circumstances as a way in which history unfolds, to some extent independently of human ideas. Also, old people die off and young people grow up, with new perspectives and values. No one intended or planned the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War or the fall of the British Empire, or the current decline of American hegemony – it’s just the way things are unfolding.

I feel that, in the end, this is what will happen here too, for both ‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’ are constructs, and meanwhile there are people, there is land and there is life to get on with. You are personal friends with Palestinian neighbours, and you’d miss them if they disappeared, and they would miss you too if you disappeared. The world is changing very rapidly and what affects all of us together are the global issues that are becoming more pressing as time goes on – climate, ecology, economics, demography, resources, everything.

I think it’s worth investigating all the options, such as one-state and two-state solutions, but I believe that, in the end, neither will happen or, if they do, they will prove temporary. It’s a deeper change that’s needed. To quote a now-deceased Sufi sheikh friend in Jerusalem, Sheikh Bukhari, ‘God is too big to fit within just one faith’. It’s our common humanity which will bind us in the end – we all have kids, eat food, live in houses and have needs and contributions to make. It’s funny how, as I grow older, I find myself returning to the basic principles I saw as a young hippy, summed up as ‘love and peace’. It’s not as easy and simple as that, but if we humans are to be happy, that’s the basis on which the future will be carved.

My primary identity is that of a human on Planet Earth, and I welcome the rest of humanity to sign up to this, because that’s who we all are, whatever our beliefs and ways. This will then put our secondary ethnic and national identities into a new context, and it might cause us to start really enjoying and appreciating our differences more constructively. In this sense, you and I might have some differences of opinion or viewpoint, but I enjoy your existence and appreciate meeting you, and I hope we carry on! Part of the reason I come here to Palestine-Israel is to be stretched, and I hope I help others stretch too by coming here. No one pays or supports me in this – it’s my own stupid choice and preoccupation!

I’m not anti-settler, but I do think something needs to change in the way the settlement project is unfolding, and I suspect that this is where you and I meet. I work with Palestinians because they welcome me and, as a healer, I can work only with people who invite me to work with them. And I become healed thereby.

I’m sure that, if you snuck in discreetly and intuitively, there would be no problem in visiting the school (just call to arrange it – I serve good tea!). The people of Al Khader are fine folk, with an eye for good people whatever their persuasion or background, and we used to have Jews at the school until 1999, and Jewish teachers. One was Menachem Froman, the rabbi of Tekoa settlement southeast of Bethlehem. He is strong advocate of settlement, yet big enough in his heart to make close friends with Yasser Arafat during the second intifada ten years ago, and more recently to walk into Gaza to meet Ismael Haniyeh of Hamas. When challenged by IDF soldiers he used to simply say, “Go on then, shoot a rabbi!” and he’d keep on walking, beard and locks flowing in the wind. Sadly, cancer is getting to him now. I am game for coming over to your side of the wall again and, if anyone shoots me, then I’ll just go home to heaven and do something else! I’ve been screwed over enough in my life to have developed a slight resilience! But I find a smile and a gentlemanly approach works wonders and seems to get me through the scrapes that life can bring – thus far!

Shalom alekum, brother – you’re cool and you have integrity, and I like that.

Palden

Christmas in Bethlehem 1

2011-12-18T16:03:00.000+02:00

Here are some photos taken on Saturday 17th December, showing the holy sites around Manger Square in Bethlehem. More to follow as Christmas progresses, inshallah...

The Church of the Nativity (the metal stuff in front is temporary, for Christmas concerts in Manger Square)

Looking down into part of Manger Square

Here's the controversial $70,000 Christmas tree from Italy I mentioned two blogs down

The Mosque of Omar, opposite the Nativity Church.
On its right is the street we looked down two photos up, in the opposite direction

Church of the Nativity

The Syrian Orthodox Church. Syrian Christians are one of the most ancient Christian sects.

Gush Etzion settlement bloc

2011-12-17T15:02:00.001+02:00

Hope Flowers School and Al Khader from Givat HaDagan

It’s easy to fall into the idea that it is Palestinians who are chaotic but Israelis can be similar. I had an arrangement with Joachim for him to pick me up just down below Jabal al Khader at 1, but no, he rings up at 12 and says, “Are you ready?”. So I had to get down there quick.

On the way, my phone rang and it was him. “Hurry up! The soldiers here don’t like me hanging around.” Hmmm, soldiers? I rounded the corner to go down the hill, and there were four Israeli soldiers at the bottom, just where the border sign is, where it says ‘Entry forbidden to Israelis’. (I live in dangerous territory – as you probably know, I get blown up twice a day!)

I walked down the hill, playing my English gentleman act, confident, relaxed and polite. They were okay: they just looked at me and didn’t seem to be concerned to see a European walking out of a Palestinian area. I got in the car. Joachim’s wife was with him. We were going to see someone at Givat HaDagan, the Israeli settlement outpost over the valley from the school. This was going to be interesting.

Givat HaDagan from the school - Efrat on the far right

We drove up the road to the boundary checkpoint which marks the edge of the settlement of Efrat. Quite often unmanned, they’re there to look imposing and just in case there’s trouble. However, a couple of soldiers were there. What’s this? We speculated whether they anticipated protests or reprisals from Palestinians, concerning the rather controversial extension of Efrat settlement which had been announced earlier this week.

Later it turned out that the soldiers weren’t guarding against Palestinians: they were there to stop extremist settlers getting into Palestinian areas and committing incendiary ‘price tag’ crimes against Palestinians. Recently, reckless settlers have been attacking people, torching mosques, painting offensive graffiti and burning farmland to assert a ‘price tag’ on Palestinians (though not generally in this area), for the latter’s resistance against land seizures and settlement-expansion. After all, how dare the Palestinians not move off their land when the settlers want it!

The settlers are declaring a manic war of their own. This bodes ill, because they could also turn against the Israeli government – signs of which are already happening. So Bibi Netanyahu, a true Zionist who supports the settler movement but also has become aware things could run amok, has set the army on them, to get them under control. Except the settlers are pretty uncontrollable – probably more dangerous to Israel’s future than all the world’s Arabs put together.

So that’s why the soldiers were at the bottom of Jabal al Khader – they were protecting Palestinians! This is a crazy land. Have I said that before?

Efrat from Givat HaDagan settlement outpost

We turned left onto a narrow road uphill to the settler outpost of Givat HaGadan – a collection of trailers and cabins called home. This land used to be owned by Palestinian neighbours of mine just down the hill from the school, until it was appropriated and the security wall went up. I have never been on this side of the valley before. It’s quite a mess – wire fencing, junk, trailers, rubble. Unloved. By this time, Joachim had been on the phone and established that we weren’t going to meet the settler he was taking me to see. She had gone somewhere else. More chaos – well, the best way to make God laugh is to tell Her your plans. I caught some quick photos of the area and we headed off into Efrat.

Efrat is a privately-developed settlement, less religious than many of the others around here. It is part of the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, a chunk of Palestine which the Israelis have appropriated. Sooner or later they're likely to annex it to incorporate it formally into Israel – it lies on the Palestinian side of the Green Line but it borders onto ‘Israel proper’. It is made up of quite a few settlements big and small, the biggest being Betar Illit, population 38,000, inhabited by Haredim or ultra-orthodox Jews. Efrat has 8,000 people, Alon Shvut has 3,500, Elazar and Neve Daniel 2,000, Nokdim 1,300 and the rest have populations in the hundreds.

This whole area is topographically and geographically very confusing and, although it’s Israeli-dominated there are plenty of Palestinians living amongst them – it’s a patchwork of fenced-off settlements interspersed by Palestinian farms and villages. It’s quite fertile, with many orchards, vineyards and farms. This is the first time I’ve been here properly (usually I just drive through toward Hebron on Route 60) and Joachim was a good guide. He’s American by origin, made aliyah in 1971, and he lives on the kibbutz of Kvar Etzion, the oldest settlement in the area – it dates back to 1967, immediately following the Six Day War, but it was founded in 1935, abandoned because of Palestinian pressures and reoccupied in 1943, then to be abandoned again in the 1948 war when the Jordanians took over the West Bank.

O brave new world - Efrat

We cruised through Efrat (which Joachim informed me boasts 37 speed-bumps) and wove around the circuitous roads, crossing over Route 60, eventually reaching Kvar Etzion to drop off his wife, who had been working in Jerusalem. They’re both good-hearted people, and they are anti-settlement activists in some way or another. There wasn’t the opportunity to discuss this – too much was happening, and Joachim has hyperactive brains which zoot all over the place – so I’ll have to pin him down sometime to have a proper discussion about why and how he’s a settler who seems to oppose settlements.

To Europeans this might seem logically inconsistent, but logic is not what works here, so forget it. Later I discussed another inconsistency which he acknowledged to be strange. It concerns the Haredim or ultra-orthodox Jews – the ones dressed up as if they still live in the late 1700s. How, I asked him, can the Haredim live by 600-odd strict religious rules and with such decidedly un-modern ways and values, while occupying a thoroughly modern settlement such as Betar Illit? He mentioned how they’re big on mobile phones and internet and they seem to use modern appurtenances freely. But he didn’t really understand this either.

Kvar Etzion seems a happy enough place. People were out and about, doing things. As a kibbutz, it is a collective, unlike many settlements – kibbutzim were formed in the early days of Israel, up to 1970, when it was more a secular-socialist than a religious-dominated place (the intense religiosity is something that has moved into the foreground since the 1980s). At the entry gate Joachim stopped to talk to someone and picked him up. It turns out he was a Palestinian going to a house at the other end of the kibbutz, and that it’s not easy for him to cross it on foot – he can get hassled. So he was waiting for a friendly Israeli to come along to give a lift, which Joachim did. If an Israeli is transporting him it gives implicit permission for the Palestinian to be there. This illustrates the strangely mixed nature of this area, Etzion, where Israelis and Palestinians live cheek-by-jowl in a very socially-cellular landscape, close and quite interdependent yet largely separated.

Joachim then took me to Etzion Junction on Route 60, the main artery from Jerusalem to Hebron. This is the hub of the Etzion bloc, the location of a shopping mall which hosts a branch of a big discount superstore called Rami Levy, with branches throughout Israel. This, unusually, is a mixed supermarket, Jewish owned yet permitted to Palestinians and with part-Palestinian staff – many Bethlehemites come here for bulk buys. Before you think peace has suddenly broken out and apartheid has disappeared, it’s not quite like that.

Rami Levy is clearly an astute businessman who knows where the sales are. Like any good capitalist, he doesn’t mind who people are as long as they buy his stuff, and he employs Palestinians to help attract Palestinian customers. But he might have principles too, and he demonstrates how business can cross boundaries – after all, in the end, it was the business community in South Africa who tipped the balance in the ending of the apartheid regime there, around 1990.

However, ultra-orthodox and right-wing Jews don’t like the idea of meeting up in the aisles with Palestinians, only to see that they’re real people that do ordinary things like shopping. It’s more comfortable to maintain stereotypes than to deal with real-life people. Some Palestinians don’t like their own people giving business to Israeli companies either. Apparently an Israeli and Palestinian on the staff here fell in love and it caused an uproar. They were fired and all Palestinian staff were fired too, to prevent recurrences. However, once the dust settled the Palestinians were re-hired. Rami Levy is obviously a pragmatist.

We then went to visit a Palestinian family living on a hillside surrounded with settlements. The ladies sat in a horseshoe, smiling and very welcoming. The place was quite un-modern and basic, but homely. We started talking to a young man, and more men appeared. We were served coffee, then tea, then coffee again. I couldn’t understand everything that was going on, but the animated conversation between Joachim and these Palestinians seemed interesting. The women went off to do things and we sat there discussing things – though my Arabic is only sufficient to help me understand roughly the subject they’re discussing.

Joachim told me two stories that came up in the conversation. One visitor had told him that a Jewish settler family had once moved onto his land. He had lodged a complaint and the judgement went in his favour, surprisingly – the army came and threw out the settlers. Time went on, and the same settler family returned again. He doesn’t reckon the authorities will judge in his favour this time. Settlers are persistent. He was vexed about this because this could be the beginning of the end for him and his property.

View from the house: in front, Palestinian land, behind, Israeli settlement

The Palestinians around here have lived here for some time, but they are not allowed building permits to accommodate their growing families. However, one chap managed to obtain building permission from the local mayor, which surprised him. He then went to the regional council for their approval (these things are never simple), and permission was refused. The mayor later told him, with classic chutzpah, that he had granted it knowing the higher authority would refuse it. He wanted the Palestinian to accept him as a good guy. Hmmm, not much consolation - in fact it leaves a strange taste in the mouth.

It highlights something I discuss in my forthcoming book Pictures of Palestine. Israelis are an individualistic and argumentative lot. During the British Mandate period they deliberately organised themselves in small cells to stop the British penetrating and undermining them and also because they differed with each other over values, plans, preferences and politics. This didn’t end when the state of Israel was founded in 1948 – the arguments were so intense that a constitution was never agreed. So Israel has no single, coherent aim and direction. Everyone, including state employees and different units in the army, does what they feel best. There's an organised randomness to it. What unites them is a common opposition to the enemy – one reason why they make such a fuss about the enemy seeking to annihilate them and drive them into the sea. This man’s story is thus quite typical: one person says yes, and another says no, and that’s the way things are. This is one reason why extremist settlers take their own initiatives – dissonance is an institution.

A Palestinian village in Etzion

The local Palestinians want to establish a village on this hill but they are disallowed. If their families expand, that’s their business, and sons and their families must move away. That’s a big issue because Palestinian families are large. But Palestinians, they look at settlers who move into the area, establishing settlement outposts without permission, and they ask, why can’t we? Well indeed. Planning laws do have their virtues – they can stop a landscape being ruined by development – but the rules cannot be selectively applied.

What amazes me is this. The Israelis frequently question whether Palestinians have been in the area very long – they still labour under the blindfolded mythology that this is ‘a land without people waiting for a people without a land’. Yet, look around much of the landscape of the West Bank and you see the hillsides covered with old agricultural terracing. It’s all over the place, demonstrating that the land has been intensely farmed for centuries, producing significant agricultural output. Who did this, before most Israelis came along?

In parts this will have started millennia ago, done by Canaanites, Jews and the full multi-ethnic range of peoples who have always lived here. The people who account for most of the terracing were the predecessors of what we now call ‘Palestinians’, over the last few centuries. Historically it is a flimsy assertion that the Palestinians are somehow new migrants here. Paradoxically, some Palestinians are descended from ancient Jews who remained here after the forced Jewish diasporas of two millennia ago – it was mostly the elite and urban Jews who were forced by the Assyrians, Babylonians and Romans to leave.

Betar Illit, an ultra-orthodox settlement and the largest in Etzion

Joachim then took me to see some landscape views, knowing I am a photographer. Encountering the usual photographic problem of wires criss-crossing the panorama and getting in the way, I could see why this area is being fought over. It is hilly, fertile and scenic, with views toward the Mediterranean, and it’s not far from Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. We looked over Betar Illit, the largest Etzion settlement, home to thousands of Haredim, then we went to Rosh Zurim, a smaller settlement for another kind of Orthodox settlers. Then we wove back and followed a track called the Patriarch’s Way. Allegedly this was the route that Abraham followed when travelling from Hebron, his home in ancient times, to Jerusalem. It still has Roman milestones along it.

On the edge of Alon Shevut, where one of his daughters lives, he showed me the site of a demolished Palestinian house. The owners now live on the land in a tent. It was something to do with the abstruse legalities Israelis use to claim land for the government, and quite frequently they refuse to accept property deeds as evidence of ownership. Sometimes they serve a ‘stop work order’ prohibiting improvement of land or property, then they claim the land is unused. According to an old Ottoman law, unused land reverts to the government. But the Ottoman law wasn't written for Israeli settlers - it was written to stop land ownership stagnating and leading to under-employed productive land, and often it was redistributed.

In Israel’s early days, founded as it was on socialist principles, this government ownership of land made some sense – it heightened Israel’s control. The government and the Jewish Agency own most of the land of Israel, and most Israelis live on properties with a 99-year lease. Since most of them have been here 60 years or less, this is not yet a problem, but a time will come when those leases need renewing, and that could get complex.

Then he showed me another Palestinian house which had not been demolished. Here the orchards and farm were thriving. Yet it was overlooked by the settlement of Elazar, and there were signs that the settlers had their eyes on this land – Joachim pointed out seats which had been placed around the place, nominally for people to sit on but actually a preliminary announcement of intent to take over.

Later we passed a sign in Hebrew announcing a settler outpost called Netzer – it’s illegal and unrecognised but in due course it will probably be legitimised. In this way the settlers act as proxies for the government, taking initiatives it cannot rightly take, then having their actions legalised once time has passed and everyone has forgotten how things were before. It’s all part of laying down ‘facts on the ground’: the Gush Etzion bloc could, after all, suddenly find itself on the wrong side of the line in a peace agreement, requiring evacuation – and we can’t have that, can we? This is why Israel tends to drag its feet over peace agreements – it allows sufficient time for more and more facts on the ground to be established, thus invalidating such peace agreements. The greatest expansion of settlement building took place while the Oslo Agreements were being thrashed out in the 1990s. Security measures, of course.

Joachim drove me back to the edge of Al Khader. The soldiers were still there. As I got out, he gave his excuses to the soldiers. I did my trick of looking them in the eyes and giving a gentlemanly smile, saying hello. One of them asked me something. “I don’t speak Hebrew.” “Where are you going?” “Up there, to the Hope Flowers School, where I’m staying.” He asked nothing more, nodded, and I walked up the hill. After all, as mentioned earlier, he was simply protecting Palestinians from settler extremists and their price tags.

This is a crazy land. Have I said this before?

The Intricacies of Arabic

2011-12-15T19:20:00.027+02:00

I took Aisha to the neighbours’ house – I had picked her up in town. She stays one night a week with me when she teaches English at the Hope Flowers Centre – otherwise she lives near Ramallah. An Englishwoman who has married into Palestine, she speaks Arabic well. This meant I could ask her to help with some translation.

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

Those Notorious Settlers

2011-12-14T14:26:00.001+02:00

This is a chapter from my forthcoming book Pictures of Palestine, which gives an all-round picture of the Israeli setttlement project. I've posted it online before six months ago, but it's worth re-posting since I seem suddenly to be getting involved in settler issues, arising from the recent announcement of setttlement expansion in Efrat, close to the Hope Flowers School. This summary gives readers an overall perspective before things start unfolding on that front.

The settlement of Har Homa as seen from Bethlehem.
As you can see, there's an architectural difference between Palestinian areas (foreground) and Israeli setttlements.
You can see the separation wall below the settlement.

Bethlehem sits on a high plateau with quite steep sides. If you go along Manger Street, the historic main road from the Nativity Church toward Jerusalem, the route sweeps in a series of curves along the high edge of the plateau, affording fine panoramas, until it joins the old Hebron Road. There sits the Rachel’s Tomb checkpoint and the security wall, nowadays marking the northeast edge of town, separating Bethlehem from Jerusalem and blocking interaction between people lacking the right permits.

That view from Manger Street looks over a sweeping valley. On the far side rises another prominent hill – again, once covered with forest, felled in 1996-97. On the hilltop arose the Israeli settlement of Har Homa, a commuter settlement incorporated into the Israeli-created Greater Jerusalem area. An ugly, snaking fence with a cleared security zone on the Palestinian side separates Har Homa from Bethlehem.

This modern concrete monstrosity, with a population of 4,000, glowers over Bethlehem like a hilltop citadel. It always astounds me that Jewish people want to live there, with a commanding view over Arabic Bethlehem, which Har Homa residents cannot visit, and from which the Muslim calling to prayers resounds throughout the day. Surely that must give Jewish housewives headaches? But then, many of the inhabitants are neither the privileged of Israel nor the troublemaking ideology-soaked settlers who hit the headlines – they’re working couples with families, drawn there by the facilities, cheap property, tax breaks and financial incentives. These people are the more innocent and numerous of the many different kinds of West Bank settlers.

Israel

is a settler country. The vast majority have immigrated over the last century, and settlements have been a major mechanism in the staking out of territory. In the West Bank they have taken on many different forms – urban, dormitory and industrial municipalities, city neighbourhoods (in Jerusalem, Hebron and Nablus), religious and secular townships, farming communities and colonial outposts in the wilderness. Nowadays, in the political controversies over settlements, their variety is not widely understood.

The 1948 war left Palestinians with 22% of former Mandate Palestine. This they lost in the 1967 war. This occupied land was not incorporated into Israel proper, except for Jerusalem. The West Bank is run either by a military ‘civil administration’ or by the municipality of Jerusalem, and Palestinians occupy 54% of it, or 12% of ‘historic Palestine’ – the rest is Israeli settlements, military zones, nature reserves or government land. There are settlements northwards in the Golan Heights too (taken from Syria in 1967) and they existed in the Gaza Strip until Israel withdrew from it in 2005.

Settlement blocs have eaten into large chunks of the West Bank, either on its edge (such as the Etzion bloc west of Bethlehem, containing Efrat, Kvar Etzion and Betar Illit), or penetrating deep into wedges of the West Bank (such as the Ariel and Ma’ale Adumim blocs, orbital to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem respectively). There are farming and military settlements and zones in the Jordan valley and corridors of land, settlements and outposts breaking up many parts of the West Bank, leaving Palestinian enclaves with limited or circuitous connections.

Ma'ale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, one of Israel's larger commuter settlements.
It cuts the West Bank into northern and southern halves and is strategically placed,
pulling the centre of gravity of Jewish Jerusalem east into Palestinian territory.

Settlements are largely officially sanctioned, though naturally it’s complex. Some are not, and most of those are officially overlooked. They’re another masterpiece of exceptionalism, all stridently variable, yet they’re all part of the same overall colonising strategy. Smaller outposts are largely the initiative of independent settler groups and they’re often illegal in Israeli law, which is only sometimes enforced. Or they are officially illegal at first, then they are legalised as time goes on. Under the military administration, Israeli laws are applied selectively in the West Bank. ‘Security measures’, meaning ‘what the military administration wants’, are the mechanism by which things usually happen – and there’s no questioning a security measure. It’s a military dictatorship, really, for Palestinians.

Some ideological settlers want the occupied settler areas to become a ‘new’ or ‘other’ Israel, subject to Orthodox Jewish rules and autonomous from Israel proper. This is a potentially dangerous state of affairs which could blow up into a conflict between the state of Israel and renegade settler groups. There’s already a low-level war going on between these settlers and adjacent Palestinian communities (more about this below).

The settlement outpost opposite the school.
This has just been legitimised in an announcement this week - houses will be built here soon.

Outposts – often trailers, cabins and tents – are the way that settlements are established and extended. Settler pioneers head out, take some land, defend it, hold out for a while, then develop and expand from there. The authorities conveniently build roads and services for them, and the army guards them when called on.

Some settlements are full-scale towns, such as Pisgat Ze’ev (40,000), Ramot Alon (40,000), Ma’ale Adumim (30,000), Modi’in Illit (27,000), Ariel (16,000) and Betar Illit (25,000). Others are more like suburban dormitories with a few thousand people. Some are populated by special interest groups, whether ultra-orthodox Haredim in Betar Illit and Modi’in Illit, or Russians in Ariel, or supporters of parties such as Labour or Likud, or ex-army people.

Some are city neighbourhoods carved out of Palestinian urban areas – 35% of East Jerusalem is now made up of Israeli settlements and neighbourhoods. Some settlements (such as Gush Etzion) are former Jewish settlements founded in the 1930s, abandoned in the 1948 war when Jews had to retreat into Israel and later reoccupied after 1967. Some are outposts of followers of certain rabbis or sects, or they’re alternative communes or run by independent-minded pioneers (‘Jewish rednecks’, an Italian activist called them) with a penchant for building and farming.

The purpose behind settlements is strategic, to obstruct an Arab re-invasion, a Palestinian revival or the expansion of Palestinian towns. Or it is religious, to fulfil the biblical notion that the land was given to Jews by God. Or it is economic, to allow Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to expand. Or Zionist, based on an expansionist and colonialist impulse.

The settlement of Ma'on in the southern West Bank
- as seen from the Palestinian village of At Tuwani.
These settlers, helped by soldiers, have been attacking the village and its lands.

Settlers you hear of in the news, encroaching on Palestinian farmland, uprooting trees, attacking Palestinians, setting fire to fields, houses and mosques and causing other trouble are a minority. They are ideological, religious or cowboyish settlers with overblown chutzpah, ranged particularly around the biblical towns of Hebron and Nablus, or out in wilder rural areas. Most settlers are more harmless, there because of economic incentives or a need for a home, and many are immigrants of the last few decades.

Tuwani villagers fruitlessly protesting attacks against their land and houses

In 2007 there were 485,000 settlers, of whom 280,000 were in the West Bank, 190,000 in East Jerusalem and 19,000 in the Golan Heights. Eighty percent of settlers live within commuting distance of Jerusalem. Added to settlements are infrastructure such as security walls, which break up the West Bank and isolate Palestinians from each other, together with settler roads and bypasses, military zones with restricted access, nature reserves, appropriated farmland, industrial sites and land reserved for settlement expansion.

Settlers can thus range from secular commuters, disadvantaged families and new immigrants to orthodox religious nationalists, farmers and idealistic Zionists. The overall effect is that Palestinian lands have been sectioned up, rendered into patches which can no longer form a proper contiguous Palestinian state. The Arabic word for settlements means ‘colonies’. Colonisation is the reason for their development.

Irrespective of their legality in international law – which states that all settlements on the Palestinian side of the Green Line are illegal – facts on the ground have been established to make any abandonment of settlements difficult. Large numbers of Israelis would have to be moved and much infrastructure would be destroyed – something no Israeli administration would willingly do, especially if it relies on settler or right-wing nationalist parties to keep it in power. There have already been cases where soldiers refuse to move settlers or, if they do, the action is symbolic and settlers simply move back afterwards.

Ironically, much settlement and infrastructure construction work has been done by Palestinians, simply because of their need for employment and income. They are hired as cheap labour without being subject to Israeli employment laws, which don’t apply in the West Bank. Up to 2009, 12,000 Palestinian building workers gained permits each year to work in settlements. Controversially, some Palestinian construction and materials firms have been involved as well – the West Bank has plenty of good quarrying stone. The PA decided in 2010 to end this divisive system, though whether there will be jobs to replace those lost is a moot point. Settlement-building will become more expensive as a result. There are also international moves to obstruct the settler movement through selective boycotts and disinvestment, and product-labelling and trade restrictions on goods exported from the settlements.

Aside from considerable losses and hardships incurred by Palestinians, I have two worrying concerns. The first is space, both geographical and psychological. The West Bank is densely populated and settlements have been dropped into small spaces, not only impinging on Palestinian farmland, villages and towns but also dominating them since they are often high up, overlooking Palestinian areas. A wall or fence is built around settlements, usually more visible and humiliating to Palestinians than to Israelis. So life has become more claustrophobic for Palestinians.

The second concerns the settlements themselves, modern concrete estates with little spare space – though their elevation compensates for this. Innocent kids’ bike-rides into the country are just not done unless overseen by soldiers. These places are incubators of social problems and mental illness, sharing the ills of faceless dormitory towns worldwide, dependent on car transport and, in times of economic downturn and oil-price hikes, potential prisons.

Though Israelis are the apparent winners of this population-and-location game, their settlements are not naturally-evolved, full-spectrum communities, and thus they are susceptible to serious social issues. Settlements have narrow demographics, housing people of certain age-groups, belief-groups or social types, leading to problems arising from a deficient social spread. Other issues such as environmental and resource stress, effluent disposal, water aquifers, social polarisation and humanitarian, economic and social impacts on Palestinians all add up to a future headache of enormous proportions.

About 40% of settlements sit on private Palestinian land. Ottoman law had it that, if land was registered, farmed for ten years and taxed, ownership was recognised. If not, or if farming lapsed for three years, it reverted to government land. However, the later British-run registration process was incomplete in 1948 when Israel was established and the West Bank was occupied by Jordan. The Jordanians let people stay where they lived, intervening only when there was a dispute, so there is still much unregistered land.

Much was communally owned, therefore not technically ‘private’, and much land had only common or customary legal standing, without contractual ownership. Many ownership rights have been overlooked by the Israelis anyway, and land has been forcibly occupied by the army, settlers, court judgements or construction firms, walled in or otherwise appropriated for security zones or other purposes – especially in the case of large tracts of land in the Jordan valley. Eighteen percent of the West Bank is made up of Israeli military zones.

Above, the settlement of Ariel, a mainly Russian Jewish settlement and
orbital to Tel Aviv. Below, the ancient Palestinian town of Marda.

So it’s all suitably complicated – a nightmare to sort out and, in the Israeli way of things, intentionally so. This complexity obstructs any unravelling of the settlement project. If the evacuation of settled land were called for, then Israel would be responsible for doing it. It is therefore unlikely to be done, however many UN resolutions are agreed. The prospect of foreign troops battling with settlers to enforce laws, resolutions or treaties is a nightmare no one wishes to take on.

Some have suggested that settlers could become Palestinian citizens, but this is improbable and wouldn’t be accepted by many of them, given their nationalist zeal. Some would fight and some reckon that, since they are enacting the Law of God, they are fighting God’s war and that human rights or political decency play no part. It is God who decides these things, not humans, so this interpretation of God’s Law is a moot point. Some settlers oppose the idea of the state of Israel, though they’re happy to call in the Israeli army to protect them if necessary.

This is a success for the ‘facts on the ground’ strategy, adopted before Israel was founded. But this strategy isn’t unique in history: in the occupation of America, Australia, Siberia and the past colonial enterprises of European powers, laying facts on the ground was standard practice. The main difference is that Israel’s colonial enterprise has taken place in modern times. Key principles are thus involved here which, because of the passage of time, morally override earlier colonial precedents.

The first principle is that, whatever Israelis believe, Palestinians have needs and rights which are equal in all respects to those of Israelis. Second, whatever the historic and biblical claims of Jews, most Palestinians were living in Palestine before most Jews immigrated. Religious Jews reckon this land is theirs by God’s gift, but some assert that other Jews have not fulfilled the Covenant by which God granted them this land, and that the killing and stealing accompanying the occupation breaks the Ten Commandments. All this doesn’t mean Jews should leave, but it does mean, as in post-apartheid South Africa and other post-colonial countries, that the needs and rights of the original de facto inhabitants must be respected, accommodated and even prevail, especially if they are a majority.

Third, the right of invasion and occupation was legally abolished in 1920 by the League of Nations – this distinguishes the Israeli settler movement from earlier colonial enterprises. Fourth, it’s commonsense that all people must have a fair deal, with equal access to and responsibility for the space and resources of the Earth. That’s the bottom line and, in time, that’s what must prevail. Worldwide, if we cannot cooperate, all of humanity will suffer in the 21st century, Israelis included.

When I look out from my workplace at the school, over the valley I see a collection of portable cabins, a settler outpost at the northeast end of the rather long, thin settlement of Efrat. Efrat has a population of 7,000, and it is part of the Etzion bloc. The outpost has been there a few years, making a statement and creating a fact on the ground. Efrat will one day extend right up to the wall. That’s why the watchtower on the hill, overlooking Al Khader, is retained. Efrat is financed by a property developer who made his millions by running gambling joints in USA. He offered a large sum of money to the Issa family to get them to move the school so that the settlement could extend to the edge of Al Khader – the money was refused.

It makes me wonder whether, eventually, the school and the Palestinian houses on the hill around it, located on the Palestinian side of the wall, might nevertheless be forced to move. After all, the Palestinians over here are second-class citizens, whose needs and priorities are considered less important than the march of Israeli progress.

Encroachment on Al Khader could be prevented in the unlikely event that a peace agreement established clear borders and rights, permitting Palestine to become a proper country. This is one reason why, over the decades, Israel has prevaricated, delayed and dragged its feet over peace agreements. Such delay allows Israel to carry on its quiet invasion, its incremental conversion of a military occupation into a full appropriation of what remains of Palestine.

Settlement-building might, in international law, be illegal, but Palestine is not thus far a legally recognised nation, so its claim on the land is technically tenuous. Yes, Palestine doesn’t exist. In this political void, anything may happen. That’s why the international community quietly allows this situation to persist – it’s a convenient abrogation of responsibility. The right of invasion has been abolished, yes, but this applies only to recognised nations with legally-sound borders, which Palestine is not. Neat, huh?

Postscript

There's a developing trend which is rather ominous. Signs of it are given in this BBC report here. There's an emergent movement amongst the radical religious settler minority, particularly those living in outposts deeper in the West Bank (in distinction to the suburban settlers around Jerusalem or in the Ariel settlment block) that is edging toward separation from Israel, to found an 'Israel 2'. Put another way, Israel's right-wing, having made use of these pioneer settlers for their own purposes, are beginning to lose control of them.

The basis of this is the idea amongst some 'ultra-orthodox' religious Jews that the state of Israel is an abomination andconstitutes a breach of the prophecies, which say that the nation of Israel will be formed after the coming of the Messiah, who has not yet come. Before that can take place they believe there must be a showdown, a catastrophe which will cleanse the earth and allow the Messiah to appear. This interlocks with the ideas of right-wing Christians, particularly in USA, who to some extent are using the Jews for the achievement of the final conflagration as described in the Book of Revelations.

Settlers are now beginning to fight the Israeli army - as well as carrying out raids on Palestinian villages and mosques, and killings and attacks on Palestinians. This is an outcome of the loose and hubristic thinking of many expansionist Israelis who believe the occupation of Palestine to be good and just, even a duty before God to claim all of the land from the Jordan River to the sea (even, for some, all of the land from the Euphrates in Iraq to the Nile in Egypt).

As I have mentioned in my forthcoming book, one of my fears for this area is a war between Israelis - particularly since they have a habit of not knowing when to stop. It's a consequence of having lived in such a highly militarised and aggressive state for so long - in a sense, it has bred an addiction to conflict and a hardening of Israeli society to the degree where such things can happen.

This tendency is still new but it bodes ill, and I know some Israelis who, if they dare to think or talk about it, see red lights. It could mean things turning very ugly for the Jewish people, turning on each other, or it could also mean the debilitation or even, at a push, the end of the Israeli project. It would mean the end of the Israeli consensus, such as it is, which has allowed things to progress thus far. So the settlement project is not just problematic for Palestinians - it is becoming a problem for Israelis too. This was visible from its very beginning, back around 1970.

This scenario is admittedly pessimistic. But it shows what can happen when wrongs are permitted to go a long way - unintended consequences can arise, and transgressions progressively increase until a crisis comes.