Made it to Palestine

It’s now Tuesday; I arrived in Nablus Sunday afternoon. I’ve barely had time to sit down since then. The buses from Jerusalem to Ramallah and then on to Nablus were surprisingly easy: the checkpoints were all open and there was no queue at the Security Wall. The wall itself makes the West Bank look like a prison compound; when the gates are closed, to the locals it feels like one. Really, that is what is being created here in the occupied territories: the world’s largest and to many the most controversial prison, with guards of one creed and inmates of one race. If you think of the Stanford Prison experiments you can only imagine what ends are met here when the roles are designated by something far more fundamental than just the whim of the experimenter.

The change, once you pass the wall, is incredible. I’d read that the West Bank is possibly the best place to experience the Middle East, and past the wall you begin to see why. The tri-lingual street signs of Jerusalem disappear; Arabic dominates; Hebrew vanishes; English only appears in logos and on road names. The presence of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) is sparse in the city centres (which are designated as Security Area A – under both civilian and military Palestinian control) but is fairly widespread outside the cities (mostly Area C – Israeli civilian and military control). The wall and any secure compounds are dotted with pillboxes and towers, and the soldiers are just kids with guns. As we drove through the Huwwara checkpoint, one soldier looked just like the typical school geek: thick rimmed glasses and not yet out of braces, but now with an AK-47. We were waved on through.

Nablus itself is an interesting place. The city, refugee camps and surrounding villages are home to over 300,000 people, and were the scene of some of the heaviest fighting during the second intifada. There is a strange mix of warm Middle Eastern hospitality from the people but an undertone of anger and tension in the city itself. Many buildings remain as rubble from the Israeli shelling, and posters of solemn young men with rifles line the walls; pictures of ‘martyrs’ that died in the ongoing struggle to shake off the occupation.

After what was a tiring journey, I finished signing the forms, was shown round the Old City, and went back to the school with the intension of sleeping. I asked if there was anything I could do to help (really an empty pleasantry – I needed sleep) and was told that, actually, the teacher of a class couldn’t make it and the UN school was on strike; there was a class of a dozen teenagers on their way round with no one to teach them. Could I help? Of course I could, I suppose. When in Rome...

The class went well, all things considered, and after I got an hour’s kip. Then came a lecture from a Palestinian doctor who’d been shot, imprisoned and tortured by the IDF, and had lost his mother and several family members in the fighting. He was lecturing on the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) program to help to end the occupation, and on the need for a genuine one-state solution. I will write more in detail about these when I have time, but for now I’ll say that they do seem to be two of the more hopeful possibilities in this situation which often feels immutably hopeless. He spoke consistently of his commitment to non-violence, which is honourable, but the tone of his speech betrayed a definite anger, which of course is understandable. Non-violence and anger are not mutually exclusive, but the later weakens the resolve to maintain a state of the former, and it is anger which has too often boiled over in the face of harsh Israeli oppression. With this in mind, remember Yasser Arafat’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly: “I come bearing an olive branch in one hand, and the freedom fighter’s gun in the other. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand”. Do not forget though, just who it was that let the branch come crashing down.

I’d write more, but I have classes to prepare for.

Shabbat in Jerusalem

I got word from Nablus that as it was their weekend I should stay in Jerusalem until Sunday; it would be rude to have a member of staff come and welcome me on their day off. Fair play, I thought; to be honest, I was glad. It would be good to have another couple of days to see this remarkable and infamous city. Trouble is, they take the Shabbat very seriously here. To quote an old phrase, they don’t fucking roll on Shabbat. The city is, for all intents and purposes, shut. Ah well; time to rest my legs and think for a while.

This, however, can be quite troublesome here in Jerusalem: no doubt this city is drenched in history and the site of numerous important historical events; but at the same time there is an almost Disney-like quality to certain aspects of it – crucially, many of the ‘sacred’ places are either probable forgeries or known replicas. I would not question the significance of the Al-Aqsa mosque and its Western Wall, or the timeless feel of the Old City, or even the pilgrimage people take along the Via Dolorosa, but it is difficult not to be cynical about monuments like the Garden Tomb (an alternative site to where Jesus may have been buried) or the Stone of Unction in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The latter is meant to be the stone on which Jesus’ body was anointed before his burial, but in fact it's replica laid in 1810, and the evidence supporting the former’s claim to being Jesus’ burial site has been debunked - the ancient tombs found at the speculated site were shown to date to the 5^th century BCE – and the myth is most likely maintained as it is almost the only part of Jerusalem which Protestants have a claim to.

One of the primary causes of the trouble here in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories was observed by Robert M. Pirsig when he noted that:

[T]he doctrinal differences among Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.

It is worth recalling at this point that the conflict in Palestine boils down to a dispute over real-estate, albeit over real-estate which is of religious significance, and by parties which are defined along religious lines. The Balfour Declaration in 1917 promised an independent state for the Jewish people in Palestine, and much of the justification for the placing of the future state of Israel in this region was because the vast majority of places mentioned in Jewish scripture could be found in what was Palestine. I do not want to tread the perilous waters of discussing the merits or shortcomings of the Balfour Declaration, but the significance placed on the veracity of the claims to the Holy Land are surely cheapened and sullied by the placing of suspicious Holy relics on supposedly sacred ground. To watch people touch their heads to a holy stone we know not to be genuine and to watch tourists listen in awe to a guide tell them how Jesus paid the ultimate sacrifice at a place we know he can’t have done is to see people willingly fall for fallacies that do nothing but undermine the struggles and violence that have beset this land over the last century.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, when I asked which way the exit was from the Garden Tombs, the receptionist told me: “through the gift shop”.

Some pictures from the first days

The Wailing Wall at Shabbat

The Old City in Jerusalem

More Old City

The hills around Jerusalem

Soldiers in the Jewish Quarter

To Jerusalem

A 5am start is never easy, especially when you know you have to venture out of the world you know and jump deep into a world you don’t. Oddly the darkness is appealing, and the journey to the airport passes in a blink. As I walk through the terminal and towards the gate the crowd is the first thing that begins to feel foreign about this trip; skull-caps and orthodox Jews abound and, knowing that my ultimate destination is Palestine, there is a certain feeling of unease. If someone asks me where I’m headed, do I lie? Do I risk causing offence? Am I just being too paranoid? Perhaps... Still; better to keep quiet and keep my eyes in my book.

The airport security again went smoothly; I’d been warned that customs at Tel Aviv can either be a frustrating nuisance or a comical farce, but really it was neither. The immigration official barely even looked at me as she continued her conversation with the woman next to her and stamped my passport with a stamp that effectively bans me from travelling to Lebanon and Syria. Aside from having to crawl down into the conveyor-belt part of the luggage carousel to retrieve my stuck guitar case nothing was out of the ordinary.

Waiting for the sherut (small shuttle bus) to Jerusalem I get confused as people crowd around me and shout in Hebrew and look like they know what’s going on. Someone who looks like the driver points at me, and I stumble out the words ‘Jaffa Gate’. He disappears and I feel more lost, but before long I’m being shuttled onto the sherut and I take the last seat. I’d seen the girl I sat next to at the bus stop, and she’d had the same problem as me. “Don’t speak much Hebrew?” Of course not. We talk for a little and it turns out she’s teaching English. I ask where; she hesitates and says “Nablus”. Small world, I guess. At least she broke the silence about where we were headed, although later she told me she saw the woman in front of us mouth to her husband, “They’re going to the West Bank!” Maybe I’d been right to keep my eyes in a book.

Still, we ended up in Jerusalem safe, found a nice little hostel in the Old City and found some excellent food. This city is stunningly beautiful; I’m not quite sure what I had imagined. Winding ancient stone alleyways and paving slabs worn smooth; a hustle of people late into the dark and a smell just like the pictures say. The young soldiers with machine guns were a little disconcerting, but they had smiles on their faces. So did I, for that matter; somehow, tomorrow I have to get to Nablus.

The journey begins...

In an interview with the Independent, the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy said of his work in the occupied Palestinian territories “a whistle in the dark is still a whistle.” Having seen firsthand the effects of the occupation on the Palestinian people – the fighting; the displacement; the disenfranchisement; the loss of rights, hopes and dignity – he felt duty bound to report to the world the suffering he saw in the hope that, little by little, the world may sit up and take notice of what is by any measure an apartheid. By reporting honestly on the facts, he states that he hopes only to avoid a situation where people allow human rights abuses to continue and defend themselves by saying “We didn’t know.” This, I believe, is the office of the journalist.

In this blog I shall record my own travels into the occupied territories. In a few days time I begin my journey to the city of Nablus in the north of the West Bank, where I will be working until the middle of April. I’ll be spending the winter in Palestine, working with the non-governmental organization Project HOPE – Humanitarian Opportunities for Peace and Education – either teaching, organizing humanitarian aid projects, or leading workshops on human rights with the refugees and young people of Nablus.

 As yet, I have little idea what the next six months have in store. Frankly, I don’t think anyone could predict how the coming months will pan out in the region: with continued fighting in Gaza, settlement expansion being approved in East Jerusalem amidst international condemnation, and US lead peace talks crumbling under the demands of the Israeli right, few are optimistic that the troubles will be resolved soon. However, at the same time, increasing calls from within Israel to cease the construction of illegal settlements, increasing pressure from the international community to halt the blockade of Gaza – Spain, Britain and Turkey all announced official boycotts of Israel’s first meeting of the OECD – and an ever more fragmented coalition government offer hope that the will to change may finally outweigh the will to continue on this weary and tattered path. If this were to happen, then the pessimism which seems to envelope this corner of the Middle East may finally begin to fade away.

By Friday I should be in Nablus, and from there I shall keep everyone updated on the progress of the journey, one step at a time. I hope you all choose to follow my progress, and I welcome any questions, comments and correspondence you may want to send. I will post pictures and places, and do what I can to report the truth of the situation, of life in the occupied Palestinian territories. A whistle in the dark is still a whistle, and all you can do is tell the truth as you see it.

Wish me luck.