Autumn Days

Many jets have flown overhead in the last couple of days, the most since I’ve been here. More than any of the other volunteers can remember, it seems. They come and go every day, but since yesterday their presence has been almost constant. Often they pass faster than sound, and so leave the crack of a sonic-boom in their wake. In most countries, the army has the decency not to fly supersonic jets over civilian airspace, and certainly to not fly them so low. But this isn’t most countries, nor – in the minds of the IDF at least – is the airspace civilian. And so I was woken from my sleep with the latest blast from the latest plane to fly crashing over Nablus. It is disconcerting just how much the boom sounds like a bomb, but the double crack – of the nose and of the tail of the plane – is quite distinctive, and so you just carry on with your day.

Classes continue, and I’m trying to prepare a proposal that will allow me to give lectures and hold debates on global health and social justice. Over the last week many classes have been cancelled due to the university elections, and so much of the talk has been of the partisan politics engulfing Palestine. However, it can be difficult to follow the political situation here; strictly, the volunteers are prohibited from discussing politics with their students.  More difficult than this though is that when you do talk to people, often you are confronted by a complete sense of apathy and an unwillingness to talk about the situation. I guess that’s quite understandable... My local guide today – who has just joined the project – was telling me just how ironic he thought the name Project Hope was: he is 22 years old and about to finish a degree in Pharmacy, but with no Jordanian passport he has no hope of leaving the country. From his house in the hills he can see the ocean, but he could never go there; next week it is the festival of Eid ul-Fitr but, here, there is nothing to celebrate. He was 5 years old when the Oslo Accords were signed, and only 12 at the start of the second intifada.

In the national context, it is important to remember that democratic elections were held in Palestine in 2006, but the people voted for Hamas, and this was unacceptable for Israel and the US. Heavy sanctions were imposed until governmental power was transferred to Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party, which divided the government and undermined the Palestinian position in the peace negotiations. Given the various warring factions, it is difficult to visualise how a stable government – and one that is acceptable to both the Palestinians and the international community – could be formed. Fatah officially controls the West Bank, but are blighted by their continuing failure to end the occupation and their internal corruption; Hamas control the Gaza Strip and enjoy significant support in the West Bank, but are not recognised by the international community, much less by Israel. Further, Fatah have ties to the US whilst Iran has ties to Hamas, and so whilst Iran and the US dispute on the wider international front, they fight by proxy in Palestine: I heard someone liken the the political allegiances to two kids playing on their Playstation, with Hamas and Fatah as the fighting computer characters. Here, though, peoples’ lives are real, and the civilian cost is more than just game points clocked up far away from Washington and Tehran. The jets still roar past in the sky.