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[salaamagain]

and one last post...

Tuesday 29th November

I said I wouldn’t post again but I am sure you are all on tenterhooks: I got through Ben Gurion like a knife through butter and am home safe and tired.

I forgot to thank in my last post my dear readers who followed me up hill and down dale, through joyous food and horrific tales.  You were very dear to me, because I knew my tale was listened to, but also because so many of you cared about what happened to me and made my two worlds connect.

shukran and massalama until next time (look them up)

[salaamagain]

and what about me...

last evening, Sunday 27th November

My pre-COVID confidence and sense of utility have more than returned along with my trust in my body’s ability to do most of what I need it to do.

I’m ever more firmly in love with this place in that enduring way that embraces weaknesses along with strengths in those we really love.  It’s a burden to Palestinians to place them in the role of cartoon superheroes.  But they are testimony to what the human being can do when placed in continuous impossibility.  

I thank everybody I talked to, learned from, laughed with, worked with and I thank most of all the people who fed me so well.

I will not post again unless I fail to get through Ben Gurion security.  

[salaamagain]

Bethlehem  Saturday 26th November

Tourists, touts, a scout band marching, Christian funeral cortège, Christmas decorations and the best damn chai yet

Cinnamon, sage, cardamom, rose, mint, za’atar, ginger

But no high end Palestinian restaurant: damn guy has set up in Notting Hill

[salaamagain]

and farewell Hebron

Poor old Al Khalil (Hebron) used up, squeezed out and discarded any remaining energy and enthusiasm in under twenty four hours sadly.  It is not entirely poor Hebron’s fault although it is undoubtedly one of the hardest places in the West Bank to be.  I think I simply ran out of what I had thought was an inextinguishable appetite for taking on newness.  I was overfed by three different old friends in twenty four hours and ran away a day early to Beit Sahour, an enjoyable village near Bethlehem where I have slept the afternoon away.

My acute analysis of the situation in Hebron will have to wait.  My focus here is sleep, food, reading and an occasional beer.  

It is raining.  Hard.

[salaamagain]

and finally something cheering...

there is still m’ssakan in Palestine and we got to eat it

[salaamagain]

good morning Palestine!

I woke up here on my last morning in the house, bright and early with my head full of writing to you about what I have learned this trip of Palestine now...

The patient is very sick.  In the countryside the settlements are visibly extending all the time until they are joining up irreversibly, and the settlers are ever more confident and aggressive.  The soldiers remain the same imperturbable defenders and enablers.  The cities are being invaded, and 200 Palestinians, mostly young men, but also children, have been killed by Israeli forces since the beginning of the year.  Every day in the house we wake up to bad news and that did not happen before.  The roots of shabab armed resistance are strengthening against one of the most military forces in the world.  

The world remains largely unconcerned.  Palestinians are more despairing than I have ever known them, and their despair is exacerbated by their puzzlement that this goes unnoticed, unchecked.  The new government in Israel is openly racist, filled with hate, and supported by a surprisingly large proportion of young Israelis.  The gloves are off.  The settlers in Hebron crow ‘we are the government now’ and they literally are.  Itamar Ben Gvir lives in the largest settlement in the Hebron area. The Palestinians say ‘they can do anything. we can do nothing.’

This extraordinary confidence of the Israeli state is born of unblinking international support, aid, arms, media, pushback against pro-Palestinians, and the relaying of Israeli hasbara*.  Trump is running for president again. The weedy handwringing of the west and the adherence to a two state solution are a parade.  You only have to travel around the West Bank to see that two states are logistically completely impossible.  But the pretence that the whole Oslo agreement is alive allows the sitting on hands that is so useful.  

So where is hope? Really? Rebecca Solnit says hope is what you have when there is little else and it is what gets you to that other place.  But also, also, I do see a tiny glimmer and it is not here but in the US.  A 2021 survey of Jewish voters just after the last Gaza ‘conflict’ showed that a quarter of US Jews think that Israel is an apartheid state, 22% agree that ‘Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.’ Figures are even higher for young Jews.  When I first came in 2016 I did not use the word apartheid, not because I could not see it, but because I didn’t want to alienate my readers. Now I can and people do.  The Israeli state knows this is changing and it frightens them, intensifies their hasbara efforts.  As conflict and atrocity intensify here so those tectonic plates will keep shifting. Which they need to.  Palestinians can and do resist every inch but their efforts need to be met by realistic responses from the west.  

I am sorry this is so long.  And I am surprised that I am writing it at all.  I never thought I would pontificate generally on the state of things here.  But here I am, appalled by the sliding I am watching and wanting to report it.  

Now to Hebron...

*hasbara, the Hebrew word for Israeli public diplomacy , advocacy and public relations, to quote an entirely pro-Israeli definition

[salaamagain]

an odd day to wake up to...

Yesterday we said goodbye to our Icelandic women, this morning to our Swedish friend.  We have not a great deal to do, olives are finished and the house winds down, much socialising with our local friends... tomorrow I go to Al Khalil and leave this house.

We woke up to news of olive trees being burned by settlers in the fields of Burin where we pick so often, to three Palestinians kidnapped by the army in Jenin, to an invasion by armoured vehicles of the old city of Nablus where a sixteen year old was killed.

And then we hear news of two bombs in Jerusalem set by Palestinians, killing one and injuring nineteen. Little detail as yet: what happened to the bomb setters? is this part of a resurgence of resistance? But the most pressing thing is to find out if Susanne can get through road blocks to Jerusalem this morning (don’t be surprised: this is what Palestinians have to think every time they try to go somewhere - can I get there? is it safe?)

And the horror of the coming retaliation across the West Bank.

Now I go tomorrow to Hebron where I will have horror stories that I need to nerve myself to hear.  Poor battered damned Hebron is the epicentre. 

[salaamagain]

BEST food so far Tuesday 22 November 

aubergine sandwich, aubergines from Doha’s garden, oil from Doha’s fields.  standing up at the cooker 

[salaamagain]

legal rights for women

Tuesday 22nd November

I spoke to a wonderful woman in 2019 Myassar who talked about the huge gaps in women’s rights here in Palestine and how the women’s sections of the trade unions are fighting each injustice piecemeal in the court.  

Now I talk to Shatha and there has been little progress: wives now have a right to be informed if their husbands take a second wife, but as Shatha says, how much use is this?

There is a draft law in existence which would give some strong rights to women regarding marriage, custody, divorce, work and study.  It will include sexual harassment which is not a term presently existing in law. But her political party chooses not to petition the PA President to have it passed: ‘he is not the king: if we ask him we are accepting his power’.  And he would certainly dilute it.  He has already applied for advice from sharia courts in Egypt on this.  “The PA don’t represent us: they are the occupation. We need a parliament.’

This a horrible dilemma: to campaign for some rights now or to refuse the power of an oppressive overlord.

[salaamagain]

and the women?

Monday 21st November

We meet men here all the time: farmers, taxi drivers, shopkeepers, mayors, activists and our lovely olive harvest coordinators.  Some women but not so many.  We come across two different views of Palestinian women, often in the same person, that they are fierce and strong, and that their lives are hard and unjust.  I too think both are probably true.

We met Shatha earlier in the week to talk about this.  She works for Palestine Medical Relief Society a lot of whose services revolve around the problems women have: culture, occupation, health.  She says things have been getting better slowly (shwai shwai)* and it seems from some of the PA figures that is true. But from a low base.  Gender based violence appears to be decreasing slowly, the proportion of women in well paid and socially influential jobs (where they need to be) is increasing, young women are more free to study at universities away from home and even abroad. ‘When women study and have jobs they will be stronger, but they often still don’t have control of their incomes.’ The new generations of parents bring their children up differently.  Shwai shwai it changes.

The occupation has an enormous effect on women’s freedom: families don’t want girls tangled up in violence, night time, checkpoints, uncertainty, and the PA (’they are the worst’) but despite this young women are moving around the West Bank and spending time with friends more and more. But ‘we all have phones always and we are constantly stressed and sharing news if there are attacks.’  The Second Intifada was a terrible blow to women’s freedoms, and COVID has not helped.

More on women later: on legal rights, the influence of the wider family, and on gender based violence.  Two of us have worked long years for women’s refuges and so this was a real focus for us.

*slowly, slowly

[salaamagain]

domestic miscellany Monday 21st November

The house is slowly closing down now: my lovely Icelandic women left in a great sadness (for me) this morning.  By Wednesday two more will have gone, on Thursday me too, which will leave two to finally close the house in the first days of December.  We are already washing sheets and wrapping things in plastic (sorry but necessary).  The olive harvest is nearly done but on Wednesday we do a final pick with one of our dearest farmers who will feast us both in the field and afterwards.

I have laughed more here than I have done since my teens.

[salaamagain]

Sunday 20th November

Ticked off the last two squares on my Palestine bingo card at last, kunafe and the hammam.  I could just come home but I will stay til my flight next monday and in the meantime I will spend a few days in and around Hebron, my favourite Palestinian town and the most blighted place in the entire West Bank.  I’m sorry to give you some reading homework but this article (unusually for the Guardian) gives a great simple overview of both the history and the current troubles of this city 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/12/hebrons-jewish-settlers-take-heart-from-far-right-polls-surge-in-israel

but tomorrow a day of rest (the hammam can be very harrowing and overeating is always hard work)

[salaamagain]

A peaceful day’s picking alhamdullilah Saturday 19th November

This may well be my last pick, and it was with  with a farmer very close (as you can see) to a rapidly expanding settlement.  He and other farmers have been having problems with settlers coming down from the settlement, but today was a great but tiring day when we got a lot of his olives in with him completely peacefully.

The settlement you can see is his own land, stolen from him and it all that building work was not there when we were last picking.  The settlers are planting non-olive trees at the top of this hill and we will go tomorrow with all the villagers to protest and to report.

Seems Shabbat is a day when settlers have other things to do.  Small mercies...

[salaamagain]

Another Friday another demo

Friday 18th November

Friday is demo day and we usually go to Kufr Khaddoum.  We have always been there and it is familiar in its risks and rhythms.  But today we elected to go to a different demo and all seven of us appeared at Beit Dajan, which has been demonstrating against the appearance of a mini settlement on its land for some time.

(First settler tents appear, then the army turfs them off, then it is a military zone, then the settlers take it back in more solid form.  that is the way it goes...)

It is very different.  There is no local shop for ice cream and the setting is not a built up road but a stony plain with soldiers overlooking.  It is peaceful at first but the villagers are very close up with the soldiers and having bad tempered exchanges.  One has a megaphone and relays his view of the situation:

“ this is our land.  you should go back to Ukraine and Russia.  you are sinners”

But when the shabab get going with their slings, called into action by the megaphone, then the tear gas starts and it is difficult to know where they will fire it and which way the wind blows.  There is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing on our part.  The wind changes and the soldiers find they have gassed themselves which is entertaining.  

And in the end it dissolves as they all do, this one without mishap to the demonstrators, and we are on our way home...

[salaamagain]

finally some photographs of our rooftop vigil

[salaamagain]

Palestine bingo...

Friday 18th November

A trip to Palestine is incomplete without the following...

✓ getting in safely

✓ night-time Jerusalem rooftops

✓ the women’s house

✓ tea with sugar and maramiya (a thousand)

✓ maqluba (several by now)

✓ falafel

✓ Friday demo (tick two)

✓ gas (twice, unpleasant but defining)

✓ olive picking 

✓ maqluba (several)

 ✘ hammam

✘  kunafe 

[salaamagain]

how to explain...

The dynamics of our interactions here usually follow a pattern and the dynamics are getting worse.  There are up to four players in this game: the internationals, the Palestinians, the army and the settlers.   This is true whether we are at olive picking or an action or a demo or a clash.

The Palestinians are always there because they are who we are working with.  The settlers are all around and love to disrupt whatever is happening.  This is how they hope to drive Palestinians out.  Usually they do not approach unless they feel safe that the army is there (usually they ring them just to make sure; there is much coordination between these two players).  Then the settlers will be threatening and may throw stones and chase us and the Palestinians.  They do also beat people up.  The army will do nothing.  They are there to protect the settlers. If you ask them why they do not prevent the settlers’ violence, they will say it is not their business, that is police business.  Police however very rarely come and if they do they will likely arrest Palestinians and settlers.  It is best to have gone as soon as settlers are seen.

However, sometimes the army come without settlers.  They may explain that we cannot pick, or be there or whatever we are doing.  They will tell us we are in a military zone, but the paperwork is in Hebrew so we cannot read it.  Usually, there is no military zone. We try not to look at the paper at all as then we have a defence if it ever comes to court.  In the end it will be the Palestinians we are working with who decide whether we stay or go (unless, of course, we feel unsafe ourselves).

Sometimes we talk to the army arguing that we have a right to be there and the Palestinians have a right on their land, but this is for argument’s sake.  The army have guns...  There is a film of one of us engaged in this dialogue and I will post it.

The army frequently argues that we are the problem: that they would not need to come if we were not there, that the farmer does not want us, that we are the disruption ourselves.  This is hard as it might be true, but all our Palestinian friends tell us repeatedly not only that we are wanted but that this is a conscious tactic of the occupation: divide and rule.  We only go where we are asked, we only stay as long as we are wanted.  We do a lot of handwringing about how much help or hindrance we really are, but in the end, if the army want us out of it and the Palestinians want us in it, that is an indicator that we have a useful role.  

Are you following? I thought this might be quite short but it is very long.  Do your best.