APPENDIX

1:07 AM, 06/19/05, Sunday in Bethlehem:

I am unable to sleep despite being awake since 6 am Newfoundland time two days ago. There were some moments of sleep on the planes, but nothing like a couple of solid hours. It is not for want of comfort I’m wakeful; if anything, the opposite. The bed is good, neither too hard nor soft; the ambient temperature is perfect and a soothing breeze blows over the head of the bed. I am as safe and comfortable as I have ever been anywhere, but with so many thoughts busying me I decided to get up and come out to the living room where I can write without disturbing my roommate who is asleep. 

The great, cumbersome airbus goes lumbering down the runway with its massive engines wobbling under its wings. They are wobbling slowly, dangling, pendulous, twisting as if they might or might not stay attached. Indeed, it is the slowness of everything that amazes me: the length of the run required for take-off, the absence of perceptible rapid acceleration. When we are airborne is ambiguous: we have left the ground by a centimeter, then two, and at long last are climbing. The effortful work goes on after takeoff until the behemoth is finally at height. But when all her flaps are drawn and the sky is being sliced at a steady rate, the marvel is fully felt: this is what it’s supposed to do.

We are staying for two months in Bethlehem, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), in a program called Palestine Summer Encounter (PSE). This is put on by an organization called Holy Land Trust and its sister organization in California, called Middle East Fellowship. As Palestinian supporters we are subject to what might be called ‘another law of return;’ that is, if the Israelis find out our true feelings they can send us back, on the next plane, to wherever we came from. 

This sorry fate actually happened to eight of last year’s participants, and though we were not advised of the size of the risk to begin with, we were warned that we had to cover our travel expenses if Israel refused our admission to the country. In any case, we got into the country with help from Jewish supporters who met us with a sign naming a kibbutz we said we were going to stay in to begin two months of tourism.

On the way from JFK to Frankfurt, when our group of six or eight participants was discovering itself amid the passengers, I stood in the aisle of the airbus and talked to a New York lawyer who had left her husband home to go on this adventure. Within the first few minutes of conversation she told me she was Jewish and that she would have the easiest and most certain entry into the country. She had been there before and was giving advice to the rest of us on how to answer immigration authorities. I told her it pleased me that our first destination was a kibbutz because it was important to feel we were not aligned along ethnic lines. She said, ‘Oh yeah,’as if that were obvious, and I suppose it is, but it’s germane to a certain, venomous criticism of all Palestinian supporters, namely that they’re anti-Semitic. Later I heard her telling someone else that while she and her husband adored one another (he’s studying to be a rabbi) they had taken quite different values from their Jewishness.

The participants I have met so far are plucky and interesting people, most in their twenties and thirties, except for my roommate who looks about the same age as me: sixty-one. On the flight from JFK to Frankfurt I sat with Katy who is about to get a master’s degree in philosophy and religious studies at Duke and would like to go on to get a Ph.D. and then teach. She told me of some of her previous travels during our seven- or eight-hour flight: she spent a year in Amsterdam working in a hostel, and another in Guatemala ‘helping with kids at the dump.’ 

But none of the participants is more interesting or pleasant than the family of Christian Arabs Henry and I are living with. They seem very much at ease with themselves and others, highly sociable and conspicuously happy. A lot of this, I think, stems from living with relatives on all sides. People come and go through the front door without knocking and sit in the living room without expectation. 

We are in Beit Sahour, a town neighboring Bethlehem, more or less contiguous to it, but down the hill a few miles and away from the checkpoint and hubbub above. The grandparents, whose house it is, are not surprisingly the most contented of all, unless it’s Biisaan, the seven-month-old baby girl they pass around joyfully and keep in a state of delight herself. The part of the family we share a bathroom with consists of the grandparents, Nimr and Shimaa, and Rowan, who is in her last days of high school. In an addition to the house on back are the eldest son and his wife and baby daughter, Biisaan. The house has a nice front sitting area and a couple of young guys came up and chatted with Rowan and her mother who were cutting the stems out of grape leaves and putting them away for the winter. Then one of the boys left and the other sat down and replaced her mother to work.

I had asked for a private room but find myself, not only in the same room, but under the same counterpane as Henry, a great (and I use the word advisedly), big bearded Berkley radical. He snores like a mill and has none of the virtues of my wife, save an easy-going manner and a great store of knowledge. But I jest: It is true that we sleep together, but it is not true that he lacks all of my wife’s other virtues. He is friendly, sociable, and other good things, all of which leave me quite satisfied with my living situation. Verily, I would be poorer without him. 

His daughter is on the trip, staying with another family. Many of the women are quite beautiful, so young it almost makes me indifferent to them, a feeling I intend to cultivate. In the lines going through immigration I stood behind a stylish and sexy young woman I took to be a wealthy tourist. Later, I was very surprised to find her seated among the participants at Holy Land Trust when our busload of ten arrived. 

Perhaps for reasons of not having all their eggs in one basket, HLT had us arrive in various groupings. Like most of the others in our bus, I had no problem getting in: the immigration officer did not even speak to me. Others had the same experience, and still others were questioned but slightly, probably because we were able to name the kibbutz and individual meeting us on the entry form.

Henry, however, had a three-and-a-half-hour hold-up as he entered by land from Jordan after first flying to Aman. He was already unpopular with the Israelis on account of previous visits, including one that featured a couple of weeks with International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in Gaza. Meanwhile, his daughter came on a plane to Tel Aviv. He said they didn’t ask him a single question: just kept him waiting in one room and another, searched his luggage repeatedly, etc. He said that back in the States, his whole family (himself, his wife, and two daughters) was arrested in two different American cities on the same day for protesting the Iraq war. That must be a record for family protest. 

The mosquitoes have found me and I’m going back to bed.   

6/19/2005

We had a very inspired introduction to Bethlehem, hearing a speech from the mayor and then another from the leader of Holy Land Trust. I should include parts of the mayor’s speech and notes from Sami’s whose best point was the challenge of being creative and on the offensive with nonviolence. He wanted to get beyond the point where their group only reacted to what the Israelis did, protesting the closure of a bridge, for example, and take it to them with actions of their own. His best idea along these lines is not entirely pro-active, since it does pertain to the dire straits created by Israeli action, but it is somewhat so: bring tourism back to Bethlehem. With 60 percent unemployment the leaders of this community have as a primary task to keep up the morale and energy of their population. They are working hard to bring work and signs of progress to an otherwise stricken place.

6/20/2005

My first day of work at the Beit Sahour municipal center was a good one. I worked over a grant written a year ago by the young woman who is effectively my boss. It was greatly satisfying to do what friends of mine, who do the same thing for a living, have grimly called hack writing. I spent some time with Suzanne and some with the city engineer, a woman of about 50.  Working from an unsubmitted proposal made a year earlier, we together applied for grant money to purchase city maintenance equipment. I could  include relevant sections with some pride.

When we finished I remarked that it was made easy by all the good work of someone a year earlier, and wondered who that was. It was Suzanne.

I then composed a letter for the mayor of Beit Sahour to thank the mayor of Cambridge England for an invitation for a delegation to visit them next year and to try and keep open stalls for Palestinian handicraft. The two Brits in the office, who came with the invitation, were doubtless the real people to thank. Janet and her husband Phillip were thanking their lucky stars of David for being able to get in. Janet said that her husband was the cover because he was an archaeologist.  The three of them joked that the upside of the British pro-Israeli policies was that Britons could get in and out of Israel. Probably everyone has the idea that the place is now in a condition reminiscent of iron curtain countries. 

Suzanne bought lunch for the office and I went to take Arabic training at about 1 pm. 

6/21/2005

Last night I was completely awake and with no interest in sleep until after the muezzin made his pre-dawn calls. There was gunfire or something that sounded like it on seven occasions by my counting. Most of it was small, firecracker-like noise, but on two or three occasions, including the last one, just after the call to prayer, there were heavier  explosions. 

6/24/2005

Yesterday I went to the big tent for an evening with our group. Evidently Thursday night is the big night of the week around here. I heard Nimr say that every Thursday there are parties, and next Thursday there will be more parties. That’s what I like, a prophet promising a future. The atmosphere in the big tent was very nice and we had a great few hours. I came home first and had a nap for an hour which can be a great asset to the elderly traveler. Consequently I was wide awake throughout.

Lying in bed later I thought of some conversations during the evening and estimated the likelihood that our group was not infiltrated by both American and Israeli professionals to be zero. The American is a young fellow I talked with at some length. He was pleasantly pissed and sitting by a girl he’s putting the moves on. The three of us were smoking my arageel and talking about what brought us here and the like. He mentioned how close he had come to joining the military and said he escaped at the last minute, even though he had signed papers. He had also been recruited by the State Department and the CIA. When he went home from this he would still consider becoming ‘an analyst.’

I had my first arageel, a very pleasant commodity. The menu included two apples, bubblegum, mixed fruit and something else. Mine was mixed fruit.

 As of yesterday the road we drove into town on is closed. This was the smaller of two checkpoints on our side of Bethlehem, now another cul de sac.

Also, yesterday was my first day of doing nothing at work. Suzanne sent me down to Hanan’s office. Hanan ran off to a meeting with the mayor for an hour or so. I studied Arabic and when she came back put my books away and ate a little cucumber they’re having a celebration about this Sunday. Then she busied herself with paperwork and phone calls and I sat patiently for a few minutes before finally going back to my studies. There is no internet on that computer so I used it to create a vocab list from the yalla nihki arabi  book. It’s a good piece of pedagogy.

In both the morning and the afternoon I was almost falling off my chair with sleepiness so a nap before evening was sorely needed.

6/26/2005

The visit to Hebron was preceded by Jonathan’s giving us a pamphlet from the alternative information center called Occupation in Hebron, written by Patrick Muller. It is academic in style, heavy on fact, understated and annotated, a brief work that reflects, I would say, years of study. Jonathan asked fifteen NIS (New Israeli Shekels) for the pamphlet but was pleased to let anyone pay later. I am pleased to be one of those, but must remember to pay on Monday.

A succinct summary of this pamphlet would be too difficult: the writing is already terse and dense. Let me say only that radically religious Jews, with the economic and military support of the State, not to mention nearly absolute legal impunity for their crimes, took over Palestinian land and property, first on the outskirts of Hebron, and lately, in the old city near the Tomb of the Patriarchs Synagogue/Ibrahami Mosque. The objective of the settlers and the government is ethnic cleansing, plain and simple, and the result has been ongoing violence with no end in sight.

As a tour bus full of Americans we were allowed to drive the fine, almost-empty Israeli roads that are closed to Palestinians. For a Palestinian to go from Bethlehem to Hebron, he must use back roads and taxies. He is not allowed to take his own car but has to take a taxi to one side of a checkpoint, get out, walk across, and get another. A few days ago our family went to a wedding in Nabalus by this process. 

Before going into Hebron proper we visited the village of At-Twani, which I had heard of because it had been in the news lately. The bus lumbered carefully off the main road onto a dirt road leading up a hill toward no visible destination. As the driver was taking a very long time to get us over some soft-looking gravel at the side of the main road, the guide explained that another bus had got hung up here because ‘the body of the bus was not very high from down.’

We went about three hundred meters up the hill before getting out at the most convenient place to turn the bus around: any farther and he would have to back all the way to this point. The guide had been in telephone contact with Scott, from Christian Peacemakers Team, who was now coming down the road to meet us. He was a well-spoken young fellow who, with his wife of five years, was out here to act as an international presence, along with two other people, one from Operation Dove, an Italian organization, and the other a Chilean group whose name I forget. Their procedure is to stay for five days and then go back to Tel Aviv while someone else takes a turn.

CPT came here to walk the children to school. A neighboring village, Tuba, is even smaller than At-Twani, so the children come to school here. Prior to CPT’s arrival, settlers had been coming out and scaring the children. A few weeks ago, seven men in masks came out of the woods with sticks and chains and attacked the CPT people. They put them both in the hospital, one man with a punctured lung, the other with a broken arm and memory problems.

The upshot of this incident has been that the Israeli army walks the kids to school, driving along behind them, evidently, with CPT calling them when they’re late and observing their work from a hilltop. 

Scott said they also slept in the houses of families who had been harassed by men with dogs, entering and trying to scare the people into moving. That seemed to have been successful since the midnight visits had ceased. 

Other incentives to leave that the settlers have thought of include throwing dead chickens into an At-Twani well and poisoning a hundred sheep. We had a big sit-down meeting on the floor of a comfortable concrete hut and heard from an elder about their struggles. We were joined in this meeting by an Israeli who was also on the scene to help contain settler misconduct. He was a  tough-looking bald guy driving a new truck and proclaiming his plan to ‘demolish’ the occupation. Each of us must fight as we could, he said, leaving the impression that his method might not be to write letters to the editor.

Last night an Israeli settler was killed in a settlement just across the main road, so the army began putting dirt mounds by the edge of the road to block the paths of At-Twanii citizens to access a field they use there. They were working with heavy equipment as we watched. 

Getting almost to Hebron we encountered a big snarl of traffic and taxis at a checkpoint the Israelis had closed in response to last night’s killing. The guide said, ‘This is always how it is: collective punishment.’ For a while it seemed that we too might get a small taste of it by having our Hebron visit cancelled. However, the guide was resourceful and called people in Hebron and learned that we could drive around the city and get in through another village on a road that was not blocked. The driver did some hilly and awkward driving and soon we were having dinner at a Hebron restaurant.

The Arabic name for Hebron is El Khalil which means Charles which means friend, as does the Hebrew. The name apparently comes from a biblical reference to Abraham as a friend of God. The city has a population of 150,000 and is the biggest in the occupied West Bank. It is partitioned at the moment so as to put 20 percent, including all of the Old City and the Tomb of the Patriots Synagogue/Ibrahim Mosque under Israeli administration, and the remaining 80 percent under the Palestinian Authority. That 20 percent, however, is for only 500 settlers and the consequence of their having it has been the closure of what was the busiest market place in the area.

We walked through this ghost town of shuttered shops on our way to the mosque, feeling the kind of uneasiness and regret one always does at the sight of uninhabited buildings that were once lively. Overhead was a mesh of wire that the locals had put up in order to catch the garbage flung down on them by settlers. It was sagging under the weight of the refuse and broken in places where paving stones or heavier objects had been dropped. The settlers had built apartment blocks above the shops and had the advantage of height for their offal bombing. Now the narrow street was unoccupied except for a few Arab children of about eight or ten, riding bikes or kicking a ball. The 500 settlers are protected by 1500 soldiers and their aim, and Israel’s aim, is to Judaize the entire Old City. In the pamphlet ‘Occupation in Hebron’ former defense minister Moshe Dayan is said to have called his permission for this colonization, the most severe mistake of his career.

The mosque/synagogue is surrounded by cliques of soldiers wearing flack jackets helmets and machine guns. It was Saturday and we had to wait for prayers to finish in the mosque before entering, so to kill time we went through to the Jewish side, hoping to look around there. We were stopped at a couple of points but Jen spoke Hebrew to the soldiers and they got on their phones and by and by we were allowed to walk around near the synagogue, but not to go in because, again, people were praying.

Finally we put ourselves through a checkpoint, passing our backpacks through little windows to the soldiers and then stepping through screening devices. They questioned the pretty girls but not me.

This holy site is divided right down the middle with steel bars and you pray on either side with murder in your heart. In 1994 a settler got into the mosque and killed 29 worshipers and wounded 125. They have cenotaphs for several famous biblical figures, like Abraham and Sarah and Leah A big manhole cover with air holes leads down to a cave that is said to be the real tomb of Abraham. Nobody has gone in recently, they say, except Moshe Dayan during the 1967 war.

The women enjoy wearing the abaya, which gives them a spooky look, and they happily pose for photos, which, surprisingly are permitted. We walk around the carpets with our shoes off. The place is ornate but by no means comparable to European cathedrals. 

We stopped at a Hebron glass factory on the way out and I got a tea pot. There were lots of beautiful objects and Adam, the young fellow seated in front of me, got a serving dish made with tiny inlaid fragments.

On the way home we are guided by phone calls to the best checkpoint. However, when we get there it seems to have just closed. We get in line behind some trucks and cars and wait while Josh and the tour guide go up to see if they can get us through. No dice. The guide comes back for Mrs. Kline (Jen). She walks up with him and talks for a few minutes and we’re underway. 

It was a long day and worth the entire price of the summer. It was something that would have been completely impossible for me to undertake on my own.

6/28/2005

On Sunday we just rested. Henry said next Sunday he’d like to plan something but the rest was so agreeable to me that I might be looking forward to it again. I had a good session of Arabic practice with my family, reading a picture book and trying to pronounce a few words.

Monday was a good day at work, a nice contrast to Thursday and Friday of last week. Once again I was given something to do and, I think, did a good job. This was a proposal to build three retaining walls. I took the folder with the map and the engineer’s descriptions and wrote it into a summary touting the good effects of such a project and saying how important it was to the municipality. Ah! The joys of so-called hack writing! But I think any kind of good writing is a splendid achievement. I’m often pleased and amazed at how well instructions are written for the use of a machine, for example. When I lived in Quebec for a few months and was reading and studying French, I went to the library once and picked up some legal decisions in English, just for a break. It was a pleasure to read those well-reasoned arguments.

6/30/2005

Last night we had meshwaba for supper. This is a squash and tomato and garlic dish made by putting the ingredients in the oven and letting them bake in their own juices. When it’s taken out of the oven the skins of the tomatoes are removed.

Prior to that we had been at a meeting in the rapprochement center with Hasan, one of the co-founders of the international solidarity movement, ISM, a Palestinian led action group dedicated to defeating the occupation through civil disobedience. These are the people who have included Rachel Corrie who was killed when a tank ran over her, and Tim Hurnbull who was killed by a sniper as he tried to escort children away from gunfire. Henry was also part of them in his visit to Gaza several years ago.

Hasan’s message was: you have to take a side in this; you have to be patient and recognize that nothing will change very much overnight; therefore content yourself with doing some good for the Palestinians on a day to day basis and be in it for the long haul; you have to be strategic and not expect that momentum alone is going to get you very far.

Prior to that I had spent the day stuffing envelopes at the Bethlehem Bible College. They had six thousand to get out and asked anybody who was not too busy to come and help. I figured that included me since, on Tuesday Hanan and Suzan left to spend the day in Jerusalem, and I studied Arabic in Hanan’s office. So, Monday I wrote a summary of a proposal for three retaining walls, Tuesday, studied Arabic, and Wednesday sat at a big table with other students and Bible College staff and helped get their newsletter in the mail. Today I’ll go back to the municipality center.

Oh yes, on Tuesday night we saw the documentary, Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land, an excellent presentation on the dismal performance of the U.S. media in covering the Occupation. That was the first time I’d seen Robert Fisk, whose work I’ve read frequently. Also speaking were Chomsky and several other regulars, or ‘usual suspects’ if you’re brain dead or willfully ignorant. I ate at the Al Sahoury restaurant as is my custom (for the second time). Shwarma is the meat shaved off a large, rotating, vertical mass. Then you put your pickles and onions, etc. on it and the man wraps it up in a large flat crepe-like piece of bread. It’s very good. So far I’ve had two bottles of Taybeh beer here, both of them last Thursday night at the big tent. Tonight we eat and drink together at the Reem al-Mawadi restaurant in Bethlehem. The mosquitoes are eating well around here too. We put a little strip of repellant in a device that plugs into a wall outlet and that does some good (they carry you off without it)  but not enough. I am itchy.

7/1/2005

Yesterday was a good work day in the sense that I had something to do. We proposed finishing the first floor of a structurally completed building for the Arab Orthodox Club. The Club appears to be a center of socializing and sporting events, as well as a means of supporting scouts and leadership training, women’s consciousness raising, helping the handicapped and other good deeds.

When I was finished and went up to the Holy Land Trust building to read email, Melissa approached me with the proposal that I come up there and write for them. Since the Municipality didn’t have enough to keep everybody busy, she wondered if I would write some journal entries for them. They aren’t getting any from the participants yet, so I could do that four days a week and go to an old folks’ home on the fifth. I said ok but I’d check in with my municipality people first and see if they wanted me one or two days a week. I’m going to say yes to whatever is asked, short of suicide bombing, since I’m here to help and support: they can determine the formula.

We went to the Reem Al Bawadi (Bedouin Deer) restaurant for our Thursday night socializing at seven o’clock. But this necessitated traipsing around the town for a couple of hours first. So a party of five of us went through the shopping area in the old part of Bethlehem and I got a CD that plays Syrian and Egyptian music. The restaurant man charged me too much, I thought, but it was a small matter and I wasn’t sure, so let it go without saying anything. Perhaps seeing my surprise, he lowered his price on giving me my change and said it was a special deal for me.

7/2/2005

Yesterday Leif gave me the Jerusalem Sabeel Document which states as simply and eloquently as possible the Principles for a Just Peace in Palestine-Israel. This is a religious group so I’m surprised to be so much in accord with them; however, their reasoning and conclusions are exactly the same as my own. Palestine must now be rebuilt on 22 % of the original territory, compensation must be paid, the right of return guaranteed, and several other things. See their pamphlet for more detail, or else go to www.sabeel.org. 

Today we went to Jericho and the Dead Sea. That was a blast of light and heat that will be enough to hold me for some time to come. This country is too bright and hot for of me.

The first village we went through was Abu Diiya which was said to be unique in Palestine because it was originally a village of Europeans condemned to death in the fourth or fifth centuries (BC, AD or sideways, I’m not sure) for one reason or other but then allowed to live for the construction of monasteries. And so they did, finally settling near their work in a village whose name means slavery. I don’t know what the abu part would mean (apart from father of) but that doesn’t seem to fit. I must remember to ask someone. The famous three kings were said to have stayed at one of these great monasteries on their way home from the first Christmas. Why would they stay at one if it were four or five hundred years from completion, and why would there be one in the first place if the time were four or five hundred years AD. This isn’t making sense. I would file a complaint if I didn’t think the confusion would turn out to be my fault.

We have to drive the only north-south road allowed to Palestinians in order to get out of Beit Sahour; it is winding and steep indeed. The first checkpoint is only 10 or 15 minutes out of town, called the “container checkpoint.”  Soldiers get on the bus with their machine guns and joke with each other in Russian. Only taxis and commercial vehicles are allowed on this road and the guide complains that he would be unable to drive his own car to Jericho.

This has inspired my first poem of the trip, possibly the only one.

Three Little Thugs

Three little thugs

with machine guns slung

on their shoulders 

swagger into our path,

almost stop eating nuts but don’t, 

beckon our driver off to the side­ 

of his own road to the Dead Sea, 

outside Jericho: we’re in Palestine.

The driver gets out, one thug gets on,

strolls up the aisle, machine gun low,

scrutinizes us roughly, gets off,

stands with the others about the driver–

a Palestinian surrounded again.

Spitting pistachio husks on the road,

they interrogate him (in silence to us),

one reaches out and plucks his I.D.,

a green card, from his shirt pocket,

studies it while the others ask questions,

passes it back and they let us go–

swimming, but only two hours.

The guide tells us they were joking in Russian.

Bedouin are living in tents and corrugated metal shelters outside Abu Diiya. We see quite a number of them along the way to Jericho. They’re herding their goats and sheep and are, according to the guide, rich men, paying no taxes or water bills, selling their milk and meat. Josh says they use the Jordanian Dinar because it is strong.

We passed Mal A Donmie, said to be the biggest settlement on the west bank.

We pass a well that is fenced in and guarded by Israelies. Palestinians are allowed to drill, but only to a depth of 100 meters, not enough for a good well. I had heard previously they couldn’t work on water projects at all, even the repair of their own wells. Whatever the case, it’s beyond the pale…

We visited the Greek Orthodox monastery of  St. George, probably a Turk or a Macedonian, we’re told. A very hot walk down to see the place and a hotter walk back. I had my picture taken with the little Bedouin boys whose father made me a glass of juice. I bought three nice bracelets from one little guy for 10 shekels.

7/4/2005

We saw A Stone’s Throw Away which was made in Dehisha refugee camp in Bethlehem in 2002.  It follows children involved with the intifada at that time, watching them run from the tanks and sneak out to throw their rocks. Rami and several of the others saw one of their own shot and killed. Today Rami, one of the kids in the movie, faces 20 years of prison time for crimes he committed when 13-14. Jonathon, the Israeli/Swede who showed the film says the policy of the army is to wait a couple of years till the child turns 16 and then charge him in military court for what he did in the year 2002. Evidently there is not even a specific date for the alleged crime. Thus, the defence has a harder time establishing the whereabouts of the accused to prove his innocence.

Of the movies on Palestine I’ve seen so far, I would rate them for personal and political impact as follows.

1. A Caged Bird’s Song

2. Checkpoint 

3. Private 

4. Until When 

5. Peace, Propaganda And The Promised Land 

6. A Stone’s Throw Away

7. In The Spider’s Web

We had a very delicious dinner tonight. Fry some onions in olive oil, put that with rice and RED lentils, add water and saffron and cumin and boil. Serve with a whole lemon cut in half by everyone’s dish. Don’t spare the lemon juice. Ktiir zakkii.

Earlier in the day I gave my article to josh. He and George made some changes which I worked in; then Melissa changed another couple of things. Henry had improved it at home before I ever took it up. This is the most criticism I’ve ever accepted smiling. It’s no way to live, but I can stand it for a month or two. 

This evening as several other evenings we’ve heard what might have been gunfire. Not knowing what it was, I’ve considered it firecrackers except for once when it corresponded in time exactly with Israeli raids in our vicinity. Tonight, however, it was quite close and Rowan says a neighbor called from the next street over to say the Israelis were shooting. I took a shower and when I came back Henry asked if I’d heard the shooting. He says the Israelis claim they’re making a roundup of Islamic Jihadists.

7/5/2005

We hiked around Marsaba monestary tonight after class. That got us home about 9 and Shimaa served a delicious dish of rice and noodles on which we put something called Jew’s mallow. Nimir had shown me the greens in his back yard earlier. They were about calf high. The so-called Jew’s mallow was more or less like a spinach soup. 

Marsaba was beautiful, built in a gorge with a couple of towers defending the road in to it. I left my bag with computer and flash jet, plus all my school books, with two of the women in our group, one of whom had a bad knee and could not do the hike. When we were on the other side of the gorge from them I could see they were surrounded by Arab boys. They said it was a little tense trying to keep all the bags covered, and they were very happy when a taxi driver they knew came up and shooed the kids away. Tanya said she had her leg through the strap of my computer bag, and meant to defend it. But it’s too bad to be worried.

Language classes are up and down in terms of usefulness. I need to do more work but we are pretty busy. I get a bit down by the end of a day. 

7/6/2005

In Bethlehem a horn-op is any situation in which one can blow his horn vigorously. Presumably this is celebratory and related to the town’s being the birthplace of Jesus Christ, who was related to David and perhaps also to Gabriel. A horn-op occurs whenever a driver sees someone or something in the road ahead of him; it is greatly preferred to steering or braking. Horn-ops also occur when descrying a friend or acquaintance, no matter how far away. Significant horn-ops occur when the traffic comes to a standstill. At this point, the only way to get it moving again is for everybody to seize the moment and have a hornucopia.

Two nights ago there was a riot only one or two streets away from us. I do not know the cause or the resolution of it but the police came and fired their guns in the air to break it up. We heard the pop-pop-pop and had a phone call to the house from a relative who said it was definitely shooting. I was taking a shower at the time and figured it was celebratory; i.e., firecrackers. But apparently it was the real thing: the law, exercising its limited influence. One only hopes that all bullets fired achieved orbit, or else came back to earth at some insignificant terminal velocity.

7/8/2005

The riot of a few days ago was described by Luke as having occurred between Muslims and Christians when a bunch of Christian guys happened to be walking past a Muslim wedding. Somehow an argument ensued and the Muslim fellows came out on the street and commenced pounding upon the sorely outnumbered Crusaders. However, among the latter was a cell phone, so the Onward Christian Soldiers called in reinforcements and soon another twenty-five guys came running in. When the affair was in full swing the police arrived and fired their weapons in the air to indicate their discontent.

I am staying home from a demonstration against house demolition in Belin today. The houses are being destroyed for construction of The Wall, so it’s a doubly ugly deed which is being opposed, and most of our group is going, including Henry. They have this protest every Friday and Sasha is here on a campaign to stop The Wall, so she had been on her own last Friday. She is in her early twenties and is a very well-spoken unpretentious and deliberate young woman who has a long career in peace activism. Back in San Francisco, she and some others got some throwaway automobiles, situated them conveniently and chained themselves inside to make a better protest against the war in Iraq. 

Sasha and Jonathan described last week’s protest in order to prepare participants for this one. I paraphrase their joint testimony. ‘Basically, we all walk down the hill to where the houses are being destroyed. The soldiers will be watching for us and they are quick to run out and set up a cordon. They stand facing us with their arms stretched out wide, their fingertips almost touching those next to them. You just push right through and keep going. They can’t stop you. But at this point the soldiers will react. When they start firing rubber bullets and sound grenades everybody runs back up the hill, except for a few Palestinian youths who remain behind throwing stones. Don’t stand near these boys or you may be hit by a rubber bullet. They are not allowed to shoot at Israelis or internationals. That was one good thing that came of an Israeli getting hit in the leg a few weeks ago. Any questions?’ Someone wondered if there would be tear gas. ‘Oh yeah but it’s nothing. You cry your tears and it’s over.’ But what about contact lenses? ‘Bring your contact lens solution.’ But I can’t see at all without mine; if I have to take them off someone will literally have to hold my hand.’ ‘No problem, someone will be glad to.’

Several people asked why I wasn’t going and I said I wasn’t brave enough. I didn’t feel like developing arguments for my choice since I didn’t want to dissuade anyone else, but among other things, I didn’t relish the thought of being arrested and put out of the country at this stage of the trip. There was also the matter of a day in the sun, plus the inconvenience of running uphill in teargas with rubber bullets bouncing around. My short answer was adequate.

By six o’clock Henry had still not come home and since he left around 8 in the morning, I was getting worried. I told him before he left that he couldn’t run as fast as those kids and to take that into account. He said he realized that; in fact, his feet were a mess, and a bone spur operation of some years ago hadn’t repaired them. However, he finally came home, looking a little droopy, as one does after a day of demonstrations, but basically fine. 

Later that night, one of the young guys reminisced on how he went running through the gas as fast as he could and eventually got to where he could look around at how people were doing behind him. He was surprised to see Henry walking along as if nothing were the matter, holding his onion to his face, evidently content with the natural order of things. As a life long demonstrator, Henry of course knew all about holding  a cut onion in a handkerchief to assist breathing in clouds of tear gas (something, incidentally, that I had never heard of). Henry thought the brand they were using must have been a weak version, but others said, no, it was a super strong military deluxe knock-you-on-your-ass version. It may have been that Henry’s lungs are somewhat hardened to it.

Anyway, though all seemed conducive to smiles chuckles the first evening, I heard Henry talking to his wife about it, a few days later on the phone. One boy had a rubber bullet lodge in his stomach, and another boy had taken one in the temple and was still in the hospital, in critical condition. He had been close to internationals at the time and was not throwing stones when he was shot. Jonatan said he was quite close to him and took off his tee-shirt to put on the boy’s head where it was bleeding. He said the boy was conscious at the time but later lost consciousness on account of bleeding in his brain.

I recognize that not everyone has to be on the front lines in the eternal struggle against viciousness: it may even be useful for some of us to reflect and report on it at a safe distance. That being said I knew I was going to feel somewhat bad about not taking part in the protest when, that same evening, we had dinner and entertainment at an outdoor restaurant called the Double Four. 

It was balmy and beautiful, the music was good, and the food and beer and bubbly pipes. Pretty girls got up and shook their booties and boobs to the rhythm. All was as it should have been for a rollicking good time, but I took the quieter and soberer route. I was resolved not to be totally bummed and depressed on account of missing the demonstration, and I succeeded, but I suppose that tempered my enjoyment somewhat. In any case, I was somewhat subdued, enjoying the evening, but not ecstatically, as I might have at other times in my life. I can feel my age difference with the bulk of the participants, and to act as I might have years ago would perhaps have been unbecoming for a man of sixty-one years. I had three bottles of beer and one bubbly pipe. As little as I’m drinking around here, that gave me a hangover next morning. 

A few days ago we had an interesting discussion of word choice with a young woman who was writing the English version of Palestine News Network, PNN. She was concerned, not only for an exact use of language, but also for ways into people’s minds something that equaled or surpassed the effects of corporate media buzz words such as: ‘terrorist, defense, retaliation, soldiers vs. gunmen, security needs, security wall’ and so on. 

As an exercise she set us the task of naming the eight-meter-high, concrete barrier that runs over a good deal of Palestinian land so as to take it in for Israel and punish the people on the wrong side of it, apparently with a view to making them leave. I said, ‘The Apartheid Wall,’ but her choice was simply ‘The Wall.’ 

It took me only a moment’s reflection to see that her choice was vastly superior. In the first place, it will not drive away readers who might disdain to hear an advocate for the Palestinian side. In the second place, ‘The Wall’ evokes associations with the Berlin Wall and all other walls of hatred, fear and imprisonment that one would prefer not encounter. If the world has room in its consciousness for one principal, despicable wall at a time, then this one in Palestine is surely the one we should all think about. And ‘The Wall’ is the exact name for it. Through hundreds or thousands of photographs, essays and discussions, The Wall will become known to everyone for what it is. Adding the word ‘Apartheid’ will be quite superfluous.

As a monument to error, The Wall is perhaps a good thing, and indeed, could hardly be improved upon. Here we have, snaking across the country in tall concrete slabs that link together like the tombstones of cheap giants, a really preposterous eyesore. It represents land theft, military occupation, the disruption of another people’s transportation and health systems, harassment and collective punishment for their own sakes and an effort to drive the victims away. The Wall not only represents apartheid and attempted ethnic cleansing, it screams these concepts with a starkness that could not be plainer.

The Wall is, quite simply, a monumental error, something the whole world can look down on and say, ‘Wow! You did that? Is it Art? Is it self-parody? What the hell is it?”

There’s a great photograph of a whole bunch of young fellows climbing over it, so we know it’s not security. 

I think The Wall is what Jewish people, in their unconscious, collective wisdom, have done to bring to a head and correct the stereotype of their character. And I think this will be accomplished by two more or less opposing forces that are at work. One is the unlimited ugliness of rampant ethnic nationalism, an impetus that continues until it insists on its own destruction. The other is the stripe of decency that runs in all of us. I think there are so many Jews who are so much greater than the farcical villainy represented here, that we will see an end to it, in large part through their efforts. In place of that wall we will see a just peace, the only kind of peace there is.

7/10/2005

Yesterday’s trip was to Jenin. We wiggled our way north over the sickeningly twisted, hilly roads south east of Jerusalem to pass a second or third checkpoint and get onto a decent (Israeli and foreigners only) highway toward Nablus. 

I don’t regret this difficult early part of our trips east and north because they show us what the Palestinians have to go through on a daily basis. Additionally, we rehear the stories of points of interest, a couple of which I will herewith summarize for the future would-be traveler or otherwise idle reader. Beit Sahour, where I live, is the location of Shepherd’s Fields. Not only did the shepherds get news of the birth of Jesus here, but before that, Ruth worked so sexily in the corn fields that Boaz positively had to have her, thus creating or continuing the direct line to King David and Christ. That’s what I’ve heard or read or misremembered.

In the area of Nablus we made a diversion so as to miss its checkpoint, which is supposedly a real killer. The guide and the driver seemed to take some joy in showing us what an incredible pain in the ass these checkpoints are, but even they had limits to what they would willingly put on display while having to take part in the inconvenience. 

We passed one checkpoint where cars going in the opposite direction were backed up for about a mile and kids were selling drinks to the traveling public. Verily, there is no point to these stoppages except to harass the Palestinian public, because, as the Palestinians say, the terrorists don’t go through checkpoints.

The guide decided to give us a bathroom break at Sabastia, an old Roman (?) ruin. The tour bus climbed up a steep, broken little side road only to come upon a great pile of dirt preventing further ascent. The Israelis do this all over the country ‘for security reasons’ or ‘to prevent terrorism,’ if you’re a lobotomized American journalist. To such people, the wisdom and morality of this tactic are beyond question, for any fool can see that a pile of dirt on a little back road would most likely cause a terrorist to return home and dismantle his bomb. 

So, we got out and peed on the thistles. We masculine sorts did not get our bare bums anywhere near these thorny threats, and congratulated ourselves once again on being boys; at least, I did.

The farther north one goes the greener it gets, and we were told that Jenin is a city of agriculture but that it now wants customers because people cannot get in to buy things. 

That being said, there was no checkpoint on the day we were there, and when I expressed surprise and asked about it, our Jenin host said they used flying checkpoints here: sometimes they’re present, sometimes not. Jenin is a Muslim town of 40- 45,000 with about 10 Christian families. Other Christians live in outlying towns. Sixty-five percent of the people were said to live below the poverty line. There was one UN health facility to deal with all emergencies and daily necessities.

In Jenin we walked through the refugee camp and saw the uniform new construction which had replaced the ruin created by Israel in April 2002. At that time, according to our host, a few dozen freedom fighters were able to hold off the Israeli army, including attack helicopters and tanks, because of the closeness of the housing. At last, however, giant bulldozers were brought in and the whole area was leveled, killing 18 freedom fighters and 40 civilians. Four thousand people, ranging in age from twelve to seventy-five, were detained. Of these 182 remain in prison today. 482 houses were completely destroyed and another 700 damaged. 

The streets have been widened and the new construction looks quite substantial, nothing like what one would associate with a refugee camp. This work was paid for by the Gulf States, especially the United Arab Emirates. Martyrs’ posters are everywhere, including one big one, mounted on a metal frame across the main road, of a cousin of our Jenin host. Later we visited the martyrs’ cemetery where a Palestinian flag flew and a couple of gravediggers were at work in the mid-day heat. I thought this must have meant that there had been recent casualties but when I asked, the guide said no, the cemetery had now been given over to public use.

The refugee camp is contiguous with but politically distinct from the city of Jenin, which is administered by the Palestinian Authority. Policemen only rarely venture into the camp, which continues to be run by freedom fighters. Asked whether the camps were run by lawless gangs, as described in the American press, our host said they sometimes had to punish people and if that was considered lawlessness he welcomed the description.

After walking through the camp in a very warm sun we went to a new civic center, the top floor of which had just been built by the Palestinian Authority. This was where we sat down, in a big partially finished room with wires hanging in wait of fixtures and conference chairs still covered in cellophane. A fellow turned on the air conditioning and we were given a packaged cold drink. Always one has the feeling of being welcomed here, that hospitality is routine but a matter of the deepest obligation.

There was a new guy on the tour this time (Jewish, I think) and he held forth on the history of nonviolence in political causes. He discussed unfamiliar examples in the Philippines and Pakistan, as well as the better-known cases. He had enough information that no one was likely to contradict him on any point of fact, and he did a good job of rationalizing the process, saying it depended only on reaching the heart of the sternest oppressor, presuming only a remnant of human kindness in anyone. As to whether Gandhi could have defeated the Germans or Japanese by the same tactics, he said such matters were entirely speculation.

He thought the whites might have been important in the civil rights movement in the U.S. because the bigots they were trying to convert were able to see that they, the whites, were human beings, whereas they couldn’t see this of their colored cousins. By extension, he thought the solution to this problem in Palestine might well require the deaths of a few hundred nonviolent Jews, since only Jewish sacrifice was likely to crack the tough nut which is a Zionist’s head. (Some of this construction is my own.)

Our guide was an angry man and we were his captive audience. As for the notion that suicide bombers believed they were headed for seventy-two virgins in the sky, he dismissed this as pure, western propaganda. To illustrate, he told what he said was a true story about an old man in Beit Sahour. The man was ninety-six years old and constantly complaining that he had not yet been called home to his maker. One day he wanted a drink of water and a six-year-old boy got it for him; after he had drunk the child said ‘Grandfather, I poisoned you so you could die,’ and the old man swung at him with his cane, thereby proving the preciousness of life to one and all. The morale of the story, in case you’re not getting it, was that if this old man wanted to live, so must young people who blow themselves to bits.

Further to the possibility that they expected 72 virgins lying in wait for them in the afterlife, he asked what we thought of female bombers: were they looking for 72 husbands in the sky? If so, they were in for a rough time.

Among the most terrible of thefts by Israel is the Palestinian water. (You may wonder what else there is to steal, besides land and water; however, there are a few things on the surface. Henry said that when he was in Gaza he watched giant cranes rip olive trees from the earth and set them onto a tractor-trailers which then took them to Jerusalem for sale. He smiled ruefully as if to say: How typically Israeli.) But getting back to water: Israel alone is allowed to drill into west bank aquifers, guard the wells with troops and barriers, and use the water as it likes. 

It needs emphasis that this water is being taken from the west bank. Most of what is pumped out is for settlers’ use, but some is sold back to the Palestinians. Our guide said a cubic meter of water costs a settler 0.5 NIS, whereas the same volume costs a Palestinian 4.5 NIS. The settler can afford it for his swimming pool but the Palestinian cannot afford it for agriculture.

One of the most impressive people I’ve met on this trip is Jonatan, who has both Swedish and Israeli citizenship. He is on vacation here from his job as a nurse in a children’s hospital in Sweden. He seems connected with everyone, constantly on the go, facilitating and participating in almost everything of any interest in the west bank. He arranges for most of the films to be shown; he is the contact for Israeli peace groups; he got us the AIC documents on Hebron and Jerusalem, plus he carries other scholarly pamphlets with data on children’s health, etc.; he belongs to the group, Anarchists Against The Wall, and made a pre-dawn trip to wrap barbed wire around the cage containing 3 Israelis, 3 Palestinians and a goat in the path of destruction; and he is the prime mover to obtain first rate legal defense for Rami, one of the children in the documentary, A Stone’s Throw Away. 

Rami is 16 and facing up to 20 years in prison for crimes he committed when 13-14. As one of the ‘stars’ of the documentary, ‘A Stone’s Throw Away,’ he can be seen for what he is, a child. Whether he succeeded in making explosives at this age is irrelevant to the UN CRC.

Jonatan points out that Israel has ratified all International Human Rights agreements, including the Convention on The Rights of the Child (CRC), yet it applies laws by ethnicity. Obviously, this is not in the spirit or the letter of the convention, but Israel insists on the necessity of such practices so long as its soldiers remain in Palestinian territory. 

Apart from killing and injuring children, destroying their housing and their parents’ economy, Israel subjects children to military trials. Of course they are taken at the will of the armed forces during acute conflict, but then they may be released and seized again later for the purpose of imposing long sentences, after they have reached the age of 16. (This is still two years too young to be considered adult by CRC but is apparently close enough in Israel’s opinion, given the circumstances.) In any event, Israel then charges these youths with things they are accused of doing some time earlier.

Lest it be thought these remarks represent gratuitous calumny and misunderstanding of the state of Israel, I have excerpted a page from Defense for Children International, Palestinian section.

Since the beginning of the Palestinian uprising against occupation, or Intifada, on 29 September 2000, Palestinian children have suffered an unprecedented series of human rights violations as a result of Israeli military and settler activity in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Hundreds of children have been killed, thousands injured and arrested, and hundreds of thousands of others exposed to repeated violence, denied an adequate standard of living, and denied the right to education and adequate health care. 

These violations are not the result of new measures that Israel has implemented in response to the Intifada. Rather, they are the result of Israel’s intensification of pre-existing policies implemented in the OPT that are aimed towards controlling Palestinian land and the movement of persons and goods in these areas. 

Israeli restrictions on Palestinian freedom of movement since September 2000, along with Israeli military actions in the OPT, has caused a dramatic downturn of the Palestinian economy and a significant decline in the Palestinian standard of living. An estimated 60 – 70% of the Palestinian workforce is unemployed and over half the population is reliant upon direct food aid. Pre-existing conditions have been exacerbated in many parts of the West Bank since 2002 due to Israel’s ongoing construction of the West Bank Segregation Wall. 

Constituting over half the population, and as the most vulnerable and dependent sector of society, Palestinian children are disproportionately affected by Israeli policies. Inability to access medical care, poverty levels that affect nutritional intake and interruptions in some immunization programs have all lead to an overall decrease in the status of children’s health and an increase in malnutrition and anaemia rates. Spiraling poverty, curfews and closures, the devastation of basic infrastructure, the ever-present threat of violence and the deliberate destruction of homes and schools have provoked a serious decline in the quality of education and the loss of school days. 

In 1991, Israel became a State Party to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). In 2002, upon its initial review of Israel’s compliance with the CRC, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child underlined the applicability of the Convention in the OPT and Israel’s responsibility to implement its provisions therein. Likewise, in its 9 July 2004 Advisory Opinion concerning the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the International Court of Justice affirmed the CRC’s applicability to Palestinian areas under Israeli occupation. 

In spite of Israel’s clear and well defined legal obligation to respect and ensure Palestinian children’s rights, Israel continues to deny the applicability of human rights treaties to the OPT while its military forces simultaneously perpetrate systematic violations of Palestinian human rights as they enforce policies sanctioned by the government of Israel. 

At lunch we were told we had only a few minutes and had to eat chicken or salad because of our time commitments. I wasn’t hungry so I stayed on the bus to drink water, eat nuts and go over my notes and photos. Well, they didn’t come back, and after an eternity during which I watched some builders work from the roof to do a very difficult job of putting a hideous plastic awning over a beautiful stone archway on the top story of a new building, they finally came out looking like they had talked to Jesus Christ.

Lo and behold, they had dined with Zacharya Zubeidi, the number one man in the Al Aqsa martyrs’ brigade! A year ago he was the number one man on Israel’s hit list but now he was more of a political figure, able to walk around in broad daylight, albeit smartly and with a bodyguard who totes a machine gun. Z.Z. himself carries a piece. We saw the site of his house in the refugee camp: it had been rebuilt and destroyed three times.

Well darn it! I was missing out on everything this weekend. I didn’t go to the demonstration; that was bad enough, and now I didn’t have dinner with Zacharya Zubeidi! What the hell was I here for? The only positive spin I could put on it was to imagine that the Israelis asking me if I met him. They would think I had, of course, because this luncheon engagement is the kind of secret our busload of young people is going to find hard to keep, but I would be able to say no, never laid eyes on him.

7/12/2005

Scattered thoughts: this place makes me nervous. The whole world makes me nervous. The UN is trying to expand the number of permanent members. Various options are touted including one that calls for a dozen or so countries. I think that would be the final icing on the cake of chaos. The USA would pay even less attention to world opinion than usual.

But speaking of chaos, and thinking locally, Ha’aratz had an article on the mayor of Jerusalem. He’s an ultra-orthodox Jew who is said to be trying to serve the three major religions that claim his city as a holy place. He may be serving them all but to Christians and Muslims this is in the manner of a stud. He’s knocking down houses, building the wall and keeping the percentage of Jews at a firm 66. In one place the wall runs right down the middle of a street. In Abu Dis it cuts the town in half. In some places The Wall takes in the land without its inhabitants.

The mayor opposed a recent gay rights demonstration, as did leaders of all three religions, but the demonstration went ahead anyway. It ended when a Jew sharing some of the mayor’s convictions stabbed three participants. Of the 9,000 secular Jews remaining in Jerusalem, many are said to be leaving for Tel Aviv. This is probably a good thing for them but too bad for the city, as it loses a moderating influence. 

The trend is reminiscent of Christians leaving Bethlehem. They do so because they can: because they have relatives and contacts that permit their escape. For them it’s a good thing, but for the city, the percentages of population shift further toward a Muslim majority. In Bethlehem this may suit the Israelis, since if the town were mainly Muslim they would be able to pound on it with an even greater degree of impunity, but it’s too bad for the world. 

Many would say the Israelis already do whatever they want, but I don’t believe they do. I think they do what they can within the limits of various constraints imposed by world, local, and U.S. opinion. I suspect they would like to drive the Palestinians like cattle across the Jordan River. To date, however, Israel has not seen the opportunity for such a move. Maybe I’m just being silly but the insanity around here is palpable.

7/13/2005

Yesterday after class we went on foot to the Aida refugee camp. It was less than a kilometer from the serenity of Bethlehem Bible College and a stark reminder of the huge divisions and short distances in this country generally. We walked in with two local boys guiding us the first part of the way along reasonably pleasant streets to the camp proper. There we met a man in his thirties or forties who spoke good English and served as our guide the rest of the time.

He tried to take us along a road beside The Wall to a point where they were working on finishing it. A soldier stood behind a corner, perhaps seventy-five feet in the direction we wanted to go, and aimed his rifle at us. We walked toward him and he came out waving his hand for us to go back. The guide and Jonatan argued with him for a bit and then we gave up and turned away from The Wall, into the refugee camp. The buildings were several stories high and close to one another with narrow, winding streets between. 

We climbed up through these hillside dwellings to where we ran into a gang of little boys, mostly in their early teens; a few were younger and one or two might have been as old as sixteen. Their leader seemed one of these older boys and he was animated and bellicose. Words were exchanged between him and our guide, who was supported by the two boys that had picked us up at the bible college, and eventually we started toward The Wall again, now with the crowd of boys trailing behind. 

At this time we were approximately at the level where work on the wall was going on and we walked toward it, down a street where spent teargas canisters or sound grenades lay every fifteen or twenty feet. Our street was at right angles to The Wall and since we had come to it exactly where the gap remained, we could see through to the other side where the soldiers and crane were. The crane would install the last two or three slabs. The wall had been built from two directions and only lacked about two or three meters of work for completion. 

On what was to become the Israeli side was a big open field with a few olive trees, a part of Bethlehem that the 4500 inhabitants of Aida considered their park. They were within a few minutes of seeing the last of it. (According to Raffat the people of Aida had permission from the Armenian Patriarchy to harvest the olives.)

The soldiers approached the gap from their side and we approached from the camp. Just as the soldiers were coming through The Wall there came a shower of stones and pieces of concrete flying over our heads. It was an opportunity the boys could simply not let pass. The soldiers had The Wall to use as protection and they did, but the boys were well practiced and lobbed over it in hope of a lucky strike. The soldiers came back and shot tear gas, but by then most of the PSE participants had turned right and gone down the street parallel to the wall, leaving the boys face to face with the soldiers again. 

We headed away from the face off and only a little tear gas drifted onto us. The boys and soldiers stayed at their jobs and the crane came along and put the last of the wall in place. 

We went down to a meeting center for discussions with our guide. Aida is one of three refugee camps in Bethlehem and holds 4500 inhabitants. They have open access to the city of Bethlehem but there is little work there and unemployment in the camp is at 80 %. The man from Aida said that while they do not have incidents or suffer incursions every day, they certainly have them every month. This month more than a hundred people had been jailed. Thirty-two camp members had been killed in recent years. 

The children, as we could see for ourselves, were very hard and difficult to deal with. He observed that, if they are not afraid of soldiers, they will not be afraid of their teachers or parents or anyone else. Discipline in the camp is a problem.

Also, because soldiers enter the camp so often at night to arrest people, a lot of the children are traumatized and bed-wetting is a big problem. This would not be worthy of the six o’clock news, but for the families affected, would be a considerable daily struggle.

Asked how people get enough to eat, with 80 % unemployment, he said families helped one another. If one man finds work he shares with others.

I asked about water and he said the water is turned on for them one or two days a  week. They fill their tanks and try to make it last till next week. Yesterday the electricity was cut because the camp had not been able to pay. Today it was back on. 

Here are a couple of things from the web that give the feeling of distress during more acute crises. 

Eyewitness Report from Aida Refugee Camp

AbdelFattah Abu-Srour, PhD
Director of Al-Rowwad Cultural and Theatre Training Center

April 26, 2002

Concerning the situation here in Bethlehem, talks arrived to a dead end concerning the nativity and the situation in Bethlehem. A lot of games are played, and nothing changes on the ground. Israelis talk about a military operation to enter the church, and still about people as hostages inside.

Yesterday Israelis have agreed to release 9 young people, in coordination with Palestinians to be sent home, but after interrogation they released them, and on their way back home, Israelis re-arrested them. They were finally released again this afternoon. So it is really a situation that is not leading any where, pacifically at least, till now.

Still some areas of Aida camp have no electricity, no water, and no telephone.

We are in a real lack of a lot of medications now, and milk for children.

Al-Rowwad center remains open as an emergency clinic receiving people from Aida, part from Beit Jala and the neighboring areas.

But the main thing is this continuous pressure and humiliation that, with the silence of the world's governments generally, and the support of US government specifically, does not come to an end.

The main response came from Jenin camp, this camp which is living catastrophic conditions have rejected all the help that came from USAID saying that US bring us help, while giving Israel weapons, bombs and Apache helicopters and F16s to kill us too... We don't want their help, and the help was returned back....

What is really lacking is not food or money or anything that turns this suffering and resisting people into beggars....

A lot of organizations, a lot of people choose this moment to ask for donations.  Misery is a chance to ask those who are emotionally touch, so they donate.

What happens tomorrow, and the day after?

Today we do not need money. Because we can't get out of our houses, because we have an occupation waiting at every corner of the streets, at every entrance or exit of each quarter or camp or village or city.

We don't need food that come in packages from everywhere in the world,  these packages which are a sign of humiliation more that a sign of solidarity for our people (with all my respect to the good intentions of people);  which increase the numbers of unemployed among the Palestinians and make more food factories and food industries as will as drug industries close their doors because of impossibility to have access to the port or not allowed to import primary materials because of this closure.

Schools are still closed, even those areas which are considered as open, a lot of Israeli checkpoints which have for main function to humiliate the people, search them physically, and making normal things a hell and transforming simple things into nightmares.

When all this injustice and crimes are over, you will find the ways to better help our people "return to life" more powerfully and to re-establish the society and the infrastructure, which the israeli occupation with all its force tries to destroy...

The thing that is lacking is breaking the silence, and make these sleeping governments aware that their people are angry because of their complicity with Israeli war crimes, a people is massacred every day, and injustice is still continuing, and everybody stay, probably praying that a miracle could be achieved.... miracles are not done in a WORLD WITH NO FAITH, in a world that have lost it's humanity and dignity, in a world that has to beg for his rights and the rights of the others, in a world that has lost the ability to think, the capacity to learn and to understand, the power to change things, and the wisdom to make this change...

Peace be upon you all, hopefully, while you still alive.

Message From Aida Refugee Camp

February 2, 2004

Bethlehem, Palestine

Message #1

Since 2 days the Israeli army continues to enter Aida camp. Aida camp is a permitted land to all the barbarism of savages in uniform who come, shoot and terrify the people in the camp. They are now, since one hour, 11:10 in the camp, occupied the roofs of some of the high houses in the camp. The jeeps are controlling the streets, but still there are some children throwing stones to say: get out of here. The camp is inundated with sound bombs and tear gas and bullets. Till now we do not now what is the purpose of this visit: to arrest a presumed terrorist? To demolish another house? or To just be in our company? 

The ambulance just arrived. I can't get out of the house, a sniper is just on the roof facing our house.

Message #2

Few minutes ago, the Israeli "heroic" soldiers left the camp after planting explosives and imploding the House of Mohammad Abu-Odah in Aida Camp. The invasion of the camp lasted about five hours, and the camp was a battle field but I think that one side was shooting bullets, tear gas, sound bombs and whatever they had. I could not distinguish different sound of arms. The children of the camp where shooting stones from time to time. According to the Israeli army, four soldiers were injured and Mohammad Abu Odah was killed after an exchange of fire. 

Two soldiers were posted in front of my parents house, and one soldier pushed our outside door with his foot. One side of the door opened, and Kanan, my eldest son who is 4 years old ran into the house afraid. I went out and said to the soldier: Easy, You can just knock and I will open. No need to kick the door with your boots. I opened the door, and then I brought my son and we sat in the house facing the two soldiers. Kanan started to calm down, saying when they are going to leave, and he said the soldiers is an animal, who is a dog, he shouldn't kick the door. If he listens to his mother and to his wife he wouldn't do that. This is kanan, a four years old who said this word by word.

Before the demolish the house, they evacuated the houses of the neighbourhood and the family. Most of them came to our house and to the center.

After they left, all the people went to the destroyed house. The family was in hysteric situation. The mother, the wife who is pregnant, the brother who is diabetic, were transported to the hospital. 

Again, the army left the camp, leaving destruction, clouds of smoke of the destroyed house, tears and misery. Two boys and two girls are now orphans, and a new born will come in few months. He was almost killed after the army hit the mother, but he will never see his father, except may be in a poster glorifying him as a martyr fighting for the freedom of his people.

And life continues... in silence or in a big fuss... it continues

After the visit to the camp we went down to the Beit Sahour Medical Clinic for a showing of A Caged Bird’s Song. This is the story of Birzeit University’s struggle to continue with higher education under the conditions of military occupation.

I would put it at the top of my list of movies seen so far. It may or may not be better than Checkpoint, but it has the virtue of being shorter and most, if not all the impact of that latter. It has the narrow focus of higher education but succeeds in showing much of the rest of the misery.

The one we saw Monday, In The Spider’s Web, was considered by Bex, the woman at AIC, to be the at the top of her list. However, for me it was less effective. Much of it is verbal testimony which might or might not be true, and it tells only a couple of very disturbing stories. I would put this one at the bottom of my list so far.

7/13/2005

There is a lot of good in this world and I just saw some of it: the SOS Village in Bethlehem. HLT was sending a couple of women to evaluate its volunteer participation in the SOS program, so I asked if I could go along. Then I read the SOS web site so as to be more knowledgeable when we arrived.

The basic concept is to provide care for four to ten orphans in a house run by a single woman. They live in a village of similar houses that make up a small, planned community, designed using local architecture. SOS was started by an Austrian by the name of Hermann Gmeiner in 1949 and has been growing ever since. SOS villages are now all over the world, with another six scheduled to open in 2006.

Gmeiner thought that every child should have four pillars underpinning his development: a mother, a house, brothers and sisters and a village. Other support included in a typical village now is a school, a kindergarten, training centers, a social center, plus medical and psychological support, much of which is also available to the public. The Bethlehem village also includes a workshop in case anything breaks (as anything might in the presence of 100 children).

A single woman makes a long-term commitment to live with and care for up to ten children. One woman at the Bethlehem village had been there 17 years; others apparently have lasted only a couple of years. But before becoming a mother, a woman is first given intensive training and evaluation as an ‘aunt;’ that is, she helps in a house already run by an established mother. If an aunt is accepted to become a mother she is given a house of her own, with her own room and a budget for the children’s care. 

Natural brothers and sisters are never separated, and boys and girls live together with their SOS mother until they reach the age of 14, when they transfer to a same-sex high school for further schooling. Some go on to university.

During our visit I met a young man who had just graduated from Bir Zeit University and was now a civil engineer. He showed me his photographs of the graduation ceremony and said that another two of this year’s graduates had also come from the Bethlehem SOS Village: one took a degree in history and the other in media. 

The Village itself was almost unbelievably nice. When we walked in the main street there was a little boy sitting by himself on a plastic car, eating a sort of subway sandwich that could have nourished a workman for the afternoon. The road was lined with mature gardens full of flowering trees, evergreens etc. The houses were as pleasant a form of shelter as I’ve seen anywhere and the house we went into was clean, quiet and orderly. It had a big front porch, medium-sized living room with TV, perfectly adequate bed rooms, one for boys and one for girls, reasonably spaced beds, an automatic washing machine, modern kitchen and so on. It was so beautiful there might have been children willing to trade their parents for admission. 

However, the Bethlehem SOS Village is full, with 108 children in the 12 houses. They are all Muslim except two who are living in what is normally intended as an Aunt’s house. As for putting Christians and Muslims together, the receptionist said it would be too difficult.

I asked if there were any men in the children’s lives and she said the director of the village was considered the village father. Additionally there was an activity supervisor, also a man. The village has access to the services of a psychologist and a social worker to help with severely disturbed children. 

In the house we visited, the children were milling around, wanting to shake hands and have their pictures taken; they were all apparently healthy and contented. No doubt there are rougher moments than the few we saw, but at the time of our visit, all was calm, all was bright.

7/17/2005

Yesterday we joined a convoy led by the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) to deliver water to the Bedouin of the Negev. Their bus picked us up at the Bethlehem checkpoint and we collected another two groups of internationals in Jerusalem before joining about fifty automobiles to drive down the main north-south highway of Israel. 

To quote from the flyer ICAHD handed out on the bus: 

‘Bedouin citizens of the State of Israel continue to suffer under severe shortages of water, while their Jewish neighbors, sometimes residing in tiny communities, enjoy plentiful water supplies for both drinking and agriculture.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Bedouins have been subject to a continual process of land confiscation and dispossession. In order to force the Bedouins to relocate to townships, where the Government hopes to “concentrate” all of them, Bedouin citizens are denied basic services in all living necessities—housing, infrastructure, health, education, electricity and water.

 Recently, the Government has begun to implement a plan to resettle villagers in new townships. Those who oppose the plan are being forced into accepting it by a means of house demolitions, crop destruction and the prevention of vital services.

We demand of the Israeli Government:

• To provide without delay running water to the Bedouin citizens in the rural communities of the Negev.

• To grant recognition to the Bedouin villages, to connect them to infrastructure and provide their residents the full range of services.

• To respect the Bedouin way of life and endow them with full civil rights.

Background:

Following the 1948 war the majority of the Negev Bedouins were uprooted and expelled. The small remaining population was driven into a reduced area of 1,500 sq. km. called the Sayyag district.

Today the Bedouin population of the Negev numbers approximately 140,000 people. About 50 % of them live in Rahat and six other poverty stricken townships. The rest reside in tens of villages that are not recognized by the Government.

As a consequence, they are not provided with indispensable services that all other citizens receive, such as infrastructure, housing, education, electricity, water and health services. To carry out this policy, efforts are made to uproot the village residents from their life supporting centers and to “concentrate” them in townships, thereby denying them the right to choose freely their own way of life. Other oppressive initiatives on the part of the Government include massive home demolitions, land confiscation and destruction of crops.

Thus, in the midst of the hot summer, tens of thousands of Negev citizens are not connected to a water network. The resulting water shortage endangers their health. Bedouin villagers are compelled to travel long distances in order to obtain water for their families, storing the water in plastic or metal containers that may cause water contamination and poisoning of both humans and livestock.’

The microphone on our tour bus was in the hands of a middle-aged British Jewess with a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the country. (I don’t actually know that she was Jewish but this was my impression based on her appearance and that she seemed fluent in Hebrew and knew the names of villages and settlements.) A few miles out of Jerusalem she pointed out the town of Meveserat which she said was the first Israeli community to join a couple of neighboring Palestinian towns to protest the route of The Wall. 

As I was saying, the Israeli town of Meveserat, together with a couple of neighboring Palestinian towns, is protesting the course of The Wall. They think it’s unneighborly.

More of what the British woman tells us (I paraphrase): ‘We are now in the northern Negev. After the war of 1948 the Bedouin were rounded up and put in camps. The land we see was taken over by kibbutzim and turned mainly to agriculture. It still serves agriculture today and the Bedouin are not allowed in, except briefly to harvest. They have by and large become West Bank citizens. Rahat is the largest recognized Bedouin township but it has no proper infrastructure.’ 

We continue south and she calls our attention to a manicured Israeli village not far from a Bedouin one. The Israeli village is bursting with greenery. Just over the pine-clad South Hebron Hills to our left is the West Bank. Sayyag is the triangle of land onto which most of the remaining Bedouin have been pushed (there are some, however, in Rafa, in the Gaza strip). Of the 145,000 Bedouin remaining in the Negev, about half are in forty-five unrecognized villages. Of these forty-five, Israel is considering recognizing seven. In Said, the village we are passing on the right, Israel demolished houses as recently as a month and a half ago.

The village we are going to visit has no water in summer, except what is transported, 2-3 cubic meters at a time. Sewage from Hebron and the Hebron Settlements pollutes the ground water. Such water as the Bedouin transport in these small tractor-pulled containers is often infected. Even the Israeli Supreme Court has ordered The State to link these people to water, but The State has yet to do it. There are other problems as well: children have to spend an hour each way on busses to get to school. There is no garbage collection. This region of the Negev has the biggest dump in Israel but the Bedouin are forbidden to use it.

Snatches of conversation around me on the bus: ‘I’m an Israeli going to school in the US... yeah, it’s been a crazy couple of weeks...two Palestinians killed, one instantly, the other prevented from getting to hospital…he was supposed to walk right through the bricks but the bricks are still standing…well, you work all morning putting something in good English and you wonder, what’s the point…maybe in the long term…’

People on the bus are mostly from The USA but there are some from China, Korea, Australia, The UK and Canada. 

ICAHD is going to rebuild a house next week and we are invited to take part.

We finally reach the village of Tel Arad (this is the name on our sheet of paper, but I see on the web there is also an Israeli site of the same name which has 1000 residents), and our big shiny tanker begins to unload into little rusty ones pulled by farm tractors. There is a stampede of photographers and one woman puts herself in the way of big wheels. She is generously not run over nor scolded; however, she is asked to be more careful. The unloading proceeds for about two hours, during which time there are many, many speeches in the welcoming tent, both in Arabic and Hebrew. 

Instead of listening ignorantly, I go and take pictures of the camels and the village until I am ready finally ready to endure any number of Arabic or Hebrew speeches for the sake of getting out of the sun. After a while I start rethinking how hot it is out there. They’ve already been speechifying for an hour and a half but show no signs of fatigue. Many worthy men have not spoken yet, and many have much to say. The microphone is passed with reluctance and received with relish.

I venture back into the blast and return to the arse end of the tanker where water still runs, some of it being spilled to create a considerable mud pie. It’s on the low side, which is the shady side, so I wade through to get near the connecting hose. The connection of the big hose to the rear valve leaks at a rate such as one would see with a kitchen faucet half open.  

I told a little boy we needed something here and patted the downfall. He looked away so I went up to the tent and got two plastic jugs and filled them. Another fellow from our group brought more jugs. However the bus was then leaving so we took my modest harvest back to the big tent and let the tanker water continue running onto the ground. Maybe it’s a sign of its not being needed very badly after receipt of the tanker-load, but we could have watered a couple of camels.

The only bit of baloney our British guide fed us (which is to say, the only bit that I could detect with my ever-alert baloney sensors) was that our leadership, in consultation with the driver, was debating which road to take home. There was a shorter route through the West Bank which would only take us about 40 minutes; however, it was ‘less secure.’ Alternatively, we could go back the way we came, which would take about two hours. 

The West Bank road she referred to happened to be the one we had gone to Hebron on a couple of weeks ago. It is a big modern paved highway for Israelis and tourists only, as all big modern highways are in these parts; and hardly ever do guerrillas come out of the hills to ambush tour busses: in my experience, never. Anyway, we screwed up our courage and took a chance on going home the short way. As expected, we made it.

Some of this is too goofy. I don’t know if I can sustain a sensible tact for any length of time. Perhaps I should confine myself to poems.

Here’s one I finished today.

When Man Was Roaming Cat Food

When man was roaming cat food, pure

and simple, 

and he had no tools,

except for sticks he hadn’t yet 

secured the stones to 

for more clout,

and the rules of etiquette were weak,

so slack, in fact, 

the breech clout wasn’t,

never mind ‘invented yet,’ 

it wasn’t even dreamt about, 

and dimmer still was china, crockery, 

all things nice and bric-a-brac,

and dinner was what you happened upon

in the fields or trees, 

and women cooked,

but only after the crack of thunder 

signaled a lightning fire nearby,

and you jumped right out of your skin 

and found it,

and fed it, and then the kids,

if you could,

and bed was a pile of chaff or leaves

the children were put in 

in heaps for warmth,

preferably toward the back of the cave,

if you had a cave the bears didn’t take,

then you elders could sit around,

feeding the fire, enjoying life,

saying how all your political leaders 

were assholes, one and all, every one,

and got where they did by being assholes,

blabbering, gibbering, aggressive shits

you accepted because the neighboring tribe

elected that type and that’s all they knew:

a stick on the head and the threat of more.

Ah, those were the first days of Politics,

matured as much as it has to date.

7/20/2005

Yesterday, two PSE participants (Leif and Michelle) were standing in Nativity Square when they heard gun fire. Leif stuck his head around a corner in hope of getting some video footage, and a bullet whizzed past and hit the wall nearby. Then a couple of Israeli jeeps raced past, firing up the road. He said he kept using his camera and managed to catch some of the action, but when the jeeps had passed, he and Michelle fell into each other’s arms, their hearts a-pounding. If you saw Michelle you’d understand his heart at least.

But it’s not funny.

Today, when I came out of class at the 4 o’clock break, the Israelis were invading the refugee camp across the road from the Bible College. There were two vehicles slightly larger than jeeps parked on the sidewalk, and there was a large personnel carrier with machine guns and Israeli eyes peeking over its walls. This latter vehicle, a thing the size of a bus, was lazily obstructing a turn a hundred feet from the jeeps. 

A big dump truck with a big Palestinian driving it was blowing his horn and yelling at the personnel carrier. It finally deigned to move and the dump truck got around. There were more jeeps in the area, just down the road.

This invasion is part of a big sweep that is going on all over the West Bank since a suicide bombing in Netanya a few days ago. It’s hard to exaggerate the hatred local people feel for this sort of thing. It’s in the dump truck driver’s yelling and horn blowing; it’s written on the face of a shop keeper with his broom in hand; it is on the faces of everyone walking or driving by. 

Ah well, you may say, they brought it on themselves; the ‘Israeli response’ is just in the interest of national security, and entirely understandable. But it is not in the interest of national security to close roads and conduct raids to arrest people all over the west bank; nor is it in the interest of national security to destroy a suicide bomber’s family house. These are primitive acts of collective punishment.

It is not in the interest of national security to engender widespread hatred. True, the hatred is already there: the Palestinians are enduring a military occupation and they have seen this sort of thing so many times they already hate. But it revolts them further to see it again. 

The family I live with is a quiet, peaceful, educated and loving middle class family that includes three generations under the one roof. They are as pleasant and happy as any family I have seen, and never have a show of anger that threatens to become physical violence. Yet even these people lost their son to two months of imprisonment in 1987. They said they didn’t decorate the Christmas tree that year because it was a very sad Christmas.

Imagine living in a refugee camp where foreign soldiers come racing in every so often to seize people, many of them mere children. This can only beget more hatred. It cannot control or stamp out terrorism. It cannot improve security. Security is what you get from having people love you or being, at worst, indifferent to you.

Admittedly security is relative and there is no perfect measure of it: any of us might be assaulted or killed by criminal elements that exist everywhere. But if we seek security by training weapons or laying hands on everyone around us, the effect will be the opposite of what we seek. Surely, this is obvious. If it is not obvious, it can be made so by asking how we would feel and act if on the other side.

To take up my own challenge, let me herewith consider how I would feel if I were an Israeli. I would be nervous. I would recognize that, for whatever reasons, large numbers of people hated me and wished me dead. I would know that military advantage offers some safety from that situation, at least on surface analysis. But for how long? Unless I was prepared to live at war forever, I would know that I should take some risks. As Zoughbi Zoubhi said the other day, Hope without risk is not hope.  And I would think it cowardly not to hope. I would hope for a world more comfortable than this. Moral considerations, of course, dictate the same course: taking some risk. Quite apart from that, as the party with the upper hand, I would feel some responsibility to behave decently toward the losing side.

This does not mean throwing down all weapons and going bare-ass to the weather (although that would be vastly preferred to the practices presently endorsed); it just means acting upon elementary concepts of justice and human rights, admitting that others need to be treated equally in this country where they were born. I would say, let’s take some risks and accept Democracy and see if we can’t reduce the feelings which are at the root of this perpetual crisis.

How? Last night a speaker suggested the following two-state/one-state solution. He said the Jews are never going to accept a situation where they’re in a minority. Nor are they going to give up all their illegal settlements. Why not divide the country along the 1967 borders but give all citizens of the two countries residency rights in the two places. This would solve the refugee problem and let the Jews keep their demographic majority. As a first step it might be a good idea, although the number of details to work out is rather daunting. Water, for instance, coming from West Bank aquifers, might reasonably be thought to belong to the state of Palestine. It’s hard to imagine Israel giving this back along with all the land they’ve taken. But, perhaps time will tell.

7/22/2005

The Closest I Came To A Religious Experience.

I brought my bible thinking that maybe now I could read it. The Bible I carried is one I won for an essay when I was 16. the essay is lost but I remember it having to do with determinism in human behavior. I thought people were free and argued that religion made no sense unless one was free. Reverend Alexander liked that and gave me the prize. The next year we moved to Ottawa, and that was the end of my Christianity, at least in so far as I believed the Christian myth and took part in organized religion.

Part of my intention to read the bible over here had to do with seeing it recommended in the guide book as good reading while in these parts. Another part of the idea stemmed from the romantic notion that I might finally educate myself in this possibly important way, ironically getting back to the good book at 61. The reversal of digits was pretty spooky, after all. The other consideration was that I was somewhat afraid to come all the way to these troubled parts on my own. Whoever said there were no atheists in foxholes had a great insight. I believe it.

But I also know that one becomes more comfortable in a troubling situation, and eventually treats it as being not so different from any other working environment. I had this experience working on my well. It was necessary to put my body under an overhanging pile of dirt and I could see that if it should fall on me I would drown like a rat. But if I was going to work on things I had to get under. Before long the anxiety abated and I could work alright.

Here in Bethlehem and Beit Sahour I am now comfortable enough, and when I read the bible it’s as boring to me as it ever was. There are indeed some poetic passages and I found the 23rd and 100th psalms moving, perhaps even as moving I found them as a child. But most of the bible (at least the old testament, which is what I started on again) is extremely uninteresting. As prose it is insufferably repetitious; as psychology it is narrow and selfish; as thinking it is gibberish.

Still, you never know what might happen in these particular airwaves that have stirred so many to imaginative ascent. I was keeping my fingers crossed, and sure enough:

Last night I walked to big open air restaurant and bar at dusk. This is place is called The Tent for the obvious reason that overhead is canvas. The walls are open in good weather, which means all summer. The Tent is in Beit Sahour and is a pleasant atmosphere for smoking and drinking. It might also be a good place to eat but I haven’t tried that. PSE uses it frequently on Thursday nights for socializing.

Beit Sahour means house of vigilance, and this is where shepherds watched their flocks in the olden days. Currently, it is home to the tourist attraction called Shepherd’s Fields, and I walked alongside these on my way to The Tent. Shepherd’s Fields are not only where the shepherds abandoned their flocks in order make a special visit to baby Jesus on Manger Street, at Nativity Square, they are also the very fields where Ruth of Moab worked so fetchingly that Boaz positively had to have her, thus begetting a line that led to David and (some say) Jesus.

Anyway it was a beautiful evening and I was going along, thinking Christian thoughts as well as I could remember them, with only an occasional fast-forward to the cold beer awaiting me in The Tent…, when, what to my wondering eye should appear, but an evening star!

Now, without exaggeration, this star was as big as two stars side by side, and it was directly over Bethlehem! ‘What thee Hell!’ I thought to myself, as perhaps the shepherds long ago thought to themselves. This star lacked circular symmetry and was not only as big as two stars side by side, but it actually seemed to be two stars side by side, fused in the middle. 

If Jesus was to come back, wouldn’t there be a sign of some sort? And wouldn’t he choose to do it when I was in the neighborhood? I was almost tempted to start trudging up the hill to Bethlehem, but by my calculations the star was right over the Aida refugee Camp, and not Nativity Square where it belonged. ‘Could this be an astronomical error?’ I wondered. Or could man himself have gotten the first location wrong? Could Jesus be coming back as a baby Muslim? Surely that would be letting down the side. Additionally, I was getting closer and closer to The Tent. Moreover, if I went up there and found an Arab Christ, fully Muslim as he would have to be to get along in Aida for any length of time, the onus would be on me to break the news to the rest of Christendom. 

I decided to put off investigating, for the moment.  If this star kept showing itself in the same location night after night, then maybe one night I’d take a cab and go look. Meanwhile I would put it off until some other time.

But the point is: there it was! A more religious man might have followed up on the spot, but even I experienced a stirring, involuntary thrill and a flashback to childhood or earlier days of old.

As for reading my bible again on account of this potential miracle, I’m just too tired to wade into it at the end of a day.

7/22/2005

Two days ago we went up to the Alternative Information Center to hear a discussion in English and Arabic. The first fellow to speak was Professor Howard from The University of Manitoba. He had a wealth of information but no more ability to process it than a meat grinder sand.

When he finished, the moderator/translator said he respectfully disagreed with almost everything said but knew this would create no problems between them because they were both Canadians. Me too I felt that way. I liked Howard and didn’t care if he couldn’t think or anything else; he seemed like a perfectly affable fellow.

What he was, was a lefty of the old school who felt we had to put the Palestinian/Israeli problems in the context of a larger struggle: between the working classes and the wealthy elite. Knowing how people like cars and coats and sneakers, I could not imagine anything more self-defeating than this particular tact, but neither I nor anyone else bothered to argue the issue.

Then came an Arab speaker. He said that all proposed solutions to the problem have focused on security and failed to come to grips with three issues crucial to the Palestinians: 1) The right of return, 2) Jerusalem, and 3) Sovereignty. And all future solutions that ignore these three matters, including the so-called ‘roadmap,’ will also fail. In the past, Palestinians wanted one state with the destruction of Israel. Now they will have to work toward one state with Israel, because their options for a viable state have been curtailed.

When the two speakers had spoken and been translated, phrase by phrase, then began the question period. But they were not so much questions as further speeches, beginning with an historic review that started, sometimes in 1948 and sometimes in the nineteenth century. No detail was too slight for inclusion; no fact or date too well known for repetition. Nor were the questions, if one could call them such, answered directly afterward. The moderator, now a woman, chose to take three in a row before letting the two speakers get down to answering them. And so it went, on and on. They were so thorough we were all drooling on our shirts an hour or two later.

But it was not a waste of time. The moderator had some incisive comments which he delivered directly upon the completion of the two speeches. He said you could forget the one-state solution as a starting point because the Jews wanted a Jewish state and would never consent to being in the minority. He agreed that Palestine was beyond the condition where it could be a viable state, except for one possibility that the Israelis might at some point agree to: the granting of residency rights, but not citizenship, to both peoples in both states. This would obviate the problem of dismantling the settlements, and it would solve the problem of right of return, and it could conceivably deal with Jerusalem, if the city were to become open again.

Both Henry and I thought this idea showed imagination, but we also thought that working out the details might be beyond human endurance. Would the Israelis give up control of the west bank water? Not likely. Would they assent to Palestinian building rights in Israel equal to those they themselves had usurped in The West Bank? Not likely. The trouble with any solution that calls for Justice is that Israelis consider their rights greater than those of the people around them. A State conceived in the notion that one ethnic group has more rights than others is anathema to Democracy. 

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual. -Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)”

Yet it is the Democracy of the USA which proclaims Israel a Democracy and promotes and protects it, even as it attempts to colonize a densely populated land. 

One Arab questioner pointed out that there were more Jews in this world than those living in Israel, and he thought that at some point they would cut the rug out from under Zionism. He was decried as being sorely mistaken by several in the audience, but I thought he was right on the money. The fiasco that derives from perpetual special consideration is evident enough. It is one thing to have affirmative action on behalf of some group that is down and out, but it is quite another to institutionalize it forever.

7/23/2005

Going to Ramallah we first exit Beit Sahour through Waddi Naar, The valley of Fire. Raffat is conducting this tour and remarks that this road reminds him of a typical refugee camp in the occupation: it was built by Palestinians in the exigencies of the moment, presumably as a temporary necessity, but then it was paved and now looks to be permanent. It’s an unbelievably winding hair-pinned descent and ascent, where a bus cannot pass oncoming traffic on some turns. You get dizzy to start your day. At the end of this ordeal you come to the container checkpoint, (so called because it started with the Israelis occupying a container to stop this particular stream of west bank traffic) and sit for as long as the soldiers want you to.

This is the way one exits the Bethlehem area to go to any number of West Bank towns: Jenin, Nablus, Jericho. Raffat says: “And this is the kind of a State they are talking about giving us.”

In Abu Dis, right in front of Al Quds (Jerusalem) University, The Wall runs down the middle of the street and the bus passes within a meter of it. This is a Palestinian suburb of Jerusalem and there are Palestinians on either side of the wall. The Wall is not serving a security function, unless it is somehow known that all those Palestinians on the Jerusalem side are good ones and those on our side, suspect.

Other guides have pointed out means of distinguishing Palestinian and Israeli housing: the Israelis take a hilltop; the Palestinians go to a valley for agriculture. Raffat points out another: every Palestinian house will have water tanks on the top of it. This is because the water is only turned on two or three days a week; in some places only one, but in our area, two or three. Also, Palestinian houses are built at random and all look different one from another. ‘This is because they were built by people; the Israeli houses were built by government.’

The most direct path to Ramallah would take us through the Qalandia checkpoint, which is notoriously difficult. On this occasion it is closed so we have to drive another thirty minutes, around through the village of Bir Zeit to get into town.  Raffat says: “I don’t think they didn’t know this road was open. They just make us go this way to make things difficult for Palestinians. This way, they hope we will all leave voluntarily and they will not have to force us.”

Ramallah means mountain of God. One travel brochure I bought in Jerusalem claims this is the only Arab built town in Israel! A day later, an ICAHD lecturer tells us his (Israeli) children’s geography books don’t even show this, or a number of other towns on the map. He  asked their teacher about it but got no satisfactory reply.

At Ramallah our first stop is the Prisoner rights group Addameer (Arabic for conscience). Our speaker addresses us about the problems of prisoners: From 1967 till today there have been between 650,000 and 700,000 people arrested in the OPT. This represents more than 20 % of the population. Since almost all of the arrests are males, this means that more than 40% of the male population has been arrested. 

 One of the articles I was reading about the Balata refugee camp, which was said to be the hottest of hot spots for resistance to the occupation, claimed that one in three males over 16 had been arrested. This was presented as a very startling figure, and it is. The Addameer number seems to me unreasonably high.

Nevertheless there was a lot to be learned from the Addameer lecturer. He said the west bank is governed by more than 1500 military orders, exact copies of which are hard to come by. They are not announced or written out for the public but rather discovered in the breech, any one of which is potentially considered a security violation. For instance, he says, there is a list of banned publications, among which is a list of UN resolutions concerning Israel: it is against the law to be carrying such a list, even without commentary upon them. Additionally, it is illegal to have a Palestinian flag or even a drawing of one. These regulations are no longer enforced, but they might be at any time the Israelis needed to invoke them for purposes of arrest.

In January, 1996, during the run-up to Palestinian elections, an independent candidate who advocated boycotting the elections until political prisoners were released was arrested by the Hebron Police for flying a Palestinian flag at his home, which was also his headquarters. 

Any Palestinian can be arrested and held for 8 days without charge; this period has been 18 days at other times but is currently 8. Palestinians can be held and interrogated on ‘administrative detention’ which means suspicion of terrorism for 180 days, the first 60 without a lawyer, and this 180 day period can then begin again. Some have been held this way from 4 to 5 years. Currently there are 850 detainees held under this condition, about 10 % of the total population of prisoners.

On to torture and dirty tricks (I don’t know what to make of these; they might be true or they might not. There is no video footage that I know of so the best I can do is to report the words of a man who has talked to many prisoners and ex-prisoners. The claims here are of beatings, electric shock and sodomizing until the 1980s. From then on we have people hung from their hands, tied together behind their backs, with their toes just touching the floor. This is painful and exhausting but leaves no traces of injury and has proved so popular among torturers it is now being employed in Turkey and is known as ‘The Palestinian position.’

Another good means of getting information out of your suspects is to put them in a cell together with one collaborator who claims to be a top dog in Islamic Jihad or Al Aqsa martyrs or whatever. He says he will get the word back to management about everyone’s work. So everybody tells what he did, and if you don’t have anything to tell, then you might be considered a collaborator. The tendency is to exaggerate your bad behavior and this is what is presented to the court.

Addameer has no access to prisoners except through their lawyers.

Coming home we met another bus in Waddi Naar and he had to back up to let us around a hairpin turn. He did this reluctantly and Raffat told us we had just met the Hebronites (evidently the Bethlehem people consider those of Hebron defective).

Defense of Children International has many branches which are separate and effectively independent; DCI Palestine was set up in 1992. Fatalities are their main focus but they also investigate injuries; there are so many violations of children’s rights they have ten investigators for the west bank and seven for Gaza. The following is from DCI.

The child is any person under eighteen years of age. Since the beginning of this intifada (September, 2002) there have been 700 children killed. It is impossible to document the number of nonfatal injuries but they find a disproportionate number to the upper body.

Among the children’s rights abused are the right to education and housing. Curfews pertain to the former and house demolitions to the latter. Children have been killed in the classroom by stray bullets. Houses are destroyed, usually on the grounds that the builder did not have a permit but also in the course of military operations, as in Jenin and Raffa, and as a family punishment or deterrence after suicide bombings. The documentary, Stolen Youth, is part of their work. 

Military order 132 says that a child is someone under the age of 11 (not arrested), a teen is someone 12-14 (charged after 16 for serious offences), an adolescent is someone 14-16 (I don’t know how they are different) and an adult is someone over the age of 16.

Children are frequently arrested in the middle of the night, handcuffed and taken to a military station. Most confess to whatever they’re accused of within forty-eight hours. Trials are in Hebrew and most have no idea of what’s being said. Rarely are children found innocent. Throwing stones commonly brings a six month sentence, but children may be arrested at 15 for throwing stones at age 13 so as to give them a longer sentence, even in cases where the children have done nothing criminal in the intervening two years. 

Girls: one had a knife in her bag and was charged with attempting to kill. In plea bargaining this was reduced to attempting to stab. This girl was taken to Israel for trial, which is in contravention of the 4th Geneva Convention.

Roll call in jail is a harsh experience, and the food is bad.

Visits from parents: it can take 3 months to get a permit to visit and that is valid for two months. Visits from families in Nablus were prevented absolutely for a time, though this is not the case now. 

Lawyers can be made to wait two hours to see their clients.

Why are children arrested so often? To break the Palestinian spirit, to select collaborators (the younger someone is obtained the more easily he can be manipulated), and for deterrence.

They have a lawyer who has refused to go to trial because he feels useless and doesn’t want to lend an air of legitimacy to a process which he feels lacks it. Everything he asks for from the prosecution is said to be secret.

There are 300 in prison at the moment, including 8 girls; DCI represents about half of the 300, others opt for private representation in the hope that it will be better.

This woman, Kathrine, another Brit, says she is hardened to her job and feels that is essential to doing it well. At first she would become very distraught writing about a child being shot while putting out the laundry on a roof of a family house, but now she can write about such things unemotionally.

Henry asked her to tell a bit about herself and how she got into the job in the first place. She said she was a business journalist writing about oil finds in the Middle East and one day decided she would rather do something else. Earlier in her life she had been a staunch Israeli supporter and cheered their various military victories.

Al Haq, The Right, or Justice, was started in 1979 by Palestinian activists and lawyers. They set up in Gaza and the West Bank but eventually gave up on Gaza and now exist only here. They document all killings and seek testimony from more than one eyewitness. They investigate all house demolitions by military orders.  

7/24/2005

BBC television showed a bunch of heads talking about the problem of terrorism. They were all agog at the peculiar ethics of the bombers. Not a soul suggested the bombers were identical to themselves.

Visiting east Jerusalem today after driving through the primped and watered Jewish side, one could not help being struck by the chaos. The garbage has not only piled up, it has drifted. There are big multi-colored plastic banks to the roads in some places. Is this more unsightly, or is the watered turf of an otherwise parched landscape uglier? I don’t know.

7/25/2005

A donkey and a mule are tethered side by side in a field I walk past every day. I stop occasionally to talk with them and observe their lives. Both have halters that include a piece of chain over the nose. The mule’s cuts into his face and makes a feast for the flies. The donkey’s nose is not weeping. 

The other day I saw that the man who owns them had changed the chain on the mule for a piece of bristly rope. That seemed to make a bigger feast for the flies, perhaps because it could not sink in deep enough to occlude any of the festering meat but irritated it with the nylon bristles.

They don’t complain. They just munch along. By the expressions on their faces and their relative inactivity it would appear they are not uncomfortable. But one wishes things could be better.

It occurred to me that the animals might be less likely to escape with this threat of pain associated with pulling on the rope. Maybe the farmer has calculated the effect of his harness.

Ahmed is a pleasant young fellow in the cubicle next to me. He has to endure Katy who makes loud pronouncements to him about the air conditioning and everything else. “Oh! No! Ahmed! Please! Do not open the window! It is too hot Ahmed! We have turn on the air conditioning, today! Ahmed! Do you understand?”

Merciful Christ! I hope he doesn’t understand or he’ll jump off a bridge. But maybe they’re communicating perfectly and I’m the odd one out. They have long excited conversations and frequently and Ahmed gets his own back.

Today Ahmed told me there was a demonstration at the wall tomorrow at 9:30 and he expected me there. I inquired about it rather than assent or refuse, and he explained that it was creative protest. There would be a drawing on the wall and they would put sand down and pretend to have a beach party by the nice picture. I said ok.

 Next day we got right into it. There was a real artist who sketched out the plan and the rest of us worked like housepainters. I got up on a ladder and painted a pink sky. Then I had a chance to paint Hamdila’s face black and put some lines representing hair on his head.

7/27/2005

We had a lecture on the economy of the occupation last night by Shir Hever. The work is his Master’s thesis and he has it on line at www.alternativenews.org. I asked him to read a draft of my representation of his work, below, and he made a number of corrections and additions which I incorporated. I also went to his AIC brochure, The Economy of The Occupation’ and took information from it. 

He said pre-1967 Israel was a welfare state, primarily for Jews but with socialist leanings similar to Scandinavian countries. In the first years after the 1967 war there was an economic boom based in part on the end of a recession but also on donations from Jews abroad who saw the success of the Israeli military as indication that it was likely to survive; Israel was expressly theirs and therefore a good place to send money. These donations completely reimbursed the cost of the war. 

After the war, Palestinians could work in Israel so, economically, it was a good time for them too. Palestinians inside Israel may or may not have been worse off because of competition from the territories, but in general things were good economically.

After the six-day war all occupied Palestinian land which was not private was confiscated. Military installations and military industry were immediately set up on some of these lands, and Israeli arms quickly became an exported commodity.

Oil prices were booming after 1973 and educated Palestinians went to work in the Gulf states to help them spend their oil money.

At home, the Palestinian economy derived income from three main sources: goods and services sold to one another; the 120,000 workers who went to Israel every day and came home at night; and the money sent home from the Palestinians working in the Gulf States.

Israel blocked all industry in the occupied territories. Basically, no machines were allowed in and no exports, allowed out. This policy was implemented by military people and carried out very consistently.

After the war of 1973 the USA started funding Israel heavily, at an average rate of three billion dollars a year, continuing to this day. Such funding was a very important contribution to the Israeli economy in the early years; it is less so now. 

Despite steady economic growth, Israeli purchasing power remained fairly constant until the 1980s when it took a dive.

In the 1980s oil prices fell and the Palestinians working in the Gulf states lost their jobs. Many came back to Palestine where, as educated people, they set up businesses and competed with those who had stayed home. There was growing inequality in the OPT, and the economic slump contributed to the development of the first Intifada. 

Israel too was experiencing a downturn. They lost the war in Lebanon and inflation was rampant, ranging from 100 % to a record 400 % per year. The banks were betting heavily on the stock market and made out very well until going bankrupt in 1983 when everybody sold and prices crashed.

The government then took over the banks for a spell and the economy recovered. Eventually, the banks were privatized again, a process which is still going on today.

The Occupation became unprofitable in the mid 1980s, shortly before the first Intifada. An analysis of Israeli expenditures in the OPT makes it clear that security costs surpass all others and that Palestinian resistance was at last expensive to the occupier.

Since 1967 Israel’s security costs have been $100 billion. Someone in the audience said this sounded like a bargain compared to the American invasion of Iraq, and he agreed: expenses were relatively greater in Iraq. 

Since the Oslo accord, the PA has begun to get back some of the taxes collected by Israel. Since Oslo there has also been considerable funding of both Palestine and Israel by the European Community. The Europeans, however, are not pleased with their investment in Palestinian infrastructure because it tends to be short-lived: i.e., the Israelis come along and destroy it. Cases in point are the airport and seaport built for Gaza, both smashed by Israel, and the destruction of sections of Jenin and Nablus by bulldozers, F16s and Apache helicopters. Additionally, infrastructure spending is rendered less effective than it might be by Israel’s prevention of workers and materials reaching the desired sites.

The Paris accords of 1994 were the economic agreements that accompanied Oslo. By these arrangements, all goods coming and going to Palestine were still to go through Israel and Israel was to continue harvesting customs and taxes. Israel also got a portion of all International funding to the PA. The Palestinian prize for assenting to these plums for Israel was the promise that Palestinians would be allowed to work freely in Israel. However, Israel reneged on this. Nevertheless, Israeli control over the Palestinian economy through the taxation of imports and exports, plus determining their nature and admissibility at all, continues today.

After Oslo the USA gave Israel a special reward of $10 Billion for having returned to the peace process. Israel used this to bring in Russian immigrants to fill the settlements. They also started bringing in foreign labor to replace Palestinian labor. At the peak, these temporary workers numbered 400,000.

Israeli employers abused these imported workers, routinely firing them after a couple of months to prevent them from learning their rights and becoming unionized. With a large labor force in a state of flux, not to mention their being in poverty or near poverty since a couple of months work hardly covered their air fare from the Philippines or wherever, employers inevitably had the upper hand.

Immigrant workers are presently being deported en masse out of fear that they will demand citizenship for their children born in Israel and thereby dilute the Jewish Nature of the State.

Wars in the Middle East are associated with periods of relative profit for oil and weapons industries. Obviously, this is because oil prices soar and weapons are consumed. The bar graph showing the combined data for these industries was quite striking, but it stopped in 1995. The data are available for analysis up to the present, but require a great deal of work, which has not been done.

Both Israeli and Palestinian economies were hurt by the second Intifada, but in Palestine the second Intifada was associated with an unprecedented downturn. Between September 2000 and late 2002, the GDP per capita fell by 40 %, a rate that surpasses that of the Great Depression in the USA in 1929 and the recent financial collapse of Argentina.

Foreign aid to Palestine is closely monitored and, looking at this in terms of its destinations, one sees that before 2000 the ratio of development aid to humanitarian aid was 5/1; but in recent years the economic collapse has required that ratio of humanit­arian aid to development aid become 7/1. 

In Hever’s opinion, there is no way the occupation has ever been economically beneficial to Palestinians. Israel controls water, electricity and phone services to the OPT, and despite the lower incomes of Palestinians, charges them higher prices than those paid by Israelis. A guide on one of our tours said that Israeli settlers in the west bank pay 0.5 shekels per cubic meter of water whereas Palestinians pay 4.5, despite the fact that the water is being pumped from their aquifers.  

If one considers the humanitarian and development aid that Palestinians have won as a consequence of Israeli aggression, it becomes clear that Israel has a vested interest in keeping it coming. When Palestinians import goods with this aid they either pay customs to the Israeli government for their purchases, or else avoid these by buying directly from Israel. 73 % of all imports to the OPT come from Israel because, even if goods from Jordan or Egypt might still be cheaper than those coming from Israel, there are administrative hurdles placed in the way of such purchases. The end result is that Palestinians buy from the companies of their occupiers.

The humanitarian aid in particular helps Israel escape its responsibilities for the situation it has created. Hever notes that at the beginning of 2004 Israel Defense minister Shaul Mofaz asked international organizations to pull together and prevent the collapse of the Palestinian Authority. It’s hard to imagine he was feeling a twinge of conscience, although that cannot be ruled out.

As for the Israeli economy, it is near collapse and would have collapsed long ago except that the main import is capital. This comes from three principal sources: U.S. Government donations, Jewish Community donations and Holocaust reparations. The last are paid to the state rather than individuals, on the grounds that the state receives and spends them on the behalf of Jewish people. 

Israeli Banks, which have been privatized again (an ongoing process), are presently making a lot of money. By contrast, perhaps ninety percent of the Israeli populace is feeling the pinch. This is a story not told in the media, which are owned by five wealthy families whose second largest source of income is the weapons industry. Nonetheless, the growing inequality in Israel is depleting internal support for the State, so much that many now feel the country is for a wealthy elite. More and more young people are refusing to serve in the military, primarily for personal rather than ideological reasons. 

In all, Hever believes that when the international community finally begins to inflict economic punishment on Israel, this will necessitate major policy change. He supports such action and other forms of boycott as well, including academic boycotts. He believes that the number of clear-thinking, fair-minded intellectuals in Israel is small, but that such numbers as do exist will be able to appreciate the need of sanctions and boycotts. 

However, economic actions are key: if Europe began to impose sanctions, Japan and the Arab states would probably follow, and at this point the USA would have a very big job on its hands keeping Israel afloat.

Henry got back about 9:30 or 10 tonight and I was mighty glad to see him. It seemed to me that he was on a dangerous mission and I was delighted to see him looking so healthy and satisfied.

He and a Danish fellow made the trip down to the Hebron area for their three day assignment in Qawaiis. He said you could drive right past the village on the highway and never know it was there. Evidently they approached it from back roads and had to take two or three services or taxis to get there; the last fellow put them out well short of their destination because the road was too rocky for his car.

All of the following is from Henry’s telling: There is one house in the village and, apart from the people who live there, everybody else lives in caves. Earlier, the villagers had been driven off by settlers who came into their caves and shouted and beat them up. Since then, the citizens of Qawaiis had somehow got a court order to return to their village, but they would not come back alone: they feared the settlers would be even angrier with them for doing this, and perhaps more vindictive than previously. Consequently, ISM provided them protection but soon tried to reduce this to weekends, which had been when most of the harassment took place. The people said they would not stay unless ISM guarded them throughout the week. This created a shortage of personnel and so a trip to Qawaiis became one of Henry’s assignments.

He said living in Qawaiis was like living in Biblical times. They would get up at daylight and take their sheep and goats to graze until it became too hot, usually around ten o’clock. To Henry, it looked like there was nothing for the animals to eat, but somehow they found enough grass. Grazing problems had been exacerbated by the settlers’ insisting that flocks not come within a hundred and fifty meters of the road, which was a big loss of pasture; however, the people accepted this, including the more serious loss of a couple of watering holes in these regions. This meant that they now had to water their flocks from wells they normally used exclusively for people, back at the village. They feared they would run out of water in a month or so.

They had only one encounter with the settlers while Henry was there, and he managed to take pictures as a couple of them galloped through the village on horseback.

The villagers had built a little three-sided structure of piled stones for their protectors, covering it with stitched feed sacks. Israel was surveying this and comparing satellite images with those of the previous years in order to decide whether it would have to be bulldozed.

The villagers did not invite them into their caves. 

Henry said the diet consisted of a lot of bread, which was cooked fresh and quite delicious, plus vegetables, without much protein. The little protein they did eat was some kind of sheep’s cheese with olive oil added.

In the break between classes at the Bible College, Henry described his visit and said that ISM desperately needed more people to take these three-day shifts but would not send anyone down without training. The training would take place in Ramallah unless a big enough group warranted sending an instructor here. A couple of students were interested, and later the number was eight. 

When Henry finished telling me about his trip last night before bed I mentioned that there had been house demolitions in Al Khadder today and that a number of us were getting up early to go watch the destruction of another house tomorrow, some people with the intention of occupying it for the sake of protest. I thought he might like to sleep in and take a day off, but he said that sounded like an important thing to do and he definitely wanted to go.

7/28/2005

Yesterday there were houses demolished in the nearby village of Al Khadder. Alyssa and Michelle, two PSE girls happened to be at HLT when a phone call to the office told it was eminent, and so they attended. Alyssa told us what she had seen during the afternoon break in Arabic classes, shedding a few tears as she did. It is evidently a very sad sight to see, alongside the affected families. 

She confronted soldiers and at least some of them seemed to know they were doing something wrong, an inference she made by their looking at the ground; however not all of them felt the same: she had to tell one person to get his hands off her. In conclusion, she said there was another house to be destroyed today, and she encouraged us to be on hand.

Apparently, house demolitions are usually done first thing in the morning, so a number of us agreed to get up early and try to be there when the Israelis came back to do more of what may be described (with academic detachment) as their dirty rotten colonial work.

With a little difficulty and a lot of broken Arabic (my own phrase was ‘broken house,’ others attempted to imitate a descriptive phrase they had been given by teachers) we finally found it. It was just beyond Solomon’s pools, an easy walk from the same Dehesia bus stop bus I had used a couple of weeks ago.

There was no sign of action when we got there, so we photographed the rubble of the three houses of yesterday. Each of these families had been given one hour’s notice to get their belongings out of their houses. 

We were told the houses were built in 1996 on land owned by Palestinians, in order to allow families to expand. The Israelis demolished them (and had plans to demolish one more), because they said they were built without permits. Yet such permits cannot be obtained when Israel covets a piece of land. On a hilltop across the way, easily within range of my unprofessional photography, was a new Israeli settlement. This one was still in the stage of mobile homes with telephone poles bringing in some modern conveniences. But there was a sniper’s tower nearby, not to mention others in other parts of Al Khadder. 

Interestingly, an additional reason for Israel’s not liking the houses described was that they were above a road used by settlers. In such a position the Palestinians might have taken potshots at passing traffic. It might be claimed that one can never be too careful, but this is exactly what one can be, because this kind of carefulness inspires widespread hatred.

Hussein, a calm and articulate, gray-haired man showed up and sat with us under a tree to answer questions. He is the source of most of the information offered below. 

The family of one of the houses sat down the hill from us under another tree. He said they consisted in one man, two wives and fifteen children; one woman had twelve, the other, three. I understood him to say they all lived in one of the houses. At the moment they had not even a tent, despite the demolitions having been covered by media yesterday, and despite the Red Cross’s having been in attendance. (Nimr had also told me that the demolitions were on TV last night, and I saw news of them on the web this morning.)

Bigger children, who may or may not have been part of the family of fifteen children, brought us glasses of soft drink, and later gave us apples that were among the best I have ever eaten.

In the course of interviewing, Hussein said that his brother was in jail for life in an Israeli prison. Someone asked delicately what crime he had been accused of, and Hussein said that, first of all, it was not a crime: international law permitted people to defend themselves by all means against invasion. Then he said his brother had placed a bomb at a military post and killed one soldier and wounded others.

He also told us that his best friend in the world was a Jew living in Jerusalem: he had six brothers and this man was the seventh. When his seventy-three-year-old mother was hospitalized by being struck by a settler vehicle while riding her donkey to work, Hussein was prevented from reaching her by being on the wrong side of some checkpoint. He said his friend’s wife went to her at once and brought her things and oversaw her care. Thus, he could sleep easily. 

Concerning the house demolitions yesterday, he said his friend had called him on the phone and wept and said he was ashamed.

As the morning wore on it appeared that the Israelis were not coming back, at least today. We had first had the strong impression that they were coming because we had been told they would and because electricians were on the scene disconnecting electricity from the designated house. The electricians were Jerusalem Palestinians driving an official van with an orange ribbon hung in the front window to help them get through checkpoints. In Israel, this colored ribbon currently symbolizes resistance to the upcoming pull-out from Gaza. (A blue ribbon symbolizes the opposite and apparently often results in damage to the vehicle.)

Eventually we were told that the family whose house was scheduled for demolition had been given another 45 days by the Israeli captain in charge yesterday. They had stopped work for the day because there were chickens in an out-building they needed to knock down to get at the family dwelling. Their consciences would not allow them to harm these innocent birds. This does not explain why the electricians were disconnecting the house but nothing explains anything. However, it does seem that a family is given one hour’s notice but chickens get an extra forty-five days if they’re not ready.

I am grubby. It doesn’t seem sensible to take a shower when you’re going to plaster fly dope on your face and neck and arms, which I did last night. Besides that, I had a shower last Sunday and it is a shame to waste water when it costs 4.5 shekels per cubic meter. At the moment I have a nice mix of fly dope, sun screen, sweat and dust, and my feet stink. However, I like myself. Tonight I’m taking a shower. 

Outside HLT I ran into George S. Rishmawi with Paul, a fellow about my age who is doing a visit to Birzeit, studying Arabic for a month without our touring and evening meetings. We exchanged pleasantries and Paul told me he was a teacher trying to set up a visit next year for about twenty of his students. I asked if he was a peace activist and he said no, he was very much in favor of activism but we all had our niches. I agreed. He went on to say he could do a lot more good if he got twenty people to go out and become activists than if he went himself. I agreed and added that it hurts a lot less too. He looked taken aback and said he didn’t care very much about that. I said I did and we parted without that feeling of perfect sympathy one often achieves here. It was probably my fault and probably unnecessary, but I think a certain amount of self-accusation is worthwhile.

Later I decided definitely against the shower. There was lots of water and I could have done it but I didn’t see the point. Besides I’m taking a Pavlovian liking the smell of my fly dope, associating it, as I do, with bed.

8/1/2005

We saw the slides and heard the stories of our contingent of five who went to Gaza. They had a 26 hour delay at a checkpoint coming out and almost started a riot when it appeared they might be able to jump the queue and escape with some Red Cross and UN people. However, as it turned out, not even these latter vehicles were allowed through and they all sat still until their turns came. Their turns did come sooner than they might have, though, since one of the guys called the American consulate to complain and twenty minutes after that the checkpoint was open. 

Like most other checkpoints in the OPT this one was entirely on Palestinian soil, preventing Palestinians from free travel within their own regions. The Israelis impose this sort of inconvenience at their whim, presumably to torment and punish. Sometimes there is a way around it, as on our visits to Hebron and Ramallah, other times there is not.

During the wait they were surrounded by a crowd of boys, one of whom reached in and felt one of our girls’ hair. She was a big girl so she got out to yell the F word  and the PA had to come along and beat people with batons and throw them into the back of a jeep.

They saw where Rachel Corrie was killed.

The slides showed how badly Gaza was hammered. There were endless piles of rubble, some of it burning and with people scavenging what they could from the garbage on top. Buildings that were not destroyed were nearly destroyed, yet still had people in them. Clothes were hanging to dry on a balcony of an apartment building full of holes. There was an inside photo of a child’s bedroom with gaping holes in the wall near the ceiling. Even the SOS center was pocked with bullet marks.

One of our boys describing their experience became choked up as he told of an incident their host had videotaped: A curfew had been in effect without letup for fifteen days and the people were starving. They decided to all come out for a peaceful protest demanding milk. The Israelis sent an Apache helicopter over and shot a rocket into the crowd killing and injuring many people. He said the video showed people running with their wounded children in arms, dead bodies, missing faces and so on. It was horrible enough that he couldn’t understand how anyone could have brought himself to do it.

One of the slides showed Allah, written in bullet holes in the side of a building.

8/3/2005

Diana Zimmerman of CPT consents to give me an interview and I buy her a coke and myself a beer at the Bethlehem Hotel before our meeting with HLT to say how we liked the program and how to improve it for next year. We’re the only people in the bar and the barmaid was just leaving; after she gives us our drinks she goes and when another friend comes along he can’t drink with us but does sit.

The first thing she says is that she is not Jewish and she’s sure of it; everybody asks her (I hadn’t, by the way, but did say something a couple of days ago to indicate that I thought there were Jews in CPT. My idea was based on the inclusion of Jerry Levin whose story was told in the pamphlet we received before coming here. She explains to me that he was converted during his captivity by kidnappers in Lebanon and is now a Quaker.)

She is working hard on her Arabic to be able to speak with the people of Atwani when she goes to work protecting them from settlers in the middle of August. She had done a two-week program with them in 2003 and intended that this would be the end of her commitment, but when she returned home to Baltimore she changed her mind.

She said she was reading an article on how people’s involvement in peace and development, poverty reduction and so on, were likely to be different from one person to the next, depending on their talents and commitments, etc. But, the article claimed, the crucial thing was for each person to identify the level and nature of responsible action appropriate and then get at it. She said she finished the article and found herself agreeing with it when her next thought was of Christian Peacemaker Teams.

She made arrangements for someone to live in her Baltimore house for very cheap rent, with the proviso that she could come home at any time and live there herself. Then she made a three-year commitment to CPT and came back here and did her first three-month stint. They ask her to fundraise but make no specific requirements and budget $15,000 per year for her inclusion on the team. This pays for her travel, keeps up her license as a trauma nurse back home, pays other small expenses she has there, and gives her $100 per month to live on here.

She has been here five months now: this is her fourth time. In becoming a full time CPT person she agrees to work three-months at a time with a vacation following.

CPT suffered its first serious attack from the settlers on September 30 of last year. On that occasion a man and woman were beaten with baseball bats and chains so that the man had a punctured lung and the woman a broken arm and some damage to her knee.

On the next occasion, October 9, 2004, when CPT was escorting children to and from school, Diana was part of the team that was attacked. This was during her first 3-month stint and she said they had already seen the children home and were walking back to Atwani themselves. The settlers were wearing masks and wielding sticks and chains. They mostly pushed the women aside after bruising them slightly, and then went after the men quite savagely. She said they got an Italian man from Operation Dove on the ground and beat him with the sticks and chains, causing him to have a ruptured kidney and sprained wrist.

At this point the Knesset required the IDF to escort the children to school, but with Internationals excluded from the party. CPT had to call the army to come and do its job on many occasions, and they always watched them from hilltops to be sure that they did it right.

At this point, they asked the villagers if there was anything else they could do to help. The villagers said yes, they hadn’t been using some of their grazing land because they had been threatened to keep off it. After four or five years of not using it, the Government would claim it fell under absentee ownership and claim it for themselves. So the people wanted to start using it again with their protectors on the scene.

Diana said things were going smoothly enough at first: the settlers would come out occasionally and issue threats but didn’t seem to be too serious a problem. Then on February 14 of this year, CPT and Operation Dove were in the field when there appeared a masked man with a gun about a hundred meters away from where she was sitting.

He discharged his weapon once and another masked man ran up among the Palestinian farmers, and though she couldn’t understand what was being said, she taped it, and later learned that he was saying: “You’re a dog, a dog!’

She confronted the man and tried to have a conversation with him. His English was so limited he was having a hard time thinking up anything to yell and the whole problem of communication seemed to create a cooling off.

 Another tall CPT man was still standing when the settlers seemed to be leaving, but then one of the attackers made a 180 degree spin kick and broke his jaw and caused him to have a detached retina. The case is presently in court but since the man who did the kick still had his mask on, they could not charge anyone with this particular act. Another man, whose mask fell off during the attack was the one being prosecuted.

CPT teams work five days on and two off. Diana says a three-month stint is as much of this as most people are good for since at this point they begin to become too paranoid to be useful, and need a vacation.

8/8/2005

Henry said at breakfast that Summer had married an unsavory character and Tanya was engaged to one. These guys are apparently notorious for pursuing internationals and are desperately seeking American passports. It’s kind of laughable in that we were pooh poohing the Israeli suspicion that young women were especially vulnerable to the amorous Arab just a few days ago. This is the basis for their being grilled at the airport longer and harder than anyone else.

Speaking of which, Alyssa just came in and said she had heard from Michelle who left for Cyprus on the weekend. She was strip-searched at the airport and had her computer and cell phone seized, plus her shampoo and something else I forget. She emailed this news when she got to Cyprus. Though she was scheduled to stay 4 months with Alyssa she will probably not be allowed back in the country.

Alyssa said that she and Shabnam and one other girl whose name I forget were coming back from Jerusalem last night and saw about 60 people detained at the checkpoint. They inquired and were told by the soldiers that the people were all trying to make an illegal crossing. Our girls were not allowed to talk with the people but told the soldiers they were sitting there until they were released. After a while they let the women and children go, and little by little some of the men. At last when it was near dark one of the soldiers came over and said they had better leave while there was still light because if there was some movement and they happened to shoot at something they wouldn’t want them to get hurt. The girls asked if they were being threatened and he said, no, they were just concerned for their safety. At this point there were only six or seven men left, so the girls went home.

8/9/2005

With only a few days to go I’m spending the morning trying to get my computer ready. It’s not easy because anything I mail will be unavailable to me till after my family reunion in Ontario, and I’ll not have it to show folks when I get there. I guess what I’ll have to do is email some shots from each folder and then take things off. It’s that or risk losing the computer at the airport.

On Sunday we visited the Shefayim Kibbutz and met Amos Gvritz whose name and address we used to facilitate entry into the country. This was a welcome conclusion to our travels because I especially wanted to see him after he had taken the time to come to the airport and greet us and guarantee our admission.

He sat all 25 of us, including driver and guide, in his modest living room where there were glasses and water and soft drinks, together with a few snacks and said he hoped we were having a good time, if such a thing were possible in this country. 

He said his kibbutz as well as many others were in real trouble at the moment but he would talk of that at the end if we were interested. He did and it was a pleasant relief from all the grim contemplating we had been doing till then. The Kibbutz is a form of socialism he believes in, although he almost left on a couple of occasions. It was simply an arrangement whereby a group of people attempted to create a classless society. They recognized that they would have different rates of consumption but this was compensated by equal access to whatever it was they consumed. In the matter of apartments, seniority decided who had the best (so evidently you couldn’t just get the biggest by having the most kids).

Anyway, it seemed that the crisis he was referring to was the challenge of globalization to all small business and agriculture. At the Shefayim Kibbutz enterprise had been diversified so as to protect the group from failure in any particular activity, but they still needed some market protection because they were in business on a small scale. ( I didn’t understand this at the time of our meeting. These assertions were worked out through conversation on the bus afterward.)

‘What is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict about? Before Zionism, say 120 years ago, the population in these parts was about 10 % Jewish, and they lived in four main centers: Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberius (and one other I didn’t catch).

‘In 1948, before the war, a third of the population was Jewish and lived on seven percent of the land. Today 80 % of the population in Israel is Jewish and the state holds 96 % of the land. So what happened? Basically, one society invaded another and displaced it. And that process continues today. The aim of Israel is to squeeze the Palestinians into smaller and smaller areas. If we look at Gaza, there are 1.2 m people whose lands have been taken so that even here (where the population density is the greatest in the world) 34 % of this tiny area is in the hands of some 8000 Jewish settlers.

‘During this Intifada alone some 5000 Palestinian houses have been demolished, 3000 of these in Gaza. You cannot make peace with a state that is continuing to take land and housing away from you. Israel has even evicted 750 people from caves.

‘What is war? Normally we think of war as a clash between two armed groups. But if a clerk comes along with a piece of paper and tells you that you do not own the land you are living on and therefore must leave, either quietly or through a rougher and more brutal eviction, and if this goes on daily all around you in larger and smaller examples, I would call it an act of war. 

‘Usually the government will say a house was built illegally, with reference to some previous confiscation of a large tract of land. But how can people accept this? The family that has received its notice of eviction lives in panic because they do not know when the army is going to come and destroy their home. It will be terrible if the man of the house is away at the time of the demolition and the woman and children have to face this event by themselves. But perhaps it is even more terrible if the man happens to be home when they come, because he can do nothing. There are thousands of people living under these demolition orders right now.

‘And if the children who witness this calamity come back to visit destruction on Israel who can honestly claim to be surprised? Yet the majority of Israelis do not seem to know there are acts of war underpinning suicide bombings in their cities. Stealing water, stealing land, destroying houses: these are all acts of war.

‘The conflict most similar to this one was that between native Americans and the Europeans who invaded them. And those wars did not have to have taken place either. 

‘The ideal model for introducing new people into a country was provided by the Quakers. They came to America and bought the land they subsequently lived on, refusing to accept that the land belonged to the King of England. Rather, they said, it belongs to the people living on it. Therefore they made honest transactions and proceeded to live peacefully with their red brethren for some seventy years, at which time they (the Quakers) became outnumbered and the situation degenerated into what it was everywhere else in North America.

‘I understand the second Intifada (which has been far more violent than the first), but it has to be recognized that the end result has been to make things worse for the Palestinians in almost every way. [He mentions particularly the destruction of agricultural land, with hundreds of thousands of olive trees being pulled up, but the collapse of the economy and restrictions on movement might also have been cited.] Now, with all the attention on Gaza, Sharon is speeding things up in the West Bank again. So what is to be done?

‘Nonviolence is the only viable approach and there are good reasons to think it would work. If we take the example of the civil rights movement in the US: the demonstrators went out week after week and put the situation squarely in the public eye. Time and again they showed who was right and who was wrong; who was moral and who was not. In the end they showed who were the brutes and who were the real people, and when the public could stand it no longer, the necessary changes were made.

‘In the 1980s the PLO decided to commission a ship to bring them from Tunisia to Haifa. This was in imitation of the Jewish refugees, some of whose ships are still preserved there as museum pieces. Israel was so afraid of this happening that it sent its submarines to bomb the ship before it loaded. And they sank it in the harbor to prevent this potentially damaging publicity. They fully understood the meaning such an event would have in public consciousness.

‘And yet, the majority of people in the western world think Israel is the victim. They think that it is the one being attacked by terrorists, that it is struggling to survive and maintain civilization in opposition to these savages. 

‘Preventive nonviolence must demand an end to land theft, water theft, house demolitions, illegal settlements and human rights abuses. These are the crimes that provoke the other side.

‘Every conscientious objector does some good. Those who refuse to serve in the OPT do an act of preventive nonviolence. Those who boycott goods taken out of the OPT do an act of preventive nonviolence. But the solution must come from outside intervention.

‘Take the analogy of two children fighting. If a third child comes along and stands between them, neither of the children will attack him. Normally, fighting can be stopped by a third party as, for example, when the UN stands between the Greeks and Turks. 

‘In the case of Israel there is the example of Christian Peacemaker Teams. (Someone raises the fact that these teams have indeed been attacked by settlers, and he says yes, but the settlers know their limits. They will not kill members of CPT.) The International Solidarity Movement, ISM, is another example. They are pro-Palestinian but they provide only nonviolent support intended to halt Israeli aggression. In a tiny village near Nablus the inhabitants had been attacked so many times everyone left but two old people who said they were staying even if they were killed. ISM came along and brought the villagers back.’ (he stops for questions)

Sol tells Amos that he (Sol) is of Jewish background but is now a Quaker. When he is at home in the US, he stands in protest at various functions designed to garner support for Israel, often in the rain and cold. For his reward he is called a self-hating Jew and otherwise insulted. Sol is near tears telling this and ends by wondering what is to be done. This behavior of Israel is contrary to Judaism. 

Amos said something about the Heroes of Mitsada (sp? I didn’t catch it). He goes on to say that during the Gulf war there was a political party that openly advocated transfer of Palestinians to Jordan. The fact that this party could gain enough support to be included in the government was appalling to him, so similar was it to the beginnings of a quest for a ‘final solution’ in Germany. Then, in 1997, when the Jahline Bedouin were forcibly transferred from their lands he felt that a moral line had been crossed and knew himself to be an anti-Zionist from then on.

Someone asks about his own career and he says he did military service unwillingly and with the knowledge that if he ever killed anyone he would kill himself right afterward. His time as a reservist entailed much bickering with the IDF, which could have jailed him, but in the end the authorities made creative use of his services in a nonviolent capacity.

Referring to Oslo, when illegal building was speeded up and many house demolitions occurred, he pooh poohs the idea that the situation was very complicated. The 4th Geneva Convention was written because some people knew what it felt like to lose a war and live under occupation. Thus it was that rules were written for the occupiers. Israel had two scholars working on the creation of this document and was one of the first states to sign and ratify it. Yet now Israel says this treaty does not apply because Jordan and Egypt used to own the West Bank and Gaza. This is pure, legalistic double-talk and the rest of the world, with the exception of the USA which has frequently used its veto power in the Security Council to protect Israel, does not accept it. There is no valid excuse for human rights abuses in the OPT.

He thinks the Palestinian move seeking ‘advisory opinion’ from the International Court of Justice was brilliant. It provided an embarrassing, if non-binding, decision against Israel.

How does he survive here, holding the opinions he does? An acquaintance told him he was a very nice man but that if he were in charge of the government, he, Amos, would be in jail. Still, he says, it’s a democracy, if you’re Jewish. Someone asks about the paradox of that and he says that the first democracy (in Greece) was a society of slave owners, as was the USA. Today, we may hope for higher standards, but in any case, he remains able to function. A history student, on the other hand, who merely reported on being told of a massacre in the 1948 war, had threats on his life.

Asked about The Wall, he says Sharon did not want to build it because it implied a border. However, having it forced upon him as he did, he took as much land as possible and tried to keep the Settlements mostly on the ‘Israeli’ side. 

Asked about Gaza as a source of inspiration for more violent resistance in the West Bank, he denies that the violent resistance in Gaza was itself is the reason for Israel’s departure. It was mainly a matter of negotiating between Israel and President Bush. Pressed on the matter of how it might nevertheless appear to the common man, he allows that the arguments of Hamas might have some validity but they should hold very little appeal to thinking people. What they are saying, he says, is that they propose to take the model of Vietnam or Algeria or any number of other places where the occupied people lost all the battles but won the war. That would be fine if you didn’t want any kind of a life for a few generations. But if you wanted to live during your own lifetime, it would not be the way. 

Remembering an interview with a hostile journalist, Amos said he was accused of being anti-Israel. His response was that he was fighting for Human Rights and for Peace; if this implied that he was against Israel then it followed that Israel must be against Human Rights and against Peace. He said the tone of the interview became much friendlier. 

It’s almost dark and the guide calls a halt for the sake of the bus driver. One final question is allowed from Christina, our beautiful Chilean nurse/belly dancer. She says, ‘Without going into examples, what do you think about terrorism?’

He says: ‘I will tell you a story. A pirate was disrupting shipping so the navy was called out to catch him. When they had caught him the admiral ordered that the pirate be brought before him and he asked: Why are you a pirate? The pirate said, because I only have three ships. If I had eighty, like you, I’d be an admiral.’

8/10/2005

Yesterday we went shopping before our Arabic class and afterward ended up in Nativity Square. There were many Koreans dancing and singing, using their amplification systems as they will, and generally having a fine time. The local children were into it too, often with a Korean on each arm or, if they were very short, on each hand. Soon the smells and sounds led me to a free sample of Korean food and a small plateful of kim chi and meatballs had me very much in the mood to watch the dance.

I blessed them then but doubly bless them again today. I was working along in a cubicle at Holy Land Trust when I heard the call to come and watch a Korean Peace Parade that was going to go by in a few minutes. Not wanting to miss it in large part but not wanting to stand in the sun for five or ten minutes before it came, I more or less kept working with one eye on the window, like a civil servant. Finally, afraid of missing them I got up and went out onto Manger Street to endure the sun. They were already going by, but on the far side of the street where I had been unable to see them.

Well what a lift! They were there in the thousands! I stood on that blasted sidewalk till I was almost sun-struck, and still they kept coming. It got to a point where I wondered if there were any of them left in Korea, or alternatively, whether they were going around in a circle. (They all look the same.)

But that didn’t matter a tinker’s damn. Around here, and in the world in general, one feels a sense of relief to be in the company of thirty or so like-minded people on the issue of Palestine/Israel. And here they came in the thousands: brightly costumed, singing, dancing, bearing big banners that said God Loves Palestine, beating drums and so on. It was almost enough to make a grown man cry. However, I kept a lid on it and only clapped and waved. 

The HLT people happened to have a Palestinian flag they brought out for waving and the Koreans descried it and focused upon ’t with joy. They cried out to us in English and Arabic: Shalom! Peace! Is-salem allykum! and the like, and we, in our turns cried back unto them in similar terms (not knowing a word of Korean at the time, but determined to learn one or two for the next such occasion). We clapped and made peace signs and thumbs up and waved our arms, all of the foregoing a-smiling. 

One of our boys was wrapped in another banner that I didn’t recognize but knew must be good. It was a moment such as one feels when rescued from the icy North Atlantic, I suppose; or the middle of the Sahara desert by a passing caravan with a free camel and bottle of water.

 The Israelis had already been to town in the morning, shooting the place up and setting off explosions, seizing the brothers of people they wanted in lieu of them, making their iron fisted-efforts to erase their woes with force. The rest of the day was ours.

I wanted to mail a bunch of my own papers, plus pamphlets and Arabic books, cd player and electric cords for the camera, etc. So I put them all in plastic bags and brought them up to HLT in order to be driven to the best shipping place by Rafat. Just before Arabic classes he took me to what looked like a grocery store with a few bottles of liquor and we made an effort to weigh the three plastic bagfuls I had. They wouldn’t all stay on the scales together and we didn’t trust the process of addition so made wild guesses as the top bag slid off the other two. It looked like it was between 9 and 10 kilos. 

The fellow behind the front desk didn’t feel qualified to do it himself so he said to come back later when the boss would be in. I asked if they’d be open at 5 and he said they would be open till 9 in the evening. Rafat said it was fine to just leave everything on the floor toward the back, so I did, without so much as an address in it. I left class at about 4:20 to be safe and returned to the store to find that the owner still not present.

The store opened again at 7 in the morning but the owner wouldn’t be in till 9. I took my flash jet for another transfer of computer stuff and came down to the Bethlehem hotel to write and drink beer for a while before our evening lecture on The Wall.

In the lobby I saw weary Koreans and congratulated them.