salamfrombetty

This is my final post from this last tour of duty.  I’ve been home nearly two weeks now.  I will be returning to Palestine and to this blog in the autumn.  I’m coming back for the olive harvest, for my friends in Hebron, for the food, and to preserve my own sanity and sense of utility.  

While I was in Hebron this last time, it seemed like really hardly anything happened, good or bad.  As soon as my back is turned it all kicks off: good things like the Nablus festival and the festival of music and crafts in Hebron, the welcome back party for the four al-Khalili activists arrested on Land Day; bad things like the road blocks, closed checkpoints, delays and detentions so settlers can celebrate Pesach, whole streets of Palestinian shops abruptly  closed for the same reason, the Ibrahimi mosque stormed by hundreds of settlers, a child assaulted by settlers, soldiers invading the old city and the beautiful public garden, the arrest for peaceful demonstration of the al-Khalili four, the military court hearing and ongoing injustice hanging over them, the children faced with military training manoeuvres and sound grenades on their way to school. Have I missed anything out? Oh, certainly.

Now I am not saying remotely that I want bad things to happen to my beloved Hebron.  Just that if they have to happen it’s too bad that I’m not there standing with my Hebronite friends.  

Look out for me in autumn.  I’ll be back.

This is my hotel bedroom in East Jerusalem.  I left al-Khalil this morning in fog and spots of rain and am settled in here to prepare for return: I am cleaning off my laptop and phone and preparing a delicious and detailed story of travels in lovely Israel in case I need it in Ben Gurion.  Inshallah I don’t.  My mind is in the departure lounge already.

Meanwhile, today, four activists from al-Khalil face  the military court in Ofer, with the near certainty of large fines and the distinct possibility of administrative detention (no evidence needed against you, no idea of your release date, a British invention here in Palestine).  Their crime? To be Palestinian and to resist.

* according to the Israeli courts, but not international law

This is my friend Badee Dwaik being arrested with four other long term activists here on Thursday at an action for Land Day planting olive trees on Palestinian land in H2.  He faces charges tomorrow in a military court for participating in an illegal demonstration and being in a closed military zone. (Be aware, all demonstrations in the Israeli controlled West Bank are illegal, and a closed military zone is pretty much what and where the army decides it is.)  ISM were at the action and reported.  To my regret, I wasn’t able to go.  

Badee and his friends at Human Rights Defenders provide some of the cameras that expose the injustice of this occupation.  Without them, the world would not have known about the extra-judicial killing last March here in Hebron  of a young Palestinian and the soldier responsible would never have been tried at all.  

Ironically, the latest film to be uploaded to their website is that of Badee’s own arrest (below).

I have been working with Badee to publicise his new work putting cameras in schools and training a new generation of young child activists to defend their own human rights and document the harassment and danger they face as schoolchildren here.

He and two of his friends were due to come to the UK (including to Nottingham) next month to talk about this work.  That is now very unlikely.  Even if Badee is not sent to prison it is unlikely now that he will get the necessary visa from the Israeli authorities to travel.

Looks like a lot of letter writing to embassies and MPs may be coming up.  

stuffed neck of lamb at Abu Mazen restaurant, al Khalil

Readers who have been paying close attention, and perhaps those that know me well, may have noticed that I have sounded rather tired of late.  My steam has finally fairly much run out and I have changed my flight home to a week earlier.  I will be finishing off the things that I have been especially responsible for while I have been here, and saying goodbye to particular friends and I will be back in the UK by the middle of next week.

I’m sad to go: there are new people coming into the organisation with new energy, there is a great sounding festival opening up the old city and the souk soon, and there is the fact that I will have to miss the Nablus arts festival and the hammam that I had promised myself at the close of this trip.   But there is next time...

normalisation* Khalili style

I meet people new to al-Khalil who have just had circumstances here explained to them: ‘...and here are the bags of faeces and urine that are thrown by settlers; and this is where one of the extra-judicial killings took place; and this is my friend who lost two pregnancies when settlers attacked her’.  They look at the fortified checkpoints, the children passing through to school, the graffiti (’Gas The Arabs’), the shop doors welded shut and the empty streets, soldiers everywhere and settlers strolling by with automatic weapons.

They are horrified.  Of course.  Like me when I first came.  They grasp for metaphor: Kafka, Orwell, Catch-22, Alice in Wonderland.  I remember this well. The ironies were so unlikely, so glaring, that they actually made me laugh.  I didn’t know where to put the information in the filing system of my brain.  I didn’t know the words to convey it to you dear readers.  

But now it is normal.  It is where I live.  The beige and sand colours of the stone buildings, dusty streets, soldiers’ uniforms, jeeps.  It is a landscape.  

We talked to two new friends last week, Palestinians, old ISMers who want to be involved again.  We talked of Oslo, of the PA, of the soft creeping closure of any sense of possibility for Palestinians, the encroachment on land, on hope, on the hobbled economy, on any space for resistance.  Like a frog in a pan of water: you turn the heat on and the frog cooks gently, degree by degree.

It is hot, it is uncomfortable, it is getting worse every day, but it is the water the Palestinians have to live in here in the West Bank.  I don’t have to live here for ever.  My friends do.

homesick

I sat in a smoke-filled bar last night in Ramallah with beers and young internationals, and I felt old (and a little bored) and I wanted to be home.

update on my post on hijab

making mujadarra for a house-full while listening to this and other classics.  I know this music three times: once on the radio in my teens, once in my twenties in the clubs of Manchester, and once in the kitchen at breakfast with Harry and Kate.

to...

hi guys

Humiliation? No, sumud

This is my very dear friend Abd, who miraculously managed to pick me up when I had a depressive crash two days after arriving.  He is trying to go home through the Shuhada street checkpoint as he has to do most days. He gives his number (as a resident of the neighbourhood, the only way he will get in) and shows his ID.  He passes through a metal detector which beeps.  He faces the soldiers, standing fresh faced and confident behind the glass, and they bark at him: he must take off his shoes.

This encounter encapsulates occupation.  The Israeli forces look every Palestinian in the eye every day and say: we can do what we want with you, we have complete impunity, and you must submit or suffer our power.  And this is our power: we can turn you away, rummage in your bags, trash your house in the middle of the night, we can body search you for no reason at all, spread-eagled on a wall, we can tear gas your children; we can shoot at you, imprison you without trial, in the end, kill you; we can humiliate you daily.

And this is our power: America funds us to the tune of $3.8billion a year and covers our back at the UN.  Nobody will come to save you.

But wait: humiliation? That is the word that Abd used when he posted this video yesterday.  I hope Palestinians do not feel humiliated.  They do not look humiliated to me as I watch them go through this, from my position of privilege, ever.  

Tourist for a day...

A trip to Bethlehem where hordes of reverent pilgrims and scaffolding inside the Church of the Nativity remind me of Rome.

thinking a lot about women and hijab...

I had a great conversation with new friends here on International Womens’ Day about conservatism in Hebron, their lives, hijab, and western pressures on women (worsening greatly since my own youth I think).  I had also just read a great book* by Leila Ahmed on her journey from liberal 1950s Cairo to a US campus women’s studies faculty today.  She has also written on hijab as a complex symbol, indicator and tool for women within and without Muslim communities and that will be one of my next reads.

This is what my Hebron friends here had to say (I think): they would like Hebron to be less conservative and they would like to have more freedom as women than they do; it is changing, but it is slow.  Freedoms like being able to move around the city on their own, which some girls do not have, are more important than wearing or not wearing hijab.  It seemed to me that they were willing for their freedoms to come more slowly so that they did not have to lose all that is immensely valuable here about being part of the family.  Not only that, but it is almost impossible to draw away from family, even if you wanted to: incomes are too low for independent living and even in Ramallah, you are judged for living as a woman alone.

They see hijab as a statement of religious feeling, and of modesty and privacy in the face of sexual pressure, but they see many women around them responding only to the pressures of the community. 

Finally, they agreed with Leila Ahmed’s idea (I think), that hijab could provide a useful signal that reassured family and community that they were ‘serious Muslim women’ and then enabled them to get on with the things that were valuable to them: studying, having professional lives and moving independently around their world.

I say ‘I think’ twice because this was a proper conversation between women, not an interview.  I hope I got some of their views right and I am just beginning to explore and not to conclude on these things.