Some emails I wrote to friends when I was there

Email to friend Phillip 13/07/11

Hi Phillip,

How are you?  This is just a short email to let you know that everything is good.  I am living in the refugee camp with Mustafa and his family.  He and his family, mother wife and baby daughter.  Lots of young nephews and nieces come round all the time.  I am sitting here at the internet.  Above me is a plasma screen on which the others are watching a film on a satellite channel from Abu Dabi.  It is getting late.  I have been teaching here for about a week, trying to avoid the sun, sitting drinking thick Arabic coffee. 

The only problem is that since the death of Juliano Mer Khamis, there have been some restrictions on our movement.  We have to move around, especially in the camp, with our hosts or other locals. This has been a bit hard sometimes, especially as I like to wander around by myself sometimes.  The camp (which is really a warren of small streets and concrete houses) is about a kilometre from the town, which is itself busy with markets, chaotic crowds.  

I have started to write a blog, which is a bit slow because I don't have access to the internet all the time.  Today has been a good day.  Once or twice I have been a bit down.  Having a bit of trouble with some of the other volunteers, who are much younger than me, and seem to resent me if I take any sort of a lead, but at the same time expect me to do so.  Generally though everything is good and I am glad I am here.  I will be in Jenin until 26th July, then go on to Abu Dis to catch up with my friends there for a day, and then spend two days in Jaffa to meet my cousin Peter (I am determined not to have our usual pointless argument this time) and his son Yaniv who I like very much.

Email to friend Monika 15/07/11:

Hi Monika,

I am having an interesting time.  Relaxing though it is not.  I am in Palestine again this year, this time not in Abu Dis which was a relative piece of cake compared to where I am now.  Four other volunteers (all much younger women) and I are volunteering in Jenin refugee camp.  We are all staying in the camp ('camp' doesn't mean tents by the way as I thought when I first heard of it.  It is a residential area of crowded streets and concrete houses about one kilometre away from Jenin city).  We are staying with families all of whom are incredibly hospitable.  Palestinian hospitality is famous.  My host Mustafa, is a man of about 40 who lives with his mother and wife and a lovely eight year old daughter, called Mais.  When he was 16, during the first intifada, he was shot in the back by an Israeli sniper, and lost the use of his legs.  He goes around in a wheelchair.  He is amazingly cheerful generous man, not bitter, not angry.  We go around a lot.  He is very skilled at table tennis.  He learnt quite a lot of English during the time he was in physical rehab in Ramallah and Jerusalem.  We talk in English and Arabic.  All the people in the camp are descendants of refugees mainly from the Haifa area.  
 
There is so much to say about all this.  I am keeping a blog bit by bit when I have the opportunity.  It is at www.jeninvolunteer.blogspot.com
The area is not entirely safe.  I don't know whether you heard, but in April this year, an amazing man called Juliano Mer-Khamis, half-Jewish half-Palestinian Christian actor and director of the groundbreaking Freedom Theatre here in the camp, was shot dead 'by persons unknown' just five minutes from where I am living.  Other things have happened in the camp and the town too, rumours abound (was it conservatives, fundamentalists hostile to foreigners or to liberal influences, or maybe the Israelis as lots of people are saying?)  Anyway, we have to go around accompanied, which is a bit of a bind, as I like to wander around by myself sometimes.  One problem for me about Palestinian life, is the constant sociability with very little break to be private, which I find quite stressful sometimes.  Needless to say I have decided to be a little more closeted about being Jewish than I was in Abu Dis, though I think some people know, though in a very tactful way they are keeping quiet about it, and touchingly protecting me by keeping the information from getting into more hostile hands.
 
I am writing this from near another refugee camp called Al Farah, half way between Jenin and Nablus.  I have been taken here by Marwan our main contact here, who works for the Palestinian authority.  Here in the building where he works, there is a week long residential summer camp for children from all over the West Bank.  All the boys and girls on it have lost at least one member of their family, fathers brothers etc, who were killed by the Israelis and are called Shahids (martyrs).  It is beautiful, and I have been fighting back tears all morning.  They do sport, English, art, music, write poetry.  I have visited a class organised by a poet.  The children have been writing letters to the souls of their dead loved ones and placing them in envelopes.  Can you imagine?  It breaks me up now to think about it.
 

Another email to Phillip 19/07/11

Hi Phillip,

I am in the office of the Rehabilitation Centre in Jenin Camp.  I am going to have a conversation class with some of the staff members in about half an hour.  The centre does wonderful work with children and young people with cerebral palsy and other physical problems, some of which have been caused by accidents some by birth traumas.   One of the staff members Walid makes surgical shoes, another Mahmoud makes prosthetic limbs.  They have a room where they can help children with learning difficulties caused by brain damage, and they also train parents to look after their children.  The centre is also a place where young student physiotherapists can do their practicals. There is a university outside Jenin called the Arab American University where they study.  Funnily enough a lot of Israeli Palestinians study there.  I was talking to one yesterday a very bright and friendly young woman from a village outside Haifa.  (The border is only a few miles a way.  A few days ago we all went to the house of one of our friends here Hisham who lives in another part of the camp up a steep hill.  From there you can look out over the bleached countryside westwards up a range a hills, and there along the crest is the border with Israel.  You can see it is Israel because from there you can see that it is heavily forested, and here the countryside is dry and yellow.  'They have more water', I say to Hisham.  'They have more of everything', he replies. Beyond the hills not very far away is the very different world of Haifa and the Mediterranean).  The young woman has an Israeli passport, comes across a checkpoint every day to the university or here to do her practical.  'How do you see yourself?’  I ask her.  'Are you an Israeli Arab or a Palestinian?'  'I am a Palestinian', she replies.  'It is all the same to me.  Other people where I come from will say something different'.   

Today in the middle of a class, I was terrified by the sudden noise of a jet flying in low over the town. Sef told me about this, something that he had experienced when he was here.  He saw a plane flying really low, heard a huge roar, he thought the plane was going to launch a missile. The noise comes suddenly out of nowhere, a huge roar.  It happens once or twice a month.  Israeli jets training.  But they probably don't do it over Israel itself.  Basically they don't give a shit, or they are doing it deliberately to intimidate and frighten, which it certainly does.  The kids were very blasé about it, as is Mustafa when I mentioned it just now.  But it must traumatise people over time.  People must internalise the sudden shock.  It must affect the kids there.  Mustafa's daughter Mais, a lovely sensitive beautiful child of 8, cries easily, gets nervous and afraid, always has presentiments that things are going to happen to her dad, Mustafa says. 

I have been having good conversations with Mustafa.  Did I tell you about him?  He is in a wheelchair, having been shot in the back when he was 16 during the first intifada in 1987.  'I actually met the soldier who shot me.  It was a time when I went into Israel for treatment.  I was introduced to the soldier.  “Why did you shoot me?” I asked him.  'Because you were throwing stones', he answered, which I wasn't.  Anyway, he never apologised, because if he had there would have been a black mark against him on his military record.   When the soldier shot me, funnily enough I didn't feel any pain, but I suddenly lost my sight, although it came back later.  I knew anyway that I would never walk again.  They sent me for rehabilitation to a centre near Ramallah, where they taught me to use a wheelchair, to wash myself, to use the toilet.  Then I came back here.  There were doctors from Sweden there, who were very good.  One man was a Jewish man from that country.  He was called David like you.  I called him Doctor David, and that is why I call you Doctor David'.

We play chess, ('Jatarange'), which I haven't done since I was a uni, and I am still not very good.  We also play a strange game called Idris, which is like drafts but more interesting.  Mustafa kept telling me the rules as we went along.  He is so generous that he keeps telling me when I am about to make a mistake, what move I should be making, so I end up winning or drawing.

I think the class is about to begin so I will write more later.

Email  to friend Alix 22/07/11:

Hi Alix,
 
Thank you for your invitation.  I will be very pleased to be added to your professional network.  I am not sure how it works, I will have to research it when I get back to London.  At the moment I am sitting in an internet cafe in the refugee camp in Jenin Palestine.  I have been volunteering here for the last few weeks, staying with a family, learning a lot, having some amazing and intense emotional experiences .  It is so strange today.  It is Friday, and at the moment you can here the mu'ezzin's call for midday prayers.  Before I was in town with my host Mustafa.  We passed a cd shop.  Through one speaker the call to prayers was being broadcast.  On the other you could hear some Arabic house music.  I wish I had had a recorder to capture it.  Mustafa says that putting together both kinds of music is haram (forbidden), but I thought it really does show something about this society, how complicated it is.  You keep meeting contradictions at every turn.  I went to some events in a cultural festival here earlier in the week.  It was bloody amazing.  One of the highpoints was a feminist comedy sketch involving two women, one older and more traditional one younger and trendier.  It was quite difficult to follow but with the help of some others I got some of the gist.  Apparently the two women represented Palestinians living in Israel (a more 'progressive' westernised but also a colonialist country).  The older woman was at a hospital to get a nose job so that she could attract a husband.  The younger woman, who was young and trendily dressed was embarrassed by her friend, was berating her for being backward and traditional.  Some banter between the two followed.  The culmination of the sketch was when the older woman told the younger, 'Here (in Israel) everyone is equal, women are equal to men but Palestinians will never be equal to Israelis'.  Everybody in the audience roared with laughter of course.  There is so much to write about here, I have only had sporadic access to the internet and anyway I have been so revved up that I have not been able to write so much in my blog as I have in previous years when I was in Abu Dis 
 
some beautiful Arabic music, Lebanese I think, has just started up from somewhere, thick strings passionate love lyrics.   I told one of my fellow volunteers yesterday, 'I am not in love, but in love with the idea of love' (from St. Augustine), which is a different thing. Something that has just occurred to me.
 
What I love about Palestinian / Arab culture, is the mixture of intense emotion with formality and gentility, it is mind-blowing sometimes.  I am going to buy some cds of different kinds of music I love here, if I can get them past the fucking gestapo at Ben Gurion airport. 

From my Journal Sunday 17th July 2011

Two of my fellow volunteers Wanda and Bethan took a taxi down to the Dead Sea from Ramallah. The taxi driver is a Muslim Palestinian. The car is stopped by soldiers, who as soon as they see a Quran in the taxi turn nasty. "Why have you got those bitches in the car?' they ask.

Zainab and Sana the other two volunteers also go down to the Dead Sea.  There they meet an Israeli woman.  Because Zainab and Sana are dark skinned (they are of Pakistani origin) and speak 'good' English, the Israeli assumes that they are Israeli.  But as soon as they say that they have come from Ramalllah the woman's assitude changes.  She becomes cold and distant.

I have been thinking about the shahid (martyr) in Al-Farah camp.  The man was shot in both thighs for "being in the wrong place at the wrong time".  There is a small report on the bbc website.  The army has come out with a statement.  It speaks of 'procedures' that have to be followed, the cruel military bureaucratic language which has also brought us 'collateral damage'. 

In another UK paper online, I find this quote, describing life in Tel Aviv. "Meanwhile this September , Israelis all go to the beach, look out over the Mediterannean sea and pretend they are in Europe".

Today we go to Hisham's family's house.  Hisham teaches physiotherapy at the Arab Armerican university just outside the town.  He also organises an informal sports club for disabled people in the camp.  He is on the Palestine para-Olympic committee.  He is in his thirties about to get married.  He has lived in England in Southampton where he studied for his masters.  Now he is living at home.  His house, a large one of several stories, is on the edge of the camp.  You get to it up a steep hill.  You can feel the wind.  Out of the westward facing window you can look across at the border with Israel, which skirts along a line of hills in the distance. You can see the line where the border is, the trees and oter vegetation get thicker, greener, more lush, because the Israelis even in this period of drought, have access to more water. (Often the running water stops in Mustafa's house.  When that happens, I 'shower' with water poured from plastic cans. ) "They (the Israelis) have more water", I say to Hisham.  "They have more of everything", he replies.

Marwan and Hisham are frustrated that when it comes to services and funds, Jenin Camp is left out of the loop and loses out every time to Jenin Town. This seems to be another symptom of inequalities in Palestinian society. The town or some of it is relatively less poor.  On Haifa Street, there are large cafes and restaurants.  The camp by contrast has narrow streets a shortage of doctors, schools and leisure areas, althgough some of the houses are large (not always a sign of wealth in Palestine). There are some professional families that live there too because they have grown up there, have come from refugee families, have lived through some of hte dark events of the past, that have created a very close bond among the people there. 

Hisham tells about what happened during the fighting in 2002.  "There was fighting.  The soldiers came with bulldozers.  We hid in the basement.  My brother, who knows Hebrew heard the soldiers talking.  Some of them were crying and cursing Sharon.  'We are going to die, we don't want to be here' [some of them would have been just kids of 20]. 

Mustafa told me an amazing story.  One of his relatives, the cousin of his mother, lives in Israel and was in the Israeli army.  In 2002, there was a knock on the door of his house in the camp.  It was his cousin in Israeli uniform.

More from my journal 15th July 2011

Marwan, who works for the Palestinian Authority takes me out to his workplace, as it is Friday, the day of rest here and my day off from teaching. He has a house in the Jenin camp but works in Farah, a small town about twenty kilometres south, half way between Jenin and Nablus. Farah, as well as well as having a large administrative complex, is the also the home of another refugee camp, a bit smaller than Jenin's, maybe of about 8,000 people.

We drive in silence along a dusty road bare hills on either side. Suddenly he tells me. 'You know two years ago I could not have used this road. Over there (he points to a ruined cluster of buildings on a hill on the other side ofa valley to our right), there was an Israeli military base. If any car or other vehicle went along this road they would automatically shoot at it. It was very dangerous then.

We arrive at Farah. Marwan shows me his office, which is full of medals and certificates, and a picture of him shaking the hand of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. After that, I have a bit of free time to wander about the refugee camp. Some of the walls are covered with fresh pictures of the young man, Shahid (martyr), who has just been shot dead the day before by Israeli soldiers following "procedures". I have already written about this. I wander into a back street, and a woman with a baby allows me to photograph her.

Marwan's office is part of a large administrative complex. There are other offices to do with the Palestinian Authority. The buildings have an interesting history. They were put up by the British in the 1930's when they ruled Palestine. Then the Israelis used them as a detention centre for Palestinians in the seventies and eighties. Now the Palestinian Authority has them. There is a large abandoned football stadium outside, covered with weeds. Marwan says that they hope to return it to its original use.

At the moment, because it is summer and the school year has finished, the complex is housing a series of residential summer camps for teenagers from all over the West Bank. There is one going on today. It is for young men and women who have lost a family member, father brother sister, as a result of the conflict. We meet some of the teenagers and the teachers. They stay there for a week, they have sports events, English classes, painting, even a resident poet. I talk to the poet, and I almost start to cry when he tells me what they are doing. They are making drawings and writing letters to their dead loved ones and posting them on the walls. I talk to a young woman called Miriam, who is spirited, teases me when I momentarily forget her name.

Later we go into a gym where a group of kids are receiving medals for gymnastics and other sports. Marwan wants me to give out the medals. 'What is congratulations in Arabic?', I whisper. 'MaBruk', he says. Like the Hebrew word, Baruch - blessed. So I place the medals which are tied to coloured ribbons around the necks of the athletes. MaBruk, MaBruk.

More from my notes 15th July .......

He has got many friends Mustafa, he seems to know everyone in the camp and many people in the town. Every time we go out, we stop and talk to someone new. One of his friends sits outside his house on the Shariah Ouda - Return Street - in the camp. He is a school teacher, he has white hair and wears a permanently ironic expression. He is constantly teasing Mustafa, who receives it all in good humour. 'This man is an elephant, a donkey', the school teacher says to me in English, indicating Mustafa. Afterwards I ask Mustafa, if he is offended by being compared to a donkey, which is I think quite an insult in Middle Eastern cultures. 'No, it's just a joke. I have known him for years. I tease him too'.



Another time, we leave the camp and go down to the main road called Haifa Road which used to go from Jenin west towards the coast at Haifa. There is a checkpoint now of course not many miles down the road. We stop at a coffee kiosk. A small crowd of people, sitting, drinking coffee and chatting. We sit down, Mustafa and me, on some upturned plastic crates and drink and chat. Suddenly I hear someone, one of the coffee-drinkers repeating in English, "Objective, Subjective, Objective, Subjective". A Lewis Carroll moment. Mustafa asks me, "What does Objective, and Subjective mean". I get fired up by this, related as it is to my philosophy interests, and I start to describe to him what I think the differences are. Then I ask him,


"Who is that man who keeps repeating 'Objective, Subjective'?"

"Oh him, he is a member of the secret police" (Palestinian)

"What does he do all day?"

"Oh he just sits around, drinking coffee watching and listening".


It is strange this moment, surreal and seemingly childlike, innocent. But later, after I have returned to London, I find out that there is something more sinister to all this. There are two main parties in Palestine: Fatah, secular nominally left-wing, and Hamas religious conservative. In 2007 there was a bloody civil war betwen them in Gaza. Since then Hamas has ruled in Gaza, Fatah in the West Bank. In both areas, there is suppression of the supporters of the other party. The secret policeman is probably listening out for signs of Hamas supporters.

More notes that I took last Summer

Friday 08/07/11 .......

I have been thinking about this blog. I need to be careful about it become too official, written for other potential volunteers, to encourage them, or to present a particular political viewpoint. My sympathies in this and other blogs are fairly clear. But I want my thoughts to run freely, to present the paradoxical nature of things here, which does not always lend itself to a black and white presentation. And then there are times when I wish I was safe at home, when I ask myself how and why I have ended up here.

I would like to start in the middle of things, without too much in the way of background information. Such as "the camp is not different from the town, but everybody here behaves as though it was".

It is night. Mustafa has taken his daughter Mais to the hospital, there are doctors on duty in their equivalent of our A & E departments. There are three or four doctors on duty all night to serve the whole camp, he tells me. So there is a long wait. Mais is delicate and nervous. She has a recurring fear that something will happen to her father and she will be left alone. I often hear children playing in the streets very late at night, including Mais and her mates.

... Tuesday 12/07/11 ....

The lack of privacy is the thing that is most difficult at the moment. That I can't go wandering around as I want to.

... Thursday 14/07/11 ...

The days of July go by. I don't really care either way what happens to me. Do you know what the most difficult thing is for me? it is the constant desire of everyone around me for sociability. Sometimes it is thrilling, sometimes I feel squeezed out within.

When I ask people if tere is going to be peace, they will say no, there won't be peace.

... Friday 15/07/11 .... Sometimes I wonder about my motives for getting into this in the first place. I was studying Arabic, met Nandita, activist for Palestine there, was struck how worked up my young Bengali students got at the time of the Gaza war. I have also been thinking about Jewish ethics, about how wrong this attitude that Israel has to be supported come what may. I also have to admit that I get a bit of a thrill outraging conventional people from my own community. There was an incident at Jewish Book Week in February 2011. In a discussion I made a point comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa. Afterwards, a man came up to me, said he was from the Jewish Board of Deputies, which has officially governed the community in Britain for the past 200 years. 'You are a disgrace', he said, 'An absolute disgrace'. And then rushed off before I could reply. I thought it was funny and pathetic. There was this man trying to be so establishment, so respectable, he ought to have been wearing a top hat and challenging me to a duel. There is something a bit pathetic about establishment Jews in Britain, scrabbling around for a bit of respectability, notwithstanding the anti-semitic sneering that must take place in some quarters behind their backs. Being called a disgrace of course excites my adolescent sense of transgression. But it is not the reason why I am doing this, notwithstanding what my friend Michael says, who puts it all down to an arrested teenage rebelliousness. But it is the icing on the cake.

When things get too intense here, I read a crime novel that I have brought along. It is written by one of my workmates in London. It is very violent and sleazy.

These are notes that I took, not strictly a blog

I am writing the following several months later based on notes I took when I was in Jenin. Everything was so emotionally intense when I was there that I was not always in the mood to sit down at a computer and write. I also didn't always have access to the internet, and I wrote in my notebook instead. So this is not strictly a blog at all, but the immediacy comes back when I now review what I wrote then.

from Tuesday 05/07/11 ...

It is noisy in the camp. The camp consists of narrow streets concrete houses and shops, not a camp as people might imagine it with tents, although in the early years people would have lived like that, literally in tents before small concrete structures were put up. And then when Jenin camp was attacked in 2002 and partly destroyed, the camp was rebuilt with newer buildings. some of the houses are quite large. Mustafa's house looks narrow from the street. The street, the size of a small lane is one of the main roads ofte camp is called Shariah Ouda - Return Street. Everything here reminds you of the original trauma, the Nakba - catastrophe - that occurred in 1948 when the Palestinians fled or were emptied from cities like Haifa and the surrounding villages and countryside when Israel was established. The people who live in the camp now are the third generation of refugees from that event.

Mustafa's house although narrow from the street, is quite large inside. You come off the street through a metal gate down a little path and go in through a side door. There is a large sitting room on the left and next to it the bedroom of his young five year old daughter Mais and her bathroom. All these Mustafa has given over to me. In the sitting room there is a flat screen television from which I can watch satellite television, many middle eastern channels, stations from Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Al Jazira in Arabic and English, Palestinian stations, nationalists channels.

There is another sitting room to the right as you come in through the side door, covered with mats and mattresses. This is where we eat. Mais runs in and out and up and down the path all day and with her friends, neighbouring kids from the other close by houses, late into the night. Mustafa's wife I only see occasionally. She brings cooks, we talk a bit, and then she goes to another part of the house. It is customary in Palestine for men and women to socialise separately. Mustafa's mother lives in a flat at the top of the house. I never see her. I am in Mais's bedroom, which is filled with children's toys like any room anywhere for a child of her age. I don't know what she thinks about me taking over her room for a month. At the far end of the room Mais has a bathroom and shower which I use. Sometimes the shower is not working and I have to wash from a bucket of water, it is extremely hot and dry here in the summer, not a hint of rain for the whole of the summer, really until late autumn, and there are often water shortages.

It is peaceful in the house. I spend a lot of time talking to Mustafa in Arabic and English. The contrast between the atmosphere of the house and what happens outside, even at a time of relative peace - incursions of soldiers, arrests, the still unresolved murder of Juliano Mer-Khamis at the Freedom Theatre.

Mustafa once told me how anxious he was for the future, for the life that his daughter would have to live later on. He has noticed my habit of talking to myself when I think I am alone. 'My father used to do that', he said, 'He was a nervous man'. I try to imagine what it was like, living year after year with the uncertainty, the receding hopes of return, the periods of danger and bloodshed, but above all the monotonous waiting year after year for a resolution that never comes. At the time of the fighting in 2002, Mustafa was away with his family in a nearby village. The soldiers took over his house and used it as a sniping post. There is a crack along the lenght of the ceiling in the living room, which was where the house was hit by a mortar shell. The soldiers threw most of the furniture out on to the street.

Friday 08/07/11 ...

Mustafa and I go out from the camp into the town. The town is about twenty minutes walk away. Out of his house along Shariah Ouda, past the metal horse sculpture, down a side road and we come out at the cinema. Mustafa has an electrically powered wheelchair, given to him by the Palestinian authority. He is very confident navigating the roads, far more confident than I am.

Mustafa has a brother who has a small stall selling hats, belts, and other tourist things. Every Saturday, Palestinians from Israel are allowed to cross the checkpoint into Jenin, which they do in quite large numbers, because most of the shops in Israel are closed on that day. Today is Friday which is the Muslim day of prayer. Most of the shops and businesses in Jenin are closed but Mustafa's brother is working on building a metal shutter for his stall. He is using an oxy-acetylene welder. I sit on a plastic crate, drink coffee and talk to him and his teenage son, Mustafa's nephew. I have already met his son. He came to Mustafa's house soon after I arrived. I had shown him my Arabic English dictionary. 'What is Zahyunia [Zionism] in English?', he asked me.

Later we go back to the camp and visit Mustafa's sister. Then we go to the Freedom Theatre which is nearby. Outside, at the place where the director Juliano Mer-Khamis was shot dead in April, there is a large photograph of him on a black cloth background hanging down from a wall. He is holding out his hand, pointing with two fingers, prophetically. There is a sign next to the picture that says, 'Martyr to Freedom, Culture and Original Thought'. The theatre is going to continue despite the proximity of unseen enemies. Juliano founded it after 2002 so that young people could express their lives, traumas, fears, anger, rather than become a new generation of martyrs. They are going to tour in Europe in the autumn with a show called Shu Kman - What Else?

A few pictures

Here are a few pictures that I took in Jenin and in Al-Farah, a refugee camp about fifteen miles south of Jenin. None of this is live because by now I am back in London for over two weeks. So this is not really a blog in the strict sense from here on, though I took notes and the memories are still very vivid.

By now I have given some talks about my 'Jenin experience', one a workshop at the liberal synagogue in Notting Hill where I go sometimes. Last Saturday they held a study day on Israel and Palestine and I gave one of the workshops, showing these pictures and others and talking about a memory that was still very real. Today, I did a couple of sessions with the teenage students who study where I work. I no longer teach them directly, but I did this as a kind of guest speaker. The morning session went down very well. One of the kids, Bengali of about seventeen, was passionate and informed about the issue. He talked about 'ethnic cleansing'. I said that I thought it was a slow motion version of it. I told them that I did not think it was a religious conflict but one about land, although relgion has inflitrated itself into the whole thing. I explained to them about how our borough Tower Hamlets was twinned with Jenin. Two of the students were keen to volunteer there next year, and there was another one from the afternoon class.

The picture at the top I took at night. It was on one of the roads leading up to the camp from the modern avenue with its large cafes and restaurants. Next to Yassir Arafat is a smiling jovial figure of Saddam Hussain. I am used to the fact that he is held in great affection in Palestine. (Can't help remembering though that the Palestinians have been used most of their neighbours for their own purposes, as a moral shield, as a diversion from their own oppressions, as a way of focussing attention away from themselves towards the 'common enemy'.

The middle picture shows a recent shahid, martyr, who was killed at Al-Farah camp two days before I visited it. I heard several accounts of what happened, and checked different media online. Apparently, the young man went to an early morning service in the mosque. Meanwhile Israeli soldiers had come into the camp to arrest three young men. (The fact that Al-Farah like Jenin is Zone A under the Oslo agreement, and therefore fully under the control of the Palestinian Authority, police and army, doesn't stop the Israeli army arriving to arrest people whenever it wants to. Maybe they tell the Palestinian police in advance, who keep conveniently out of the way). On this occasion the young man left the mosque and seeing the soldiers, panicked and ran away. The soldiers shouted to him to stop, and then shot him one bullet in each thigh. The man, bleeding heavily collapsed in the garden of a house. The soldiers did not allow ambulances to come except after a long delay. An artery was severed by one of hte bullets and he bled to death.

Incidents like these are not uncommon. They are not part of large incidents or major crises. At best they might get a small mention in the Arabic version of the bbc news online site.

The bottom picture is Farah camp itself. This woman, who had a child with her, let me take this picture.