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.