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.
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