Palestine Trip 2: Facts on the Ground

Up here. [EDIT: LINK DEAD-REPRODUCED BELOW]
On a lighter note, some more testimony as to the Godlike power of Leon has been added to the Making Leon a God website.
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PREVIOUSLY: PALESTINE TRIP 1

Friday April 9, 2004

The call to prayer sounds like a cross between an air raid siren and a Leonard Cohen song, and it sounds at the first touch of dawn, which is way to early for us. We sleep uneasily after that, not quite believing where we were.

Breakfast with Sabine and Jean-Guy – pita bread and houmous and cheese and meat. Nothing gets you in a local mood like diving into the local breakfast. Then ATG people Samer and Sarah appeared and we were out.

BEIT SAHOUR

Samer drove us around Beit Sahour, and we started to see the things we’d only read about before – the settlements, the bypass roads. The closeness of them is shocking. From the street outside our hotel you can see a huge settlement, Gilo I think, which is still being worked on. It’s literally just across the valley. It is built inside the ‘green line’, on Palestinian land, and it is staring the population of Beit Sahour in the face every single day.

Bypass roads, as well, are a revelation. They carve through the west bank sheathed in barbed wire and electric fences, and as they go they chop up communities, cut off farmland and orchards, and necessitate the demolition of Palestinian homes. We see a group of five homes that are hemmed in by bypass roads; all will be demolished eventually. The families just have to move. Nearby, a bypass road loops around an olive orchard, cutting it off completely from the locals.

I have been reading about bypass roads and settlements for years, but until I saw them I didn’t really understand what they were and what they meant. I didn’t understand how powerful they were – the power of, as the saying goes, ‘facts on the ground’.

AIDA CAMP

We visited a refugee camp in Bethlehem, Aida camp. It has evolved from a hilltop covered with tents in ’48 into an alley-network of cramped tenements. Kids called out greetings, ran down for photos. Everyone
greeted us warmly: “you are welcome.”

There were signs of conflict. Bullet holes in the wall of a school. Ruined walls and buildings. A factory’s blue corrugated wall ripped open by a missile, the interior now dormant.

Alongside Aida is a field. Across the field is Gilo settlement. The separation wall enters the field from two directions. Soon, new construction will join the wall together, and cut off this view.

We walked up to the end of the wall nearest Aida and some Israeli troops appeared from the other side. We walked away and they paced after us. Being followed by a force of uniformed men and women carrying weapons is not a nice feeling. They came up to the fringe of Aida proper and then watched
us for a while before going back. “They are not allowed here but they come and go as they please. They do whatever they want.”

It is hard to keep hope alive here. The Al Rowwad centre (http://alrowwad.virtualactivism.net/) keeps children busy with theatre and art projects. They have toured theatre pieces through Europe. The director
of Al Rowwad, AbdelFattah Abu-Srour, earned a PhD in France but turned down the right to stay there: “If I had it, the temptation to leave here when it got difficult would have been too great.”

JERUSALEM
The Holy City on Good Friday. It was incredible. Jerusalem’s Old City is a network of narrow streets, some of them built over so completely that you’re effectively underground. It twists and turns and is full of colour and culture – ultraorthodox Jews in their enormous hats, orthodox Jews in their traditional garb, Arab women in hejab, Christian priests and nuns and monks in full dress, salesmen and touts of all stripes, tourists, pilgrims, soldiers, us. It was an incredible place, unlike any place I’ve been to or seen. Probably it’s unique.

We sat in on a talk given by Rabbi Arik Ascherman of Rabbis for Human Rights (http://www.rhr.israel.net/), which was centred on RHR’s work in solidarity with the Palestinians.

Then we just explored. We ended up walking the Via Dolorosa, the path Jesus took with the cross to Calvary (as defined, of course, in the middle ages) to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was a confusing dark cave housing a mad melange of different Christian traditions, each pitting prayers and
incense against the others in trying to carve out a space for their individual flavour of the divine. Down below the Church was a deep chamber, the tomb of Jesus in Catholic tradition. (In Protestant tradition, it’s a few hilltops over.)

Its easy to forget that in amongst this best-guess mythplanting, there is truth – Jesus did preach here in Jerusalem, he did die here. The Temple did stand here – one wall, the Western Wall, remains.

Okay, it’s a bit harder to prove that Mohammed and his horse rode up to heaven from the Rock on Temple Mount. But I’m happy to give them the benefit of the doubt.

That evening we went to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. On Good Friday, passing from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, the spot where Jesus was crucified and rose again to the spot where he was born. Quite an Easter – and not a chocolate egg between us.

NEXT: PALESTINE TRIP 3