Rock Sea

Back in 2012 I was doing a tour of duty in Palestine. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was to be my last. After that I was visiting Palestinian refugees in Syria, who were in an awkward situation regarding the Assad family’s ultimately self-destructive habit of shooting at their own people.

The Assads had been good to the Palestinians, but the Palestinians could not accept what the Syrian regime was doing. That put them in a politically awkward situation. So, at the request of some Palestinians in Bethlehem, who could not visit their relatives in Syria, I went from Amman in Jordan to Yarmouk refugee camp near Damascus to help with some awkward issues they were facing.

This was early on in the Syrian civil war in 2013-4, when there were about 5-6 parties slugging it out. You couldn’t tell who was shooting, or who the next checkpoint belonged to – it was a nightmare. It was a matter of staying calm, being friendly and hoping for the best – it worked. I’m good at that and, as proof, I’m still alive.

Anyway, while in Palestine I had to leave after three months because I had only a three month tourist visa. I had to leave and then re-enter – a rather dodgy business. So I caught a bus to Eilat in the far south of Israel, over the prickly border into Egypt (the Israelis give you a harder time when you’re leaving than when you’re entering), and then I hitched a ride in a Bedouin taxi down to the Rock Sea Camp.

While there, I wrote this blog entry, called ‘Lost in Arabiyya’:

https://www.palden.co.uk/pop/arabiyya.html

Rock Sea was a camp by the side of Red Sea, not far from Nuweiba, filled mostly with Europeans. https://www.rocksea.net They mostly flew in from Europe via Sharm el Sheikh – Egypt’s big tourist resort on the Sinai peninsula.

I went there to decompress, to think things over, and then to return to Bethlehem for another two months in the rather hot frying pan that is Palestine.

I needed this thinking time because I had been involved in some rather hair-raising events in Bethlehem, and there was a chance that certain people might have been watching me. Not very nice people. The story (as much as I can safely tell it) is here, as an audiobook called Blogging in Bethlehem:

https://www.palden.co.uk/bethlehemblog.html

So this is the short story of what went on for me at Rock Sea, extracted from my third Palestine book, called O Little Town of Bethlehem – Christmas in God’s Holy Land, available online here, for free: https://www.palden.co.uk/pop/order.html

Love, Abu Balden

Arabs can’t say ‘p’ – instead they say ‘b’. Hence that, there, I’m called Balden. ‘Abu’ is an honorific meaning ‘father figure’.