Palestine – Page 2 – Notes from the Far Beyond

Bearing Witness

I’m away for two weeks, at the Oak Dragon Camp (I was its founder nearly 40 years ago) and speaking at the Glastonbury Symposium – so you won’t be hearing from me for a while! Recently I’ve been rendering my cancer book Blessings that Bones Bring into audiobook format, and that’s now complete.

Just in case you were desperate for something to read, haha, here’s a chapter from my 2012 book O Little Town of Bethlehem – Christmas in God’s Holy Land (here). Compared with the situation now, Palestine in 2011 was much better but, even then, people were beset with issues to deal with, and this excerpt gives some examples. It’s also about one of the key activities a foreigner visiting Palestine needs to be willing to do – listening. Bearing witness.

In the streets of Bethlehem, December 2011

When I went to town to check out various friends, many of them were gloomy, beset with problems. It was one of those days. Each person had their own particular issues, but they all add up to a morass of collective difficulty which the customary Palestinian good humour cannot penetrate.

Naturally, our perception of life is made up of an interaction of circumstances and our feelings about them, and these are two rather different things. For Palestinians living under occupation, the circumstances side of the equation bites and scrapes harder than for most people across the world. Especially since the occupiers deliberately go about making life difficult, complex and insecure for the occupied, in military, administrative, legal and quite everyday ways. This is what Jeff Halper, a critical Israeli thinker, calls ‘the matrix of control’. The ultimate goal is to make Palestinians submit to Israeli rule, give up, go quiet and preferably leave the country.

But they don’t give up, despite the muddy mire of problems they can be beset with – or perhaps it’s a dust-storm where it’s impossible to see far and sand gets in the engine and all the moving parts. Palestinians have a life-philosophy which is admirable. But some days they go down into the doldrums and they need a good moan.

That’s one of the roles of foreigners who come here: bearing witness. This often means letting Palestinians have a good moan, describing to you with a full spectrum of feeling how difficult everything is. It can be quite challenging though if you have something in your own life that’s nagging you too – happily, this wasn’t the case for me today. So I was able to listen fully and, when a person ground to a halt, I could start up something that might change the context of things, so that they see the situation in a different way – for the difference between a situation and a problem lies in our state of heart and mind.

There’s a Christian grocer in town who stocks a lot of things I like, so I went to his place. While wandering around looking through the densely, intricately packed shelves, a guy comes in and starts up. I don’t understand much Arabic, but the tone of his voice translated easily – he was on a down day, overwhelmed. He and the grocer were so engaged in this man’s inventory of problems that I had to stand there patiently waiting to pay, listening too.

Little did he know, but in the process I did a little psychic healing on this man – smoothing out his aura, shifting the movement of his energy and the orientation of his aura from downward to upward and reconnecting him with his guardian angel. After a while, the grocer turned, noticed me, apologised and started totting up my buys. Suddenly, his friend said to him (it could have been), “And guess what…?”. The grocer grunted, to say go on, and the guy burst out laughing and said something. The grocer turns to me and said, “He tell me all these problem, and now he say his wife just got pregnant again – fifth. He say only now. Why not before, eh?”. Well, looks like the healing did something to loosen things up.

With goods in hand, I wandered off down Faraheih Street, turned left through the market, to be how-arre-youed and wherre-you-frommed by stall-keepers as I strolled past. Mid-afternoon, they were all sitting around wondering whether to close for siesta.

I’m always amazed that being British is regarded positively by Palestinians, despite what we’ve done in the past. Announcing Britaniyya to them always seems to elicit a good response. Perhaps they think we’re less bad than others, therefore good. Just as well. A Danish guy I met a few days ago had complained that Denmark is notorious for offensive cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, and he often had to prove to people that he didn’t agree with it.

Down the passageway and some steps leading from the market I was accosted by a sweet-seller. He asked how arre you, as they do, and I joked back hamdulillah – thanks God (I’m okay). It was a joke because, last time I was here, I couldn’t manage responses in Arabic. He has a hand-pushed cart parked at the top of the main steps down toward the Omar Mosque and Manger Square. Palestinian sweets are gooey, rich, soft cakes of honey, almond and who knows what, often eaten by dropping a cubic inch of the stuff straight into the mouth and swilling it down with coffee. I got some, in order to augment my weight-gain programme. Yes, folks, one of the ways I differ from many people is that I’m thin and bony, so I actually have to eat calorie-rich things to gain weight.

I then proceeded down the steps and met up with a shopkeeper I know who was sorely troubled by the lack of trade. The pilgrim and tourist business is down and the Israelis have creamed off most of the business. Most visitors come in shepherded groups for just a few hours in an Israeli coach from Jerusalem, visiting the Church of the Nativity and an approved souvenir shop, from which 30% of the takings are paid to the Israeli tour operators. Then they’re shuttled back to Jerusalem. The Israelis have niftily captured the income from Bethlehem’s pilgrimage tourism.

Independent travellers who arrive here – not exactly in floods – tend to run on a tight budget, so they aren’t big consumers. Norwegians seem to be the richest at present. Instead of money, these visitors mainly bring ‘witness’ and interaction, a social currency, worth perhaps more than money, if truth be known.

The shopkeeper complained that he had made only 100 shekels today – about £20 or $30. He thrust tea before me and carried on. Usually he has quite positive attitude, but this time he was struggling. I let him run with it, and it did him good. It does give them some assurance to be able to offload like this and to gain some understanding from another person – it helps them objectivise their lives.

Then I went round the corner to a café run by Adnan’s brother. I had falafel, hummus, pitta, salad and sage tea, as a late lunch. In came Adnan, plonking himself straight down and huffing. He starts up. His story is always complex, but he’s in the tourist souvenir trade too and he’s almost bankrupt. I know some of the things he could do to improve things (such as trading on eBay), and I have told him about them, but he doesn’t get it. He perpetually hopes things will work well next time, things will get better, but they don’t. Or someone else is making his life difficult and he wishes they would stop. So I usually let him blurt out his complaints, in the hope that some relief of pressure might lead him to form new conclusions.

The souvenirs he sells are lovely – especially if you’re a Christian. Lovely hand-carved olive-wood effigies of Jesus, Mary, the saints and the Nativity. Bedouin carpets, lovely Arabic dresses, inlaid boxes – all made within a few miles of here. But they don’t sell, the overheads are high, the checkpoints scare visitors away and, if your spirits are down, it’s a disaster.

Round and round in loops he goes. Adnan requires perseverance because he’s quite resistant. It’s the world that’s wrong, not him. But he appreciates the listening ear anyway, and soon we were talking about other things – mainly about the carpets his grandmother had diligently woven throughout her life, adorning the floors of many of his vast Bedouin family’s network of homes. Well, that’s that done. Now to see Jack, down in the Christian Quarter.

Jack is not a complainer, but he is in a sorry state. One year ago he had a major accident at work, fracturing his skull, haemorrhaging his brain and breaking some ribs. Then his wife, who had suffered MS, had died. Understandably, he had plummeted. His capacity to work is now much reduced, though he carries on all the same. He’s 52 and worn out. He works as a security guard for UNRWA, and he also clears out old wells and builds walls for a living. His spare-time obsession is billiards – his friends come round to play. He’s a real character – altruistic, humorous, maverick, but nowadays much faded. I cannot tell whether this is a low patch of life, or whether he’s on his way to dying. Bless him.

But he doesn’t moan. In fact, we started up a really good conversation, but it was still about his difficulties. He talked about how, at the bottom of some wells – many of them centuries old, some millennia old – there is no air and he has sometimes nearly suffocated. In a few others there are underground toxic flows of petrol or sewage, which he refuses to work with. At his work at UNRWA a few days ago, he was caught sleeping – not a good thing for a security guard – and given a warning. But they seem to like him too.

Jack, Catholic wheelchair smuggler, in happier days

But then he started up telling his stories of former days. There was one time he took his wife to an Israeli hospital without having a permit. He managed to get her in by a combination of charm, bluster and play-acting and then, having sat with her for hours, made his way home. But in the lift he had a heart attack – he was found lying there by a doctor, who rushed him to a ward and saved him. When Jack came to, the doctor came to visit him and simply said, with a wry smile, “Next time, get a permit if you’re going to have a heart attack, won’t you?” The doctor fixed him a lift to a checkpoint, to get back home. You do indeed get remarkable acts of compassion in this strangely conflicted country.

Jack’s son came in, looking really annoyed – fuming, in fact. I understood he had had an argument with his sister in his grandmother’s house next door. He’s 21 and quite a special young guy – plays Liszt and Chopin on the piano and works with computer hardware – but he had recently flunked his mathematics at college and, for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom, could not re-take the exam. Which meant he couldn’t go to university, and they couldn’t afford it anyway. So he was in a state.

He sat there listening – his English is good – and then he perked up when he told me about the free trip he had had with the Salesian Brothers (a Catholic order) to see the Pope in Spain, visiting Italy on the way. He was selected from a large crowd of applicants and he was away for three weeks. He’s a Sagittarian, our Shukry, and travelling the world is what he would love to do – but he’s imprisoned behind walls instead, living in a world-famous city, Bethlehem, that’s strangely isolated. If I could wave a magic wand I’d love to fix him three years at the Royal College of Music in London. He deserves it, and his frustration at getting nowhere in life was probably the underlying cause of his argument with his sister.

Jack was falling asleep. The drugs the doctor had given him to deal with the after-effects of his brain haemorrhage last year make him drowsy. I told him to get to bed instead of forcing himself to stay awake. “Yes, doctor”, he replied, and we parted company. I made my way out, walking back through the narrow stone streets of the Old Town to Manger Square. Another shopkeeper tried waylaying me but, by this time, I was tired and I didn’t want tea. I wanted a taxi home.

But even then, the taxi-driver, whom I knew from previous years, had a tale to tell. One of his children had died – I think about a month ago. Of what, I don’t know, because the word he gave me was in Arabic. In limited English he said he had not had enough money for the hospital. I could tell by the tone of his voice he was cut up about it, probably feeling like a failed father.

When we got to the school at Al Khader, I asked him how much he wanted for the trip. Thirty, he said – the evening rate (usually it’s twenty shekels). I only had 25 in change, and otherwise only a 200 shekel note (£40), which he couldn’t change. So I dug around in my bag, leafing through my carefully-stashed collection of Euros, Swiss Francs, Pounds, Kronor and Dinars to find him a Jordanian ten dinar note. He smiled. This was worth 50 shekels. “God bless you, Mister Balden. I like you. Thanks God. Ma’assalam.” The only trouble is, I’m not a banker or an oil sheikh, but it was worth it – even a bit of money can raise the spirits sometimes.

Sometimes I wonder what good I bring by being here. It’s as if the mountain of life-obstacles people experience in this place is too large for someone like me to make a difference. But then, as the Dalai Lama is quoted to have said: “If you think you’re too small to make a difference, try spending a night in a room with a mosquito”.

This young chap is now around 20 – as he’s grown up life has got worse, and I find myself wondering how he’s dealing with it.

With love, Palden
http://www.palden.co.uk

Compassion

I quite recommend not being a retired humanitarian. Or, for that matter, trying to retire from many other helping and caring roles and professions. Because people come back for more, often for very good reasons, even if they’d prefer not to, and levels of genuine need in the world are rising sharply. So pulling out isn’t as easy as in a normal job. And when it comes to helping a person find food or pay an emergency hospital bill, it’s not a matter that can wait. “Is there a doctor on board?“, “Granny’s had a fall…” and “Could you just…?“.

This presents a dilemma, because the world needs people who help. Not advisers but actual helpers – people who do things. While some people are called to do it since they are by nature server-souls, it’s often foisted and dumped on them by a society that lacks time for being human, and server souls are not remembered and honoured very often.

Capitalism is not geared to accommodate compassion and empathy: you’re supposed to look after your own interests and, if you don’t, that’s your responsibility, and tough luck. The tragedy of this is that genocides happen and we as a society regret it yet we implicitly permit them, always busy with other things. That’s one of the great tragedies of our day, and we tend to worry more about Donald Trump than people in Gaza.

It’s not that enormous sacrifices are necessary, since £10 from a thousand people does make £10,000. Theoretically, many hands make light work. But it’s easier raising money for pussycats than for humans who live far away. Part of our problem is that our societies are so privatised – everyone’s supposed to look after themselves, and that’s the way the world is supposed to work.

But it doesn’t – there are too many things such an approach fails to cover. We have delegated caring to professionals, leaving it to them, yet there aren’t enough professionals, and many are under-supported. Also it’s personal closeness and family and community involvement that often are most needed, not regulated care administered according to official guidelines, done by stressed-out, underpaid people in uniforms.

We all get genuinely overloaded with issues and concerns… another war, another famine, another hurricane, another vexatious issue, another person needing concern. Compassion and empathy grate with the heartless pressures of staying alive in a capitalist system.

One of the frustrating issues I’ve faced in my humanitarian work is that I was always pressured to raise money, and that’s not my strong point. Philanthropists are regarded as rich gits who are there to disburse money, but my wealth is rooted in healing, reconciliation, communication and concocting occasional bursts of sheer magic. Even so, money needs are critical for many people, and often these needs are urgent. So it often defaults to money.

On Monday night I attended an all-night spiritual ceremony, processing this kind of thing in my heart through the night. It was a chance to step outside such concerns and look at them from a soul level, getting focused on inner healing. At present I have a friend in Gaza, with baby, who needs rescuing, plus a village of Tuareg people who need help (they’re under attack), plus a spirit-granddaughter, Phyllis, aged about six, whom I thought was dead. She has recently been found, rescued from Niamey in Niger and has now contracted malaria while in transit. So she’s in hospital in Ghana, in a country where, if you don’t have funds to pay, they dump you outside and leave you to your fate. That’s because of privatisations that rich countries imposed on developing countries in the 1990s, as a requirement for lending them money.

But we have achieved one thing: she’s safe in Ghana with Maa Ayensuwaa, who will look after her. I always suspected Phyllis was one of those rather special kids – her dead mother Felicia was a special soul too. Eighteen months ago, Phyllis had the fingers of one hand chopped off by a drug-crazed, murderous criminal, all because her mother refused to hand over a memory-stick that his gang wanted. I hard-talked with him just before he did it but I could not dissuade him. Perhaps Maa Ayensuwaa will train her as an Okomfo, a traditional healer – she needs to pass her remarkable knowledge and gifts on to someone, and perhaps that’s why Phyllis is still alive today, to inherit the secrets of Maa Ayensuwaa’s line of healers and bring their heritage of knowledge into the future.

Lo behold, as soon as I returned from the ceremony, tired yet in good spirits, in comes an urgent request from a hospital doctor for £100 for medication for Phyllis. Which, of course, I do not have, since I’ve already paid for her rescue and that emptied me out. The doctor cares about Phyllis but, if he breaks the rules, he loses his job. Telling them to seek support elsewhere is no help at all since they have already done so (and it’s rather callous and discouraging a response too).

So I’m back in the loop, begging people for money, yet again. I used to be much better in a team, when working with my old soul-sister Pam Perry – she could get on the phone and rustle up funds and action much better than me. With only one lung, she’d sit in bed with her oxygen tank, phone and laptop, raising money for Jerusalem Peacemakers and the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem, Palestine. We were a dynamite pair because I gave her brains, backing, online outreach and magical input, and she was great at what she did.

In magical operations I work best as a battery-backup, a reserve warrior for heavyweight situations, a standard-holder and a protector and minder for those at the frontline. Or, at least, that used to be the case – but cancer went for my lower back and bones, and I cannot carry the same weight I used to bear.

Still, as one with a conscience and a heart that some regard as too soft, and with the involvements I’ve had over the years, I’m still at it, scrabbling for money to save someone yet again. In one sense it brings gladness to my heart and meaning to what remains of my life, and in another sense it’s a weighty bane. It’s difficult finding people to replace me. I have personal relationships with the people I work with in Palestine, Mali and Ghana – I’m unhappy about just dropping them during a time when it’s getting harder for them.

So that’s the story for today: raising money for a rather special child who’s struggling to stay alive.

In September I’ll be doing an AHA workshop on this issue, in Penzance, called ‘Changing the World’. It’s for helpers, activists, meditators and change-agents of any kind, and it will cover real-life questions concerning personal risk, life-purpose, commitment, psycho-emotional issues, burn-out, energy-management, holding true to your core beliefs, staying with it despite everything, and tricks for getting through. And planetary healing too.

Not that I’m the world’s greatest expert on this (is anyone?), but I do have some real-life experience. I’m still accumulating it, even as an old crock, and today it concerns one of those small yet big hurdles you come upon: how to create a miracle and raise £100 out of thin air when you don’t feel like it and you’re already worn out.

If you’d like to contribute even just a fiver to help Phyllis get better, that’d be really welcome. Drop me a message and I’ll give details about a bank transfer in UK or PayPal from elsewhere. Alternatively, please send her and Maa Ayensuwaa a healing, supportive prayer. Thank you, and bless you.

From a personal growth viewpoint it’s common to talk about boundaries. Well, yes, that’s true, but that’s not really the goal: after all, most wars and disagreements concern boundaries and we can go on forever being anxious about what separates us. It’s really about sharing and how to do it well, for sharing is a healing thing – personal, societal and global.

We too can become refugees, fall through the net and need help – too often we forget that. Giving is a concept with problems around it – it’s sharing that is really the big issue. It’s always an energy-exchange. It’s in our mutual interests to share what we have. Recipients share too, what they have – if it’s only their humanity and efforts.

However, even then, sometimes we’re tested, especially when we seek to treat others as we would have them treat us and they don’t return it. In such a situation I just try to keep going forward in faith without giving up.

There’s a level deeper too. To survive in this game I’ve really had to learn it in my cells. As a mantra of perseverance it gets me through the difficult stuff, and I’ve quoted it before…

It’s alright in the end, and if it’s not alright, it’s not the end.

With love, Palden

Site: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Cancer Audiobook: www.palden.co.uk/boneblessings.html
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

A Blog about a Blog

This is interesting. It’s written by an old friend who is himself involved with helping out in a freelance-humanitarian sense with Gaza. But this is something that anyone involved in conflict resolution, or in any kind of change-bringing commitment, needs to ask themselves: what is it that drives me to do this?

https://mike-scialom.medium.com/born-and-raised-in-egypt…

It came up for me too. In my case, my maternal grandfather was in General Allenby’s British invasion force in Palestine in WW1, my father was in Egypt in WW2, and I have Roma and German (though not Jewish) ancestry – Holocaust stuff. That’s what I’ve identified in myself that hooked me into it.

But also, growing up in a polarised and violent city, Liverpool, in the 1960s, played its part – overcoming the effects in myself of being bullied in early life. We teach best what we ourselves have had to learn.

If you have a bee in your bonnet about particular issues, driving you into activism, it’s worth looking into your ancestral background and your history. It can help make it all more conscious.

Many Palestine and other activists would do well to look at the emotional source in themselves of their despair, anger and commitment, because this will help them become more effective, tactical and compassionate in pursuing their vision.

It’s important because issues like this will not be resolved overnight. Yes, a ceasefire has been needed and is still needed, but a ceasefire without resolution of fundamentals might not be the best thing. Sad to say, sometimes the horror has to get worse, until a point comes where peace and resolution are the only options left.

We need to own up to the perverse fact that many of us worry about Gaza and similar places only when blood and horror happen, impinging on our comfort-zones. But actually, the reason why blood and horror happen rests on causes that are brewed and fermented during quieter times. If we’re going to succeed in a mission such as peacemaking of conflicts that have deep roots, it has to be sustained in the longterm.

And here’s an awkward truth. If campaigning for our beliefs polarises society, then we shall fail. Because if others have different beliefs, thinking of them as nasty ‘them’ people itself lies at the root of conflict. People who are anti-anything, who wish to ban things or people, and who dehumanise people with different viewpoints, become part of the problem they’re sincerely trying to resolve.

We really are all in this together, if we wish to resolve the fundamental issues that the world faces today. Peace will not come, and ecological and societal issues will not be resolved, unless we all work together.

This is not idealistic thinking. It is a very real socio-political issue. If we don’t get through this in the coming decades – global consensus-forming – then we’re fucked, really. War arises from polarisation, and there is little value in trying to stop war or save our world by polarising society.

Working to overcome polarisation and build bridges makes things more difficult. It means we must work longer and harder on this. It means we are challenged to walk our talk more consistently and for longer.

When the shooting and dismay stop, if everyone just goes home, back to normality, then peace will not come, because the matter is not sorted. And in this century we really need to sort things out, changing and ending the patterns of centuries and millennia.

That’s my thought for the day. However, there’s something else too – a new podcast.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | HUMAN INTELLIGENCE

I recorded this in January and completely forgot about it! That was a memory question. And that’s why it’s coming out now. I remembered.

Jean Piaget once said that intelligence is not about what we know, but what we do when we don’t know. How we figure things out when we’re in new territory or out of our depth.

The problem with AI is that it works by drawing on data and on what is known, on memory, and on the way things have happened thus far.

That’s not true intelligence. Human intelligence is better at dealing with the unknown. That is, if we humans act intelligently – which we do only occasionally.

So AI is unlikely to be as wondrous in its problem-solving capacities as tech-bedazzled AI cultists would like us to believe.

And there’s a hidden twist here concerning human intelligence – it’s in the podcast! Recorded in January 2024, down by an old silted-up millpond in the stream below our farm. 27 mins long.

With love, Palden.

Listen to it here:
https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/vSPHJFc1FJb

or go to my podcast page here:
www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Irtas, Bethlehem, in the West Bank of Palestine

Hope Flowers School

The Israeli army blocks the gate to the school

In my audiobook and various of my postings you’ll have heard of Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem, Palestine (here’s a brief intro). I used to work there.

Here’s a newsletter from Ibrahim Issa, the school’s director. It gives a taste of what it’s like running a school in occupied Palestine at present.

With love, Palden

—————————-

Dear Friends,

Thank you for all your support and solidarity with the Hope Flowers School (HFS). I am trying through this letter, to share with you what happened on 6 December 2023 at the HFS. It is a bit long; I believe that some of you have received a big number of pictures and videos on that day.

It is almost 21 years ago, when James Bennet wrote an article in the New York Times about HFS: “Arab Coexistence school falls victim to violence” you can read this article on: https://www.nytimes.com/…/arab-coexistence-school-falls…

Between December 2002 and December 2023, HFS battle for Peace continues.

The school-day at HFS starts early in the morning. Children and staff start arriving at 07:15 A.m. It is quite difficult to predict the day and whether clashes between Palestinians and Israeli army will erupt that day. Clashes could erupt at any moment of the day. HFS staffs have to be prepared to act in case any violence erupts at a sudden.

On Wednesday, December 6th 2023, in my way to HFS at 7:15 AM. I have to pass Deheisha refugee camp and Al Khader village. In my way I found tens of Israeli military vehicles and armed personal carriers about to enter the refugee camp and the village. Despite military presence on the way, but I managed to reach HFS at 07:30 A.m. The neighborhood of HFS was quite. I did not see any Israeli soldiers in the neighborhood.

I started to receive calls at about 07:45 from HFS staff that they could not reach the school because of Israeli army presence and clashes between the army and Palestinians. So we decided to start the school day with the absence of two staff members who could not reach the school.

At 8:30 am, I was in my way from HFS to another meeting. On the corner of the school, I was stopped by tens of Israeli soldiers who were just arriving to the street and started to block the road with large concrete blocks using a bulldozer. The soldiers were very tense, especially I found myself with my car surrounded by big number of soldiers. The one soldier asked me to continue driving while another asked me to return backwards to HFS. I decided to stay unmoved because of unclearity in soldiers demands. Any wrong movement at this situation may be interpreted as an attack on soldiers and could kill me.

At this moment a military vehicle stopped next to me and there was apparently the commander of the unit. I talked to him in English and explained the situation that one soldier is asking to drive backwards and the other is asking me to drive forwards, I asked him if I could drive backwards (back to HFS), but he refused and asked me to continue driving forwards. He also instructed the soldiers to allow me moving forwards. I also told the army officer that I am a principle of a school located on the corner, and that I have 350 children aged 4-13 years old right now in the school with some children with special needs, and that I would appreciate if the army could give me 30 minutes to evacuate the school before they enter further in the neighborhood. The commander refused and he told me that in one hour they will finish their operation and that the army will reopen the road.

I cancelled my meeting and decided to stay nearby the HFS. I immediately called the staff at the HFS and asked them to take all measures (according to emergency plan) to protect the children and staff at the school and warned them that soldiers are in the neighborhood near the school.

At about 09:00 I received a call from vice-principle of HFS informing me that soldiers are near the school and that few armored vehicles have blocked the school parking and the main gate of the school and that leaving the school or entering the school is not possible.

At 09:10 I received another call informing me that children with autism spectrum disorder (32 out of 358) are terrified and that social workers and staff need help to calm them down. Then I continued to receive calls from HFS informing me that children are totally in panic after soldiers started to fire teargas and heard of sounds of explosions nearby HFS due to clashing with Palestinian youth outside the HFS.

At this point I asked teachers and all staff of HFS to pay attention for the physical safety of children and to avoid sitting beside windows or even trying to look outside from the windows. I also informed the education department in Bethlehem that we have an emergency at HFS and explained the situation inside the HFS.

Everyone was concerned that the situation will get worse especially that some schools in Bethlehem and in the West Bank have encountered similar problems in the past few weeks.

Some children have reacted strongly to fear like inability to breathe, others were crying, etc. Therefore, I asked the health department to help sending ambulances to help the staff to deal with stressed and fearful children at HFS. Indeed, 6 ambulances from Palestine Red Crescent Society arrived few minutes later, but the Israeli army prevented the ambulances to reach the HFS justifying that the area is “a military closed area”.

At this moment I started to realize the danger that children are in and started to call the Palestinian-Israeli military coordination office and asked them to speak to the Israeli military to allow the ambulances to reach the school. I decided to call other international organizations and asked them to urgently reach out for Israeli army to allow ambulances to reaching HFS.

The Israeli army has finally agreed to allow the ambulances to reach the school and finally allowed me to get back to the school in one of the ambulances. A detailed inspection of each ambulance was conducted by the army before it was allowed to move ahead. All ambulances were accompanied by an Israeli patrol.

At HFS, children were extremely fearful; in addition we were concerned that clashes between Palestinian and Israelis will erupt further.

Therefore, in consultation with the paramedics in the ambulances, we decided that it would be better to evacuate the whole school and take children to transport children to a safer place. The ambulances started to transport groups of children (maximum 10 in each ambulance accompanied by one teacher) to a nearby hospital.

Due to intensity of the situation, the general director of the education department arrived at HFS with one of the ambulances to support HFS’s staff and children. With the heroic work of paramedics of the Red Crescent society we managed to get all children and staff out safely.

A neighbour got shot. Well, he might have thrown stones at soldiers twenty years ago in the intifada, but he doesn’t have to die for that. He was just protecting his home.

During the evacuation, it was clear that a ‘demolition order’ was being carried out, and three neighbors’ houses right next to the school were razed to the ground by heavy demolition machines. Much violence was used by the army. Soldiers tried to prevent photos or videos from being taken, neighbors’ and teachers’ phones were roughly taken and broken. Three neighbors were injured, one seriously, he was shot in the head.

Some children have seen this happen. Hundreds of parents have heard about evacuation of the school. Parents started to reach the area of the school asking about their children. They were very scared. We asked parents to wait in hospital, you can imagine hundreds of parents were waiting every ambulance to arrive to see of their child/ren is/ are being safe. At the end of this difficult day, three families were left homeless, three people are injured, one of whom is in danger of life, and hundreds of children are further traumatized.

The impact of this violence on children, families is immense.

Teachers and counselors at HFS will have lots of extra work to do in trauma care in the weeks and months to come. It is therefore as urgent as ever that HFS work continue to provide trauma counseling for children and their families. We are very thankful for all of you who helped us on December 6th and many thanks for your solidarity and support to HFS.

The trauma counseling program at HFS aims to:

• To provide help for the children at the school and for families in Bethlehem to address the effects of the downward-spiralling cycle of violence and trauma that has arisen from violence and the occupation, and to remove the basis for future hostile behaviour.

• To create a model for wider use in Palestinian schools, to become a centre of excellence and dissemination for psychological support for people of the West Bank, and to share our accumulated knowledge and experience with the wider world.

Your support to HFS and trauma counseling program will be highly appreciated. Our battle for peace will continue!

Best regards,
Ibrahim Issa,
Director of HFS.
hopeflowers@palnet.com
www.hopeflowers.org
Cell: +972(0)599294355

Blogging in Bethlehem

An audiobook about life in the West Bank of Palestine
www.palden.co.uk/audiobook.html

The first two audio instalments of my 2011 book Blogging in Bethlehem are now available, and the remaining five will come out once a week over winter (inshallah). The written version is available too.

I hope you enjoy them. It’s free, no strings.

Well, that lot took 20 hours to make, but I got through it quite quickly. That’s one advantage of hyperfocus and living alone. Rain drumming on the roof has stopped play for now. Just as well, really – I had my cancer treatment yesterday/Weds and I’m all floppy and wobbly.

I’m enjoying doing it though. The story comes from better times in Palestine in 2011, but it gives a sense of real life and some of the positive things happening there, and the social and cultural strengths of Palestinians. I miss friends there and would love to go back, but this is beyond my physical scope and financial ability now. So this is a way to be with them in spirit.

With love, Palden

The Christ Mass

Reindeer, Kvikkjokk, Sapmi (Swedish Lappland)

It’s funny. I’ve always had a strange allergy to Christmas. In recent weeks I’ve been looking into this issue. What is bizarre is that I have lived in the Baltic region – the source of Father Christmas and sleighbells – and also in Bethlehem – the source of the Christ-is-born part of the package. So I’ve lived in the source-places of Christmas but I’m not particularly into it. Well, we all have our weird pathologies.

I have fond memories of both places – of genuine sleighbells (except on horses pulling sledges through the snow-bedecked forest), and of crowds of the devout in Manger Square, Bethlehem, during the three Christmases they have (Catholic, Orthodox and Armenian) at roughly two-week intervals. When I was in Bethlehem one Christmas I wrote a blog about it all. The town customarily welcomes 100,000 visitors for the Christmas Pilgrimage, and often it’s utter madness in town. It’s not happening this year: Palestinians are really downhearted, in no mood for celebrating the birth of a holy child, or celebrating anything.

I’ve asked myself why I have this Yuletide allergic reaction. In my case, part of the answer is Asperger’s Syndrome – ‘Wrong Planet Syndrome’. It’s an inherent feeling of outsideness, and it brings both benefits and problems. It’s a bit like the day you land in a foreign country: you understand nothing of the language and you experience the funky quirks of that country with the eye of an outsider – like the smelly toilets in Austria, the crooked telegraph poles in USA, or the way that Australian wildlife is busily noisy in the night and quiet during the day, or the sheer colourful intensity and olfactory richness of India, or the foot-washing places outside mosques in Jordan.

Another factor was the Christmases we had in our rather dysfunctional family. I couldn’t stand the pressure to ‘behave myself’ and to eat food I didn’t really like. Things got more interesting when I was around age eleven, when my parents started inviting three or four foreign students from the School of Tropical Medicine in Liverpool to our house for Christmas Day. Suddenly I was meeting people from Uganda, India, Hong Kong, Egypt and Barbados. But even then I was frustrated because we had to enact the Christmas rituals and suffer the stomachic consequences instead of getting into far more interesting things… and meanwhile my mother worked her socks off, not enjoying Christmas at all, and getting annoyed with my father, my brother or me for reasons I never fully understood.

I’d stand there thinking ‘Why can’t we make this easier and have a good time together without all this fuss and bother?‘. But relentlessly, each year, it had to be done. I never quite figured out why. So perhaps that’s a cause of my allergy.

In Bethlehem, as a lifelong vegetarian, it was always a bit difficult passing the meat market – another rich olfactory experience. I turned vegetarian long ago in 1971 and, for fortyish years, people would regard folks like me as strange and awkward, missing something important in life. In Palestine I got away with it by saying it was part of my religion – and that’s something they easily accept and oblige. However, to a vegetarian, being vegetarian is a perfectly logical and sound way of behaving and conducting one’s life. Being an Aspie is rather like that – you’re regarded as strange, abnormal and in need of correction, while from your own minority viewpoint the world around you is incomprehensible and crazy.

An Indonesian Christian rock band, Manger Square, Bethlehem

Yet Aspergers is not a programming error – it’s a different operating system. I believe it’s not really a ‘spectrum’ issue either – to me, that’s a neurotypical excuse for not really understanding what’s going on. The way I see it, you’re either an Aspie or you aren’t, since this concerns operating systems, and the spectrum bit relates to an Aspie’s capacity to adjust, or not, to the world around – what’s called the ‘Aspie mask’. How well we adjust depends a lot on how we were brought up – whether we were encouraged to grow into being ourselves or whether we had to conform to imposed behaviours that weren’t our own. That adjustment factor is what gives the appearance of a continuous ‘autistic spectrum’.

It seems that the proportion of Aspies, Autistics, ADHDs and others in society is increasing, and this is an evolutionary change for humanity. It’s the direction the world is heading in and it’s happening for a reason. It’s not a problem, and Aspies and Auties generally aren’t ill or malfunctioning. Actually, there is cause for us to feel sympathy for ordinary, neurotypical people and the templated, frameworked world they live in.

It has a fascinating side to it, inasmuch as, not seeing life in the same way as most other people, your perceptions are inherently out-of-the-box. So it means that you can come up with solutions that seem mad to some and brilliant to others – depending largely on whether their primary optic looks forwards or backwards. It also has a problematic side because it’s then a matter of whether it’s possible for that perspective to be expressed and accepted in society, for our strengths to be taken up and valued. This is slowly changing as society notes a growing variety of interesting public figures with this ‘condition’.

This was my problem. At Christmas, it was the implicit social requirement to behave in certain prescriptive ways, irrespective of how I felt inside myself, and the indulgence, waste and pretence of the relentlessly rolling bulldozer of Christmas behaviours. It grated for me and still does, and my own Xmas-avoidance can grate for other people.

In the 1980s, when I was in my thirties, I decided to clarify things, come out with it and just stop doing Christmas. If I was unclear I’d get drawn back into it, so I got clear and became ‘antisocial’ instead. In the later 1980s I started doing non-Christmas retreats for about ten people in the mountains of Snowdonia, which were fully booked. There would be no Xmas rigmarole, no presents, no special food or boozing, and we’d have silence and personal time up to 2pm each day and then hanging out together after that. The people who came to the retreats would rest, recharge and have some genuine human togetherness, without all the ritual. We had a great time!

Even though I’ve played a significant part in encouraging ceremony and ritual in Glastonbury, in the camps movement and elsewhere, and I’ve designed and led a good number of ceremonies myself, I’m not really into ceremony and ritual very much. I prefer to act spontaneously, picking up on and acting out the drama of the moment without making plans or imposing structures. I think this arises from a psychic sense of participating in a much broader and deeper reality-landscape and dialogue than many non-psychics perceive. If you’re in the right inner state, the spirits of the four directions will come and be there with you without needing much invitation. Like perceptive humans, they get a sense of where the action is and they go there.

I used to have problems when attending funerals. The vicar would be standing there leading the funeral service, while the hovering soul, looking for someone receptive, would find me sitting there in the pews. In some cases they would want me to lead the service, since I would be able more properly to speak on their behalf. But this was not to be, and I had to tell them so, secretly in my thoughts – the formalities had to be adhered to during such a solemn occasion.

The dead and the beings of the otherworlds run their own realities in parallel to ours, and the objective in ceremony is to bring those worlds closer. However, a direct psychic connection renders formalised ceremony less necessary – the action happens in ‘deep thought’. Formalised ceremony can indeed truly entrance people, enacting something that genuinely helps the interaction between worlds but, in my judgement, many ceremonies don’t do this as much as they could. The soul-quality of it can be obscured by the script. While many participants might wish to believe the gods are present, only sometimes do they seem to really feel it in their hearts and through their antennae. So there can be an element of pious game-playing to it. I hope I don’t offend by saying that. One of the things I’ve had to learn is how to say awkward things in an acceptable way – it took until my mid-thirties – and I’m not sure whether I’ve succeeded in that.

So, at funerals I have run, I asked people to address the departed soul directly, not as him or her but as you – since that soul was actually there (well, most times – there can be exceptions). It can be quite upsetting to someone who has just died to hear yourself being talked about and ignored by old friends and family, as if you no longer exist. I’d invite people to participate in a talking-stick process, each giving a short anecdote of their interaction with the deceasing person, addressing them personally as you – we were talking to that person about their life, and this is an important life-review process to help a departing soul understand nuances of their life that they’d perhaps never seen before. People were really moved by this. But I haven’t noticed such a method being widely adopted.

Bethlehem. But do they need to import north European pagan imagery such as sleighbells? Most Arabs don’t even understand what a sleigh is.

Winter Solstice and Christmas are important times for connecting with and reflecting on ancestry, origins, custom and tradition, but their importance lies not so much in ritual observance or cringeing Christmas habits as it lies in shared feeling and togetherness. It’s a time of social love and mutual support. The past is not important in itself, except inasmuch as it has some relevance to the present as a stabilising though not as a constraining factor.

There’s something wonderful about Christmas – the gathering of clans, the giving of gifts and the feasting. But for much of human history there has been a different context to these: today, in affluent societies, the feasting isn’t really necessary or good for us, and we already mostly have what we need so gifts have acquired hyper-consumption undertones, and while the gathering of families and friends can be wonderful, it can also be mixed in atmosphere, landing up with the TV, alcohol and niggly narrow-mindedness controlling the occasion.

Over the years I’ve found that, before Christmas, I get a slightly humbug, silent-to-disapproving response from many people when I tell them I’m not interested in it. Then after Christmas I’m told I’m lucky, or even envied. Most strange. We live in a very schizoid world. Some years, such as this year, with the devastation of Gaza, or back in 2004 with the Tsunami, the contradictions get quite stark, with people hungry in one place and over-filled in another, and both having a hard time over it. Sorry, but this doesn’t strike me as a good way to design the world of the future.

Anyway, that’s just me – though perhaps I’m articulating something for a few others too. Plenty of people are alone or lonely at Christmas. I am happy for those who are happy celebrating Christmas – it’s good for society to do things like this. And also I think about people who are unhappy about it, either because they’re left out or because they feel obliged to play along with something they don’t really feel right about. Perhaps Christmas needs a redesign to fit the reality of our current time. Less of the consumption, profiteering and excess, and more of the human aspect of things – the peace and the goodwill.

The Church of the Nativity (on the site of an Apollo temple and a Canaanite Goddess temple)

This is important. On the run-up to Christmas, one issue that has been bugging me is that I’m getting too many requests for help from people in many places and situations around the world, and it’s getting to be too much. Human need on Planet Earth is rising. My own sense of peace and goodwill has been under test. I’m currently working on three missions and I have the capacity for one. I’m having to remind people not to depend too much on me, because one day they won’t get an answer – I’ll be incapacitated or dead. I can’t find people to take on these people and their needs for help, all of which are genuine and legitimate. So that presents a problem. They need to get sorted out and back on their feet, and it’s good for us, for our souls, to take on karma-yogic responsibilities such as these. Well, that’s what I have found, at least.

So I’ve been experiencing compassion fatigue. Too many people asking for help. I have to remind them I am not a public-service help agency – I’m an old crock running on three cylinders. This fatigue has been accentuated by a need to re-focus on my own life – after all, living with cancer is a wee bit challenging – and on keeping my own head above water. If I don’t do this, I might well have a shorter life, meaning that I won’t be here any more for these people to contact. But then, to be ruthlessly honest, perhaps I need them as much as they need me.

But then, after I pop my clogs I’ll be Upstairs, accessible at least to those who attune their inner devices sufficiently and sign in to the dialogue. It’s certainly possible for me to tap on the top of people’s heads, or to walk into one of their dreams but, even then, it’s a toss-up whether they will notice or respond.

If you see things from the viewpoint of the ancestors, it’s difficult for them when the majority of people disregard them, or think of them as fantasy, as imaginary or even hauntingly disturbing. Or people shut off their receptivity by ‘just’ having another drink, or rushing off to spend money in shopping malls and bowling alleys, or arguing with each other over unresolved issues or trivialities. It can be frustrating being an ancestor in modern times, especially if there’s some wisdom to impart during moments of Christmastide reflection. Wisdoms such as…

Sometimes the young are wiser than the old. Sometimes adversity is really helpful. Or no matter how close you get to someone, there can still be light-years between you. Or that many hands make light work. Or that you can have the world’s greatest army but you still don’t win your wars. Or that the people who are regarded as winners are often very alone, even when they’re popular.

So I spent Christmas Day with a friend I met in 2022 who seems like an old friend already – Brian Abbot from Devon (he of the Invisible Opera Company of Tibet). Two aged hippies having a deep dialogue over all that has changed and all that has not changed, in our own lives, in the wider world and in the cosmos. One an author and the other a musician, both of us having started on our spirit-paths by consorting with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, in her blotter and microdot format, fiftysomething years ago in another millennium. He cooked a nut roast.

That was our Christmas. The wind blew, the rain came down, the woodstove burned bright with aromatic birchwood, and no animals died to feed us with Christmas dinner. All was well down’ere in West Penwith, at the end of the world – well, the end of the small British part of our world. And the Atlantic rollers crashed against the rocks on the coast with not a single care for human beliefs such as Christmas. As for Jesus, he was in Khan Younis, not Bethlehem, busy ministering to people in need. Good on him – we need a few more people like him around.

With love, Paldywan.

Written using GHI (genuine human intelligence).

Website: www.palden.co.uk
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html and on Spotify, Apple and Google.

It is Necessary only that Good People do Nothing

I’ve always been an optimist, deep down inside – a Jupiter in Pisces type. I’ve felt this underlying optimism ever since I was young – not rigidly, but because I keep coming back to it after periodic times of despair over the state of the world, to which, for my growth, I’ve been karmically tied all my adult life. It’s over fifty years since John Lennon sang, outrageously at the time, that we should give peace a chance. I cannot say there has been a lot of visible progress.

However, underneath, something has changed. Many of the ideals of 50-60 years ago are in fits and starts becoming pragmatic policy strategies, and the balance of opinion at street and village level across the world has over the years quietly tilted against war. The strength and clarity of this consensus is yet to be tested, but hints of it are visible in world opinion over Gaza. We’re approaching that test.

Hair-raising world situations and crises have a way of arousing public feeling to a sufficient extent that a mountain of inertia, of helpless addiction to conflict, could actually start moving before long. Ukraine and Gaza have jogged us that way and there’s further to go. Trouble is, a consensus often takes shape in the background while vested interests act more quickly. This formula worked when Pluto was in Capricorn, from 2008 until now, but things are changing. With Pluto in Aquarius, we’re likely to have situations arising where vested interests find themselves encircled.

Polarisation, demonisation and dehumanisation are pre-requisites for conflict, and here the media and social media play an outsize role. If we truly believe in peace, then these three issues need tackling inside ourselves.

The information war is now as important as the military war. Since social media appeared, Palestinians have had more of a level playing-field. In the last conflict, young Gazans won the info-war on points, and this is one reason why Gazan phone networks are disabled now. Israel meanwhile fails to realise that, apart from military overkill, its determined, uncompromising certainty in pursuing its cause undermines it in the eyes of much of the world.

We’re getting too accustomed to witnessing blood sacrifices. We live in a thoroughly amoral world system and, collectively, by omission, we have failed to stop them happening. The system is rigged in such a way that, though we might choose peace, justice and ecological priorities, we undermine them simply by shopping at supermarkets, driving cars and using phones and computers.

I keep repeating Edmund Burke’s 250 year old quote: “For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing“. It’s true.

So we get the cruel destruction of people, cities and landscapes in ‘theatres’ such as Syria, Ukraine and Gaza – hellish nightmares that everyone hoped we’d left behind long ago. We’ll get more of this unless there’s a fundamental change. Such a change might start happening in the second half of this decade.[1] But, as with many of the world’s key issues, it won’t just happen. It has to be pushed, firmly and consistently.

It’s important that this pressure for change doesn’t become a new social conflict, a new cause for social and political polarisation. Battling over it will lead to delays and complications we can’t afford. The movement for peace needs to avoid adopting the methods of war and confrontation: success comes through building a rising tide of solidarity, consensus and cooperation. It needs longterm commitment and mass momentum, and if it is to succeed, the people of Earth need to get behind the project of saving our world. Global peacebuilding is a key part of that.

In relation to the current conflict in Is-Pal, taking sides is understandable, yet it is part of the problem. The problem arises from polarisation itself, not from the perceived goodness or badness of either side. What is under-reported here is an indistinct but nevertheless a majority global consensus tilting against war and devastation, by anyone, against anyone and for whatever reason.

The destruction we’ve seen in Gaza, Mariupol (Ukraine) and Kobani (Syria) in recent years have nudged this sleepy consensus along. Humane empathy is bubbling up in collective consciousness, especially amongst the young, the power-holders of future decades. But is it strong enough to overcome the resigned belief that conflicts are an unavoidable yet necessary evil?

Behind this lies a bigger problem. Governments of all kinds are out of step with their people. Defence and international relations, even in democracies, are managed by godfathers who decide the ‘national interest’ on our behalf. So, in future, matters of war and peace boil down to a bigger question: who decides?

Majorities in the Global South and also the Global North are proving to be pro-people in attitude. Current wars have taken on a people-against-the-Megamachine optic: we see high-tech war machines ranged against crowds and communities of people, mowing them down. With Pluto entering Aquarius for the next 15 years, this meme is strengthening – we’re watching it happen in Gaza.

Here’s an astrologer’s warning. From 2025-6 until 2038 Neptune is in Aries, an awkward period in which we’ll be faced with a key cause of war: big guys and strongmen who take it upon themselves to determine our future, often at the expense of majorities.

In Sudan we see a country being wrecked by two competing military leaders and their oligarchies. In Ukraine we see two very different kinds of strongman ranged against one another – Putin and Zelensky. In Israel we see a remarkably cynical prime minister taking on the whole world, convinced of his own rightness. In Gaza, Hamas is a resistance movement which, though it has its prominent leaders, is more horizontal than a hierarchy – more like a cooperative and rather like the Jewish terror organisations of the 1940s, Haganah, Lehi and Irgun.

Hamas will never remove the state of Israel, and they know it (they aren’t fools): Israel is here to stay. So are the Palestinians – here to stay. Israel will not eliminate Hamas because, even if it kills most of the current Hamas leadership, its actions generate new supporters and fighters willing to continue, whatever the cost, now and in twenty years’ time. That is, unless something big changes to make Palestinian lives better.

Big leaders and strongmen… Like that of war, this question has been allowed to drift because we were all too busy doing other things. This is one of the big challenges we must face globally if we are to avoid becoming a failed planet. However, here’s some good news: in the late 2020s and the 2030s we’re likely also to see a new crop of benign, altruistic leaders – of whom there have been too few in recent times. We could also see leaders who look as if they have solutions but they don’t, and visionary leaders with good solutions and a good way of asking people to face the music and grasp the nettle.

Palestinians are in a terrible mess. They have a strange mixture of social unity and political disunity, and they’re at a diplomatic disadvantage, poorly represented. ‘Palestine’s Mandela’, Marwan Barghouti, has sat in Israel jail for twenty years. The future of Gaza is now likely to be decided by outsiders. One sad fact here (many will disagree) is that the future governance of Gaza is best left in the hands of Hamas. The Palestine Authority, Israelis or international bodies are unlikely to get things right since they will simply perpetuate Palestinians’ position as dissatisfied victims.

Israelis have got themselves into a thorough mess too. They have landed themselves in a war on five fronts – against Gazans, West Bank Palestinians, Arab Jerusalemites, Arab Israelis and Hezbollah in Lebanon. They have an enormous domestic disagreement over the future direction of their country, which risks civil war or a separation of the country into an Israel and a Judea. Peace-oriented Israelis are having a hard time right now.[2]

By destroying Gaza Israel has raised a big question: who will pay the necessary mega-billions for its reconstruction? If there’s a risk of further destruction, governments, NGOs and investors will have little interest in an insecure investment that won’t pay off. Construction contracts will be valuable to Israeli companies, and plenty of cheap labour is available, but since Israel’s economy is tanking it will rely on foreign investment, during a time when the international community has plenty of bills to pay. It makes Israel accountable – it must promise to avoid destroying Gaza again.

And where and how will Gazans survive and get a decent life? A strong minority in Israel wants Palestinians simply to disappear – to Egypt, Jordan or anywhere – and this has been a hidden agenda for some interests in Israel since the late 1940s. But if this were possible, it would already have happened. Palestinians are good at standing their ground, whatever Israelis and the world throw at them.

Even if all Palestinians obligingly left, Israel would not be safe and secure – it would still be at war with itself, it would have unhappy neighbours and a further two million unhappy Palestinian refugees staring at it, and it would be internationally isolated (since USA is a fitful partner). Meanwhile the world is tired of holding its nose, paying Israel’s bills and accepting Palestinian refugees. Seen from outside, peace and security for Israelis have been destroyed by Israel’s own actions.

For Israel to feel safe and secure it must play its part in creating the right conditions. Palestinians need a decent life where they can be happy, make progress, do well, feel free and feel safe. The threat to Israel will then diminish – not without problems and crunch-points, but in the course of a generation of calming, it will happen.

This conflict exposes a key global issue we consistently fail to address. Who decides things at the global level? Gaza has now gone global. Perhaps this was Hamas’ hidden strategic aim: to put the cat amongst the pigeons internationally. It has exposed Israeli dependency on support and cover from abroad, and it has dragged neighbouring countries and the UN system into the debate over the future of Gaza. In effect it has made Israel lose its control of Gaza and even of itself. Confusing self-defence with revenge, Israel has alienated the world, lost its Middle Eastern neighbours’ trust and come under USA’s thumb. Even though Hamas’ strategy and actions are highly questionable, Israel has outclassed it in the badness stakes.

Who decides? This is a big, awkward international problem. Our haphazard, under-powered system of international decision-making is inadequate. The UN, the only international body we have for dealing with global affairs, is hamstrung by its incapacity to act independently. There is a growing need, though no capacity, for international bodies to overrule the decisions and actions of individual countries if they harm the wider world.

This is a minefield, but it’s a question we must sort out in coming decades. Gaza has become a nexus-point in a bigger argument between the Global South and North. However much Hamas intended it, this is what it has achieved.

The solution doesn’t lie in the past, in differing historic narratives and arguments about who did what, who suffers more and what God thinks about land-distribution. It lies in the future, and on the capacity of two peoples to live together sharing the same small space. Actually, we aren’t talking about two peoples, but more like seven or eight. Conflicts like this hold back the rest of the world and, if the world is to progress, disagreements must in future be resolved by means other than war.

The Middle East, the historic crossing-place of Eurasia, is filled with multiple ethnic groups, all with a history. For millennia it has been ruled by single systems – empires – where ethnic groups lived alongside each other in neighbouring villages and city quarters, each having quite distinct identities, laws and customs, without dividing the region into the separate territorial nations we have now. Today’s countries, introduced by the British and French around 1920, have had multiple nightmares ever since. As the hydrocarbon age ends, if it is sensible the Middle East will pull together, led probably by the Gulf States, and conflicts will tend to dwindle because its natural state is to be united in one multicultural system where everyone has rights and no one is excluded.

For that to happen, peace in Is-Pal must come first – it’s critical. It’s also difficult, after the damage that has been done. Peace is at root a consensual, emotional, people-scale thing, not just a diplomatic, business solution. It requires forgiveness, trust-building and a calming period of at least a generation. Hatchets must be buried. Lives reconstructed. Justice restored. Pain dealt with in another way. People need the space and calm to experience the advantages of peaceful coexistence.

It’s the same with the wider world: everyone needs to get a clear feeling that, whatever the costs and disruptions of change, change is better than non-change. In all departments of life. It won’t be easy, but it’s easier than the alternative.

Israel and Palestine act as a microcosm of the world. When peace comes to this small, benighted and strangely holy land, it will be because the world is itself coming to peace. The Is-Pal conflict is a key conflict, locally and worldwide, acting as a focus-point for a much-needed process of global peacebuilding. Without global peace we are unlikely to survive – Earth will become like Gaza.

Even so, I’m still an optimist. Optimism might be a sad pathology, but don’t bank on it. Just because things are bad and disillusionment is rife, this doesn’t mean this sad state of affairs will continue forever. Bizarrely – and this is a tragic point – the worse it gets, the more likely we might be to make fundamental changes. Perhaps this is the hidden psychology of the Israelis and Palestinians: unconsciously both sides feel out of control, driven by deep feelings and a kind of self-destructive despair, crying out for help and support.

Also, this is a gift they are giving the world, highlighting our helplessness in dealing with conflict and its causes. The extent of the current tragedy takes Israelis and Palestinians close to a brink, an epiphany point. People on both sides need somehow to realise that their existing strategies aren’t working.

So my prayer is that current momentous events in and around Gaza become a catalyst, a turning point, a tidal shift, both in Is-Pal and globally. A turnaround that seeds conditions in which a more lasting, true peace may come. Not just a ceasefire but a comprehensive solution. Actually it’s about justice, a correction of extreme imbalances, which will lay the foundations for peaceful coexistence. It is possible to do this by mid-century. It falls on a younger generation to do it since, sadly, my generation hasn’t succeeded. And they will succeed, since war is now obsolete as a way of settling our differences, and we need simply to accept that.

With love, Palden

————-

My next blog will be on more personal matters. Also, I’ve been quiet because I’ve been assembling a book for cancer patients and their helpers, drawn from my blog over the last four years. Thanks to those of you who have encouraged me to do this. Called Bones, it’ll be ready in due course (in Cornwall we say ‘dreckly’) as a free online PDF and possibly later as an audiobook. It’s in consultation stage at present with two special soul-sisters, Sian and Faith (thank you), and awaiting a final editorial trawl. Definitely dreckly.

NOTES:
[1] I explain my astrological thoughts on the later 2020s here: https://penwithbeyond.blog/2020s/
[2] Here’s an article by Gershon Baskin, an Israeli peacemaker, about Marwan Barghouti, widely regarded as ‘Palestine’s Mandela’ – and the telling point is the comment below it, accusing him of being a traitor. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/to-the-one-who-could-be-the-next-leader-of-palestine/

I’ve written a trilogy of books about Palestine – the West Bank. I wrote them in 2009-2012 and not much has changed since then except people getting older. I feared the books would go out of date but they haven’t, really, apart from details. One is available in print and all are available free as online PDFs. www.palden.co.uk/pop/

These are Palestine Authority soldiers, not Israelis

Meditation

MEDITATION today, Sunday.
And every Sunday, regardless, whether or not announced.

We’re in a deep time when the hidden and not-so-hidden feelings of humanity are coming up in all sorts of ways – not just around Gaza, though it does symbolise the world’s situation.

The Scorpio newmoon comes at 9.30am GMT on Monday morning. This is an angry, restive, frustrated, oppositional time (Sun, Moon, Mars, Uranus), yet underneath it there’s an exposure of human truths and motivations, powered by pain and memory from the past and a need to make a big step into a new future.

A future where humans and our heart-sensitivities prevail over horror, disaster and grief, the cruelty of explosions and the bulldozing facelessness of the Megamachine.

‘Disaster’ means ‘out of tune with the stars’. A sustainable future involves tuning back into the stars, to nature and toward our fellow humans. A harmonisation of human feeling that incorporates uncomfortable truths, healing them and bringing a turn-around in the deepest corners of the human heart.

One member of our group is close to the volcanic eruption in Iceland – even the Earth is speaking.

There will be more of this in coming times, as we face the uncomfortable truths that stand in the way of progress on our shrinking, quaking planet.

Peace is not just about cease-fires – it’s far bigger, deeper and wider.

You’re welcome to join us for half an hour (times below). Thanks for being with.

More information: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

Current times, on Sundays:
UK | GMT 7-7.30pm
W Europe 8-8.30pm
E Europe and the Levant 9-9.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm
PST North America 11-11.30am

Explaining

…and Stone Walls

If you wish to understand the psy-ops and propaganda war that’s going on, it’s worth reflecting on the word hasbara, a Hebrew word often translated as ‘explaining’, but it means a lot more than that. The hidden agenda behind hasbara is to say things that are the opposite to the way they actually are, and to project on the other side qualities that actually are your own, blaming them for what is happening and thus justifying any actions that are taken in response.

A classic hasbara word is ‘defence’, as in ‘defence forces’, which is only part of the truth, concealing the less popular aspect of it. Israelis ascribe ‘defence’ to themselves and ‘attack’ to its neighbours, when actually, for both, it cuts both ways.

This shadow-stuff is common in international relations – creation of often unfair images of other countries or peoples in order to bolster one’s own projected image. They are the bad guys and we are the good guys. It gets exaggerated during times of conflict – and the basis of conflict is a sundering of consensus and a dangerous polarisation between sectors of society, nations or blocs. It can be used to justify actions that otherwise are unacceptable or atrocious. Every nation does it in some way, though Israelis are really good at it, as are Americans and British.

So if you look at what you read and hear with this in mind, you’ll understand things in a new way. Sides in a conflict project negatively on each other, demonising and dehumanising each other, to justify their own offensive or outrageous actions.

If Israel, Hamas and the ‘international community’ truly seek peace and a fulfilment of their needs, the dialogue needs to change. The terminology, the attitudes, the dehumanisation, the unreasonableness, the accusations and the anger. It starts with a change of heart. This is at present slimly possible though highly unlikely – there are too many vested interests and set agendas involved, of many kinds. So the current Gaza conflict will likely remain unresolved, as have previous conflicts. Not that it is easy or quick to resolve – incrementally, it will take generations. Recent events could serve as a turning-point, but I do not detect a necessary will to change.

However, the people with the biggest cards, regarding peacemaking, are Israel and the American bloc, closely followed by the Middle Eastern nations. It starts with a realisation amongst Israelis that they will fail to create longterm security while they are damaging new generations of Arabs and thus creating new enemies for the future. They cannot eliminate Hamas or the constituency it reflects and, in Gaza, there is no one capable of replacing Hamas as a government.

Also, Hamas have not actually been bad as a government (given that people in most countries have problems with their governments), and it needs recognising that they are an Islamist social reform party with a military wing, not a military force with an appended political wing.

A crow at Tel-es-Sultan, the remains of ancient Jericho, going back 7,000 years

But both sides need to change their views – their whole optic.

Palestinians are not extremists, though they are in an extreme situation and thus they react extremely. But they dislike Muslim fundamentalism, ISIS, Al Qaeda or even the wearing by women of the full face-covering. Most Israelis are not extremists either but, when they feel under attack, they can be overwhelmed with insecurity, fury and vengeance. This has deep historical roots and, while it’s understandable, it doesn’t help the future. It makes Israel overreact, with the longterm effect of perpetuating the insecurity that Israelis so much want to be free of.

It makes Arabs overreact too. Most Arabs accept that Israel is there, wishing it to withdraw to the 1948 borders (perhaps with a few trade-offs) and to become a good neighbour. But when they see Israel’s military actions, they become emotionally reactive and the rather over-worn and unworkable idea of driving the Israelis into the sea is reborn.

So somehow there needs to be a massive act of mutual trust and respect of a kind that very few Israelis, Palestinians or neighbouring Arabs could accept. Things are so touchy that it could break down over the slightest incident. And there are interest groups, both high-up in the geopolitical sphere and on the ground, who are dead set on perpetuating and enforcing the existing mindset they already hold.

The ancient spring at Jericho – the reason why the town is there and has been there for 10,000 years. It’s the oldest continually inhabited town in the world

At present I see only two possibilities: calming and exhaustion.

Calming means an incremental stepping back and reduction of conflict, by agreement. This could be achieved either on the ground, through the upwelling of a suppressed aspect of public sentiment on both sides, particularly amongst women, to apply deconfliction pressure from within each society. Or it could be achieved diplomatically, but this would require all those countries that matter to agree on one strategy, applying strongly both to Israel and the Palestinians. Don’t hope too hard for this, but it is always possible. As Sir Steven O’Brien, a diplomat, said on the radio (Saturday 4th Nov), “Diplomacy always fails until it succeeds“.

Then there is exhaustion. A conflict ends when there is an equalisation between forces, such that both sides perceive that they cannot win. This can happen militarily, but neither side in this conflict is likely to be able to win clearly, and there is a high price-tag to it.

Here the Palestinians have a slight advantage since their attitude of ‘sumud’ – perseverance and hanging in there – has more lasting power than Israeli rage. They lose every conflict, trying to draw down the world’s sympathy by suffering massive damage – a kind of collective martyrdom – but they also stop the Israelis from winning, every time. Meanwhile, the international community watches, fruitlessly spluttering and wringing its hands.

The Greek Orthodox monastery at the Mount of Temptation, Jericho (where Jesus did his forty days and forty nights).

It’s all nicely complex, and there is a counter-argument to every argument, and there are no easy answers. But it looks like we’re following the exhaustion track. This is also what’s happening in Ukraine.

The real battle lies between those who encourage polarisation and violence and those on the receiving end of them. Both sides can live together, and they shall. They do live together, even though they are strangely divided.

Palestinians aren’t angels and they’ve made mistakes but the burden of power and error weighs heavily on the Israeli side. Israel has long had superiority in weapons, money, connections, PR, chutzpah and forcefulness. Israelis don’t see things this way, seeing themselves as endangered victims. This is not unique amongst nations, but for Israel it’s extreme and the effects impact heavily on their victims and the wider world.

The Israeli project – to provide a safe haven for Jews – is a noble thing. Historically, Jews have suffered immensely, especially from the actions of Europeans. This doesn’t justify their oppressing Arabs today or doing to others many of the things that once were done to them. Israelis don’t see themselves as oppressors – they are the oppressed, busy protecting themselves.

Israelis have a lot to be proud of. They built a nation in decades. From their perspective, Arabs have attacked and menaced them and Israelis have bravely held off such threats – this was the narrative I learned as a teenager in 1967 at the time of the Six Day War, during which the Israelis occupied the Palestinian territories as if by accident, pre-emptively defending themselves (we were told).

Westerners fail to understand that this is where the power really lies in Middle Eastern society

In later life, I discovered that this, like the previous one of 1948, involved severe ethnic cleansing and uprooting of Palestinians, razing and occupying villages and parts of towns, and the killing of thousands of largely defenceless people. The awful fate visited on Jews by Europeans was visited by Jews on Palestinians. In the long arc of Jewish history this is tragic.

Only some early Israelis were perpetrators. Many were accomplices who shut their eyes, went along with things or obeyed orders, to an extent tricked by their leaders. Or they felt unable to encompass the situation, complain or do anything about it – they were simply thankful to be in Israel. Some protested but didn’t get far, others felt that the ills taking place were regrettable but unavoidable, while others just didn’t look. Zionists defined Israel’s character and future as a state, locked into an endless military vortex.

It could have been done differently. As they immigrated in the earlier 20th Century, Jews could have been integrated more with Palestinians – there would have been difficulties, though arguably fewer difficulties than actually arose. The British administration of the 1920s-1940s could have exercised less of a divide-and-rule approach. When the UN partitioned Palestine, favouring Jews, the Israelis could have made do with the territory they were allocated – they were given 56% and took 78%. They could have traded land for peace in the 1970s or 1990s.

None of these options would have been perfect, but some sort of peaceful and productive coexistence could have arisen, leading to a sounder long term future for everyone. But the path Israel chose lacks foresight, and the results come back to haunt them today.

Israeli feelings of existential threat arose from deep-seated vulnerabilities following the Jews’ terrible history in Europe. But the threat from Palestinians and other Arabs has been less a conquering aggression, more a largely ineffective response to Israeli force and expansion. A sense of threat does not have to be the case now. When Israel upsets its neighbours, or when it refuses to budge on issues crucial to Arabs, it naturally creates an unhappy response.

Thus, Israel becomes its own worst enemy: while intending to reinforce Israeli security, it generates antipathy and threats instead, undermining that security. The ethnic cleansing of 1948 would be consigned to history if it didn’t continue today. Hezbollah would be no threat if Israel hadn’t invaded Lebanon so devastatingly, not long ago. Israeli actions caused the founding of both Hamas and Hezbollah. Hamas and other militias in Gaza would not fire rockets if Israel let up on its siege of Gaza.

Zionism sees Israel’s own interests and expansion as paramount. Whatever means are used, whatever the wisdom of it, and whatever costs are incurred, Israel’s growth must go on. The notion that Israelis’ needs and security could be helped by acknowledging the needs and security of others doesn’t enter the equation, except amongst a dedicated but much shrivelled Israeli peace camp.

In the long term, if anything weakens Israel, it is Zionism, since it undermines the sympathy the world has toward Jews. Only a proportion of Israelis actively subscribe to Zionist sentiments, though acquiescence to them increases when Israel feels threatened, which happens regularly. Zionism is a norm drummed into Israelis from an early age.

Judaism is one thing and Zionism another. The Zionist mentality builds concrete walls and fences around Israel in self-protection, and in so doing Israelis become separated from the world, increasingly failing to see the wider world’s viewpoint. Zionists accuse critics of anti-Semitism, labelling Jewish detractors as ‘self-hating Jews’. Thereby, balanced dialogue is blocked.

But here comes a key proposition. If both Israelis and Arabs saw things another way, opening up to the notion that their fellow humans sit in the same boat as they, and if Israel ramped down its military expansionism, permitting some restitution of the ills which have occurred since 1948, then, over time, threats to Israel will subside, and the country and its population will become more safe and secure.

Most Palestinians and Arabs don’t want to fight. The idea that they want to destroy Israel is nowadays somewhere between a myth and an expletive uttered by Arabs when tempers are hot. Similarly, in Britain in WW2, it was the case that ‘the only good German is a dead German’.

Early Christian hermits’ caves at the Mount of Temptation

Most Palestinians and Arabs accept the existence of an Israel within the pre-1967 borders – an enormous concession they signed up to thirty years ago in the 1993 Oslo Accords. Even Hamas has stated that it will recognise Israel within such boundaries. Palestinians just want a fair deal and a decent life. Peace will never be a perfect deal, but it will be better than the current situation.

Israel cannot afford to remain militarised forever: it has poor people, social problems, enormous water-shortages, a risk of coastal flooding, toxicity, pollution and all the kinds of problems that pervade most modern countries.

It claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East (that’s hasbara) yet the nation is riven with disagreement over the nature of democracy, the constitution and the purpose of the nation, reflected in a succession of demonstrations and indecisive elections. It also shares the Global North’s dwindling prestige and power. After all, Israel’s population is only one third of the Egyptian city of Cairo.

Even if Israel won every war it undertakes, this doesn’t make for a happy, healthy nation. It needs to make friends with its neighbours because it needs them, and they need Israel. They have a lot to offer each other. They share Middle Eastern space. It’s a multicultural space.

Israelis need a safe and peaceful future. Many are not fully aware of what goes on in their name, or they shruggingly accept the ‘security reasons’ they are given. Many feel powerless, or they maintain a comfortable indifference ‘living inside the bubble’. Others adopt extreme, partisan views, as if everyone is against Jews and a strident, hammer response is always needed.

Since the late 1990s, the centre of gravity of Israeli politics has headed rightwards, and a harsh minority dominates the public discourse. The rule of dominant interests, while not unique to Israel, maintains a perpetual state of near-conflict.

Israel could come to regret many aspects of the years since its founding. It soils its nest by pushing its case uncompromisingly, thus creating enemies and the opposite longterm effects to what it genuinely seeks. Its reliance on force, bombing, assassinations, land-grabs and ill-treatment of Arabs builds up new, avoidable problems, fostering new generations of opponents.

We need a new habit of peaceful coexistence. This will take a generation or even seven, but it is important.

The Holy Land is a multi-ethnic, multi-faith land and a fascinating place. Sanctity is elusive and each faith defines sanctity differently, but it’s safe to say that ongoing conflict is not one of its characteristics. Positive change matters for the whole world – Israel and Palestine form a bottleneck in the world’s process of change.

Security is developed by building up a nation’s internal feelings of alrightness, community and integrity. It is built by cultivating collective happiness and creativity, giving people a sense of a positive, mutually-beneficial future. This is the real national interest, the guarantee of Israel’s future.

Once there was an old rabbi who had been praying for peace daily at the Western (Wailing) Wall in Jerusalem, for decades. When asked by an admiring journalist what it was like, he simply replied, “It’s like talking to a stone wall“.

With love, Palden

For better or worse, written using HI (human intelligence, aka brainz)

Site: palden.co.uk
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Pictures of Palestine: www.palden.co.uk/pop/

Looking from the Mount of Temptation over Jericho, toward the Dead Sea and the mountains of Jordan

Holy Land

*Jeez woz ‘ere*. Looking over the Judaean Desert toward the Dead Sea and Jordan

Last night (Sunday 22nd October) I had a very profound meditation, more like trance – I was carried away and ‘out of it’, surfacing far later than the usual time, after more than an hour. I felt quite at peace. This morning I feel quite changed – a bit wobbly yet feeling alright too. A few thoughts came up this morning that might be of interest or value.

It’s important to remember that those who are killed in disasters like this are well dealt with. They are withdrawn before pain or horror cloud their passing. They are pulled out in micro-seconds and instantly taken into care, as appropriate to each soul. They don’t seem to experience the impact of whatever hits them or whatever is the cause of their death. If they do experience it, they are detached from it, without accruing psycho-emotional damage. They witness it (for the soul-learning therefrom) but they are put into a kind of state of grace and objectivity where they are not damaged by it. It’s a kind of fast-tracking transitional process.

I’m more concerned about the living and what they are going through.

There are Christians in Gaza as well as Muslims – and also seculars, who are often forgotten. Many of the Christians belong to ancient pre-Catholic, pre-Orthodox churches. (By the way, Arab Christians also call God Allah – which means ‘the God’, to distinguish it from a pantheon of gods.)

Yet I find Christians can have more difficulty passing over – more of a struggle – than Muslims, who seem to have a clearer sense of returning to Allah. Perhaps Christians and Jews have more of a feeling of distance and separation from God, involving more striving, more doubt, more questioning, while Muslims seem to have more inner confidence in their relationship with Allah. Not totally, yet they seem inherently more inclined that way. Hence, perhaps it is the case that they manage dying a bit more easily. In my observation. Speaking as an aged-hippy esotericist with Buddhist inclinations.

If you’re tracking Gaza inwardly, remember the people of the West Bank and the Palestinians in Israel and Jerusalem. ‘Arab Israelis’ are 20% of the population of ‘Israel proper’ and 40% of the population of Jerusalem. Some are Christians and many are Muslims – and they’re both friendly to each other. Arab Israelis aren’t dying in numbers, but they’re going through extreme discrimination and insecurity. Meanwhile, the West Bank is simmering and in danger of boiling over.

However, as an individual, while being aware of the complexity of this situation, it’s better to do small things well than big things badly, so give attention to those aspects of this situation that you are drawn to. Between us, we’ll cover a variety of things.

A boy in Jenin. He knows the sound of flying bullets.

This is big – a paroxysm of human madness where the heat gets high and the light grows dim. Negative influences are having a field day and, to some extent, we cannot stop this and must let the fire burn out. We cannot really affect what actually happens (the forces at play are big and complex), but the secret lies in seeing if we can flip, ease or assist the way it happens, so that there are glimmers of light, more opportunities for redemptive things to happen amidst a disaster.

There’s a lot of opinion and propaganda flying around. Well, in the ‘fog of war’, everyone is right and everyone is wrong. So take note of what people say and understand what lies behind it for them, while also observing your own responses, biases and predilections. Don’t necessarily block off from it, but try to avoid buying into the frenzy. Form judgements slowly. This is a battle of thoughts and feelings, intermixed with anger, and it’s good to try to hold that perspective.

It is possible to hold such a perspective while still having your own personal leanings – if, for example, you are Jewish, or you empathise with Arabs, or you have friends on one or both sides, or whatever. It is possible to run these in parallel, at least for the duration of this madness-epidemic. It’s an awareness exercise.

This part of the world is often called ‘the Holy Land’. Yet holiness manifests itself there in emphatically unholy, paradoxical terms. It is a magnified microcosm of the whole planet, like a crucible, and Earth’s core issues are all present there. It’s a very small patch of land, the same size as Wales, Albania or New Jersey, in which there is immense complexity, intensity and confusion.

Still, there’s a lot of light there, and the contrast makes the issues so much starker. As a microcosm, what happens there affects everywhere else far more than its size and population would otherwise suggest. It has a similar population to Tajikistan, Togo, Sierra Leone, Laos, Austria, Portugal and Greece, Virginia or Washington state.

The situation in Is-Pal is very much affected by influences from elsewhere – not just military and economic but much deeper, more profound and hidden.

This includes positive influences too: there has been no shortage of Native American medicine wheels, Tibetan pujas, Bah’ai prayers and interfaith ‘encounters’ in this land, and while I was there I met amazing people from all over – even Siberia, Indonesia and the Amazonas. Amongst Israelis and Palestinians there are amazing people. Do not fall for the idea that this is just a simple two-sided battle of hearts and minds – it is multiplex, and the quality of souls in the ‘holy land’ is surprisingly high.

Young peacemakers from a variety of countries, with the mayor of Al Aqaba (who was injured in the first *intifada* in the late 1980s – he spent ten years in Israeli jail too)

To some extent we must let it play out, and to some extent we can bring some relief, space and blessing to this conflagration. This is a classic high-magnitude soulquake. Above all, stay steady. Keep returning to centre. Stay benign and well-wishing. If you get steamed up and in a mess, go take a walk, get some space and let the knots within you unravel – and take that relieving walk on behalf of those who cannot.

As Pluto enters Aquarius, we’re entering at least 15 years of ‘the battle for the hearts and minds of humanity’. This conflict is one such situation and there will be more, so get used to it and try to work with it. Because it is necessary. As is the case with Is-Pal right now, many of the world’s problems arise from issues we have not tackled and sorted out before. Chickens are coming home to roost in droves, in every department of life and every country. Issues are being brought to our awareness through the events manifesting in our time. These are the material through which we work out these issues.

There will come a point in coming decades when we get to The Big Issue. In this sense we are being given a gift, a collective training, through being given escalating waves of crisis to face. We’re being loosened up and forced to think, to see things in different ways from before, and from a larger perspective.

Palestinian kids on the whole have good fathers

In this sense, something right is happening here – we’re at a ‘never again’ point. This isn’t about cease-fires: this is about ending war and oppression, historically, and events like this will repeat until we get it and do it.

Oh, and by the way, put in a prayer for people in the UN and NGO sectors, from all over the world, who represent a neutral, global viewpoint in the conflict, and who take the strain in very practical ways. For some of them, it’s at great risk to themselves and, for others, it’s round the clock, every hour of the day and night. Stressful and often unthanked – they’re holy warriors.

With love, Palden.

Marwan Barghouti, regarded as Palestine’s Mandela. He’s been in Israeli jail for the last 20 years and they’re likely to keep him there. A mural on the separation wall at Qalandia, West Bank

In the 1990s I ran some meditation camping retreats called the Hundredth Monkey Project (M100). We worked in a circle of 70-80 people with world issues. We didn’t prescribe meditative methods but, to help people get oriented and give them ideas, a method was suggested as a basis to work with. If this interests you, it’s here: www.palden.co.uk/cs06-m100meditation.html

If you’re a member of a group working with issues such as these, then you might be interested in this material about talking-stick processes: www.palden.co.uk/cs07-talkingstick.html

Site: www.palden.co.uk
Podcasts: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/palden-jenkins
Book Pictures of Palestine: www.palden.co.uk/pop/