Palestine – Page 3 – Notes from the Far Beyond

Brinkmanship

A good friend of mine rang up this morning. She’s Jewish – some Zionists might call her a self-hating Jew – who shares the collective feelings and pathos of Jewry while having grave reservations about the behaviour of the state of Israel. She’s one of those thoughtful Jews who is brave enough to talk to someone like me, who has worked a lot with Arabs.

She comes round for tea and we have great discussions, both of us enjoying the contrasting insider knowledge we each have. Of course, what we face now, in and around Gaza, puts her in a really difficult position. She struggles with it inside herself and she talks with me about that struggle. If you have any empathy and conscience as a human, whatever position you take, it’s really difficult, this stuff.

A few days ago she was with a bunch of eco-activists with whom she’d worked for ages. They were vehemently pro-Palestinian in a way that she found difficult, because they were anti-Israeli. She’s not paranoid about anti-semitism, but it still hurts when people vehemently disapprove of your own people. Her friends had taken sides.

Fifteenish years ago in Palestine, I had a similar problem: I worked with Palestinians but I’m not anti-Israeli – I’m fundamentally pro-people. To me, helping Palestinians doesn’t mean opposing Israel – actually, I felt I was helping Israelis by helping Palestinians, but only a few Israelis would get what I mean by that. Seeing everything in a polarised, partisan way is, dare I say it, inherently hypocritical – it makes Them bad and Us good, as also does the current over-use and misuse of the term ‘terrorist’.

It’s a cover-up, a denial of responsibility, a projection. In my reckoning, it’s part of the problem. The partisan approach taken by the governments of UK, Europe and USA, which they believe to be a show of strength, is undermining the remaining, sagging respect that the Global South – the world’s majority – has for us, and this will lead to difficulties further down the line. We need to stop politicking and act like mature nations.

Citizen peacemakers from both sides, meeting at the All Nations Cafe. This photo was 12 years ago, but it’s still going, led by a brave former Israeli soldier

When working in Palestine I had some difficulty with zealous Palestine activists from abroad who commonly adopted a partisan position: within themselves they had declared war on Israel, even if expressing it only in the form of olive-picking and visiting frontline towns like Tulkarm, Hebron, Jenin or Nablus to witness the damage and the pain. I respect such people for their humane feelings, empathy and commitment but also I felt they needed to do more homework, to go a bit further in their understanding and feelings.

They made life more difficult for people like me – amongst other things driving Israelis against humanitarians. Many activists didn’t really like me, and my book P ictures of Palestine hasn’t been popular with many of them. In my teens in Liverpool I was wedged between Protestants and Catholics, and Mods and Rockers – I started my peacemaker education early! So this issue isn’t new.

The Matrix of Control. There are hundreds of these things around the West Bank

If we take sides, we start projecting a subjective and emotive image on the Other, upon which subsequent actions and atrocities are then justified. It makes Us right and Them wrong, so that We claim legitimacy in questionably punishing Them for their crimes. In and around Israel-Palestine, as soon as conflict breaks out, most people lock into this charged mentality, setting all other considerations aside.

It’s a form of psycho-emotional slavery, and the puppet-master controlling the strings is the Lord of Division. It’s an endemic mass-psychology that needs to polarise, dehumanise and denigrate the other side so that we can overcome the guilt and shame of performing wrongs in the furtherance of our own beliefs – even when those beliefs do not support committing such wrongs.

This mentality leads to consequences. As I write, Israeli forces are poised to start a ground invasion of Gaza. From the Israeli viewpoint, I can see why they are taking this approach: they need to eliminate Hamas, and they’re driven by a ‘never again’ feeling – never again do they want to be threatened and harmed in this way. Fair enough. Except there’s a problem. It’s unlikely to work.

Israelis may kill as many people as they like but they won’t be rid of the problem, because those who are left behind will be hurt. The pain passes down the generations. The cycle of uprisings has repeated itself roughly every twenty years since the 1930s, as each generation has grown up and sought to change things.

The damage done to people and to land is tragic – a ground invasion of Gaza will cost both sides very high. Innocent Palestinians will be mown down, and committed freedom-fighters will sacrifice their lives. Israeli troops will die, one by one, hit by snipers, booby-traps and innovative Gazan devices. Jewish and Palestinian mothers will rue the loss of their sons and daughters.

Israelis will not and cannot eliminate Hamas, even if, improbably, they eliminate all of its fighters and the main characters who head it up. They have not managed to do this before, and they are unlikely to achieve it now. All they can achieve is a costly delay until the next flare-up happens. The reason is this: every time Israel fires a bullet, it creates several new fighters taking up a gun – frustrated young men who seek a future and cannot have it.

The Matrix of Control: a flying checkpoint (upper left), imposed randomly and causing long queues on the roads.

Instead of getting depressed and committing suicide quietly to themselves, they join one of the militias, with the idea that their sacrifice might benefit their people. This isn’t so strange: my own father did this in WW2, volunteering his life for King and Country (except he survived, minus a leg).

Hamas was founded in the first intifada of the 1980s. Ironically, Israel secretly funded its founding, to counteract the Yasser Arafat’s PLO and divide Palestinians against each other. Well, that backfired. Hamas speaks for the embattled feelings of Palestinians and, if there were an election instead of a war, Hamas would most likely win. They won in 2006, in a free and fair election, undermined and annulled by Israel and the West – and they would win now.

To many Palestinians, Hamas represents the best of a very bad set of options – not least because it is relatively free of corruption, it has principles, and Hamas is resolute and cannot be bribed or arm-twisted into submission.

There’s a lot of maleness being displayed on both sides – a resolute, despairing, ultimately self-destructive maleness. But behind this lies a deep feminine-rooted emotion too – the urge to protect women and children from the monstrous ogres on the other side.

An old friend, Ibrahim Abu el-Hawa, peacemaker extraordinaire – some of you might know him

Here I wish to introduce a constructive thought and prayer, or two.

The problem with males is that, when we get worked up, we tend not to stop until we’ve achieved our objectives. It’s sexual: a man seeks a climax, through which all can be resolved and he can forget all his troubles. Except, when this orgiastic urge is driven by short-sighted urges such as control or revenge, it gets really destructive. In war and competition, masculinity doesn’t think much about the damage it might create while seeking that climax, and while we usually focus on winners, in competition most people lose.

There’s a secret here about males, to do with brinkmanship and danger. When it comes to the crunch, sometimes men go more crazy, and sometimes, when genuinely threatened, we start calculating our situation and seeing sense. Unless there is a miraculous and unusual philosophical change of heart, it needs to go up to the brink for us to get there.

Speaking astrologically, this is about the planet Mars. The lowest aspect of Mars fights to destroy – as with the Stalingrad-like scenes we’ve seen in recent decades. The default aspect of Mars fights to win – even though both sides ultimately lose, since victory is never as sweet as expected. The highest aspect of Mars is about coming to the crunch and realising there is no virtue in fighting and no enemy, because we’re all ultimately on the same side. The skillful playing of a game is more important than the winning of it. We suddenly realise we are all our own enemies, beating ourselves up.

So here’s a prayer and something to visualise. As I write we stand at a choice-point, before an expected ground invasion of Gaza. The urge to go to the brink is there, and no one will be dissuaded. This is a point of vulnerability and choice. Consequences will follow, whichever choice is made.

So visualise this crunch point as a potential breakthrough point and hold that thought, that feeling. Don’t be overcome with depression and helplessness, or get stuck on what you think ought to happen. These are of no use right now. If you were in a war zone, you’d get shot.

In war, one must take advantage of whatever situation that arises, as it arises. So apply your prayers to the situation as it stands, to help the universe twist events in a direction that somehow changes flow of the tide.

The Dome of the Rock and the Old City of Jerusalem, with Israeli West Jerusalem behind

We’re at a brief point of realisation that there actually are options. Fighting it out is unlikely to achieve the objectives either side has, and the costs will probably outweigh the benefits. The pain each side experiences will not be soothed.

Here’s another thought. Even if the warring parties do fight it out – and the above prayer will thus be seen to have failed – it’s a matter of stoking up positive energy for the longterm, to build up the potential for the pattern to change. Store it up in humanity’s collective psyche, so that this option is more available next time round, even if it doesn’t work this time round.

Building up the energy-potential for de-confliction is best done by making use of actual circumstances where these issues are acutely at stake. Brinkmanship-points like today’s are junctures where the collective psyche of humanity is at its most vulnerable. It’s under pressure and surprisingly open to making a change.

The seemingly irrevocable rush to conflict sets in motion forces and consequences that seemingly cannot be stopped, and this is the pattern that needs to change. We need a new, transitional pattern where, when the risk of conflict comes close, everyone gets it that there is or must somehow be another way. It’s all to do with agreeing to disagree, and doing something to reduce the intensity of disagreement.

I say transitional because, whatever dreamers might dream, we aren’t suddenly going to have world peace tomorrow. We have to deconstruct the patterns that make for conflict, generation by generation, building new replacement habits. We can do this over the coming decades by facing high-risk situations where our true will gets tested and we are forced to get clear – if necessary, under duress.

In Israel and Palestine, repeated conflicts have not achieved either side’s objectives. This one won’t either. If nothing changes, the next conflict comes in about four years’ time. So let’s get real here. There’s another way. It does require guts to pursue it – the guts to change the pattern and step back from disaster.

Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem – Islam’s third-holiest place

Here’s the awkward bit: though both sides are responsible for their actions, in my estimation, Israel holds around 70% of the power, with greater freedom of action than the Palestinians. Saying this doesn’t make me anti-Israeli. Palestinians hold 30%, and Hamas have recently shown how they also have power to shift the agenda. But 70-30ish is the way the odds are stacked. This makes it more difficult to flip the pattern because ceasefires come when there’s some kind of equalisation of force and influence.

Firing munitions, however impressive, is no longer manly. We need to protect women, children, and also our rights, needs and fortunes, by thinking further and bigger and wider. It’s an emotional choice, made with extra power when we stand on the brink of disaster.

What’s important here is that, whatever happens, humanity learns. Even if the worst happens, this needs to be the last time. Something has to shift – the world is fed up with this, and we have other concerns.

This means that lessons need learning now, today, in these circumstances – emotionally, in the heart, womb and gut. Lives have been lost and are being lost, and the only way to redeem those deaths and make them more meaningful is to learn from them and change things. Only then do they serve a positive purpose in the long run. If people’s sacrifices on both sides are sufficient to build up a head of energy-potential for change, then may this be so. May that change come about.

Changing history takes time. Yet it happens in intense situations like this.

With love, Palden.

Site: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Podcasts: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/palden-jenkins

Three Palestinian Christians playing Arabic classic music

Fences and Walls

We Brits straddle a strange hypocrisy. In Ukraine our government supports the people (Ukrainians) against the Megamachine (Russia, as we currently perceive it). In Israel it supports the Megamachine, the Israeli government, against the people, the Palestinians (as many of us see it).

Though it’s not as simple as that, since there are real people on both sides of both conflicts. And while the British support for Ukrainians is pretty solid, our support for Israelis and Palestinians is equivocal, mixed and changeable – when people bother to pay attention. For most Brits, sympathies currently extend to people on both sides, with only a degree of rigid partisanship on either side of the spectrum.

Such partisanship is largely because of personal connections. Or it depends on which media people follow. Older people tend to sympathise with Israel (their reference point goes back to WW2 and the 1967 Six Day War), while younger people tend toward sympathising with Palestinians (their reference point goes back to the intifadas and repeated Gaza bombings).

My prayer is that the vengeful aspect of the Israeli psyche does not exceed itself. Israelis need to understand how to create peace and security around them without feeling a need for an iron wall mentality – those days are going, and painfully slowly. Actually, we all need to learn that lesson, but in Israel the iron wall mentality is exemplified.

Many Israeli soldiers are quite okay people – and they like rock festivals too

The trouble is that, in a country surrounded with walls, fences and missile defences, supposedly to keep enemies and threats out, it imprisons Israelis themselves, inside their own bubble. Pretty much the only way out of the country is through Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv. It’s built on land owned up to 1948 by the Issa family, a refugee family who now run the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem.

Regarding that, here’s a report from Ibrahim Issa, the school director, where I lived and worked in Bethlehem. Though in the West Bank, it is only about 45 miles from Gaza – three minutes in a warplane. In Bethlehem they can probably hear and even smell what’s going on over in Gaza.

Here’s Ibrahim (he’s around 40 in age now)…

AROUND THE SCHOOL
It is extremely sad to see this escalation of violence and associated human suffering on both sides. We are safe until now, despite escalation in the area. Two days ago we had to evacuate the school. Hope Flowers School is located in Area C, which is Palestinian land under Israeli control – in the southwest part of Bethlehem. The school is located about 150 meters away from [the edges of] an Israeli settlement (Efrat).

One of the Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza fell about 50 meters from the school building and injured two boys from the neighborhood. One of them is already declared dead. Yesterday, Israeli settlers have been attacking Palestinians near the school. This situation is extremely scary for children at Hope Flowers, for teachers and certainly for families.

IN OUR FAMILY
Fourteen members of my extended family have been killed today in Gaza. The grandparents, sons, daughters and grandsons are all killed in an airstrike.

ON THE WESTBANK
Most schools have turned to online education. Hope Flowers School is doing that also for children who cannot reach the building anymore. Bethlehem is a totally closed-off area. We do not have fuel coming in; we do not have diesel to operate the school buses. I think it is a matter of days before everything stops totally, unless Israelis release the siege on Palestinian areas here in the West Bank. Food is also running out in the supermarkets. No food supplies are coming. It may be just a few days before people start to feel the shortage.

The view from my apartment at the school – over the valley you can see the security wall, an observation tower and, to the right, an ‘outpost’ that has now become a settlement

Palestinians are regrettably accustomed to adversity and crisis – that’s why a squad of Palestinians is advising the Ukraine government on social resilience and resistance. Over the decades many Palestinians went to university in Ukraine and Russia, so they know the deal there – about 6,000 Palestinians were in Ukraine at the outbreak of war in 2021.

MY OWN INNER CONNECTION

My Palestinian journey has been one where I have had to examine my biases and the contradictions in my viewpoints. They are very mixed.

My maternal grandfather was in Allenby’s invading force in WW1 in Iraq and Palestine, and my father fought in Egypt in WW2. I have Roma ancestry, and the Roma experienced holocaust tragedy as much as the Jews. I also have German (and Welsh) ancestry, and when my father was younger, ‘the only good German was a dead German’, according to the mad logic of war-thinking at that time. It’s not that long ago that towns and cities this country were blitzed like Gaza – my mother hid under the table nightly in Walthamstow, East London. So it’s in my genes and those of many of us.

Amidst the damage of urban war, ordinary life goes on. This is Hebron.

Here’s comes a seriously woo-woo bit, which some readers might not like. It’s something you can take either literally or metaphorically since, whether or not it’s true, I carry similar issues to those of a similar character to me, back in history. It is a past-life thing, going back to the time when I was working for the Council of Nine in 1991-93. At one stage, I asked them why they called me ‘Paladin Saladin’ – I had thought it was a kind of jocular rhyming name. They did after all crack jokes! They simply said, “You were he“.

This was like a bolt of lightning. As a historian I immediately knew what they were throwing at me. For some years afterwards I had a resistance to the idea. I recounted this to a close friend, Jean Gardner, a Glaswegian aged hippy, now in heaven, who had been a friend of R D Laing in the Sixties. She looked at me intently, got up, went to the bookshelf, leafed through a history book and gave it to me, pointing at a picture.

“Palden, you sit exactly like this. And look at the simple diet he had – exactly like yours, minus the tofu… and how he could be tough and also show mercy… and the way he was always giving away the money he had to people in need, and he was personally perpetually broke, even though he was the Sultan of Egypt and Syria.” When Jean spoke like this, her words had that deep, no-bullshit Glaswegian firmness. Woo. I had to acknowledge this and take it on.

The Nine also said I had been the slave to Abraham’s pagan father, Terach, back in Ur, around 1900 BCE. Abraham had a big argument with his father and smashed all his idols, at the time when he was adopting the idea of a One God – and presumably I was in on that moment. Servants are often privy to all sorts of stuff.

Then, they said I was a Nubian slave to Moses – yes, I waited for him at the bottom of the mountain. They finished by saying, “You have been involved with the Jews three times, always as a foreigner, and this is your fourth”. In this they were implying, ‘And what are you going to do now?‘. Five years later I was getting involved with Israel and Palestine, starting by being a co-founder of Jerusalem Peacemakers.

On my first visit to Jerusalem in 1991 I cried my eyes out in the back of a taxi driving along under the medieval city walls. I’d been here before, and I was all stirred up. We had walked out of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, entranced by the strong atmosphere there, straight into a soldier situation – and that’s what’s really weird and intense in Jerusalem. The best and the worst in human experience can come at you in quick succession. Actually, Glastonbury is a bit like that, minus the guns. Both holy places are somehow deeply connected as places where light meets dark. You have to get used to the extreme ups and downs. Glastonbury trained me for Jerusalem.

THE NINE’S THOUGHTS ON ISRAEL

Here’s a simple quote from the Nine [1]: “Do you have the understanding that Abraham was the father of two nations?” Biblical and Quranic tradition have it that the Arabs were descended from Ishmael and the Jews from Isaac, both sons of Ibrahim/Abraham. “Then you also understand that Allah is what those of Israel call Yehovah.“

The Nine didn’t regard the Jews as ‘the Chosen People’. They saw them as the People of a (big) Choice.

“They [as souls] came from a planet of strength. They came from [another world called] Hoova. They had strength within their character, and also the planet from which they came was a warlike planet – and in their seeding here [on Earth], they were asked to be at peace. But they have factors of doubt and questioning, which cause us difficulty. They have doubt, suspicion and deception – because of the place they come from [Hoova]. Part of the reason for their existence on this planet was to overcome that factor.

“It began when they left Ur [heading to Palestine]. Before that, they listened. But the descendants of Abraham lost their internal knowledge: they only kept the knowledge of who they were. In their need for survival, they did not accept total obedience [to the Covenant]. They were always making deals. Where one group would be in awe of Creation, the Hoovids would look at Creation as something to be utilised.

“The nation is fierce with pride, and from this grew the desire to help their own nation only – in the times before the man Jesus. So in effect our plan [the Covenant] was turned around. The people of Israel will eventually accept their responsibility. And yet in effect this is their salvation, because it shows the nations of planet Earth that they are a nation that will not be conquered. Also, even though they made an error, every nation has made an error.

“There were only two commandments for the nation of Hoova. Those two are: Thou shalt not worship false gods; Do unto others as you want others to do unto you. Those are the only two commandments given to the nation of Hoova.

“The nation of Israel has forgotten its heritage, its choosing and its Covenant. Abraham was told to go and spread his seed through all the planet Earth. Abraham was told to populate and to go forth, and yet this Covenant was not kept. The Hebrews did not go forth and mingle. If this nation had gone forth and mingled with the peoples of the world, then this the planet Earth would not be in such a serious state as it is at this time.”

There are peace-freaks in Israel too – many have done military service and know what they’re talking about when it comes to peace-building

In one of the interviews I had with the Nine, I asked this:

“The people of the north of Israel, the lost tribes, were taken away and dispersed by invaders. Were these people eliminated, or did they mix with the peoples of other lands?”

“They are all over the world and, as examples, some are in Afghanistan. There are some in Ethiopia, in the Phoenicians [Lebanese and Tunisians], in the people of the musical language written of by Caesar [the Celts], and in the Orientals [such as Kashmiris and Uighurs].”

I then asked, “You have said that the Hoovids came in order to mix with the people of planet Earth.”

“That is a truism, but they that stayed together did so because the others had been dispersed. If I would have a word of my own to say, would you like to hear? I will ask the Council if I may say it. They said I may say, but you may not be pleased with it. It is this. We would have one warning to people who are working with higher consciousness, to be very cautious about your attitudes toward the Hoovids: for it may very well be that you are a Hoovid also, yes. What we are attempting to say is that the majority of people that are involved in spiritual elevation contain the genes of Hoovids – so look upon what I say. How do you then place yourself in that?

“Look at all the world, in every nation, and see which negative characteristics developed that made that nation feel different to others. In your nation [Britain] you believed you were superior to other nations, and that your rightness was the rightness of rightness. And as you have now evolved beyond that, you give to others that same understanding [of seeing beyond tribal perspectives]. When people come to gather as many, and the clapping goes all around the world [across borders], all will be free of the bondage of their bringing forth [of their tribes, nationalities and cultures].

“The people of the nations of Ishmael [Arabs] are brothers and sisters with the nation of Israel. It is important that brothers not fight brothers, but in your world it seems to be your system. It is important for this message to be given to the nation of Israel, for they need to have the understanding that the powers of their mind create trouble when mixed with their fears. Your mind brings to you not what you want – it brings to you what you fear.

“The nation of Israel must look closely at what they fear. They want peace, but may we ask why they do not have peace? For what are their fears? It is what is in the hearts of the men and women of the nation of Israel that is most important. When the nation of Israel begins to fear less, then also it will begin to change.”

It’s really boring, spening a long shift inside one of those spy towers

HISTORY AND THE FUTURE: NOT A STRAIGHT LINE

Arabs have a different history to Jews. Arabs are not one people – they are mixed in origin, encompassing thousands of years, and some Palestinians are of Jewish origin. Multi-cultural and multi-ethnic by nature, they are united by speaking Arabic and sharing certian core beliefs. But after the diasporas, the Jews, having been decimated, dispersed and, in medieval-to-modern Europe, persecuted, have different shadows to contend with to Arabs. It even goes into depth-psychology: Arabs suffer shame while Jews suffer guilt. As do Europeans. And all of us suffer fear – big doses of it.

The Middle East has always been a crossing-point of the Old World, between Africa, Asia and Europe. Many peoples of the Old World have ranged across it over the millennia (even the Roma, coming from India). Nations with borders do not suit the region – it has usually come under large empires. It was the Europeans – the Brits and French – who sectioned up the Middle East around 1920, setting in motion much of the trouble that is happening today.

To solve the endemic insecurity and power problems of Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, the whole region needs reuniting as a community of peoples without borders. This process is slowly, painfully starting, as the oil industry and its over-powered oligarchies begin to decline. A sign of this was the pan-Arabic revolutions around 2011 – suppressed, essentially, by oil money and the vested interests invested in it. The ‘Arab Street’ made its voice heard – sparked by a young vegetable-seller in Tunisia. The voice of The Street will return.

Middle Eastern administrative tradition involves ‘Millets’, a multicultural interlocking of peoples, each with their own customs and laws, who all lived in neighbouring communities across the same wide territory – in city quarters, villages and local areas. So the Jews, the Druze, Maronites, Copts, Kurds, Armenians, Alawites, Turkmen, Yazidis, the Shi’a and the Sunnis all rubbed shoulders, living within their own communities under their own laws. To some extent, whenever a new invader arrived, these millets survived and, as long as everyone paid their taxes, the imperialists left things that way. Until the British and French came along.

We British carry much historic responsibility for what’s happening in Palestine and Israel today.[2] I am rather disappointed that His Majesty’s Government has opted to side with Netanyahu’s Israeli government rather than taking a more humane, humanitarian approach, pressurising not only for a cease-fire but for a longterm resolution, backed with some muscle and sticking power.

The issue is the future, not the past. The core issue is the future of planet Earth and the global challenges before us. A crux issue amongst these is an end to war all over the world. That’s the only likely way the Israeli wars will end. War is no longer an appropriate way to settle our many differences. It’s swords to ploughshares time. Otherwise, there’s trouble. Speaking as an astrologer, probably that trouble comes in the 2030s.

If I’ve pressed anyone’s buttons by writing this stuff, please forgive me. I don’t insist on your believing either me or the Nine. I submit it for your consideration. It might give a few helpful perspectives.

With love. Palden

NOTES:
[1] The Only Planet of Choice – essential briefings from deep space. Various editions from 1993. www.palden.co.uk/nine.html
[2] The British Mandate – the inter-war years, written by me, from Pictures of Palestine. www.palden.co.uk/pop/british-mandate.html

Paldywan’s website: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog (‘follow’ it to get blogs delivered by e-mail, hot off the keyboard)
Podcasts: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/palden-jenkins

Deep Disappointment

With humans, and the way we behave.

I’m deliberately making few statements at this time, even though people ask me what I think. There’s no point.

To re-quote Bertrand Russell: ‘War is not about who is right, it is about who is left‘. The coin is spinning in the air. It has already been flipped.

Corresponding with an old friend in Tel Aviv, who is Jewish, of Romanian origin, she told me this morning that she and her friends are standing together with Arabs in Jaffa (an ancient Arab town next door to Tel Aviv), and, for better or worse, I replied like this…

The pics are from Bethlehem in the West Bank, 2011

Stand together, sister. This is about humans and the Megamachine – Pluto in Aquarius, astrologically. I think it might eventually be a turning point.

I hope everyone on both sides thinks twice before acting. And I hope the Gazans treat their prisoners according to true sharia – in which case they will be as well cared for as possible, under the circumstances.

Indeed, God is great, though he makes his own decisions, and he doesn’t necessarily think what we humans want to think he thinks, and all of us are equally his little children.

I have a young friend in Gaza, Basma, who’s popping a baby in the next few days. Life on Earth becomes incredibly bizarre sometimes.

I have been doing some psychic work on the other side, working with people who have died, and here’s an interesting observation: the ‘angelic operation’ to deal with the influx of hurt, deceased souls is one operation, and the deceased are all being treated together.

And when you listen to the news propaganda, remember that there are plenty of good humans here in Britain and around the world who watch this, and who care, and who form their own conclusions.

This lady’s eyes have seen things humans shouldn’t witness

If I were fitter and had the funds, I wouldn’t go to Is-Pal right now. I would wait, because it’s the abiding damage, psycho-emotional and concrete, that matters. It’s what happens next, with those who are left, that matters.

Those who pass away, they will be cared for, and they will come to peace in their hearts. It’s those who remain who have an uphill climb ahead of them.

This outbreak of war is caused by the damage that has already been done. Every act of violence begins with an unhealed wound – this is the motto of the school where I used to work in Beit Lahem (Bethlehem).

Beware a rush to judge, and be aware of your tendency to take sides. Take both sides, and see each side’s viewpoint(s) – each ‘side’ has a range of viewpoints, actually. Because, strangely, each side is right. From its own adopted viewpoint. And each side is wrong.

Yet there is not right or wrong in this game: there are simply outcomes. And what exactly are the chosen outcomes?

Remember that, when war breaks out, there is a polisation of anger-driven awareness and attitudes into simplistic, black-and-white terms (‘terrorists’, ‘genocide’, etc) and this does no good at all.

Are you a victim of this mentality? This is the psychosis that drives war, and this kind of psychosis needs to end if we are to get through the 21st Century in one piece.

This is about humans against the Megamachine. It’s not really about humans against humans – that’s the psychosis.

I’ll come up with further observations in due course. But for now, silence works best. Bear witness. This is Planet Earth. This is humanity in action. Across the universe, we are frightening, dangerous beings.

True holy war, jihad, concerns the struggle and conflict within ourselves to find the bottom-line truth of our lives. To come to peace within ourselves. By doing this we come closer to what many humans call ‘God’. What arises from this is a deep urge to do good in the world, to make the world a place of justice, peace, safety and basic happiness. That’s what holy war is, and it needs no weapons.

With love. Palden.

A World of Appearances

Finally I’ve written an autobiography. It’s online and shortish, the equivalent of ten pages. I was reluctant to write an autobiography, partially because I feel it’s not greatly important and partially because my memory of past events is foggy. In it I explain why this is so. Lots of people have said I ought to write one. I dragged my feet. Standing on stages in front of people comes naturally to me, but I’m also a quietish, Saturnine Virgo who’s happy beavering away behind the scenes and not making a big deal about it.

Yet writing it has been therapeutic. I did it in two rounds. In the first, a year or so ago, I wrote down all I could remember. Letting time pass and recently reading it again, I remembered more events, details and issues. Though really, it’s not life’s events that matter: it’s what goes on inside, prompted partially by those events and partially by stuff coming up from within.

There are general, lifelong issues and patterns too, which are difficult to weave into a short autobiography without making it lengthy. Even so, while working on it I’ve been reminded of something that has been important throughout my life. I’m not sure what to call it. It’s all to do with working with contradiction and paradox. In a way I’m a radical extremist in my spiritual-political views and, to some people, I’m right off the map, not even a decently normal left-winger, conspiracy buff, new age glitteratum or a proper anything. But in another way I have always been measured, considered, anchored in lived experience and seeking balance in my thinking.

My politics – particularly in international relations – comes from my heart. Being with Tibetan Lamas in the 1970s clarified this. They showed me how everyone suffers, rich or poor, privileged or deprived, and that we need to practice compassion and loving kindness toward each and every person and living being. The secret here is to put ourselves in others’ shoes, to see what life looks like from where they stand. You don’t have to agree, just to bear witness and comprehend their situation. I firmly disagree over a lot of things, though I’m not into pointing fingers or demonising people. Such a non-polarised approach isn’t complacency but a way of seeing life that can unlock doors to effective activism or concrete action.

Revolution, to me, involves building the future while letting the past dwindle of its own accord and in its own time, perhaps with an occasional strategic shove. I’ve always been focused not so much with rousing people to rise up as with looking beyond the next perceived horizon and laying the ground for what happens afterwards.

Of course, everyone needs to do whatever they’re moved to do, and to do the best they can with it, preferably without harming others. In the end we all learn from what life has taught us. It’s all part of a bigger, wider movie with a cast encompassing the whole of humanity. If people die in war or by starvation, it is indeed tragic and wrong – one young friend in Gaza has just been killed – yet it is also a sad part of humanity’s learning process, its aversion therapy. It happens because we humans have not remembered the main agenda and what the endgame is.

It’s both a personal and a collective process and, today, the pendulum is swinging toward collective priorities. Our attention is being drawn to the collective dynamics involved in facing the future, which are incrementally overriding the personal preferences and envisionings we all variously might have. In the Global North there’s a lot of braying about personal rights and sovereignty, but much of this is the sad complaining of affluent Westerners, scared of losing the power, advantages and comforts we have had. The future no longer lies with us whiteskins, though we do have a place in it. Around 15% of the world’s population, having banged on about democracy and human rights for decades, to our surprise we’re faced with being but a minority, with equal, not superior, rights to everyone else.

For better or worse, I’m seriously moderate. I regard Bilderbergers as humans. They do things that are beneficial and things that aren’t. They’re like you and me, really – thoroughly imperfect beings. Yes, they have a certain power to swing things their way, though not as much as some of their critics believe. We need to help them change their thinking, their hearts and their behaviour, since no system of social-political organisation will work well without people’s hearts being in the right place.

If we see those at the top of society as Them, by implication making Us into their underdogs, we tend to reinforce the masters-and-slaves mentality. Even so, we apparent slaves far outnumber them, and we aren’t always stupid sheeple who obey our masters, so ‘the Cabal’ doesn’t control everything. We are co-responsible.

It’s all to do with how we choose to see things. Personally, I see a transformation of the current system to be inevitable and unavoidable. It’s taking longer than many of us first thought, but it is happening. It’s up to us to do what we can to nurture and channel that inevitability, in order not to prolong the agony, since what’s really at stake is the amount, the depth and intensity of suffering and damage that people and the world must go through before we reach a breakthrough point.

Seen in this light, the latest outbreak of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, or between rival factions in Sudan, is a tragic saga of the thrashing of the tail of a slowly dying dragon. In WW2 we had an example of dying dragons: the greatest destruction in the war took place after 1942, when its course had already pretty much been decided at Stalingrad, Alamein and Midway – yet it took a lot of further destruction to confirm that inevitability. Mainly because of masculine bull-headedness. But the matter was eventually harrowingly resolved amongst the ruins of Berlin and Hiroshima.

In the last thirty years, on top of other projects and activities, I’ve worked with meditation and psychic work. Many political types and rationalists think this is woo-woo, a joke, or peripheral or impractical, and they may hold that view if they wish. The way I see things, a tide is turning, nothing is permanent and we’re working with the historic trends of centuries and millennia. We’re working with the underlying thoughts, feelings and beliefs of people, and that’s what shapes the future.

Those of us who elevate our individual freedoms as benchmarks upon which everything else should be judged are having to swim against a growing tide moving the other way. Individualised self-interest, though indeed relevant and part of life’s equation, is not actually in everyone’s best interest – and the endangered state of our world demonstrates that. Our world problem derives from self-interest. We’re at a stage in history where the survival and benefit of humanity and of the natural environment as a whole have become the top priority. Global circumstances push things this way, and the big question is how fast and fully we respond and adapt. The future is nowadays having a greater causative influence on the present than the past has. We’re being sucked toward the future.

So I don’t rail against the banksters, the billionaires and the secretive manipulators, though I do twiddle their knobs while they aren’t looking, when I can. I do my bit. In my innerwork I sometimes penetrate the backrooms of Davos, or tweak the energy-fields around certain cloud computers, or drop thoughts into prominent people from afar. This probably sounds like fantasy or even megalomania, and there’s truth in that observation too, but feeding and seeding the collective psyche with such perspectives is the beginning of change. All man-made change begins in the psyches of people.

I tend not to see things in black-and-white, good/bad, right/wrong terms – that, to me, is a prejudicial, blinkered comfort-zone allowing us to avoid seeing clearly. When working in Palestine I was not really like many of the other activists. I believed in staying in Palestine for long periods and participating personally in people’s lives, rather than visiting in an activist group for an exhausting and short week picking olives, doing conflict tours and leaning on the copious hospitality of Palestinians.

I wasn’t anti-Israeli either, even though I found some Israelis difficult to relate to, especially if politics came up. Also I don’t agree with the agendas of the state of Israel. But I don’t agree either with the minority of Palestinians who wish, at least in heated moments, to eliminate Israel or drive the Israelis out. To me, it’s not about Palestinians and Israelis – it’s about people, and I worked with those who sought my kind of input.

So when I went through Israeli checkpoints, I regarded the soldiers scrutinising me as real humans, and my behaviour and body-language reflected that – and I got through, often by simply brightening up their day and being a nice guy. I wasn’t there to do battle with the poor grunts on whose shoulders it fell to protect a screwed-up system.

It is easy, popular and sexy to bang on about the badguys at the top of the pile and to dish out neatly packaged certainties about the solution to the problems we face. It gets the hits, royalties and votes, but those who do it then become part of the psychosis of the divisive system that they oppose. Yes, it’s easy to regard Them as the reptilians, the child-molesters, the evil ones, the exploiters, and this neatly places Us in a position of being the pure, the innocent and deserving – and anyone who disagrees with this is clearly on the side of The Cabal.

For me it all started at the London School of Economics in 1969, when I was a student. A situation was brewing where quite a few students were getting confrontative, hurt by the treatment the police and authorities were meting out to us. But I did not believe in confrontation or violence – this would not get the people of Britain on our side. Even if we, the goodguys, won, violence wouldn’t simply subside since it would already be baked into the character of the revolution itself, leading to new atrocities and the subsequent rise of Napoleons and Stalins. So I advocated working toward creating a new future rather than fighting the agents and symbols of the past – a fight we would not win, given the circumstances we were in. I and people like me lost that argument, and eventually the revolution sadly exhausted itself, mainly by tilting at windmills.

I’ve always held a gap-straddling line. Only as I grew older did I come to understand why. I came to see the situation on Earth as part of a larger, deeper, wider scenario. Here comes the button-pressing extremist in me: I fundamentally believe we are not alone and isolated here on Earth – though we are to an extent quarantined. Many people who are into ETs focus on galactic locals such as Pleiadians, Arcturians or Zetas, but it gets bigger, wider and deeper than that. [Here’s an audio talk of mine about this: Life on Earth, Life off Earth.] This has big implications for us on Earth. Bizarrely, the only public figure of recent times to mention this was Ronald Reagan, who once said, “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world“.

Beings from other worlds are mostly not ‘aliens’, and our origins as human-type souls lie amongst them. But we earthlings do like to see things in polarised terms, and we need to understand that we also are rather daunting to ETs since we’re fitful, unpredictable, inconsistent and we even have divided selves.

It’s a matter of how we choose to see things, and how much fear we weave into it. If you want to see lizard beings and regard them as dangerous, that’s what you’ll tend to see. The same goes for our relationships with all ‘others’, including foreigners, criminals or simply people who share our planet while living in different worlds. It applies also to creepy-crawlies and sharks, or cancer cells, Covid viruses, refugees or lightning strikes.

It’s time to step beyond the judgemental constraints of good and bad, right and wrong. There’s more to life than this. We need also to look carefully at the notion of ‘evil’, which is so easily bandied around – again, to make ourselves look like goodguys. I’ve been accused of being a criminal, traitor, toxic male, dictator and asshole myself, but that doesn’t make me so unless I buy into it. However, it’s still my duty as a human to work on those aspects of myself where I do fuck up.

The way I see things, evil doesn’t exist in itself – it is simply poisoned, blocked, polluted, diverted life and naturalness. The Tibetan story of Padmasambhava is instructive. When he took the Buddha-dharma to Tibet, he did not cast out the old gods and render them into evil entities, as Christians did over in Europe. He made friends and, as a teacher, he raised their perspective so that they could see beyond their situation. He co-opted them to become wrathful protectors of truth – scary, yes, but embodying the fears and defilements that we must face in the process of progressing spiritually. They were given a bigger, broader and deeper job.

This is similar to the legend of Lucifer, the angelic bringer of light, who sheds light on our darker sides, obliging us to learn through hard but necessary lessons. Except the notion of Lucifer got twisted, he was made into a badguy, the light and awareness bit was removed and his badness was made permanent. Poor chap, he’s misunderstood.

Yet there is always redemption, and we can do things to further it. I’m not at all perfect in this, and there are issues I need to sort out before I’m gone. But the main thing is to work at it. The Council of Nine were emphatic about this. [The Nine was a group of cosmic beings I compiled a book for thirty years ago and continue to work with.] They didn’t prescribe an ideal world or state of enlightenment that we should strive to attain – because there’s always further to go, and this is what evolution is all about. They spoke instead of simply creating forwardness and a feeling of progress, because the more it happens, the more it grows in momentum.

That in itself, in any situation big or small, is all that is needed. Whether it’s gardening your allotment, bringing up your kids, doing your work, being socially active or weighing in on large-scale issues, creating forwardness is what we’re here for, as souls. It all adds magnitude to a growing current. It’s about making Earth a good, safe and happy place to live.

In our time, our big advantage is this. Amidst darkness, one candle makes a big difference. In the sunshine, a candle is hardly noticed. We’re in a time when small things matter more than we tend to believe, even though it sometimes feels like the darkness is overwhelming. Yet keeping our eyes on an aged neighbour, changing nappies (diapers), fishing plastic from a river, cooking a nourishing meal for hungry people, or even joining a meditation once a week can make a difference in a beshadowed world.

On Pordenack Point, looking toward Carn Boel and, behind, Tol Pedn Penwith

I have not done well in terms of money or status, though toward the end of my life I’m happy about what I’ve done in other spheres. I’m aware also of times I’ve failed or omitted to step up, but the net balance is, I hope, positive. It feels that way, and in recent years this feeling has helped me deal with cancer: I chose to treat cancer as a crash course in being alive and making the best of what I’m given. Over many years I had gathered a quiverful of growth-tools that have served me well in my cancer journey, and I’m glad I did that. Because cancer and, later, dying, involve a loss of control, and our success in handling them rests on where we’re really at, not in what we’re trying to be. It’s our actual spiritual fitness and muscle-tone that matter here.

This gives us access to a miracle zone where it’s possible to bend, break or bypass the constraints of normality and expectation. Life is a strange dance and, if the one we are dancing with doesn’t dance to the same tune, or seems to oppress or constrain us, then the secret is to step out of the way, out of the set patterns and moulds in ourselves that render us into being victims. The degree to which we feel oppressed, and what we do about it, is something we can change. It can take time and it can be a struggle, but that’s the direction to go in.

A good friend wrote to me as I was writing this. She was concerned about the new outbreak of violence between Palestinians and Israelis. It’s happening yet again. It’s terrible, and it’s easy to get locked into hand-tied consternation about it. Peace will indeed come to the Holy Land, and many people there already subscribe to it. But the dragon’s tail is still thrashing, and it’s tragic and painful for those who are personally affected and involved. Sadly for Israelis, it’s also shutting down an enormous domestic dialogue about the future of their divided nation – predictably, that suppression will charge a high price later on. Yet step back from this conflict and look at it another way, and this is not a war between Israelis and Palestinians so much as a war between the dehumanising drivers of conflict on both sides and ordinary people of both sides.

We can do things about this. We can visit Palestine or Israel to add our bit, or we can make friends with an Israeli or a Palestinian online, or we can donate money, or in meditation we can work at creating a vibe where the people involved are raised up to see things another way, to see the futility of their situation and get a clearer sense of what is genuinely best for the future. It’s not for us to prescribe what that might be, but it is for us to help create a psychic field in which they might progress with what’s genuinely right for them.

Once a conflict starts, it’s not helpful simply to oppose it – it’s too late and, as is often the case, the opportunity for preventing conflict came earlier and we missed it. The trick is to take the situation as it stands, working to twist and weave it another way, to introduce new, unlocking factors, to help those who are suffering, to work with wider public awareness, and even to conduct direct dialogues with generals and fighters in our inner universe.

It’s not a matter of taking sides: we need to step beyond our preferences and biases. No matter how much we believe that past history is important in this or any conflict, it’s the future that really matters.

A young friend in Gaza, Basma, is going to have a baby any day now. What a way for a child to be born. Her brother Moh, a male nurse, escaped Gaza in 2015 and was one of the boat people crossing from Turkey to Greece. He landed up in Belgium, working as a nurse, and died of Covid in 2022. What a life these people have. He had been the hope of the family.

In this week’s medit ation, if you join it, I encourage paying some attention to this issue. However, this world is full of worrying problems, and good-hearted people can get overwhelmed with it all. To deal with this, it’s advisable to do small things well rather than big things badly – that is, to focus on the particular issues that mean a lot to you, and to stay with them and proactively do something with them. If we all do that, we’ll cover things better.

It’s also true that everything is interrelated. What’s happening in the Holy Land affects other people and places. Each time something like this breaks out, the collective psyche of the world becomes more disappointed, dismayed and depressed. Explosions and bloodbaths make sensitive, delicate, human issues seem irrelevant, and the problem with this is that empathic sensitivity is a key ingredient in making the world a better place. Wars, meanwhile, are useful to the status quo – they suppress not only the people in war zones, but also the spirits and hopes of humanity as a whole. They make the public jaded, accepting conflict as a given, shrugging shoulders and turning away.

We’re faced with many paradoxes and knife-edge choices in our day. It isn’t simple. This has been the saga of my own life, and many of you might share a similar story. Yet it’s what we’re faced with, and we can fret and worry about it or we can do something, within the scope of our lives and possibilities, and at times beyond it. That is our choice.

Back in 2011 I gave a speech at a conference called ‘Will they still serve tea in 2023?‘. This was the moderate in me, speaking. Some people thought the world might end, or at least radically change, in 2012. Well, life went on after 2012 passed. So, apparently nothing happened. The catastrophists were proven wrong and the normality-freaks seemed to win. But this was a lot to do with the dramatic utterings of advocates who desperately wished to be the one who got a big prediction right. Things did happen. Discreetly, the tide turned. Before 2012 we had a future global problem and, after 2012, we had an actual problem, and as the decades roll on, we’re going deeper into it.

In Britain there’s a legend that King Knut (Canute) tried to demonstrate his power by turning back the tide – and he got wet feet. No, historians are now seeing this differently. He sought to demonstrate that even he, with all his worldly power, could not turn back the tide. He didn’t write an autobiography either.

With love, Palden

Autobiography: www.palden.co.uk/autobiography.ht ml

Website: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Audio Archive: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

Ancient Protector of the Isles of Britain. Pordenack Point, near Land’s End, Cornwall.

Tinzibitane Elabdach

When I was diagnosed with cancer in late 2019 it was at first like receiving a death sentence. I was indeed close. This has a way of changing and reorienting everything inside – or it did so for me.

When it looks like your life really could be ending, it makes you reassess everything, where everything stands, what can be dropped, what means a lot to you, and what is unresolved, regretted and incomplete. It’s a rapid, factual acceptance process, prompted by a loss of ability to act on life, owing to serious illness and malfunction.

So I looked at my life. Some things I could let go of easily, some needed attention, some presented hurdles to cross and some looked impossible. This process went on over a period of weeks while I was flat on my back, struggling to stay alive. As it happened, I made it through, with the loving help of my then partner and the ministrations of the staff at Torbay hospital.

After three months, I was gradually reviving. After six months I was more or less on my feet and functioning – enough to be able to go home to Cornwall and look after myself, with a little help from my friends – and the staff at Royal Cornwall hospital at Treliske. Lucky me. I survived.

Being a writer and communicator, there were still things I could do, and it became part of my cancer therapy. If I were younger, with a job and family, or if I were in engineering or farming, I’d have been in a catastrophic situation. But as a freelance writer and broadcaster, I could carry on. My brains and the creative process changed, and my fingers weren’t as keyboard-accurate as they once were, but it worked.

Even so, part of me was left hanging – the humanitarian part. So were the people in other countries who were affected by my loss of functionality. I could no longer travel long distances and my capacity to get through such a rigorous life had collapsed. If I went to Palestine or Mali now, it might well be a one-way journey. That remains an option, though I’d also be happy for my ashes to be buried under a tree on Botrea Hill.

I made a prayer for clues suggesting how to resolve this question. Three issues came up.

One was the growing needs of the people I’d been working with. This included Hope Flowers Scho ol in Bethlehem, all sorts of individuals in Palestine and Syria and in the Tuareg village of Tinzibitane, Mali. In the 2020s, need and crisis levels were rising, and this was vexing.

The second issue was me, since doing such work had meant so much. These people, whom I had grown so close to, were some of the most valuable people in my life – I had learned so much and become so much more of a real human as a result of working with them and finding my place amongst them.

The third was finding people to take over from me. That was the biggest question.

As my old friend Sheikh Bukhari once put it, “God has a staff shortage, with plenty of eligible employees who for some reason prefer to stay unemployed“. A kind of Sufi bishop with a deep Muslim heritage, he had emigrated from Jerusalem to America, landing up flipping burgers in a California burger joint. He returned home after a decade, back into the frying pan that is Jerusalem, to become a leader in a community of spiritual peacemakers in Israel-Palestine – then called Jerusalem Peacemakers, and now called the Abrahamic Reunion.

“I finally accepted Allah’s job offer“, he said. A good man, he was. He’s now in heaven, carrying on up there, and his widow Hala carries on down here. His son Izzedin Naqshband runs a Palestinian vegan restaurant in East Jerusalem, if you’re ever over that way.

Finding people to take over helping Tinzibitane has been a challenge. The Tuareg don’t have as much PR power and experience as Palestinians do. However, they make amazing hand-made, trademark-free, talismanic jewellery and other crafts, and that’s their tradeable USP or ‘unique selling point’. Many Palestinians are educated, literate, competent, urbanised people, while the Tuareg live a simple life out in the desert, without being highly engaged in the modern world.

They are not tempted by modernity, tending to hold it at bay. From a humanitarian networking viewpoint, this is a good marketing tag to use – the Tuareg have a genuine mystique that charms and fascinates people. If it were lost, it would be a loss to the world. They don’t beg and bleat either.

The modern world comes at them anyway. In 2016 I managed to save the life of a baby, Zeinabou, whose mother died in childbirth. I helped with other survival issues by making Facebook appeals and raising a few hundred quid to help.

Mercifully, I was joined by two others, Eve and Jane, and we were able to fund social-reconstruction projects going into the thousands. Over a few years we restocked their camels and goats, sank a well and funded the building of a small village school, helping them regain confidence as a village after a devastating war and drought around 2011-12.

They hadn’t actively participated in the war, but it had affected them and they had been attacked by both sides – the Malian army and Al Qa’eda-related Jihadi militias spilling over into the Sahel from Libya and Syria. The Jihadis tried to establish an Islamic caliphate to lord it over the independent-minded Tuareg, and they’re still at it. I think they will blow out, get tired and go home eventually, but not anytime soon.

Testosterone does wear out after a while – and this is how many wars come to an end. Eventually, people just want to go home and sleep in a proper bed.

The desert village, some way west of Timbuktu, started coming together again. People returned from refugee camps in neighbouring Mauretania and new people joined from other villages, seeing how they were getting organised and taking life back into their own hands. The chief, a thoughtful man in his early seventies, with good intentions for his people, strengthened the social fabric of the village and gave it new hope, with our help.

The Tuareg are a consensual people with deep traditions going way back before the arrival of Islam in medieval times. They are independent people, with significant gender equality and a strong sense of collective solidarity. I liked working with them, and they did the right things to help us help them.

They are a desert people. For centuries they have been the camel-truckers of the Sahara, carrying goods between south and north, inhabiting the southern edge of the desert, the Sahel. Gold, salt and high-value goods were their main cargoes, plus, in medieval times, slaves to Algeria and Egypt, which they stopped doing later. These goods and people were sold in the souks of the Arab world and forwarded to Europe, Ottoman Turkey and the Middle East.

One thing I like about them is their integrity, honesty and lack of corruption, and this makes it easier to work with them. They don’t like asking for help, and they budget and spend well, and money sent for a particular purpose is usually spent on that purpose, as arranged.

In many crisis zones, money just gets spent on whatever urgent need comes up next – it’s understandable, a ‘firefighting’ approach, and that’s life there, but from a fundraising viewpoint in the rich world it’s difficult, because of our issues around accountability. Accountability is a polite word for post-Protestant tight-fisted control-freakery, a key quality that has made us whiteskins rich.

We communicated through Anim al Husseini, who first contacted me in 2015. It was his wife who had died in childbirth, and Zeinabou is now growing up in the village. Anim speaks Tamashek (the Tuareg language), Arabic, French and English, and he’s good at staying in touch and supplying information and photos – without these, support work gets difficult.

The chief has nominated Anim to be the next chief – though, whenever that happens, he will need the consensus of the villagers to step into that role. That’s the way it works amongst the Tuareg: their traditional systems of governance are consultative and confederal. As desert individualists with a self-help survival ethic, any family or tribe may take their leave and join other villages if they feel the need. Nominally the men make the decisions but, if the women disapprove, it simply doesn’t happen, and that’s that. So the women set the norms and the men do the business.

The village has hit new political difficulties. It’s a long story, going back to the 1880s-90s when the French took over the Sahara, dividing it into what are now Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Morocco, Algeria and Libya. They took the Tuaregs’ camels, goats and best lands, oppressing, conscripting and enslaving them and discouraging their nomadic lifestyle. Over time there were a few Tuareg revolts against this.

When independence came in the 1960s, power went to the Mandinka and Bambara majorities in the southern, greener part of Mali, who continued discriminating against the Tuareg, regarding them as a threat. Yes, there is black racism too, and the Tuareg are only partly black – they derive from ancient Saharan, Berber, Arabic, Nubian and West African stock.

By the 1990s some Tuareg wanted their own independent country of Azawad in the northern half of Mali – the desert region. The government wouldn’t have it and fought back. There were also frictions with other peoples in the area – the Dogon, Fulani, Songhai, Bambara, Soninka – as populations grew and the region became more desertified.

Recently, Anim Touareg wrote to me, and this is the first time he has ever expressed true fear over the future. This is what he wrote:

Salam Aleykoum dear Palden
How are you ?
All the people of the village greet you
We are very scared about the situation and yes we hope everyone will be safe
A lot of people already flee to Mauritania
But in the village we discussed about it and we decided to stay in the village
Because travelling will cost a lot of money and the last time we went to [refugee camps in] Mauritania, everybody get sick
Here now the biggest problem we have is the provision [food]
Things are getting very very expensive because of the war
However if we get food for the people, we will stay in the village and continue education for the children
The chief of the village is sending his worry and ask you to tell to your friends
Because this is very emergency and we hope everything is gonna be alright
Thank you so much for everything dear Palden
Please receive greetings and prayers from all the village
Ma’Assalam

And later he added this:

We don’t have access to a good and reliable internet connection these days
I am happy to tell you we sent some families to the refugee camps In Mauritania
We evacuated elder people first because they have a lot of health issues and can’t support big pressure
For me I am still in the village with my family and some other families
We will work hard to continue running the school so our children get educated
It’s very important for us
We are trying our best
I know about your health issue dear friend and I don’t want you to work a lot also
So take your time and share some Infos when you can
Thank you so much for everything dear Palden
Please take good care of you and keep in touch
Maasalam
Anim ❤🙏🙏🙏

Anim is a Capricorn in his early thirties – a Tuareg Millennial and single father, with camel.

I’m telling you this story partially for your interest and information, but also I’m sniffing around. We need about three people with a good mix of skills who would be happy and willing to work with this and – this is the important bit – stick with it. The good news is that this project is not a big one – it’s human-sized. The turnover of the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem was over a million dollars a year, with which I could only tinker around the edges and do specific bits of hassle-busting but, with this village, our input has made a total, marked difference.

It’s a smaller-scale project, involving real people. We have no offices or international development degrees, though we’ve lived round campfires in tents and tipis. The involvement of an enlightened NGO might be welcome, yet there’s something special here about people-to-people, ground-to-ground connections – and not just handing it over to the charitable sector.

It feels best for there to be something like a small group of (say) three proactive energy-holders with 2-3 helpers. But it will take the shape it takes, around the people who turn up.

This isn’t about aid and development in the standard model. This is about helping the Tuareg stay Tuareg, and helping them interact constructively with the encroaching 21st Century world – and its guns, troublemakers, competing interests and geopolitics. A friend in Cornwall, Kellie Odgers-Brown, has come forward to market their jewellery here in Britain, and that’s a first step – the Tuareg want to generate their own income.

Now we need:

a good networker experienced in social media, crowdfunding and handling payments,
someone who understands cultural sensitivities and the politics of the region (who has also travelled outside the rich world without staying in hotels),
someone who is good at hustling, writing and organising,
plus a couple of people who are happy to pitch in when needed and handle special issues (such as cultivating a funder, running a website, starting a branch in another country or even going to Mali).

There’s a crisis going on in the Sahel and it is unlikely to end quickly. So this is not an easy mission, but it is doable by keeping an eye to the future. These people are a potential shining light in the post-conflict revival of the area. They stay politically neutral, focusing on their village and raising its game. By setting an example they give a model for other villages and tribes to emulate – this is a multiplier factor that is worth considering, and it’s already ‘case proven’.

But it needs resolute perseverance. It’s not full-time – it’s a spare-time thing that will go in waves and bursts. It might be good if there is one person in their 50s-60s, one in their 30s-40s and one in their teens-twenties, since each generation has its virtues. But those who turn up and make a difference are those who will run it and decide.

My dilemma is that I am no longer able to head this up and I have only a few years to live. The best I can do is advise, support and stand behind you. I no longer have what it takes to shoulder this operation. Think in terms of a minimum three-year commitment, with an added duty of finding someone to replace you if you wish to go.

If there is a gap in your life, if you seek engagement with something meaningful and out of the ordinary, and if it fits your ethical values to the extent that you can focus on it and become a trusty friend to these people, then this might be of interest to you.

If so, think about it for a few days, do some research, take a look at Anim’s Facebook page, contact him if you wish, and write to me with your thoughts (just a few paragraphs at first, please!). We’ll go on from there. Consider your realistically available time-space and your capacity to carry things through, and be clear about where your limits lie.

This is teamwork and others will rely on you to do whatever you take on. It’s unpaid, voluntary work, and it might or might not benefit your CV or resume, but it could benefit your mana – your standing as a soul. At the end of my life, I am so thankful for having been involved in this kind of work – it has been enriching in heart and soul.

That’s what this is about. To fulfil our missions on Earth, we need to get engaged with specific issues, activities and projects. We need to test ourselves with some gritty stuff, bringing light into the darkness. While this world has no shortage of crises and issues to worry about, getting involved with one thing like this is doable, and it can have wider implications longterm. It’s something where you as an individual can make an impact.

You form relationships with these people, and it’s about giving them some hope and backup, to make their lives better. They live in a very different world to us and, in our time, we need to learn to avoid imposing our ways on them and getting them to suck up to us. Instead we need to help them be themselves, stay themselves and develop themselves in their own way.

This is the way of the 21st Century. Leaders in this are the Palestinians – they are advising the Ukrainians in non-violent social survival and resistance skills. This is the stuff of the future – human, spirited aid.

It’s about building resilience, ecological, cultural and societal, about helping people face modern times, and bridgebuilding between cultures while honouring diversity. It isn’t only about helping them: it’s about an energy-exchange where they give what they are strong in, and we give what we are strong in, and it connects up, and everybody benefits.

For we, in the rich world, we need aid too. It’s just that we don’t fully know it yet. These people know a lot about survival and self-sufficiency. They understand the magic of life. They have a deep-rooted culture. They need friends, and so do we.

If this says something to you, or if you know someone who might be interested, or if you’d simply like to donate a tenner to the kitty (details from me), or rustle together tenners from your friends, or even take over the kitty, or make a prayer for protection of the village and the departed villagers, then please do. It would be great to give them some encouragement right now.

I’ve given you another long read, haven’t I? Well, congratulations in getting to the end. Happy newmoon. And Happy Birthday to Lynne too!

With love, Palden.

Anim Touareg in Mali: w ww.facebook.com/anim.touareg
Kellie Odgers-Brown in Cornwall: www.facebook.com/kellie.odgersbrown
Hala Bukhari in Jerusalem: https://www.facebook.com/sheikhbukhari
Izzedine Naqshband in Jerusalem: https://www.facebook.com/3izzdean
The Tuareg Desert People of Timbuktu (web-page): www.palden.co.uk/the-tuareg-of-mali.html
Palden on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/palden.jenkins

Jenin

Here’s a story from Jenin, in happier times in 2011. It might give you a feel of the place as it is when life is more normal.

THE SPRING OF THE GARDENS, Jenin, 28-29th June

Jenin is perched on the north-facing slopes of the West Bank plateau, on the edge of a wide, green plain stretching west from Galilee toward Haifa and north toward Nazareth. The security wall separates Jenin from the Arabic towns of Afula and Nazareth in Israel, not very far away. This is Jesus country, and Mohammed, although Muslim, is enamoured of the Jesus stories here.

Jenin is lower than most West Bank towns – except Jericho, the world’s lowest town. You can feel it in the thicker, moister, softer Mediterranean air of Jenin. A friendly town of 40,000 or so, we made stops at a workshop, then at Mohammed’s family firm’s sizable warehouses and offices. More coffee – I was beginning to get jittery and strung out on the stuff. But another special moment was coming up.

We went to the village of Birqin, west of Jenin, to see an ancient Christian church – apparently the world’s fourth oldest church, founded by the Byzantine empress Helena. Here Jesus had healed the lepers, in a biblical story. It was lovely inside, with richly-painted icons and Greek Orthodox paraphernalia. While the caretaker talked to Mohammed, I went into meditation, perched on a wooden pew – the place was tranquil and atmospheric, imbued with radiance.

While in that state, spontaneously I became aware of my mother, who had died 18 months earlier. Something in me suddenly wished, deep in my heart, that I could have brought her here. I don’t know where that feeling came from, but tears welled up inside, trickling down my cheeks. Cleansing tears, tears of release and healing forgiveness. I had always wished to share with her some of the remarkable spiritual experiences I have had in my life, but she never allowed it. She was quite a believer and she would have loved this church. Later I thanked the caretaker, and Mohammed too, for giving me this moment. Another level of resolution with my mother had taken place, unforeseen, yet a great blessing.

Mohammed had a lovely Palestinian wife who had lived in Germany with him, and a family with two girls and a newborn boy. I had a delightful evening with them. Ismael, my taxi-driver in Bethlehem, rang to find out if I was alright – that’s kind of him. He might also have been fishing for me to ask him to come and fetch me tomorrow, but I’ll make my own way back home to Bethlehem.

Being in Palestine is a perpetual process of being waylaid and sidetracked. If you try to change or resist it, or if you attempt to hold on to even the best-laid of plans, you land up worn out and frustrated. If you go along with the flow of it, remarkable things can happen.

Mohammed took me on a tour of Jenin – the market, the main street, the old town – though really the tour consisted of a series of stopovers for Mohammed to have conversations with people in the street, and with cafe owners, the director of the musical conservatory and a former Marxist running a shop next door to it. Well, I’m here to plug into real life in Palestine, and it was an interesting process. If all I can do is to be a character in people’s lives, and they in mine, something has been achieved.

People accost you in the friendliest of ways, even in the middle of a busy street. I was standing in a corner in the market, training my telephoto on people walking past, quietly taking pictures, and a steady stream of people came up asking me where I was from, where I am working, whether I come from London (as if it’s the only place in Britain) and why I didn’t bring my wife (she doesn’t exist, but sometimes I tell them she’s back home, to make it simpler).

The former Marxist was interesting, an intensely ruminative man who struggles within himself to find a new picture of the world and where it is going, after the fall of the USSR and the shift of China to capitalism. He had gone to university in Russia, as a number of older Palestinians have done. “The past is our future”, he said, “and the future is already come”. He sold old relics. He asked me what I recommended for Palestine. I thought about it, knowing he was seeking original thinking, and then told him I thought Palestinians should avoid adopting the wider world’s ways and becoming a client state of Europe and America – otherwise known as ‘economic development’. Or at least, Palestinians should be more discerning about it.

Peace and freedom are the peace that makes traffic jams possible and the freedom to sit in them – Martin Bell, war correspondent

‘Development’ involves an adoption of modern, market-oriented, high-tech, capitalist ways. It is assumed A Good Thing, but this viewpoint comes from one angle only – profit, gain and the assumption that economic growth makes people happy. Culture, society, nature, spirituality and finer human qualities are conveniently overlooked. Palestine would do better to be a cultural originator, not a slavish adopter, finding its own solutions and modifying the best of others’ to suit its own core objectives. He thought this was a good answer.

You can see the price of economic development by the plastic bags that blow around in the wind across the streets and hills of the Holy Land. Shopkeepers give them to you even if you have a cloth bag to use. My cloth bag slings over my shoulder, freeing my hands but, no, everyone carries multiplicities of plastic bags, destined to harness wind power and fly freely once they’ve been used. Or they get burned, releasing PCB toxins. The march of progress comes down to seemingly small issues such as these. Palestinians tend unthinkingly to believe that anything modern is good – it isn’t always so.

In the women’s empowerment courses back in Bethlehem they teach about the dangers of using plastics indiscriminately. For food use, Palestinians often use plastic bags that aren’t food-grade. Thus, invisibly and insidiously, the bags shed phthalates, PCBs and all manner of nasties into people’s food. On the course they teach about the dangers of those Alzheimers-stimulating nightmares called aluminium pans, and about microwaves that can cook you as well as the food, if you’re close. Palestinians use these without knowing their dangers, then wondering why Allah awards them with cancer. I’m sure he shakes his eschatological head in dismay.

I said to the Marxist that they ought to consider banning cars from at least some streets, giving the streets back to the people. That couldn’t happen, of course, and he said so – people wouldn’t agree with it. But they won’t support the idea unless they try it first, to see the difference. Manger Square back in Bethlehem is free of parked cars on Fridays and Sundays, and it’s wonderful – on Fridays hundreds of Muslims do their prayers in the square, and on Sundays churchgoers spill out of the Nativity Church to mill around, while boys kick balls and ride their bikes and people gather in gaggles to chatter.

Oh well, Westerners nagging about environmental issues don’t necessarily help either. People need to discover these things for themselves, learning the connection between baby formula and their babies’ depleted immune systems, or between cancer and the pollution generated from burning plastic.

We left the Marxist, with his visible back pain, to continue with his struggle. One form of development aid would be really valuable here: squads of osteopaths and chiropractors. So many Palestinians are out of joint. Water dowsers would also be valuable, except that the Israelis would quickly deport them because they want control of Palestinians’ access to water.

Jenin is a pleasant town. I came with an image of it as rather squalid, intense and somehow parochial, given its reputation for Israeli army incursions and Palestinian resistance. But no, it’s relaxed, friendly and not as crowded and walled-in as Bethlehem. It has a large, wide-open hinterland with nary an Israeli in sight. Even the local Israeli settlements were vacated – perhaps the Jeninis had succeeded in their resistance. The separation wall is some miles away, leaving open farmland around the town.

Jenin is populated with many refugees who originate from Haifa, on the coast of what’s now Israel. It was once the most tolerant and multicultural town in historic Palestine but it was ethnically cleansed in the 1948 Nakba when it was taken by Israel. Many were killed and the remainder escaped to Jenin.

Tolerant people, if their tolerance is seriously betrayed by sectarian or racist separatism or violence, can become deeply distrustful as a result. Sarajevo in Bosnia is like this, as is Beirut in Lebanon. People’s faith in humanity is more seriously destroyed than it is in the case of people who distrusted others anyway as a matter of course. That’s why Jenin, in the second intifada around 2000, fought ferociously against the Israelis.

I saw a sign saying ‘Dear Haifa, we are returning’. Israelis might interpret this to mean driving Jews into the sea, but it doesn’t. The Palestinian ethos is not ethnically exclusive like that of Israelis. It doesn’t stop them wanting to go back to their foreparents’ home though, to return to what had been a truly multicultural port city.

Jenin is a fertile place with many water sources, and it’s greener than much of Palestine. Its name is derived from Ayn al Janin, ‘spring of the gardens’. But ‘progress’ has had its way. Mohammed, an eco-campaigner, showed me where springs had been canalised, then to dry up, and where trees had been felled and the water table had thus sunk, and where a mosque extension had caused some old fountains to cease flowing. Then people wonder why.

This ‘progress’ ethos is adopted from abroad. It’s a progress that bulldozes away key resources such as underground water, farmland, clean air and balanced societies, undermining the true and full interests of a nation and its people, ruining everything with concrete and garbage.

Mohammed took me to a bare, wide-open place outside town which, he said, was being built as a result of corruption. It was the site of a new industrial park, as yet unbuilt, where the foundations of what looks like a future eight-lane highway had been laid over rich agricultural land. In development logic, it’s industry and commerce that are priority number one. This will lead to regret one day. Development and resulting crisis go hand in hand, with but a time-gap between them. Perhaps I’ll say that again. Development and crisis go hand in hand, with just a time-gap between them.

Eventually it was time to go home to Bethlehem. Mohammed had hosted me royally. He dropped me off at the taxi station, where I caught a service taxi – a ten-seater VW van – for Ramallah. These guys drive fast, but they do indeed get you there. I sat in the front seat. A young guy behind me was fascinated at what I was photographing, watching me closely as I turned my telephoto to focus on specific scenes, calculating my shooting carefully to avoid wires and roadside obstacles. I told him I was trying to catch a wide range of classic scenes, to build a website about Palestine. He said shukran jazilan, thank you very much, and the driver agreed. Afwan, it’s my pleasure. It really is. It’s an immense honour.

The checkpoints were all open. Things were improving year by year in Palestine and travel was getting easier. Just 5-6 years earlier this journey would have been a major expedition with no guaranteed arrival time – or no guarantee of arrival at all. Travelling to Ramallah from Jenin would have involved bringing out permits and passports at least five times.

The Samaritan landscape on the way from Jenin, past Nablus and down to Ramallah, is lovely. At Bir Zeit, Palestine’s Oxford, the uplands look west over the Israeli plains with wide-open vistas to the sea – to a Mediterranean which, though not far away, few West Bank Palestinians may visit.

On arrival at Ramallah I bundled out, with ma’assalams (goodbyes) all round, and bundled straight into a service taxi for Bethlehem – again, luckily, in the front seat. We sped off down to Qalandia, the main Ramallah checkpoint for Jerusalem – a place where queues are guaranteed – but we passed it by and headed down the Jerusalem bypass road, weaving through valleys and up and down hills, down to the Jerusalem-Jericho ‘peace road’.

One wonders why aid donors don’t feel ripped off by the lack of progress in building peace. But it was guilt money, really: on some level aid-providers know they perpetuate injustice and conflict, simply by using money to soften the blow of Israeli occupation. So, really, though it appears that they are helping Palestinians, in reality they are helping Israelis by keeping Palestinians quiet.

The boundary between East Jerusalem and the West Bank

The desert mountains east of Jerusalem are hauntingly, barrenly, dramatically stunning. High limestone ridges, starkly bare of vegetation, sit there like a rock installation of God’s geological artistry – lacking vegetation due to millennia of sheep and goats and a good dose of recent climate change.

This is the land of the prophets, the stomping ground of Jesus and John, of the Essenes, Sufis and the Magi. The road does some tortuously sharp bends which everyone takes at speed. Israeli and Palestinian cars, with different coloured number plates, vie with each other and, generally, the Palestinians, free-range in driving style, get there first. It’s not all Israeli dominance in this crazy country!

The 1990s Japanese-funded ‘peace road’. In front, the illegal Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, and in the distance, the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem

The Green Intifada and the Witches of Beit Sahour

Looking over the Judaean desert, with the Dead Sea and the montains of Jordan behind

I’m busy re-editing two of the three books I’ve written about Palestine (the first is here). Here’s a clip from the third, written in January 2012 when I was in Bethlehem on a five-month stint, and it might interest some of you. I’ll publish the second and third books online at some point soon.

On Saturday I went to a talk at the Alternative Information Centre in Beit Sahour (part of Bethlehem) about the Green Intifada. This was given by a British woman, Alice, who helps run a permaculture farm down below Beit Sahour called Bustan Qaraaqa. Here is one arena where the British and European alternative movement plays a significant role in Palestine and Jordan.

The village of Irtas, as seen from my kitchen window

Alice talked about the historic deforestation of the Middle East. It was recorded even in the Epic of Gilgamesh of 300 BCE, but it has been seriously rampant in recent times. Jordan’s forests were decimated a century ago to build the Hejaz railway from Damascus to Mecca, and Israel has focused on disabling Palestinians’ farming and food security for decades. Israel’s strategy has been to drive people off the land, especially in Area C, which is 62% of the West Bank, into the cities, ripping Palestinians away from their rural birthright.

This is happening right now in the Negev area of Israel, where Bedouin villages and lands are being destroyed and appropriated, and they’re being herded into townships to ‘civilise’ them and rip them away from their cultural roots. One Bedouin village has been destroyed by the Israelis and rebuilt by the Bedouin, helped by Israeli and international supporters, thirty times.

Palestine’s natural forests included oak, olive, cedar, pistachio, almond, fig, pine and moringa trees (moringa is both nutritional and medicinal). Many trees were domesticated and farmed long ago – figs in 9000 BCE, olives in 4000 and almonds in 3000. Sylvicultural products included frankincense, balsam and other medicinal extracts, and woodland-dependent herbs. The rise and fall of cultures in the Middle East has been intimately connected by historians with the health of forests.

Looking toward Bethlehem from the Herodeon

What’s necessary is not just a revival of farmed trees but also a propagation of shade-inducing, humus-building, land-regenerating, soil-fixing un-farmed trees. This is difficult because the Israelis deliberately oppose and destroy such work – they often plant pine and eucalyptus plantations over old Palestinian villages and farmlands to judaise and ‘redeem’ the land. In doing so they also kill the sub-soil and render land useless to further farming by Palestinians.

When forests disappear, the water table sinks and rainfall declines, increasing desertification. Israeli settlement-building, often on hilltops, many of which were previously wooded, destroys water-sources, leading to rapid run-off and soil erosion lower down and causing rain to fail to infiltrate the ground and the water table.

They take water from the West Bank highland aquifers for irrigation and modern urban water-usage, charging Palestinians high rates when the sell it back to them and using the money to subsidise water prices for Israeli settlers. The Israeli offensive focuses systematically on disabling farmers and driving them off the land into towns or, preferably, out of the country.

Irtas is Arabic, taken from the Greek word Hortas, which has the same root as ‘horticulture’. Irtas is a market-gardening village, founded 7,000 years ago.

Deforestation thus represents dispossession. But it started long ago, and one problem has been that, when armies have rampaged over the land – as in Roman times or during the Crusades – wrecking the land and destroying farming and village security, people stop investing effort in the longterm. They stop practising sylvicultural methods that would sustain the forests and farmland. Much of the hilly West Bank is festooned with ancient terracing which, if not maintained, falls apart, leading to soil erosion, land-defertilisation, loss of trees, lowering of water tables and agricultural decline.

So the revival of Palestine is intimately connected with a green intifada, a new kind of resistance movement that builds sustainability and re-fertilises the land. Except there’s a problem: Palestinians are hardly aware of the need for it. [I think this has changed quite a lot since I wrote this in 2012, especially amongst the young.] They tend to think that ecological action is superfluous to their more pressing human rights and material problems.

Ecology is something Westerners go on about which is irrelevant to them, or it’s a luxury consideration. Yet they suffer cancer from toxins, dense urban populations, land-loss, dependency on imported food, psychological damage arising from loss of emotional contact with wilderness and open space, a preponderance of litter and rubbish and a general social disempowerment which re-ruralisation could ameliorate.

So, somehow, it’s necessary to spark a new green awareness in Palestine, an awareness which gets incorporated into the resistance movement. By resistance I don’t mean warfare and polarisation but social-cultural revival amongst the Palestinian people, a strengthening of society such that, whatever is done to them, they have an increased resilience, adaptability and survival power.

Ecological revival is a core, not a peripheral issue: the whole world needs to understand this, but Palestinians in particular, with their special problem as an occupied, colonised people, need really to become leaders in this field. It is a strange yet karmic fact that both British people and Palestinians who have lived abroad and returned home become crucial catalysts of this.

This is the next level of the resistance movement in Palestine, the agenda for the coming generation. So good on you, Alice, for articulating this issue so clearly and doing your bit to spread the word – not least through the exemplary work they’re doing down at Bustan Qaraaqa.

Irtas. On the hill on the left is a Catholic monastery and in the distance on a hill is the illegal Israeli settlement of Efrat. Hope Flowers School is up the hill on the right, just outside the picture.

Before and after the lecture I met two delightful English ladies, ‘the witches of Beit Sahour’ – and Alice, a ‘green witch’ from North Wales, made a third. This was great, because suddenly I was with people with whom I could be open about things I usually remain quiet about.

Most Westerners and nearly all Palestinians don’t want to hear about my psychic work, about my being an astrologer, healer and political mystic, a dissident powered by vegetarian food, meditation and holistic attitudes, with a pedigree and a bunch of perspectives that are right off most people’s map. Not to mention the curled-copper, phi-ratio, anti-gravitational energy-harmoniser I wear round my neck, tucked under my shirt!

One of the witches asked me how I had started my involvement with Palestine. I thought a bit before answering and then came out with it. It was ETs and cosmic beings, the Council of Nine to be precise, in the early 1990s, that started the process. They put the situation on planet Earth into clear perspective, also clearly stating that I had an appointment with this land which I should follow up.

This was followed in the late 1990s by the late Pam Perry, a disabled Glastonbury astrologer, Pisces, who campaigned for Palestine by phone and laptop from her bed, who benignly tricked me into pursuing this sometimes-futile game, bless her. Together with Sheikh Bukhari, a Palestinian, and Eliyahu McLean, an observant Jew, we founded Jerusalem Peacemakers in 2002.

It was also a calling from at least three former lives involved in this region, always a as foreigner (as a Sumerian, a Nubian and a Kurd) yet playing a part in the history of the Jewish people, a jiggling of the soul and a grinding process in my heart which caused me to cut out of the bill-paying, treadmill-treading duties of a typical Westerner and to get involved with this mess. Well, my maternal grandfather was in General Allenby’s army of invasion in WW1, and my father fought in Egypt, so it’s in my genes too.

They lit up when I told them this, and suddenly they came out with their own secrets about the consciousness and healing work they do. One of them is married to a Palestinian (a nice chap) and the other works as a legal advisor and researcher for a rights organisation in Bethlehem called Badil – but even there they keep quiet about their core beliefs. Their activities and beliefs are not deemed credible, whether from a Western-rationalist viewpoint, from a Muslim viewpoint or from a modernist-Palestinian viewpoint. So people like us keep quiet. But we had a profound sharing together, like a secret cabal, and it was refreshing.

We had a fine time in our corner at the AIC until it was time to go home – Bethlehem closes down early, and the chances of finding a taxi back to Al Khader decrease rapidly after 10pm. Nevertheless, as I wandered out, steeling myself for a long and chilly wait, a taxi drove past and stopped for me. It turned out, as is nowadays increasingly the case, this taxi-driver had carried me before in a former year, and we chattered on the way back, he in his broken English and me in my patchy Arabic, until we reached the school. The lift to the top floor was defunct, thanks to the recent electricity cuts, so I climbed the stairs. There was another electricity cut while I was writing this piece, and I gave thanks for being on a laptop with a good battery!

Hot water bottle time, and the customary shivering as my bed warmed up. Ah, I love living on Planet Earth – well, sometimes, at least. Other times, my guardian angels watch me, fascinated, as I struggle and persevere through the facts of worldly existence, and wondering what’s to come next.

Well, inshallah, I have a visitor from Glastonbury (Liz Pearson) coming to stay, and a report to write, and a load of other issues to get to grips with. Now it’s time to put the kettle on – classically bloody British behaviour. Would you care for a cup of tea in Bethlehem?

Ooops, the lights have just gone out again. The mobile phone network goes down too, at the same time. Well, one thing is for sure: it’s probably not the Israelis – it’s crummy power equipment, suffering a hangover after the wind and rain. A funny consequence of this is that many of my neighbours emerge from their houses when this happens, because their electric heaters and TVs have gone off! We really do need a green intifada, and PDQ.

Sunday Meditation

You’re welcome to join the weekly Sunday meditation this week.

It’s at 8pm UK time, 7pm GMT, 8pm in Western Europe, and for other places, plus more details, check out times lower down this page: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

This week I’m going to pay attention to Israel-Palestine and also to Sudan – in both places the virus of violence is running rampage. It’s as if, as Syria and Yemen die down as conflicts, the virus has shifted. The earthquake in Syria tapped and released the conflicted feelings of people in the Syrian civil wars, taking the fire out of the conflict. Yemen, meanwhile, has demonstrated one of the most regular causes of peace – sheer exhaustion.

It’s important not just to try to impose peace – this doesn’t necessarily heal the causes of conflict. What’s important is to seek to transform the sheer expression of violence and resentment into something that does something – something to address the fundamental causes of the problem. This requires some imagination and exploration.

Palestinians in Manger Square, Bethlehem

It means that people might suffer or die, which is tragic. But if hardship and death lead us toward a realisation that resolution must happen, this is more valuable suffering – a soul-sacrifice, in a way, which might save lives and hardship further on in the future. What is most important is the collective learning experiences that build a basis for resolution.

The Elders, Mary Robinson and Ban Ki Moon, have made a strong statement about this which is worth a read (link below). What they say about the demise of the two-state solution between Palestine and Israel isn’t new – it was visible 15 years ago at least. But at least they are acknowledging that the two-state framework is now obsolete, and a more fundamental rethink is necessary – this is back now as an international issue (itself an important development).

In Sudan, the eruption of wild violence is such a sorry thing. Sudan has so many unhealed wounds, from recent decades but also it goes way back. It is by nature a mature nation which could have a steadying effect on the Middle East, where an experiment in people power had been thriving until this dual coup d’etat fomented by two fighting generals and their men, overriding the people’s movement – and this, globally, is a worrying sign of our times.

So, if you’d like to join in, please consider the thoughts above. Praying for peace can work before a conflict erupts but, once it has started, it’s necessary to make use of what is happening, seeking to turn it to a more positive direction, to create situations and openings where positive developments may emerge. Sometimes a showdown or even a tragedy is necessary in order to turn around the local and the global consensus. Sometimes a ray of light needs to come into the situation in an unexpected way.

With love, Palden.

Here’s the Elders link: https://theelders.org/news/elders-warn-consequences-one-state-reality-israel-and-palestine

Some Austrian musicians who once came to Palestine to entertain and uplift the locals in Bethlehem – and the locals loved it.

Women’s Empowerment

A number of people liked my previous blog about Palestine, and here’s a related one from the same unpublished 2011 book Blogging in Bethlehem. It’s about women’s empowerment courses at the Hope Flowers adult education centre in Deheisheh, Bethlehem.

Monday 6th June 2011, Bethlehem, Palestine

“Where is your wife?” I was being asked this by a lively young lady of about eighteen who wore the full niqab. Not many women in Palestine wear them (Palestinians don’t like religious extremism), and most of them are young. “Er, I have no wife…”. It was tricky to explain further. “Oh, I am sorry.” I guess she assumed I was a widower. It was one of those situations where cultures scrape against one another, and there was no opportunity right then to reconcile the dysjunction.

*Niqab* and *hijab* – daughter and mother

She liked me and spoke good English – a thoroughly modern young woman. Her sparkly eyes shone through the narrow gap in her niqab. Her mother, wearing a normal headscarf or hijab, came up, visibly proud of her rather intelligent daughter, who was busy explaining to me how Islam is the only truth and how I ought to become a Muslim. She pointed out some verses in the Qur’an (though it was in Arabic, so I pretended to understand) and, rather touchingly, she gave me her own pocket Qur’an. This was an honour, a gift from the heart, I could tell.

In an Islamic kind of way, this young lady is a feminist. Wearing the niqab demonstrates her reservations about modern ways and the sexual and psychological pressures modern women experience. She wasn’t doing it for her parents (I checked later) – it was her own teenage life-choice. This movement of young Islamic women has some parallels to the bra-burning feminists of my generation many years ago, declaring that they are not just the appurtenances of men.

I had been at a women’s empowerment course at the Hope Flowers Centre for adult education at Deheisheh. Deheisheh is a part of greater Bethlehem (population 100,000), dominated by a large refugee camp, a community for the underprivileged. The Issa family had once lived there and worked their way out of it, and they deliberately put the centre there. The thirtyish women on the course came mainly from surrounding villages, with some from refugee camps and a number of educated women from Bethlehem. Some were illiterate and some had degrees, and Hope Flowers intentionally mixes them so that they can share the relative merits of both education and the lack of it. Apparently the educated ones initially had reservations, but these soon disappeared.

Today the subject was food hygiene. The purpose is to give women the necessary training to start cooperatives and create work for themselves. They were studying microbes, hygiene and infections, as well as nutritional issues, proteins, carbohydrates and balanced diets. They discussed the E. coli
outbreak in Europe at that time, fascinated that even in hygienic, chlorinated Germany and Britain such infections could occur. I told them that this is one of the consequences of industrial-scale food production.

The lecturer, Ibrahim Afaneh, who had done his doctorate in Belfast in the late 1990s, was brilliant. He had them enthused. He knew his stuff about good practice and quality control in food production, and he had good teaching technique, eliciting the ladies’ engagement and existing knowledge, getting various of them to teach what they knew to the others. When someone made a good contribution, everyone would clap.

This is only one segment of the women’s course. Another concerns group counselling, family therapy and self-development. Tomorrow, Tuesday, I’m also going down to Yatta, south of Hebron, with Ibrahim Afaneh, to watch another course in progress. Many of these women are so poor that providing for their transport is a vital ingredient in guaranteeing attendance. But enthusiasm levels are so high that it strikes me the women don’t need much incentive, only help getting there.

Ibrahim Afaneh invited me to speak and, though I had reservations as a man about teaching on a women’s empowerment course, it was clear that, to them, this was a unique opportunity because I was behaviourally non-sexist, and they loved having me around. Ibrahim, who had lived some years in Britain and also had it in his nature, as many of the more liberal Palestinian men do, was pretty good at non-oppressive male behaviour too. He was training women to do his job.

I shared some of my knowhow acquired from being a longstanding wholefood vegetarian. They didn’t know that the best source of protein is nuts (plenteous in Palestine), or that sesame seeds and tahini, a dietary standard here, provide the full range of amino acids which themselves facilitate the absorption of other proteins. At one point I asked them what the most important ingredient in cooking is. They suggested quality sources of foodstuffs, hygiene in kitchens, balanced diets… and then, after a pause, one of the illiterate women said, in Arabic, immediately translated, “The whole of your being”. Yes! She was closest to the point I was making: love. “If you cook with love, you bring Allah into the food, you heal people and it’s just like painting a picture or making music.” They all laughed, nodded and clapped.

We had a great time. I took lots of photos. I shall write a report for the course’s UK funders, who have thus far provided 80,000 GBP over three years. A Quaker trust connected with Clark’s, the shoemakers, they fund women’s empowerment projects throughout the Muslim world. They are one of the few funding sources for Hope Flowers who have been steady, understanding, progressive and non-neurotic in their approach to funding.

Here I could see what was really happening at this course. These women aren’t fools, and they are not dazzled or easily tricked: they have a large fund of commonsense, they’re highly motivated and, were there anything spurious about these courses, they would leave like a shot. But no, they were excited, bubbling, rapt, eager to engage – and clearly their acquired knowledge would spread around their communities, leveraging the educational effect of the courses. Which is precisely what Hope Flowers sets out to do: it has a social philosophy of setting out to strengthen society.

Several women had turned up late, wanting to join, following reports from their friends. Maram (Ibrahim Issa’s wife), who runs the courses, told them the course was ending so there was no point, but they insisted and joined in. The young lady in the niqab and her mother were two of them, and later they emerged inspired. What I read from this was that observant Muslim women, while their ideas about self-development might not accord with those in the West, nevertheless are taking the modern world by the horns and striving to make something of it, but within their own context and way of seeing things. Modernity doesn’t involve just emulating the West.

Ibrahim Afaneh invited me to introduce myself. I told them I had started out in my adult life in the revolutions of the late Sixties, that I understood and supported the recent revolutions in the Arab world and, though I was British, I did not on the whole agree with the government and conventions of my own country. They loved that. So did I! I must confess that it is good to be welcomed and respected for this since, in Britain, being a dissident brings disadvantage, it’s a disqualifier and a source of disrespect. Being a dissenter here is seen as the sign of respect. But I felt duty-bound to bring them some tougher truths too.

Talking about proteins and nutrition, I mentioned how meat production uses up far more resources and land than what is involved in production of vegetable proteins. The seas are being fished out too. This is unsustainable. Something must change with protein consumption worldwide. Throughout history, most people have been 90% vegetarian and 10% meat-eating – meat and fish are dietary supplements, and their over-use today ruins the Earth. During my lifetime the world’s population had swollen from three to (in 2011) seven billion, and industrial meat-production and fishing cannot continue as they do if humanity is to survive in peace, justice and decency.

Much nodding: they knew this, but I think they appreciated someone articulating it clearly. I added that I had no stomach hanging out in front of me because of my chosen diet. Immediately there was excitement: it turned out that one-third of the women had lost weight in the last two months as a result
of dietary changes they had made in connection with the course. One woman said, “Look, the happy in me!”. She had lost twelve kilos. This training had significant consequences for the ladies – and other segments of the course included counselling, family therapy and open discussion of women’s issues which, for many, was the first time they had encountered this. This was a liberation course, tailored to them.

Yatta. Here the women are generally older, re-starting their lives after being thrown off their land by settlers and army

Finally I said that they will know that peace and justice have come when men do a lot of the cooking and raising of families. This raised the roof! As a Western eccentric I can get away with saying things like this, but I’ve also been privileged to be part of an historic change in gender balances in the West, even though it has at times been hard, and men like me, only 25 years ago, were still branded as failures and wimps.

Tomorrow I go with Ibrahim Afaneh to Yatta, south of Hebron, to witness the women’s empowerment course there. Yatta is an area where there are many illegal land-appropriations by Israeli settlers, and Palestinians there feel ignored and marginalised, out of the world’s sight. The area has many Bedouin, who sit at the very bottom of the apartheid pile in this segmented land. Many of their villages are unrecognised and deemed illegal, especially when they stand in the way of Israeli expansion.

This afternoon, having only just arrived back in Bethlehem, I went around town buying pots, pans, utensils, a lamp and other bits for the apartment where I am staying. I had done this two years ago too, but they are all gone – dispersed no doubt around the building or down some community black hole. This is one of the challenges of operating in Palestine – it’s a high-level chaos zone, and if you like order, you’ve got problems. It’s partially to do with Arabic cultural elasticism, to put it politely, and partially to do with living under occupation. Conflict has thrown Palestinians into a mindset of perpetual firefighting, living quite spontaneously without plans, systems and rules. So, when someone walked into my apartment while it was empty, seeing something useful, they ‘just borrowed’ it – and perhaps someone else just borrowed it from them, and off it went and was put, no doubt, to good use somewhere else. I hope the kit that I have just bought stays in the apartment in future. I’m going to get a Bedouin rug too – make the place more comfortable.

Later I had another challenge. Arriving back home tired, it took me fifteen minutes to realise that the reason the kettle wouldn’t work was that the electric trip-switch had killed the power. Then, later, with cuppa in hand, I fired up my computer to start uploading my blog entry and found the internet router downstairs was dysfunctional too. Of course, predictably I had no key to access the router. Another exercise in existential flexibility. Hopefully I can do the uploading tomorrow morning before heading off to Yatta.

Trainee women’s empowerment teacher, Sana

We have internet apartheid here. Israel has hot fibre optics linking it with the West. But Palestinian internet goes by slower microwave transmission to Jordan – the Israelis won’t permit fibre optics or anything more than 3G mobile connectivity – then down to Dubai, where a big fibre-optic ‘pipe’ leads through Saudi Arabia to Egypt, under the Mediterranean and into Europe. Actually, it later passes just 2km from my home in Cornwall before heading out over the Atlantic to America. When President Mubarak, in his last days, shut down the Egyptian internet, you can bet there were high-level phone calls from Riyadh, Brussels and Washington DC instructing him not to shut down that pipe. Had he done so, the world could have pitched into another serious financial crisis. The Palestinians would probably have survived it better than most – survival is one of their acquired skills.

At Tuwani

Here’s something I wrote 12 years ago in a book I did about Palestine which was never published. A short interesting read from that time…

An Eclipse and a visit to At Tuwani, 16th June 2011

I discovered a setting on my camera that I didn’t know existed until the very end of the lunar eclipse. Eclipses can be times of revelation! It removed the problem, classic for digital cameras, where the contrast between the light and the dark sides of the moon is too emphasised for the subtle details of the moon’s pocked surface to be seen. Even so, witnessing the eclipse from my eyrie at the top of the school was a privilege.

When it started there was a full-scale racket going on in Al Khader – loud music and the customary summer evening pandemonium of this town, spiced with the barking of dogs and the croaking of geckos. But as a slice began to be cut from the moon, gracefully arching over the Israeli watchtower, the area fell silent. Traffic disappeared, the dogs went quiet and all became still. Except for the shutter of my camera. It was late by the time it was over.

That didn’t stop me waking up at 6.30 the next morning. I’m not sure why I’m waking up so early at present. But it permitted me to rise and process my photos, posting them on Facebook – and the ‘likes’ started rolling in. I had breakfast and waited for Maram, who was picking me up at nine. By ten, having filled time and had a conversation with Mohammed, the school’s educational director, I rang Maram. Oh dear, car troubles. A taxi arrived to pick me up, then a call came to say hold on to the taxi and stay there – we’re coming. Ibrahim’s car soon arrived and Maram and I bundled into the taxi while Ibrahim went into the school, lugging his laptop, bag and bundles of files.

Off we went down the main road toward Hebron. The area south of Bethlehem is interesting because Israelis and Palestinians live quite intermixed with each other, unseparated by the separation wall. This area lies inside the Green Line, the official boundary between Israel and Palestine. This is a collection of Israeli settlements called the Etzion Bloc, interspersed with old Palestinian villages. Or perhaps the other way round, since the Palestinian villages have been there far longer. It’s quite a green, agricultural area.

We proceeded around Hebron, the third largest Palestinian city after East Jerusalem and Gaza City and the biggest in the West Bank, past Qiryat Arba, an Israeli settlement outside Hebron, into a hilly, rocky district that turned browner as we drove south. This much-disputed area is where the most assertive wing of the Israeli settler movement is, stage by stage, staking out its claim, and where many of the most outrageous settler atrocities take place. We were heading for a village, At Tuwani, where resistance to settlers is strongest. It’s also the place where the women’s embroidery project is located.

As we neared the village Maram pointed out several Israeli settlements, such as Karmel and Ma’on, which periodically crop up in the news, home to some of the most assertive settlers that exist. They’re so aggressive that many Israelis disown them, and the Knesset (Israeli parliament) uncharacteristically declared these settlements illegal. That made no difference. This said, a schizoid situation holds sway whereby the Israeli government pays for the building of the settlements (with American money), and the army makes symbolic gestures to clear them, to respond to foreign pressures, while actually reinforcing them and doing donkey-work for them – such as clearing Palestinians off land the settlers want, helping destroy trees and farmland, and ‘defending’ settlers whenever Palestinians push back.

There’s a double American involvement here. American money supports these frontline settlements, and many of the settlers are of American origin. But on the other side, Americans like Whit help the Palestinians, as also do American humanitarians such as the Christian Peacemaker Teams, who accompany and protect Palestinians in risky situations. America fighting against itself in foreign lands? The West plays a strange double game, advocating peace and supplying weapons at the same time.

We attended a meeting of the women. Whit and Paula were with some of the women from Jaffa and the Israeli production organiser – a nice lady who sits in the more enlightened and principled sector of Israeli society. Whit spoke, various of the ladies spoke, I added my bit and a Palestinian activist spoke.

Then the activist took us on a tour. He first explained the situation. This was tragic stuff. These are old villages going back centuries. The people of Tuwani are simple folk, many of them illiterate. For the last twenty or more years they have been under pressure from the settlers, who have been chopping down olive trees, burning farmland, demolishing the local mosque and quite a few houses, beating up farmers and children, blockading the village and generally making life hell for the villagers so that they leave. The Israeli army has played its part: army units down here are filled with nationalist settlers, opting to be posted here to reinforce the settler incursions.

But the villagers aren’t budging, even though they have put up with a lot over the years. One of the things that makes the settlers pressure the villagers of Tuwani and equally makes the villagers resist them is that two mountain tracks lead through Tuwani to a number of other villages. If the settlers close down Tuwani, those other villages die too.

We were taken up a rocky, dry hill – the trees had been burned down and uprooted by settlers – to see the settlement of Ma’on just over on the other side, a half mile from the village. This settlement was planted on the villagers’ own land. An outpost of caravans in the trees, away from the settlers, was pointed out – apparently these settlers were so radical and insistent that even the settlers of Ma’on had thrown them out.

Whit asked the Palestinian activist how he had got involved. The activist explained how, when he was young, he had witnessed his mother being beaten up by soldiers. Running to rescue her, he was peppered with bullets from settlers and troops, who shot around his legs as he ran. Later he got his mother to hospital. She told him not to be angry and fight back because she would then lose him – he would lose his life or freedom. He asked her what he then should do. She said she didn’t know, but please find another way.

So he studied and adopted non-violent direct action, eventually moving down here once his mother died. He was joined by the Christian Peacemakers and some Italian Catholic activists. I met one Italian who had been here two years, with whom I discussed the stresses and strains of regularly going back and forth between Palestine and Europe and interfacing two very different worlds. It was a brotherly sharing.

He said his time in Palestine was coming to an end because he wanted to get out before he was blacklisted and thrown out forever – and he needed to go home to earn money. As it was, he was here on three-month tourist visas, leaving every three months, returning to Italy for a month and then coming back – but this ploy wasn’t going to last much longer. He was sad about that. We commiserated about how we both had fallen in love with our friends in Palestine, missing them when we were away, yet neither of us could move here.

The villagers gave us lunch – far more than we could eat – and showed us other items of their work. Lovely embroidered dresses, bags, belts and other things. I bought a dress for each of my three grown-up daughters, crossing my fingers that the dresses would fit them and suit their tastes (in the end, I’m not sure they did). They weren’t suitable for ordinary wear – they require a graceful style of moving that doesn’t work in the West – or for party wear, but they’re useful for pottering around the house in a relaxed, off-duty kind of way. All of the money would go to the village women: as a foreigner, one must do judicious spending with a view to helping people stay alive.

I would have liked to stay longer, but by mid-afternoon it was time to go – Ibrahim had come to pick us up. I was sad to leave these people – they need reinforcement, interaction and solidarity. But my duties lay back in Bethlehem with Hope Flowers. So we cannonaded up the road past Hebron and I was dropped at the school. I took a break in the late-afternoon sun on the flat roof of the school, reading. Then back to work.

I was nearly half-way through my month-long stay. It was going to be challenging to finish everything. There were friends to visit too, in Hebron, Jerusalem and Jenin. Ah, time: I was reminded of its passing by the outbreak of the calling to prayers from the local mosques. This isn’t just a religious thing: it’s the way Muslims section up their day. Even I, an infidel Westerner, time my day by the muezzins’ amplified chanting – the calling to prayers divides the day into periods which, in this climate, work well.

The previous night, as the eclipse gathered strength and the world went quiet, one muezzin was chanting the ninety-nine names of God. I guess it’s ninety-nine because the hundredth is beyond expression. These ninety-nine names describe divinity in all its aspects. There is, to Muslims, but one God, with no other complications – no sons, holy ghosts, angels or cherubim – just Allah, with ninety-nine facets. By the way, Arab Christians, the very earliest of Christians, use the term Allah as well as Muslims – it’s not uniquely a Muslim term. And it is pronounced Al-Lah. The God.

As I concluded writing this piece, a donkey called out in accidental synchrony with the muezzin, croaking plaintively, reminding people it was there. Or perhaps this was Allah’s ninety-nine names elucidated in donkeyese. Great Spirit expresses itself in remarkable ways.

I wrote this piece while working at the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem in the West Bank 12 years ago. Here’s the school’s website and here’s a piece I wrote about Hope Flowers and its history and background. For my 2012 book Pictures of Palestine – a humanitarian blogging from Bethlehem, go here.

Website: www.palden.co.ukBlog: https://penwithbeyond.blogPodcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.htmlAudio Archive: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

Website: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Audio Archive: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html