Silk Roads and Ocean Winds

Globalisation’s troublesome birth


This is a re-post – it might interest you.

I’m re-working a 2003 book, Healing the Hurts of Nations, as a short, thinking-points archive version, and here’s a chapter about the historic growth of globalisation.

————————–

In the Sahara with the Bedouin

Our time is the first in which it has been possible to take a literally universal view of human history, because this is the first time in which the whole human race around the globe has come within sight of coalescing into a single society. In the past, a number of empires, and a smaller number of missionary religions, have aimed at universality. None of them, so far, has ever attained to universality in the literal sense. – Arnold Toynbee, historian, 1967.

Healing the Hurts of Nations contains a few unusual underlying assumptions. One of them is that globalisation is historically inevitable. A bit like growing up. I am not suggesting that the once imperialistic and now corporate-style globalisation process we see today is the only way it could have happened – perhaps it took place this way because humanity rejected earlier-presented options. Nevertheless, globalisation was a pre-programmed potentiality from the early days of human history.

Saying that globalisation is inevitable does not mean that inevitably it should happen as it did, when it did, carried out by the people who did it and with the outcomes that resulted. But it suggests that there is an urge or secret aspiration deep in the human psyche, seeking to form a planetary civilisation, and that humans would therefore try, mostly unconsciously, to put into place the conditions to achieve it.

Humanity customarily walks into the future facing backwards, yet this does not exclude the possibility that, deep down, it secretly knows something more than it sees. Several attempts at globalisation are visible in history. Let’s look at a few.

Alexander the Great

Athens

Alexander, one of history’s finest megalomaniacs, did not invade all of Eurasia, but he made a good try. Had his conquests lasted, they could have been a platform for further extension at a later date, by the inheritors of his bequest to history. Starting from Greece in 334 BCE, he and his troops swept through Anatolia, Egypt and the Middle East, through Persia and Afghanistan to Turkestan and what is now Pakistan in eight years, by 325 BCE.

They established a capital at Babylon, Eurasia’s key meeting-place. He took on god-like status, gobbled up several major civilisations and then died prematurely in 323, aged 32. He had set in motion one of history’s biggest intentional genetic engineering experiments too – mating his men with women across his conquered territories.

His big idea was to seed Greek culture and, in his view, to upgrade humanity with Greek modernist internationalism. A flash in the pan, the social and political effects of his audacious feats all the same survived centuries after his time. Had he lived a longer life and run his affairs well, history today might look very different.

The Silk Roads

Three centuries later, in the time of the great classical empires, the world tentatively approached the possibility of unifying Eurasia. The Roman, Persian, Kushan and Han Chinese empires, between them, controlled most of the main axis of Eurasia, from Spain to Manchuria. The backbone of this civilisational axis was the Silk Road from China, through Turkestan to the Mediterranean, along which there was continual travel and trade, despite the distance. Few travelled the Silk Road in its entirety – instead, goods and ideas changed hands at caravanserais and trading cities, and trade between Rome and China reached significant levels for the time.

Chinese silks first reached the West in 500 BCE through Persian intermediaries. Chaotic forces put an end to this period of Eurasian stability: warrior nomads rampaging across Central Asia, together with the separate yet roughly synchronous collapses of imperial Rome and Han China, caused trans-Eurasian trade and interchange to collapse for some time.

The precedent of connecting civilisations and setting intercultural exchange in motion was now there, setting patterns for the future. It is suggested, with some plausibility, that Jesus, in his ‘lost years’, travelled as far east as Tibet and as far west as Britain. This sounds fantastic, yet significant international travel was not uncommon at the time. People had gained a taste for items and influences from faraway places. Imperial administrative structures also approached a scale which could, with a few more developmental steps, begin to manage global control – if subsequent human history had but followed this thread. Though this was perhaps premature.

The Muslim Ascendancy

Amman, Jordan

Then came the rapid Muslim expansion initiated by Muhammad the Prophet in 630 when he and his followers took Mecca, an ancient Arabic cult-centre. He died in 632, but his successors channelled the dynamism of their faith by invading the whole Middle East. By 670 the Islamic empire stretched from Tunisia to Afghanistan, spreading to Spain, Turkestan and northwest India by 720. They had a go at Europe too, but it was too muddy, cold and backward to bother with, and the Franks beat them back.

The Muslim empire’s success arose not only from the energy of the new Islamic dispensation, but also from the acquiescence of conquered peoples, many of whom thought the new dominators better than their predecessors. Muslims did not forcibly convert their subjects, and the relative doctrinal, social and legal clarity and coherence of Islam was attractive to many, whether or not they converted.

Political unity in the empire later broke down, but cultural unity continued, with a second zenith in the 1600s in the form of the Ottoman, Persian Safavid and Indian Mughal empires. Had Westerners not intervened, it is conceivable that a third wave might have occurred during the 20th Century. Despite the fact that globalisation is currently Western-driven, it is likely that the Muslim world will have a big influence in shaping the culture of the 21st Century world. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda might even play a part in this: though their actions are questionable in a short-term context, the longterm effect of their impact on globalisation and its moral tone could be influential. Whether Muhammad the Prophet would approve of their actions is another question, but the fact that the centre of al Qaeda’s initiative has been Saudi Arabia, Muhammad’s home, is not insignificant.

The Crusades, Richard and Salah-ad-Din

Jerusalem

A further chance to build a proto-global fusion came during the Crusades of the 1090s-1290s – Europe’s first bout of overseas expansionism. The Crusaders made their mark with extreme courage and bravado, yet they blundered repeatedly. When they seized Jerusalem in 1099, they allegedly murdered virtually all Muslims and Jews as well as eastern Christians. The Crusaders were a strange mixture of religious visionaries and holy warriors, glory-and-booty seekers, power-maniacs, noble adventurers, outlaws and vagabonds.

Their unprincipled actions incited a pan-Arabic reaction, especially under Nureddin, Seljuk ruler of Syria 1146-74, and his successor Salah-ad-Din or Saladin, Sultan of Egypt and Syria, 1175-93. They took strong objection to Crusader atrocities and arrogance. This was a religious matter of righting wrongs rather than a purely territorial issue, since it was the stated duty of all Muslims to protect their fellows from oppression by the launching of jihad or holy war.

Nureddin and Saladin were not implacably opposed to the presence of foreigners in the Holy Land, as long as they behaved themselves. Saladin mooted the idea of sharing Palestine with the Europeans on a principle of mutual respect for each others’ people, faiths and holy places. This accorded with the highest of Muslim ideals. But he would not allow the Crusaders sole control, since they did not behave themselves and were over-ambitious. His diplomacy could have laid a basis for substantial cultural interchange between Europe and the Muslim world which, conceivably, could have created a vast world bloc with enormous potential.

The English king Richard Coeur de Lion was hesitantly partial to his proposition, tempted by Saladin’s chivalrous political challenge. Some Crusaders were relatively pacific and liberal, many of them born and living in Palestine, with Muslim friends and concubines and adopting some Middle Eastern ways. Muslim civilisation was, after all, culturally superior. But Richard was persuaded and outmanoeuvred by the belligerent lobby amongst Crusaders, mostly fresher to the Holy Land. They were backed by an unholy alliance of Papal, lordly and financial interests back in Europe, who preferred cultural separatism, booty and sole control of Palestine.

The mediating efforts of 1192 by Saladin’s brother were sabotaged. The possibility collapsed. This led to the eventual failure of the Crusades: after the collapse, Saladin knew the Crusaders must be ejected. It blew an historic opportunity to bring together two extensive cultures which, together, were potentially in a position to bring about a new international order. It was not to be.

European magnates became ever more bigoted and dogmatic during the Middle Ages: cultural cleansing and the imposition of control and uniformity were major trends underlying the period. Lordly church henchmen even sent Crusades against heretical and pagan Europeans in southwest France, Bosnia and Latvia. Islamic civilisation, which had matured by the 1100s, was multicultural, to the extent that its top level was taken over by Turkic peoples, the Seljuks, and later the Ottomans, without enormous disruption. It had little to gain from cooperation with Europeans, but the Christians nevertheless had their merits – a spunky and enterprising lot.

This failed meeting of cultures was but one entry in a catalogue of missed historic opportunities. In Israel and Lebanon to this day, much suffering might have been avoided, had this cultural hand-shaking taken place. It might have affected the many persecutions of Jews in Europe, the breaking up of the Middle East by the West in the 20th Century and the nature of European imperialism from the 1500s onwards.

The Mongols

Another window of opportunity arose under the Mongols in the 1200s. Invincible blitzkrieg warriors, they felled the Chin and Song dynasties of China and the great Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad. They brought down the feared Assassin (Hashishiyun) Order of Syria, a Shi’a terrorist sect led by the legendary Old Man of the Mountain, whom even Saladin could not beat. But to do so they had to use massive force – this story slightly resembles America’s match with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

The Mongols had an interesting style: they were herders by nature, setting themselves over their conquered lands and employing local administrations and institutions to run their empire. At first they did not take over the palaces and great cities, camping instead outside their walls. Genghiz Khan (c1167-1227) saw it as his and the Mongols’ divine destiny to rule the world, on behalf of the gods, who wanted it unified. This man had a global vision: any opposition was opposition to the will of the gods, worthy of instant death.

The Mongol empire, at its peak between the 1220s and the 1290s, stretched from China to the Middle East and Ukraine, embracing many ancient culture-areas. Rapid communications systems were developed and intercultural exchange was encouraged, knitting diverse cultures into an internationalist order controlled from Karakoram in Mongolia. They invited Buddhists, Taoists, Christians, Manichaeans, Muslims and pagans to their courts, bringing all under their umbrella. Many impressive potentials were there, but the essentially nomadic Mongols, who were not by nature civilisation-builders, only coordinators, gradually subsided in power.

Two of their biggest weaknesses related to democracy and delegation of power: whenever a Great Khan died, the hordes returned to Mongolia to elect a new one, meaning that their conquests lost momentum; additionally, regional power was delegated to khans who eventually pulled away from the centre, adopted the ways of China, Turkestan or Persia and loosened the ties of the empire. Yet the Mongols had brought a flourish of world integration. No empire was ever so extensive or all-embracing. But then, few empires created piles of skulls to the extent they did.

The Meeting of Civilisations

A further rumbling of global hegemony arose during the 1400s. Three powers were unwittingly positioning themselves for world domination, and not entirely consciously: imperial China, the Islamic bloc and the upstart Europeans, then in the early stages of their cheeky exploratory adventures led by the Portuguese. The smallest of these powers was the Europeans, a smelly, drunken, flea-ridden and voracious lot whose raucous bravado and booming cannons shocked the Muslims and sank their navy in a trice.

Civilised Islamic principles were the Muslims’ undoing when they met the Europeans – the Muslims were too gentlemanly. The Chinese had invented gunpowder, but they considered it immoral to use it in war, so they too had a problem with battle ethics – their philosophy was that it was ignoble to kill a warrior without looking them in the eyes. The Portuguese cared not a hoot about that.

The Chinese sent out embassies all over Asia during the reign of the Ming emperor Yung Lo in the early 1400s. His Chinese Muslim admiral Cheng Ho, from Yunnan in south China, led an enormous flotilla of ships to Indonesia, Australia, India, Arabia and east Africa (some say even the American west coast), furthering the grandiose interests of the Middle Kingdom. They sought ambassadorially to extend the hegemony of the Chinese emperor worldwide and render all other lands tributary – to the Chinese, the emperor was both a monarch and the embodiment on Earth of the gods.

This rare outburst of Chinese internationalism was courteous and diplomatic: Ming mandarins presumably dreamt of lording it over the world. Their big failing was that, since commerce was distasteful to the Chinese ruling class, their costly expeditions led to no significant profit. By 1433, there was a change of emperor and all embassies were called back. When Cheng Ho, who had sailed as far as Zanzibar, came home, he took giraffes and lions back with him for the imperial zoo. The succeeding emperor decided, for internal political reasons, to revert to traditional isolationism. This knocked the Chinese out of the game, by their own doing.

The Portuguese and the Muslims (the Ottomans, Safavid Persians and Indian Moghuls) met up at sea outside the Persian Gulf in 1509. The combined Islamic fleets, masters of the Indian Ocean, were quickly sunk and scattered by Portuguese cannons, giving the Europeans sudden dominance of the Indian Ocean and its trade. Muslim traders had for long plied the waves from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf down the African coast, and past India to China and the Spice Islands (Indonesia).

The result of the European victory was that, of the three powers eligible to dominate the world at that time, the Europeans had suddenly gained the ascendancy. For the next four centuries, they were the prevalent world force, followed in the 20th Century by their successors, the Americans. The whiteskins, by force, trade and missionary activity, united the world – at least in terms of materialistic integration. By 2000 it was woven into a multi-channel telecommunications web which has turned the world into a buzzing network with a rapidly-diminishing need for a central dominating power. The conclusion of this story is yet to come.

Exploration

Cape St Vincent, Portugal

Exploration is not a European invention. Hanno the Carthaginian circumnavigated Africa around 2,500 years ago. Pytheas, a Greek, reached Britain, Iceland and the Baltic Sea around 2,300 years ago. Nearchos of Crete sailed to India, followed by Alexander the Great overland. Eudoxus of Rome visited India and East Africa around 120 BCE. Roman traders reached south China around 100 CE by boat. The monk Fa-hsien travelled from China to Afghanistan and India around 400 CE.

Much later, the Vikings sailed from Scandinavia to Baghdad and Byzantium down the rivers of Russia, over the North Sea to Britain and Ireland and across the Atlantic to Iceland and Canada between 800 and 1000. They had followed Irish monks over the Atlantic: the Irish settled Iceland around 795, themselves preceded by St Brendan, who was reputed to have reached Newfoundland in a leather and wood curragh around 550. The Polynesians canoed from the central Pacific to South America, Hawaii and New Zealand, sometimes in significant numbers. Two notable later explorers were the well-known Venetian Marco Polo, who travelled from Italy to Mongolia, China, SE Asia and India between 1271 and 1295, and the Moroccan ibn Battuta, who travelled 75,000 miles around Africa, Russia, India and China – perhaps history’s greatest traveller-chronicler.

When the Europeans started exploring the world, the globalisation process we know today truly began. One crucial person in this was Henry the Navigator, a Portuguese prince who set up a school in Algarve in 1419, teaching navigation, astronomy and cartography to selected sailors. Not long after, his sailors reached Madeira and the Azores, then travelling as far as Sierra Leone in West Africa. This set in motion a trend which led to Columbus’ voyages to the Caribbean from 1492 onwards – though he never landed on the American mainland.

By 1500, English fishermen from Bristol had reached Newfoundland, followed by an official expedition under John Cabot, and meanwhile the Portuguese Cabral reached Brazil and Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa to India. Magellan achieved the first world circumnavigation in 1519-22 – a tremendous and courageous feat and precedent, equivalent to sending a man to the Moon. Later, the pirate and naval terrorist, Francis Drake, who later achieved great honours, claimed California for the British and circumnavigated the world again in 1577-80. Also, Russian pioneers were pushing across the vastness of Siberia.

By the 1600s this period of exploration had immensely profited the Spaniards and Portuguese in South America. Overseas adventures became serious business – Spanish gold and silver from the Americas, followed by the slave trade, was instrumental in financing European economic growth. European hegemony was built on the sweat, blood and tears of many long-forgotten conquered and enslaved non-Europeans.

Trading posts, ports, depots, trade routes, plantations and towns were established worldwide; embassies were sent to exotic monarchs in India and the Far East; the slave trade was started, eventually transporting over ten million Africans to the Americas; lands and markets in Africa and Asia were penetrated; substantial European colonies and towns grew in South America, later in North America and South Africa, and later still in Australia and New Zealand; and hub port cities such as Bombay, Singapore, Jakarta and Shanghai in due course became major world cities.

In the 1700s the initial driving urge for exploration and commerce was supplemented by scientific exploration. An enormous collection and classification of species took place, together with documentation, charting and pushing out the edges of the known world. European maritime powers fought each other for control of India, the East Indies and the China trade. This was driven by the profit-seeking voyages of merchant adventurers and trading companies, and only later did governments take direct control.

The first multinational corporations were the Dutch, French and English East India Companies: the English company, chartered in 1600, came to rule much of India from the 1750s-1850s, with the British government taking control only in 1858, after the Indian Mutiny. The Dutch did similar in Indonesia.

Shanghai, Mumbai and Dubai

Uppsala, Sweden

Thus began European world domination, reaching its zenith by 1900. It laid the foundations for American corporate domination of the world in the 20th Century. The American period, accompanied by European decolonialisation of the 1940s-70s, laid the foundations of the global village. Then, from the 1960s onward, the momentum changed again: the initiative began slipping from America, Europe and USSR as the Japanese began to out-manufacture the West, exceeding it in quality of production from the 1980s onwards and itself becoming an inventor. In the 1990s the Asian tiger economies (Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand), together with China and parts of Latin America, were growing too. They were not only cheap production sheds, but asserted a growing cultural influence.

As from 1990, Euro-American dominance began relatively to decline, though it still determines the nature of the game, while all the time losing influence. Guangdong province in south China is now the world’s biggest industrial park, and some of the world’s hottest computer programmers work in Bangalore, India. Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and Indonesia, despite uncertainties and growth-pangs, are new economic powers.

At a cost. In the colonial period, the blessings were mixed-to-catastrophic for recipient peoples. Cultures were destroyed or undermined. In some parts enormous populations were shamelessly decimated – especially in the Americas and Africa. Modernisation was thrust on disparate lands as fast as railways and telegraph wires could be laid down. Ethnic groups were played against one another, colonial puppet states were founded, resources were plundered, internal affairs interfered with, blood spilt and things were simply changed, totally, from what they had been before.

Some recipient peoples benefited by being released from the hold of ossifying traditional systems, but the balance of benefit is to this day debatable. This could have been done otherwise. Ultimately, things will go full-cycle when the cultures of the world, having absorbed Western and global ways, reach a new self-defined balance and individuality from that standpoint. Cultural variation is not dead – it is reconstituting.

The pain and consequences of Western imperialism sit with us now, expressed in various manifest forms of anti-Western feeling lurking under the surface and popping up in different contexts around the world. Around 1990 the moral pressure and tempo came from the ‘Confucian sphere’, around 2000 from the Muslim world. Africa, Central Asia and Latin America are yet to come. Antarctica speaks by jettisoning massive ice-shelves, threatening coastal areas worldwide with sea-level rise.

The former subjects of Euro-American domination have adopted the ways of the dominators, giving it their own twist, and the drive toward ‘development’ now covers the world and is no longer Western-driven. TV, cars and computers are everywhere, together with ubiquitous burger bars and all that goes with them. While Europeans and Americans clean up their cities, the smog of developing world cities grows ever thicker and more toxic. But the values driving this Western-led development are incrementally changing, and the West itself is experiencing bounce-back. There are sub-plots going on too, such as relations between China and Latin America, Indians in Africa and the Caribbean and Filipinos in Arabia. When the Dalai Lama visits the Pope, something quivers worldwide. There is much more going on than what the West thinks.

The 21st Century brings us a planetary civilisation. The means by which we got here is receding into the past. Many new problems face us – some a result of imperialism and some new. In the new global situation there lies an enormous historic opportunity, and today’s world is our starting place. We are now in a century of reassessment: everything is up for review. The true reason for which those intrepid world travellers risked life and limb is now approaching its fulfilment. We must not confuse how we got here with what happens next. This concerns global civilisation.

Sapmi – Lappland

Earth

A view from the outside

In case you need a refresher for you as a shining soul, here are some words from the Council of Nine, a bunch of people not of this Earth, about the place where we live. If you have a problem with channelled material (I do with a lot of it) or with some of the terminologies used, try to hop over that to see what they’re saying.

May we explain to you that your planet Earth is the most beautiful that exists in the universe. It has a physical variety that no other planet has. It has a varied climate that no other planet has. In all the universe there is no planet in existence that has the physical characteristics of planet Earth. It is the rarest of beauties, and it does attract souls which, once they have come, would like to come back again.

It is of a different nature from any other planet. It has aspects of all planets: it is like a composite of the universe, with all the positive and all the negative aspects, and all in between. This is what attracts souls. It has with it a gravitational pull that is different from other planets, and because of this a soul begins to feel, for the first time, a physicalness. Souls become adapted to their physical bodies, and they forget the freedom and pleasures they have without it.

The Earth was created to be a paradise. When souls achieve harmony it will become a paradise again. But when we say a para¬dise we speak of a paradise of creativity, one that brings knowledge, one that brings joy and love; a paradise in which people may heal themselves or may even experience pain, if they wish.

The Merry Maidens, Cornwall

It is not a paradise where all challenge, all growth or all pain will be removed. It will be a paradise where people, through their own experience, may evolve their own understanding of their connection with the universe, accept their own responsibility for themselves, for their fellows, for planet Earth, and therefore for the universe, and may bring all of that, including themselves, into perfection.

Humankind needs to understand the uniqueness and purpose of planet Earth, and the directness that it has in its evolution. Humankind needs to understand that it is not alone and there is no end to life. What people must begin to understand is that there is no escaping, for in future there must be payment for all escaping.

If they also knew that each of them has a quality of greatness, that they have opportunity to be uplifted in joy, and that when there is acceptance of not being alone and of no end to life, then energies of fear may be released. Energies of joy may replace fear, and planet Earth may begin to fulfil its position in the universe. It is in truth the most beautiful of all planets in the universe.

We related before that the planet Earth has the greatest of beauty, and it may also become the greatest of joy. When we say ‘beauty’, we mean the quintessence which then penetrates the external. People have confused physical beauty, what is seen with the outer shell of the eye, with the inner soul of the planet or of those that exist upon it. That is also what humanity must learn upon planet Earth.

This your planet is a planet of balance, for you to learn to balance between the physical and spiritual worlds. planet Earth is the only one of its kind, the only planet of free choice in the entire universe, the only planet created for the balancing of the spiritual with the physical, in other words, the creating of paradise.

Humanity has created corruption within, which came about because people became more involved in physicalness than in attempting to balance and understand. But now your planet Earth is at a point where it may move out of balance quicker than at any other point. This time of history that you are in is the time of change. It is time for humanity to begin to understand this, to live on this planet of great beauty with a true balance of spiritual and physical, and to live in unity with the Creator. Your purpose is to live in true balance, in manifestation of love, in connection with the Creator, in that which was created.

People in their innermost know, or have a feeling, that they are from something other than just themself, but people upon planet Earth have gone into competition with the Creator. We understand this, for people understand that there is a nature within them that may do all things, but they neglect to identify and know the Creator. They alone wish to be the Creator. It cannot be.

The problem we have had before is that many times we have been to planet Earth: we have come to help, and it was expected of us to do what we cannot do, what this planet must do for itself. You are a part of this planet because you chose it in order to help it.

In your world things are very simple, but people make them very complicated. If you approach things in a simple manner, many things can be overcome and accomplished with a great deal of acceleration, and with not too much use of energy. The worry and the concern burns up more energy than the activity of dealing with the problem.

In order for the universe to evolve it is important for planet Earth to evolve. The souls that have come to this planet have become irresponsible in their physical bodies. It has become a planet of desire. The souls that are here behave as if they were in quicksand and were being gobbled up and swallowed in this desire.

It is important for you to evolve, because without this planet being evolved, the other planets in the universe are not able to go forward. It has stopped the growth of the universe.

Staloluokta, Sapmi/Lappland, Sweden

It is important for the level of consciousness of this planet to be raised. It is the love from this planet that generates the energy that feeds God. And this planet has stopped the growth of part of the universe. In other words: instead of evolving in the manner it should, to become one with the Divine, it is going backwards.

I will explain one step further: many of these souls that live here, when they die, are trapped in the atmosphere of the planet, and then they are reborn over and over on the same world, and they seem to be going nowhere. This planet originally was created to teach balance between the spiritual and the physical world.

But in this physical world they got involved in materialism, and so these beings never evolve beyond the belt of this planet. Their desires are still in their minds and emotions, and their desires hold them to this planet, and so you have a multiplication that is going on until this planet will sink.

They cannot get beyond it because of desire, greed, hate, because of enjoying their physical pleasures. And we have no objections about their physical activities on this planet: it is when this becomes their primary concern, and they are no longer concerned with evolving the planet, their fellow humans, or finding their divinity.

The Face crop formation, Sparsholt, 2002

You explained this when we listened to you the other day when you called it a ‘bottleneck’. We just consulted and decided that if we looked in a bottle, and there were a plug, and we could not get it out, that’s exactly what this planet is. Your description was correct.

The energy that surrounds you creates a vortex that then radiates out, and then can raise the consciousness of this planet. Even though you feel it is an impossible task, it is not an impossible task.

You people chose this situation, you willingly gave yourselves to come back unto this dense, heavy Earth. People like you have reincarnated on this planet many times, often not because it was nec¬essary, but because you needed to understand and to get the feel of this planet, in order to raise its level of consciousness. With this energy, it creates a vortex of love and peace and harmony, and others will gravitate towards you, so that you may explain to them to help raise the level. Everything needs an energy base. We are energy, and through people like you this planet will be saved. We work through people.

——————-

From: The Only Planet of Choice -essential briefings from deep space, by Phyllis Schlemmer and Palden Jenkins, Gateway Books, 1993. www.palden.co.uk/nine.html

The Judaean Desert, Palestine

Oak Dragon

Guess what? It rained.

Not all of the time, but at times it rained quite a bit. Nevertheless, Oak Dragon has been doing camps for 35 years, and British weather doesn’t stop it, even in force nine gales. Under the shelters, into our tents and vans, or into the domes we went, and sat it out, chattering. When I came home my joints and muscles ached, and it took three days for that to go.

But the compensating factors, the payoffs, far outweighed all that living in a planetary-body decrepitude I now live with. It was great. There’s a deep, magical spiritual uplift that dawns on everyone, and a family feeling, and there’s something special about disconnecting from the world for a week, as if going to another planet (which it is) – something captivating and engaging, moving and clarifying to the spirit. It’s like a multilevel recharge, and people’s souls start shining through.

In a way it’s a taste of future society. Conditions while camping are quite simple (we’ve got all the kit for it though), yet there’s somethinghere about a potential society where people have reunited and re-entrusted themselves to each other, and where the energy-saving effect of living in a community lifts off, opening out the possibilities for everyone.

One of the biggest things is the profound everyday sharings between people. Exchanges and connections, with an openness that allows us to experience more of the soul more and less of the adopted, conditioned behaviours in each of us. But group events – simple yet moving ceremonies, mystery-journeys, shared meals and the amateurishly uproarious show on the last night – create a kind of experiential sharing that is memorable to have been a part of.

One day, a wicker coffin was built in the middle of the camp. We all thought about ancestors of ours with whom we sought to reconnect, and wrote messages to them, during the day. Meanwhile an enormous pyre was built, with a flower-bedecked coffin containing our messages. With due aplomb, up in flames it went, and our thoughts and prayers went with them, and we could feel the ancestors close, and all of us were entranced by the enormous blaze.

Special moments. The theme of this year’s camp was ‘the Triple Goddess’ – the maiden, the mother and crone (though I think ‘the biddy’ is better). The camp was divided in three parts and we explored each aspect of the Goddess sequentially through the week. That was great. On the first night we were taken in small groups on a journey in the dusk to meet the goddesses, one by one (enacted by members of the camp), and we were given teachings and face-paintings and oracular moments.

Photo by Chrissie Ferngrove

As the founder of Oak Dragon (our first season was 1987), I was deeply moved by all this – I was shedding tears daily! In sharing circles I’ve even learned how to talk lucidly while crying buckets! They’re still here and at it, the Dragons, and many of them thought this was the best camp for many years. It’s particularly touching on a deep level to realise how, had I and we not started this, hardly any of these people, this family, would even have met. Many children would not have been born. Many lives would not have been reset and restarted. Many other miracles would not have happened. There’s something deeply moving about this and I felt privileged to witness it and play a part in it, as the Dragons’ kinda grandfather.

Also, I was so happy and relieved to see twenty- and thirty-somethings taking the reins, leading the circles, making the rules and teaching us wisdoms afresh. Many Millennials give me a feeling of confidence that the world will be alright in future times – they’ve got hearts and brains, good hands and broad shoulders. There was a good spread of ages at the camp, and there are signs that Oak Dragon might still be around in 35 years’ time.

You missed it. But there are coming years (it happens in late July and early August at Lughnasa). If I can, I’m going back. You can do that: you can come and go each year, and return years later, and the family, the tribe, rolls on, and you become part of it – your presence is your membership. You can come for the first weekend of the camp if you wish – though everyone who does so tends to regret leaving just as the camp is gaining momentum, so I don’t recommend it!

Now it’s true, I’m good at writing PR blurbs for things I like supporting, but actually, though clearly I am thoroughly biased, what I’ve written here isn’t too biased, actually. So it might sound like a sales pitch, but actually it’s pretty close to the mark. I had a great time, and it has changed my perspective, and I’m looking at life in a different way from just three weeks ago. Personally, I was honoured to be there, and I seem to be under strict instructions to come back next year. I’ll try. For me, it’s a bit like taking medication for the soul. I’ll leave it at that.

I even had the sneaky thought that it might be really good dying at a camp! What a way to go.

Meanwhile, I’m back in West Cornwall, and there’s more to come. And I have a pile of campfire smoke-infested clothing awaiting a sunny day for washing and drying them. Blimey, living on Earth ain’t half complex sometimes.

With love, Palden

www.palden.co.uk – here’s my site
Here’s an audio talk I gave at the camp, about the Decline of the Goddess Cultures of Ancient Britain (1hr 30mins)

Pictures mostly by me, with one taken of me by Chrissie Ferngrove (another of the founders of Oak Dragon), without whom lots wouldn’t have happened…

Decline of the Goddess Cultures of Ancient Britain

Godrevy Head and Lighthouse from St Ives, Cornwall, with St Agnes Beacon behind

Here’s one of my podtalks, recorded in early August, Lughnasa, at the Oak Dragon Camp in Somerset.

It’s all about our prehistory in Britain, and how and why people built ancient sites, and their advanced shamanic-magical culture, and sympathetic, sustainable societies, and the creation of gods and religion, and a few other wee matters such as these.

A sweep over the megalithic periods of the Neolithic and Bronze ages. 90 mins.

It’s to be found on Spotify here
or on my site at www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

Especially good for when driving boring motorways and ironing endless socks and underpants, or as withdrawal therapy from the BBC.

With love, Paldywan

Godrevy from Trencrom Hill, Cornwall

Off

The sweat lodge fire at last year’s camp

I have a couple of half-written blogs that didn’t get the whole way. One was my current thoughts and tips for other cancer patients – I’ll complete that another time. I’m a bit distracted and unfocused at present. I’m going away tomorrow (Thursday) to join friends old and new at the Oak Dragon Camp in a field in Somerset, upcountry from Cornwall – that’ll do me a world of good, inshallah.

It’s funny because, although it’s perfectly safe and I’ll be with lots of friends, I feel quite wobbly about it! I think that’s cancer-vulnerability. Since getting cancer I’ve not had the same insensitivities and protections as I had previously. I can’t handle stuff as well, and get impacted more by things that other people just pass on by. If a lot of life happens, it gets a bit much. It’s a bit like being a little boy again, needing someone to hold my hand. But it’ll be okay – it’s change-apprehension. I’ve been on my own a lot – perhaps too much – and in my own world, and stepping out of that feels like quite a step.

There are things in life I’d like to change before long, though I’m not sure how or where, because it’s a set of circumstances I seek, really. To have someone covering my back and keeping their eye on me, and to be amongst people who can help me with the small things I need help with – often it’s just the fetching of a prescription, or a lift or adventure, or people popping round, and stimulus, or even a cup of tea.

Sitting with old friend Barry Hoon, sorting out the world, at last year’s camp

Anyway, that’s for another day. I’m off camping. I love it, and have camped through every decade of my life, ever since being in Cubs and Scouts. I was amazed at last years’s camp – I went through quite a healing. Beforehand, I could stand for two minutes without support (such as two sticks), and afterwards I could stand for up to ten minutes. It has stayed more or less like that, except perhaps when I’m tired and gravity gets heavy.

Last year was a time of relative rebirth, after the main cancer shock of 3-4 years ago, and I’m not expecting quite the same this year, though I feel I’ll either strengthen myself up or it will be time to accept that my limits are closing in – one of the two. It’s all part of the journey. Perhaps I have some emotional stuff to work out this time – after all, the theme of the camp is ‘the Triple Goddess’.

So, I’m almost packed – boxes and bags are all over the floor – and I’m quite amazed I have managed. Some issues that I’ve been trying to bring to completion have not come to completion, which means I can’t put them away entirely, but perhaps they might resolve while I’m away, or perhaps not.

At these camps, we leave the world for a week and have no contact with it. On the other hand, we’re close to the earth, and in a really nice location. So I’m off to another world for a while – it feels a bit like jumping into Cerridwen’s Cauldron or going through a wormhole! I’ll be back around 10th August.

I shall be doing the Sunday meditation as always, on the next two Sundays.

Love from me, from a rainy Cornwall.

Palden

To consort with a dragon
At the ancient yew tree at Compton Dundon church, on a trip from the camp with historian Ronald Hutton

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

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.

Birqin

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.

The market

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.

A cobbler at the market

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.

Ottoman architecture in the Old Town

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.

The music conservatory

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.

Tel Aviv from Bir Zeit

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.

Architectural glories at Qalandia

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

Conformity

and the price of locking step

The Longships Rocks, with the Isles of Scilly Behind

There are two routes to the farm where I live, and they are shown on online maps. The problem is, one route is easy and good, and if you follow the other – as recommended on satnavs – then you’re likely to lose your exhaust pipe and damage your car, unless it’s a Land Rover.

Claudia Caolin took this

We’ve tried to get the satnav people to change the instructions, but they won’t do it. They look at a satellite photo and see a road there, without knowing what its surface is like. So they even disbelieve evidence that we, who live here, send them – because the satellite says there’s a road there. Well, at your peril.

So when people come to visit, I send a map and instructions but some rather slavishly follow their satnav. They trust it more than they should, because it tells them what to do. As a result, they arrive late, flustered, after having made a few extra phone calls to me to find out the way. That cuts down our time together.

This highlights a big problem in our time. Many people – even quite aware ones, and even those who otherwise distrust a lot of things handed down to them from the corporate and governmental world – believe and obey what we are told. We set aside our own thoughts, experience, finer judgement and intuition, because the instructions say that we ought to follow this route, not that.

Precarity at Porthmoina Cove, Penwith, Cornwall

But if the satellite system breaks down (almost inevitable sometime), and if we lose our map-reading skills and intuitions, then we’ll get lost. Not only with finding the way, but also because we’re addicted to obeying orders. We all do it, in varying degrees! Even if you are a dissenter, an ‘alternative type’, or a sensitive soul, there will be areas of life where you snap to and do what you’re told, even at a price.

Even with conspiracy thinking, there’s an element in it where people disagreeing with the ‘official line’ transfer all their need for certainties to other things they’re told by other people, who sound as if they know what they’re talking about, and uncritically they follow a new set of rules.

Move along please… Bosigran, Penwith

One of my bugbears is typical: we are told that mobile phones and wi-fi are safe and okay, and we are addicted to all that phones have brought us (it’s an amazing technology). Yet, just consult your feelings, consult your body and your psyche, and something is not right. This radiation is changing you. It changed my life – I have a cancer caused by radiation, and when I mention this to others, or when I walk out of a room because I can’t handle being in the company of six phones with humans attached to them, there’s often an awkward silence. Ooops, I’ve said something wrong. If I mention the effects this has on nature, the world’s climate and on earth energy and subtle energies, most people just don’t want to know – even if they’re nature-lovers. Yet this is suicidal. And you don’t need a PhD to understand that.

We all do this. It arises from the fear that “I do not have the knowledge, authority and whatever else it takes to cut my own line through life“. This is the way that the Megamachine retains control – through imposing a fear of what might happen if you don’t obey, through telling us what’s right and what’s wrong, infantilising us and making us conform.

Listen guys, I’m in charge, okay?

In the end, this is not about Them – it’s about Us. It’s about our deepest psychology – profoundly stilted and stunted by fear, guilt and shame, the big blockers of inner progress and of correction of the world’s ills.

We all do it – I do too.

I did this last year. I was accused of being a narcissist. Bewildered and feeling at a loss, I took it upon myself and carried that for about nine months, feeling bad. It was a burden of guilt – my own guilt from the past. Not about being a narcissist, but simply about feeling inadequate and flawed.

But I was bewildered and confused about it too. Perhaps I am a narcissist? Perhaps the person who put that on me was right.

But then, a good friend came along and grilled me – she could see I was unhappy and weighed down with it. She had experience of this, having been a ‘victim’ of a narcissist herself. Though she pointed out how a victim is part of the equation too. She questioned me about what had happened, saying in the end, “Hang on, it wasn’t you – it was the other person. The actual behaviour of a narcissist was displayed not by you but by the other person, and this was projected on you”.

The Universal Solution to Everything

Now this was a big revelation. Suddenly a weight started falling off my shoulders. It was like a forgiveness. It didn’t just dissolve the issue – it gave me a new perspective. It allowed me to look at the narcissistic tendencies within me – after all, I do like standing on stages, and I’m what Facebook would label a ‘public figure’. Part of me is shy and a hermit, and part of me loves attention. So there’s stuff to take ownership of here, and it has helped me understand much about my life.

I’ve always been something of a reluctant leader. There’s pain in my psyche over matters of power. But this has made me focus on ‘right leadership’. The world does need leaders, but of a certain kind. In my 2003 book Healing the Hurts of Nations, in a chapter about power and legitimacy, I give three quotes.

Rioters and vandals at the Oak Dragon Camp

“A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation. A politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service.” – Georges Pompidou, French prime minister, in 1973.

“You can erect a throne of bayonets, but you cannot sit on it for long.” – Boris Yeltsin, Russian president, in 1991 (Mr Putin, take note!).

“Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.” – Winston Churchill, Hansard, November 11, 1947.

These photos of me are by Claudia Caolin

This concerns right leadership. In my life I’ve learned a lot about this, and the question still continues. I’ve often felt like a monarch without a kingdom, a bishop without a church and a professor without a university – and this has been my karma in this life. It concerns service. It’s a big question for Virgos like me: the difference between service and slavery.

Service is willing, intentional and conscious. Slavery is reluctant, grudging and involuntary. Slavery is about resorting to type, conforming to what we feel is expected of us by those who seem to know better, and doing our best to avoid punishment.

If you’re going to be a shining star in the public firmament, then rightly or wrongly you need to fulfil what you feel are people’s needs and expectations. In this context, staying in power starts becoming more important.

The matter of staying in power is a difficult one. It’s not just a form of corruption and powermongery. It might be the case that, in a position of power, you actually are the best person for the job – it’s arguable that Mr Putin was the best for the job 10-20 years ago, and many a strongman is like that. But then your star starts falling and times start changing – Xi Jin Ping will experience this in coming years. The tide goes out on you, as it does.

But if you’re good at what you do, then you’re faced with the possibility that the person or the oligarchy that replaces you could actually be worse. I’ve faced this myself. Many people who rail at leaders are, frankly, covertly envious. Watching things that I’ve started deteriorate in others’ hands has been a big and painful lesson to me, bringing me back to a difficult truth: while holding onto power is not advisable, letting go of it can also be problematic.

It comes down to our motivation, and to being honest, often while standing in the spotlight in the ‘court of public opinion’, ruthless as it sometimes can be. Remember the British politician Paddy Ashdown? When he was caught with his pants down he owned up immediately – and everyone thought, “Good on you, Paddy – at least you’re honest”. Meanwhile, others were caught with pants down but they went into denial – they were clearly ‘in office but not in power’.

Tony Blair then came along – he looked like a clean pair of hands. But Tony, after a few years of doing some pretty good things, himself made a classic error – he sucked up to the big guys and took Britain into the Iraq war, when most people in Britain knew this wasn’t right. He sucked up to the Americans and PNAC, a cabal of believers in ‘The New American Century’, which now, chaps like Putin and Xi are showing to be empty and hubristic – America was being what Chairman Mao once called a ‘paper tiger’. Hm, fatal error, Tony – and he’s paid a price for it.

It’s all in the motivation. When I was a young acid head revolutionary in a former millennium, I realised then that it wasn’t just a question of replacing one evil system with another, whether through revolution or reform. It concerned the hearts and minds of the people actually sitting in seats of power. No one system has The Answer. No system is perfect.

Democracy has big problems, and we cannot say that our democratic governments truly represent what the people of our countries need. But autocracies like China and ‘managed democracies’ like Turkiye, though at times they can deliver the goods, have their problems too. It’s all to do with the matter of succession.

Some people moan about our king, here in Britain, but would an elected president and House of Lords really be a better solution? Hmmm, that’s questionable. King Charles III, well, you might or might not like him, but he’s okay, actually, as a person. Though his limited and mainly moral power is inherited, he happens to be an interesting person, and his son isn’t bad either – compared with what we could have.

I remember standing on stage at the Glastonbury Festival in the early 1980s, saying, as an astrologer, that Prince William, born during the festival during an eclipse, would be an interesting character as a future monarch. And he is likely to be so. Do we want to get rid of this guy and his missus?

Why do we expect perfection of our leaders? Why do Americans place so much belief in their elected presidents when they have lots of evidence that such belief is futile? Why do we continue electing the same old political parties, even when we’re disappointed in them?

I remember in 2005, many Palestinians asked me, “Why, after you had the biggest demonstrations in British history against the Iraq War, did you re-elect Tony Blair a third time?”. Well the answer was, “Because he’s still better than the other lot”. Twenty years on, that’s why quite a few people might vote for Biden or a clone of him – because of the other lot.

That’s the dilemma of democracy – it gives us second-best solutions. It is based not on consensus and agreement but on argument and dissension, meaning that 49% of the population land up dissatisfied, unhappy to support their government. Actually, through the quirks of our supposed constitution here in Britain, Margaret Thatcher only ever really achieved about 25% support of the whole electorate, even at the peak of her power. Is that democracy?

Sometimes you just have to stand on your own – a baby swallow on our farm

Well, it’s a common quirk of majoritarian democracy. In some countries, we vote for a plethora of parties, and then the biggest, or not even the biggest, cobbles together a coalition that might not at all resemble what voters wanted – as Israelis have discovered. It relies on conformity and grudging acceptance of bad political outcomes – AND we, the public, customarily disunited, then fail to support our governments wholeheartedly, even when we vote them into power.

The result is that it’s a recipe for failure, because someone somewhere is always opposing it. So this concerns the responsiveness of political systems to public need. And, besides, it isn’t democratic governments that really decide things: such governments exist to ease the cruel grating between the priorities of the Megamachine (the apparently ‘free’ market), and the needs of The People (whoever we truly are).

It’s all down to right leadership and right use of power. But that’s difficult, because sitting in the power seat is not comfortable, and it’s a 20 hour a day job, under a lot of pressure, and subject to cruel judgements from the public – witness those promising leaders, many of them women, who choose not to sit in that seat because it’s painful to get exposed to the sheer negativity of the commentariat and people on the street who land up even hating you.

You get there in the end

So, if we want good leadership, we need to treat our leaders with greater empathy and support, remembering that they actually are human beings, with sensitivities. And we need leaders with human sensitivities. But we need also to hold them to account. We need them to change when they get things wrong.

It doesn’t always work to jettison old leaders and put new leaders in place – it can lead to a cycle of deterioration where we get leaders who are either bombastic and imposing, or leaders who say one thing and do another, or they make it sound as if they’re doing things when actually nothing is changing at all.

In fact, it might be valuable sometimes to welcome back old leaders – to give Theresa May or Tony Blair a second chance. Why? Because they’ve had a period in the wilderness, a time to think things over, and they might well have a deep need, in later life, to get things right. Well, perhaps. Second-term presidents can be a bit like that. They don’t want to go down in history for the wrong thing.

Anyway, so I might well be a narcissist. It’s a convenient accusation to make, for which one is guilty unless proven innocent – but even then one might not be believed. Just to be suspected is enough to ruin a person’s life. What’s needed here is owning up, in public, and self-correction.

It gets a bit rough sometimes

Mistakes are allowed. Learn first time round and you’re doing alright. Learn second time round and you have a problem but it might be excusable. Leave it to third time round and you have a deeper issue going on, and it’s best to go – whatever his merits, Boris Johnson got to that point.

Human error. There’s accountability and there is forgiveness. Just because someone fucked up, it doesn’t necessarily mean they should be blacklisted – it means they need to self-correct, and genuinely so. And everyone, everyone, is a mixed bag – yes, even Bill Gates, who does both some questionable things and some laudable things (and, as an Aspie, he also has an exaggerated capacity to be misunderstood).

So, it might be that I’m a narcissist. To be honest, I really do not know, and it’s up to people’s own judgement. It has caused the person who accused me to completely cut off all contact and unfriend me, perhaps obeying the strictures of a famous psychologist in Canada who says that the only way to deal with narcissists is to cut off all contact.

Standing there for 2,500 years and not going anywhere

Well, I experience that to be rather cruel, actually, throwing out both the baby and the bathwater. I sincerely hope the accuser was right, because otherwise this fierce separation was a very destructive strategy. I’ve learned a lot from it and, for my sins, I now live in glorous isolation, and that’s my karma and life-lesson, and on some level there’s something good about it. Because, for better or worse, it enables me to write yardages of verbiage to you lot, and I sincerely hope it’s useful!

Life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans. In the end, there is no right or wrong – there are simply outcomes. And life is for the learning. So, whatever my fuckups, I’d like to be remembered at least for trying to redeem those fuckups and make things good. But there are some who would even question whether I’m getting anywhere with that.

In the end, it’s necessary to listen and to take in the feedback that people, life and its learning experiences give us. But not too much, because otherwise we become guilty of another crime – the crime of holding back our gifts, believing that someone else can do it better. However, if it’s a gift, it’s highly unlikely. The secret lies somewhere between taking a stand and keeping your antennae up.

With love, Palden

www.palden.co.uk
www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

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.

The ancient holy well at Irtas

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.