In my audiobook and various of my postings you’ll have heard of Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem, Palestine (here’s a brief intro). I used to work there.
Here’s a newsletter from Ibrahim Issa, the school’s director. It gives a taste of what it’s like running a school in occupied Palestine at present.
With love, Palden
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Dear Friends,
Thank you for all your support and solidarity with the Hope Flowers School (HFS). I am trying through this letter, to share with you what happened on 6 December 2023 at the HFS. It is a bit long; I believe that some of you have received a big number of pictures and videos on that day.
It is almost 21 years ago, when James Bennet wrote an article in the New York Times about HFS: “Arab Coexistence school falls victim to violence” you can read this article on: https://www.nytimes.com/…/arab-coexistence-school-falls…
Between December 2002 and December 2023, HFS battle for Peace continues.
The school-day at HFS starts early in the morning. Children and staff start arriving at 07:15 A.m. It is quite difficult to predict the day and whether clashes between Palestinians and Israeli army will erupt that day. Clashes could erupt at any moment of the day. HFS staffs have to be prepared to act in case any violence erupts at a sudden.
Elegant vehicles, huh?
On Wednesday, December 6th 2023, in my way to HFS at 7:15 AM. I have to pass Deheisha refugee camp and Al Khader village. In my way I found tens of Israeli military vehicles and armed personal carriers about to enter the refugee camp and the village. Despite military presence on the way, but I managed to reach HFS at 07:30 A.m. The neighborhood of HFS was quite. I did not see any Israeli soldiers in the neighborhood.
I started to receive calls at about 07:45 from HFS staff that they could not reach the school because of Israeli army presence and clashes between the army and Palestinians. So we decided to start the school day with the absence of two staff members who could not reach the school.
At 8:30 am, I was in my way from HFS to another meeting. On the corner of the school, I was stopped by tens of Israeli soldiers who were just arriving to the street and started to block the road with large concrete blocks using a bulldozer. The soldiers were very tense, especially I found myself with my car surrounded by big number of soldiers. The one soldier asked me to continue driving while another asked me to return backwards to HFS. I decided to stay unmoved because of unclearity in soldiers demands. Any wrong movement at this situation may be interpreted as an attack on soldiers and could kill me.
At this moment a military vehicle stopped next to me and there was apparently the commander of the unit. I talked to him in English and explained the situation that one soldier is asking to drive backwards and the other is asking me to drive forwards, I asked him if I could drive backwards (back to HFS), but he refused and asked me to continue driving forwards. He also instructed the soldiers to allow me moving forwards. I also told the army officer that I am a principle of a school located on the corner, and that I have 350 children aged 4-13 years old right now in the school with some children with special needs, and that I would appreciate if the army could give me 30 minutes to evacuate the school before they enter further in the neighborhood. The commander refused and he told me that in one hour they will finish their operation and that the army will reopen the road.
I cancelled my meeting and decided to stay nearby the HFS. I immediately called the staff at the HFS and asked them to take all measures (according to emergency plan) to protect the children and staff at the school and warned them that soldiers are in the neighborhood near the school.
At about 09:00 I received a call from vice-principle of HFS informing me that soldiers are near the school and that few armored vehicles have blocked the school parking and the main gate of the school and that leaving the school or entering the school is not possible.
A paramedic comforts an upset boy
At 09:10 I received another call informing me that children with autism spectrum disorder (32 out of 358) are terrified and that social workers and staff need help to calm them down. Then I continued to receive calls from HFS informing me that children are totally in panic after soldiers started to fire teargas and heard of sounds of explosions nearby HFS due to clashing with Palestinian youth outside the HFS.
At this point I asked teachers and all staff of HFS to pay attention for the physical safety of children and to avoid sitting beside windows or even trying to look outside from the windows. I also informed the education department in Bethlehem that we have an emergency at HFS and explained the situation inside the HFS.
Everyone was concerned that the situation will get worse especially that some schools in Bethlehem and in the West Bank have encountered similar problems in the past few weeks.
Some children have reacted strongly to fear like inability to breathe, others were crying, etc. Therefore, I asked the health department to help sending ambulances to help the staff to deal with stressed and fearful children at HFS. Indeed, 6 ambulances from Palestine Red Crescent Society arrived few minutes later, but the Israeli army prevented the ambulances to reach the HFS justifying that the area is “a military closed area”.
A teacher tries to calm the children
At this moment I started to realize the danger that children are in and started to call the Palestinian-Israeli military coordination office and asked them to speak to the Israeli military to allow the ambulances to reach the school. I decided to call other international organizations and asked them to urgently reach out for Israeli army to allow ambulances to reaching HFS.
The Israeli army has finally agreed to allow the ambulances to reach the school and finally allowed me to get back to the school in one of the ambulances. A detailed inspection of each ambulance was conducted by the army before it was allowed to move ahead. All ambulances were accompanied by an Israeli patrol.
At HFS, children were extremely fearful; in addition we were concerned that clashes between Palestinian and Israelis will erupt further.
Evacuation
Therefore, in consultation with the paramedics in the ambulances, we decided that it would be better to evacuate the whole school and take children to transport children to a safer place. The ambulances started to transport groups of children (maximum 10 in each ambulance accompanied by one teacher) to a nearby hospital.
Due to intensity of the situation, the general director of the education department arrived at HFS with one of the ambulances to support HFS’s staff and children. With the heroic work of paramedics of the Red Crescent society we managed to get all children and staff out safely.
A neighbour got shot. Well, he might have thrown stones at soldiers twenty years ago in the intifada, but he doesn’t have to die for that. He was just protecting his home.
During the evacuation, it was clear that a ‘demolition order’ was being carried out, and three neighbors’ houses right next to the school were razed to the ground by heavy demolition machines. Much violence was used by the army. Soldiers tried to prevent photos or videos from being taken, neighbors’ and teachers’ phones were roughly taken and broken. Three neighbors were injured, one seriously, he was shot in the head.
Some children have seen this happen. Hundreds of parents have heard about evacuation of the school. Parents started to reach the area of the school asking about their children. They were very scared. We asked parents to wait in hospital, you can imagine hundreds of parents were waiting every ambulance to arrive to see of their child/ren is/ are being safe. At the end of this difficult day, three families were left homeless, three people are injured, one of whom is in danger of life, and hundreds of children are further traumatized.
The impact of this violence on children, families is immense.
Teachers and counselors at HFS will have lots of extra work to do in trauma care in the weeks and months to come. It is therefore as urgent as ever that HFS work continue to provide trauma counseling for children and their families. We are very thankful for all of you who helped us on December 6th and many thanks for your solidarity and support to HFS.
The trauma counseling program at HFS aims to:
• To provide help for the children at the school and for families in Bethlehem to address the effects of the downward-spiralling cycle of violence and trauma that has arisen from violence and the occupation, and to remove the basis for future hostile behaviour.
• To create a model for wider use in Palestinian schools, to become a centre of excellence and dissemination for psychological support for people of the West Bank, and to share our accumulated knowledge and experience with the wider world.
Your support to HFS and trauma counseling program will be highly appreciated. Our battle for peace will continue!
Best regards, Ibrahim Issa, Director of HFS. hopeflowers@palnet.com www.hopeflowers.org Cell: +972(0)599294355
The first two audio instalments of my 2011 book Blogging in Bethlehem are now available, and the remaining five will come out once a week over winter (inshallah). The written version is available too.
I hope you enjoy them. It’s free, no strings.
Well, that lot took 20 hours to make, but I got through it quite quickly. That’s one advantage of hyperfocus and living alone. Rain drumming on the roof has stopped play for now. Just as well, really – I had my cancer treatment yesterday/Weds and I’m all floppy and wobbly.
I’m enjoying doing it though. The story comes from better times in Palestine in 2011, but it gives a sense of real life and some of the positive things happening there, and the social and cultural strengths of Palestinians. I miss friends there and would love to go back, but this is beyond my physical scope and financial ability now. So this is a way to be with them in spirit.
It’s funny. I’ve always had a strange allergy to Christmas. In recent weeks I’ve been looking into this issue. What is bizarre is that I have lived in the Baltic region – the source of Father Christmas and sleighbells – and also in Bethlehem – the source of the Christ-is-born part of the package. So I’ve lived in the source-places of Christmas but I’m not particularly into it. Well, we all have our weird pathologies.
I have fond memories of both places – of genuine sleighbells (except on horses pulling sledges through the snow-bedecked forest), and of crowds of the devout in Manger Square, Bethlehem, during the three Christmases they have (Catholic, Orthodox and Armenian) at roughly two-week intervals. When I was in Bethlehem one Christmas I wrote a blog about it all. The town customarily welcomes 100,000 visitors for the Christmas Pilgrimage, and often it’s utter madness in town. It’s not happening this year: Palestinians are really downhearted, in no mood for celebrating the birth of a holy child, or celebrating anything.
I’ve asked myself why I have this Yuletide allergic reaction. In my case, part of the answer is Asperger’s Syndrome – ‘Wrong Planet Syndrome’. It’s an inherent feeling of outsideness, and it brings both benefits and problems. It’s a bit like the day you land in a foreign country: you understand nothing of the language and you experience the funky quirks of that country with the eye of an outsider – like the smelly toilets in Austria, the crooked telegraph poles in USA, or the way that Australian wildlife is busily noisy in the night and quiet during the day, or the sheer colourful intensity and olfactory richness of India, or the foot-washing places outside mosques in Jordan.
Another factor was the Christmases we had in our rather dysfunctional family. I couldn’t stand the pressure to ‘behave myself’ and to eat food I didn’t really like. Things got more interesting when I was around age eleven, when my parents started inviting three or four foreign students from the School of Tropical Medicine in Liverpool to our house for Christmas Day. Suddenly I was meeting people from Uganda, India, Hong Kong, Egypt and Barbados. But even then I was frustrated because we had to enact the Christmas rituals and suffer the stomachic consequences instead of getting into far more interesting things… and meanwhile my mother worked her socks off, not enjoying Christmas at all, and getting annoyed with my father, my brother or me for reasons I never fully understood.
I’d stand there thinking ‘Why can’t we make this easier and have a good time together without all this fuss and bother?‘. But relentlessly, each year, it had to be done. I never quite figured out why. So perhaps that’s a cause of my allergy.
In Bethlehem, as a lifelong vegetarian, it was always a bit difficult passing the meat market – another rich olfactory experience. I turned vegetarian long ago in 1971 and, for fortyish years, people would regard folks like me as strange and awkward, missing something important in life. In Palestine I got away with it by saying it was part of my religion – and that’s something they easily accept and oblige. However, to a vegetarian, being vegetarian is a perfectly logical and sound way of behaving and conducting one’s life. Being an Aspie is rather like that – you’re regarded as strange, abnormal and in need of correction, while from your own minority viewpoint the world around you is incomprehensible and crazy.
An Indonesian Christian rock band, Manger Square, Bethlehem
Yet Aspergers is not a programming error – it’s a different operating system. I believe it’s not really a ‘spectrum’ issue either – to me, that’s a neurotypical excuse for not really understanding what’s going on. The way I see it, you’re either an Aspie or you aren’t, since this concerns operating systems, and the spectrum bit relates to an Aspie’s capacity to adjust, or not, to the world around – what’s called the ‘Aspie mask’. How well we adjust depends a lot on how we were brought up – whether we were encouraged to grow into being ourselves or whether we had to conform to imposed behaviours that weren’t our own. That adjustment factor is what gives the appearance of a continuous ‘autistic spectrum’.
It seems that the proportion of Aspies, Autistics, ADHDs and others in society is increasing, and this is an evolutionary change for humanity. It’s the direction the world is heading in and it’s happening for a reason. It’s not a problem, and Aspies and Auties generally aren’t ill or malfunctioning. Actually, there is cause for us to feel sympathy for ordinary, neurotypical people and the templated, frameworked world they live in.
It has a fascinating side to it, inasmuch as, not seeing life in the same way as most other people, your perceptions are inherently out-of-the-box. So it means that you can come up with solutions that seem mad to some and brilliant to others – depending largely on whether their primary optic looks forwards or backwards. It also has a problematic side because it’s then a matter of whether it’s possible for that perspective to be expressed and accepted in society, for our strengths to be taken up and valued. This is slowly changing as society notes a growing variety of interesting public figures with this ‘condition’.
This was my problem. At Christmas, it was the implicit social requirement to behave in certain prescriptive ways, irrespective of how I felt inside myself, and the indulgence, waste and pretence of the relentlessly rolling bulldozer of Christmas behaviours. It grated for me and still does, and my own Xmas-avoidance can grate for other people.
In the 1980s, when I was in my thirties, I decided to clarify things, come out with it and just stop doing Christmas. If I was unclear I’d get drawn back into it, so I got clear and became ‘antisocial’ instead. In the later 1980s I started doing non-Christmas retreats for about ten people in the mountains of Snowdonia, which were fully booked. There would be no Xmas rigmarole, no presents, no special food or boozing, and we’d have silence and personal time up to 2pm each day and then hanging out together after that. The people who came to the retreats would rest, recharge and have some genuine human togetherness, without all the ritual. We had a great time!
Even though I’ve played a significant part in encouraging ceremony and ritual in Glastonbury, in the camps movement and elsewhere, and I’ve designed and led a good number of ceremonies myself, I’m not really into ceremony and ritual very much. I prefer to act spontaneously, picking up on and acting out the drama of the moment without making plans or imposing structures. I think this arises from a psychic sense of participating in a much broader and deeper reality-landscape and dialogue than many non-psychics perceive. If you’re in the right inner state, the spirits of the four directions will come and be there with you without needing much invitation. Like perceptive humans, they get a sense of where the action is and they go there.
I used to have problems when attending funerals. The vicar would be standing there leading the funeral service, while the hovering soul, looking for someone receptive, would find me sitting there in the pews. In some cases they would want me to lead the service, since I would be able more properly to speak on their behalf. But this was not to be, and I had to tell them so, secretly in my thoughts – the formalities had to be adhered to during such a solemn occasion.
The dead and the beings of the otherworlds run their own realities in parallel to ours, and the objective in ceremony is to bring those worlds closer. However, a direct psychic connection renders formalised ceremony less necessary – the action happens in ‘deep thought’. Formalised ceremony can indeed truly entrance people, enacting something that genuinely helps the interaction between worlds but, in my judgement, many ceremonies don’t do this as much as they could. The soul-quality of it can be obscured by the script. While many participants might wish to believe the gods are present, only sometimes do they seem to really feel it in their hearts and through their antennae. So there can be an element of pious game-playing to it. I hope I don’t offend by saying that. One of the things I’ve had to learn is how to say awkward things in an acceptable way – it took until my mid-thirties – and I’m not sure whether I’ve succeeded in that.
So, at funerals I have run, I asked people to address the departed soul directly, not as him or her but as you – since that soul was actually there (well, most times – there can be exceptions). It can be quite upsetting to someone who has just died to hear yourself being talked about and ignored by old friends and family, as if you no longer exist. I’d invite people to participate in a talking-stick process, each giving a short anecdote of their interaction with the deceasing person, addressing them personally as you – we were talking to that person about their life, and this is an important life-review process to help a departing soul understand nuances of their life that they’d perhaps never seen before. People were really moved by this. But I haven’t noticed such a method being widely adopted.
Bethlehem. But do they need to import north European pagan imagery such as sleighbells? Most Arabs don’t even understand what a sleigh is.
Winter Solstice and Christmas are important times for connecting with and reflecting on ancestry, origins, custom and tradition, but their importance lies not so much in ritual observance or cringeing Christmas habits as it lies in shared feeling and togetherness. It’s a time of social love and mutual support. The past is not important in itself, except inasmuch as it has some relevance to the present as a stabilising though not as a constraining factor.
There’s something wonderful about Christmas – the gathering of clans, the giving of gifts and the feasting. But for much of human history there has been a different context to these: today, in affluent societies, the feasting isn’t really necessary or good for us, and we already mostly have what we need so gifts have acquired hyper-consumption undertones, and while the gathering of families and friends can be wonderful, it can also be mixed in atmosphere, landing up with the TV, alcohol and niggly narrow-mindedness controlling the occasion.
Over the years I’ve found that, before Christmas, I get a slightly humbug, silent-to-disapproving response from many people when I tell them I’m not interested in it. Then after Christmas I’m told I’m lucky, or even envied. Most strange. We live in a very schizoid world. Some years, such as this year, with the devastation of Gaza, or back in 2004 with the Tsunami, the contradictions get quite stark, with people hungry in one place and over-filled in another, and both having a hard time over it. Sorry, but this doesn’t strike me as a good way to design the world of the future.
Anyway, that’s just me – though perhaps I’m articulating something for a few others too. Plenty of people are alone or lonely at Christmas. I am happy for those who are happy celebrating Christmas – it’s good for society to do things like this. And also I think about people who are unhappy about it, either because they’re left out or because they feel obliged to play along with something they don’t really feel right about. Perhaps Christmas needs a redesign to fit the reality of our current time. Less of the consumption, profiteering and excess, and more of the human aspect of things – the peace and the goodwill.
The Church of the Nativity (on the site of an Apollo temple and a Canaanite Goddess temple)
This is important. On the run-up to Christmas, one issue that has been bugging me is that I’m getting too many requests for help from people in many places and situations around the world, and it’s getting to be too much. Human need on Planet Earth is rising. My own sense of peace and goodwill has been under test. I’m currently working on three missions and I have the capacity for one. I’m having to remind people not to depend too much on me, because one day they won’t get an answer – I’ll be incapacitated or dead. I can’t find people to take on these people and their needs for help, all of which are genuine and legitimate. So that presents a problem. They need to get sorted out and back on their feet, and it’s good for us, for our souls, to take on karma-yogic responsibilities such as these. Well, that’s what I have found, at least.
So I’ve been experiencing compassion fatigue. Too many people asking for help. I have to remind them I am not a public-service help agency – I’m an old crock running on three cylinders. This fatigue has been accentuated by a need to re-focus on my own life – after all, living with cancer is a wee bit challenging – and on keeping my own head above water. If I don’t do this, I might well have a shorter life, meaning that I won’t be here any more for these people to contact. But then, to be ruthlessly honest, perhaps I need them as much as they need me.
But then, after I pop my clogs I’ll be Upstairs, accessible at least to those who attune their inner devices sufficiently and sign in to the dialogue. It’s certainly possible for me to tap on the top of people’s heads, or to walk into one of their dreams but, even then, it’s a toss-up whether they will notice or respond.
If you see things from the viewpoint of the ancestors, it’s difficult for them when the majority of people disregard them, or think of them as fantasy, as imaginary or even hauntingly disturbing. Or people shut off their receptivity by ‘just’ having another drink, or rushing off to spend money in shopping malls and bowling alleys, or arguing with each other over unresolved issues or trivialities. It can be frustrating being an ancestor in modern times, especially if there’s some wisdom to impart during moments of Christmastide reflection. Wisdoms such as…
Sometimes the young are wiser than the old. Sometimes adversity is really helpful. Or no matter how close you get to someone, there can still be light-years between you. Or that many hands make light work. Or that you can have the world’s greatest army but you still don’t win your wars. Or that the people who are regarded as winners are often very alone, even when they’re popular.
So I spent Christmas Day with a friend I met in 2022 who seems like an old friend already – Brian Abbot from Devon (he of the Invisible Opera Company of Tibet). Two aged hippies having a deep dialogue over all that has changed and all that has not changed, in our own lives, in the wider world and in the cosmos. One an author and the other a musician, both of us having started on our spirit-paths by consorting with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, in her blotter and microdot format, fiftysomething years ago in another millennium. He cooked a nut roast.
That was our Christmas. The wind blew, the rain came down, the woodstove burned bright with aromatic birchwood, and no animals died to feed us with Christmas dinner. All was well down’ere in West Penwith, at the end of the world – well, the end of the small British part of our world. And the Atlantic rollers crashed against the rocks on the coast with not a single care for human beliefs such as Christmas. As for Jesus, he was in Khan Younis, not Bethlehem, busy ministering to people in need. Good on him – we need a few more people like him around.
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.
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.
Here’s something I wrote 12 years ago in a book I did about Palestine which was never published. A short interesting read from that time…
An Eclipse and a visit to At Tuwani, 16th June 2011
I discovered a setting on my camera that I didn’t know existed until the very end of the lunar eclipse. Eclipses can be times of revelation! It removed the problem, classic for digital cameras, where the contrast between the light and the dark sides of the moon is too emphasised for the subtle details of the moon’s pocked surface to be seen. Even so, witnessing the eclipse from my eyrie at the top of the school was a privilege.
When it started there was a full-scale racket going on in Al Khader – loud music and the customary summer evening pandemonium of this town, spiced with the barking of dogs and the croaking of geckos. But as a slice began to be cut from the moon, gracefully arching over the Israeli watchtower, the area fell silent. Traffic disappeared, the dogs went quiet and all became still. Except for the shutter of my camera. It was late by the time it was over.
Maram Issa (right)
That didn’t stop me waking up at 6.30 the next morning. I’m not sure why I’m waking up so early at present. But it permitted me to rise and process my photos, posting them on Facebook – and the ‘likes’ started rolling in. I had breakfast and waited for Maram, who was picking me up at nine. By ten, having filled time and had a conversation with Mohammed, the school’s educational director, I rang Maram. Oh dear, car troubles. A taxi arrived to pick me up, then a call came to say hold on to the taxi and stay there – we’re coming. Ibrahim’s car soon arrived and Maram and I bundled into the taxi while Ibrahim went into the school, lugging his laptop, bag and bundles of files.
Off we went down the main road toward Hebron. The area south of Bethlehem is interesting because Israelis and Palestinians live quite intermixed with each other, unseparated by the separation wall. This area lies inside the Green Line, the official boundary between Israel and Palestine. This is a collection of Israeli settlements called the Etzion Bloc, interspersed with old Palestinian villages. Or perhaps the other way round, since the Palestinian villages have been there far longer. It’s quite a green, agricultural area.
At Tuwani
We proceeded around Hebron, the third largest Palestinian city after East Jerusalem and Gaza City and the biggest in the West Bank, past Qiryat Arba, an Israeli settlement outside Hebron, into a hilly, rocky district that turned browner as we drove south. This much-disputed area is where the most assertive wing of the Israeli settler movement is, stage by stage, staking out its claim, and where many of the most outrageous settler atrocities take place. We were heading for a village, At Tuwani, where resistance to settlers is strongest. It’s also the place where the women’s embroidery project is located.
The settlement of Ma’on
As we neared the village Maram pointed out several Israeli settlements, such as Karmel and Ma’on, which periodically crop up in the news, home to some of the most assertive settlers that exist. They’re so aggressive that many Israelis disown them, and the Knesset (Israeli parliament) uncharacteristically declared these settlements illegal. That made no difference. This said, a schizoid situation holds sway whereby the Israeli government pays for the building of the settlements (with American money), and the army makes symbolic gestures to clear them, to respond to foreign pressures, while actually reinforcing them and doing donkey-work for them – such as clearing Palestinians off land the settlers want, helping destroy trees and farmland, and ‘defending’ settlers whenever Palestinians push back.
There’s a double American involvement here. American money supports these frontline settlements, and many of the settlers are of American origin. But on the other side, Americans like Whit help the Palestinians, as also do American humanitarians such as the Christian Peacemaker Teams, who accompany and protect Palestinians in risky situations. America fighting against itself in foreign lands? The West plays a strange double game, advocating peace and supplying weapons at the same time.
Whit
We attended a meeting of the women. Whit and Paula were with some of the women from Jaffa and the Israeli production organiser – a nice lady who sits in the more enlightened and principled sector of Israeli society. Whit spoke, various of the ladies spoke, I added my bit and a Palestinian activist spoke.
Then the activist took us on a tour. He first explained the situation. This was tragic stuff. These are old villages going back centuries. The people of Tuwani are simple folk, many of them illiterate. For the last twenty or more years they have been under pressure from the settlers, who have been chopping down olive trees, burning farmland, demolishing the local mosque and quite a few houses, beating up farmers and children, blockading the village and generally making life hell for the villagers so that they leave. The Israeli army has played its part: army units down here are filled with nationalist settlers, opting to be posted here to reinforce the settler incursions.
But the villagers aren’t budging, even though they have put up with a lot over the years. One of the things that makes the settlers pressure the villagers of Tuwani and equally makes the villagers resist them is that two mountain tracks lead through Tuwani to a number of other villages. If the settlers close down Tuwani, those other villages die too.
The men of Tuwani
We were taken up a rocky, dry hill – the trees had been burned down and uprooted by settlers – to see the settlement of Ma’on just over on the other side, a half mile from the village. This settlement was planted on the villagers’ own land. An outpost of caravans in the trees, away from the settlers, was pointed out – apparently these settlers were so radical and insistent that even the settlers of Ma’on had thrown them out.
Whit asked the Palestinian activist how he had got involved. The activist explained how, when he was young, he had witnessed his mother being beaten up by soldiers. Running to rescue her, he was peppered with bullets from settlers and troops, who shot around his legs as he ran. Later he got his mother to hospital. She told him not to be angry and fight back because she would then lose him – he would lose his life or freedom. He asked her what he then should do. She said she didn’t know, but please find another way.
So he studied and adopted non-violent direct action, eventually moving down here once his mother died. He was joined by the Christian Peacemakers and some Italian Catholic activists. I met one Italian who had been here two years, with whom I discussed the stresses and strains of regularly going back and forth between Palestine and Europe and interfacing two very different worlds. It was a brotherly sharing.
He said his time in Palestine was coming to an end because he wanted to get out before he was blacklisted and thrown out forever – and he needed to go home to earn money. As it was, he was here on three-month tourist visas, leaving every three months, returning to Italy for a month and then coming back – but this ploy wasn’t going to last much longer. He was sad about that. We commiserated about how we both had fallen in love with our friends in Palestine, missing them when we were away, yet neither of us could move here.
The villagers gave us lunch – far more than we could eat – and showed us other items of their work. Lovely embroidered dresses, bags, belts and other things. I bought a dress for each of my three grown-up daughters, crossing my fingers that the dresses would fit them and suit their tastes (in the end, I’m not sure they did). They weren’t suitable for ordinary wear – they require a graceful style of moving that doesn’t work in the West – or for party wear, but they’re useful for pottering around the house in a relaxed, off-duty kind of way. All of the money would go to the village women: as a foreigner, one must do judicious spending with a view to helping people stay alive.
I would have liked to stay longer, but by mid-afternoon it was time to go – Ibrahim had come to pick us up. I was sad to leave these people – they need reinforcement, interaction and solidarity. But my duties lay back in Bethlehem with Hope Flowers. So we cannonaded up the road past Hebron and I was dropped at the school. I took a break in the late-afternoon sun on the flat roof of the school, reading. Then back to work.
I was nearly half-way through my month-long stay. It was going to be challenging to finish everything. There were friends to visit too, in Hebron, Jerusalem and Jenin. Ah, time: I was reminded of its passing by the outbreak of the calling to prayers from the local mosques. This isn’t just a religious thing: it’s the way Muslims section up their day. Even I, an infidel Westerner, time my day by the muezzins’ amplified chanting – the calling to prayers divides the day into periods which, in this climate, work well.
The previous night, as the eclipse gathered strength and the world went quiet, one muezzin was chanting the ninety-nine names of God. I guess it’s ninety-nine because the hundredth is beyond expression. These ninety-nine names describe divinity in all its aspects. There is, to Muslims, but one God, with no other complications – no sons, holy ghosts, angels or cherubim – just Allah, with ninety-nine facets. By the way, Arab Christians, the very earliest of Christians, use the term Allah as well as Muslims – it’s not uniquely a Muslim term. And it is pronounced Al-Lah. The God.
As I concluded writing this piece, a donkey called out in accidental synchrony with the muezzin, croaking plaintively, reminding people it was there. Or perhaps this was Allah’s ninety-nine names elucidated in donkeyese. Great Spirit expresses itself in remarkable ways.
I wrote this piece while working at the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem in the West Bank 12 years ago. Here’s the school’s website and here’s a piece I wrote about Hope Flowers and its history and background. For my 2012 book Pictures of Palestine – a humanitarian blogging from Bethlehem, go here.
This is not a christmas card. This is Kvikkjokk in the north of Sweden, north of the polar circle, last year. It’s where my daughter Maya lives. It was -30C there last night.
There’s one robin that comes from the thicket above my cabin, and another who lives in the brambles down below the barn.
Problem is, being male robins, and with breeding season coming, they’re doing their territoriality trip – much to the consternation of the tits and the blackie, who also want to get to the feeder just outside my door.
When you spend much of your time alone, issues like this do matter! But it’s a welcome diversion too because, as you might imagine, my thumbs haven’t exactly been twiddling very much recently, and I’ll welcome an off-duty break one day.
It hasn’t snowed here in Penwith, though it went sub-zero and icy in the last few nights. Stuck out in the Atlantic and bathed in water that not too long ago passed Miami Beach, we’ve been about 5 degrees warmer than most of Britain. But then, though Brits love to complain, whatever the weather, up where my daughter Maya lives, north of the polar circle in northern Sweden, it was -30C last night – and the sun won’t rise until mid-January. Welcome to Planet Earth, dear friends – this is what you get on this world, and this is what you chose when you decided to come here.
I get cold feet. I’ve got this weird thing called Peripheral Neuropathy – a side-effect of chemo drugs where your nerve-endings die off. So I can feel the inner feelings in my feet but not the outer ones – and I never knew there was a difference until the Good Lord (or whoever) gave me cancer. This also means I don’t feel the cold in my feet very much – which goes to show how, in life, you win some and you lose some, and that’s the deal. I still have warm double socks on though.
An Indonesian Christian rock band in Bethlehem
One of the narratives of my life has been about dealing with paradox. My mother did love and care for me but she didn’t have the time and presence to mother me in the way I needed – that kind of thing. But that’s alright: it gave me some mother patterns to work with. Or this: my Tibetan name means ‘radiant merit’, my Arabic name ‘servant of the light’ and my Brahmin name is god of the sun, but there’s a shady side to me too, who gets involved in gritty, underworldy, heavy stuff. I’ve been exposing this side of me in the last month, with the strange thriller I’ve found myself in.
It goes to show, I’m not a holyholy meditation teacher at all, but a lawbreaking aged hippy charlatan who does nasty things, corrupts dishy young ladies, leads people astray and ought to be locked up forthwith – a danger to civilised society. Be warned.
I’ve been breaking the law recently, paying bribes. In West Africa, if you don’t pay enablement payments, nothing gets done. However, as my late senior barrister friend Keith used to say, in his endearingly bombastic Leo kind of way, “I, dear boy, am a purveyor of the Law of Man, but you, sir, are a purveyor of the Law of God”. Well, that’s a bit over the top, but there’s truth in it too, and sometimes divine will does need to prevail, whatever anyone thinks. So I’ve paid some bribes because, actually, it’s usually just to pay the guy’s phone bill or taxi fare so that he can do what you’re asking for and perhaps take a few bob home to his missus.
Well, if they want to arrest me for that, I’m over here. It’s a professional expense, and not the least of the sins I’ve committed. I’ve been a traitor, consorted with terrorists, smuggled tofu though Israeli checkpoints (they think it’s Semtex), taken on false guises and a few other things I’d better not mention.
But on the other hand, bad as I am, my life-saving stats measure well against any doctor or paramedic, and I’ve had the pleasure of uplifting thousands of people, and many of the bad things I once did, or decidedly didn’t do, are now, a few decades later, strangely approved of. It took a while. Some people think I’m brave, though my rather naive Aspie response is simply, ‘But why is that unusual?’.
Manger Square, Bethlehem, full of people
I have another weird Aspie thing too. I have an aversion to Christmas. I don’t do it. I’ve always felt unhappy feeling obligated to be happy and congenial when, at the time, I’m feeling contemplative and quiet. So I have a no-compromise approach that, before Xmas, is frowned on and, after Xmas, is envied.
On Xmas Day, if the weather allows, I’ll be out on the moors or the cliffs with a flask and a pie, attending to the top of my head and a few related matters, and if the weather is bad I’ll be huddled round the woodstove, propped in my chair or inner journeying in bed, busy not drinking sherry. Unless I find another person who would delight in an utter non-Xmas with me, I’ll be on my own, and that’ll be alright. You might wonder why.
Well, it’s a time for wrapping up the past and looking toward the future, and I have rather a lot of both at present. That’s solstice, the turning of a tide.
But it’s also a time when, rarely, the Christian and Westernised elements in the world suddenly get excited about peace and goodwill for a day or two. This is really good. My only reservation is that it suddenly ends around lunchtime on Xmas Day, when everyone starts blotting themselves out with food and booze, only to regret it afterwards.
Manger Square, Bethlehem, Palestine, at Christmas
Nevertheless, as a guerrilla planet-fixer with an esoteric style, I find it’s worth scooping up some of this goodwill for good use. After all, there are at least a billion people on Earth who really need some peace and goodwill to be shoved their way right now. If not, truth be told, the whole eight billion of us.
So I spend my solstice-to-Xmas doing consciousness work. It’s secret – don’t tell anyone. It’s a good time for doing some gentle infiltration of the collective psyche, to strengthen that thought: goodwill. If you’re on your own this Christmas, then, wherever you are, stick up your antennae and see whether you can find me in that ‘reality-field’ and come join me. Try 11am and 2pm GMT, Xmas Day.
I’m always there on Sunday evenings at 7pm GMT too, for half an hour.
Ten years ago I was in Bethlehem at Christmas. The slightly sad thing is that Christian numbers for the Christmas Pilgrimage are much diminished nowadays, so Muslims make up the numbers – Palestinians do appreciate Bethlehem’s global name-recognition in such a forgotten land, and Jesus is also one of the prophets of Islam.
The Catholic Xmas is a bit like ours in NW Europe, with a lot of the jingle-jangle, and big concerts in Manger Square with Christian singers and bands from Germany, Indonesia and Nigeria, and a few Papal delegates thrown in. And why on earth do they import Father Christmas to Bethlehem, already replete with Christ Mass primacy, when most Palestinians have no idea where Estonia is or what slieghbells are?
Then comes the Orthodox Xmas, which is a bit more sedate, very ornate and quite delightful to a jaded old heathen like me. The chanting is done with deep faith and mystique, and the archangels and cherubim really do seem to hover around.
Then in mid-January comes the Armenian Xmas, which actually, if I were Christian, is the kind of Christmas I’d prefer – ruminative and richly calm. Either way, they’re all resplendent with candles, incense, chant and reverence – that’s very different to the mosques, where there’s nearly no ceremony or pizazz, just quiet prayer. They both have their virtues, but give me an ocean clifftop or a desert outcrop anyday, and I’ll be happy.
It looks like I’ll still be on duty over Christmas, monitoring the West Africa situation daily. Here’s the latest news from there.
Phyllis, now three, some time ago
Phyllis, the child, is happy and in good shape. She underwent an amazing turnaround last week, going from fever and coughing blood to wanting an ice cream in two days flat. I think you lot, with your prayers, played a key part in that. She is now staying with Dr Isaac and his family. Phyllis seems to be a great kid, easy to have around, and everyone loves her. I’m so happy about that. She’s special, that one.
Felicia… well, she’s improving, but we hit a setback two days ago. She has been reviving, and three days ago we moved her out of hospital into accommodation near the doctor and his wife. She was awake and becoming able to function, but she fell over, and it was bad. She needed two blood transfusions, a drip and medication. I’ve managed to finance that. So, it’s tenuous with her at present.
Those of you who have been giving your prayers, healing and positive thoughts to Felicia… may I ask for another round? Please hold her and raise her up. She has brain injuries from the ‘accident’ two weeks ago (they were rammed, actually). We think she’ll be alright, and she’s in good care, though she isn’t out of danger yet.
I want to put in a word for Dr Isaac and his partner Millicent and their children. They have taken in Felicia and Phyllis. They live simply and have their own family concerns, but they care a lot, and they’re definitely not in it for the money.
One of the greatest benefits I’ve had from my humanitarian work has been meeting simple, good-hearted folk like these who are the real saviours of our planet. They just get on with it and hold the world up. They do so much of the mopping up of the world’s mess.
Here’s Dr Isaac
The people I’m involved with in West Africa, and also my handler with the fraud investigation company, are all good and remarkable people. In this business, you develop ways of finding out who you can and cannot trust, and everyone depends on each other, and there’s a certain implicit code of behaviour, and you bond closely with people you encounter when sharing intense situations with them.
The Syrian Orthodox church, Bethlehem, Palestine
In something like this, to use an old sexist term, it sorts out the men from the boys. The people who hang with you through thick and thin are often amazing people. Dr Isaac is like that. He lost his job for us (though I think he’ll get it back). He risked his and his family’s lives. He’s gone several extra miles. He’s a man of faith and a good doctor who deserves more than a one-room home for his family.
I’ve met many remarkable people, and he ranks high, a true server, a doctor of whom Hippocrates would be proud. We’ve known each other for three rather long weeks. God bless you, Isaac. People like you convince me that this world will survive. My daughters, son and grandchildren do that too.
I guess I’m a sucker for crisis situations because it brings out the best in many people, and I like working with them, and it brings out the best in me. I’m not good at normality, you see. I’ve always felt I’m there to help the helpers, the social healers and the frontline people, and it’s an area of deep late-life satisfaction now.
Here’s the Mosque of Omar on the other side of the square. Sensibly, when they invaded, the Muslims under Caliph Omar didn’t take over and convert the church. Bethlehem has had very good Christian-Muslim relations throughout history. I wonder why?
As an independent ‘freelance humanitarian’, for want of a better term, I’ve held to certain principles I feel are important such as: ‘don’t give a person a fish, but teach them how to fish’, and ‘teach a man and you teach a man, but teach a woman and you teach a generation’. There’s even William Blake’s statement: ‘the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’ – and war is excess to human need, in my judgement.
I feel also that, as an educated, white, male, privileged Brit whose ancestors built the empire and kept it going, and living through its downfall and seeing its very mixed outcomes, I have a bit of an urge to complete the job. I’m not a great believer in reparations, guilt or sorrow – I just like to get in there and do something to help people have a better life and rise to their full potential. To the extent I can.
People have asked who or what I work with. To my surprise, at present it’s for a big bank – though that’s not my style. One of my PodTalks, The Only Planet of Choosing, gives clues. I’ve worked with all sorts of people, but the bottom line for me is their humanity, and progressing humanity’s evolution. My focus has been community-building, conflicts and crises, and helping social leaders stay on the rails.
You have to have your wits about you. This is strange because, as an Aspie, I can be at times apparently naively open but it’s not exactly that – it’s because I sense people’s hidden motives and agendas, and I often get delayed-action clarity on what’s really happening. So I look blank for a while. Then it all comes. So I’m best working with others, inputting what I’m good at. Such as total attention, hyper-focus. When I’m on form, I’m brilliant, and when I’m not, I’m best back here in Cornwall, out of everyone’s way.
Which is where I am now, on the farm, and it’s a dark and rainy pre-solstice night, and the owls and crows are all tucked under their wings down in the woods and hiding from the feather-ruffly wind. Wherever you are, may all be well with you.
Don’t worry too much about your circumstances, even if they’re tough at present – look at your attitude, and be innovative. Find simple ways to be happy. We all get inner friction and pain, but these are things we can reduce, even if we can’t reduce the adversity. That’s what’ll get us all through.
The Church of the Nativity began as a goddess temple (hence the Virgin Mary came here), then a Greek Apollo temple, and only then did it become a Christian Church. The front entrance is really low and you have to duck to go through – this is to force Crusaders to dismount and it stopped their hunky stallions from entering the church. But the Israelis just roll bombs in. Interestingly, in Bethlehem, I don’t get a feeling of Jesus – it’s Mother Mary’s or Mariam’s town, and the matriarchs there definitely let you know it
Aisha and I went into Bethlehem. The town was crowded, mostly with Palestinians, Christian and Muslim, who come from around the West Bank, Gaza and in Israel, but also with a much larger number of foreigners than usual. Eventually 100,000 visitors hit Bethlehem by Christmas Eve, the largest turnout for at least a decade.
We went to the Nativity Church but it was packed with visitors. There are two halves to the church, Orthodox and Catholic, and the place was crowded mainly with Italians, flashing their cameras and forming long queues to visit the shrines. We didn’t stay long. I don’t think Jesus would have done so either – though I can’t really speak for him. I reflected on the strange fact that, whenever I come to this church, I seem to be brought here by Muslims.
Aisha, a British Muslim, had to go home to Ramallah where she lived, so we had hummus and falafel at a friend’s cafe and then trogged up through the Old Town to Bab-al-Sqaq where she caught the 21 bus to Jerusalem. She was trying out this route because, though it requires passing through two major checkpoints near Bethlehem and Ramallah, it’s shorter and cheaper than going along the circuitous Palestinian main route around Jerusalem, staying within the West Bank.
I walked back as darkness fell toward Manger Square, taking photos and chatting with people. The square was heaving by now, with people streaming in from all directions. I spent much of the time with an enterprising young coffee seller, Mahmoud, who places his big charcoal-fired coffee pot on a concrete pedestal and does a roaring trade, selling coffee for a shekel (20p). We have an ongoing dialogue, and he likes his pet Englishman – except that I don’t support Real Madrid, but no one is perfect. I somehow doubt that Jesus supports Real Madrid either, or Barcelona for that matter, and told him so. “Ah, but Mohammed the Prophet supports Madrid!”, he joked.
Indonesian evangelism, no less
Soon a weird and very loud concert cranked up, by an Indonesian Christian rock band. The concert was sponsored by an Indonesian evangelical foundation. I heard the best rendering of the Lord’s Prayer that I have ever heard, quite tastefully done. One of them gave a lovely rap about harmony between Christians and Muslims, and everyone cheered, even though there was an embarrassing moment when he asked Christians, then Muslims, to stick up their hands, and the Muslims outnumbered the Christians by three to one – oops!
Before long I had had enough of harking to herald angels, soon degenerating into Santa and sleighbell songs, even though the music was rocking and rolling with vigour and aplomb, Indonesian style. Do Indonesians, or Palestinians for that matter, actually know what sleighbells are? I took refuge at my friend Alaa ad-Din’s shop, sitting people-watching as the endless crowds streamed down the narrow street. An old taxi-driver I knew drove past and I asked him to return in twenty minutes to pick me up.
I’ve never been one for Christmas – usually I go quiet and into retreat. This year I have felt more sociable about it but, suddenly, I realised that Bethlehem was becoming a nightmare. Why, in this source-point of the Christmas tradition, do they have to import all the Santa razzmatazz, all the commercial crap that has so ruined the spirit of Christmas, burying peace and goodwill under a mountain of consumptive blindness and artifice? After all, this is Bethlehem, the home of Christmas – it doesn’t need to import anything, and in fact it should by rights set the tone. When I had mentioned this to Aisha, she had said I was welcome to come to Ramallah to escape. Suddenly I knew I was going to Ramallah tomorrow, on Christmas Eve.
The taximan never came. After an hour of waiting – allowing for Palestine Inshallah Time – I waved goodbye to my friends at the shop, who were duly worried that I wasn’t enjoying myself, but I was just fine. In truth, if they stopped deluding themselves, most people in these crowds didn’t seem too happy to me either. But then, as someone aptly wrote recently, if you live inside a myth it looks like reality – though the gentleman in question was referring to the growth-economics of recent decades. Yet this rendering of Christmas, in my judgement, has more to do with growth-economics than Jesus, peace and goodwill. Or perhaps I’m just being Scrooge-like and grumpy, or becoming jaded?
It took a while to find a taxi, and then we had to weave around backstreets dodging the traffic-jams. Looking out at the crowds, it’s rather tragic that the majority of people here were Muslims. This isn’t a problem – it’s a blessing, saving the Christmas celebrations from moribund decline. What’s sad is that the Christian presence is so thin. Most of Palestine’s Christians have emigrated.
I had an image of Jesus coming down the street ranting at the desecration of his memory, vaulting onto the stage in Manger Square to unplug the amps and tell the privileged visitors in their allocated seats in front of the stage to yield them up to the poor and needy. Or perhaps just to go home and get on with the job of building Heaven on Earth and acting on His teachings. I’m sure there are spiritual moments for many people here, when they contemplate the tender meaning of the Christ Mass, of the shepherds who came up from Beit Sahour to see the newborn babe and of the Holy Mother and Child, but this… this is something else. I was glad to get out.
So, to all my dear readers, my apologies for omitting to give you a warm and toasty image of Christmas in Bethlehem! I’m sure it has its finer side, and it certainly puts this walled-in city on the world map, at least for a few days each year. It’s good to make a bit of a fuss about peace and goodwill, but why don’t we do this all year?
Ismael
Next day I pottered around the apartment tidying up and exercising my fingers on my computer keyboard, then I rang Ismael and left with him for the service-taxi station, to go to Ramallah. Ismael was a happy man today – his son Tareq had just been released early from jail, thanks to Hamas’ clever politics in exchanging a thousand Palestinian prisoners for one woe-begotten Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. This says something about Hamas’ strategy: they doggedly hold out for their principles without budging an inch, and this time it worked. Israel, which desperately believes Hamas is a bunch of terrorists, did the deal and paid the price. Ismael’s son was free.
Ismael had driven with his wife to the prison near Ramallah to meet him, but the Israelis kept everyone waiting until late into the night, to prevent an outburst of celebration and protest – though it hadn’t worked. There had been a near-riot outside the jail, and Ismael and his wife had beaten a retreat until things calmed down. Ismael is a respectable gentleman, by profession a surveyor but now redundant and a taxi-driver, and quite poor. But they found Tareq and brought him home at last. Their house had since then been busy for some days as people came by to congratulate the son and family, bringing gifts and partying. Released prisoners are heroes in Palestine. Tareq had been jailed for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers who were raiding Deheisheh refugee camp, themselves breaking the rules of the Oslo Accords.
Ismael is trying to get Tareq into Abu Dis university. But he’s worried because the jail term has delayed his son’s entry into university, meaning that one of his daughters has reached the age for university too. He can’t afford to pay for both of them. This is deeply vexing to him, because Palestinians value education very highly. A while ago I had given Ismael 400 shekels toward the 8,000 shekel (£1,600 or $2,000) fine he would have to pay for his son on release in about nine months’ time, except the Hamas deal had cut this short and saved the fine, so I told him to put it in Tareq’s self-help fund. He was so grateful, it was touching, and we both cried a few tears together.
Bethlehem was choked with traffic. The place was crawling with armed security men because Abu Mazen, the president, and Salam Fayyad, the prime minister, were on their way here to deliver annual Christmas speeches – a tradition started by Yasser Arafat. There were loads of big SUVs everywhere, the cars of privileged members of the PA hierarchy – people who have done well from Western and Gulf subsidies that support this nation. Unfortunately these subsidies support the hierarchy more than the nation. There’s no major crime in Palestine except for this.
Eventually we reached the service-taxi station. I bundled into a van and we were soon off, down through Beit Sahour and onto the main trunk road northwards. Most of the traffic was coming the other way – not least the armed motorcade of the president and prime minister, with flashing blue lights and a swarm of big motorbikes out in front and in the rear.
This is a trunk road not because of its quality – in British terms it’s a bumpy old ‘B’ road – but because it’s the only road from the southern to the northern West Bank, from Bethlehem to Ramallah, avoiding Israeli controls. Most Palestinians are not permitted to enter Israel proper or Jerusalem, which would be the shortest route – 25km instead of 70km – so they have to go round Jerusalem along this convoluted mountain route.
Palestine Route One
This road is dramatic, a tremendous ride. At first it weaves along the top of the limestone plateaux east and north of Bethlehem, where there’s a view down into a deep valley and then, on the other side, high up, the walled-off outskirts of East Jerusalem. This is vivid enough in itself, but then it suddenly plunges dramatically 1,000ft (300m) down a steep switchback into Wadi Nar, the Valley of Fire, where it changes from a winding old road into a new USAid-modernised dual carriageway heading north to Abu Dis and Al Azariyah, through more wild semi-desert mountain landscape, and winding tortuously through Wadi Nar until it eventually joins the Israeli east-west Route 1 from Jerusalem to the King Hussein Bridge and Jordan. This is a full-scale modern dual carriageway, financed in the 1990s by the Japanese government as a peace road linking Jerusalem and Amman – except peace never came. As far as I know the Japanese never asked for their money back.
We cannonaded down this road, past the Ma’ale Adumim Israeli settlement, perched on a hilltop to the right, then we turned left toward Ramallah. More dramatic landscape, and a few impoverished Bedouin shack-villages. This certainly is a memorable trip, this road. It weaves around hither and thither, and the service-taxi drivers do it at breakneck speed – mercifully they seem to be good drivers. Eventually we reached Ramallah – and it suddenly started raining! This was the first rain for over a month. It was tipping down. I waited to meet Aisha at Manara Circle, the centre of town – a funny bi-directional roundabout with a monument in the middle, dating back to British Mandate times. The British used to come here to get out of Jerusalem and enjoy themselves – rather like a hill-station in the Indian Raj.
Aisha took me to a Latin (Catholic) church for the Christ Mass. It’s the first time I’ve been to a church service for, er, well, must be over a decade, heathen that I am. The service was in Arabic and the church was packed. I floated off into another world, standing up and sitting down when required, looking as if I knew what I was doing. I had been in rather an altered, spaced-out state during the day, so it was rather nice to let myself drift along with the choral singing.
Again, I was taken to a church by a Muslim. I didn’t understand a word of the sermon, but the priest, dressed in white robes with lovely embroidery on it, spoke quite clearly and slowly – useful to listen to, picking up Arabic words I’m beginning to recognise. I hadn’t realised until now that Christians also use the term ‘Allah’ in Arabic. But then, he’s the One God, so why shouldn’t they? For your interest, Allah means ‘The God’ – it has a slightly different nuance to the Western personalisation of ‘God’ as a name, while the Arabic term is a noun.
Ramallah – where the foreign money is
We emerged from the church into the pouring rain, dodging torrents of water, and found a taxi to take us to the village outside town where Aisha and her husband Ahmed live. He’s a web-designer and film-maker, and we had lots to chatter about. They’re moving to England in a few months’ time to work and study (inshallah, if the British do the right thing with his visa, at a cost of £800). Ahmed likes the relatively high educational and intellectual standards of the English. The idea of living in London gives me a sinking feeling, but they’re excited about it. Perhaps I’m just a provincial country bumpkin with moss in my brains.
Next morning, Christmas Day, I sat writing my blog – I was falling behind – while Aisha went out and Ahmed updated websites. It was raining hard – not a day for sightseeing or footling around outside. It was a slow, do-nothing-much day. The calling to prayers at the local mosque was particularly tuneful – though Aisha later told me that, unlike in Bethlehem where it is sung by live singers and therefore quite variable in quality, this was pre-recorded by star muezzin from Mecca or Medina, and pumped out through sound systems paid for by Saudi sheikhs. Then we had a chat and a late lunch, and I bade them farewell to return to Bethlehem. I was still feeling rather wobbly, and wanted to get home to be in my own space.
At the service-taxi station I had to wait some time for the taxi to fill up – it has space for eight passengers. The driver thought I was German, but when I told him in German that I wasn’t, and came from Britaniyya, he didn’t understand, so I stuttered it in Arabic. He was fascinated when I stood outside smoking my pipe – around here, the only pipe-smokers are wizened old Bedouin out in the hills. Eventually people came and we started out.
It was still swilling down with rain and progress was slow. Palestinian roads aren’t built for handling rain, so there were massive pools and floods, and we had some great moments of aquaplaning. Heavy rain in a desert landscape is quite paradoxical. When eventually we reached the steep, winding switchback at the far end of Wadi Nar there was a big traffic jam. People had ground to a halt on the 1-in-3 hill and, the road being covered with a film of rubber and oil from the customarily hot weather, they couldn’t get up. Neither could they back down because of the traffic jam behind them. But Palestinians are good at crises, and it sorted itself out in due course.
When we reached Bethlehem the taxi-station was closed. Since it was still bucketing down the passengers nagged the driver to take them up toward Manger Square, which he duly did, and we tipped out into the monsoon, running everywhichway. By now I was not just wobbly and vulnerable but cold and wet and, being a thin pile of bones, I decided to run for the nearest shelter to ring Ismael, to ask him to come and rescue me. The nearest shelter was a coffee bar called – wait for it – Stars and Bucks, a Palestinian chain that has taken this name to dig Starbucks in the ribs for avoiding setting up in Palestine. Some global corporations (such as Coca Cola, Wall’s ice cream or Nestle) come to Palestine and others, such as Starbucks, don’t. So it looks like Starbucks has lost its chance for business in Palestine – though they probably don’t care.
Whatever, Stars and Bucks had a heater on and served a good cup of tea, and I waited for Ismael. The guys there interviewed me about what I am doing in Palestine: Palestinians are so interested in foreigners, especially the ones who stay a long time and return repeatedly. The usual questions came about my family, my wife (haha), with the customary expression of surprise when I said I had grandchildren (to them I look young), and the questions about my work, where I was staying, and then the riveted attention watching me lighting my pipe.
Bethlehem Old Town
Ismael arrived at last and off we went, weaving around the Old Town, slowing for the virulent speed-bumps, stopping at a shop to get a few provisions and then water-skiing back to Al Khader. I promised to come to visit his son soon. We waved goodbye. Ismael and I are getting like brothers of the soul – he looks my age but he’s ten years younger. I’ll miss him when I go back to Britain, since it’s so good having someone who thinks of me and rings me regularly to make sure I’m alright. He also knows that, as an old revolutionary and dissident who has had his own problems with police and authorities, I understand his son and I have a few survival secrets to share with him.
The apartment was quiet and cold but, once I’d had a bite to eat and a cuppa, I put my hot water bottle on my lap and wrapped a big blanket around myself, finished and uploaded my blog about Hebron, processed my latest photos, did a few e-mails, did my meditation and then staggered off to bed.
So much for Christmas 2011. I went back to Britain in late March 2012.
Recently I haven’t been in the best of health and spirits and I shall write a blog about that soon, when my energy is right. But if you want clues, listen to my last podcast Popping Clogs and Kicking Buckets.
Meanwhile, I’ve begun a kind of preliminary goodbyeing process, and in the last 24 hours I’ve been wishing I could be back in Palestine, with friends and ‘family’ there. So I was moved this morning to post a chapter from Pictures of Palestine, to share this feeling with you.
(If you like this chapter, you can download a free PDF or e-book version on the site, or order the print version.)
It was written in 2009 but, while details in Palestine have changed, the situation has not, and this chapter in essence has not dated.
The Back-Roads of Palestine – arriving in Bethlehem
“Where you want go?” “Beit Lahem”.
“Where you from?” “Britaniyya.”
“Ah, my son, he in Leicester, doctor in hospital.” I’m never sure whether to be happy or sad when they say things like this, but most Palestinians seem quite happy that at least someone in the family is chasing a future abroad. It’s their family insurance policy.
I was the first to the yellow eight-seater VW service bus, so I would have to wait for more passengers to appear. That was fine – I wanted to assimilate being in Jericho again. Everyone was friendly. If ever you come to Palestine, be ready to be overwhelmed with hospitality – it’s quite moving and takes a while to get used to. It’s not a front. People come up and shake your hand, saying “Wilcome, wilcome to Falastin”, and they really mean it. They know it takes some resolve to get here.
I went off and found some Egyptian mango juice and Jericho springwater to guzzle. The dense Jordan valley heat was like an engulfing blanket but, being thin, I’m fine with that – it’s chilly, damp British weather I have a problem with! I went over to some guys standing around talking. The usual friendly questions. Where you from? What your name? Where you going? How many children you have? What you doing here? They’re often interested in my age, and eyebrows raise when I tell them – Palestinian men of my age often look older and more worn than I do.
I took photos of some of them – they seemed to love it. But some didn’t want it, gesticulating ‘No’ with a quick wave of the finger, and I knew why. It’s politics and security: they or their family have had trouble with the Israelis, or they supported Hamas or another faction, or they had a history, or their brother was in jail, or… Long ago I had been in similar straits and I know what it’s like: it’s not just that you want to avoid the gaze of the powers that be, but also that you don’t want to keep reminding your friends or even yourself that, rightly or wrongly, you’re toxic property.
Eventually the service taxi-van was full and we were off through the streets of Jericho, an ancient city with an 8,000 year history. We left the town, driving some miles up to the main Jerusalem highway and then turning right, following the road as it ascends through the Judean desert hills. It sweeps through the valleys, climbing up and up just to reach sea level, marked by a sign in Hebrew, Arabic and English. After making good progress, still uphill, we suddenly slowed down and pulled off near the Ma’ale Adumim interchange onto a bumpy, crowded road and into a scrappy Palestinian township near Al Azariya.
Ma’ale Adumim is one of the biggest Israeli West Bank settlements, a Jerusalem orbital town and an asset Israel is unlikely to abandon, whatever foreign politicians want. This new town and the roads servicing it, built on confiscated Palestinian land, split the West Bank into northern and southern halves, rendering Palestine territorially sub-functional as a nation.
But we were not going to Ma’ale Adumim. Instead, we hit a bumpy side-road which, for Palestinians, is a key trunk road linking the northern and southern West Bank. It weaves through a small town, then weaving along valleys and up and down the high hills, with sharp switchbacks, steep inclines and loads of traffic. In Britain we’d regard it as a back-country ‘B’ road, but actually it is ‘Palestine Route One’. Nowadays it is being modernised but in 2009 the only sign of its trunk road status was the density of traffic.
Some of the areas it drives through are poor and dilapidated, the houses quite scrappy, the land stony and dry. Garbage, wrecks and piles of rubble are heaped here and there – an alienated landscape where the locals have lost their care and pride. They’re probably rural refugees, thrown off land the Israelis have taken, such as at Ma’ale Adumim. It’s one of the tragic aspects of this country. But then, many Palestinians harbour little hope, so they’re unlikely to invest in longterm improvements. They half-expect the Israelis to come in some day, wreck everything again or drive them out, and they do have reason to anticipate that.
Yet there are some pretty nice houses along the road too, in other locations. Palestinians who are go-getters or beneficiaries of the PA or foreign agencies take great pride in their new-builds, many of which have a fine vista and attractive courtyards with flowering trees and bushes. It’s as if their optimism compensates for their others’ lack of it. It also reveals an emerging class divide between those who benefit from foreign subsidies and advantages and those who do not. Palestine has its haves and have-nots and they nowadays live in quite distinct economies.
The road is exciting to travel as it climbs up steep hills and tips into deep valleys, weaving through an impressive limestone upland landscape, passing through hilltop villages with prominent mosques and affording views stretching many miles. Yes, this is a trunk road – but it’s heartbreaking too. Privileged Israelis drive along their fast, wide highways while Palestinians have to heave up, down and around on side-roads like this: transportation apartheid. Although the West Bank is occupied by Israel, its cars have different number-plates from those of Israelis, conferring different driving and access rights. Go up the wrong road and you could, on a bad day, experience a sudden hail of bullets at worst, or interrogation at best.
It’s not easy, living under military occupation
We passed through only one checkpoint, which today was open. The Israeli soldiers leaned against their booths and bollards, talking to each other and idly gazing at passing traffic. Poor guys – what a job. There they stood sweating, posted in an unfriendly spot next to a Palestinian hilltop village, perpetually on guard against a foe who nowadays rarely materialises and might hardly exist.
In the distance I could see the Herodeon, near Bethlehem, a prominent conical hill and ancient site going back millennia. It looks like a volcano but it was shape-enhanced in ancient times and contains, allegedly, the tomb of Herod the king. Naturally, we didn’t head straight toward it – our route was still sinuous and tortuous. After another twenty minutes we pulled into Beit Sahour – Shepherds’ Fields, referring to the Christmas story – near Bethlehem. The family that made up most of the passengers in the bus was dropped off right outside their gate. The remaining woman asked me, on behalf of the driver, where I wanted to be dropped. I decided to go to Manger Square in central Bethlehem to catch some food, take a rest and ascertain where Ibrahim Issa was to be found.
Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem
There I bundled out of the bus dragging my wheeled bag, my precious technology bag over my shoulder. Containing a netbook computer, camera and lenses, digital sound recording equipment, DVD and card readers, cables, plugs and adaptors, with room for travel papers, passport and a bottle of water, this technology bag is neat – but rather a wrench on the shoulder muscles.
The Christian taxi-drivers near the Nativity Church, seeing a Westerner – who of course must be rich – started hollering at me for my custom. You learn how to gesticulate ‘No’. One bright young driver with a pleasant face got my attention, though I still said no to him. I wanted to sit down and have something to eat. He shepherded me to a nearby café and within seconds a pitta stuffed with salad and falafel was set in front of me, along with fresh carrot juice. What a relief! All the taxi-drivers stood round asking questions and smiling, all very amiable once they’d realised I was no source of business for them right now.
I rang Ibrahim, but no answer. Did I have the right number? Hmmm, what next? Leaving my bag at the café, I went wandering. As I returned, the young taxi-driver signalled me: “I help you. What your name?”
He took me to the Hope Flowers School at the far end of Al Khader, west of Bethlehem, but it was locked and deserted. On the way I noticed that the town was in visibly better shape than on my last trip in 2005, just after the second intifada, during which the Israelis had wrecked Bethlehem and still then staged periodic incursions and searches. But now the separation wall had been built and Bethlehem, imprisoned behind it, was safer and more relaxed. The security wall protects Palestinians from Israelis as well as vice versa. This relaxation of tension was visible on the streets. Another sign of progress was the condition of the trees in the central reservation of the Hebron road leading to Al Khader.
These trees, planted in 2005 by the Earth Stewards, were all intact and growing! I had joined them – mostly Dutch, German and Austrian green activists – in a tree-planting project organised by Hope Flowers. Ibrahim had known the Earth Stewards when he lived in Holland in the 1990s and he had organised PeaceTrees as a joint project with them in Bethlehem, not just as an ecological but also as a social empowerment project. The trees’ continued existence showed that something had worked – the locals had got the message.
During the intifada people had lost hope. It had followed a period in the 1990s when peace and progress came close and then ebbed away, prompting the uprising, a mass expression of sheer frustration. Israeli measures taken against Palestinians were terrible and Bethlehem had been an epicentre of conflict – remember the shoot-out at the Church of the Nativity in 2002? By 2005, when the intifada had subsided, the locals needed jump-starting with initiatives to help them improve their lives and encourage them to invest energy in the future. The regular experience of seeing houses demolished, parts of town wrecked, buildings shelled and people carted off had given Bethlehemites a feeling of futility and pointlessness.
By planting a large number of trees in a very visible place – the main road’s central reservation – we caused mild fascination at first, followed by interest and questions. Then people joined in, then energy and enthusiasm grew. We wrapped up the project by saying, “If you don’t look after these trees, they will die, so it’s up to you” – and we left. The trees survived: someone had made sure they were watered and cared for. PeaceTrees had worked.
The Old Town of Bethlehem
As the young taxi-driver and I returned to central Bethlehem, he told me that he was a student of accountancy in Hebron and drove his uncle’s taxi to pay his way. He wanted to be my friend and I promised I would find him again. Subsequently I had a number of lifts with him, and only half the time did he charge me. He dropped me off and I headed up to Manger Square, standing there awhile, taking it all in. A wide, large square, milling with people.
A man approached, asking in quite good English whether he could help me. Adnan took me to his shop near the square, where he sold souvenirs – olive-wood religious objects, Arabic dresses, Bedouin rugs, decorative inlaid boxes and allsorts. Some of the woodwork was exquisitely carved and the rugs and clothing came in lovely colours, all with a very hand-made feel to them. Mint tea appeared and people came and went as we talked. Adnan discovered I was a webmaster and asked if I would help him make a website – I said I would consider it. He rang a friend who knew Ibrahim – an answer would come soon about where to find him.
I got out my computer and skyped my cousin, then my son and then my ladyfriend back in England, to tell them I’d got here. I wanted to share it with them. A small crowd gathered round, goggling at this visitor’s neat technology, and they said hello on Skype, all very thrilled. My son just said, “Cool”, and carried on tapping on his computer. Then he looked up and suddenly saw several faces looking at him through the screen.
“Who’re they?” “I’ve finally got to Bethlehem, and these are some of the kids here”. “Cool”, he repeated, in his perpetually unfazed way, still tapping keys.
My ladyfriend was dumbstruck at talking live to some real Palestinians. Palestinians are people you hear about on the news, you don’t expect to talk personally with them on Skype. Everyone helloed, and she helloed back. While I was talking to her, the calling to prayers started up – really loud, since we were right next to the Omar Mosque. She was visibly moved at the sound, as it hit her that I was really there. She and my cousin were serving as ‘ground control’ back in England, and it was fitting to share with them my first taste of returning.
Eventually the grapevine worked and Ibrahim Issa came to fetch me. I’d last seen him five months earlier in England during one of his speaking tours. He had looked tired, not really wanting to stand on stages giving speeches, and I was concerned about him, wondering whether he was burning out. But today he was his sprightly self, at ease, smiling. He’s rotund, like a cuddly bear, with a character-filled face and a bright countenance.
I feel brotherly toward him, as if we had made some mutual contract way back in the mists of time, yet I’m old enough to be his father. We hugged in the middle of the street – much to the interest of onlookers – and looked at each other for a long moment. I knew he felt some relief that I was back and had probably wondered whether he would see me here again. Foreigners come and go, saying they will return, but only a few reappear.
Hope Flowers had started as a kindergarten in 1984 and by the late 1990s it was a school with 500 pupils. It shrank after 2000 during the second intifada, as the Palestinian economy tanked and hardship set in, but now the school is growing again and a community development centre was started in 2004. I’d been working with the school from Britain, running its website, writing and editing grant proposals, newsletters and outreach material. Now, one aim of my trip to the school was to re-work the website, then perhaps to edit some teacher-training manuals, possibly even help Ibrahim start writing a book about peace education. That was the idea.
The story of the Issa family and Hope Flowers is poignant. Ibrahim’s father Hussein, an advocate of non-violence, found himself in a dilemma some years ago when Ibrahim narrowly escaped paralysis, shot through the back by Israeli soldiers. Later, Ibrahim saw Palestinian radicals accuse his father of treason because of his commitment to reconciliation. The family was under attack from both Israeli troops and Palestinian radicals. Ibrahim knew the situation was complex but, to quote him, “The most painful thing for me as a child was that I couldn’t recognise the difference between a peace activist and a collaborator – it took years until I did. Palestinian radical groups also couldn’t recognise it. When I grew up I started to see the difference”. But some Palestinian radicals and Israeli Zionists still don’t see that difference, and this makes life risky for people who work for reconciliation.
In 1991 Ibrahim moved to Holland to get out of harm’s way. He studied engineering, got a job and became a permanent émigré. He attended courses on ecology, non-violence, community-building and psychotherapy too, mixing with interesting people, some of whom later came to do stints as volunteers at the school in Palestine. Then his father died unexpectedly in 1999 and Ibrahim was asked to return. This involved leaving a secure, promising Dutch life to jump back into the Palestinian frying pan, taking on a burden most sane people would turn down flat. I greatly admire his steadfastness.
Hope Flowers
Returning to Bethlehem in the midst of the second intifada, Ibrahim joined his sister and his mother in running the school. Later another sister, a teacher, joined them, as did Ibrahim’s new wife, once a kid at the kindergarten. They run the school with a remarkable team of teachers, managers and supporters. It felt right to work with these people – I like them all very much.
Now Ibrahim and I went to a café, had a drink and munched nuts, smoking apple-flavoured hubble-bubble from an ornate water pipe. We discussed what I would do during my three months’ stay. There was certainly a lot to be done and three months might not be long enough.
Ibrahim told me of difficulties he currently had with a faction in the Palestine Authority (PA). It was the product of an awkward public debate concerning the value of negotiating with the Israelis. Ibrahim, a committed peacemaker and bridge-builder who had had regular contact with peace-oriented Israelis, was under suspicion as a collaborator, and this was complex. The PA, seeking to establish control over an ungoverned non-country, had applied a mixture of Western regulations and Arabic bureaucracy, with not a few personal fiefdom issues thrown in, making life difficult for ordinary people. A peacemaker in a conflict-polarised society is susceptible to accusations of collaboration.
The discussion in Palestine about how to relate to the Israelis was heated and ongoing. Palestinians had bent over backwards to comply with international agreements as part of the 1990s peace process, and yet in Palestinians’ perception the Israelis hadn’t budged an inch on crucial issues such as settlement-building, land-seizures, Jerusalem or refugees. The result had been continued losses for Palestinians and a growing number of them were now convinced that negotiation and accommodation were pointless, even though very few wanted any return to conflict. Negotiation had been worth trying in the 1990s, but it had not delivered. It’s a tragic predicament: if you neither want to negotiate nor to fight, what do you do?
Hope Flowers had been teaching the kids Hebrew to help them understand the Israeli mindset. When the kids were older, this would help them deal with Israeli people and officials. The school set out to help the kids understand the perspectives of the very people who had killed or jailed their own fathers, uncles and relatives. This was not a matter of agreeing with or sucking up to the Israelis, as some suspected. It was a matter of following the old military adage, ‘know your enemy’. It was a key issue in preparing Palestinian children for a time when the nightmare of conflict ends – which it shall and must do one day. But in 2009 that day was receding and there was simmering frustration in the air.
Some Palestinian officials didn’t like what the school was doing and didn’t want Palestinians having connections with Israelis. Ibrahim, who had learned to be patient with Israeli arbitrariness and obstructionism, even having been arrested by them for allegedly harbouring terrorists, understood this viewpoint well. But as an educationalist and peace-builder, he stood up for dialogue with people on the other side just as his father had done.
Westerners, with a tendency to see things in black-and-white terms, oversimplify the intricacies of this situation, failing to understand such sharp dilemmas. “Why don’t Israelis and Palestinians just make peace?” Well, as Rabbi Lerner, a Jewish-American thinker, once pointed out, both sides suffer from PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder – they’re super-touchy, super-reactive and suspicious – and untangling this mess isn’t as simple as outsiders would like it to be.
It had taken me some 20 years to understand the intricacies of the Israel-Palestine situation, and only visiting the place had brought better comprehension. I started as a peacemaker working on both sides, with the best of neutral intents, but found myself gravitating to the Palestinian cause. I was not turning against Israel, but I felt that they shot themselves in the foot by the hostile attitude they took toward Palestinians. I work where I can most assist, and while Palestinians seemed to appreciate my input many Israelis didn’t seem to think there was a need for me to be there. So I ended up working with Hope Flowers.
That’s also why I had sobbed from the soul when I arrived in Jericho earlier that day – there was something personal and emotional about all this. As a British dissident, I had had nonsensical and painful experiences that would shock many people, so I could empathise with the Palestinians’ dilemma. I saw Ibrahim’s dilemma too – that of a peace-bringer whose work is regularly screwed up, not just by Israelis but also by the double-standards of Westerners and the militancy of some Palestinians.
Perhaps Palestinians embody something that exists within many of us when we are repeatedly let down by forces beyond our control, when Murphy’s Law applies itself over and over, or when the narrow interests of the powerful few prevail incessantly over the needs of the majority. It’s a futile feeling that, whatever one does, nothing will really progress. This kind of thing happens everywhere but, in Palestine, people have internalised it and adapted to it more than is healthy for them.
I stayed at the Issa family’s place that night and next day Ibrahim took me to the school, where I was to stay in the volunteers’ accommodation on the top floor. Back again – and now to work.
Things don’t change a lot in Palestine, but one good thing that has changed is that Hope Flowers’ methods and philosophy is now being replicated across the Palestinian school system in the West Bank – this was a major breakthrough a few years ago. However, the school still struggles on financially under, as always, difficult constraints.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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