Palestine – Notes from the Far Beyond

Just a Thought…

The world is in such a parlous state, and we’ve seen so much mindless devastation and tragedy recently.

Below is a chapter extracted from my 2012 book Pictures of Palestine. It’s about the amazing creative contributions that some people make, with a view to re-heartening downhearted people.

This might not be a thought for you now, but it might become relevant in perhaps a few years’ time. The agenda here is to help people rebuild, once the horrors have stopped. There are plenty of countries to choose from.

It can be done for (say) two months each year. If you’re in your 20s or 30s, or approaching retirement, it’s a chance to do something really meaningful. This extracted chapter will give a taste of it.

Or, regardless, it’s a good read!

Love, Palden

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

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Fun in Beit Lahem

bagpipes and saxes in the Old Town

Arriving back in Bethlehem from Ramallah, I went to Adnan’s shop to sit down. But then something else happened: music started playing down in Manger Square. It turned out to be a Palestinian Christian marching band playing, to my surprise, Scots bagpipes and drums. The shutter on my camera was busy for a while.

This was a throwback to the days of the British Mandate. The band, clothed in smart uniforms with red berets, marched around Manger Square, then up Al-Najmah Street into the Old Town. It was rousing music, yet coloured with a wry sense of historic tragedy, a hint of wishful thinking of former days. It faded into the distance, there was a pause and then they came back down again, with gaggles of people in tow and others hanging out of the windows watching. The band marched around the square again and then stopped. People hung around, chatting and the atmosphere on the square was sociable and upbeat.

Then something else started up: the unmistakeable sound of ragtime jazz, coming closer down Al-Najmah Street. As I went down to see, seven Austrian musicians appeared, dressed in comical clothing and followed by a happy crowd of kids and adults, all now entering the square. Everything and everyone perked up and people flooded into the square from all directions. Eventually hundreds were gathered, young and old. The jazz band stood in a semi-circle, striking funny poses, eyeballing people as they played, taking turns to do solos, and people gathered around, taken with the witty ragtime music. It was good music, skilfully played.

Bravo to them. The group had come to Palestine to entertain, and they were succeeding spectacularly. Their crazy humour connected well with Bethlehemites, everyone smiling and chuckling. Christian monks in their habits hung around, chatting with the remnants of the marching band; boys on bikes weaved around them, and families, old ladies, kids and sundry foreigners all were drawn in by the happy din.

My eyes were becoming moist – the scene was so poignant. Here was an imprisoned people chattering, laughing, hanging out. This musical intervention is real aid and development, providing an ignition-spark to raise people’s spirits, give youngsters ideas, remind oldsters of happier times and simply to exorcise all current gloom. Bethlehem broke out into a smile and tapped its feet while the trombone, clarinet, cornet, trumpet and drums blasted out jazztime ditties and the Austrians sweated in their funny costumes.

A number of private initiatives like this do happen in Palestine – people come here bringing spirited cultural and human input. They bravely contribute what they’re good at to a remarkably grateful and responsive audience. Carrying a trombone through security checks can’t be the easiest thing to explain to a sceptical Israeli officer.

I heard of a project by a Dutch rock band, half of them working in Israel, half in Palestine. They held drumming workshops on both sides to train people up for the main event. They got loads of people drumming on anything they could find, all ages joining the training. Then one day everyone trooped upstairs through the buildings on each side of the separation wall on to the flat rooftops, where they played together for hours, across the concrete curtain of the security wall. Apparently it was quite a gig.

Some years ago a German installation artist came to Palestine, mobilising people to assemble junk, wrecks and bits of old metal, of which there is plenty. Then he set to welding them into massive statues outside various Palestinian towns. After completing one junk-sculpture, he would move to another town, leaving a series of sculptures which are mostly still there.

There was also a woman from Switzerland, whom I helped to get fixed up, carrying out her own aid initiative. She taught the European Computer Driving Licence, a certificate course in computer and software use. Her aim was to teach five Palestinians whom she would then set loose to teach others, and she would return later to supervise developments. She had discovered the Hope Flowers Centre in Deheisheh as a place to help facilitate this process – they had a newly kitted-out computer room funded by a European charitable trust.

I talked her through a few facts of the game, and she was receptive. This was a good sign: many Westerners have difficulty encompassing the differences between Palestine and the West. I told her that the basic efficiency standards we take for granted in the West were unlikely to work here – people turning up on time and things happening as planned. She wouldn’t achieve her teaching task in just a few days, as she first had anticipated. I advised her to give it a few weeks, and she’d probably need to do more supervision and follow-up than intended, but her students would be intelligent and motivated. She would also make many friends and might even fall in love with the place – these are the truly human spin-offs that can arise. She got the message and I think it rather excited her.

This kind of thing can be problematic though. As Hope Flowers’ webmaster, people e-mail me with offers of help, but they don’t necessarily understand the realities involved. There’s an expectation that Palestinians will jump to attention and accommodate their generosity, and it’s not quite like that.

One lady from New York City wished to teach cartoon-drawing to the children, to help them deal with their trauma by externalising their life-stories in cartoon format. A very good idea! Except that she wanted to have everything lined up so that she could do it in just one day. This was just not doable: it’s not possible to move everything around to accommodate the urgent timetables of a visiting Westerner. People wouldn’t be convinced of the value of cartooning until they tried it. To succeed in her mission, she would have to adapt to the situation, give it time and take things as they come. I had to decline her offer and regretted that.

A charity in California wanted to send vitamin pills for the school kids, another wonderful idea. Usually they sent them to Africa or to disaster areas, so they didn’t quite understand the unique political circumstances here: the Israelis would not allow such a consignment through. The charity could not believe this – after all, Israel is an ally of USA, isn’t it? Well, that makes no difference.

There’s an extra twist to this. It’s not just a question of straight, oppressive restrictions. If the charity gave the school money to buy the vitamins from abroad, then the business would go through an Israeli importer who would profit from the transaction and, eventually, inshallah, the vitamins would probably get through. The fact that this was an aid donation made it different, since Israeli policy firmly has it that there is no humanitarian problem in the West Bank, so no aid is needed. The charity got upset with us because they thought we were being ungrateful and obstructive.

Such ungratefulness also happened with a charity seeking to send Christmas gifts. Theoretically a good idea, except that Muslims don’t do Christmas. A consignment of gifts was sent but Israeli customs got hold of them, so Ibrahim worked hard to release the gifts. Eventually they arrived long after Christmas, with most gifts removed and distributed to poor Orthodox Jewish families, whose parents don’t work for a living.

Disappointingly, only the boxes and a few leftover gifts were allowed through. Ibrahim told the charity not to send more gifts the following year but they couldn’t believe that the Israelis would block such a donation. Surely corrupt Palestinians had embezzled the gifts instead?

There’s another issue here: cultural sensitivity. Palestinian children don’t need Santa socks. As for cake with brandy in, books with Bible stories or plastic toys that break on day two, forget it. So, the thought is nice, but it’s necessary to find out what’s actually needed or to send some money, or to come over to visit and find out what will work and why. We might ask for art materials or photocopier spare parts, or even money to cover the accountants’ and auditors’ services that Western organisations often require, to prove that we’re not embezzling funds. Westerners’ generosity is sincere but it doesn’t always have the intended effect and the hassles incurred can be immense. Or the aid that is sent mainly benefits educated, well-connected Palestinians who need it less than the underprivileged. Complications that are encountered can cause charities and well-wishers to withhold support, which in turn increases Palestinians’ feelings of abandonment.

The street-level aid and support ventures that individual people think up and carry out are heart-warming, imaginative and, at times, genuinely helpful – often in different ways than first conceived. Healers, artists and all sorts of people come here, and the locals appreciate it. Fancy taking an initiative yourself? Someone might fix you a piano, a room or a crowd of people. If not, something else will happen. But it’s probably best to make a reconnaissance trip first, to find out what reality looks like in Palestine.

Rock Sea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love, Abu Balden

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

Making a Difference

This is a short talk I gave recently in Penzance, Cornwall, during a Palestine-support event.

Many of us get caught up in the big issues around Palestine, often paying a lot of attention to our own countries’ or international politics and inadvertently forgetting actual Palestinians in places like Gaza. Anyway, the politics is a nightmare that’s going nowhere anytime soon.

This is about making friends with an actual Gazan, taking a person-to-person approach. It can have a bigger effect that you might at first imagine. And the friendship and benefit goes both ways.

You can also find it on my podcast page at https://palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

In the talk I recommend a website run by Gazan young people: www.wearenotnumbers.org – check it out.

Thanks to Gershon Baskin of Jerusalem – a good-hearted Israeli – for a quote from his recent writing. Well done Adam Stout and Alison Dhuanna for organising the event – and thereby raising 600 GBP to help a few Gazans.

A correction: to get out of Gaza costs $5,000, and it is paid to the Egyptians at Rafah Crossing, who pay the Israelis, and both take their cut. It’s just as bad, whatever the excuse and whoever does it – exploiting people in need.

With love, Palden

By the seaside. Photo by Refaat Ibrahim of wearenotnumbers.org

Hope Flowers in Bethlehem

Take a look at these pics.

These are kids at the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem, West Bank, Palestine, and these pics were taken in the last few days.

They are orphans from Gaza, and refugee and special needs kids from the West Bank. Apart from giving a good education under difficult circumstances, the school gives kids the tools to process their anger, loss, fear and trauma, so that they grow up knowing there is another way. Another way from what has happened over the last hundred years in Palestine and Israel.

Note the performers. These look like visiting Europeans. They are independent humanitarians: they set about brightening up the lives of people in places like Palestine and they make a big difference. They often fund themselves to do so, and travel cheap and crash on sofas. Some are performers, some hairdressers, some are welders and some are law graduates, artists and retired professionals. Have you ever considered doing something like this?

Forget Trump and Natanyahu: this is the human frontline, where the real work of peacemaking happens. These children are, I hope, the generation who will see a big change across the Middle East. The times of war need to end now: we must do things another way. And these are the people who will do it. That is my prayer for them.

Here’s the translation of the text that came with the pics:

In an atmosphere filled with fun and positive energy, the professor of physical education, Mr. Mustafa, organized a special recreational day for the students of the school, in cooperation with the refugee center, where play, art, and laughter came together in an unforgettable day ✨

⭕ A variety of events between animated games that enhanced activity and interaction, face painting added colors of joy to the faces of children, alongside a theatrical circus that presented pleasant performances that brought joy to the hearts🎪😊

‪Our students also participated in playing with parschute and other group activities that contributed to promoting a spirit of cooperation, active discharge, and building self-confidence in a fun and safe way 🌟

⛔ This day was an open space for joy and expression, and an integrated recreational educational experience that emphasizes the importance of play in supporting our children’s physical and psychological development 💚

ـــــــــ🍂ــــــ We learn for human well-being ــــــ🍂ــــــــ

Here’s their website:
https://hopeflowers.org/wp/

and their FB page (mostly in Arabic, for locals):
https://www.facebook.com/Hope.Flowers.School/posts/pfbid02mtAFNELopcSZ3eknikmSvQFouFghRGcHyPNWG4uQPzhWPMWgfWhBZecKdf2myzaTl?rdid=hVLn6DjWEM1DLRTP

To make a donation to Hope Flowers, go to this page for links to Hope Flowers’ supporting organisations in different countries:
https://hopeflowers.org/wp/support/

Here’s a readable story about the history and philosophy of the school. It’s from my book Pictures of Palestine, and it’s called ‘Korea meets Palestine’. (Korea and Palestine were both divided in the same year, 1948.)
https://www.palden.co.uk/pop/korea-meets-palestine.html

How Many Worlds can a Planet contain?

Thirtysomething years ago I had the privilege of working with a bunch of (for want of a better term) cosmic beings called the Council of Nine, compiling and editing a book for them, ‘The Only Planet of Choice‘. They dropped in loads of remarkable insights and here’s a bundle or two of them. Some readers might think this stuff far too way out, or utter garbage – so use your freedom of thought and intuitive discernment here.

Planet Earth is very different from other worlds. One factor affecting this is its gravitational density and the intense physicality of our lives on Earth. This has had a troublesome, diversionary and downward-pulling effect on human consciousness, with the result that we tend to forget why we came and what we are here for. We get lost in the daily round and in our psycho-emotional stuff, losing our connection with spirit. It has made human history into something we can be proud of and also we ought to be ashamed of it.

Over the centuries and millennia we have institutionalised this situation, making it our default behaviour, such that waking up to the heart of the matter has become an exceptional, dissenting thing to do, with difficulties and sanctions attached. This is further exacerbated by historical factors such as the control agendas of dominant elements in society and the compromised submissiveness and conformity of the majority. We’ve given power to fear, guilt and shame, clamping our spirits and clipping our wings.

There’s another issue too. As a planetary race, we did not start our evolutionary journey together as one tribe or family, originating from one single source, as is the case (according to the Nine) with many worlds, cultures and civilisations throughout the universe. Humanity has physically evolved in a Darwinian sense, with periodic non-Darwinian seedings and tweaks from outside, as part of a hybridisation project. Such discreet interventions have helped us evolve in consciousness, culture and technology too, though in quirky and sometimes dangerous ways.

The aim was to breed a new kind of conscious being that could be at home in denser and more experientially-diverse conditions than ever before. The idea was to draw influences and souls from throughout the universe, throwing us together on one planet, in the hope that we might co-create something new, different and never done before. We were to become a new kind of individualised, enspirited, dense-physical, humanoid-type being.

So Earth has become rather like a New York or a Singapore in experiential terms – naturally and intentionally multicultural. Living in different cultural realities and localised mini-worlds, we have been bumping up against one another throughout history, becoming changed in the process. The end-game of the modern phase of Earth’s history is to get all these cultures and individuals to come together as one planetary race – a race that is capable of managing its own world and making something of it.

So now, by 2025, we have created a world system, criss-crossed with cables, shipping and air lanes, and humanity now needs to catch up with all that this means. Nationalist and isolationist feelings are a symptom of a stop-the-world reaction to this historic mega-trend. As usual, we walk into the future facing backwards, more concerned about what we’re losing than what we’re gaining.

Also, life on Earth is always a mixed bag, and experiencing this is part of the grinding process that hones the soul. It faces us with choices – sometimes big and deep ones – and that’s what we came for.

They called for volunteers – this wasn’t conscription – saying that living on Earth would be difficult though potentially rewarding – a fast-track way of honing the soul. We would be given individualised free-will – a capacity to do whatever each of us feels best. As incoming souls, we felt that we could maintain consciousness sufficiently to fulfil our purposes in signing up for this project. At first we had that kind of clarity about life that you sometimes get when you’ve been on holiday, done ayahuasca or been on a meditation retreat – but then, when you get home, the pressures and complications start, and the main agenda gets set aside for another day, when there’s time… and we get lost again.

Over time, more and more souls came, as individuals and as groups, creating a population explosion in modern times. It has become a mass-migration, rising into billions, and fresh souls are still coming. (At one point the Nine said that Earth’s optimum population is around 200 million, not 8-10 billion, though they also reckoned we could manage such high numbers if we did it right.)

We now have a situation where we have billion of souls on one planet, yet in very different worlds. Multiplicities of them. This diversity happens on the same street, even within families. Diversity doesn’t have to mean dissonance yet currently dissonance is strong, and this matter is going critical. Not least because, on a deep psycho-spiritual level, dissonance makes divide-and-rule easier, and arguing has become pandemic in scale.

The consequences of dissonance have been highlighted in Gaza. Palestine/Israel is a microcosm of the whole world – divided, and not just two ways. This microcosm business is a key reason why this conflict matters so much to so many people. It holds the world down. Around 12 million people are holding 8,300 million back. Yet equally, if it is resolved, it could lift up the whole world. And this isn’t really just about Israelis and Palestinians – at root it’s about people and the Megamachine.

Neither is it a simple equation of one side as badguys and the other side as goodguys – it’s far more subtle and convoluted. Yet it polarises around Israelis and Palestinians because we have a habit of dehumanising others, lumping them together into a mass of horrible, fundamentally different people who threaten our happiness or our very existence.

Israelis and Palestinians, bless them, live in very different worlds, to the extent that people on either side just cannot see what it’s like being on the other side – except for some brave souls on both sides who are willing to step outside the confines of groupthink. We all variously do this dehumanising thing, justifying ourselves by making others wrong, but Israelis and Palestinians have an acute and persistent case of it.

They aren’t even in the same conflict, though they live close together in one small ‘holy’ land. It all boils down to the way we see things – especially when we get het up, losing our patience and tolerance.

This is why, in peacemaking, it isn’t possible to propose nice, sensible diplomatic solutions to which everyone can easily agree and comply, point by point, so that we can all go home and forget it. They’re fighting different wars, committing different suicides. This stuff, this shadow, goes so much deeper.

Plenty of shadows lurk in the collective psyche of virtually every country and social grouping worldwide – some of these ghosts are dormant, some simmer and some are heating up.

At present, globally there are few encouraging signs of mass healings and breakthroughs, and this leads to a creeping sense of disillusionment and disappointment across humanity.

If anything, the main factor currently pacifying conflicts seems to be exhaustion – sheer weariness. That’s not resolution and healing, but it can allow feelings to cool to manageable levels. Social-cultural healing can take decades, but there comes a point where both sides see that healing is cheaper than the price of continued conflict.

So it’s all a matter of what happens after open conflict ends, and whether a momentum of progress can be built up. It requires a time of confidence-building where each side has to restrain itself, even during touchy moments. In some respects this demands more bravery than in times of war, since there’s a courageously resilient madness to warfare that subsides with peace, once people get used to sleeping safely in their own beds.

Deep down, many Palestinians understand the pain Israelis feel over the pogroms and the Holocaust, but it was Europeans who did this, yet Arabs are being punished. The Arabs of Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and Israel are divided by circumstance, permits and walls. There’s a tug-of-war between negotiators (Fateh) and resistance fighters (Hamas), and neither is winning or compromising. Recent events have stumped the negotiators and decimated the resisters, and many Palestinians feel rudderless and stuck in a tightening vice of diminishing options. Top to bottom, Palestinians are hurt, dismayed, upset, unsure what to do next.

Meanwhile, Israelis feel deeply hurt and shocked, and for entirely different reasons. Zionists, centred in Jerusalem, are hurt and angry since their God-given right to the land of ‘Greater Israel’ is being obstructed by an interfering world filled with Jew-haters – and Arabs ought to get out of the way. Meanwhile the ‘peace camp’ centred in Tel Aviv, themselves hurt, diminished and stumped, have lost much of their trust in everything and everyone, preferring life inside a missile-protected beachside bubble.

Historic Jewish insecurities have genuinely been reawakened, with some Israelis lashing out, others recoiling in dread and many stuck, confused and afraid. Something fundamental has dislodged in the Israeli and the international Jewish psyche, and something ill-judged and disproportionate has welled up in the attitudes of non-Jews toward Jews.

Israelis and Palestinians sit in fundamentally different worlds, each with different ways of dehumanising the other. As do those who support either side, around the world. Palestine activists need to stop belly-aching about genocide and rights and actually support real-life Palestinians directly with friendship, money and contact. Meanwhile, those who bang on about anti-Semitism need to forget it, and those who deny or ignore it need to remember it, deep in their hearts.

It’s a reality-conflict, projected on others yet reflecting what’s going on inside all of us. It’s about far more than just Palestinians and Israelis.

But there’s a flipside. Conflict and hardship can be so crazy, tough and senseless that it leads to a kind of rapid de-traumatisation, an epiphany, a deeper change of heart and optic. This happened after WW2, with the founding of the UN, the EU, the welfare state, the beginning of decolonialisation and of the urbanised modernity we now take for granted.

That ‘rules-based order’ is now getting shaken up and we have entered a slippery phase in which things are accelerating to a point where none of us really knows where we stand any more. We’re being forced to let go of past structures, habits, heroes and normalities. We’re being ground down.

The key issue is that we need to get on with each other.

Otherwise nothing else can get resolved. So, from a planetary-evolutionary viewpoint we’re at a really critical tipping point in history. We have come from very different worlds across the universe, developing very different cultures here on Earth, and we now have urbanised ourselves into multicultural melting-pots – 60% of humanity lives in artificial cities over half a million in size. This, plus increasing global migration, is humanity meeting up with itself.

The whole universe is watching, and it means a lot to them – not least because we’re their relatives. They will not intervene unless it is absolutely necessary (think of the ‘prime directive’) because intervention will override the purpose of the whole planetary project – to find out what happens in a dense-physical world run according to free-will rules.

Besides, I don’t think they really know what to do with us. They really need us to sort ourselves out.

We humans have become hyper-reactive, complex and dangerous – we even fight over toilet rolls. When they give us prompts, gifts and clues – subtle interventions – as a whole we tend to ignore, corrupt or misuse them. Or we resist. Or we create complex diversions and avoidances.

It’s all to do with seeing beyond our own little worlds, stretching ourselves and seeing things from another viewpoint. This is difficult right now, since our divisiveness has gone viral. Every society has a kind of concussion, dogged by past trauma and by the intensity of change happening now in these times. All societies have a consensus problem, a solidarity problem and a leadership problem. Old answers aren’t working, even though we keep grasping for them. Yet, strangely, this parlous situation is a necessary part of the change process – and there’s further to go.

We no longer need a rules-based order. We need an integrity-based order.

Some are moved to weaken and destroy the old rules-based order, but on the whole they do not know how to create a system based in integrity. Meanwhile, oligarchies cannot reform systems from which they themselves benefit, and which protects them from a latently angry world public.

So change needs to start from bottom up, and increasingly, fitfully, valiantly this is happening more and more. But to do so, ‘the mass of humanity’ needs to develop a certain maturity, forgiveness and a set of basic common standards. The Hindu rule of ahimsa or non-harming is one such standard.

This is why the imagery of devastation emanating from Gaza stirs so many people worldwide. Such devastation has been seen before but Gaza hits a nerve in the global psyche – especially in the Global South. Gazans have hit bottom. A fuse is close to blowing in the world psyche and in the geopolitical arena. Gaza is like a magnifying glass, exposing all sorts of agendas, shadows and cobwebs underneath.

At present there’s even a possibility of a sudden, house-of-cards tectonic change in world geopolitics – as a pragmatic and rapid adaptation to an avalanche of facts. This might lead to coffee and toilet roll shortages: it will affect everyone and force changes that, if truth be known, really need to happen.

We humans are up against the consequences of letting things pass when we know we should have drawn a line, many times throughout history. The ‘war to end all wars’ should have been like it said on the tin. We’ve got ourselves into a global-scale historic mess, imprisoned in self-created default behaviours, laws, regulations, systems and self-defeating patterns.

This has framed itself around Israel-Palestine because it’s not just about Palestinians and Israelis. It’s about the world’s capacity to decide what’s best. This hundred-year conflict would not exist without the interventions and manipulations of foreign powers that have fuelled it and failed repeatedly to address it. Too many bombs, too little wisdom.

It boils down to a touchy geopolitical question that we face in coming decades: the capacity of nations and the ‘international community’ to interfere in the sovereign affairs of individual nations, when necessary. And who decides?

Take this a level deeper, and it concerns our capacity as a planetary race to run and organise our planet. Doing so involves facing all of the big and small problems we have – an enormous task, yet it’s unavoidable. This would be a critical step in human evolution – a rite of passage and a triumph of global solidarity, based in disagreeing agreeably, bridging differences and staying focused on the main priority – getting the world back on track and making it a safe, fair and happy enough place to be.

There is a solution to all of this that the Nine mentioned quite often, and it isn’t new. It’s a simple, easy-to-understand yet profound method for achieving an integrity-based order, and it applies to everyone, at all levels of the human pyramid.

Treat other people as you wish to be treated yourself.

If we did just this, Earth would be a very different place.

With love, Paldywan
www.palden.co.uk

The pictures are from Planet Earth. Quite a remarkable place. Worth a visit.

Antipathy

This started out as my usual weekly posting about the Sunday Meditation, but it turned into something else…

A Palestinian bagpipe band in Manger Square, Bethlehem – a leftover from British Mandate days

In Britain we currently have a kerfuffle about an anti-Semitic murder outbreak in Manchester, one of the most multicultural cities in our country. Though I’ve worked a lot with Palestinians, mercifully I’ve never been accused of anti-Semitism. Throughout my time working in the West Bank I had a lot to do with Israelis too – particularly former soldiers. A few of them helped me smuggle tofu from Tel Aviv through Checkpoint 500 outside Bethlehem – packaged tofu looks rather like Semtex, you see.

My grandfather was part of General Allenby’s British invasion force in Iraq and Palestine in WW1, and my father was in Egypt and Palestine in WW2. Some of my German ancestors were executed for opposing Hitler, probably at Sachsenhausen concentration camp for dissenters, and some of my Roma ancestors went down in the Holocaust. Jews have played a key part in my awakening, in this life and others. So I have some threads of personal involvement here.

But what matters is that all this concerns humans and the way we treat each other. We’ve reached a global-scale impasse where our mistreatment and exploitation really need to change – particularly, to start with, humanity’s self-destructive tendencies toward war and violence.

Early on in life, as I was beginning to awaken in my late teens, though I was then oriented toward ecological issues, I realised that we will not make significant progress with eco-stuff while we are committing acts of violation and warfare against each other. Such atrocities put the brakes on human and planetary evolution. Since then I have trodden a path with one foot in the spiritual sphere and one in the political – an awkward dualism if ever there was one, with deep and conflicting moral and human issues involved.

One basic thing holds universally for all people of all faiths, beliefs and inclinations, including seculars. It’s necessary to understand and to feel what it’s like being on the other side. That’s one reason I’ve been involved with Palestinians: they’re on the other side from me – or at least, from where I started in life. Stepping over that gulf has been one of the most rewarding aspects of my life. Stepping over not just in belief and viewpoint, but in practical terms and, on a few occasions, putting my life on the line.

It was Tibetans, another bunch of apparent perpetual losers, who shoe-horned me into this. They presented me with the option to take the Bodhisattva Vow, a vow to dedicate my life to the benefit of all sentient biengs. In this I cannot claim to have succeeded and I’ve made loads of errors, hurting people and getting things wrong in the process, though the centre of gravity of my life has tilted toward service as a result of taking the vow. And I’m really glad about that.

For me, there is a connection between the blood-and-thunder stuff of politics and what many might consider fluffy, useless, unrealistic stuff such as spiritual beings and extraterrestrials. It’s all about stepping over gulfs. Mentally and emotionally. Crossing that divide. ‘Going native’. Setting selfhood aside in order to open up sufficiently to empathise with those others over there, on the other side. In this, a statement by a Christian minister in Northern Ireland has had a big effect on me. It’s this…

It’s better to fail in something that ultimately will succeed, than to succeed in something that ultimately will fail.

It’s pretty profound, that. Write it on your toilet wall.

Two West Bank Palestinians chatting with an Israeli settler

Back to anti-Semitism. So, in your thoughts and beliefs and the way you structure and apply them, use your discernment. When your finger is on the trigger, you have a choice. You can kill or harm that person (even if only in your private thoughts), but the memory will stay with you forever, no matter how much you repress it. That’s an example of something that succeeds in the short term though it will fail in the longterm.

Or you can spare them and turn the occasion into a massive, pattern-changing mutual learning-situation for both of you. That’s your choice. And there are consequences to everything that we do. And there are consequences also to those things we avoid and deny, or we fail or omit to do.

We live our lives on each other’s behalf. Humanity is one being, and we are micro-cells within that being. Humankind is on a path of accelerated growth, both in population and in spirit. We’re now being faced with the future and with a choice to carry on as before, or to step over a threshold into a rather wide-open and at times scary space. This comes to a crunch when we face the Other, the person or the people over there – the people we don’t like. They test our capacity to understand, accept and forgive – and to see ourselves more clearly.

Compassion means ‘with-feeling’, standing in others’ sandals and boots and feeling what it’s like. Agreement or sympathy are not required. Just feel what it’s like.

This isn’t about giving way, losing your precious sovereignty or getting guiltily floppy. It’s about a new kind of strength that requires discernment. There are things in our world that are wrong, regrettable and ultimately flawed, and we are challenged to stand up and do something about correcting those. Not just to wring hands and grind our angst over them, but actually to do something about it – at least within our own sphere of possibilities.

And there are situations where we need to stop, look and listen – we need to be willing to review our position, our habits, preferences and patterns, and make a change. If a stranger knocks on our door seeking help and refuge, what is our choice?

Israelis and Palestinians can and do have fun with each other

So, if you are pro-Palestinian in inclination, make a stretch and put yourself in the shoes of a variety of Israelis and international Jews. Feel what it’s like being them and being in the situation they find themselves in. And if you are pro-Israeli or Jewish, stretch over to feel what it’s like being a variety of Palestinians, whether in Historic Palestine or in the diaspora. And if you’re not bothered, feel what it’s like being bothered.

Because it’s good for you. It broadens your horizons. This is about humans – and you are one of this crazy, self-immolating species. Would you like being shot at or bombed? Would you like being hungry, having your home destroyed or seeing your father carted away at gunpoint?

Discernment is tricky to work with. Quite often I am approached for help, and I have to say No. That’s because helping them will overload my capacities and harm the people and things I am already working to help. Better to do small things well than big things badly. Guilt does not work in this context: if guilt is involved in altruism or political activism, things will go wrong. Guilt distorts true giving and sharing.

The world is polarising right now, more and more. We’re each and all faced with a question: are we ourselves adding to it, or are we bridging gulfs, whether with a smile or by giving our lives to something that builds bridges?

Jews have been victimised and persecuted for many centuries – particularly by Europeans claiming to be Christians and followers of that Jew called Jesus. Secretly, we Brits, though we righteously fought Hitler, we were quite happy to get rid of Jews and send them to Palestine, one of our colonies – though we’d have preferred them to go to Uganda. We taught those Jews all the means of oppression that we now see imposed by Israelis on their neighbours.

This doesn’t mean we should guiltily go along with what the Israeli state – Netanyahu and the Judaeans – currently do. Because this is about People and the Megamachine, and Israelis suffer this problem as much as anyone. There are young IDF soldiers who, today, are eating their hearts out over serving in Gaza or the West Bank. There are Israelis and diaspora Jews who are in a deep moral confusion and pain over this. It’s Christian fundamentalism more than Jewish extremism that is really driving the Gaza catastrophe.

John, a Palestinian Christian, outside his souvenir shop in Bethlehem, now closed by Israeli soldiers. I wonder how and where he is now?

In the West Bank, one thing that impressed me was that the majority of Palestinians didn’t dislike Israelis as such. Only a few Israeli friends would dare to visit me in the West Bank – the rest feared for their lives, and largely incorrectly. I forget the Arabic word for it, but what Arabs feel strongly about is not Jews, but assholes. They have a strong sense of the difference between a good person and an asshole. As a Brit, by rights I should have attracted the anger of some Arabs, because of history and what we were at that time doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I did not.

People would ask me whether I was a Christian, a Jew or a Muslim and, when I said No, they couldn’t figure out how I could be ‘a good man’. Well, the Hand of God moves in strange ways. But they were willing to rise up and stretch beyond their customary social judgements. That was a big teaching for me.

One Palestinian Christian, John, said to me that he felt pity for Israelis, despite all the wrongs they had done to him and his family, because many were Europeans, Americans and Russians who had gone through so much. “As a result, they are individuals, on their own, and they even question and defy God, while we Arabs have each other and we love Allah in ways you Europeans do not understand. We fight them because of our current pain, not because of the pain of the past – their pogroms and Holocaust. So, when the pain stops, we’ll stop. But they find it difficult stopping. If we stop, I fear that they will fight each other. So perhaps it is better they fight us.“

It’s also true that in times of bloodshed and violence, Palestinians polarise against Israelis, and those who don’t polarise have to keep their heads down. But when times of relative calm come along, Arabic attitudes tend to be more forgiving.

This is the secret that many Israelis fail to understand. If they let Palestinians get on with their lives and have a decent life, all will be well, and eventually Israelis and international Jews will have the safety and security they deserve. This will take time (perhaps three generations), and there will be mishaps, but this is how endless war and jeopardy will turn into mutual appreciation and cooperation, even if it takes time.

The Manchester killings happened on the Day of Atonement, giving them extra poignancy. It’s a day of recognition, understanding and forgiveness. A day of consciousness, awareness of options. The Council of Nine, a bunch of non-earthly cosmic beings I had the priviledge of working for, thirty years ago, put it very well. They said that Jews are not the Chosen People – they are People of the Choice. The choice to ‘obey the laws of God’ and the covenant that we as humans have with God or the world of spirit, or of nature.

They also said something else. Although Jews can be clannish, separative and exceptionalist, throughout history the vast majority have melted into the wider world population, through exile, intermarriage, conversion or change over the centuries. This means that you could have Jewish genes, even if you don’t know it. Think about it. I’m part-Welsh, and the Welsh claim historic connections with Jews, going back millennia.

So, if you have strong feelings about Israel and Jews, just remember, there’s something inside you that might need facing. All the things we blame Israel for now, well… actually we all do them and we and our ancestors have all done them in the past – so own up. It helps not to carry those patterns into the future. Because this concerns humans and the future of our planet.

Thus endeth today’s sermon!

As for the Sunday Meditation, you’re welcome to join. There is no mantra, no scripture, no method, no sign-up and no obligation – it’s just a group of us in various countries meditating together for half an hour on Sundays (times below), and doing it each in our own way, together. If needed, further details are here: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

May all beings be blessed, whether they are upstanding citizens or horrendous terrorists, on the right or the wrong side, and whether or not they have a right or an ability to defend themselves. For we all are here on Earth anyway and, in the end, we all seek happiness. And that’s the main thing. Oh, and, if you really want to find a cure for cancer, it’s forgiveness.

Love from me, Palden

If you seek further reading, try these:

The Problem of Israel. (I wrote this article in 2008 for a Bangladeshi newspaper.)
Brinkmanship. (An extract from Healing the Hurts of Nations, a book I wrote in 2003 at the time of the Iraq war.)
A Palestine historic timeline. (The pages that follow it might interest you if you seek insights into Palestine’s history).

Current meditation times, on Sundays:
UK, Ireland & Portugal 8-8.30pm
W Europe 9-9.30pm
E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 10-10.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm
EST, Cuba 3-3.30pm
PST North America 12noon-12.30pm

PS. In my last podcast I mentioned how I’m finding writing more difficult now, and this is still true. Normally I’d write a piece like this in 1-2 hours but this took six. But I did it. Or it did me.

Tipping into the Future

A new podcast

Here are some thoughts on the current vexatious world situation and some of the threads that lie behind it. It’s all about the incremental North-to-South shift of world power, about people against the Megamachine, and Gaza and Israel, the decline of the West, and a few things like that.

Are we entering the future facing forwards or facing backwards? This is a key question in our time.

Listen on Spotify (it’s also on Apple and Google Podcasts):

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

Should it interest you, here are two relevant articles I’ve written in former times:
+ An astrological article I wrote about the 2020s, written back in 2020:
⁠https://penwithbeyond.blog/2020s/
+ And here’s something I wrote in 2011 when in Bethlehem during the Arab Revolutions, about Hamas and its relationship with Fateh (the Palestine Authority in the West Bank). It’s pertinent now, for those of you who are into more in-depth thinking around Palestine.
⁠www.palden.co.uk/pop/hamas-and-fatah.html⁠

With love, Palden

Ocular Nutrition

Since it’s crap weather (here in Cornwall, at least), and winter seems to be coming on early (here in Cornwall, at least), you might like some vitamins for the ears (wherever you are, and however things are).

I’ve assembled my four audiobooks in one place, here…

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

They cover three different subjects:
Palestine,
Ancient Mysteries and
Living with Cancer.

Good for when you’re stuck in a traffic jam, stuck in bed, stuck in the kitchen or stuck on a train, or if you’re fed up with the radio, or simply if you’d like something interesting to listen to!

Cos I enjoyed doing it, with you in mind.

Love from me. Palden

Freedom of Attitude

I’m continually reminded of the extent to which the present is a gift. Everything comes from Spirit, from the Void, from what we call God, and everything returns to Spirit, to the Void and to God. And everything exists within them.

It doesn’t matter how we see the nature and meaning of life, the universe and everything – it’s still the same. We are the eyes, ears and hands of existence-consciousness-beingness. It’s dead easy to forget, to get lost in our stuff, but it remains true.

Some people are in the midst of nightmares right now. Some days ago I did a joint online presentation to a support group in Britain with Ibrahim Issa, director of the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem, in the West Bank of Palestine. Western governments, aid agencies and donors have withdrawn a lot of support, so we’re having to do some remedying of that, especially since life in the West Bank is getting harder and harder.

I was amazed at his composure. Or perhaps he was just too tired. He and everyone around him had been kept awake through the night by missiles, planes and sirens. And fear.

Even so, they keep on at the school, driving by the seats of their pants – attending to the needs of the children, their families and the local community. On a shoestring.

The latest measure they’ve taken – since Israeli roadblocks all over town make movement difficult – is to take trauma-support services to the people, in a Volkswagen van. It’s a sort of trauma-ambulance, for people losing their rag because of the tensions, dangers and offensive experiences they’re living through.

In my contribution I mentioned the Arabic term, sumud – hanging in there, never giving up. The secret is to stay in the present, to make the best use of the gifts it yields. When the past is being obliterated and the future holds little to hope for, there remains the present – the only time we actually have agency.

My own body is gradually deteriorating – a new health issue is slowly immobilising me – yet I’m continually amazed at the gifts that life presents. One is this: lessons I’m learning from people younger than me. In this case, it’s Ibrahim, teaching-reminding me about the present moment. Doing what you can with whatever is available right now and making the best of it. Because the past is gone and the future is but an idea.

People bang on a lot about freedom of speech, though really we need to learn more about exercising our freedom of attitude.

In the immediately-impending future, on Sunday (times below, for different countries), there comes the Sunday Meditation, and you’re welcome to be present with it. It’s free, no sign-up, no strings, do it your way, and wherever you are.

Perhaps give some attention to feeling what it’s like to stand in the shoes of someone whose life could be snuffed out tonight, for no understandable reason or purpose. Hold their hand. There’s no shortage of available souls in need of good-hearted soul-company, in plenty of places. This is what we can do.

With love from me. Palden.

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Current meditation times, on Sundays:
UK, Ireland & Portugal 8-8.30pm GMT
W Europe 9-9.30pm
E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 10-10.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm
EST, Cuba 3-3.30pm
PST North America 12noon-12.30pm

—————–

More about the meditation: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
About Hope Flowers school: www.hopeflowers.org – click ‘support’ to find out how to make donations from different countries.
Here’s an interesting talk by Ibrahim, during a recent visit to UK (36 mins long): https://open.spotify.com/episode/0gW1m1QSbrknFftmjzkA2f…

On Wings and Prayers

This is another of my Palestine tales from 12-15 years ago, from a book called O Little Town of Bethlehem, which recorded a five-month stay in 2011-12. In my writings and photos at the time my aim was to humanise Palestinians. Because, like you and me, they’re real humans with real human lives to live.

———————

As the sun went down, a wonderful atmosphere settled upon Bethlehem. The town was in a genial mood – people chatting and hanging out in the streets. At Cinema, a busy intersection with taxis and taxi-vans, I saw a six year old girl standing on some steps simply singing out loud to the street. This was not only touching but also rather refreshing because, for some reason, Palestinians tend not to sing.

Aisha, an English friend who teaches English at the Hope Flowers Centre and stays at my place one night a week, uses the large, empty, echoey conference room in the school for practising opera – she’s an accomplished singer but, living in Ramallah and surrounded with people who would find opera rather strange, doing her scales and practicing her arias doesn’t quite work easily. So she loves practising at the school, where she won’t be heard – and the conference room echoes quite nicely too.

Nevertheless, a neighbour discretely enquired of me what was happening. I explained and he smiled. He’d seen opera on TV, and was interested when I said that operas were like plays sung out loud, with stories to them. I asked him why Palestinians tend not to sing, and he said back, “Since the Nakba we haven’t had much to sing about”. Well, true, but I know that’s not the real answer, which I am yet to find out.

The Nakba, by the way, was ‘The Disaster’, the 1948 war during which the Israelis staked out their nation militarily, by ethnically cleansing and killing the Arabic inhabitants of hundreds of villages and towns in what became Israel. In the space of a few months, the population of Bethlehem quadrupled with refugees and they have never gone home – there’s no home to go back to. As a symbolic act, refugee families keep the keys to their old, lost houses, like a family totem, proof of having torn-up roots in their own land.

This afternoon was one of those times when people set their cares aside and enjoy the moment. That’s one thing I like in Palestine: people do their best to keep their spirits up and enjoy life. There is no alternative. Or at least, the alternative, dwelling on your problems, is far worse.

As my friend Ghada once put it, at a time when she was feeling pessimistic a few years ago, “In Palestine we don’t have up days and down days, we have down days and worse days”. She was at that moment manifesting symptoms of the strange collective bipolarity Palestinians live by, thanks to their circumstances: generally they keep their mood positive in spite of everything, but when they lose their strength and fortitude, they plummet into deep despond. That was where she was when she said this.

Palestinians wear their emotions inside out: love and sadness, friendship and disgust, humour and anger, they share them openly, men perhaps more than women. Their feelings spill out liberally. Mercifully it’s their positive emotions they show most. I have never seen a sign of violence except on a couple of occasions when Israeli soldiers are around, acting provocatively, but even then Palestinians suppress it because they usually don’t feel like getting shot, beaten up, arrested or hounded. They got tired of that ten years ago, and it doesn’t achieve much.

But on a lovely, tranquil afternoon like today, there was still a problem. On the way home, passing through Deheisheh and Duha, there was smoke everywhere. People were setting fire to the skips in which they put their rubbish. They do this because civic rubbish disposal is patchy at the best of times, and the skips were full. It’s not only smoky but dangerous, since so much of their rubbish contains plastics and other toxic materials, and the slow smoulder of the rubbish means that it doesn’t even burn properly. They have a blind spot around this issue. When Westerners like me raise the matter, they shrug it off as if it is no problem. But it is a problem and a big one.

Before you disapprove of these apparently backward people, let me remind you that we in the West started seriously addressing issues such as this only 20-30 years ago, when it was already too late for us. Before that, we trusted in modernity and slavishly paid the price in smog, toxicity, fumes and ugliness. Even today, when I speak to Westerners of the dangers of mobile phones, microwave ovens, wireless internet and electro-smog, people smirk or frown, as if to say “Oh no, he’s one of them”, since this is a current blind spot. One day an enormous scandal will erupt about it and people will yell “Why weren’t we told? Who is responsible for all this?”. We are responsible. We know. But we don’t want to face it.

So blind-spots – areas of life that people deliberately ignore, ultimately to our own cost – are not unique to Arabs. In fact, Arabs look on Westerners as backward because we turn our backs on God – Europeans by becoming increasingly secular and Americans by turning God into a heavily-armed, consumptive patriot with conservative politics.

Every race and nationality covers its insecurities by looking on others as inherently deficient. The less contact they have with other kinds of people, the stronger the negative projection on outsiders – this is one reason for the separation wall, so that each side can project its fantasies about the other onto a concrete screen untainted by reality. This is why Iran is currently a bogeyman – no one goes there to meet the people, so it’s easy to dehumanise them.

This said, Palestinians must still address the issue of rubbish – creating less of it and disposing of it properly. Battery recycling, vegetable waste composting and plastics disposal? Forget it, it doesn’t exist here. But probably it will exist in 10-20 years’ time – Palestine is at a similar stage to the West in the early 1970s. Yet regarding social values, sharing and human warmth, Palestinians are advanced, at a stage that I hope the West will reach in a few decades’ time.

I went into town to do my shopping. I’ve been sitting slogging away at the computer for the last week, so I don’t have many events to report. The trouble with computers is that people hardly see the results of your work because it’s digitally concealed, distinctly not in your face. Much of the work is for people far and wide, so that people around you see little significance in what you’re doing – you’re just sitting at a computer, twiddling fingers and looking serious. I’ve been building a website, dealing with issues for Hope Flowers, doing bits of work and answering questions online – many questions, from many people.

When shopping I went to an old lady I visit regularly. She has a small stall on the streetside in the Old Town. By stall, I mean a stool and a few boxes and bags. She sells herbs and figs. She’s a lovely old lady, clad in her embroidered traditional dress. She walks into town daily with her husband, who leads their donkey, which carries the herbs – then he returns home to work on the land, and he comes back to pick her up later.

Palestinians are big on herbs – they have mint or thyme in their tea and they eat parsley, sage, coriander, spinach and chillies copiously. I buy my herbs from her – big bunches of them, far too big to use on my own, for 1-2 shekels per bunch (20-40p in British money). She likes her pet Englishman. She eyes me closely when she thinks I’m not looking. I think she knows intuitively that I’m roughly the same age as she is, except she’s an old woman and I look younger – apart from a rather wrinkly face which has clearly seen some things. She hasn’t figured me out yet. Life wears out Palestinians.

Then I went down to the market to get vegetables. Two stallholders were trying to steal me off the stallholder I usually go to, but he has the best vegetables. One thing many Palestinians don’t quite understand is this. They tend to think one is obliged to shop with them out of a duty to support them – after all, fair’s fair, isn’t it? Well no, I’m a Westerner, and I go for the best stuff and the best deal. Sorry about that. Also, annoyingly, I buy things only when I need them.

The souvenir shopkeepers down in town think similarly. I’m a Westerner, therefore I have money, therefore I ought to buy from them. Not so. I buy presents only because there are people I know and love to whom I wish to give things, and I buy specifically for them. There’s also the question of how to get it back to England, so I cannot buy much. I’m not a buying machine – well, at least, not in my own head.

Dear reader, this might seem elementary, but it’s not so for Palestinians. This is a walled-off cooperation and mutual-support economy, an economy where everyone depends on everyone else for keeping each other alive, so the emphasis here is on supporting your fellow citizens by trading with them, to some extent whether or not you need what they’re selling.

Nevertheless, when one of the traders, a young chap of seventeen who helps his elder brother run a shop, moaned to me today about having no money to buy schoolbooks, I took pity on him. He had said there had been no business today, and he needed 50 Jordanian Dinars (250 shekels or £50) for the books tomorrow. He was worried and depressed. So I wandered off to do other chores, including raiding a bank machine, and slipped him 50 JDs on the way back. He lit up and hugged me, shedding a tear. Now he could get his books.

I told him that this is a life-lesson we all need to learn: solutions often come when you’ve given up. When you give up, it means you’re opening up to Allah, handing over your problems since you couldn’t solve them yourself. This money is a gift from Allah, through a random Englishman. So give thanks to Allah.

“You are a good man, Mr Balden. I pray that Allah, he will pick you up when you have a need.” Well thanks, I might need your prayer to come true one day. This young Palestinian, poor yet intelligent, has better English than some of the 17-year old Brits I know. Good luck to you, mate – I sincerely hope you get a future.

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My three Palestine books are:
– Pictures of Palestine (in print and as a downloadable PDF)
– Blogging in Bethlehem (an audiobook and PDF)
– O Little Town of Bethlehem (PDF only)
Available here: http://www.palden.co.uk/pop/order.html