20th March: Nablus, Bethlehem, Hebron, Jerusalem

Well, we're back in Jerusalem now after a fairly hectic few days in which Dad got his first proper checkpoint experience, A got invited for dinner in Beit Safafa by a nice lady on a bus and found that there's a brand of water named after her, and I got fed so many different kinds of little Arabic sweets and pastries in Nablus that I got a massive attack of the sugar shakes, and officially became a year older and less wise.
My friend Naseer very kindly took the time to show the three of us around Nablus again. Between destroyed buildings and ancient stonework, one of the highlights was watching kanafeh being made. This delicious sweet is a layer of chewy cheese topped with crunchy baked semolina, which turns bright orange when cooked, and doused in sugar water. It's made in metre-wide metal trays in a kind of upside-down-cake style, where the semolina layer turns orange by being baked against the bottom of the pan with the cheese on top of its, and then a second pan is placed on top and the whole thing turned over with one terrifying but skillful flip. At the al-Aqsa sweet house in Nablus Old City, it is then sliced up and served hot and one of these metre-wide trays lasts about 5 minutes.
Anyway, I've got a terrific sequence of photos of it being made so if anyone can think of a place I can pitch a kanafeh piece too, let me know!
The following day, after a slightly tense and very odd morning amongst Mt Jarzim/Gerizim's Samaritan community for an article for The Arab, we headed back to Jerusalem and on to Bethlehem via Ramallah. At Huwarra we had a bit of a wait because we were in a private taxi but all generally went pretty smoothly.
At Kalandia checkpoint, however, Dad and A got their first real taste of how these monstrous barriers to movement work. Last year when I passed through it the public buses from Ramallah to Jerusalem were being permitted to pass, albeit with men and boys having to get down and be id'd.
This week, however, they were being strict, so we all had to get out and pass through the full battery-animal process. Although it was busy, only a couple of channels (narrow rows between metal grid walls and corrugated iron roofs) were open, with x-ray machines and id checks at the end of the lengthy queues. After that check there were ore turnstiles – great fun for getting through with large bags, small children, sick people etc – and then more id checking. This was being carried out by a small, plump and exceptionally shouty Israeli female soldier, who kept yelling at people to get behind the line. If she thought this was inspiring discipline and gravitas amongst her line of victims she was wrong, as most of the Palestinian people in the line with us were in massive fits of giggles over her antics and kept delivering stage-whispered instructions to their friends 'not to annoy the lady.'
Several more buses later we were in Bethlehem, staying at the Star. Now, last time I was in that particular part of town for any length of time it was 2002 and in the middle of some humongous invasion, with tanks and squished street lamps littering the streets and a heady blend of ISMers, international journalists and Israeli soldiers making life hellish for the staff of the hotel. I was staying down the road in the Palestine TV building, helping out with Indymedia and the occasional food run into the area around the Nativity Church which was under 24/7 curfew. So being there was a fairly memory-laden experience, and to see it all busy and full of shops and cars and buses was odd, if good. The Star still has lousy plumbing and minimal hot water though.
I figured that given Dad's short time here an ATG day tour would be a good way to introduce him to some of the Southern part of the West Bank, namely Bethlehem and Hebron. As well as full organised tours, an increasing number of organisations here, including ATG and PACE, seem to have realised that there are plenty of people who don't necessarily want or can't afford full length organised tours, but who are in the market for day-long experiences which introduce them to the issues and sights. It was also lovely to see Samer from ATG again, from my Olive Co-op days.
So, this tour included visits to the Ibrahimi Mosque/Tombs of the Patriarchs in Hebron, a 2-thousand-year old part-synagogue, part-mosque which houses the resting places of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah and other significant early Biblical figures. It's also, of course, the site of the massacre of several dozen Palestinian worshippers by the settler Baruch Goldstein in 1994, when he and possibly others walked into the early Friday prayers spraying bullets, having locked the doors to prevent any escapes.
Hebron is also shocking for the revolting behaviour of the settlers – who live inside the city, not around it – towards the local Palestinian population. They through piss and dirty nappies and rotting food into the streets, necessitating nets across the souq roads to catch it all. Where they want to drive a family out, they commit appalling acts of cruelty. In the case of one family we visited, this included torching rooms in the house using Molotov cocktails, on one occasion burning a three year old boy to death. The family have had to put a grille up above their stairwell to stop rubbish being thrown in by the settlers, but this has now been punctured by a boulder which was thrown in a few weeks ago, shattering on the stairs but fortunately not hitting any people.
Heading back to Bethlehem, we passed through Deheishe refugee camp, where 12,000 people live in a space spanning a kilometre by a kilometre, enduring 75% unemployment and a complete lack of space and privacy. There are new martyr posters in the entrance to the camp, after a 16 year old was killed last autumn for throwing stones at soldiers demolishing a house.
And now back into the melee that is Jerusalem, with Dad sorting out his journey home and A and I working out our plans from here.