March 27th: Jerusalem, Akka

A and I have finally returned to Jerusalem after an exhausting few days chasing round some of the Palestinian cities of Israel – Jaffa, Nazareth, Haifa and Akka. It's been interesting but tiring.




Of the four Akka is definitely my favourite – a beautiful little port city full of haunting Crusader halls, 18th century khans built to house thousands of merchants and their horses and camels and wares, fishing boats and amazing markets. It has the gorgeous al-Jazzer mosque and the – ahem – interesting Akko Gate Hostel, a slightly ramshackle place run by a guy called Walid, whose family have lived in the Old City for generations. He had a lot to say about bureaucracy and the strangling of small business by red tape, which inevitably becomes that much worse when the business is Arab-run in Israel, and where the Israeli state still claims a third of the ownership of any building registered as having been abandoned by its Palestinian occupants in 1948. Walid himself lost his mother to the shelling of Akka when he was six weeks old.
In Jerusalem, I'm now strung out and nauseous after spending the afternoon drinking evilly strong coffee with an old friend who runs an internet cafe in the Old City. So my clothes also stink of smoke from the cafe's clientèle of young men playing football games on the computers and puffing away. As ever, M was a mine of Old City gossip and scandal and tales of the dark underbelly of Jerusalemite Palestinian life – so the conversation ran the gamut of honour killings (yes, he did tell me exactly which shop owner offed his daughter after she was caught with her lover; I'm not sure I wanted to know), embezzlement, adultery, the shenanigans of sundry nuclear whistleblowers and people taking up going to the mosque and on Haj in order to make their seedy businesses more respectable to the locals.
Oh, and apparently small Palestinian boys make great internet cafe customers, because none of them can touch type so they take ages to get anything done. But Mordechai Vanunu had to be barred because the Israeli police kept turning up and demanding to examine the computer he'd been using, and it put the other customers off.
The conversation also ran over subjects like the increasing rate of Israeli land grabs in Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem like Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah, and new Israeli tactics for getting rid of its Palestinian citizens, like raiding East Jerusalem houses at 2am and delisting as residents anyone not there – even though they might be on holiday, or visiting a sick relative, or at a party. And the unintended (one hopes, although these things are always questionable) side-effects of the EU and USA's demands for a crackdown on corruption in the PA, which have meant that buying cheap stocks for Jerusalem shops in the West Bank has become much harder, which has hit everyone's profit margins considerably. And his gloomy but probably not far off the mark prediction that of the 150,000 Palestinians living in East Jerusalem, only 30,000 or 40,000 will be left in 5 years, and that they will be the rich who are able to withstand the worst vicissitudes of Israeli policies which make it so hard for Arab residents to get decent jobs or run businesses.
M didn't used to talk politics. It's a measure of how bad the situation is that this tidal wave of anger and frustration came out of him so quickly. “This is my city?” he said, in reply to my asking him about somewhere to go for a drink. “Really?”