European elections

Now there's a title to inspire, eh? But this year's euro-elections in the North West need to be taken very seriously indeed, in that there is a very real danger that the execrable Nick Griffin, ex-National Front member and now leader of the fascist BNP, will get in. Now, the BNP may be busy pretending to be a respectable party but they are still a bunch of vile little racists (not to mention their views on anyone else who isn't white, male and conforming to their narrow and basically fundamentalist views on society - I wouldn't fancy being a single mum under them, or a women looking for reproductive choices.)
It genuinely seems that the best bets to keep these bastards out are a) a good turnout overall, and b) a high level of votes for the Green Party. The latter argument is strong enough that Respect have, to their credit, stood aside and asked left-wing voters who would have supported them to vote Green instead. So here are a few pertinent links, such as a few apposite words from the chair of Manchester Green Party, the campaign site for Peter Cranie, Green candidate in the European elections and some links to Unite Against Fascism groups in the North-West. I did want to include a link to Manchester No Borders here but can't actually find anything from them on the subject...

Spawn of the Devil

Hahaha. Sometimes I really like the Daily Mirror, when it's not doing tabloid-celeb bollox, and the link I've just been sent sparks one of those times... with this rant against that vile travesty of the human race that is Jeremy Clarkson. Clarkson's evangelical approach to macho, dangerous driving styles and general climate-change-inducing, animal-squishing, cyclist-damaging, community-dividing, health-wrecking, planet-raping behaviour is annoying enough, but when he turns himself into the wounded Messiah of a band of whinging half-wits who complain about 'attacks' on the put-upon 'British motorist' then it's hard to decide whether the correct response is to throw up or go out and strangle the first motorist who floors it to rush (dangerously through the bike lane) into the next traffic jam space.

Marguerite Dabaie, graphic artist

Having said lots of nice things about Marc Roberts and Polyp on this, blog, it's nice to feel moved to flag up a female political cartoonist. So this is a quick link to the wonderful Marguerite Dabaie, a Palestinian Christian female graphic artist whose book I am trying to buy when Paypal decides to co-operate...

Gaza benefit, Manchester, 6th May

Audio Uprising are doing a Gaza (Disasters Emergency Committee fund) benefit on 6th May at Club Academy in the Student Union, featuring a bunch of bands and musicians I've never heard of, being professionally old and boring, and a few I have, like Dom from the excellent Blood & Fire label and Caulbearers. 8pm-2am (surely that's well after bedtime!). Also visuals from Polyp, who is, let's face it, a bit of a genius even if I do have to have rows with him in the office ;-). And all for the measly suggested donation of 4 quid!

The life, death and funeral of Bassem Aburahma

Here's the Youtube video of the life, death and funeral of Bassem Aburahma, the latest victim of the new high-velocity tear gas canisters being used as anti-personnel weaponry by Israeli soldiers at the Bil'in protests against the Separation Wall and Israel's confiscation of Palestinian land:

Judge in misogynist cretin shocker

So, a London taxi driver who raped AT LEAST 12 women and possibly up to 500, having drugged them, has finally been sentenced to an indeterminate length of time 'with a minimum of 8 years.' EIGHT YEARS!!! You are having a fucking larf. Surely having been stuck in Croydon has addled the old fart of a sentencing judge's mind (I was born and raised in Croydon, I know the horrors whereof I speak). You can get more than that for fraud or nicking stuff, if it's valuable and belonged to someone posh. And, of course, the police dragged their feet over the whole thing for months, having arrested him in 2007 and let him go. But then of course the police are good at that kind of thing - just look at Peter Sutcliffe and how many women would be alive today if proper attention had been paid to him. So if they're so shite at catching rapists and murderers, what exactly is it the British police do when they're not beating up protesters and killing newspaper sellers? Enquiring (taxpayer) minds would like to know.

Auntie slides a bit further down the drain...

So, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC's Middle East editor, has come in from some stick from the BBC Trust, the structure which took over from the Governors in the wake of various little spats with the Blair government.
Now, I'm fairly weary of saying that I don't believe that there is some global Zionist conspiracy to control the media, and that I think that Palestine solidarity activists who do subscribe to this view are generally being lazy, anti-semitic, or both. But what Zionist organisers are good at doing (and we're not, although we're probably getting better at it, and don't forget they've had more practice), is mobilising large numbers of people to contact organisations like the BBC and moan whenever Israel, its state and its activities aren't painted in the purest and most glorious of colours.
So Jeremy Bowen's reporting on Har Homa settlement (just outside Bethlehem, and a key part of Israel's expansion of what it classifies as 'Jerusalem' out into Palestinian West Bank land) and the anniversary of the 1967 war has been censured by the Trust in the wake of just such organised lobbying.
Har Homa is a particularly interesting case in the war of terminology and myth which Zionists are so good at. 'Official' accounts of the genesis of Har Homa settlement paint it as an unoccupied hill south of Jerusalem which was a logical building site for overspill Israeli population from the city. Anyone who's ever actually been there will know that it is very much part of the circle of hills within which Bethlehem and Beit Sahour sit. Jebel abu Ghnaim, the local name for the site, was, my Beit Sahour friends tell me, a favourite picnic site for Palestinian families on weekends, and a place where probably hundreds or thousands of local kids (including my friend S) have, over the centuries, roamed and explored.
And one of the reasons it was so free of habitation when that renowned peacemaker Shimon Peres signed the order to build 6,500 Israeli homes on it? It had been designated a 'green area' by the Israeli state, to be preserved for local ecological balance and biodiversity. But only, apparently, until the Israeli state wanted to move a population of 30-40,000 people onto it. And Bowen's crime in the eyes of the BBC Trust was, apparently, to point out that a number of governments and major international institutions consider such settlements to be illegal under international law.
I'm going to admit an interest here. I like Jeremy Bowen. In 2002, when we were under curfew and attack in Bethlehem during Israel's Operation Defensive Shield invasion of much of the West Bank, Bowen was one of many international journalists who rocked up a week or so in to report on the situation, particularly the siege in the Church of the Nativity. But he was also one of the most humane and inquisitive amongst them, genuinely interested in finding out what was going on around him rather than churning out the story and then heading for the bar. Most of the press were fairly sneery about the gangs of idealistic ISMers trying to do things like get food into the areas around the Church and Bethlehem city centre which were under 24/7 curfew for something like 6 weeks, without a break. But on one of the food runs we did, carrying UN food aid bags into the city from the warehouse where they'd been left, Bowen not only came with us (along with Jon Snow from Ch4 and some stray cameramen hoping to get a shot of some activist chicks getting shot at) but he even carried a big box of milk powder. We were bloody grateful, because all that food is pretty heavy and we had a longish walk through the backstreets, asking 'Jesh? Fi Jesh' of every bemused local resident who stuck their head out of a window to see what was going on. At a crossroads where we started to see the cars the Israeli army had been systematically blowing up Bowen finally handed me his case of milk powder, saying he's come far enough and apologising for not bringing it further - despite the fact that he was the only press person who brought anything at all.
So it pisses me off when the BBC Trust criticises his work, apparently for having the temerity to diverge from the BBC's usual newsgathering policy on Palestine and Israel, which is simply to interview Mark Regev, the smooth-talking and wholly evil Israeli government spokesman. Yes, there have been times when Bowen's coverage has irritated me for being a bit too 'balanced,' but largely I take this as a good sign, that he is actually being properly balanced and correcting my tendency towards a bias towards the human tragedy going on in Palestine. And these rulings from the corrupt little elitist cabal that is the BBC Trust just serve to demonstrate still further how far down the drain our national broadcaster is going.

More death in Bil'in

So, I did a quick post about Ian Tomlinson and the Edo Gaza 6 and then checked my email to find the report below. Not a lot to say about it really. Israeli soldiers murder peaceful protesters, the 'international community' ignores it and continues to facilitate human rights abuses and land grabs. Business as usual.

One killed, dozens injured at the Bil'in weekly protest

A Palestinian man was killed and dozens more injured on Friday during the weekly nonviolent protest in Bil'in village, near the central west Bank city of Ramallah.
Local sources told IMEMC that Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahmah, 30, died when soldiers shot him in the chest with a tear gas bomb.
The residents of Bil'in village marched towards the wall today after Friday prayers. The protest was joined by Israeli and international activists.
Protesters' held banners condemning Israel's ongoing policies and violence against civilians and demanding the release of the Palestinian political prisoners held by the Israeli army. The protest began in the center of the village then headed towards the Apartheid Wall which is being built on Bil'in land.
An Israeli army unit stationed behind the wall prevented the crowd from going through the gate and fired tear gas canisters and rubber-coated steel bullets to break up the crowd. In addition to the fatal wounding of Bassem, an international supporter was hit in the head and sustained moderate wounds from Israeli fire. Dozens were treated for gas inhalation.
Abdullah Abu Rahmah, from the local committee against the Wall and Settlements told IMEMC that the soldiers shot Bassem with a new type of gas bomb as he was imploring the soldiers to stop shooting as the protest a peaceful one and there were children present.
Abdullah Abu Rahmah added that Bassem will be buried on Saturday after the midday prayers.

Support the Gaza 6 and more police lies

So, today it's confirmed that Ian Tomlinson did not, in fact, die of a heart attack at the G20 as stated by the doctor who did the first post-mortem (who apparently has a long and glorious record as a police stooge.) He died of internal bleeding, and a policeman has been 'interviewed under caution' for manslaughter. History suggests that said copper will get off lightly or completely, but we can but hope. The British press have, after a brief frenzy of mea culpas, conveniently forgotten that until the video cam eto light at the Guardian, most of them were busy repeating Metropolitan Police press office lies about protesters preventing a sick man being helped by officers.
And in the meantime, here's a plea for support from the campaigners who smashed equipment at the Edo factory in Brightpon during the attacks on Gaza:

On Jan 17th, while Israeli bombs were still raining down on the people of Gaza, six people gained entry to EDO MBM/ITT, a factory in Brighton manufacturing military equipment being used by the Israeli air force, and smashed machinery and computers causing at least 300 000 pounds worth of damage and closing the factory for nearly a week.
The 6 people surrendered to the police when they arrived and have been charged with conspiracy to cause criminal damage along with three others arrested nearby. 2 people, Elijah Smith and Robert Alford, have been remanded in custody since January.
The trial of the Gaza 6 may last several months and hinge on whether the jury accepts that crimes were committed by Israel . The next hearing will be on May 8th. Details: smashedo [at] riseup.net or http://www.decommisioners.wordpress.com
Two people remain on remand, please write to them:
Elijah Smith VP7551, HMP Horfield, 19 Cambridge Road, Horfield, BS7 8PS
Robert Alford VP7552, HMP Lewes, 1 Brighton Rd, Lewes, East Sussex, BN7 1E

Baby, baby it's a weird world

I'm sure there's something in Alice in Wonderland about the number of odd things that can happen in a morning. But I can't be bothered to look it up properly.
But, firstly we have an very interesting article about Somali 'pirates' from Johann Hari. Now, I have vague recollections of Mr Hari doing something helpful for me once, can't remember if it was to do with Palestine or environmental stuff, but I did for a bit have some time for him. Then he went all Cruise Missile Left, and then flip-flopped back away from Blairite spin on Iraq when it became apparent that no-one, even the Aaronovitches of this world, let alone any sane and decent human being, could carry on swallowing that line. But Hari has been asking some sensible questions about what actually goes on in Somalia - as in, dumping of nuclear waste in its waters, theft of all its fish stocks by massive Western industrial fishing boats - and points out that going in mob-handed with a bunch of UK, US etc etc etc naval vessels may not be the most useful response.
Secondly, Manchester Confidential's Property section has gone all crusading. Despite the name, Manchester Confidential is rarely confidential about anything more exciting than the menus of the latest overpriced trendy city centre restaurant. But one of its writers has clocked that some of the beautiful big old Victorian houses on Seymour Grove are being left empty - in one case boarded up but in another open to the world, no doubt in the hope that it will become derelict enough to knock down, as has happened with so many landmark Manchester buildings from the Hacienda to the old Bank building on Stretford Road in Hulme and Sunnyside House just up the road from the properties in question. And Property Confidential is proposing to Ask Some Questions about what the hell is going on here, and whether legal measures can be taken to make sure the buildings aren't left to decay and then knocked down to build yet more bloody flats. Perhaps some of Manchester's squatters should also be taking a look at the more accessible of the two houses, in a public-spirited kind of way...
And thirdly, there is a story from the International Middle East Media Centre about a toddler born in Damascus of Syrian parents who live in the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967. The kid is confined to his home under total house arrest for being an enemy national and must remain so until he is at least 2 years old... but then nothing the Israeli authorities do to any Arab, Palestinian or otherwise, surprises me now.

Nice things, for once

At the risk of spoiling my great track record of depressing posts, here are a couple of positive initiatives which made me smile.
The first is the Kufiyeh Project, an American initiative to promote kufiyehs generally (or at least, proper ones, not the overpriced 'anti-war scarves' sold without a trace of irony in Marks & Sparks and Urban Outfitters). It's been set up to sell the products of one of the few remaining factories in the West Bank producing kufiyehs, the Hirbawi workshop in Hebron, which Olive Co-op has been sourcing its kufiyehs from for some time. They make the lovely multicoloured ones as well as the traditional black & white.
The second is a little webpage by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre, which is simply a list of nicely-written, simple Palestinian recipes. A good resource since Sahtain, a lovely Palestinian cookbook which I have a copy of, has now gone out of print, according to the guys at the Educational Bookshop on Salah ed-Din Street. The JMCC page is great though, and I do particularly like the recipe for Shakshoukeh, which should apparently be served with 'warm Palestinian.' Yummm... ;-)

Insomnia

Yep, it's 1am and I'm meant to be sleeping, but instead I'm being grimly amused as the Metropolitan Police re-implodes with trying to cover its arse as another video of coppers smacking people around at the G20 comes to light. With the stories I've been hearing from friends at the Climate Camp in London there must be a bunch more footage out there. Anyway, the actual film is here:



and Marc Roberts' usual genius take on things is here:



The Judi of Marc's cartoons is, by the way, named after the amazing Judi Bari, an environmentalist, feminist and labour campaigner who survived being blown up in an attempted stitch-up by the FBI, only to die of breast cancer in 1997. But she's a supremely inspiring example of the way that people with clear sight and integrity draw together the many oppressions which threaten our world, seeing the connections between the way that capitalist and imperialist forces work, rather than selecting single issues and exposing themselves to the 'divide and conquer' strategy by which states manage dissent.
And speaking of amazing women activists, I just wanted to flag up Sharyn's powerful writings from Gaza again. It may not be in the headlines, but the Israeli army is still killing and maiming people in Gaza, and still imposing the blockade which systematically and deliberately destroys the health care system, economy, polity, education and social life of an entire people. Sharyn's writings capture with humour and compassion the horror of the situation in Gaza and the dogged determination of people who seek only to carry on living their lives and raising their families with a bit of dignity. So I'll leave you with a little one of her vignettes from the last few days:

J insisted on driving us back to the village house, with his two little daughters, in the rickety trailer of a tiny tractor, one of the few working pieces of machinery recent attacks have left him. I kept being convinced I was about to tumble out.
“I’m too old for this sort of thing,” I said.
“I only got in because he winked!” replied E.
“As the actress said to the bishop,” I muttered, clinging on.

We drank tea, fielded the usual plans to get us married off to the locals to keep us firmly in the country, and then left for our next appointment, determined also to find L some crutches, because she can’t stand on either leg alone. Initial enquiries suggest this is something else there is a shortage of, especially since the war. The only option might be to buy her a pair, if we can even find any.

Last few days, and back home

So, a final few days in Palestine and Israel after all the interviewing of Palestinian women workers from the settlements. Chaos, generally, as final few days tend to be.
A few little things that stand out:
- a stunningly repugnant front page of the Jerusalem Post (usually a pretty vile rag anyway), announcing that Israeli soldiers had worked hard to prevent civilian casualties in the overpopulated chaos that was Gaza during the invasion. Poor dears. I'm sure they bust blood vessels making that effort. The Israeli police spent all of about 2 seconds 'investigating' reports made by soldiers who served in Gaza of war crimes before declaring them 'hearsay';
- the truly appalling state of unrecognised Bedouin villages in the Naqab, shanty towns of ragged tents - a few of them the traditional camel and goat hair, but most of them made from plastic sheeting. And the horrid irony, pointed out by my friends L and U, who live down there, of Bedouin villages with no running water or electricity, sandwiched at just a few hundred yards' remove by a power station on one side and a water treatment plant on the other, both serving Israeli communities;
- the utter gutless half-witted rubbish being spouted by some god-awful journalist on the BBC World Service, trying to find ways to justify the British police apparently adding newspaper sellers on their way home to the list of people - Brazilian electricians, any black youth they fall over - who it's ok to murder. RIP Ian Tomlinson. The video which the Guardian managed to get hold of which reveals the extent of police lies - that they were pelted with missiles while trying to save him, when actually they basically killed him and then ignored him and impeded medical care - is here:



Yes, coming home has been less than cheerful (apart from being back with my wonderful husband, lovely friends and gorgeous cats), with police brutality and suppression of environmental and anti-capitalist protests topping the bill. But the amazing Marc Roberts has, as usual, managed to crank out a topical cartoon at light speed. For Arabic readers, some of his climate change work has also been translated for a Lebanese audience at al-Bia wal-Tanmia.

Jerusalem for maybe the last time

I stood this evening for a while at the top of the steps into Bab al Amud – Damascus Gate into the Old City of Jerusalem. This gate is at the heart of the crazy, energetic whirlpool that is old Arab Jerusalem, seething with stalls selling everything from shoes to green almonds, strawberries to designer knock-offs, crockery, tarty underwear and various weird household items of indeterminate use. For all its vice, violence, confusion and dirty underbelly (see this post), I love this place with a painful sensation like a hook in the belly.
The great pain this time is in knowing that I may never see East Jerusalem and the Old City like this again. I don't know when I'll be back, and with some of the plans Marc and I have for the next few years it could be four or five years, easily. And with Israel's Judaisation policies for Jerusalem – settlements in Palestinian East Jerusalem, toleration of the kind of psycho settlers who took over another house in the old city a couple of days ago and then place huge Israeli flags on them, and persecution of any Palestinian who they can possibly cook up an excuse to send off to the West Bank, I may never see the wonderful, energetic Jerusalem that I love again, and that is devastating to me.

More photos

So, here are a few more images from the last month. The first, since it's now Easter week, is of candles burning in th Church of the Holy Sepulchre, on the outside wall of the tiny chapel that allegedly contains the tomb of Christ.
The second is also from Jerusalem and shows posters raising awareness of the Armenian Genocide by Turkey at the beginning of the 20th Century. This is a sensitive topic here, both because Turkey has been one of Israel's big political allies in the region, and because the Armenians have been denied the right to use words like 'Holocaust' for what happened to them. As I write this, I noticed that Robert Fisk has been writing about the subject too, here.
Thirdly, one of Deheishe camp's newer martyrs, a teenager shot last autumn for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers who were demolishing a house.

6th April: women workers

It's Monday and now I get my weekend, or in fact the nearest I've had to a break in several weeks.
The last two days have been sad and mad. I've spent them in the company of the amazing Salwa from KavLaOved, interviewing women who work in the Israeli settlements – in industrial zones like Barkan and Mishor Adumim, and in agricultural settlements in the vast swathe of stolen land that is the Jordan Valley.
These women are strong but the stories they have to tell are dreadful. Working condition s in the settlements are the kind of thing you're used to reading in scandalised Guardian reports from China and India. Terrible health and safety conditions, including exposure to pesticides, factories with no air conditioning in the roasting temperatures which are common here in summer, or no heating in the bitter cold of the hills in winter, and machinery with the safety guards taken off. Rates of pay a third of the Israeli minimum wage, which a court ruling says should apply in the settlements, and 12 or 14 hour days without proper overtime pay. Bullying and harassment by managers – both Israeli and from Palestinian middlemen and gangmasters. Uncompensated workplace injuries. The list goes on.
And, of course, these women also experience prejudice in their own communities. In the factories and agricultural packing houses around Jericho, at least women working outside the home is something well established in society, but in the tiny village in Salfit governorate to the north of the West Bank the women I met were the first amongst their neighbours to be employed, and they faced disapproval because of that. But all of them experienced discrimination for working in the settlements themselves, seen as somehow collaborating. The effects of this included many of them being regarded as unmarriageable, or only marrying too late to have children; one woman whose family's dire poverty meant that sometimes her children went without proper food for days said that despite this her daughters were considering quitting their settlement jobs for fear that they would never get husbands. But there is no work in the village, and mental health problems have stopped her husband working for over 20 years. So what are the household going to live on?
The women I met in Salfit are part of a legal case against their employers, an international bedding manufacturer called Royalife, which ships to Europe and the USA. So maybe the report I'll be writing for Women Working Worldwide can form part of some efforts to campaign for them to be reinstated (they were fired for continuing the legal case against their employers for their illegally low pay and poor safety conditions). But it's a difficult balance here; the boycott campaigners would obviously be saying that those products shouldn't be sold at all. But who else is going to bring these women jobs? The more time I spend here, the fewer ideas I have about what the answers might be.
And somehow it all seems all the worse for the heartbreaking beauty of the setting. The desert in the Jordan Valley is stunningly vast and mountainous and stark, while the hills of Salfit are covered with spring wildflowers and olive trees and should be the most serene and lovely place, if they weren't the backdrop to brutal extremist settlers and terrible poverty and military occupation and these labour abuses.

A few pictures...

So, here are a few of the terrifying number of pictures I've taken over the last few weeks. The first is a nice one - kids playing sack races as Bab al-Amud (Damascus Gate) on Saturday 21st March. They were, however, being closely watched over the Israeli police, as this was the launch day for Al Quds, Capital of Arab Culture, which was an event the Israeli authorities were less than keen to support.
Second is, quite simply, Netanyahu exactly where he belongs.
And the third is a little girl holding a singed page from the Quran, standing in front of a burnt-out room in her house. She has the misfortune to be growing up in Hebron and the roof of her home is accessible by settlers, who torched this room, killing her 3 year old brother. The house is now meant to be protected by a metal grille in the top of the stairwell, but the settlers have recently thrown a boulder through it - we saw the shattered pieces on the stairs, and by good if someone had been hit they would have been done for. And now, of course, the can start throwing shit (literally) down into the family's home.


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2nd April: Dodgy jokes and all over the place

This is one of the more printable of the many jokes my friend S tells. Most of the others are Khalili jokes – about people from Hebron, who seem to be the butt of 99% of Palestinian jokes. But M (see previous post) has been telling me about the Hebronite pop singer who lives in Jerusalem, who 3 years ago was booked for a concert in Hebron, only to find out that the booking was a way to get him down there to beat him up for telling jokes against the people of his town. So maybe they're best not reproduced. Anyway:

A Lebanese guy is standing in the street, very angry. A Saudi guy walks up and says to him, why are you angry?
The Lebanese guy says, I lost my wife.
The Saudi guy says, I lost my wife too, let's look for them together. What does your wife look like?
The Lebanese man says, well, she's tall, blonde, got a good body, wearing a short skirt and a little t-shirt. What does your wife look like?
And the Saudi guy says, forget my wife, let's go and find your wife.

It's been a hectic week. There was the terrific meeting with Daoud Hamoudi of Stop the Wall, who occupies a position of minor intellectual hero in my world and who I was pathetically impressed to meet. He was very cool, very kind, gave us a good hour plus of his time despite also being very busy. He does terrific research on the economic impacts of the Occupation, including the various industrial zones that the Turkish, German, French and Japanese governments and the World Bank are busy building in several parts of the West Bank, aimed at using the Palestinian population as cheap labour for Israeli export companies. Palestinian salaries are, according to the World Ban, too high and need cutting to something in the region of US$300/month, which is of course a fraction of the Israeli minimum wage.
This was followed up by another interview with the stunning Salwa Alinat of KavLaOved, an Israeli labour rights NGO which I wrote about in the Big Issue last spring because they do work with migrant labourers brought from places like Thailand and the Philippines as cheap, often bonded, labour on Israeli flower farms which supply the likes of Tesco and Sainsburys.
But Salwa heads their groundbreaking project with Palestinian workers in Israeli settlements and rather than the overarching Israeli boycott approach taken by Stop the Wall, they have a classic workers' rights position of engaging with individual groups of workers, factory by factory, and trying to improve their conditions. There have been various legal wrangles in Israel over the applicability of Israeli labour laws in the settlements, and in the meantime Palestinian workers there are subjected to long hours, undocumented overtime, low pay, arbitrary firings, lower pay for women workers and atrocious health and safety conditions. But KLO has had some successes in getting pay increases and improved conditions.
Salwa herself is terrific young woman, originally from the Galilee, and I'll never forget the pride and strength in her eyes and face as she told me: “I feel strongest when I'm in the office of a company in the settlements. I know that they hate me – because I'm with Kav La Oved, because I'm a woman, because I'm a Muslim. And I feel really strong.”
And then there was the day I expected to spend helping write Hebron & Bethlehem day tour leaflets for the Alternative Tourism Group, old friends in Beit Sahour who I used to work with when I was with Olive Co-op, organising solidarity tours to the West Bank. I did indeed spend some of the day successfully writing and printing up these leaflets, but it did kind of descend into an afternoon of Taybeh beer and arak with S and some German visitors.
And then there was the visit to Nablus, bumming a ride with a couple of people from the Empire & Commonwealth Museum who are researching an exhibition for the back end of 2010 on the British Mandate here. Which given the extent to which the extraordinarily screwed up nature of this place is down to the good ol' Brits seems a worthwhile effort. This meant I got to have a very constructive meeting myself with my friend N, but also got to earwig at their interviews.
This very excitingly meant I got to meet Bassam Shakaa, the former elected mayor of Nablus who spent a chunk of the 70s in Israeli jails and then, 4 years after being elected, had his legs blown off by a car bomb planted by the Jewish fundamentalist terror group Gush Emunim. The guy who did it got a weeny little sentence, shock horror. N, who is a fortysomething man of considerable gravitas, was very cutely excited about the meeting as well, and demanded to have his photo taken with Shakaa (he, as a schoolboy, was at the huge demonstration which greeted Shakaa from prison in the 70s), while when I was in Beit Sahour again yesterday telling S about the visit he also had stories of being in the crowd when Shakaa visited Bethlehem after his return from treatment in the UK after his bombing.
Which covers a reasonable amount of the last week, and I've run out of steam now anyway. TTFN.