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?”

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.

Nablus, March 17th

Sitting in the sun in Nablus, turning my eyes to mush on the first decent stretch of internet access I've had since we arrived. It's beautiful weather but it's bloody freezing at night. The great green dome of the an-Nasir mosque just to my right – at this precise moment a very musical call to prayer is going out from the minaret. To my left a couple are chatting away, the guy smoking a nargila and the women eating manakeesh.
The apparent 'normalisation' process by the Israelis continues, with the checkpoints easy to pass through coming in this direction. Heading the other way will probably be a bit slower, but still easy enough for us. Even at Huwarra we were able to drive straight through in a local taxi, after being dropped off by the bus from Ramallah – something I remember as being nigh impossible, even for internationals. But, as we've seen with the vicious Israeli military response at places like Bilin and Nilin, this is a fragmented and illusory normalisation, all too easy to crack when Israeli domestic politics demands it.
There are lots of soldiers around, but except at the checkpoints themselves these are all PA security forces of one variety or another. I may support the Palestinian right to self-determination, but I'm reluctant to see men with large weaponry as a positive thing, regardless of which side they're from. The need for this highly visible presence bespeaks problems in itself.
Jerusalem was its usual insane self, although with more settler types wandering round the Old City, which is disturbing. Dad and I witnessed a heavily-policed funeral round by Lion Gate, heralded first by loud chanting and then a huge crowd – hundreds of young men, mainly – surging out the gate and into the Muslim cemetery immediately outside the walls. The dead man, being called a shahid by the crowd, was shot by the police after being chased away from an upscale Israeli neighbourhood he'd apparently been burgling with a female Jewish accomplice.
Once again, my companion(s) and I are the only guests staying at the Yasmeen, although it's busy during the day – Medicins san Frontiers meetings, couples drinking coffee, families coming in for leisurely meals. But it still seems to be in ok nick, although they haven't managed to replace the lovely stained glass window of the an-Nasir dome which has several bullet holes in it, including one clean through the middle of the dome. There seems to be more building work (with terrifying health and safety standards!) and commerce going on than last time I was here, a year ago, but whether this is an illusion remains to be seen – I intend to go and chat to a few people and find out (if I can speak after I get out of this nargila smoke.)

Israeli army seriously injure another Nilin peace protester

Well, just as I arrive in Palestine again, the grim news that on Friday the Israeli army seriously injured another peace activist, a 37 year old American called Tristan Anderson. The protests against the daily oppression of the people of Nilin by the proximity of the Wall to their lands have been met with utter brutality from Israeli forces, with a number of Palestinian children and youth being hurt and killed in recent months. At the moment, Anderson's condition is said to be life-threatening, and parts of the frontal lobe of his brain have had to be removed because they had been punctured by bone fragments caused by the force of the tear gas canister he was hit by - a type of canister I've never had the misfortune to encounter in my days with ISM, as it's a new high-velocity one which makes no sound and emits no smoke trail, and is therefore impossible to run away from. Classy one there, IDF.

Co-ops rant!

The last couple of weeks have had some ups and downs for the co-ops/social enterprise chunk of my life and work.
On one hand, there's been the brilliant news, which I'd heard about months ago but finally happened, that Zaytoun's fairly traded (organic, extra virgin) Palestinian olive oil has received full Fairtrade Foundation accreditation and is now therefore the first olive oil to bear the widely-recognised Fairtrade logo (a French/Moroccan outfit is also looking to get certified but it's unlikely their product will be in the shops until at least the end of this year). This is of course fantastic news for the Palestinian farmers' co-ops producing the oil, for Zaytoun and Equal Exchange who have worked so hard to market the oil and get accreditation, and for pioneers like Olive Co-op who have been selling it for the last 5 years.
On the flipside, I've had some depressing encounters with the hierarchies of the co-operative and social enterprise sectors as well.
These have largely taken the shape of trying to disentangle the jargon-laden, increasingly corporate bullshit churned out by some of the 'support agencies' and 'representative bodies' out there. Some of the stuff I've had to try and comprehend this week has been totally impenetrable, even to me, and I did social theory classes at MA level, so I've worked my way through a lot of totally opaque and atrociously written crap before.
The social enterprise support sector just seems to be more and more a gravy train for white men in suits to get nicely-paid jobs telling people with no money and tiny businesses in a credit crunch about how to be entrepreneurs, while being firmly locked into a bureaucratic mindset and fat-cat mentality themselves.
My other gripe is with some of the PR leeches who lurk round the edges of the sector. Without naming names, I thought I had managed to find someone sensible within a co-operative sector organisation who was willing to enter into a bit of debate about whether the expansion of co-ops in a recession was, willy-nilly, a good thing. Now, I've spent nearly 10 years working in co-ops, am still a member of one, and have a considerable commitment to the sector. I certainly have no interest in doing a hatchet job on them.
But I'm finding increasing amounts of credit crunch propaganda - from 'support' and 'advice' organisations whose main function is to suck up government funding like vast cash-Hoovers, and not from actual people running actual enterprises in what might be termed the 'real' world – about how bloody marvellous co-ops are, how they are the stable, sustainable soft-capitalist economic model that encourages responsible economic behaviour and would have bolstered the economy against the current crisis.
So, when the person I thought I was getting somewhere with went off on leave, I got handed over to the organisation's PR consultants instead, and any notion of realistic, sensible, real-world debate vanished, and I got yet another bit of pointless flannel attributed to the organisation's ennobled Chair, about how wonderful co-ops are and how they are the Way, the Truth and the Light.
And I'm sorry, but this does the sector no good at all. A failing enterprise is a failing enterprise, and while being a co-op might make companies more economically and socially sustainable, this is only true if they have real markets and decent marketing and good internal controls.
To promote the idea that anyone, anywhere, wanting to do anything somehow can just by being a social enterprise is totally irresponsible. Firstly it has the ability to create a lot of pissed off, skint people if their businesses do fail. Secondly in creating those people it has a massive potential to 'tarnish the brand,' devaluing the idea of social enterprise and co-ops and making them synonymous with dud enterprises. And thirdly damaging people who should never have been persuaded by ivory-tower consultants that they should run businesses in the first place.

שטח סגור | Closed Zone | منطقة مغلقة

שטח סגור | Closed Zone | منطقة مغلقة

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The slime slimed

Got up this morning to the highly entertaining news that the slithery Mandie had been slimed by a Plane Stupid activist with a bowl of green custard, objecting to the eye-poppingly idiotic idea that Heathrow airport should be extended. Genius. Maybe he'll find true love with it.



Photo from www.planestupid.com

Moss Side graffiti

Al Baker & the Dole Queue, Roadhouse, 5th March

Last time I was in the Roadhouse, I'm pretty sure I left early because of the dense cloud of cigarette smoke that made by eyes water and obscured whatever I was trying to see onstage. I don't think there was even a mention of a smoking ban, so I guess it was a while ago.
Tonight it was Al Baker and the Dole Queue who lured me back. I've seen this talented young singer-songwriter in various settings – with a couple of members of his band supporting David Rovics and the mighty Attila the Stockbroker at the late lamented Basement, and solo, accompanied only by his guitar, at my own wedding. The band has one album, 'On the Use of Jackboots,' available through Four Dogs Music. They combine a punky-folky sound (think the Levellers, but less cheesy/twiddly, or the Pogues, but with better teeth) with clever, funny, observational lyrics that range from the fierily political to bittersweet observations of the pains of young love (when the wrong haircut's involved).
This gig was billed as one of the first outings for the new version of the Dole Queue's 'troubacore' sound, bringing together some of the folky instruments (which have attracted accusations of sounding like a ceilidh band in the past) with rockier electric guitars and bass.
Sometimes it worked. On the pacier, punkier numbers like Grandad was an Anarchist and This Machine the greater volume and gutsier sound really lifted the songs, and combined with Baker's grinning yet sarcastic enthusiasm made for an infectiously fun live set. A cover of REM's It's the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine) also took well to this treatment. These are all talented performers, and their tight sound deserved something much better than a three-quarters-empty Roadhouse on the Thursday night.
But the stronger sound doesn't suit all of Baker's tracks, and the clever, funny, poignant lyrics of, for instance, Till the Fences Fall, got kind of lost in the louder music. Which, given that one of the big attractions of Baker's music is his wry, intelligent songwriting, is definitely a pity. Hopefully with more outings the new sound will get a little finessing and some of those lovely lyrics will re-emerge.
That said, this was still a cracking set, and I look forward to Al Baker and the Dole Queue's upcoming sets, listed on the band's Myspace page. These include a TBC support slot with the fantastic Robb Johnson.

Ryanair 'pay to pee'

A friend sent me this the other day - I'm afraid I don't know the original source. Perhaps Ryanair would also like to charge the rest of us to stop wrecking our planet with their horrible short-haul flights.

Comment is Free

I wonder what it says about the Guardian at the moment that the best bits of political writing I've seen in it for some time haven't been in the paper itself, which is increasingly anodyne, cowardly and smugly middle-class and knowing, but in the Comment is Free section.
The articles in question are Charlie Brooker - who I associate with being the TV guy from the back of the Guide, for God's sake! - here, and Ben White on why, although the recent atrocities in Gaza deserve international attention, we must also not take our eye off Israel's activities in the West Bank.

Hulme graffiti

Journalistic bollocks

All very insignificant, this, but a good illustration of how inaccurate some journalists can be, and how a couple of poorly checked facts can replicate themselves...
Several years ago I interviewed a UNISON rep and psychiatric nurse called Karen Reissman about NHS privatisation, for the TogetherWorks magazine Enterprising. The article ended up as one of the excuses Karen's former employers used to sack her, since few employers are enlightened enough to want active, politicised union reps on their staff.
Unsurprisingly, this attracted a certain amount of press coverage, including from press industry publications like the Press Gazette. So when Karen settled her claim out of court during her employment tribunal, there was a certain amount of followup. This included this article by Dominic Ponsford, written using material from the PA Mediapoint agency added to by the Press Gazette. Now, this article is peppered with inaccuracies. The ones I can comment on are that he calls the magazine 'Inside Enterprise' and states that it is no longer running - when in fact there have been a number of issues of it since the Karen Reissman affair, and I'm putting together a new one at the moment. It also claims that the article was a feature on social enterprise, which is in fact the subject of the entire magazine.
A reply from the PA's Legal Editor emphasises that it was not their agency piece which included the mistakes - so I guess they were added by Dominic Ponsford at the Press Gazette.
Now, I'm not saying that these errors are particularly significant in themselves. But I am interested in what it says about poor standards of fact checking. Especially since agencies and industry publications like the Press Gazette are generally regarded as pretty reliable, which means that if anyone, for instance, ever decided to write a history of Karen's struggle, they would probably go first to these kind of sources, and get misled and sidetracked.
I'm also curious as to why the Press Gazette has removed my completely anodyne correcting comments to their web version of the article - aren't they prepared to admit they've printed an incorrect piece?

International Women's Day

A friend recently sent me this lovely and inspiring announcement from the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, about a women's sport and cultural weekend being held to celebrate International Women's Day on March 8th. Despite my visceral horror of anything resembling organised games, this seems to me a much more uplifting representation of the spirit of IWD than the terrifyingly corporate 'Official' IWD site here, sponsored by huge international banks and corporations which I would would put money on, do bugger all for gender equality at any kind of grassroots level, however much they might top corporate indices for equality in their white, upper-middle-class Western offices. Who declared this site 'official' anyway? Forgive me if I'm sceptical.

Pubs, politics and Palestine

With lots in the news at the moment about pubs closing due to the recession, I was extremely pleased this week to find a great pub which combines proper beer with genuine community spirit.
The Blue Bell, on Barlow Road in Levenshulme, doesn't look terrifically prepossessing from the outside. It's one of those big pub buildings which all too often nowadays have plastic signs proclaiming steak dinners for £3.99 or burgers for less - conjuring up images of hideous livestock conditions and inedible meat. Inside it's presentable but nothing special, with a certain amount of the kind of faux-traditional chintziness which dominates so much pub decor.
I'd been lured to the Blue Bell after having, in a rash moment of helpfulness, offered to answer questions about co-operatives and social enterprises at a public meeting of people wanting to form a co-op to save their local shop, the Village Stores. So I didn't even get as far as the bar before I was sitting down and fielding queries.
Then I noticed the beermats, which proclaimed that this was a Samuel Smith's pub. This, to me, is always a good thing, as even in the most hideous depths of central London it tends to herald good beer, reasonably priced. Sam Smith's, based in Tadcaster, is still an independent brewery and produces a full range of ales, milds and lagers, including an organic lager. And the plural of mild is advisedly used – rarely, it brews both a light and dark mild, and that is a rare and wonderful thing nowadays. The full range is Vegan Society approved and the company's tied pubs have stocked Fairtrade orange juice for some years – ie before it became a hugely successful marketing bandwagon.
But my reasons for being all excited about the Blue Bell don't stop with its beer. Licensees Mark and Mary Dunn seem to be genuinely committed to being part of and improving their local community. The room we used for the meeting for the putative co-op was provided free, as it is for a number of other organisations – from swimmers' groups to tenants' associations – during the rest of the week. Mark himself sat in on the meeting, and seemed keen to make sure that the street's excellent local shop was maintained somehow.
The descendant of market traders, Mark is bringing his interest in Manchester's history of local food production to bear on his community activities. He and other residents are planning a People's Orchard, planted with regional fruit tree varieties – and he is well able to list the kind of apples he wants to see promoted, varieties like Jonathan which have distinctive flavours and textures, instead of the bland offerings in British supermarkets.
The Blue Bell also has a wild patch out the back, where there are logs for hedgehogs to hibernate in and native flowers growing. And every year, the pub presents any children who want to enter its Garden Competition with a tub and some money to buy plants and seeds from Village Stores, and at the end of the summer the best mini-gardens win prizes. As Mark says, “it keeps them out of trouble and gives them a real sense of achievement.”

On other topics, the students occupying a building at Manchester University in solidarity with the people of Gaza are still there, a fantastic array of banners still adorning the front of the Simon Building and a great range of film showings, Dabke dance workshops and Fairtrade Palestinian olive oil launches taking place in the occupied space.
In Gaza, my friend Sharyn has moved from working with ambulances and medics to accompanying farmers into their fields where, it is hoped, the presence of internationals will allow them to harvest their crops – vital for the income of so many families and communities – without the worst excesses of Israeli military brutality. To date, results have been mixed, and despite the presence of ISMers several farmers harvesting parsley and other crops have been injured and killed by Israeli soldiers shooting at them.
On the climate change front, efforts to put together a 'Call to Real Action' in response to Manchester City Council's laughable 'Call to Action' effort continue apace, drawing in a wide range of people increasingly concerned about the lack of any real constructive activity on the subject.
And the interviews Marc and I gave to the Observer and the Mail on the subject of not having kids, which spawned a host of invitations to do more interviews, appear on the radio and feature in documentaries, has come back to haunt us yet again. Some freelancer called Britt has being trying to get in touch for an interview, pitching an article to the Guardian which – she rather misguidedly tried to reassure me – would also feature Teri 'I had an abortion for the planet' Vernelli, the other interviewee from the Mail article. The unusual thing about this Britt woman, who appears to work for IPC Media when she's not freelancing for the Grauniad, has been her persistence, sending me several emails, but more annoyingly harassing my former employers at Ethical Consumer and Togetherworks social enterprise network, where I'm a director, for my sins.