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.