Went to Nablus to see the world’s largest knafeh. We got there a little late because our bus broke down, so instead, we got to see a mad crush of people and no knafeh. We didn’t get up the building from which you could actually see the 75 meter long pastry, so I “borrowed” a picture from here.
Month: July 2009 Page 2 of 3
The aforementioned adventure with Jared was going to the weekly protest in the village of Ni’lin. The wall passes through their olive groves, and nearby settlements cut them off from 40% of their land. The protest followed Friday prayers in the mosque, and then several hundred people walked to the wall. Or, as close as the Israeli army would let us. Here is a short movie of the march.
The first volley of teargas came quickly. For ten seconds, I thought “what’s the big deal?” And then it hit. Eyes watering, coughing, sputtering, I ran through the prickly bushes, over loose stone fences, back to relative safety. I was wearing a press vest with ceramic inserts for impact protection. But people have been killed here, including children and internationals. They didn’t fire rubber bullets this time, only teargas, and that was enough for me.
We moved along the path of the wall, through the olive groves that the people are set on defending from the encroaching settlement. The soldiers followed, firing volleys from two flanks, pushing us up a hill and away from the wall. The wind was in our favor, and I wasn’t gassed again as badly. The shebab who moved forward to throw stones were used to it, and walked defiantly through clouds with only a scarf around their face. I’ll definitely send Jared my gas mask when I get back home; he’ll get more use out of it here than in Boston.
We walked back to the town through the olive groves. Last time Jared was here, the army invaded the town, and the violence continued for hours. This time at least, it wound down without serious incident. We hailed a taxi and went back to Ramallah to write, reflect, and shower. The shebab of Ni’lin will be back next week, and so will the army.
Here is Jared’s article for Ma’an, fresh off the wire: Israeli soldiers crack down on Ni’lin protesters.
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Update, 7/19: International Solidarity Movement released this video of the protest. You can see Jared and me wearing black press vests running from a huge volley of teargas around 1:55.
Hannah slept like a rock last night. After a leisurely morning, we went to the Old City so she can get her bearings. Wandered around in the Muslim Quarter for awhile, then moseyed over to the Wailing Wall. Hannah was constrained to the women’s area, but I wandered into the air conditioned synagogue in the tunnels to the left. Fundamentally unfair, but I guess that’s the way it is. Then we ascended the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif via the Maghrebi-gate. I thought the whole complex was closed to non-Muslims, but we didn’t have any trouble. It’s a profoundly beautiful spot, as the pictures attest. Sadly, I think that if “we” got to rebuild the temple it wouldn’t be nearly as pretty.
Met Nitin and the Voices Beyond Walls crew for drinks, so Hannah could meet them. Then we met Hannah’s friends Carrie and Brian for waffles and a walk through the German Colony. She’ll hang out with them on Shabbat, and Jared and I will go on an adventure. More on that later.
Went on a tour with the observers from the Temporary International Presence in Hebron. Rosa managed to get us in, as she used to work for the Danish Representative Office in Ramallah, and the observers are mostly Scandinavian. How very diplomatic of them…
The TIPH was created in 1997 as an addendum to the Oslo Process, and so has been temporary for over twelve years, with no sign of it ceasing to be necessary. Hebron is perhaps the mostly starkly divided city in the West Bank, home to 150,000 Palestinians and 530 settlers. The modern settlement was founded by Moshe Levinger and his wife Miriam; to whom I don’t think I am directly related, but which nonetheless colored my experience.The settlers are explicitly ideological, and espouse the goal of establishing “Eretz Israel” from the Nile to the Euphrates, with violence as an acceptable means. They occupy an area in the heart of the old city, near the Abraham Mosque/Cave of the Patriarchs. Violence has gone both ways, with a massacre of 67 Jews in 1929, the killing of six yeshiva students in 1980, and ongoing violence by settlers against the local community. In December 2008, after being forcibly removed from Beit Hashalom, a building they claim to have legally purchased despite the disagreement of the Israeli high court, settlers went on a rampage of Palestinian shops, shooting one man.
To me, the more insidious violence is the everyday interaction, not the massacres. The old city souq is covered with protective wire to shield the Palestinian shoppers from thrown stones and bottles, although it cannot stop dirty water or urine. As I was walking through taking pictures, a young boy spit at me from several stories up, missing by inches. His aim indicated significant practice.
Palestinians are forbidden from using several streets by the settlements, separating children from a school. TIPH observers walk every morning with them for protection. On this road, I saw a young woman nonchalantly carrying a very large automatic weapon. When I asked our guide whether a permit was required for such a gun, she replied “I’ll bet she knows how to use it.” The graffiti covering Palestinian shops and schools shows a new use of the Star of David. From its use to identify Jews in the Holocaust, it is now for these people a symbol of nationalism, and a marking of a different kind.
I had been to Hebron before with Jared and Jenna last summer, and we walked around the settlement area some. But being there with the international observers and hearing their assessment was a whole different experience. The souq was nearly empty, perhaps because it was a Friday, but it lacked much of the vibrancy I remember last year. We did avoid having any weapons pointed directly at us, as we had in the Freedom Cafe last summer. That much was a relief. I can’t imagine living in that tense of a situation, as a settler, Palestinian, or international observer. Just being there for a few hours was enough, and left me with lots to think through.
I met a friend of a friend from the internet today to do some cross-border mapping. We started in the Old City, where she hadn’t seen, getting suitably caffeinated for the walk to come. I took her to Shufat camp, as it’s not currently well mapped in the OSM dataset, and it’s a profoundly different place than Jerusalem, despite being less than 10 miles away. The change from Jewish West Jerusalem to Arab East, and then to the camp itself, is really striking. Language, religion, politics, and government services all shift over a short distance. We talked about the discontinuity as we walked around gathering road and point data.
Then we did a total turn around, and went to the “artists colony” at Ein Kerem. The tranquility of the lush valley hides an ugly past. It was an arab village that was “abandoned” in 1948, or so a resident said, making sure to point out that there wasn’t a massacre here as there was at Deir Yassin only a few miles north. But whether or not there was physical violence, people did not leave these beautiful houses without reason. The very reason the town has so much charm, and is now becoming trendy, is due to the vanished occupants. Those same families now live in places like Shufat, so far from their old homes.
After that jarring experience, we decided to go for the full Zionist kick at the Western Wall tunnels. She had another friend who met us there, and we were wowed by the multimedia-archaeological spectacle. The tour guide expounded on the glory of King Herod’s engineering feat: leveling the top of Mt Moriah, the center of creation and the spot where Abraham prepared his son for sacrifice, and building upon it a glorious temple. The tunnel follows the western retaining wall of the temple mount, which is far longer than the small “wailing” section reveals. There are some massive stones down there, bigger than those used in the pyramids. Although, it was built 2000 years after Giza with Roman techniques, so let’s not get too excited.
I bid my new friend adieu as she went to the airport, and I headed back to Ramallah. There was a long wait at the checkpoint while the rush hour traffic cleared. There’s no actual check going out of Israel proper into the West Bank, but there was a backup nonetheless. Went out for drinks with other internationals, and discussed the relative dependence of Palestine on NGO funding over many rounds of Taybeh beer. The taste of the revolution, indeed.