14 August 2008

 

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Westbankblogger has returned! For the first time in a while a trip into the West Bank has resulted in a more than mundane experience. And so, here's another instalment…

Another Hebron

On Monday and Tuesday of this week I was in Hebron. I went to visit a Californian history teacher I met a year ago, who comes for a month or so each summer to live and volunteer in the city. But as I came off the bus in front of the Tomb of the Patriarchs he was leading a tour around the central trouble spots. So I walked across the green grassy courtyard, through the metal detectors and up the steps to the tomb. Inside I picked up a scull cap, followed the passage way and took a prayer book from a shelf. Then into the central opening of the Jewish part of the structure. I found a seat and opened my book. In front of me sat a large bearded man behind a lectern on which, reverentially, were placed the two volumes of The Jewish Idea by Rabbi Meir Kahane, the leader of Kach, a party banned in 1984 for racism. I ran through the morning service.

Emerging from the Tomb I went to wait on the grass. On the way out I chatted to some of the police stationed there, one of whom had a degree in "political science" which he said had done nothing for him. I talked on the phone and chatted with some soldiers. Then I got a call from John, the Californian. I was to wait on the steps of a settler shop/café, the 'Gutnik Centre'. This I did. I sat on the steps, watching a young grey tethered horse wrangle with its chains by a checkpoint just to my right. Ten minutes passed. I read some of 1066 and All That by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman. Another ten minutes. A religious lament started to pipe loudly out from speakers above my perch. Then I recognized the tune: nicked from Leonard Cohen's 'The Partisan'.

John appeared, still with the tour group. I went with them for a few minutes, harassed all the way by a settler in a jeep. The group left us. John and I went through a checkpoint. My passport was momentarily examined and I was allowed through. In the CPT (Christian Peacemaker Teams) flat I was introduced to those present, including another John, an old British soldier whom I'd also met a year ago.

Time passed. In the flat I found myself bored, almost taking hold of a laptop to read random miscellaneous Guardian pieces lamenting Gordon Brown. John hadn't the time to baby-sit me, and I wouldn’t go anywhere alone. Then the older John (80 years of age) asked if anyone would accompany him walking towards Kiryat Arba, to check on happenings there. I volunteered.

We passed the Tomb and walk up hill, up the wide tarmacked road which cuts straight through a string of abandoned houses. Then out into the open, the no-man's-land between Hebron and Kiryat Arba. In the middle of the wide space which separates the two we saw a tent. Soon we were confronted by about a dozen teenagers, 14-16. John said to keep walking, to ignore them. This I did. Some shouted. The girls read the back of John's shirt in Hebrew, laughed about how scary he was, how he repulsed them. John kept going. He was beyond me now, higher up the hill. My path was blocked. A stocky sixteen-year-old, large scull cap, short blond hair, long blond side-curls, short, wide, squared up to me. We lent on each other. We held one another. I said we just wanted to go over there (a few meters), then off to the right. He ordered me back. John kept going. I asked John whether to cross into Hebrew: an experiment, I wanted to see what'd happen. This he permitted. The experiment bore results. With my first words the kid flew into a rage, pushing me, screaming at me. "Calm yourself", I said to him, "khalas". (Khalas, ie. "enough" in Arabic and colloquial Hebrew). "Khalas?!", he shouted, "Khalas?!". For him, apparently, khalas was a word only in Arabic. He kept screaming, asking me what I was doing with the Christian and the Arabs. I told his friends to calm him. They looked on. I looked around for soldiers, but there were none around. His blue eyes bulged. I said I was from the Tel-Aviv University, that I was interested, that I had friends in Kiryat Arba, that I'd prayed that morning in the Tomb. "Go back to Tel-Aviv!", he screamed, "You hate us! You hate us! You hate us!" He head-butted me square in the mouth. I wiped my gob. Blood covered my hand. I placed it on his shoulder, on his white tzitzit which he wore over a green t-shirt. "A Jew doesn't hit a Jew!", I said, playing on the settlers' slogan from the Disengagement. "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you!", I said, (Hillel the Elder's maxim, three words in Hebrew). We disengaged. "You’ve got blood on your tzitzit" I shouted to him. "Your blood!", He retorted. "Exactly!", I said. By this point John was making his way back down past the mêlée. Finally, we withdrew.

We looped and zigzagged 'round the slopey streets, finally finding our way into the Old City without the need for another checkpoint and a second showing of my passport. Like in Hawara in the north, these checkpoints can be easily circumnavigated given will and time. John, the old soldier, explained this simply: soldiers need to be given something to do.

In the evening I went to the local café, the Freedom Coffee Shop, to sit with local Hebronites and Tariq, a Palestinian-American and Bethlehemite Christian who works for CPT. We were in the Old City, a place quiet but for the odd pair or small group of western tourists. We smoked nargillah and drank coffee. We talked. In the street a teenager, maybe eighteen ran, caught his younger brother by the collar and gave him a caffah (a slap round the head) which was massive. The hand thudded through the back of the boy's head. He cried and whimpered. Tariq gulped. Conversation paused, then continued. We talked about women, about the gorgeous Tel-Aviv women who wear very little in the summer, especially on the beach. I kept my identity well under wraps. Talk turned to politics. They hated Hamas, though it was strong in Hebron. I sat beneath a picture of Yasser Arafat, whom they called Abu Amar. One large, friendly guy I talked with a lot – I think he wanted to practice his English – produced two pendants, one with the Fatah symbol, the other with Arafat's face. He kissed the latter. On the telly Bruce Lee was beating someone up.

I slept under a large poster showing a world map, surrounded by the world's flags. I checked: Israel's wasn't there, though the Palestinian one was. In the middle of the night I was woken by the cold. I was kept awake by what sounded like hundreds of dogs, all barking at each other angrily.

At around 9:30 am I heard kids singing outside. I looked out of the window. On the street above a group of settler children were running by, singing/chanting, "eizeh nudnickim!" again and again. (Roughly translated, "What naggers!")

10am. A cockerel crowed. My girlfriend rang to complain about Avrum Burg's new book, the first hundred pages of which I'm making her read.

I helped John clean the second of their flats, prior to the arrival of a group of internationals down from Bethlehem. Then I got Jamie, a visiting Englishmen, to baby-sit me. He came with me to look for a present for my girlfriend. The self-styled master haggler took control, bartering over any object which I tapped twice. We did this in the shop of a friend of John's, a banterous man whose fluent English was infected with a strong Mancunian accent having spent the first four years of the eighties in Manchester. We wondered into town. The Old City and adjacent settlement used to be the heart of the city, the hub. Now the action's moved on. We emerged from the narrow old streets, dark and cool beneath high-hanging tarpaulin, into a sudden loud bustle. The streets opened up. They widened and filled until we were walking up what felt like Oxford Street, though with little traffic. Jamie led me to what in Britain would be a chippie or a greasy spoon. We got rice and he ate grilled chicken, the bones of which I cleaned. I ate kebab, dark strips of tasty meat. As we left a group of kids surrounded Jamie. Tall with wavy longish blond hair and blond beard he, apparently, looks the spitting image of a popular Turkish TV hero. They had their pictures taken with him. I took the last one so that they could all get in the frame. He was used to it – it's happened to him all over the West Bank. We went to buy Knapfeh (Arab sweets) for me to bring back to my girlfriends. 15 Shekels for half a kilo, a fraction of what it'd cost in Tel-Aviv. Good stuff too.

We went for a wonder, though I kept checking that he knew how to get back. I was feeling less nervous now. As long as I was British I felt fine. We went uphill and into residential streets. On the walls I saw words scrawled in Hebrew, "rimmon", "etrog", "duvdevan". There were arrows, sometimes numbers two. These were names of Israeli army units, seemingly soldiers telling one another where their positions were to avoid firing on each other. Once this was realized, the place felt different. There had been fighting there not so long ago. A kid ran up to me, "shekel!" he demanded, his hand outstretched. I shook my head. But he was more determinned – and cheekier – than other kids had been. He followed us, and kept asking. I checked my pocket: two half shekels and a ten agorot piece. I put these in his hand and he ran off. Within a moment his older brother was there, also ready to plead. I shouted to him to go and ask his brother for half and, with my pointing, he somehow got the message and left us alone.

Back in the Old City, I left my bag with a Jamie at the café and returned to the CPT flat to get the rest of my things. By the time I returned another nargillah/coffee session was well underway. Jamie and I talked a bit, toking in the fruity smoke. A car screeched. A BMW had halted suddenly at the caf's entrance. Smoke bellowed from the exhaust. The windows came down. A round-faced man in a large white Turkish scull-cap and with a big black moustache, its edges long, spiky, pointing to the sky, sat and glared at us. Abu Kamil; I was later told that Abu Kamil was his name. The BMW screeched again and, going backwards, it was gone. The conversation continued. We talked of Ramallah, which I visited a few years ago. I did an impersonation of that city's famous traffic cop who theatrically turns and swerves to control the traffic flow in the central square. The caf owner got out a DVD and put it on: that same policeman appeared on the screen, pirouetting and gesticulating, then being interviewed. Back to politics. Like all Palestinians I've spoken to they discounted or detested almost all politicians, though they still loved Abu Amar. They were sceptical of Marwan Barghouti, the imprisoned Fatah leader, though placed him higher than the rest. There was a commotion in the street. The tourists and locals jumped out to see. Soldiers were detaining a 14-year-old boy. I sat tight. I talked to the French tourists to my right. Smug Parisians. They disliked Tel-Aviv and didn't intend to return to sovereign Israel on the other side of the Green Line. They hated the way Israelis in Tel-Aviv enjoy themselves while in Hebron there was an occupation. That was the point, I told them: the bubble. People go to live in Tel-Aviv to escape the situation. They'll have given three years of their lives to the army, plus taxes, all to support policies they didn't ask for and didn't vote for. I should have me mentioned Algiers. I didn't.

I gave Jamie the nod. We rose to leave and I bade all farewell, giving one guy my e-mail. We strode through the Ibrahimi Mosque (Tomb of the Patriarchs) checkpoint. We went through like we owned the place, as advised by the Johns of CPT. Then I walked with Jamie past the Tomb and up the hill to Kiryat Arba – he needed to use a cash machine. I showed the guard my Israeli ID and said that Jamie was a British friend. Having gotten the money, we tried to walk across the settlement. Jamie commented that the place resembled a condominium. I asked what condominium was, and was told that it meant a pleasant communal holiday-village, where people could hold second homes. We got a bit lost. I asked some Russian kids how to get to the road down to Hebron (where I 'd been with John the previous day). They said it was dangerous: there were Arabs around there. I said I'd been there, on a Friday/Shabbat. Yes, they said, but during the week there were no soldiers there. I told them that only Jamie would walk down and (being tall and blond) he didn't look Jewish, so it was OK. Neither did they. We got the directions. I left him on that road and made my way to the bus station, bound for Jerusalem. There was a bus at the station, its green frame puckered with a string of bullet-shaped indentations. It wasn't the right bus though. I'd have to wait.

The bus was packed. At the back sat a group of ultra-orthodox men, arguing in Russian. Of the many kids, only one was screaming. Stuck behind the frosted bullet-proof glass I opted for sleep. I awoke as we entered Jerusalem. A settler kid, large scull cap, large eyes and long blond side-curls, the son of a woman who droned at him in French, perched over the back of the seat in front of me. He stared at me. We exchanged silly faces. Then, the bus weaving through the Holy City, I exchanged some words with the man to my right, probably the only other secular person on the bus. He'd been down in Hebron for a few weeks, having gotten building work. Now he was back off home to the Golan Heights. I went straight back home to Tel-Aviv, the Big Bubble.


This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?