J and I drove through the driving rain to Ramallah on Wednesday - the brittle landscape dotted with olive groves looking uncharacteristically grey and draped in cloud. The Israeli soldiers at the checkpoints didn't even come out to check our papers - preferring to stay in the fug of the kiosk away from the cold.
We arrived at a restaurant situated on the side of a hill overlooking a slope of green trees and plantations - a rare sight in this age of urban development where each green patch seems to be engulfed as fast as the grass grows, with sand coloured buildings. After a few a minutes at our table, J's Palestinian friend Adela arrived, resplendent in a bright yellow jumper, making up for the lack of sunshine that day.
She has an important job in Palestinian political life and knows the socio-political landscape as well as her own heart. Her children are quite grown up now, and she is separated from her husband, but she shares her days between 3 different jobs, and in her few minutes of spare time, she told us proudly, she is learning to cook.
From the outside we were all in similar situations - professional, working parents trying to carve out a meaningful existence and raise children. But after talking to Adela for a couple of hours over hummus, fatuous and warm flat bread followed by tagine, the reality of an ordinary middle class working mother in Palestine became clearer.
She explained how her teenage daughter is in mourning for a university classmate of hers who was shot by the Israeli Defence Forces two days previously. Saji Darwish was out riding his horse near Ramallah when it happened. 'She has always lived with the struggle that we all live,' Adela explained with her barely accented, perfect English, 'but this is the first time she's had the raw truth of it pushed in her face. She's devastated and she wants to go and demonstrate against the occupation now. I can't persuade her not to.'
Adela's son had tried to get his sister to see things differently. 'You should go and demonstrate against our rubbish governments of Hamas and Fatah, not the occupation,' he explained. 'This is where the real problems lie.'
'I think I agree with my son', Adela sighed.
She went on to describe how at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah, which has a name for its open minded approach to education and is one of the best known in Palestine, is becoming more hard line. 'My daughter doesn't wear the hijab and none of us are really that religious although our family is Muslim,' Adela explained, 'And her tutor, who is very Islamic, gives her lower marks because of this, and she feels she doesn't have his respect.'
Adela has an incessant cough which she thinks is an allergy, though she can't work out the cause. I suggested maybe it was an allergy to Palestinian politics and gave her some of our medical contacts in Jerusalem. Unlike many Palestinians, she has Jerusalem identification papers which enable her to go to the city. Many Palestinians have not been able to visit Jerusalem since 1967, meaning that Ramallah has become a capital, albeit not official, Palestinian hub in its own right.
Also this week, a 38 year old Jordanian-Palestinian judge was shot dead by the IDF at the Allenby bridge crossing from Jordan to Israel (the crossing we use). There has been an outcry about all of these murders - including 3 Palestinian fighters who were killed by Israeli airstrikes this week. In a recent report, Amnesty International has accused Israel of being 'trigger happy' and using 'excessive violence'. But you wonder at politics, and why David Cameron in his visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories this week, couldn't echo these sentiments also.
Unsurprisingly, there is talk of a 3rd intifada on the Al Jazeera website. You can see why these people have no choice but to resort to violence. Who is listnening to them? Not the Israelis, not their own people and even the international community, formerly very focused on the Israel-Palestine dynamic, are distracted by the sceptre of Syria and the issue of the deepening fitna in the Arab world.
We arrived at a restaurant situated on the side of a hill overlooking a slope of green trees and plantations - a rare sight in this age of urban development where each green patch seems to be engulfed as fast as the grass grows, with sand coloured buildings. After a few a minutes at our table, J's Palestinian friend Adela arrived, resplendent in a bright yellow jumper, making up for the lack of sunshine that day.
She has an important job in Palestinian political life and knows the socio-political landscape as well as her own heart. Her children are quite grown up now, and she is separated from her husband, but she shares her days between 3 different jobs, and in her few minutes of spare time, she told us proudly, she is learning to cook.
From the outside we were all in similar situations - professional, working parents trying to carve out a meaningful existence and raise children. But after talking to Adela for a couple of hours over hummus, fatuous and warm flat bread followed by tagine, the reality of an ordinary middle class working mother in Palestine became clearer.
She explained how her teenage daughter is in mourning for a university classmate of hers who was shot by the Israeli Defence Forces two days previously. Saji Darwish was out riding his horse near Ramallah when it happened. 'She has always lived with the struggle that we all live,' Adela explained with her barely accented, perfect English, 'but this is the first time she's had the raw truth of it pushed in her face. She's devastated and she wants to go and demonstrate against the occupation now. I can't persuade her not to.'
Adela's son had tried to get his sister to see things differently. 'You should go and demonstrate against our rubbish governments of Hamas and Fatah, not the occupation,' he explained. 'This is where the real problems lie.'
'I think I agree with my son', Adela sighed.
She went on to describe how at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah, which has a name for its open minded approach to education and is one of the best known in Palestine, is becoming more hard line. 'My daughter doesn't wear the hijab and none of us are really that religious although our family is Muslim,' Adela explained, 'And her tutor, who is very Islamic, gives her lower marks because of this, and she feels she doesn't have his respect.'
Adela has an incessant cough which she thinks is an allergy, though she can't work out the cause. I suggested maybe it was an allergy to Palestinian politics and gave her some of our medical contacts in Jerusalem. Unlike many Palestinians, she has Jerusalem identification papers which enable her to go to the city. Many Palestinians have not been able to visit Jerusalem since 1967, meaning that Ramallah has become a capital, albeit not official, Palestinian hub in its own right.
Also this week, a 38 year old Jordanian-Palestinian judge was shot dead by the IDF at the Allenby bridge crossing from Jordan to Israel (the crossing we use). There has been an outcry about all of these murders - including 3 Palestinian fighters who were killed by Israeli airstrikes this week. In a recent report, Amnesty International has accused Israel of being 'trigger happy' and using 'excessive violence'. But you wonder at politics, and why David Cameron in his visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories this week, couldn't echo these sentiments also.
Unsurprisingly, there is talk of a 3rd intifada on the Al Jazeera website. You can see why these people have no choice but to resort to violence. Who is listnening to them? Not the Israelis, not their own people and even the international community, formerly very focused on the Israel-Palestine dynamic, are distracted by the sceptre of Syria and the issue of the deepening fitna in the Arab world.
East Jerusaem was never the capital of the Arabs living in Palestine - because there was never an Arab Palestinian state in Palestine.
ReplyDeleteIt was a town under British rule and before that for 400 years a town under Ottoman rule and many other rulers before that, but never he capital of an Arab Palestinian state.
According to the 1947 UN resolution, Jerusalem was not suppose to be the capital neither of the proposed Arab state nor the proposed Jewish state.
It was supposed to be an international enclave.
The Arabs who rejected that UN resolution and opened a war against the Jews in Palestinian changed the rules of the game. The Jordanians captured the old city in 1948 and held it until 1967 but strangely they didn't turn it into the capital of a Palestinian Arab state. They ruled it as if it was part of the Hashemite monarchy and the Arabs living in it became part of this monarchy and I don't recall any protests of the Arabs living in it that they live under occupation.