It's the Eid holiday: Eid ul Fitr, the Muslim feast day to celebrate the end of the month hard slog of ramadan. In Afghanistan 7 years ago, Gemma, my wonderful colleague turned friend and I had some days off over this festival and called it 'Read' rather than Eid - using the time to catch up on neglected background reading for work.
In Jerusalem this year, Eid feels more like 'Bleed'. The streets have been empty and quiet for days, and you feel like no Palestinian in the whole country, or even the world, has the appetite for a feast day this year of all years.
Well over 1,000 people have died in Gaza now, and over 6,000 have been wounded. With 53 Israeli soldiers killed in the process. It's hard not to feel that the place - or the Palestinian part of it at least - is being bled to death. Is it really possible to kill a country?
We've been hopping between East and West over the past week. We ventured West, to Mehane Yehuda market at night time for a dinner of freshly caught Mediterranean fish, some delicious white wine, and sat chatting with friends to the accompaniment of ska and reggae from a funky young band a couple of stalls away. Young people milled about - piercings, trendy clothes, female legs on show, smiles and laughter. Very far from anything you might describe as wartime. And an entire world away from the scenes we're seeing from Gaza.
Then we came home, back East. We were met by the bossy honk of Israeli police cars and sirens, and the inescapable stench of 'skunk water' the vile liquid the riot police spray on the crowds, making us wretch as we walked into our house and forcing us to close all the windows. A Palestinian man was leaning against our outer wall vomiting, panting and trying to talk on the phone to a friend. Sweaty young men in black t-shirts, fresh from a demonstration, staggered along the road covering their faces against the fetid air.
2 Palestinian men were killed in West Bank demonstrations that night.
Bleeding and suffocating. The tactics of killing a nation seem still as basic as ever.
Meanwhile we're still managing to play happy families. We spent the weekend in northern Israel with some friends who came to visit us from Jordan. They innocently asked a garage attendant if he spoke Arabic. 'We are a country at war. I am Israeli. Please don't insult me,' he responded.
We forgot about war for a while at the safari park near Tel Aviv - the animals, particularly a curious ostrich, a welcome break from humans.
And now we're preparing to go on holiday to the UK, which J and I agreed feels like a betrayal, and a guilt-inducing escape. While they're not letting anyone into Gaza, we still feel that just by staying put and showing solidarity we might be contributing. Though it's impossible to know how to help.
Sometimes you pluck a book from the shelf and you read in wonder as you get the feeling each word is written especially for you at that precise moment. I'm finally reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which I can't recommend enough for existential dilemmas, whether inside or outside of a war zone. And I've found a certain consolation in many of Robert Pirsig's paragraphs, including this one:
'I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature...; or with programs full of things for other people to do...Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.'
And as Desmond Tutu writes in his Book of Forgiveness : 'The quality of human life on our planet is nothing more than the sum total of our daily interactions with one another.'
On that consolatory note, I'm going to pack our bags for a three week foray in a green and familiar land, with our two little forces of stickiness, and pause for a while.
We just hope and pray that this still beautiful country won't be bleeding as badly when we return.
Though a point of return at the moment, seems a faraway dream.
In Jerusalem this year, Eid feels more like 'Bleed'. The streets have been empty and quiet for days, and you feel like no Palestinian in the whole country, or even the world, has the appetite for a feast day this year of all years.
Well over 1,000 people have died in Gaza now, and over 6,000 have been wounded. With 53 Israeli soldiers killed in the process. It's hard not to feel that the place - or the Palestinian part of it at least - is being bled to death. Is it really possible to kill a country?
We've been hopping between East and West over the past week. We ventured West, to Mehane Yehuda market at night time for a dinner of freshly caught Mediterranean fish, some delicious white wine, and sat chatting with friends to the accompaniment of ska and reggae from a funky young band a couple of stalls away. Young people milled about - piercings, trendy clothes, female legs on show, smiles and laughter. Very far from anything you might describe as wartime. And an entire world away from the scenes we're seeing from Gaza.
Then we came home, back East. We were met by the bossy honk of Israeli police cars and sirens, and the inescapable stench of 'skunk water' the vile liquid the riot police spray on the crowds, making us wretch as we walked into our house and forcing us to close all the windows. A Palestinian man was leaning against our outer wall vomiting, panting and trying to talk on the phone to a friend. Sweaty young men in black t-shirts, fresh from a demonstration, staggered along the road covering their faces against the fetid air.
2 Palestinian men were killed in West Bank demonstrations that night.
Bleeding and suffocating. The tactics of killing a nation seem still as basic as ever.
Meanwhile we're still managing to play happy families. We spent the weekend in northern Israel with some friends who came to visit us from Jordan. They innocently asked a garage attendant if he spoke Arabic. 'We are a country at war. I am Israeli. Please don't insult me,' he responded.
We forgot about war for a while at the safari park near Tel Aviv - the animals, particularly a curious ostrich, a welcome break from humans.
And now we're preparing to go on holiday to the UK, which J and I agreed feels like a betrayal, and a guilt-inducing escape. While they're not letting anyone into Gaza, we still feel that just by staying put and showing solidarity we might be contributing. Though it's impossible to know how to help.
Sometimes you pluck a book from the shelf and you read in wonder as you get the feeling each word is written especially for you at that precise moment. I'm finally reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which I can't recommend enough for existential dilemmas, whether inside or outside of a war zone. And I've found a certain consolation in many of Robert Pirsig's paragraphs, including this one:
'I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature...; or with programs full of things for other people to do...Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.'
And as Desmond Tutu writes in his Book of Forgiveness : 'The quality of human life on our planet is nothing more than the sum total of our daily interactions with one another.'
On that consolatory note, I'm going to pack our bags for a three week foray in a green and familiar land, with our two little forces of stickiness, and pause for a while.
We just hope and pray that this still beautiful country won't be bleeding as badly when we return.
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| St Grace's contribution to the dwarves' spiritual development |
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