Our mornings now begin with a bit of a starter gun since one of us needs to leave the house at 7.15 with the Lozenge. Though now we've found a short cut through an ultra orthodox area between us and the school we've shaved 7 minutes off the journey - each morning minute a little shard of gold to be carefully used. As we drive we are flanked by Haredim in their black hats and coats, white socks, beards and sidelocks; women with starchy brown wigs and strings of multiple children - all rushing off somewhere. J said to me the other day: 'Since they don't work and they don't do military service - I always wonder where they're all rushing off to. I want to stop and ask one of them one day.'
And for the last 10 days, Rashimi and I have had the time to tootle about, the two of us, until the Lozenge reappears in the white high top mini bus outside our gate at 3.15. Rashimi's favourite start to the day is to sit naked at the kitchen table eating porridge, while trying to pick up his little rubber crocodile with the kitchen tongs. His imaginary friend, Cololo, is normally in tow for most projects, including the olive harvest.
Rashimi makes sure I lay a place for Cololo at midday complete with a plate of Rashimi's preferred luncheon: falafel and hummus.
Sometimes the Lozenge's bus driver, Da'ub accompanies him down the two steps of the minibus and the 2 feet to our gate, his hand on the Lozenge's shaggy head in an avuncular fashion. The moment Rashimi sees him arrive he scuttles barefoot down the pathway yelling: 'Lauwiieeeee!' throwing himself at L, who juggles remains of packed lunch and whatever creations he's clutching from school to reciprocate the hug. 'Hello Washimi.' Then they spend the rest of the afternoon arguing, wrestling, finding worms in the garden or making dens before finally collapsing in front of the TV - still under a rug, though it's 30 degrees most days.
Sometimes we go to the little park down the road covered in broken glass and try and make some conversation with the Arab Mums who give us a smile and pat the boys heads. On the way back we go to the bread shop where the baker gives the dwarves a pitta each, fresh from the oven, into which they sink their sticky faces and then don't eat their dinner. Last week we made creme caramel (from a packet) and croissants (not from a packet and a time consuming and buttery business) and the house smelt like a French bakery for the next couple of days.
Since St Grace is still away, J and I have watched the entire series of the Honourable Woman, an 8 part drama on BBC 2 about Israel and Palestine. It was brilliant and gripping and we are now in mourning that we've finished it. It was really quite violent in parts, and it made me realise how much we've come to accept this in television, film and on the internet these days - both dramatised but more chillingly, real. Douglas Murray wrote a piece in the Spectator recently about how we should not accept to view or worse still, circulate, the villainous 'Islamic State's' videos showing beheadings and crucifixions. Not only does it normalise this kind of violence, but we are playing into their evil hands by clicking 'view' or 'share'.
While the ceasefire seems to be enduring here in Israel/Gaza, you can't help but feel that this country is similar to body riddled with cancer and this latest bout of fighting like a raging attack of pneumonia. And while the pneumonia has cleared, the body still suffers from the cancer as before.
Gaza is in a state of ruin. Dfid has just pledged £17 million towards reconstruction efforts. You wonder how many times an area of land can be reconsructed.
Meanwhile Israel has just 'confiscated' an area of 1,000 acres of land around Bethlehem, from the Palestinians, in retaliation for the murder of the 3 Israeli students in June. If like me, you're no good at envisaging acreage - think of an area twice the size of London's Olympic Park, or a patch bigger than the area used by the Glastonbury Festival.
Palestinian owners of the land have been given 45 days to submit formal objections to the announcement in Israeli courts, otherwise all confiscated lands would automatically become Israeli government property.
Is not over 2,000 deaths in Gaza - the large majority civilians and children - enough of a retaliation?
The cycle always leads back to another acerbically justified, but nonetheless illegal land grab.
One of Rashimi's and my adventures this week was to Katamon district in Jerusalem, where a few Palestinians I know once lived pre-1948, including Suha, founder of the Darat al Funun Gallery, and the author Ghada Karmi. This Des Res no longer belongs to Palestine. We wandered around San Simon park - famous for its Greek Orthodox monastery from where in 1948, Arab fighters tried in vain to defend the area.
I was in some ways impressed at this leafy quarter, that felt so safe and family friendly: the kind of place that a race of persecuted people should rightly dream of. And in many ways this dream has been created - but at what cost? For as long as the land grab continues, so will the Israeli people remain slaves to their greatest fear of losing it all, all over again.
Rashimi was less bothered about the meaning behind the leafy Des Res, and had a happy time scuttling in and out of plastic tunnels and flying down the hot slides while little gangs of Jewish children sat about with their Mums singing Hebrew nursery rhymes.
Last night I helped a friend move house with our car. She's moving to a little flat in a beautiful, crumbling district near Mehane Yehuda market, built in the late 1800s to house Jewish families who were moving out of the confines of the Old City walls at that time. We wove carefully with only an inch to spare either side of the car, through tiny alleys. The little square outside her flat was festooned with Israeli flags. Old men and women sat around chatting. We could have been in Greece, Italy or France. On our way back out, everyone helped, people joked and laughed and signalled so we could weave our way safely through the narrow streets.
I mentioned to my friend, who speaks good Hebrew and has lived here a few years, how this friendliness hadn't always been my impression of locals here.
'That's why native Israelis are called 'Sabra'', she explained. Referring to the cactus, or prickly pear, that's spiky on the outside while soft and sweet in the middle.
And for the last 10 days, Rashimi and I have had the time to tootle about, the two of us, until the Lozenge reappears in the white high top mini bus outside our gate at 3.15. Rashimi's favourite start to the day is to sit naked at the kitchen table eating porridge, while trying to pick up his little rubber crocodile with the kitchen tongs. His imaginary friend, Cololo, is normally in tow for most projects, including the olive harvest.
Rashimi makes sure I lay a place for Cololo at midday complete with a plate of Rashimi's preferred luncheon: falafel and hummus.
Sometimes the Lozenge's bus driver, Da'ub accompanies him down the two steps of the minibus and the 2 feet to our gate, his hand on the Lozenge's shaggy head in an avuncular fashion. The moment Rashimi sees him arrive he scuttles barefoot down the pathway yelling: 'Lauwiieeeee!' throwing himself at L, who juggles remains of packed lunch and whatever creations he's clutching from school to reciprocate the hug. 'Hello Washimi.' Then they spend the rest of the afternoon arguing, wrestling, finding worms in the garden or making dens before finally collapsing in front of the TV - still under a rug, though it's 30 degrees most days.
Sometimes we go to the little park down the road covered in broken glass and try and make some conversation with the Arab Mums who give us a smile and pat the boys heads. On the way back we go to the bread shop where the baker gives the dwarves a pitta each, fresh from the oven, into which they sink their sticky faces and then don't eat their dinner. Last week we made creme caramel (from a packet) and croissants (not from a packet and a time consuming and buttery business) and the house smelt like a French bakery for the next couple of days.
Since St Grace is still away, J and I have watched the entire series of the Honourable Woman, an 8 part drama on BBC 2 about Israel and Palestine. It was brilliant and gripping and we are now in mourning that we've finished it. It was really quite violent in parts, and it made me realise how much we've come to accept this in television, film and on the internet these days - both dramatised but more chillingly, real. Douglas Murray wrote a piece in the Spectator recently about how we should not accept to view or worse still, circulate, the villainous 'Islamic State's' videos showing beheadings and crucifixions. Not only does it normalise this kind of violence, but we are playing into their evil hands by clicking 'view' or 'share'.
While the ceasefire seems to be enduring here in Israel/Gaza, you can't help but feel that this country is similar to body riddled with cancer and this latest bout of fighting like a raging attack of pneumonia. And while the pneumonia has cleared, the body still suffers from the cancer as before.
Gaza is in a state of ruin. Dfid has just pledged £17 million towards reconstruction efforts. You wonder how many times an area of land can be reconsructed.
Meanwhile Israel has just 'confiscated' an area of 1,000 acres of land around Bethlehem, from the Palestinians, in retaliation for the murder of the 3 Israeli students in June. If like me, you're no good at envisaging acreage - think of an area twice the size of London's Olympic Park, or a patch bigger than the area used by the Glastonbury Festival.
Palestinian owners of the land have been given 45 days to submit formal objections to the announcement in Israeli courts, otherwise all confiscated lands would automatically become Israeli government property.
Is not over 2,000 deaths in Gaza - the large majority civilians and children - enough of a retaliation?
The cycle always leads back to another acerbically justified, but nonetheless illegal land grab.
One of Rashimi's and my adventures this week was to Katamon district in Jerusalem, where a few Palestinians I know once lived pre-1948, including Suha, founder of the Darat al Funun Gallery, and the author Ghada Karmi. This Des Res no longer belongs to Palestine. We wandered around San Simon park - famous for its Greek Orthodox monastery from where in 1948, Arab fighters tried in vain to defend the area.
I was in some ways impressed at this leafy quarter, that felt so safe and family friendly: the kind of place that a race of persecuted people should rightly dream of. And in many ways this dream has been created - but at what cost? For as long as the land grab continues, so will the Israeli people remain slaves to their greatest fear of losing it all, all over again.
Rashimi was less bothered about the meaning behind the leafy Des Res, and had a happy time scuttling in and out of plastic tunnels and flying down the hot slides while little gangs of Jewish children sat about with their Mums singing Hebrew nursery rhymes.
Last night I helped a friend move house with our car. She's moving to a little flat in a beautiful, crumbling district near Mehane Yehuda market, built in the late 1800s to house Jewish families who were moving out of the confines of the Old City walls at that time. We wove carefully with only an inch to spare either side of the car, through tiny alleys. The little square outside her flat was festooned with Israeli flags. Old men and women sat around chatting. We could have been in Greece, Italy or France. On our way back out, everyone helped, people joked and laughed and signalled so we could weave our way safely through the narrow streets.
I mentioned to my friend, who speaks good Hebrew and has lived here a few years, how this friendliness hadn't always been my impression of locals here.
'That's why native Israelis are called 'Sabra'', she explained. Referring to the cactus, or prickly pear, that's spiky on the outside while soft and sweet in the middle.
The neighboorhoods near Mahane Yehuda market were built in the 1870's and 1880's by Jews. They are a cluster of neighboorhoods but most people refer to them as the Nahlaot neighborhood.
ReplyDeleteAnd another small correction: the neighborhoods that comprise Nahlaot were built as a natural process of expansion of the Jews who lived within Jerusalem's old city walls for centuries and although were far less than hundreds of thousands were nevertheless expanding so that the conditions within the old city walls became too difficult for them. The neighborhoods that make up "Nahlaot" were built long before the waves of Jewish immigrants came to Palestine as part of the Zionist movement. the same goes to other Jewish neighborhoods which were built in the second half of the 19th century outside the old city walls to offer the Jews that lived inside the old city walls for centuries better conditions - like "Mishkenot Sha'ananim" which was established already in 1860 and Yemin Moshe which was established in 1891. You see, Jews lived and built in Jerusalem and Palestine long before the Zionist movement was founded.
ReplyDelete