Nissim is half way up the olive tree on a step ladder chipping away at the plaster, then peeling off the silicone mould of the tree. They've spent the last two days painting on silicone, and now peeling it off to take back to the foundry, where they'll cast the bronze. He gestures the view towards the separation wall surrounding Bethlehem and laughs. 'It's a pity about that wall, isn't it,' I say. He shrugs and says
in a Hebrew lilt. 'Just politics and stupid things.'
Nissim is a Jewish Israeli - half Libyan and half Turkish. His parents came to Israel in 1950. His wife is also Jewish - half Uruguayan, half Polish. 'I'd love to see your kids,' I laugh. He has four.
He continues with his job, and mutters, gesturing to the Palestinians working on the building site beside. 'I've lived in Israel all my life, and I've never worked with these people before. And they are nice. We are polite - we drink coffee, we say hello, we shake hands. It's okay.'
He flatly refuses for me to film him saying that. The olive tree sculpture project is about tying up populations, and the people creating it are a total mix. In one of my shots I realise I have an Orthodox Christian Palestintian from Jerusalem; a Muslim Palestinian from Bethlehem; Nissim the Israeli and Mark the British sculptor. There are some load bangs from teargas cannisters near the separation wall behind us. The wind buffets my microphone causing a thumping sound in my earphones.
You have to look for an overlap - but when you find one, like all synchronicity, you find many in a week.
Being anywhere with small people means almost certain trips to A and E. And Rashimi, living up to his name with an angry head to toe rash and 2 weeks of high temperatures, needed a trip there recently. It was my second trip to a hospital that day, as I'd been filming at the Eye Hospital all morning, with a little boy from Gaza, Yazan, who lives in a house of rubble, still not yet re-built after the 2014 summer war. He was playing outside, tripped and landed on a metal spike which went through his eye.
The week he comes to the Eye Hospital coincides with a visit from one of the top eye specialists from Moorfields in London. Yazan is wailing in the waiting room when I meet him, so I find Peppa Pig in Arabic on Youtube on my phone and hand it to him. He's transfixed - his one working eye zones onto the srcreen as oinks and giggles fill the hall. Pigs are not much of a common sight around here. Particularly not talking ones. His Grandma who's with him takes my hand and thanks me profusely for the distraction.
So later that evening in A and E with my own child, we talk to a friendly Israeli doctor who inspects Rashimi's rashy body - looking in his ears, and asking questions. 'Have you been walking in long grass? Could it be a tick? Is he allergic to anything?'
A and E at 1am is a social place to be, and unlike anything you read about the politics here - everyone is together. Ultra orthodox Jews are being tended by Arab nurses. Israeli doctors with a kippa (Jewish skull cap) talking quietly to headscarfed Muslim women waiting for their loved ones to be seen. The atmosphere is business like and caring. Humans who are accustomed to being divided by preconceptions and concrete, are separated at most by a thin plastic curtain.
As the doctor gets on with his inspection, an Israeli nurse looks desperate while trying to console a little Arab girl who is crying out and thumping her little feet on the bed. The noise is deafening and everyone in the ward looks troubled by it. I have 20 percent of battery on my phone, so I clock back into Peppa Pig in Arabic, and the dulcet tones of Miss 'Ernab (rabbit) soon pacify the little girl. The nurse is grateful. So am I, as the raucous tantrum abates.
No one can work out Sashimi's affliction but we go away feeling positive about a small bubble of overlap and politics-free place where a human body to be treated, is treated as just that.
As Dr. Joshua Schroeder, senior orthopedic surgeon at Hadassah Hospital said to one of the main newspapers recently, after a successful operation which prevented a 3-year-old boy from the Gaza Strip from becoming paralyzed. "We hope that when they go back to Gaza they will talk about the positive sides of Israeli society. There are no politics in a hospital, only people. Just yesterday we treated a girl from Ramallah. Everyone here is equal."
I'm back at Hadassah Hospital a week later to film one of the top Israeli child psychotherapists for a fundraising initiative. Hadassah hospitals are in the red and the need for child mental health services for families on both sides has soared since the second intifada, and again since the latest wave of stabbing attacks.
We begin to talk in her tiny office filled with teddy bears on shelves and whole wall of Playmobil figures - colourful drawings and posters on the walls. She interrupts herself and says: 'I'm sorry I don't have time to ask you any questions.' I shrug it off saying that's not why I'm here, and the interview begins. I realise soon that I've walked into another haven of hope in this dark political climate. Her ranks of social workers and psychotherapists reflect the society of Israel: from Ultra Orthodox Jewish to Eritrean and Arab. She's learning Arabic herself though tears her hair out over it (I relate) and bemoans she can't work in it yet. She's recently widowed and speaks fondly of trips to England and her children who are at university studying art or medicine here and Europe.
As I take my leave after an hour, she says, 'Please it would be so nice to see you again. I'm really in despair about the politics in this country. We need to restore our social values and from this little room in the main hospital here, it feels like a long uphill struggle.'
But it feels a long way from all that in this little room - a sanctuary from the politics below.
I get home and Rashimi has another rash.
This time it's chicken pox. No need for A and E at least as the pox pictures on the internet are very clear.
The Lozenge explains that his friends in his class won't catch it because their Mum took them to a chicken festival once back in London.
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