Anniversaries

This morning I'm loving the mundanity of a Monday.

It's raining and I'm sitting in a surround sound of perfect silence. Often on a Monday I wake up feeling like I've been stretched on a rack after spending the weekend with two small/big people and a boddler - the Pea currently in the mid-stage between baby and toddler. Saturday morning, I'd said Fuck three times before 10am, and lobbed a plastic stool in fury over general obnoxiousness. The air was cleared as I don't lose it very often at all. Rashimi came in with a tearful apology. Sunday morning I attempted to have a bath but found myself being pelted with plastic toys by the furious boddler who then tried to join me in there, fully clothed, slipping and falling in, soaking her new trainers. Sunday evening I unscrewed the top of a bottle of red wine and set about cleaning up dwarf detritus in every single room.

There is nothing restful about my days of rest. So I welcome Monday morning like a long-lost Puritan friend. A little stiff and plain, but a peaceful predictable presence. It's that moment where I get to sit down my own and mumble: 'Now where was I?' without being interrupted.

'I am Martin Luther King' was the book of choice last night, and over a bowl of porridge this morning, the Lozenge linked MLK's story to the tale of the Good Samaritan he'd heard at school. 'Because everyone said that the Samaritans were different but this man showed they could also be very kind. Like Martin Luther King was black, and everyone thought he was different.'

Then he pensively swallowed a mouthful of porridge. 'But hang on. Rashimi is brown.'

'But we have to treat him the same as you, the white one,' I added.

Rashimi looked relieved.

Before the weekend, St Grace skipped out the door in a brightly coloured sari, en route to the Sri Lankan embassy in Tel Aviv. '69 years since independence, Madam! So there will be lots of Sri Lankan food and it's always fun.'  'Independence...' I muse. 'From us.' St Grace roared with laughter.

2017 is the year of anniversaries. Nostalgia reigns. I listened to Vera Lynn, now 100 years old, talking on the radio, with a snippet of one of her famous songs: 'we'll meet again.' I've been thinking a lot about how things used to be and whether we're any better now, since editing interviews of my grandparents. I filmed all 4 of them before they died. Each one of them in their own way, said the most important lessons life taught them was the importance of kindness to other people, and not being judgemental.

It's four years since we left London and I think back to the first few weeks after we arrived in Amman. 2013. Rashimi was 1. The Lozenge 3. And we ragged about the city being thrown about in the back of taxis - no seatbelts, no car seats. Unprepared but minds open, looking forwards to whatever life in this region would bring.

It has brought so, so much. Happy times and friendships. Understanding, but perhaps just as many questions as when we arrived. Only, different ones. This year - 2017 -  is the 100th anniversary of the Balfour declaration which was in Palestinian terms, the malignant seed which began the rot in which they're now living up to their necks. This year also marks 50 years since the occupation proper began: after the 6 day war in 1967 when Israel took control of East Jerusalem and swathes of Palestinian land. We are often reminded of Balfour when we say we're British around here. Local people are still so very aware of it and what it has meant for their lives. I went into the pharmacy this week and met a man dressed in tweed. He spoke English like a gent, and described the impact it had had on his life, referring to Trump as a 'nitwit.' I emerged 40 minutes later.

I met another Palestinian gent, a doctor in his mid 60's, this week to talk about a film I've been asked to make. Medicine is often considered to be one of the last remaining bridges between two communities: Israel and Palestine. But the doctor, who was minister of health for the Palestinians at one point, burst the bubble. Whereas there used to be possibilities for Palestinian medical students to find training in well-funded and well-equipped Israel hospitals,  the Palestinian Authority has recently forbidden any involvement with any Israeli institution.

'It's in response to the deteriorating political situation on the ground here' the doctor told me. 'This is a tinder box. We're sitting on a powder keg. We can't control our own destiny and the Israelis are suffocating us from every angle.'

'Take East Jerusalem, where 5,500 settlement units have been planned between here and the West Bank, for instance. I'm a permanent resident, but not a citizen. What use is that? 50 per cent of our population is under the age of 20. They have no hope. It's not Islam that is telling these people to kill themselves. It's the despair they feel. We don't have good advocates of our cause.'

I read that the settler population has grown by 100,000 people in the past 8 years - that's the timescale of Obama's presidency.  The well-publicised evacuation of Amona settlement 2 weeks ago, is commonly understood to be a smoke screen by the Israeli government to make them look like they're doing something. 'They're just moving the settlers to another chunk of Palestinian land nearby' a local told me this week.'

The entrance to Aida Camp, now a suburb of Bethlehem crammed in against the separation wall, which houses Palestinian refugees who've been without a homeland since 1948 and the creation of Israeli state, has a huge key straddling its entrance. The key symbolises the door keys that many Palestinian families still have, to the doors of their homes from which they were evicted almost 70 years ago. The 'right to return' is still talked about in these terms - that people should one day be able to return to their houses, farms and villages, some of them no distance from where the subsequent generations now live in the camps.

Aida camp - like most camps around the Palestinian territories - receives constant beatings. Young boys are taken in the night by Israeli soldiers and thrown in jail, young people are shot dead for protesting in the street, or for throwing stones. There is a general loss of hope. 'What am I supposed to do when I hear a 9 or a 10 year old boy telling me they have no hope for their life, and they'd rather be dead?' explained Abdelfattah, the founder of Al Rowwad cultural centre and the man who first came up with the term 'beautiful resistance'. The Israelis have just taken away the permit he uses to enter Jerusalem, where his home is, where his wife teaches and lives with their 5 children. He is swiftly becoming a version of Martin Luther King here on Palestinian soil.

With Trump's Presidency, people expect the situation to escalate further - with new settlements planned, and the establishment of a US embassy a possibility in Jerusalem. Though many Palestinians are sanguine about it, and say they've been through worse, there is much talk of this being the beginning of the end of any form of just solution. As I look at the Dakota pipeline footage, I ask myself if Palestinians will be those unrepresented indigenous faces in 50 years time: their social and political narrative a distant reality.

Here are some of the wonderful women of the camp, some of whom cooked up some Palestinian delicacies for my friend and I on our latest visit.