The Three Terrors

"I’ve already raised the white flag. I’ve stopped searching the dictionary for the word to describe half of a boy’s missing head while his father screams “Wake up, wake up, I bought you a toy!” "
.....

I’m fed up with the failed efforts at competing with the abundance of orchestrated commentaries on Hamas’ goals and actions, from people who write as if they’ve sat down with Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh, and not just some IDF or Shin Bet security service source. Those who rejected Fatah and Yasser Arafat’s peace proposal for two states have now been given Haniyeh, Hamas and BDS. Those who turned Gaza into an internment and punishment camp for 1.8 million human beings should not be surprised that they tunnel underneath the earth. Those who sow strangling, siege and isolation reap rocket fire. Those who have, for 47 years, indiscriminately crossed the Green Line, expropriating land and constantly harming civilians in raids, shootings and settlements – what right do they have to roll their eyes and speak of Palestinian terror against civilians?

Hamas is cruelly and frighteningly destroying the traditional double standards mentality that Israel is a master at. All of those brilliant intelligence and Shin Bet brains really don’t understand that we ourselves have created the perfect recipe for our very own version of Somalia? You want to prevent escalation? Now is the time: Open up the Gaza Strip, let the people return to the world, the West Bank, and to their families and families in Israel. Let them breathe, and they will find out that life is more beautiful than death."

Amira Hass writes a soul searching article in Ha'aretz. Her piece is followed by streams of comments which might in other worlds be described as hate mail.

Well over 500 Gazans dead, and IDF taking casualties every day. For what?

An ill wind has been blowing from the sea these past few days - the kind that whips your hair in your face and blows papers from your hand. It stirs things up, and froths up the anxious feeling I already have in my stomach every minute of the day. The war may be raging away from here, but it is also being waged in the souls of the people in this city.

The night before last we were awake most of the night hearing triumphant fireworks which we mistook for further graduations, but discovered the next morning were in celebration of a kidnapped Israeli soldier. The war is certainly here, too.

A wonderful young Israeli academic we had dinner with last night described seeing a dusty, exhausted Israeli soldier walking down her road that morning in West Jerusalem, coming home to his wife, who was in her car outside their apartment, tooting and tooting on her horn so he would see her, in floods of tears at the vision before her.

In our little double reality, I sat with the dwarves last night, our bare legs interlaced on the sofa, and watched Rashimi's choice - 'Peppa Pig: International Day' where Madame Gazelle gets all the children to dress up as a different nationality and sing together: 'Peace and harmoneeeee! In all the world! Peace and harmoneeeee, in all the World!'

And I had a sudden ludicrous image of getting the world's war mongerers to board an enormous cruise ship and sing it out together until they had nothing left to fight about. I could see it in lights: 'The Three Terrors!' replacing Pavarotti, Placido and Carreras with Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, Netanyahu and Putin. Ayatollah Khomeini as understudy (for once in his life), and make Tony Blair conduct.

Man overboard for misbehaviour.

The Lozenge asked his usual question for when my face is in repose and obviously not lit up enough for his liking: 'Are you happy Mummy?'

'Yes, my sweetheart. I'm really happy.'

One day I can tell him about my dream.

Four little lights

The air is cooler today and Israeli troops entered Gaza in the early hours. This morning we awoke to unusually grey skies, a tribute at least, to these times.

There's a Scots expression which describes better than any I know, the Palestinian mood at the moment: 'hudden doon'. You feel it in each conversation and see it in every face on the street.

A photograph in yesterday's New York Times, showed a man holding the face of one of the four, slight bodies wrapped in yellow shrouds - the victims of Wednesday's horrific strike on Gaza beach.

Holding the face of a child between one's two hands is such a visceral action. Just looking at the image, I can feel our boys' warm cheeks between my palms, bright eyes looking back, warm breath on the inside of my wrist.

In a matter of seconds, out went four little lights on that beach. Their junior trajectories stopped in their tracks. Nothing to remain but the pain in the hearts of the mothers and fathers who know so well what it is to have a running, jumping, dancing, fighting, laughing ball of boy energy in their house. The feeling of that form of sculpted sinew and muscle wrapped in silken skin - so familiar to their hands from all the washing and dressing and tending and kissing. Never again will they grasp an arm in angry chastisment, stroke a head in illness, or grip with two arms around a breathless chest in response to a boyish hug. The basis of the pain must be the ghost of tangibility, the whisper of a memory of all those routine motions required from every parent. Every parent's darkest fear.

Family Bakr and all the other families in Gaza and the West Bank who have lost children since this horror was rekindled - 'nahass fikom' we are feeling it with you.

Dream Treaties

This poem was commissioned especially for the Ha'aretz Peace Supplement that came with last weekend's paper. I found it moving, particularly as so many of our Palestinian friends here lament the shrinking interlace between Palestinian and Israeli children. As one friend, now in his 50's said: 'I had so many Israeli friends when we were growing up, and they are still my friends now. But my children - not so much.'


Dream Treaties by Ronny Someck,
translated from Hebrew by Vivian Eden

There were half-green lawns,
miserly sprinklers
and one scary moment when my daughter
vanished from view.
She was three at the time and after a search of several minutes
she grinned from ear to ear,
standing in a wagon usually used for distributing towels
and Samih al Qasim's and Mohammed Hamza Ghanayem's
children
had trundled her from one end to the other of the hall
where more than a field of thorns could have been planted
in the furrows ploughed by the adults' brows.
Afterwards the children traded roles
and the cart continued to sail like a pleasure ship
in the puddles of words choked
in two languages.
I so wanted to be a captain or a deck boy
or even just a lifebuoy
on that voyage,
and I was madly envious of the children, who had they paper and
pencil,
would in the space of 10 minutes
have signed dream treaties.



How we need these dream treaties now. 

Entertaining ourselves at home…

A mother's fear

A supplement full of inspiring and thought provoking writing was included in this weekend's Haaretz newspaper. 'Give Peace a Chance' love Yoko 2014. www.imaginepeace.com

This extract from South Pacific (Rodgers and Hammerstein, 1949) was quoted in one of the articles:

'You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught from year to year,
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.'

And this mother's piece in the main section of the newspaper explains what many Arab women my age living here in Jerusalem, and elsewhere in the country, are going through. Because they have children much younger here on the whole, there are mothers of teenagers who are fearing for their adolescent girls and boys as hatred grips many a heart and people no longer feel safe on the streets.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/opinion/a-palestinian-mothers-fear-in-east-jerusalem.html?_r=0

Gaza takes it again

Like a tiny slip of a donkey, thin and mangy from maltreatment and continuous beatings, Gaza is being flogged again. While its population of 1.5 million people, famed for their stregth of spirit and warmth, must be searching for the deepest of inner reserves to survive this next onslaught, the rest of us can only look on with grave concern.

Well over a hundred people, including many children, have died and this morning's news showed the wreckage of a centre for disabled people, two of whom were killed. J and I have our iphones clamped in our hands most of the time - searching for news, and receiving automatic updates. Heroic stories trickle through, such as a group of foreign activists who yesterday formed a human chain around a hospital in an attempt to stop an Israeli strike on it. We marvelled at their courage.

I don't enjoy being on the sidelines - it's like watching people work. I'd much rather be in amongst it. But as Mum sagely suggested last night on the telephone, 'Being with your boys and keeping them safe is the right place for you at the moment, darling.'

St Grace has been in Jordan visiting her husband so the dwarves and I have had four days together. We visited our local pizza restaurant as a treat. It's a Palestinian establishment who received a grant from the EU to learn how to make a real pizza and build their own ovens. The other draw is the albino rabbit who the Lozenge and Rashimi have named 'Nibbles'. So we set off down the road in the scorching sun armed with a couple of cucumbers from the fridge so it could live up to its name.

After a Marguerita (pizza not cocktail, I promise) between them, the boys were busy tucking into an ice cream doused with chocolate sauce. The world cup highlights were blaring in the background, with Brazillian beats mixed with Arabic dialogue, then all of a sudden a loud: 'Doooommmf' then four more of the same. The dwarves were so busy covering their chins with extra choccy topping, they didn't notice, but I looked up and caught the eye of a Palestinian man sitting with his family. He nodded. They were definitely rockets and then the air raid siren sounded. Everyone sat still, and the waiters walked by, chatting in Arabic to the other Arab families there. I've interviewed enough Syrians now to know the word for shelling and rockets, and I heard the waiter say he thought the noise was from the Israeli 'iron dome' intercepting them. I looked at the structure of the building and saw we were sitting as far from the glass windows as we could have been - plus no one else was moving and I reckoned they'd been through this before, so we sat tight and then walked home as quickly as I could make the tight-bellied dwarves scamper down the uneven pavements.

As often in life, the thing you fear is not the thing that ends up hurting you. I should have looked no further than the bowl of ice cream, which caused the Lozenge a more violent bout of food poisoning than any I've witnessed. From 1am onwards he was sick every half an hour and we ended up spooning in his single bed with Rashimi jabbering away in the background: 'Ith it morning Mummeeeee! Is it morning? Is it, is it?' We limped through the beginning of the day. By 10 am we'd watched James and the Giant Peach, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and Shrek.

Being a fairly robust kinda guy, L seemed to be on the mend that afternoon and was not going to miss a friend's birthday swimming party for the sake of a bout of food poisoning. I was changing my clothes to something more modest to leave the house in, and put on a tshirt with spots on it. The Lozenge said: 'You look beautiful Mummy. Jutht like a dotty printhess.' Evidently he was recovered enough to head out.

The swimming was a huge hit - for them. You might have thought that Israel were playing in the World Cup that day for all the blue and white flags, but no, in Israel, this is just a normal day. The place was seething with children in the baby pool which had rather suspect lumps of unrecognisable solid matter floating in it. There was so much chlorine it was like getting the water from the Dead Sea in your eyes. Then the dwarves discovered the water slide, for over 10s only. But the guy waved us on and we hurtled down, over and over again. After the dwarves welfare, my main concern was to keep my bikini on before we were spat out at the bottom into a deep pool.

We made it home, and I raced about trying to make dinner for the dwarves, get changed to go out, and welcome a Sri Lankan babysitter who St Grace had arranged to come over in her absence. She sat shyly on a bench in the hall, and didn't seem to undertand much English. Just as I was trying to plunge the dwarves into a bubble bath, the air raid siren sounded and L did a huge projectile vomit all over the carpet. As I watched the sweet but rather hopeless Sri Lankan lady dabbing at it with a bit of tissue paper, also suggesting we vacuum it up, I realised this wasn't the person to leave our children with during a potential rocket attack.

We canned the evening out, which is one of a number of evenings which have not happened recently and had a night in together which  is often as exciting as a night out these days. The night was punctuated with the air raid siren, sounds of rockets being intercepted, and then hilariously the 'Iftar' cannon which sounds every night at 8pm to signal the hour when all Muslims can break their fast. It also sounds at 4am - and it still catches me out, along with randomly timed fireworks displays. You'd think that at troubled times like these they could have a bell in the mosque to ring instead of having to fire an enormous cannon and cause us to leap for cover.

There are an awful lot of people on the planet whose hearts are with Gaza - but how can this be happening again? Normally there would be an external mediator involved by now - but Egypt, who often fulfilled this role, are not interested now that they've kicked out the Muslim Brotherhood (the main basis of Hamas), so they're no longer interested. Other Arab countries are busy with their own mess, and Internationals are hopping about the sidelines, or not even that, these days.

We internationals, and most Israelis could leave the country if it gets really bad. But the Gazans are stuck there with no escape and no one to turn to but each other and their inner souls.

Though people are wary of suggesting a third intifada as yet, you wonder how much more this tortured nation can take before they retaliate with something other than rockets. There have been 80 so far, and almost all have been intercepted, which must only accentuate the feeling of powerlessness. I have a vision of those martial arts displays where a big guy deftly blocks a punch from a smaller guy, not feeling a thing from the furious fist and infuriating the weaker one until he has to resort to dirtier tricks. 

The backdrop doesn't match

With the background of 'noiseth in the the distanth' and sirens to remind us that our little paradise is perhaps not entirely real, I scratch my head most days and wonder. If someone were to paint our family portrait, the foreground would seem completely incongruous to the backdrop.

Every morning we awake to blue skies, a gentle breeze and a cacophony of birds. We open the doors and shutters and  go straight into our scurfy little yard/garden dotted with lime and lemon trees; a pomegranate and an apricot. It's the first house we've lived in with a garden and it has entirely changed the way we live and interact with one another.

We've invested in a large inflatable paddling pool which has turned the boys from dwarves into nano-nymphs. They are in it most of the time. Which I'm glad about, because St Grace and the dwarves had to take 4 taxi rides worth £15 each way, to get the pool, and then back again when they got home to realise we also needed a pump. Having been encouraged, by the Israeli shop assistant, that if she spent a further £30 she'd get £20 off the pool, shop she did - and came back laden with many other exciting items such as a loo brush and cleaning products. The entire project has cost me near on £100. And my Scottish streak is keener than it used to be (you'll be happy to hear, Dad).

After witnessing St Grace's first shopping foray, I try to do the supermarket trips myself - generally with the dwarves in tow. The round trip takes about 2 hours as the fruit and veg is sold in a separate shop. We struggle through tiny roads of gridlocked traffic with the Lozenge in the front seat and Rashimi swinging off the coat handles in the back like a chimp. The Lozenge insists on his own trolley in the green grocer so he can buy things to make 'thoup'. Rashimi's sticky hand plucks at grapes and piles of dates. The shopkeepers turn a blind eye and help us practise our Arabic.Then we struggle down the street trying not to get squashed by the revving 'Shabaab'(lads) who drive more furiously in Ramadan, encumbered always, by a watermelon, bunches of bananas from Jericho and all the rest.

The locals use a one way street, in the opposite direction, as a short cut. And three men made me (the one who was using the street the correct way) reverse all the way back down the steep slope to allow them to pass, which produced extreme expletives from me. For once the dwarves were silenced as I swore and shouted at the men. Still now when we pass that street, Rashimi reminds me: 'Thothe naughty men was going the WONG way, and made Mummy upTHET!' They are allies at times, these dwarves.

The supermarket is a euphemism for ice cream which is why the dwarves always come shopping, and this week we had to wait half an hour by the suppurating bins in 40 degrees, while Rashimi painstakingly licked his lolly, not allowing anyone, least of all the Lozenge, to come near, and all I could do was watch as the little green and pink rivulets meandered towards his elbow.

I left J and the dwarves for a weekend to go back to London for a school reunion. The dwarves spent the morning I left, stark naked as ever, playing with the plastic picnic set and pretending their noses were a carrot and a corn on the cob and sneezing them off; then Rashimi, who has a fixation with witches at the moment, rode around the house on the plunger that unblocks the sink, still naked, shrieking 'WOOOO HAAAA HAAAA HAAAA!' like a witch. Then they both dived into the paddling pool. When I left for the aiport with Bassem they hopped out to give me a slimy hug. I said: 'Look after Grace and look after Daddy.' And Rashimi said: 'Look after Batthem!' As I say, life on our patch couldn't seem further from Gaza.

But the rumblings in the news were ominous and the British Consulate has cranked into 'crisis mode'. There was a five hour delay to our flight because the Israeli airport staff were on strike, and as I sat on the runway in an orange tube with the air conditioning turning the passengers to ice, I wondered if I was making a terrible mistake leaving the dwarves and J just for a school reunion. I had the nursery rhyme in my head: 'Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home. Your house is on fire and your children are gone.' And I remembered that the Lozenge had been drawing pictures of ladybirds at breakfast and maybe that was an omen. After a panic call to J he assured me I was doing the right thing, and to try and enjoy it.

No problem there. The noise levels eminating from the room full of wonderful women, must have been audible at Arsenal (we were in Fulham). Many, many great people I'm still in touch with, but some equally brilliant girls I hadn't seen since 20 years ago, we all raced out of the traps into the wider world brandishing hopes and dreams, and it seems most of us are now living them.

Sometimes when I'm at a party I find my head doing the maths - calculating how many minutes you could have with each person - and I wonder if it's worth it, if all you can do is a conversational skate over the surface of all those lives. Maybe it was the rosé, but very soon, I forgot about that and marvelled at what a start we'd all had in life - not just being at that school, but growing up together, and still having so much to talk about 20 years on. Luckily no one has forgotten how to giggle, or drink. Or was it just me? Miraculously, we're all still alive, and everyone looks GREAT. We are so lucky.

I returned to find happy dwarves, an empty fridge (as thankfully St Grace hadn't been to the shops), and an even more mischievous Rashimi who keeps widdling all over the place now he's worked out how to do a 'man wee wee'.

So the dwarves and I did the sweaty hike to buy some food. I caught Rashimi about to whip down his pants in the fruit store and raced with him round the back of the shop to a revolting loo. As I was bending down to help him, my sunglasses fell off my head and into the loo bowl. Yuk, yuk and yuk. I don't know how I get myself into these tangles in 40 degrees.

The Lozenge spotted something by the checkout. 'Look Mummy! Lipthickth! I want to buy one for Batool (the Glammy our amazing Jordanian nanny we had in Jordan, who we're visiting next week). I pointed out that they were nail varnishes, but he was welcome to choose one for the Glammy. He chose a bright red one, and has wrapped it up in pale blue tissue paper and huge swathes of masking tape.

Rashimi left his fifth little puddle in the house, near the doorway, as though he too is marking his territory like many other people in this land, and I joked: 'If you were a dog, Rashimi, I'd rub your nose in it.'

Later that evening as I was trying to insert the toothbrush between clenched white fangs, he wrapped his sticky arms around my neck and said: 'Mummy, I don't want you to wub my nothe.' You forget that a 2.5 year old world view - is still a literal one.

Last night, J and I mulled over the situation - the tragedies on our doorstep; the Consulate in crisis mode calling us to make sure we're stockpiling food (you try...); messages going around to avoid certain areas. We both agreed we'd spent the day doing our normal thing - J had a meeting in Ramallah, I sat cross legged in my den putting my new film camera together and working out how to use it. A Palestinian friend called to invite us around on Friday night.

We are finding it hard to reconcile the normality of our daily life with the chaos so near at hand.