Experiences in Palestine (Jerusalem and Ramallah)
The next day I went to Ramallah together with my Palestinian friends.
I saw the Wall for the first time and the checkpoints. This wall looks so very much like the Berlin and East-German wall, including those menacing watch-towers and the graffiti of defiance on the Palestinian side- for a German it is eerily reminiscent.
And like in Germany the Wall here is built often through villages and towns in a way that a brother can no longer see his sister.
But different from Germany it is built often surrounding small villages, suffocating the people inside economically, taking their agricultural land, removing their sources of income. But land is confiscated not only from the West-Bank Palestinians, but from the people of East-Jerusalem as well.
My friends showed me a piece of land that once belonged to their family which now had been confiscated without any compensation to build a highway. "A settlers' road" they say, since they and other Palestinians from East-Jerusalem can never use it. It only leads to those settlements in the West-Bank. Even while my friends are officially Israeli citizens, they would not dare to drive into one of those settlements, as they would be afraid for their lives.
In Ramallah I was shown the place where the ministry with Arafat inside had been mostly destroyed by the Israelis and had now been rebuilt, and the square where the Israeli army periodically shows up to shoot around.
Then I met with 2 organizations for Palestinian women. They work mostly in empowering women, they tell me; teaching marketable skills, helping them to set up small businesses, supporting them in labor disputes. The larger organization also sponsors university scholarships and builds kindergartens.
And they work against domestic violence, for, yes, there is violence against women in Palestinian society. But, they tell me, that western reports are often overblown and used as propaganda tools. They think that domestic violence against women and children is a problem not exclusive for Arab society, while the reasons might differ, the results are not so dissimilar. And I agree, western society has its fair share of domestic violence.The shelters for battered women in the country I live in are never empty and at every holiday season they fill up rapidly.
On the way back we talked about education and my friends told me that before the occupation of the West-bank and Gaza in 1967 under the Jordanian rule the educational standard was a lot higher in Palestinian society. My friends suspected that Israel deliberately pressed down on Palestinian education.
This reminded me of a movie about Pope John Paul II: Under the Nazi occupation he had worked as an act of resistance in an underground theater. For the Nazis had closed down regular theaters, many schools and universities to destroy Polish culture and to dumb down the Polish population.
After our return from Ramallah I experienced the famous Palestinian hospitality, being invited to a turkey dinner with many Arabic side-dishes.
The family told me about their own experiences under Israeli occupation
The majority of family members had been in Israeli jail at one time or another, both parents and two of the sons, and always for many years.
One of the sons was still in jail and his parents were not allowed to visit him, since, as former inmates themselves, they were considered security risks. One other son was spared because his uncle, my friend, had whisked his nephew out of the country in time.
Now do not think that my friends are in any way unique in their experiences.
Fact, is that at least one third of Palestinian men have been in Israeli jail at one time; for women the percentage is a bit lower.
My friends are lefties and their parties had been suddenly banned. One son was arrested at age 17 and jailed for five years just for being a member.
His mother had organized a party for leftist women. She was just serving the food when Israeli soldiers busted in uninvited. She tried to run away, and this was an offense that cost her 4 years.
I didn't ask what the others did, not wanting to be nosy, but I gathered it was more or less the offense of wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking is nowadays a very serious offense, not only in Palestine.
If you daydream of shooting certain politicians to the moon, you better keep from talking to yourself, even if you do not have any NASA resources to actually do it.
And if you repeat somebody else's dreams about the pages of time from which a certain regime might disappear in the distant future, and you are the President of Iran, you might get your country nuked.
When I went back to my hostel, I met a girl who had just finished a volunteer job in a Kibbutz. Well, they call it volunteer work, but it's actually a job for which she got 3 meals, a bed and 3$ a day.
I asked her, if she had had a lot of contact with the Israelis in the Kibbutz. She told me the volunteers stayed mostly by themselves, ate and partied together with not much personal contact to Israeli families. "In some way-" she thought, "-they were glad we were there, because we did the jobs they didn't want to do, like cleaning and so on. In other ways, I had a feeling as if they did not really want us there."
She told me it was a left-wing Kibbutz, not a religious one, and so the members were not quite as hostile towards the local "Arabs", as they called them. But they were also looking forward to a next round of war with Lebanon, or with Hizbollah, as they said.
3 days I spent in Jerusalem, doing what all the tourists do normally, visiting the Holy sites.
At first glance Jerusalem seems calm and normal, at least for a tourist. You can see Israeli soldiers at the gates of the inner city, but they normally just sit around chatting with each other.
The streets are full of people shopping or selling their merchandise, sometimes from their shops, sometimes just from piles on the street.
I stayed at a hostel opposite Damaskus gate. And through this gate I entered the city several times each day.
On Friday after the noon prayers at Al Aqsa it was so crouded out of the city, that it was impossible to get through the streets in the opposite direction for quite a while.
While waiting a lady from France, a pilgrim to Jerusalem and me, we had a little chat.
She told me about the stations of the cross, a traditional Catholic prayer procession, going along the Via Dolorosa every Friday at 4 o'clock in the afternoon.
I was so glad to have met her, since I had planned to do this on my own. But this was much better.
So we went together, praying in Latin and Spanish. We were quite a large group and at every station the mostly Islamic passerbys and shoppers now waited for us patiently, in the same way as earlier in the day we Christians had to wait for Islamic worshippers coming from AlAqsa mosque.
And at every station the Franciscan monks, who led the procession, gestured us to make room for the passerbys.
But then, all of a sudden the normality broke down. We stopped at the 8.th station. A group of people came from the opposite direction, the first one was a woman who wanted to pass. She was definitely no Muslim or Catholic. One of the monks gestured her to wait for a second until we could clear a path. But she attacked him with her fists and hit him several times.
Seeing this was kind of a shock for me.
Who would hit a monk, just because he was not getting fast enough out of her way?
