Coventry is known as Britain’s Dresden. The cathedral was all but destroyed by bombing during the Second World War (despite the best efforts of the provost, who valiantly stood on the rooftop one night and tried to toss stray bombs onto the street with a pitchfork before they could explode). Only the outer walls and the spire remain. Peering into the cathedral on the morning after the bombs hit, one of the staff noticed that a pair of scorched beams had fallen in the shape of a cross.

The cross in the ruins.

When the war ended, it was decided that the ruins should remain as they were. Wandering through them, I was surprised by their peace. Normally in a place that bears obvious scars of violence I feel more grief than anything, but this place was marked with something more than that. I think it is because of all the love and care that people from Coventry (and much further afield) have put into making it a place for reconciliation. A statue was sent from Dresden, and it now stands near the entrance to the ruin, named simply ‘Survivors’. It is a quiet reminder that the prayer inscribed behind the charred cross – Jesus’ words as he died, ‘Father, forgive’ – was not just for the bomber pilots who discharged their cargo on Coventry but also for pilots who flew in the opposite direction. Nearby is a plaque in honour of people who died on the Home Front, confronting bombs with pitchforks, and one final statue – a couple embracing.

Our tour guide (a volunteer from Germany, whom Sam had roped into the expedition on the grounds that she knows more about the cathedral’s history than he does) explained that the statue’s creator was inspired by a woman who refused to believe that her husband (reported missing, believed dead) really was dead. She set off round Europe on foot to look for him. I don’t know if she ever found him, but the sculptor tried to imagine what their reunion might have looked like and cast it bronze.  Originally titled ‘Reunion’, it was renamed ‘Reconciliation’ when it was donated to the Peace Studies department at Bradford University. Fifty years after the war’s end, several casts were made of the statue. One came to Coventry. Another went to Northern Ireland. A third stands in a park in Hiroshima.

Opposite the statue is a carving of the suffering Christ, Ecce Homo, that was commissioned from a Jewish sculptor. (He also carved the angels’ faces on the door knobs of the new cathedral next door, modelling them on the faces of his grandchildren.) There is nothing else in the ruin, just space and quiet and benches where people may stop to rest or talk or pray or just look. I walked round the walls, taking note of the damaged masonry and the places where the Stations of the Cross once were. Then I came to the archway that leads into the new cathedral.

“It’s a sign of hope,” the guide’s soft voice said at my shoulder. “We stand in the ruin and we see the new church, and know that destruction passes, and there is life and forgiveness.”

The ruins viewed from inside the new cathedral.

The new cathedral is glass-fronted, so once inside, it is possible to turn and look back through a frosting of saints and angels. I paused to pray here, then looked around. Sam pointed at the baptismal font, a roughly hewn rock. “That rock came from a hill near Bethlehem. I thought that might interest you. It was transported entirely by land, and no one asked any money for carrying it once they heard what it was for.”

If I were Anglican I would be baptising my babies in that. Not that I have any babies to baptise. I turned and entered a small circular side-chapel that is dedicated to Christian unity and is managed jointly by churches of several denominations. No one owns it outright. Behind the altar I saw what I thought at first was a rather unconventional rood screen: a swoop of brightly coloured paper birds fluttering to the floor. A short text on the wall explained its story. A young girl, admitted to hospital after developing leukaemia, developed an interest in origami when her nurses started folding her medicine wrappers into interesting little animals to persuade her to take nasty medicine. She was excited to learn that when a person folds a thousand paper cranes, a person can make a wish. So she set to work, wishing with each crane folded that she would get better soon.

The cranes in the chapel.

Eventually it dawned on her that she was never going to get better. She changed her wish, telling the cranes, “I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world.” Sadako Sasaki died in her hospital bed at the age of twelve, ten years after the bombing that made her so sick, and her classmates took up her origami where she had finished. This is why there are cranes in Coventry.

Sadako’s story is famous, but I had never heard it before. Reading it, I remembered the inscription outside – Father, forgive – and thought about the forgiveness that fathers all over the world need from children. I have heard Israeli parents defending the military detention of Palestinian kids, and all that this entails. I have some good friends who suffered terrible abuse at the hands of their own families when they were little. I encounter people who perceive children who die in drone strikes as regrettable but inevitable ‘collateral’. And then I remember how a few years ago, an all-girl theatre troupe from Shatila refugee camp came to perform a fairytale in North East England – but only after the playwright Peter Mortimer had agreed to modify the ending of his play, so that the wicked king didn’t die, but instead became good and shared in the happy ever after. Those girls grew up in the shadow of a massacre that took someone from all their families. I will never know how any child is able to have a heart like that after everything that adults do to them, but whenever I see it I understand a little more what Jesus meant when he said, “Unless you become as little children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

I took an hour by myself in a little chapel that is tucked away at the very back of the cathedral, down a flight of stairs. There is a smudged sepia image of a mother cradling a baby, curled up in a huddle. It could be Mary with Christ. It could be a radiant new mum. It could be a worn-out mum in an air raid shelter during the Blitz. I was captivated by it and I sat on the bench looking at it for a while before I remembered that I had my rosary beads in my pocket and began to pray the Joyful Mysteries.

Lately I have not exactly been bursting with the joys of spring. I have problems with the bones in my feet that make walking a bit ouchy and difficult, which mean that my usual technique for clearing my mind (bounding between Bethlehem and Jerusalem like a Tigger, or else leaping into a pool for a brisk three-mile swim) is not possible. My work is emotionally quite demanding, and being stuck in the same room with it without the usual means of release is hard. The natural and sensible response would be to pray more. This work is not something I can do without faith. But not always being terribly sensible, I do not pray enough. I have been meaning to go away somewhere for a few days’ silent retreat, only I have no time. Thankfully God found me that hour in Coventry and it was as good as a week. I left with a copy of the Litany of Reconciliation (lying next to the charred cross in the ruin) tucked into my purse, so that no matter how busy, overwhelmed, or frustrated I get, I may glance at this from time to time.

The ruins after the rain (this one courtesy of Wikipedia!).

I’ve been aware of Lifelines ever since a very memorable religion and ethics class on capital punishment that my class was given when I was fourteen years old. The teacher showed us some material from them, and she also read aloud to us from Sister Helen Prejean’s remarkable book Dead Man Walking. The book chronicles Sr Helen’s time as a chaplain on Death Row and her fight to establish robust and total Catholic opposition to the death penalty. I couldn’t join Lifelines as a penfriend back then, as they only accept people who are over eighteen, but I ‘adopted’ a prisoner to pray for. This was the first political activism I ever did, pretty much.

Sr Helen has written that she was drawn towards this work by recognition of the link between the death penalty and poverty. “It didn’t take long to see that for poor people, especially poor black people, there was a greased track to prison and death row.” Her involvement was cemented by one more thing: “I began to understand that some life is valued and some life is not.” After being present at dozens of executions, she also saw that this disregard for life and dignity extends far beyond the person being killed: “When you witness an execution and watch the toll this process also takes on some of those who are charged with the actual execution—the 12 guards on the strap-down team and the warden—you recognize that part of the moral dilemma of the death penalty is also: who deserves to kill this man?”

All injustice seems to come down to the same idea, whether implied or explicit: some lives don’t matter enough. This is why I’m writing about Death Row on a blog about life in occupied Bethlehem. Perhaps some people reading may want to respond to Lifelines’s request and become a penfriend. Information and FAQ are on the website.

I had opened the front door to find that a blue metal barrier and two occupation soldiers had sprung up like mushrooms overnight. (Sadly not the edible kind.) They were blocking the mouth of our street. The wall surrounds us and the only way to get into Bethlehem lay past them. And I was going to have to walk past them with an illegal Israeli, which is not the ideal accessory to have about your person when confronted with an unexpected military roadblock.

“I don’t know,” Nadav said meekly. “Maybe they know about me.”

“They don’t, and if either of them asks, you are a British tourist named Eric. Don’t show them ID. Follow me.”

This is Area A, a place officially outside military jurisdiction, from which Israeli citizens are barred by Israeli law. The army likes to put in an appearance from time to time in what it refers to as ‘demonstration of presence’, presumably in case the wall and the watchtowers and the checkpoints aren’t an adequate enough reminder. They must think that this neighbourhood is suffering from collective amnesia. As Nadav and I approached the barrier, one soldier held out his hand for my passport. “Boker tov. Le’an atem holkhim?”

I was rattled. He knows Israelis don’t come here, and why would tourists understand Hebrew? I concealed my unease behind a smile of non-comprehension, and ignoring his outstretched hand, began to edge my way round the barrier. “Good morning to you!”

He switched to English. “Where are you going?”

“To church,” I said firmly, mentally adding, To pray for you and your comrade here to clear out and lead a better life than you are now.

“Which church?”

“The one by the checkpoint.”

He thought about this for a moment, then nodded and gave us permission to pass with a sharp jerk of the thumb. The other soldier said nothing, but stared after us as we left. Ahead, I could see cars slowly backing up and turning around as they realised that the street was blocked. I knew that elsewhere in the West Bank on this same morning there would be people who couldn’t go to work, get to school. Fortunately the positioning of this particular roadblock wasn’t too inconvenient; there is another way round that is quite short.

“It’s not as bad as Hebron,” Nadav commented, once we were out of earshot.

“No. Thank goodness.”

Inside a Women in Hebron sewing workshop. (Photo: Women in Hebron.)

We had gone to Hebron the day before. I wanted to visit the Women in Hebron embroidery co-operative to find some birthday presents for friends in England and to ask the women there a few questions for a paper I’m writing on women’s responses to militarism. The Old City was all shades of mud and rain. (Nadav, in sandals and a T-shirt, turned an interesting shade of hypothermic blue within two minutes of leaving the house.) Near the bus station, carts selling falafel, fries, and corn on the cob emitted clouds of warm steam into the damp air. Aggressive yellow taxis came barreling down the street, scattering pedestrians. There were the usual stalls piled high with fruit and vegetables, adding a splash of colour to the day, and the vendors with their clamour giving a cheerful texture to the winter air. But as we went deeper into the Old City the colours faded into the drab greens and creams of rusting window shutters, and the market was entirely without sound except for the drip-drip-drip of rainwater from the awnings. Then we came to a square, and there was olive green and khaki everywhere. How many of them? I couldn’t count and I couldn’t tell what they were doing, just standing motionless in the square like that, line after line of them, clutching their guns and staring at a near-empty street.

“That always intimidates me,” I muttered once we had gone by, half to Nadav, half to myself. “When they stand there like that, not doing anything. I feel like a salmon swimming past a barracuda shoal.”

“Don’t worry. They intimidate me as well.”

I was surprised. “What for?”

“Well, look at them!”

“But you were one of them. Why should you be afraid of what you were?”

“I was never one of them like that.”

The WiH store was open. Laila was the only member of the co-operative there, and she was busily making jewellery, but as soon as we appeared she fished under her table for a kettle and sent a passing teenage boy off with instructions to make us some tea. I eyed the kettle nervously as it left. Nadav doesn’t drink tea or coffee. Nor does he eat hummus. Nor does he consume anything else that Palestinians like to serve. This causes far more problems for him than his Israeli-ness. When he came to my workplace last year, my boss was just about able to get past the fact that I had brought an off-duty soldier into her office. She could not get past his refusal to eat or drink anything. Their hesitant conversation was punctuated by the occasional strained exclamation from her: “You’re not drinking!” In the end I grabbed his cup while her back was turned and downed the contents in a diplomatic effort to salvage the situation. I hoped I was not going to have to do the same here. I glared at him and tried to telegraph with my eyebrows, You will drink your tea.

“Nawal is not here today,” Laila told us, “only me, but I can answer your questions.” Settling herself more comfortably in her chair, gave us the history of the co-operative.

It began with her sister Nawal needing a way to support her family and maintain her own financial independence, before evolving into a means of cultural resistance. “Culture is resistance. We have to keep the culture alive.” Nawal began to sell embroidery that she had made in her free time. “At first Nawal was selling it in the street, but then one day some policemen of the PA came and saw her, and they said, ‘Why don’t you get a shop?’. So they got us the shop. It was easy to get the shop at this time because it was the Intifada and the whole market was closed. No people were coming here to work. It was a hard time. But she made the shop and then other women came to work with her.”

Nawal and Laila are the only female shop owners in the Old City. In an interview she gave last year, Nawal explained the problems that come with their status: “Many times we faced hostility, me and Laila, we are suffering a lot. Every day, especially from  men and from women also. From Palestinians, I’m sorry to say but this is always the case, because we are the only women here. First, the young shebab [youth], and men especially if they see internationals with us…”

Now the pair and their enterprise seem to have acquired a few allies amongst the youth. The teenage boy Laila had sent off for our tea returned with brimming plastic cups, setting them down carefully next to a basket overflowing with wallets that were all embroidered with, Men can do something. Women can do anything. “And men can do anything,” the boy said indignantly when he saw where my gaze was. Laila smiled indulgently and swatted him away. Then another teenager came down the alleyway, half-jogging, half-shuffling. The jog suggested that something urgent was happening, the shuffle that he was too much of a teenager to bother with it. “Mustawtinin,” he said to Laila. Monosyllabic like so many adolescents. He took some tea.

Laila looked at me. “Now they come,” she said.

A settler tour arrives in the Old City. (Photo: Tammie Danielsen, international observer with EAPPI.)

Each Saturday the settlers and their supporters take a tour of the Old City, conducted under heavy IDF guard, designed to help strengthen the sense of Jewish connection to the place. I have seen these tours before. The worst I have witnessed personally was a soldier using his rifle to prod a little girl out of his path. But worse happens. One ex-soldier, testifying with Breaking the Silence, described such a tour:

That morning, a fairly big group arrived in Hebron, around 15 people or so, of Jews from France…They were in a good mood, really having a great time, and I spent my entire shift following this gang around and trying to keep them from destroying the town. In other words, this is what they were busy doing for hours. They just wandered around, picked up every stone they saw, and started throwing them in Arabs’ windows, and overturning whatever they came across…And there’s no horror story here, they didn’t catch some Arab and kill him or anything like that, but what bothered me about this story is that along came a gang of people from France…maybe someone told them that there’s a place in the world where you can just, I don’t know…that a Jew can take all of his rage out on the Arab people, and simply do anything, do whatever he wants. To come to a Palestinian town, and do what ever he wants, and the soldiers will always be there to back him up. Because that was actually my job.

Laila and Nawal have experienced hostility from settlers. Nawal was spat on. “They spat on her face and tried to destroy her stuff. Took the embroidery, threw it in the street.” One of them was presented with a large photograph of Baruch Goldstein, the man who killed twenty-eight Palestinians in Ibrahimi Mosque, and informed, “This is your king.” The alleyway was filled with the sound of dozens of tramping feet. All of a sudden I was aware of just how exposed the shop is. There is no glass and no door; it’s just an alcove opening right on to that narrow street. Laila leaned back and folded her hands in her lap, her lips moving. Then the first soldier appeared. He took up his position right next to Laila, his gun barrel inches from her head. Shepherded by more soldiers, the settlers and their visitors began to pass. Another soldier moved along to take the place of the first. Then a third. And a fourth. It was as if they were running a relay race in slow-motion, only the baton was a rifle. The settlers must not be left exposed to any violence that might erupt from the Women in Hebron co-operative shop. Perhaps they thought that Laila might leap out and attempt to strangle someone with a skein of thread. The fifth soldier’s weapon brushed against her cheek.

“Why do you put your gun in my face?” she enquired in indignant English, attempting and failing to push herself further back. (There was no room.) “Do you want to aggress to me?”

Silence from him. The settlers continued to file by. Some of them looked at us. I caught the gaze of a young girl, no more than ten. She had on a bubblegum-pink coat. It seemed out of place against the backdrop of khaki.

“Move your gun from my face!”

“Hey, hey, stop shouting.” The officer had arrived, taking the position of the soldier. He moved with the easy insolent grace of a panther. “Everything’s going to be OK,” he said soothingly to Laila, in the manner of a parent to a fractious child. His own gun was again millimetres from her nose.

“I am not shouting, I am having a conversation.”

“Shhh now.”

I don’t know how long it took for them to pass. It can’t have been more than a few minutes, but it felt like an hour. Nadav was standing next to me, staring at them. I wondered at the time why he was doing that (forgetting that this was the first time in his life he had seen this, and he was probably a bit shocked). Didn’t he realise that staring might antagonise the army? That he might draw attention to himself? Sit down and look at the floor! I told him telepathically. He didn’t. But then they were gone and we could once again hear only the rain.

“Do they scare you when they do that?” I asked Laila. “The soldiers?”

“No. It is good that they are here. Otherwise those settlers would eat us,” and she laughed ruefully, hugging her shawl round her body.

“You should not be afraid from them,” one of the teenagers reassured me. “They are like dogs.”

“We are Arabs. God is with us,” the other added.

“God is with everyone,” I said quietly. The boy shrugged.

“You could tell from their faces which of them don’t want to be here and which of them are loving it,” Nadav said suddenly. “That first guy who came, he hates it here, but that officer – “

“They all want to be here!” one of the teenagers exclaimed. “All of them! This is how they are! This is what they do!”

Silence. Sound of rain. Then, “I’d like to buy one of these,” Nadav said, touching a stack of kuffiyehs in a rainbow of colours.

Impelled by the murders of women in their hometown of Lyd, the Palestinian hip-hop group DAM has got together with Amal Murkus and Jackie Salloum to release a rap against honour killings. Sung in Arabic, as with most of DAM’s music, it has generated a critique by two academics living in the USA, written in a particularly obscure kind of academickese (the better to give the impression that they’re making a sophisticated point when really they’re not). Stripped of its frills, the main complaint of Lila Abu Lughod and Maya Mikdashi is this: DAM rapped about the murders of Palestinian women by Palestinian men without also mentioning Israel’s military occupation and systematic discrimination against Palestinians as a whole. And this makes Palestinians look bad.

That is their primary concern. They write about the need to hear about “the context that fragments women’s family support, dislocates community systems of social protection, hollows out budgets for intervention, and denies help to those who are considered less than human because they are ‘Arab’, whether they wear jeans or hijabs”. I don’t think anyone concerned with justice and liberation – least of all DAM and Jackie Salloum, who have a reputation for their gritty engagement with tough realities – would deny that these factors are crucial. Too crucial to try and use a smokescreen in the way that Abu Lughod and Mikdashi have just done.

And if there is any doubt about their use of these issues as a smokescreen, we have only to read the authors’ objection to the concept of honour killing (‘so-called honor killing’). They see it as nothing more than a social construct, a ‘category’ that ‘highlights violence in certain contexts while obscuring it in others’. Here they do have a point: when a white British women is stabbed or beaten to death by a partner who thinks that she’s disrespected him, her death will be described as murder, not as an honour crime. In actuality domestic and sexual violence everywhere has its origins in the same thing: the idea that women are property, believed on an implicit level even if denied outwardly, and the resultant tendency amongst certain men to try and locate their egos between women’s legs. It happens in Lyd and it happens in London. Refusing to use the same name for the same murders is just a way of distancing oneself from the terrible reality of violence against women – “Oh, honour killing is something they do to their women in those countries over there, exotic places, it doesn’t happen here”. In the UK I have seen a lot of this type of distancing – in the press, in everyday conversation in the pub. And I see the same distancing tactic at work in Mikdashi and Abu Lughod’s article.

By invoking the oppression suffered by Palestinians in the specific way they have, they are trying to move the focus from violence within Palestinian society to the violence that is inflicted on it by outsiders. The existence of domestic violence in countries where there is no military occupation or painful immediate history of ethnic cleansing is a piece of vital ‘context’ that they don’t seem so keen to consider. Their reasons for avoiding it are spelled out oh so clearly:

[D]iscussions of ‘honor crimes’ in Israeli universities function as a tool of hatred. In the wider international discourse of saving Muslim women, the ‘honor crime’ plays a crucial role. It locates the problem in culture and tradition. It isolates this form of violence from any others. In locating such violence in backward communities, it stigmatizes groups.

In other words, hypocritical racists in Israel and overseas may seize on these murders as a way to try and prove that Palestinian society is uniquely bad and backward, so if you’re going to make a rap video about such murders in Palestine, be sure to include a slow-motion shot of an Israeli tank or two to deflect the criticism.

This idea is extremely harmful to women who have endured domestic violence, as they are effectively being asked to gag themselves for the good of the nation. They can’t describe their experiences without two Diaspora academics telling them (in English) what sort of language to use when they talk. A woman’s bleeding and battered body is stuffed into hastily dug earth, and for the sake of the national cause, her sisters must be careful what they say now. Dulci et decorum est to shut yourself up pro patria.

Abu Lughod and Mikdashi have this parting shot in their locker: the insinuation that DAM are helping to ‘ethnicize and racialize Arabs as one of liberalism’s Others’. Statements like this function as very effective smears in certain Palestinian circles. My friend Sameeha is finding that former colleagues and teachers in Gaza respond to her increasingly outspoken women’s rights activism with the accusation that she must have acquired some sort of colonial superiority complex and is trying to erase her own culture and people. She was recently denied a teaching post at a university because she was seen wearing trousers in public. She wrote about it. Made a noise. One lecturer accused her of ‘reduplicating colonialism’. With that one phrase, a salaried male academic whose ideas are taught from a podium was transformed into the victim, and the unemployed young woman with only her blog became his oppressor. This for me is the most disturbing aspect of Abu Lughod and Mikdashi’s writing: their (ab)use of feminist and anti-colonialist language to make an argument that is very damaging to women.

Their idea that DAM are playing to an international audience does have an amusing note, as Arabic rap music (with a colloquial Levantine overtone) doesn’t exactly occupy a prominent place in the ‘international discourse of saving Muslim women’. That song is clearly directed at Palestinian audiences. The music video itself was directed by a Palestinian woman who is well-known for her activism. Meanwhile, Abu Lughod and Mikdashi chose to respond from America in convoluted English that would not be well understood by many people in Palestine (or many people anywhere, if I’m brutally honest). Their attempt to make out that DAM is guilty of ignoring the reality of Palestinian women, symbolised by ‘the tragic heroine on whose behalf [they] are rapping’, seems especially ludicrous in light of this fact – not to mention the active participation of Murkus and Salloum. The article gives one brief mention to Salloum (implying that her standards as a director have sunk). Murkus isn’t mentioned at all. Not once. Ostensibly urging DAM to focus on their ‘Palestinian sisters’, Abu Lughod and Mikdashi manage to dismiss said women entirely, beginning with the spectacularly insensitive title of their article.

“Tradition and the Anti-Politics Machine: DAM Seduced by the ‘Honor Crime’.”

Like me, you may be wondering what Gyorgy Konrad’s political theory has to do with anything, but leave aside the peculiar use of the term ‘anti-politics’ for now and focus on what comes after the colon. Yes, a clever controversial reference to seduction in an article dealing with the murder of women, which is so frequently preceded by sexual violence and accusations of sexual ‘misconduct’! Gosh, how sharp and brilliant and provocative. More proof, if any were needed, that merely having a vagina and a reputation in the field of gender studies are not enough to inoculate you against misogyny.

Mikdashi and Abu Lughod are absolutely right in that honour killings are brought up by supporters of occupation as a way of demonising Palestinians and presenting Palestinian culture as inherently violent – but the thing is, those people would continue to do that no matter what DAM put in their videos and irrespective of what abused Palestinian women say or do. It is deeply disturbing to suggest that women survivors and witnesses of such violence should have to bear any responsibility for what certain Israelis and internationals think of Palestine – and no matter how they dress it up, this is what Mikdashi and Abu Lughod have argued for. It is a fallacy to believe that achieving liberation should ever require a woman to bite her tongue on an issue that affects her so intimately. Since when did any community ever win its rights because women gave up a few of theirs first?

Last year, one late December day, I alighted at Euston Station and caught the Tube into the East End. I was introduced to this part of the capital through Rachel Liechtenstein’s book Rodinsky’s Room, a semi-autobiographical work that tries to solve the mystery surrounding the disappearance of David Rodinsky, a reclusive man who lived above the old synagogue on Princelet Street. My present-day destination was a flat on the thirteenth floor of a tower block in a densely populated housing estate.

East London isn’t affluent, and this estate lies in a pretty deprived area. It’s not the kind of place I’d ordinarily set out to visit (or want to get lost in). As we swept upwards in a box-like lift, Catharine told me, “When we moved here the place didn’t have a concierge. Everywhere was littered with used needles. Now we’ve got the concierge, and the security pad on the door, so things are a bit better in that respect. But it’s a shame really – it’s another barrier, and we’re no longer so easy to reach.”

Catharine is a nun. She doesn’t look much like the traditional idea of one: she was dressed very simply in grey trousers and a warm blue pullover. The only outward sign of her consecration was the large wooden cross  engraved with a heart that hung from her neck. The sisters of her religious community (Little Sisters of Jesus) live and work in sixty-three countries, always settling in areas where there is greatest poverty and neglect (not just material poverty either – they argue that poverty takes different forms, such as racial ostracism or simple loneliness). When the community was founded, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the sisters lived in tents with Saharan nomads. Since then some of them have lived as voluntary prisoners, sharing the lives of prison inmates as best they could. Others have spent their nights working in homeless shelters and their days on the street with homeless people. Their work varies depending on where they are and whom they’re with. By choice, it is always simple and low-paid.

“It’s not the work itself that matters,” Sister Catharine told me. “You could be standing in the production line at a factory, making the same gesture day after day, but the thing that matters in that situation is friendship with the people you’re with.”

At first glance, the thirteenth floor of that tower block might seem a world apart from Palestine and the occupation. But I went to see the sisters with Palestine in mind. The Holy Land is very special in their spirituality, and not just because they have communities physically located there. Each of the places mentioned in the Gospels has a deeper significance for them, Bethlehem most of all.

There is always a reminder of Bethlehem in their chapels: a baby Jesus lying in a makeshift manger before the altar, his arms outstretched. The sisters’ founder Magdeleine Hutin wrote, “This Bethlehem crib is so beautiful and so great…In face of the hatred and anger of the world we must bring the gentleness and the smile of the infant Jesus of Bethlehem. In face of the pride of the world we must bring the littleness and powerlessness of the tiny newborn baby of the crib.”

I was nineteen when I visited Bethlehem for the first time. I would describe the experience as shattering, but that sounds too dramatic for the dull cold torpor that settled on me when I saw what those media phrases – ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’, ‘occupation’, ‘Intifada’ – actually looked like. The place stuck with me, and I wanted to go back, but that urge was paired with an awareness that in the greater scheme of things I could do very little. Now I look back on the helplessness I felt then and hear Catharine’s calm matter-of-fact voice: “It’s not the work that matters…”

If I had known the sisters back then, they would have gestured to their crib and told me that little can be enough when it’s given with love. They see this as the meaning of Bethlehem. Getting to meet them and see how they live out that belief was certainly a beautiful Christmas present that keeps on coming in handy, and unlike the rather awful handbag that I found under the tree this year, it’s one that I will continue to carry about.

My initial reaction was, “Smooth move, directing this picture and caption at a country where the population is a.) predominantly Catholic and b.) generally sympathetic to Palestine. PR skillz, u no have any.” Then I thought of something else.

This image of the Holy Hearts is hanging on the wall of my host family’s house in Bethlehem (only ours is kitschier and better). When I saw the embassy’s Christmas message, I thought of the family’s experiences during the Intifada, when the house was constantly being requisitioned by Israeli troops. They used to corral everyone into one corner, and my landlady was never allowed to be the one to wake her children: the soldiers pulled them out of bed at gunpoint. When the soldiers got thirsty my landlady used to give them water. Occasionally some of them became distressed and she and her husband would try to comfort them. There were times when the curfew lasted so long that the family ran out of food. Soldiers would bring their own meals into the house (sometimes hot pizza, with its appetising smell) and the kids just had to sit there and try to bear the hunger until such time as curfew was lifted and they could go to the shop.

Last year I ended up bringing an Israeli friend who was then performing his own military service into the house. (He was off-duty at the time, obviously, and before you ask – it’s a long story. I may tell it some day.) I was worried about how the family would react to him. Sure enough, my landlady wasn’t best pleased – but not because he was an Israeli Jew and a soldier to boot, but because, “If the army find out he has been here they can hurt him. You need to look after your friends, Vicky, he is a good boy.” She sat in the living room and talked with him, underneath the Holy Hearts image and the equally kitschy representation of the Last Supper.

That picture on the wall of one Bethlehem family home has witnessed a lot of things, but never hate of the sort that was exhibited by the embassy this afternoon. Just a thought.

1.) I’ve published a short piece on Gaza over on +972mag. Scribbled in the middle of the night, it’s the prelude to the post I wrote here yesterday. I’ve heard more from Sameeha since. She has been taking painkillers to help her get to sleep. I’m not sure this is the way to go, but I’m glad she was able to rest and is all in one piece still. Oh, and her thesis has been marked and she was awarded an MA with distinction (one of only three students on her course to receive one).

2.) I got my MA result yesterday. I also passed with distinction (less impressive in my case as I was writing in my own language) with a dissertation on Jewish theological responses to the Nakba. As there is so little written scholarship on this I had to rely on interviews, one of which was with Rabbi Brant Rosen who blogs at Shalom Rav. I contacted him because a couple of years ago he organised a congregational trip to Dheisheh refugee camp, which intrigued me. The information and insights he provided were central to my thesis. If you haven’t read his blog already, you’re missing out. Go and have a look (and it will give you something nice to read the next time I pull a disappearing act).

3.) Now that this is over and I have nothing much to focus on apart from the slight matter of the doctorate, I’m getting to work on my book. Stay tuned.

4.) The Bethlehem youth group should be at a conference on peace, justice, and reconciliation in Rwanda now. We weren’t successful in raising the amount needed to send them in time. We were offered a grant of four thousand euros to enable them to go, but it came too late. However, this isn’t the end of it. We’re going to use the money for a similar project, as it’s important to bring our (often isolated) teenagers into contact with other young people who have experienced violence in their lives and are working to make things different. Thank you to everyone who helped. If you’d like to donate, let me know.

5.) Earlier today there were four Israeli tanks sitting on top of the hill in Beit Jala, right next to Talitha Kumi school and the shop that always has a reliable stock of my favourite ice cream. I’m not sure if they’re still there or what on earth they’re doing (perhaps the soldiers have also heard about the ice cream and decided to bunk off a scheduled Gaza invasion in favour of getting some?) but the neighbourhood is unnerved. It doesn’t like tanks. Please keep it in your prayers.

This autumn Sameeha’s course of study in England drew to its close. We travelled to the Lake District together (I didn’t think she should leave England without seeing it) for what would be our last visit together for neither of us knows how long. Her house in Gaza City is barely a three-hour drive from me in Bethlehem, but getting into Gaza is still so hard, even with the easing on Rafah, that the best way for us to see one another is to jump on a plane.

“I need to do something radical with you before I go back home,” was her greeting.

I felt nervous. The last time she decided we needed to do something radical she attacked me with her makeup bag and tried to drag me into a nightclub. My toenails bore traces of scarlet nail polish for months. (It looked exactly like blood.) Fortunately this time she was content to hire a boat and row it out on Windermere. Considering that she can’t swim and I have a disability that means my arms and legs sometimes like to act autonomously of my brain, you would have thought that bobbing about in the middle of one of Britain’s largest and deepest lakes would have been an alarming experience. After the makeover it was positively relaxing.

Once we were far enough from shore, I laid down my oars. We sat in silence (an unusual condition for Sameeha). The lake swelled and sighed beneath us, cradling the boat. There was no sound apart from the waves on the wood and the occasional creak as an oar shifted in a rowlock. It was hard to believe that we only met in person just over a year ago; before that our friendship was based around our blogs and our Twitter accounts and the late-night Facebook chats that took place when both of us were being prevented from sleep (by drone strikes in her case, caffeine in mine). Levinas and Derrida, radical versus liberal feminism, inconvenient crushes on political Zionists (“Clarify that was you, not me!” I can hear her saying indignantly), the size of our backsides – you name it, and we have probably discussed it in the middle of the night. She feels like one of those people I’ve known forever.

“I’m OK,” she wrote. “I’m with family, all staring at the TV to anticipate what’s next. Habibti, this has been a hell of a week. I can’t sleep.”

“Probably just as well. It would hardly be reasonable for your family to have to cope with your snoring on top of everything else.”

Then she lost either Internet or electricity or both, and I was left in my cold room in the middle of the night, staring at the screen and wondering what I could possibly do. Apart from boil the kettle for the sixth time in three hours.

Ever-resourceful and knowing that she would not be able to reach my mobile in England, she has communicated her safety and unflagging spirits to me by texting one of my Israeli friends and cheerfully asking him to ask me if she might have my permission to kidnap him for ransom. Ever-obliging, he has done so. (You might think that getting his permission would be the more pertinent thing to do, but Sameeha and I are working on the establishment of the matriarchy.) “She says that she loves you, despite the unpleasant reminder of her snoring at a time like this, and she promises to treat me well and not feed me to any crocodiles.”

That wasn’t much, but it made me smile and will give me a slightly better sleep. I wish I knew that she had enjoyed the same. One of the last things I read from her before she lost Internet: “The sky is burning tonight. They’ve gone insane.”

I hope she has a kettle to hand. And some means of boiling it.

Anyway, he has started a new website, Abraham’s Tent.  “My focus is really on the idea that religion is part of the solution not just the problem.” On Twitter he has been inviting people to submit relevant writing and artwork with a personal twist. I think it’s a brilliant concept and I suspect quite a few of my own readers would be interested in taking part, hence the plug. Also, I owe him. There have been a few occasions when I have sent a grumpy salvo of prayers up to Heaven, only for an eerily apt reply to pop up on my screen from ‘Jihadi Jew’ about two seconds later. My favourite occasion was when I wasn’t feeling well and got dragged out of slumber by a concerned child who wanted to feed me ‘medicine’ – a concoction of banana, jam, and crushed digestive biscuit, plus other stuff I probably don’t want to know about. Unable to get back to sleep again after these loving ministrations, I slumped down at my computer and said by way of a friendly morning prayer, “God, some rest would have been appreciated.” Unfortunately I hadn’t give my small doctor the kind welcome she deserved, and she backed out of my bedroom hurt by my impatience. Cue a tweet from Lee: “Master of the World! Why does it take such rude awakenings to wake us up to the fact that we are actually asleep?”

I submit my MA dissertation in just over a month, so posts will probably be scarce until the thing has been printed and bound and sent off to the faculty for marking. (Unless Word Bubble can’t satisfy all my procrastination needs, in which case I will pop up here as usual.) My topic is Jewish theological responses to the Nakba. Through my reading and interviews I’m discovering lots of fascinating and exciting things that I didn’t know before, which is one of the best bits about research. As the dissertation takes shape I am being confirmed in my own belief that religion can indeed be part of the solution – even if you’re not religious. It tessellates with what I’ve discovered through mental health work about the power of stories in helping you to understand other people better – not to speak of yourself.

I have two other things to occupy me. My friend Nader has got engaged to be married (a bombshell he exploded on his friends this evening with no prior warning) and I am determined to get to that wedding somehow, even if I have to blag my way across the Erez Crossing disguised as an itinerant piano tuner or a wandering Aramean or something similar. A tunnel entry isn’t practical – I’m dreadfully claustrophobic, and in any case a tunnel would ruin the few wedding-suitable clothes I own. This is going to be tricky.

Also proving tricky to arrange is the Bethlehem youth group’s peace trip to Rwanda in November. People have sent donations via this blog (thank you so much), and some friends in England are now asking if their churches will raise a collection in aid of the trip. I hope the answers will be yes. So far we have raised £340, which will just about get the youth to Amman and buy some falafel on the way. I’m confident that the trip can happen (because bigger things happen all the time) but I need to rely heavily on the kindness of strangers for this one, as we are not a large organisation. If you are able to support us, or you know people who might, please be in touch. It’s important for our young people. I would very much like them to have the opportunity to meet survivors of the Rwandan genocide who have been able to forgive, in addition to learning about other struggles for justice first-hand.

I was reluctant to write it for several reasons. In Palestine I have met dozens of brave, beautiful, insouciant mischief-makers who have a very tough load to bear. I didn’t want to tell their stories only for them to be ridiculed by people whose first priority is to protect their own ideology (the belief that the occupation is benign) or dismissed by people who don’t care. These kids deserve better than that. While I’ve toughened up when it comes to political debate, I wasn’t sure how I would take to seeing the usual evasions and excuses directed at the children down the road.

I wanted to write it because most Israelis are blithely unaware of what life is like for Palestinians under occupation. The segregation is so complete that they have no reason to find out unless they go looking specifically. It’s possible to go to bed in Rishon le Zion and never find out that at that same moment a child is being arrested in Ramallah. That bubble needs to be punctured. I stopped hesitating.

But whose stories should I tell? Sahar’s? Maryam’s? Tamer’s? Jinan’s? There are so many. Would I write about the little girl whose home has been torn down by wasp-yellow bulldozers so often that she’s now developed a fear of the colour yellow? The teenagers who have been in military detention? Or just the Pavlovian way that the local kids froze when their football game was interrupted by the sound of a military jeep’s squawking hooter? Would I just talk about today’s children, or discuss what life was like for their parents before them, make it clear that this part of a horrible pattern woven across generations? How do I fit this world into one short article?

And how would I write it? The first draft was sepulchral in tone, and I didn’t want that. These children might be traumatised, but they’re still full of fun. The older ones would probably resent being made to sound like characters in a bad Lifetime movie. The second draft was so relentlessly cheerful that it might have been written by Pollyanna. My Israeli friend Duck proofread it, and said, “It sounds like, ‘Hey, this is a terrible tragedy, but everything’s going to be OK’ when what it really needs to be is, ‘This is a terrible crime and it needs to be stopped’.” Point taken. Back to the blank Word screen.

Eventually I got it done. This is the result. I think it provides a good snapshot of how things are. But rereading it, I see past the stories I wrote and think only of all the ones I didn’t tell.