The ruins after the rain

I’m in England at the moment. Yesterday I had a beautiful day in Coventry with my friend Sam. I never thought I would write ‘beautiful’ and ‘Coventry’ in the same sentence, but that was before I saw the cathedral, where Sam is volunteering.

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.

From Bethlehem to Rwanda

Just after Christmas I started to feel restless. I was dissatisfied with how things were going with the youth group. Late last year we lost our youth house in Bethlehem (one of three premises) because we couldn’t afford the rent and upkeep, and now the youth have to squash themselves into what was originally an office and practically sit on each other’s laps when they want to meet. I decided that they needed something to perk them up a bit. A field trip seemed in order.

The writing on the wall

If you are a tourist or pilgrim who arrives in Bethlehem via Checkpoint 300, the first thing you will see as you turn into the street is the concrete barrier that slices it in half, severing the neighbourhood from Rachel’s Tomb and the military base that lies adjacent to the holy site. Get closer to the wall and you will find the women of the neighbourhood waiting to meet you.

One of the simplest but most important aspects of my organisation’s work is providing a space where people can tell their stories. One day Toine had an idea: why not turn the wall itself into that space? We could collect short vignettes from the women who use the centre and hang them on the concrete. The stories would be like windows: tourists on their way to see Nativity Church or eat dinner at the optimistically named Bahamas Fish Restaurant would be able to catch a glimpse of Palestinian life.

Non-violence in a nutshell

As I wrote in the aftermath of Mustafa al-Tamimi’s murder, many Palestinians have become jaded with the concept of pacifist resistance, as it is often conflated with passivity. Acquiescing to the State of Israel’s insistence on retaining all of Jerusalem is needed to demonstrate ‘openness’; abandoning the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign is a sign of being ‘reasonable’; renouncing the one-state solution and accepting Israel’s right to exist as an ethno-religious state reveals a willingness to be ‘tolerant’. Without these things, Palestinians are told, you cannot be truly non-violent; and non-violence is your duty. We demand it of you. You won’t deserve even a sliver of the cake until you are on your best behaviour.

The devouring lion: graffiti near Bethlehem checkpoint

These things are not true. An unwavering commitment to justice ought to lie at the heart of all pacifist resistance. In surrendering their most basic rights in order to try and buy that crumbling slice of cake, Palestinians would become accessories to the state-sponsored violence that is being waged against their communities – the carving up of the West Bank into impoverished cantonments, the water shortages, the ongoing isolation of Gaza, the home demolitions,  the destruction of hundreds of years of Palestinian culture in Jerusalem and beyond. This meek acceptance of the status quo is not non-violence; you can’t have true non-violence without self-respect.

Through a child’s eyes

Some graffiti by Banksy in Bethlehem: A Palestinian girl frisks a soldier.

One evening late last summer, as I walked home from a day spent in Dheisheh refugee camp, I was stopped at a flying checkpoint. (These are blockades that pop up unexpectedly for a few days, or even a few hours, as opposed to the permanent checkpoints.) I took off my jacket so that they could search the pockets and waited patiently. This wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. What was unusual was the age and appearance of the ‘soldiers’. The eldest of them was nine. She is a little girl who lives just round the corner.

“Shoes!” she said imperiously, in a magnificent imitation of our local IDF, and I removed my shoes. She had a long wooden stick slung across her body in the manner of a gun. She made the motions of scanning my shoes, and then demanded, “ID!” To my horror, I didn’t have my ID on me. I stood and waited while they discussed what to do with me – would they just refuse to let me pass, or would I have to be interrogated first? Should I be arrested? In the end, needing the toilet rather badly, I bribed the occupation army by proffering a squashed packet of Oreos that I may or may not have sat on at some point. They accepted cheerfully. After I had dashed in to the bathroom, I came back out to them, and we spent a happy evening playing tag and hide-and-seek.

Pacifism or passivity?

This morning, in Tel Aviv’s Beilinson Hospital, twenty-eight-year-old Mustafa al-Tamimi died from the injuries he sustained at yesterday’s protest in the village of Nabi Saleh. A soldier opened the door of the military jeep as it was driving off and fired a tear gas canister at Mustafa at point-blank range. It struck him full in the face. When I saw the photograph, I was reminded of a red pomegranate split open on rock. His features were barely discernible.

This evening, IDF spokesperson Avital Leibovitch issued photographic justification of Mustafa’s killing, captioning it, “This is what he was doing.” The photo shows a cosy-looking bed. Looking at this piece of incontrovertible evidence, I could only conclude that Mustafa had been threatening soldiers’ lives with a 10.5 tog fibre quilt in a floral-patterned pastel cover. Then I registered the slingshot lying on top of the quilt. Avital Leibovitch’s insinuation is that Mustafa had been throwing stones.

Several people who were present at the demonstration have responded to her claim by pointing to the photo that was captured moments before the canister was fired. Mustafa has no slingshot, and he is carrying no rocks. In one sense, it was right to point this out – but in another it is wrong. It misses the point.

What ‘retards’ have taught me about peace work (and people)

“Are you mentally handicapped?”

“He’s too low IQ to give a proper response.”

“I’m sure you’re retarded.”

The use of cognitive disability as an insult has always bothered me. It’s demeaning and hurtful to people who have such disabilities, and it shows a lack of understanding of how these conditions actually affect a person. When these insults are flung about in a discussion on the conflict in Palestine and Israel, my usual distaste is tinged with a sense of something very like irony as well.

Before I started work in Bethlehem, I had a job in a residential college for young adults with learning disabilities. Most of the students were eighteen or nineteen when they came to us, although the college could accept any student between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. It was a marvellous place, set in one of the wildest and most beautiful counties of England, with a river flowing beneath it and a ruined castle in the grounds. Also dotted about were several little cottages (once the houses of farmhands) where the students lived together in groups of half a dozen.

Spot the difference

I’m back in Britain – for now.

My time in Palestine was remarkable – exhausting, thought-provoking, hope-inspiring, fun and tragic all in one go. My return journey is already planned, and this time I am taking with me a secret weapon against the occupation and injustice: my mother.

And if the socioeconomic protests that have broken out in Israel on such a seismic scale aren’t enough to topple Netanyahu’s government, her arrival will.

When I came back from my first ever visit to Bethlehem, aged nineteen, I spent the next couple of weeks in a kind of numb daze. I don’t remember much. I cried a lot, I know that. Eventually I would take my horror and my anger at what I had just seen and use it as fuel in my quest to do something, but at the time I didn’t think there was anything I could possibly do except cry. Over the past few days I have endured a muted version of that hopelessness. Aspects of life in Palestine keep flashing to mind, sharper than glass, causing me to recoil and think, “That is horrible! How did you ever manage to put up with that level of horrible? More importantly, how did it manage to become normal for you?” The contrast between British and Palestinian life makes my mental snapshots of deadly weapons and destroyed houses stand out even more clearly. For example:

Passengers on board a First North Western bus service.

Here you see people travelling into Manchester. I can’t say for certain, but it’s a pretty safe bet that none of them has a gun in there. Not even the moody-looking girl at the back.

Spot the difference.

And here is a covertly taken photo of a fellow passenger on the bus from Tiberias to Karmi’el. I wonder what goes through his mind when he gets dressed in the morning? “Right, I think I’ll wear the frayed cut-off jeans and my giant shades, and just to complete the look, I’ll accessorize with this edgy submachine gun.”

Culture shock doesn’t even begin to describe it.

A few days ago, when this post was still sitting in my ‘Drafts’ folder, I followed that sentence up with, “I’m glad to have a break from it all, though.” I am now deleting that statement, because fortunately certain elements of the great British public have decided to help me ease gently back into normal life by organising a little light recreational violence. I thank them for the thought, but I think they’ve gone a bit overboard. They can stop setting fire to things now.

Shai says:
wtf.
you people need to smoke something and relax.
Vicky says:
I don’t have a strategy for this. I’ve never done riot dispersal before. It wasn’t part of our nonviolence training.
Do I go out into the city centre and appeal to their better natures? “You are worse than the Magav! Go home!”
Shai says:

you can tell them this:
seriously, Shai is involved in more peaceful demonstrations than this. and everyone in his neighborhood owns a rocket launcher!

Don’t worry. I may have left Bethlehem for a while, but my activism doesn’t stop here, and neither does the blog. As you can see, life in Britain can afford a lot to write about…

Reaching out in Ramadan

I first heard of Ramadan as a little girl at school in the Middle East. I am not Muslim, and nor is anyone in my family, but I grew up steeped in Islam. I developed a fascination with the mosques our bus passed on the way to school, getting particularly fond of one blue-and-gold construction with an ornate minaret that reminded me of a Chinese pagoda. I liked mosque architecture, especially the curve of the dome against the burning blue sweep of sky, and the way the crescents atop the minarets stood out clear and sharp against the gathering dusk. Inside, I valued the feeling of space. Standing with my feet sinking into the velvety carpets, and looking up to the ornate calligraphy that swirled round the base of the dome, I felt as though at any minute I might take flight. It is a sensation that I still get in traditionally designed mosques today.

Excluding the adhan that came from the mosque nearest our compound, which always sounded as though the imam were doing sports commentary (and trying to drown out every other imam in the town), I loved the call to prayer as well. It seemed to have a haunting quality about it. As an eight year old, I remember standing in my best friend’s garden at sunset, watching all the neighbouring buildings turn pink and listening to the adhan ring out. I was filled with a sensation of longing, almost hunger – but for what?

Hunger is my enduring impression of Islamic spirituality: hunger for justice, hunger for heaven, hunger to know God. The fasting month of Ramadan is a powerful metaphor for all of this. From dawn until dusk, observant Muslims don’t eat or drink. (Children, sick people, and travellers are exempt.)  This year, I am taking part.