It feels great to be here! After effectively two days of travel we are in Palestine. It feels like we are a million miles away from home, and in some ways we are. As the crow flies we are about 3 hours drive from Amman, but it took us 10 hours to get door to door, Amman to Jenin yesterday. It was a good test of patience and our abilities to amuse ourselves as we waited at the crossing.
We’re straight in to work today. As I guiltily try to get this writing down so that I don’t forget anything (I had to write yesterday’s today) my travel family are already working on the guest house and later we will get to work on the Cinema. Our Council of War (CoW) starts shortly to divvy up the work and get cracking. I hope we do them justice – they spent the last three days working their socks off to get the guest house (barely) habitable. We have a crudely rigged, barely effective shower curtain which if it fell would the poor person showering in their birthday suit to the other 12 inhabitants of the guest house. This should be fun!
I’m not sure that the words dusty and sweaty really do justice to the feelings of ick and grime we’re all feeling this afternoon. Despite the water shortages (Israel channels off most of the water for itself to irrigate it’s lush gardens and fill it’s swimming pools), we’re all on two showers a day just to feel close to normal. Luckily (or not) the water is cold so showers are very short. By this afternoon we also have an additional door so no risk of exposure any more.
We walked through the Jenin refugee camp this afternoon to get to the Freedom Theatre. The camp was surrounded and placed under siege in 2002 at the same time as the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Because it was surrounded the media wasn’t able to get in and report on what was going on, but what became clear after was that the Israeli army flattened about one third of the buildings in the camp. It marked the start of the second intifada (resistance). At the Freedom Theatre we saw a play devised and performed by the students of the theatre school entitled Fragments of Palestine in which they used language, drama, physical theatre and dance to present several scenarios which they had been a part of or were aware of. Almost all of the scenes depicted death or violence, often violent death. It was a stark reminder of the privilege of growing up in the UK where the closest to witnessing such extreme violence I ever had was a movie or an episode of The Bill, and certainly not death of the keening, cut your heart out of your chest, hair tearing variety. The age of the performers today was the age at which I was at University with the difficult decision of whether to have a double or single vodka lime & soda as my tenth drink of the night at the student union. Walking to the camp we were joined by a boy who told us how the Israeli’s had arrived at his house one night and burnt it down. A while later two of the soldiers involved were discovered dead in a nearby garden. He told the story like recounting a day excursion to Chessington World of Adventures. This level of death and violence is quite normal to them. They want to share it in the hope that it will get out to the world but the shame is that the world so often misunderstands because of the Israeli’s admirable ability to spin a story in their favour. It’s normal to these boys, kids, teenagers, young adults, middle aged and the elderly, but they still want it to stop.
We watched a documentary movie entitled Heart of Jenin this evening. The story is of a family whose middle son, Ahmed Khatib, was shot by an Israeli soldier in the head and chest at the age of 12 and follows the father’s, Ismael Khatib, journey and his decisions. The Israeli army claimed that he was carrying a toy gun which looked like a real one. The toy gun was never found. His family and friends said he was on his way to buy a tie to go with the new suit that he had very proudly bought for Ramadan. After consultation with the camp dignitaries the family took the decision to donate Ahmed’s organs. Ahmed was in Rambam Hospital in Israel and it was considered such an unusual decision that the media immediately got very excited about it and a young Israeli film maker decided to document the story. The film follows three of the six recipients of Ahmed’s donated organs and demonstrates the dignity and peacefulness of people who the Israeli’s like to label as terrorists. A Bedouin boy received one of the kidneys, an Israeli Druze girl the heart and an Orthodox Jewish girl the other kidney. It was the latter that provided the most food for thought as the family are very religious and were clearly not entirely comfortable with the knowledge that the donor was an Arab boy (by the way, the Israeli’s don’t call Palestinians Palestinians as to do so would, in their eyes, legitimise the cause. Instead they refer to Palestinians as Arabs as it makes Palestinians the Arab world’s problem). Ismael went to meet each of the families and the meeting between him and the Jewish family was very strained, but very polite. He also seemed very confused. Here is this Arab man who has done something so generous, confronting him with his worst nightmare. He is receiving into his living room a man who in his mind would kill him given the chance. The reaction the Israeli’s expect is for Ismael to become a suicide bomber or at least have some sort of revenge but instead he decided to save the lives of 5 people, 4 of whom are children and none of whom were Palestinians. His act of kindness was dignified, and a real poke in the eye for the Israeli’s because now they are confronted with the truth....and there it is again, the truth. Ismael and his family, through one (admittedly weighty) decision and their humanist, pragmatic approach to the situation they found themselves in adjusted the Jewish family’s knowledge of the truth so that for the first time they are considering that maybe black isn’t black after all. Perhaps the situation as they know it is a little greyer than they had been lead to believe.
None of us were really expecting the emotions of today. It’s been a tough day. There we were, busy painting and working, singing and dancing and enjoying our time and then BANG, Fragments of Palestine and a very real presentation of the experiences of being a refugee and living in Palestine. OK, back to work, slightly more contemplative and less singing and then WALLOP, Heart of Jenin and a demonstration of the lack of information the Israeli’s receive and the dignity and generosity of a Palestinian family at a time of complete devastation. Chez Jenin didn’t rock like last night. There was nothing to celebrate and lots to think about. We did get our first Taybeh Beer of the trip though – thanks to Eyad, the trooper, who did a beer run to Ramallah. The beer felt well earned.
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