Not quite finished.....

Well, we thought we were winding down, however, we are still on the go!
A full closure of the West Bank has been imposed by the Israelis and has been effect since Friday. What that means to us is that no West Bank ID holder (i.e. all the men who queue to go to work in the morning) cannot pass through the CP, hence no CP watch. What is good for us is rather catastrophic for Bethlehemites, no work, no money and possibly no job! Remember Ameen, the morning coffee seller who supports his family, extended family and assorted others - I told you about him earlier – tough time for him with no coffee selling!

We aren’t quite off-the-hook because the Bible College Conference is in town and we meet groups of about 20 participants each morning at 6 a.m. to escort them through the CP. For the pleasure of getting up early and picking up groups from the lobby of Intercontinental Hotel, we were invited by the Sabeel organizer to stay and have breakfast in a wonderful dining room overlooking the grand swimming pool, as posh as a ***** in our world. Truth be told, she didn’t invite us, I invited myself and my colleagues. Actually, Abraham, one of the conference participants, said that he valued the work we do here and would like to pay for our breakfasts but it turned out his offer was not needed because it was a huge buffet style breakfast and no one even noticed us. Now, my colleagues and I are fighting over who will go tomorrow and Wednesday on the chance we’ll get another free breakfast. The ‘juxtaposition of incongruous elements’ (as Robert would say) is stunning with the backdrop of Aida Refugee Camp immediately behind the Intercontinental. I wish I could get up high enough on one of the surrounding buildings to get this picture but I can’t, so just visualize it.

The conference speakers and sessions are also open to us and those of us who are so inclined have been attending. I have attended two sessions (not necessarily because I was so inclined but it was an oasis of cool out of the 30C heat!): The Bible, Israel and the Church: Challenging Zionism, Anti-Semitism and Replacement Theology presented by Stephen Sizer and Evangelicals and Islam presented by Colin Chapman and Brother Andrew. Brother Andrew was nicknamed God’s Smuggler for smuggling Bibles to Communist countries at the height of the Cold war. He was a joy to listen to! You can goggle any these people if you care to know more about them.
This morning’s CP tour for the conference participants was cancelled due to increasing tension in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and actually all throughout the West Bank over holy sites in Jerusalem. Military presence is on every street corner, sirens wailing, Palestinian teenagers throwing rocks. We had an early morning phone call Samira Alshaer, the Principal of a girl’s school in Tu’qua village to request that we go there immediately because the military was throwing tear gas at the children as they went to school. Apparently, some of the teenage boys from the boys school across the highway had thrown rocks at the military hummers and the IDF responded with tear gas. We spoke to one of the young girls, Nariman Sulimann, who had had an M16 or whatever those guns are called, pointed at the side of her head. She was still physically shaking when we spoke to her. Samira told us they have a social worker who can assist students like Nariman who have been traumatized by the military, however, she is only in the school twice a week and today was not one of the days. We promised to return to Tu’qua tomorrow morning at 7:30 a.m. to monitor the situation as the kids go to school. Today, we got there after the fact! Even Eli, our driver, was a shaken by some choice words one of the soldiers shouted at him as we got in his taxi.

When we got back to town, Eli took us to the Intercontinental to take in more of the conference. There was quite a disturbance of teenagers throwing rocks at the Wall which cuts into Bethlehem to preserve Rachel’s tomb on the Israeli side. Because Bethlehem is Area A, the Palestinian Authority army dudes arrived to disperse the young men, which they did without the use of tear gas, or sound bombs. The Israeli’s declared Rachel’s tomb and the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron as Israeli heritage sites last week – just one more irritant for the Palestinians. It has been 5 days of closure now – the first closures, other than for Jewish holidays, in many months. The popular belief here is that the Israeli’s are pressuring or squeezing the Palestinians into reacting with a Third Intifada so they can then say, “look at those terrorists” and justify more oppression.

Our staff in Jerusalem become very protective of us when there is unrest in the West Bank. They want to know where we are at all times and who is in the placement and who is out on days off or whatever. One of my colleagues, Phil, is enjoying days off by the Sea of Gallillee right now and we have two visitors from other placements with us. It is quite a task to keep track of all 24 of us from Group 34 and add to that Group 35 – another 24 newbbies - are currently arriving in Jerusalem. I do not envy the EAPPI staff!

On Sunday, we travelled back to Hebron with Hamed, our UNOCHA contact, that’s the Humanitarian Affairs branch of the UN. We visited the Bedouin village of Um Al Kher which is the most vulnerable community in the South Hebron Hills. The people of the village all live in tents with the exception of one concrete block house, and 2 concrete structures which house toilets. All structures, with the exception of the one house, have demolition orders on them, meaning that at any time the military may come and flatten their tents and toilets. The settlement of Karmel is expanding and encroaching on the land of Um Al Kher. The Bedouins have actual paperwork to support the fact that they own the land, which is very unusual for a Bedouin community. The electrical poles carrying electricity to Karmel on one side and a settlement chicken farm on the other side pass on Palestinian land. This would not be so bad except that the Palestinians are not allowed to hook into the power source. So near and yet so far!



While there, we met two Israeli physicists who sympathize with the plight of the community (and other vulnerable Palestinian communities) and volunteer their time and expertise to work with Palestinians in setting up solar panels to bring electrical power to the people of Um Al Kher. Very impressive men! The first and third from the right are Israeli and the second and fourth are Palestinian.

Although there are no ongoing open hostilities between the villagers and the settlers, there are flare-ups from time to time when a donkey doesn’t seem to know the border between the communities and inadvertently gets into the settlement. Other villages in the South Hebron Hills such as Suseya, Al Twani and Tubas have benefitted from the constant presence of the international community, EAPPI and Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPTs), to name a couple. Hamed said that he fears that it is too late for these Bedouins and they will be forced to give up their way of life and have to move the Yatta, a Palestinians city, not too far away. Of course, by our standards, that may not be such a bad move but because they would be forced to do so, it would be very sad. After many cups of lukewarm sugared tea and amazing hospitality, we had the usual hair-raising ride back to Bethlehem with Hamed’s cousin. My strategy is to sit as far back in the vehicle as possible, close my eyes and hope for the best.
Phil and Muriel relaxing in our hosts tent.

Holy unfit!

The Bethlehem Bible College is an interdenominational Christian Bible College very close to our house. On Monday, we were invited to have lunch with the students and faculty and we were told about an international conference of theologians, organized by Sabeel, at the college from March 12-17th. This conference is called ‘Christ at the Checkpoint’ so they thought it would be appropriate to invite the delegates to be with us in the checkpoint at 6 a.m. So for 4 days next week, we will take groups on the wonderful journey through Gilo CP. Many of the participants will arrive to the conference by bus or car and will never experience what Palestinians go through every day. What is the point of sitting through hours of academic lectures about Christ at the CP just steps away from the CP but not visit it? We’ll show ‘em.......

For some reason, village people like to dress me up! We visited the village of Nahalin this week and were treated to a feast of, you guessed it, Maqulba. We went at 4 p.m. to visit teachers, Hussein, Naim and Yousef, for what we thought was tea time. Of course, Yousef’s wife had been cooking all day and served the 3 men and the 4 of us a wonderful meal. The women later ate what was left after the men and guests had had their fill, a custom I find extremely uncomfortable. They did not want us to leave and even though my colleagues, Phil and Sabine, had been up since 4 am and were nearly falling asleep in their Maqulba, we couldn’t extract ourselves until after 9 p.m. Gunnar was playing volleyball (with a wire for a net) with the teenage guys and the women insisted on dressing me in one of their traditional Palestinian costumes. This happened to me in the village of Jubbet adh Dhib as well, I seem to appear to be some sort of toy doll to these folks!





There is a local women’s group in town who wanted some physical activity and a young German volunteer named Kevin offered to give them aerobics classes. A generous offer from someone who only knew how to train a soccer team! Some weeks back, I told him that I would assist him and this week he took me up on my offer. So I searched back in my mind about 20 years, put some music together and off I went. It turned out that the dozen or so women we not very fit and so my level of ‘unfittness’ went unnoticed. Kevin and I did a little tag-teaming because I felt he had made the offer and he should participate in the leadership. It actually would have worked better if I had done it myself because that led to a somewhat disjointed class. Sabine watched the spectacle and told me after that the women (and Kevin) were following me – we’ll see what happens next week.





The weather has been magnificent of late – 28C and sunny. This morning we had a delegation of 18 Germans, part of an Alternative Tour to the Middle East, to escort around the Wall, CP and refugee camp for 3 hours and it was a bit of a challenge to find shade for them to shelter under. We managed to keep them alive until their bus returned.

Group 34’s Handover Report has been written and sent to Group 35; the Handover Schedule has been planned and the invitations to the Handover Party have been delivered. Now we wait for Group 35 to arrive.

Olive trees? What olive trees?

I arrived back in Bethlehem on Monday to a house full with placement visitors from Hebron and Yanoun. It is always nice to host our colleagues because it is far less boring in the CP when you have company. A really nice Arab Israeli is the commander at Gilo right now (the soldiers rotate locations every 2 months or so) and he loves to speak English. It really doesn’t matter how nice the commander is the process of humiliation remains the same. It’s all relative – better than with a nasty commander but nonetheless, humiliating. I complimented him of how smooth and fast the CP queue was cleared today – 2 ½ hours – and he told me he was there to work and that was exactly what he did. He went directly to the Humanitarian Line and fished out the women and elderly and let them through as he is supposed to do but none of the other commanders have the compassion or the guts to do it. The fact that he is an Arab makes it easier, I think, to deal with fellow Arabs. He comes from Carmel, in Haifa. Not too many Arab Israelis serve in the IDF, so it is a bit rare. We walk a fine line between being seen by the Palestinians as too friendly to the soldiers but on the other hand, the soldiers are young men and women too. I have a need to try to understand people as people, not soldiers, Palestinians, oppressors, terrorists, Israelis or whatever label you want to give them.

Israeli bull-dozers rolled into Beit Jala on Tuesday morning flattening anything and everything in their path. I guess they didn’t see the olive trees on the path! One would have to have been blind not to see the destruction the bull-dozers were causing as they uprooted one olive tree after another. Home owners were trying to replant some of the trees and cut up others to salvage what wood they could. They told us some of the trees were probably 200 years old. But the bull-dozers marched onward heavily supported by the IDF and other Israeli security forces (difficult to tell who the security players were). We had been notified by our local contacts that a demonstration would take place the following day in support of the people who were losing trees and land in this operation. The first family, whose house we stopped at, had lost part of its land the previous day, swing sets and other garden furniture had been salvaged and moved close to the house. When we arrived the owner showed us what was left of an olive tree which had been uprooted.

This homeowner will lose his whole front yard and driveway. You can see, if you click and enlarge, the Wall is coming through. The angled portion of the Wall is to prevent kids from throwing rocks on the Israeli cars below.


We always keep our distance - except when we don't!

The route of the Wall in this area makes no sense at all. We walked back to the other side of the highway where the bull-dozers were moving very fast up a hill taking down tree after tree. Protesters scrambled down the hill to meet the heavy equipment. Two young men sat down and had to be forcibly but peacefully removed by the army, carried up the hill to safer ground. Another group of protesters sat under an olive tree until the army pressured them to move up the hill. It was sad, indeed, to watch the local residents, the owners of the trees, watching the army take down what they had spent years building up. All we could do was be there, witness, photograph, and tell their stories – many times one feels completely helpless in these situations.



We did hear a bit of good news out of Beit Jala this afternoon. Our local contact in Umm Salamone, where we attend a demonstration every Friday, told us that the Israeli court ruled that the route of the Wall in this area is illegal and the destruction has come to a halt! But who know for how long?

If it is possible to have light hearted fun at a demonstration against the Wall, we had it on Friday. Our driver, Eli, and our translator, Yousef, teased each other back and forth and had us in stitches. Yousef is a student at Bethlehem University, hoping to get a scholarship to study languages in France next year. He wanted to attend a demonstration (not in the capacity as our translator) so he could say that he had been at or had at least witnessed such an event. Because the IDF photograph the protestors as much as we photograph them, Yousef stayed in the car, not wishing to jeopardize his future. So now he can say he was there! Eli had a field day teasing Yousef about his bravery! Also, one of my colleagues is deathly afraid of tear gas and so retreats at the first sight of a soldier holding a tear gas canister, regardless of the mood of the demonstration. Early on, Eli and I lost sight of my colleague, of course, because he had already retreated to Eli’s car. Another brave soul! It turned out to be a completely peaceful demonstration with a Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) politician, Abbas Zakke, showing up because elections are just around the corner. Eli said that the politicians will be at every demo from now until elections.

Early on Saturday, I came to Jerusalem for a couple of much needed days off. I took my chances with a Palestinian hairdresser and had highlights done. Not bad! Although I was looking for a mindless couple of hours, I got a 2 hour discussion about Armenian Christians and how they feel neither Palestinian nor Israeli, etc, etc, etc. It seems no matter how hard one tries, there is no clearing the mind and avoiding talk of ‘the situation’. I attended St. George’s Anglican Church this a.m. – same thing – at coffee hour following worship, someone wants to talk about ‘the situation’. This afternoon I wandered about West Jerusalem in the sunshine and no one talked to me. Lovely!

You never know what you will find in East Jerusalem – at the Legacy Hotel tonight, I found a Sushi Bar. I buried my head in my book, sipped my glass of wine and ate Sushi. Perfect end to two days off!