All in the First Week

So a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step...but when that journey is to Palestine, that first step better be accompanied by one hell of an alibi and a smile that could charm the pants off a pedophile, or your journey could find itself ending in the arrivals hall at Ben-Gurion Airport. And although I had pretensions to cruise through customs like James Bond, with seemingly effortless and immaculate English charm, it seemed my inner Daniel Craig deserted me. In fact, all illusions had disappeared when the customs officer couldn't stop laughing at the thought that a twenty year-old male dressed in a t-shirt that read "Feel the Rhythm, Feel the Rhyme.", would spend an entire month in the Franciscan Monastery in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Regardless, I got in.

And what welcome I received; with the dulcet tones Georges Wassouf flowing from the radio, mercilessly suppressed by the merry greetings of Sara: our program coordinator, sour-strip connoisseur and resident bump (baby) carrier.

Then with her briefing under our belts, we were throw into the deep end with the immediate introductions to our host families. This is when you realize that perhaps the most important word you'll ever learn in Arabic is "Zaki" - meaning delicious. For apparently this word seems to carry amazing useful multiple meanings; expressing culinary delight, gratitude for their generosity, and an understanding of one of the great bedrocks of Arab society- it's food.

This was best seen at my first breakfast, where seemingly endless supplements were offered to accompany the mountain of bread put in front of me, where stating "Zaki!" went from being a genuine exclamation of delight, to nervous tick, to the pitiful surrender of man defeated by the final saucer of olive oil and herbs.

Then there was our first opportunity to meet the rest of the group, with an overview of trips we could look forward to and the chance to find out a little bit about the other PSE'rs. Here we found out that we really were in the land of miracles when we discovered that Americans were not the majority group with a mercifully large EU contingent from England, Germany, Spain, and Ireland; giving the program a truly bizarre fusion of accents producing a throng that was no doubt completely inaudible to any Palestinian trying to work out where we were from. It was after this, that we were whisked off on our first group encounter, and straight onto the front line of the conflict with a non-violent protest at al-Ma'sara. As we got there we saw a huge Palestinian flag emerge from the village floating above the heads of perhaps fifty Palestinian men and boys, who then proceeded to the Israeli barbed wire shouting, and eye balling the guards who stood less than a foot away. Thirty minutes passed and as the chanting continued one Israeli soldier exclaimed that we had five minutes to leave the area before we were all arrested. This was accompanied by the particularly bizarre claim that we were a security threat to a near by nuclear facility; which despite sounding completely implausible also seemed to little to quell the shouting.

By the Saturday, we were raring to see more, so had somehow been organized enough to sort out going to Ramallah. Prior to the construction of the wall, this would have been a simple endeavor, crossing straight through Jerusalem; however, after the Second Intifada, Palestinians had been forced to create a new road, going down and through the valleys east of city, with multiple military checkpoints taking the total journey time just over ninety minutes. Once there, we managed have a meeting with an organization called Al Haq-Justice, and hear about the legal work they were doing to halt to the development of further settlements, whilst using Israeli law to challenge IDF infringements in the region. From here we went to Arafat's Tomb, which was made with the most blindingly white stone, and backed on to the President's residence; providing the perfect opportunity for a few cheeky pictures of his compound, and a hilarious, if not slightly painful glass door incident, which even seemed to break the iron grimace of the guards by the Tomb.

This, like most days, then descended into pound piling exercise, with the rest of our trip around the city centering around the cafe's and restaurants we entered along the way- with the superbly named "Stars and Bucks" just along the road from "Doggy Style"...providing the perfect balance of culture and tradition that we were all craving.

If Saturday was eventful, Sunday was epic. Simply the amount of stuff we managed to do in one day was worthy of a medal. For within forty minutes of getting up, I was crossing through the military checkpoint to the Old City of Jerusalem, to then sit in a garden outside the city walls just below the Jaffa Gate for meeting with an ICHAD representative and former Israeli military forces soldier on the history of the Israel Palestine conflict and the situation at the time. We then proceeded on a tour of the Jerusalem area, with special attention paid to East Jerusalem where we saw the steady and strategic Israeli efforts to remove Palestinians from there homes, criminalize their further building work, and deprive them of the facilities offered to their Jewish neighbors. Indeed, most shocking, was the hillside view on to Area E1, with the Palestinian road in the bottom of the valley, running like a tiny river below the settlements which dominated all but one hill top on the landscape, in what could clearly be seen as attempt to encroach Palestinian lands to allow for "natural growth".

The offices of B'Tselem, an Israeli organization dedicated to objective reporting of the situation, was the next appointment for the day. With an explanation of the various techinques used in such work, such as the distribution of video cameras to record illegal acts, and cross-referencing in the compilation of proper accounts of events. Yet, it was a little side comment that seemed most striking in her talk; as she stated that they had reached the point where they no longer believed that simply providing information on what was going on was enough to alter public perception or government activity. An interesting, and slightly condemning thought.

From here we went on to see the Mount of Olives, which I'm sure would have been made better with the aid of trousers, but seemed to round off our introduction to the area perfectly, with information on the most important sites to each of the three Abrahamic religions. The vast Jewish cemetery covering one side of the valley, with the Muslim one covering the other. And with the seemingly countless places of religious significance in the New Testament, by the end of the day I was fading into melt down...

And all this in the first three days.

Perhaps I'll see every thing I need to see by the end of week-ha, I JEST.

Submitted by: Howard M.