Jenin, Jenin…

My route through the checkpoint to Jenin was surprisingly quick – much faster than the previous occasion, and punctuated only by the sarcastic “if you DO want to go to Jenin…” from the security guard as I tried to find my way out of the terminal. I had reached the terminal by bus, sitting next to Israeli soldiers returning to duty at the base next to Jenin – from brushing shoulders in the morning, we’re now divided by a rather impermeable electronic fence and security barrier, rolls of razor wire, and 7-metre walls (in the vicinity of their base)…

Today I definitely have seen the fruits of the Arabic study – it was a 5% English, 95% Arabic day, whether talking the students at the academic organization where my host father in Ar’ara (Israel) volunteers, or guys in the street near where I am staying, or others. I finally understood the difference between the camp and the city in Jenin, visiting with some of the most pro-Fatah people I’ve ever spoken to – walls plastered with posters of Abu Amr and Abu Mazen (Arafat and Abbas). Jenin is quiet. The municipality is technically Hamas, though people I spoke to joked that people here are just sound businessmen; supporting Hamas in name brought campaign money (from Iran, etc), and the Hamas people now were Fatah stalwarts in the past. There are still posters of young men holding guns (the ‘martyrs’) in a few places, but it seems they remain there more out of sympathy to their families than any support for armed action. One centre for Fatah sympathizers – men in their 40s who told stories of being in prison as a result of actions during the first Intifada, one 5 years, another 3 years, another 6 years, etc – is a garage which wouldn’t look out of place in small-time America, without the bullet-holes littering walls from the second Intifada. I ask the owner what exactly happened, and get a shrugging of shoulders; he was in prison for the second Intifada as well.

I returned with one of them to his home on the edge of the camp in Jenin for the evening, hearing stories from 2002 and the siege on the camp. … many disconnected thoughts, from the Mudaaris Sheaabia “People’s schools” that were run in homes in each neighbourhood for the duration of the curfews and conflict in camps… to the bullet holes in the home next door… to the youngest daughter of Faraaz, Diana, named after the Princess of Wales. She was definitely killed by the Royal Family, he assured me.

I woke early to the sounds and smells of the vegetable market below my window; my the time my alarm went off I was already with friends in a coffee shop. A student who thought I looked out of place in an internet café insisted on being my tour guide for the later part of the morning, and we wandered through Jenin Mall – a surprisingly mall-like place, complete with a risqué lingerie store (presumably for dressing up for one’s husband).

Returning to the hostel in the afternoon, I had a somewhat unnerving experience as I tried to turn on the TV in the communal room, when a man in his late 30s (the son of the hostel owner) with mud on his face resembling a facial mask walked in, helped me turn it on, before smiling and showing me his arm. It took a moment for me to make out the large swastika branded there. Hitler, he said, he loves Hitler. He came back half and hour later, and I asked him when he got the brand. 19 years ago, he said – aged 15 in 1990, during the first Intifada. I asked why he said he likes Hitler. He lifted up his shirt, showing horrifying, disfiguring burn scars swathing the lower half of his chest. When the army came in during protests, he explained, soldiers pushed him onto burning car tyres; he spent the next six months in hospital in Nablus. He loves Hitler because he killed Jews, he said.

Though the blogging has slowed to a trickle (which I’d credit to this double life going on physically between the kibbutz-based program and the family I’m staying with and more generally with the political and cultural perspectives), I’m still reading a lot on the Middle East and conflict studies through the assorted blogosphere, and sharing the most noteworthy things. If you’re interested, this is the link, which also includes my recent photos.

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Bus stop in a nearby Arab village

I have excuse not to ratchet up the blogging – I have both interesting photos to post, and experiences to report…
For a start, last week:
Israeli Independence Day (as known as النكبة , the Catastrophe) fell on Wednesday, though starting at dusk the night before, as per Jewish tradition. We spent the previous day, Tuesday (which doubles as Israeli Remembrance/Veterans’ Day) touring Mishmar HaEmek, Lidia’s kibbutz – Lidia being a lively (sixty-year-old) of who spent her childhood in Wales. More interesting than Barkai (the kibbutz where we study) for its greater age, commercial success, closer alliance to the original principles of community, and location as a noted battle of the War of ’48, Mishmar HaEmek, with its new buildings and ornate gardens, presents an example of what things can look like when individuals with talent and flair sacrifice it toward the good of the kibbutz.
Leaving the ornate preparations for the evening’s celebrations somewhat reluctantly for the rough-and-ready plans at Barkai, we sat through the barbecue and fireworks. Lots of flashes and flag-waving, but “not much joy”, to quote one friend on the kibbutz, describing the mood compared to some prior years…

The following day, I went along with local friends to see an event to mark the Nakba. The heat, dust, crowds, and tiredness isn’t evident in the photographs; otherwise, it was a rather muted affair.

So I have a camera again, and am back from Jordan.

Today is Holocaust (שואה; كارثة) Remembrance Day, so we sat down for an hour with one of the older residents of the kibbutz to hear his story. Aged 83, Zechariah was 13 in 1939 when his life in Poland in a religious Jewish family was destroyed; he was the only one to survive, and that only due to Oskar Schindler, whose factories he reached after other concentration camps. A year after liberation, he came to Israel, to a kibbutz in the north; six months after the war of ’48, he came to Barkai, laying the foundations for the first of the kibbutz buildings.
Everyone has their own stories… I ended sitting next to a (jewish) Israeli lady at a talk the other day who spent years in Israeli jail for protesting the targeted assassination program / aiding the enemy, depending on which side you read. Certainly a world away from the government-sponsored program I’ll be continuing next weekend.

Amman was a break, a breath of fresh air, or at least fresh ideas… the Christian/Muslim choir Easter concert… stumbling upon the British Foreign Minister, David Miliband, talking to youth at Ruwwad (the NGO where I spent last summer)… the Sufi music festival, and especially the two blind Oud players… making and flying kites, with a youth group a friend is supporting in another poor community… attending an Arab Christian Palm Sunday service, and recognizing the hymn tunes from CH.

I’ve been in and out of internet communication over the past few weeks, spending my time out of classes with a family in Ar’ara (an Arab Israeli town 10 minutes east from us on the main road), as well as the past few days on weekend two of a leadership program in Jerusalem. Life is pretty jam-packed, what with class, getting buses to and from the kibbutz, trying to fit in conversation, study, and the requisite Arab TV programs (such as Star Academy, an American Idol / Big Brother / Eurovision combination, with musical contestants from around the Arab world living together and performing for weekly vote-offs). The past weekend was particularly heavy, looking at charity and social justice NGO work in Jerusalem, and trying to empathise with their approach through “Jewish values”. I guess I’ve decided it doesn’t really matter to me why people rationalise doing ‘good deeds’; nevertheless, I guess it’s good to know where another’s motivations lie.

I write this sitting and intermittently checking how Carolina (our basketball team) is getting on against Duke… And I guess I have a lot to reflect on. Today we were in Dalit El-Carmel, a Druze village about half an hour away. The Druze are a fascinating lot – secret religion, strict rules for marriage, and fierce patriotism are just a few of the things which jump to mind when describing them. Still, to go into detail regarding them would take far more time than I am will to devote to this, so I’ll content myself with saying simply that it’s both refreshing and frustrating to have a guide who openly admits that his description and explanations (of the Druze religion) vary depending on his audience.
So Carolina won the game… whoop whoop… but it’s a little more melodramatic than I might have expected, from afar at least. It has been a somber week or so, from news of the death of a school friend, coming to the year’s mind of the murder of a role model at UNC, and driving through a junction in Jerusalem past a bulldozer with shot-out windows, thirty minutes after a Palestinian builder decided to plow it into a police car and a coach. I was in Jerusalem yet again, on the first of a trio of “leadership-development” (I know, I know, I winced as well when I wrote it) weekends – which actually exceeded my expectations by some margin, both in terms of the speakers, including the previous IDF (Israeli armed forces) Chief of Staff, and the discussions that arose, though the preconcert ‘motivational’ speech Thursday night, to a hall packed primarily with groups from Jewish youth movements, was an unpleasant reminder of the sweeping collective fervor I’ve seen associated with strongly evangelical Christianity…
I may be heading away from the kibbutz to spend some of the next few weeks living in the Arab community, and returning solely for classes… but we’ll have to see how that one goes.

The western wall (Kotel), with the Dome of the Rock in the background

So the past few weeks haven’t exactly been empty – I’ve been to Jerusalem (twice), Zippori and Bait She’arim (capital and mausoleum for c. 200 AD Jewry), a Circassian village, a Sufi mosque in Sakhnin, as well as the regular Arabic and Hebrew classes. Excuses aside, I think it would be fair to say that I’m settling into my life here for the next few months pretty much as well as I’d hoped – even if the blog is a little behind.

The Arab Israeli town of Umm Al-Fahm - I live just out of view in the valley below

Jerusalem is somewhat of a trek from the kibbutz – a 15 minute taxi/friendly kibbutznik ride to the train station, a 25-45 minute train journey to Tel Aviv, 10 minute exchange for a bus, and an hour on the bus, even before leaving Tel Aviv central bus station… I visited a friend from UNC at Hebrew University (who unlike me had managed to wake up and watch the whole Duke-Carolina game and saw me as somewhat of a feeble fan). It’s tough going so long away from people who ’speak Carolina’. Hebrew University is the program that Carolina tried to encourage me to do, so I guess it’s bittersweet to see their amazing campus and location. Still I think we have the better deal up in Wadi Ara, even if the group of Orthodox yeshiva boys and seminary girls I experienced Shabbat dinner with were positively repulsed by my mention of the region…

View from the Mount of Olives

Three weeks in, and I’m conscious that I’m not writing much in the way of my thoughts – it’s more out of confusion than anything else. The language courses are marching steadily onward, Hebrew especially, where I’ve gone from looking at the script as meaningless doodles to understanding and being able to write simple conversations, and getting meaningful parts of dialogue around us.
Arabic is coming on, a little more slowly…
And I’m getting practice my German once a week as well as hanging out with the kid of one of our professors (who at 5 speaks German, . English and Hebrew in a slight German accent, and basic Arabic)

We have a Jewish Identity and a History of Zionism class, both once a week. I’m a little surprised how little jewish school-educated students with me seem to know it all; I guess the Old Testament was a pretty solid grounding, for the facts at least. I’m been amazed at how foreign so much of the reasoning seems to me… I guess I expected to see more in common between Christian and Jewish thought. Certainly more than I can express simply here… but there certainly are aspects that seem completely foreign.

In other news…
- In a local Arab town once a week to converse in simple Arabic and empathise somewhat

Went to see an Arab village which was preserved as an Artists’ Colony, and the village higher up the mountain established where the Arab residents hid when fleeing the attacking Israeli army in 1949. A much deeper story there… but that will take a little more reflection.

So I’ve been in Israel almost two full weeks. A lot less going and seeing, and a lot more reading and thinking, than the average travel excursion, but that’s certainly not a negative assessment. I spent the weekend in the northern port city of Haifa, once again fortunate to have generous and welcoming local hosts. Shame about the weather though… The mild evenings with Arab (Israeli) coffeehouses lining the streets, and groups smoking shisha outside, reminded me of lazy evenings last summer in Amman. Hopefully I’ll be back albeit briefly, for the Passover holiday in March/April, to visit friends and so on. A little to the north of Petra, there’s a Bedu gentleman called Abu Sagar (with real talent on the Oud) whose keffiyeh I still have.

Bah'ai Gardens, Haifa

Kibbutz Barkai is certainly growing on me. There really are all sorts here – I’ll describe a couple of the more common categories. There are the more elderly members pushing 60 years here, who travel around on these mini golf carts, and who spend their days at a supported day centre. At the other extreme are the vast numbers of non-resident children who just go to kindergarten here during the day – the kibbutzim are renowned for the quality of their children’s development work, even if the majority view is that the extremes reached in the sixties (as regards separating children from parents at an early age) are no longer acceptable. Then there are the “lonely soldiers” – often 18-23-ish Jews of non-Israeli heritage (at the moment there are Argentines, Russians, a Peruvian, and others), who are serving in the army as part of their process of moving to Israel and gaining Israeli citizenship, and will call the kibbutz home on weekends for the next few years. I am (unless I’m very much mistaken) the only non-Jew here, but that certainly doesn’t mean right wing or orthodox views are common here – quite the opposite, though the way the Army permeates culture here means the high level of empathy for the soldiers – husbands, boyfriends, co-workers here, and more – is hardly a surprise.

Looking east, into the West Bank

Classes are going okay – Hebrew is really coming on, though the Arabic teacher still can’t quite accept that I’m not an absolute beginner. Middle-Eastern Studies took us to a hillside overlooking the 1949 Green Line where it divides a historic town, while volunteer session took us to Ar’ara, an Arab town, where we met a bunch of teenagers, and hung out with them for a while. I found it really comfortable – just like Amman, actually – despite the well-intentioned efforts of another of the American students to force out opinions on Hamas from each of them. I’m looking forward to going back.