A Year on Fire Mountain

By Anna Habibti

Explosive toilets, stuffed dead giraffes and “special milk” ... welcome to the Palestine that rarely makes it on to the news.

“A Year on Fire Mountain” is Anna Habibti’s diary of her year in Nablus, one of the most isolated cities in the West Bank of the occupied Palestinian territories.

It’s a story of life in a community physically restricted by the constant presence of the Israeli army and socially and psychologically stunted by several decades of occupation. But it’s also a celebration of the resilience, inventiveness and determination of the residents of Nablus and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories; neither ‘victims’ nor ‘villains’, but ordinary people trying to get by in extraordinary circumstances.

The bit of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan might be tiny, but events there have had a massive impact on the shaping of the modern Western world, inspiring Osama bin Laden, the London 7/7 suicide bombers and countless others to take up their ‘jihad’ against the West. A Year on Fire Mountain gives an insight into why and how, but with compassion, humour and a sense of the absurd.

Note: I paid my own way to and in Palestine and no one has paid me anything during the year-plus it has taken me, working full-time, to write the book and make it into something I hope readers will like. Therefore, if the sample you download adds as much to your life as, say, two cups of coffee in a chain coffee-shop, please think about paying to download the whole thing - then maybe I can afford to drink coffee too. Thanks!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anna Habibti
• Release date: Nov 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310521362

Anna Habibti

British. Female. Journalist. History graduate. Travelled a bit.

Book preview

A YEAR ON

FIRE MOUNTAIN

An Occupation Diary

By

Anna Habibti

For Dr Pauline Cutting

About Anna Habibti:

British. Female. Journalist. History graduate. Travelled a bit.

A YEAR ON FIRE MOUNTAIN

Smashwords edition

Copyright © 2014 Anna Habibti

All rights reserved.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The events in this book really happened, and all the people in it are real, although I may have changed their names during some incidents, to either keep them safe or spare their blushes

Cover: Children and shahid posters, Balata refugee camp, Nablus, September 2006.

Contents

Chapter One – September 2006

Welcome to Nablus! – Palestinians: six decades in limbo – Refugee camps – Conversation with the mother of a dead Resistance fighter – The Nakba, and a potted history of Palestine/Israel.

Chapter Two – October 2006

An introduction to the Separation Barrier – Jerusalem, the capital of Israel? – The aid boycott and a lean Ramadan – How the IDF killed a 62-year-old grandmother as she sewed in her garden – A colleague is kidnapped – Israel, the water thief – Sebastiya, Herod and John the Baptist – Settlerwatch in the village of Yanoun – Appropriating land for settlements.

Chapter Three- November 2006

Jericho, Wadi Qelt, Hisham’s Palace and St George’s Monastery – A float in the Dead Sea – Plenty of room at the inn in deserted Bethlehem – The vicar’s widow and the settlers in Hebron – The Palestinians of Ash Sheikh Sa’ad who want to be in Israel – Yasser Arafat’s tomb in Ramallah – First encounter with the notorious Qalandiya checkpoint – Shooting fish in a barrel: the IDF v Gaza.

Chapter Four – December 2006

Qalqiliya and probably the world’s weirdest zoo – An ICAHD settlement tour around Jerusalem, including Ma’ale Adumim – House demolitions explained – A sojourn on The Darkside – Playing demographics in Nazareth – Haifa and Blocking a Bog for Palestine – Round the Sea of Galilee by bike – Acre/Akka/Akko – Jaffa, Tel Aviv and Yitzak Rabin’s ‘Break Their Bones’ – An engineer’s way of beating the Occupation – Meeting the Samaritans – The Taj Mahal of Nablus and Munir al-Masri.

Chapter Five – January 2007

A trip to Jordan – Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon – The Israelis lift some checkpoints. Or do they? – The French Vice-Consul and his bodyguards are kidnapped.

Chapter Six – February 2007

Hamas v Fatah and the Mecca Accord – My Nabulsi Valentine – Was Saddam Hussein illegally killed? – Women in Nablus in the 1960s – Three days under curfew during an IDF incursion.

Chapter Seven – March 2007

The Crackdown on Crime is launched: goodbye cannabis farms, hello traffic lights – BBC journalist Alan Johnson is kidnapped – UNRWA head John Ging is attacked in Gaza – Palestinian children and adults in jail and ‘administrative detention’: numbers, jail conditions and international law – ‘The First Palestine International Bike Race’.

Chapter Eight – April 2007

Easter in Jerusalem – Dahab and Sinai, Egypt – Israeli Independence Day in Jerusalem.

Chapter Nine – May 2007

Nablus the Culture and the Barenboim-Said Foundation – How to dress as a woman in Gaza – The difficulties of organising anything under Occupation – Palestinians are lousy at PR: human interest journalism in Israel and Palestine.

Chapter 10 – June 2007

IDF air-strikes against home-made rockets in Gaza, the world’s biggest prison – The IDF kills a shopkeeper. Israel’s policy of ‘targeted killings’: the Geneva Conventions and international law – Hebron again – Ein Shebli village – Domestic violence and ‘honour killing’ – Burqa village – Hamas v Fatah equals heartbreak for ordinary Palestinians – The US and Israel support pro-Fatah forces against Hamas – al-Badan – My first Palestinian wedding – Israeli vehicles cause traffic problems in the village of Bezzariya.

Chapter 11 – July 2007

Jamaeen village – Sebastiya, and the looting of artefacts – Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter – The Jerusalem War Cemetery and the British West Indies Regiment in Palestine in World War I – Tel Balata, the invisible archaeological gem – Whirling Dervishes – How movement restrictions affect healthcare in the village of Yasid – Bethlehem and the only nightclub in the oPt.

Chapter 12 – August 2007

The British Government demands action over the killing of journalist James Miller – Settlers evicted from Hebron – The Crusader Church at Abu Ghosh – How Israel tears Palestinian families apart – Lydda/Lod: the Church of St George and a Nakba massacre – The children of Holocaust survivors demand compensation from Germany – A day trip to the settlement of Shilo: Living together as Jews and building Eretz Yisrael.

Chapter 13 – September 2007

Mental health issues in the oPt – Arabic Pop Idol Ammar Hassan comes home – Just how ludicrous is the Separation Barrier? Adventures in Kfar Tluth – Taybeh and the Palestinian Oktoberfest – A four-day jaunt in al-Ein refugee camp for the IDF – Death of a ‘collaborator’ in Balata.

Chapter 14 – October 2007

A last excursion through Huwarra checkpoint.

Epilogue – October 2014

Acknowledgements

Recommended reading

Chapter One

September 2006

Friday 22 September

I’ve been here less than a day and already I’m about to blow up a toilet.

Everyone warned me that water is scarce and expensive here and the flat sometimes runs out, sometimes for days at a time, but why couldn’t it have happened after someone had flushed the world’s biggest dump down the toilet, rather than before?

I can’t be angry at whoever left it there – either of the women staying here last night or one of the two men who collected them this morning – because it’s not like they could, or should, have stopped themselves doing it, even if they had realised the water had run out. But it really did smell unbelievably awful, and there was no getting away from it, either.

Samah was supposed to be helping me settle in today but she phoned this morning to tell me she won’t be coming because her uncle is ill. I shouldn’t leave the flat on my own, though, she said. The Israelis come into the city most nights, but last night’s incursion (that explains the cracks, booms, screeching car tyres and rumble of heavy vehicles that disturbed even my exhausted sleep, then) was especially big. The locals, wary of strangers at the best of times – in case they are Israeli ‘spies’ – would be even more suspicious than usual of foreigners, and maybe even resentful towards them.

Even without Samah’s sick uncle we probably wouldn’t have been able to go swimming, as we had half-planned to do via email last week. Samah said seven soldiers had been killed or injured by a home-made bomb during the incursion, and the IDF (Israeli ‘Defense’ Force, known by pro-Palestinians as the IOF – Israeli Offense Force) has set up a roadblock near the swimming pool. So I was stuck here, with nothing much to do other than try not to breathe in turd fumes as they just got worse and worse.

The flat was hot even when I woke up, and as the day has gone on it’s got hotter and hotter – just sitting here writing I’m sweating like crazy – and the turd must have started to ‘bake’ in the heat. Even with the toilet lid down and the bathroom door closed the smell was eye-wateringly disgusting. I opened every window in the flat but that probably made it even worse, as it’s really windy today too, so, having ‘baked’ the turd, the hot wind was then fanning the retch-inducing stench through the entire place.

‘They’ say the devil makes work for idle hands and ‘they’ are probably right. It was too hot – and smelly – for me to concentrate on anything too taxing, even reading; there’s no one else around to talk to; I’m too enervated to sleep, even though I’m exhausted; the TV has two channels, both in Arabic and apparently broadcasting through a blizzard, and my phone battery is almost flat and, as I don’t have an adaptor for the charger, I can’t even play with that. I can’t kill a few minutes taking a shower, even though I need one after yesterday’s complicated, sweaty, sticky journey from Jerusalem. (And why didn’t I have one last night, even though all I wanted to do was sleep? Mind you, if I had, the water would have run out earlier and I might have had two, or even more, festering dumps to cope with.)

So, for want of anything better to do, I started to go through every drawer and cupboard in the flat. Well, now the two French women have gone I’m the only person staying here. It’s not like I’m snooping round someone else’s house or anything; in fact, if this is going to be my home – as it is supposed to be for the next few months – I should know what’s in it. And in the cupboard under the kitchen sink, I found… a bottle of toilet cleaner. It was bright pink and viscous, but more importantly, it was floral scented. Very floral. Floral enough, with luck, to overpower the smell from the toilet.

I held my breath and, standing as far from the toilet as I could while still being able to lift the seat with my finger- tips, held the bottle – at arm’s length – over the bowl and squirted and squirted.

It’s at times like this that you wish you’d paid more attention in Chemistry at school. Because then you’re in with a chance of knowing what’s likely to happen when a litre of highly-scented Jordanian-manufactured toilet cleaner comes into contact with a baking, ammonia-releasing turd in a Palestinian toilet. Otherwise, all you can think of as it starts to hiss and bubble and fizz and develop into a spitting foam that swells up the inside of the bowl, is the story about your friend’s auntie who had a friend whose sister’s workmate was killed because she mixed household cleaners in a toilet and it blew up and a piece hit her on the head. And wonder if the very same is about to happen to you.

How embarrassing would it be, to be killed by an exploding toilet? How will the people at home – who have told me how worried they are because Nablus is so ‘dangerous’ – feel if my life is ended by a toilet I’ve detonated myself, and on my first day in the city too? And what about the locals? They’re used to explosions in Nablus, but I’ll bet no one’s blown up a toilet here before.

Later:

Well, I’m still alive… I’ve been in the room furthest away from the bathroom for a couple of hours and nothing too drastic seems to have happened, apart from the toilet cleaner actually making the smell worse; full-on synthetic jasmine meets baking turd, not a good combination. But even that seems to be lifting a little now, thank goodness.

Mahmoud, the volunteer who brought me to the flat yesterday, in his tiny white car that looks like it’s held together by rust, came round a little while ago. He said he had hoped to give me a guided tour of the Old City but the incursion had put a stop to that. I did lie just a little to him: after assuring him I had everything I needed and wouldn’t leave the flat, I sneaked out after he left to the shop next door. It’s literally right next door, visible from the kitchen balcony, and I reasoned that the people there would be used to new volunteers from Project Hope turning up all the time, so would realise I wasn’t a ‘spy’. I bought fresh coffee, milk and bread. Those, with the eggs, rice, tea, herbs and spices, sugar, breakfast cereal and six litre-bottles of drinking water I found in the kitchen should keep me going for a while.

So why am I here, in the city built on what is known as ‘The Mountain of Fire’ because the people are so feisty?

In a way I’ve been coming here since 1986, when British doctor Pauline Cutting was trapped in the Bourj al-Barajneh camp for Palestinian refugees in Beirut when it was put to siege by militiamen. Nobody seemed to care that the refugees had no food or medicines and the militias were threatening to overrun the camp and torture and kill everyone inside. Until Dr Cutting and her foreign colleagues, including Scots nurse Susan Wighton, put out an SOS on the radio. Then non-Palestinians started to take notice, and Dr Cutting was all over the British media, which is how I came to learn that there was such a thing as a ‘Palestinian refugee’. Until then I’d assumed ‘Palestinian’ was simply another word for ‘terrorist’.

My mother was born during World War II, so the Jewish Holocaust was the first international tragedy in her lifetime, and she brought us up fully aware of the horrors of it. Even as a small child I was vaguely conscious of stories on the news about Israelis and ‘Palestinians’. Israelis were Jewish and, because they had suffered such dreadful things during the Holocaust, they had to be ‘goodies’, I reasoned. I didn’t know what ‘Palestinians’ were but they wanted to hurt Israelis, so they had to be ‘baddies’. After all, the only time I heard anything about ‘Palestinians’ was when ‘Palestinian terrorists’ committed yet another atrocity. So it came as a bit of a revelation to learn, through the experiences of Dr Cutting and her colleagues, that Palestinians had suffered injustices too. I started to read up about the camps, and the Palestinians. And I started to wonder whether things were as simple as I’d always thought them to be.

I learned how the Palestinians in the Lebanese refugee camps were hammered by pretty much all sides in Lebanon’s 15-year-or-so-long civil war. And how, when Israel was occupying Lebanon in 1982, Israeli soldiers – under the command of Ariel Sharon, as in the man who would be Prime Minister of Israel right now if he wasn’t in a coma – had stood back and done absolutely nothing as Christian Phalangist militiamen butchered thousands of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. In fact, worse than that, Sharon had actually incited the Phalangist attacks, by claiming that it was Palestinian terrorists who had killed Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel (they hadn’t). And, so it emerged later, Israeli soldiers had actually helped the Phalangists, both during the massacre and later. (In 1993 the Israeli Kahan Commission declared Sharon personally responsible for what the Phalangists had done in September 1982. But that didn’t stop the Israelis making him their Prime Minister, did it?)

Whatever had prompted the Israelis to treat the refugees in the way they did – the questionable argument that there still might be men in the camps who were fighters with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), for example – it just couldn’t justify (to me, at any rate) their actions. And what made it even worse was that it looked like the Israelis were getting someone else to do their dirty work for them; when they weren’t themselves treating Palestinians in an appalling way, they were making it possible for others to do it instead. ‘Betrayed’ is probably the best way of describing how I felt. My whole life until then I’d rooted for these poor people who had suffered so much, yet here they were, treating others so horrendously.

Until that point I’d always thought it would be cool to spend time on a kibbutz: abroad, in the sun, cheap, funky – all the pictures I’d seen of kibbutzes seemed to feature people with 70s haircuts and stripy vests grinning like maniacs (healthy teeth as well!) while harvesting oranges. But having learned about what the Israelis had been up to in Lebanon, there was no way I could ‘support’ them by going to work on a kibbutz.

So, having ‘punished’ the Israelis by denying them my valuable labour, how could I make it up to the Palestinians for all the bad things I’d thought about them in the past? It took a while but then my friend Bill, who’d been to the West Bank several times, introduced me to Project Hope, a small non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Nablus.

Few foreigners ever made it to Nablus: they tended to be put off by its bad reputation (resistance to the Occupation is particularly strident here), and getting here was (and still is) bloody difficult, thanks to all the checkpoints and other obstacles. And that’s why Project Hope was set up, by a Canadian visitor, Jeremy Wildeman, and some local Palestinians, to encourage contact between the residents of Nablus and people from ‘outside’. Project Hope has arranged for me to spend a few weeks as a ‘guest’ (ie volunteer/unpaid) lecturer in journalism at Nablus’s an-Najah National University.

In most other countries, if you rocked up at the airport and told them you were planning to work for free at a university in a deprived community, they’d let you in with a massive smile of welcome. But, of course, Nablus isn’t in Israel, it’s in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt), and I’d been warned not to let on to the immigration people at Ben Gurion that I was planning to go to Nablus, as they have a habit of denying entry to anyone who admits to, or whom they suspect is, planning to hang out with Palestinians.

The easy solution, I decided, would be to avoid entering Israel at all. Why don’t I just come into the West Bank directly from Jordan, I (bless my naivety) asked Project Hope’s director, Hakim? Because, he explained, Israel controls the borders of the West Bank, so it’s Israeli immigration officers who police the crossings from Jordan, even Allenby Bridge, the one directly between the West Bank and Jordan. Therefore, entering via Allenby Bridge is not really that different to entering at Ben Gurion. OK, I told him: According to my map of ‘Israel’, there’s an airport near Jerusalem on the Palestinian side of the ‘border’ between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Can I get in through there? The airport is defunct, Hakim replied, and even if it wasn’t, just as they do with practically every other part of the West Bank, the Israelis would control everything that happened there, so Immigration would be no different to that at Ben Gurion.

I suppose I could have entered Israel by land from Egypt or Jordan, but seeing as I would have to go through Israeli Immigration whichever way I went, it looked simpler to use Ben Gurion. Even though I’d made sure there was nothing in my bags to suggest I would be mixing with Palestinians, and I’d chosen a guidebook that referred only to ‘Israel’ and warned against entering the West Bank, I was still bricking it during the flight. (I’d chosen SwissAir because it was the cheapest, but, Hey! I thought after I’d booked it, Who’d want to blow up the Swiss? So imagine my perturbation when, after we’d changed planes at Zurich, the pilot announced: Welcome to SwissAir flight number whatever, co-coding with El-Al and American Airlines.)

It didn’t help that as we entered the terminal building the couple in front of me, who had sat next to me on the plane and had kosher meals, were stopped by security, possibly because the man looked vaguely Arab/north African. I squatted on the floor for about 10 seconds to rearrange my bag and a security guard (who looked about 15!) demanded to see my passport.

In the end, I got off pretty lightly: just a 20 or 30-minute grilling by two security people: WHY don’t you want an Israeli stamp in your passport? Because it’s easier; sorry. (Certain countries in this region won’t let you in if they know you’ve been to Israel.) WHY do you want to visit Israel? I’m a Christian and I want to see the Holy Land. WHAT can you tell me about Christianity? WHY are you staying so long? You have a guidebook? WHERE is it? WHERE do you plan to go for so long? HOW will you pay for your trip? SHOW me the credit card you will be using here, etc etc. Not what I needed at 3.30am. Maybe they thought I was looking for work in Israel, but they’re also on the lookout for people heading for the Palestinian territories.

Certainly, Israel is not a nation at ease with itself, and I felt this so acutely in Jerusalem, particularly in the main shopping areas in West Jerusalem. I found myself looking at buses and thinking: There could be a bomb on there. And so many of the shops had notices such as: Welcome, brave tourist. x% discount at their entrances, alongside the metal detectors and security guards who check you and your bags for bombs and weapons.

I’d taken a minibus from the airport at Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It dropped me off at the Jaffa Gate entrance to the Old City. Even though it was 7am and I was knackered, I was enchanted. For a start, I don’t think I’ve been through a Moorish gate before. Plus, the Old City is built from pale sand-coloured stone, and the early-morning light gave it a lovely honey hue. Once you get inside, it’s all winding little streets, tiny windows and flights of stairs and ginnels that appear from nowhere. And because it was so early, I had the place almost to myself, apart from a couple of groups of tourists following the Stations of the Cross (the route Jesus supposedly took to the Crucifixion). Well, them and a late-middle aged man who insisted I sit in his shop and drink mint tea, even though I smelled rank, was so tired I was virtually comatose and kept banging on about having to find a place to stay.

During the usual meet-the-locals conversation, he asked if I was married, then asked why not. Then he told me more than I needed to know about the relationship between the neighbour who had just walked past us and her husband, and that their difficulties were largely down to the husband not fancying the wife anymore. The problem with Arab women is once they get married they get fat, he told me. And that he, no sylph himself, was divorced. My wife was from Jordan and she’s gone back there now. She wore all the… he said, demonstrating some kind of cover-all thing with his hands, but I prefer women to dress like you; clothes that show the shape of their bodies.

And within a couple of hours, after I’d found a place to stay and showered and changed, I was in another shop, with another man, this time one who asked me to proof-read an advert in English then plied me with (delicious) grapes from his garden as we talked about politics and the plight of the Palestinians. And then proceeded to tell me about the body-to-body massages he’d enjoyed on business trips to Thailand and how, sometimes, even if it’s the sort of thing you would normally never dream of doing, something like that, with a stranger, can do you a lot of good.

And sometimes, conversations like that with a stranger make you want to do a runner. Which I did. And what did we learn from these two experiences (apart from the importance of keeping away from dirty old men who own shops)? That I am getting old: once upon a time I got harassed by frisky 20-somethings, now I get leched at by their granddads.

These dodgy encounters aside, the Old City pretty much rocked. It blew my mind being in a place that’s so important to so many people, especially when it covers only something like one quarter of one square mile. It’s divided into four ‘Quarters’ – Jewish, Armenian, Muslim and Christian. I managed to find my way, in the Christian Quarter, to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which some Christian denominations believe covers the place where Jesus was crucified and buried, and as such contains five of the 14 Stations of the Cross. As it’s the denominations that go heaviest on Bells and Smells – Roman Catholic, Abyssinian Coptic and three types of Orthodox – and they each have their own church within the church, it is pretty spectacular, all cavernous vaulted ceilings, icons, gold and incense. Although the first place of worship was built in the 4th Century, the church that’s there now was mostly re-built by the Crusaders in the 12th Century and it’s so atmospheric I half-expected to bump into a Crusader every time I turned a corner.

There’s also, bordered by both the Muslim Quarter and the Jewish Quarter, al-Haram al-Sharif, also known as Temple Mount, a place that shows how close Muslims and Jews are – and how far apart. Jews believe it’s the site of the First and Second Temples; the place where Adam was created, Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac (to show his devotion to God) and Jacob had a dream of angels descending and ascending a ladder from earth to heaven. Muslims also recognise Abraham, and other significant figures in Judaism also linked to the Temples, such as David and Solomon, so al-Haram al-Sharif is important to them for that reason. However, it’s also the site of the al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest place in Islam after Mecca and Medina, and, alongside it, the Dome of the Rock, built over the boulder from which, Muslims believe, Mohammed began his ‘night journey’ to Heaven. And according to Jews, Jacob was asleep on that very same rock when he had his dream of angels.

Oh, and for Christians, for whom Judaism was a precursor to their religion so the site’s important to them because of that, it’s also supposed to be the place where Satan dared Jesus to throw Himself off the pinnacle of the Temple to prove He really was the son of God.

So, within a few hundred yards square, there is: the most holy shrine in Judaism, the Western (aka Wailing) Wall, supposed to be all that’s left of the Second Temple destroyed by the Romans in 70AD with, somewhere within it, the Ark of the Covenant; the third most sacred place for Muslims, plus one of their most important shrines, and a place that’s significant for Christians, too.

It’s also the place where Ariel Sharon (him again) triggered the start of the Second Intifada [Palestinian uprising against the Occupation] in September 2000, by marching onto al-Haram al-Sharif with around 1,000 Israeli policemen, to show, as he in effect told CNN, that no part of his country should be out of bounds to an Israeli citizen.

And speaking of Sharon, what did I pass as I walked back to Damascus Gate, the main access between the Old City and Palestinian East Jerusalem? Ariel Sharon’s house. He may have been in a coma for months, but someone’s doing a sterling job of keeping a massive great Israeli flag fluttering down the front of the house and a thumping great menorah sparkling on the roof, slap bang in the Muslim Quarter. Nothing incendiary about that at all, eh?

I stayed in Faisal hostel, just outside the Old City and close to Damascus Gate. Faisal is a meeting place for pro-Palestinian activists and it’s decorated with anti-Occupation and pro-human rights posters and the like. Even though the staff, all Palestinians, were really helpful and I knew I was among ‘friends’, I was still too scared to tell anyone where I was heading, in case I got shopped to Israeli immigration and deported. That’s how paranoid I was! My room was basic but pleasant, but even with a fan it was swelteringly hot, far too hot for me to sleep, and the curtains were really thin, so I ended up being woken by the sun at ridiculous o’clock. Still, I’d made it into the country at least; all I had to do next was get myself to Nablus.

It’s only something like 40 miles from Jerusalem, but, boy, was getting here a faff. First, I caught a minibus from the little bus station just up the road from the hostel. My luggage seemed to take up all the available storage space, but when a young man who spoke good English told the driver my bags were full of stuff for the university in Nablus, he helped me cram it all in. The minibus went past the ‘Separation Barrier’, that wretched wall Israel is building around the West Bank, supposedly to prevent ‘terrorists’ getting into Israel. It was the most depression-inducing thing I have seen in a long while: an endless expanse of 30ft (8 metre)-or-so high slabs of drab grey concrete, which at times seemed to run right down the middle of the road, and/or just a couple of feet from someone’s house.

I’d been told to get a bus to the city of Ramallah but a man at the bus station said this bus would get me as far along the road to Nablus as the one to Ramallah. But I wasn’t so sure of that when, after following the Barrier for what felt like miles, the driver dropped me seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Behind me there was the Barrier and what appeared to be a part-built concrete house the wrong side of Classical good taste, and stretching before me to the horizon nothing but rock-strewn scrub. Apart from, by the side of the road a hundred yards or so away, a battered, big yellow car. It turned out to be the share taxi – ‘service’, pronounced serveese – to Huwarra, the main checkpoint outside Nablus. It took a while for the service to fill up, but eventually we set off. I didn’t really take much notice of the road, apart from the fact that it seemed to be rather twisting, and rough going in places, and it was dusk by the time we reached Huwarra.

Very few vehicles are allowed through Huwarra, so almost everyone entering or leaving Nablus has to get themselves to the checkpoint, usually by service, walk through the checkpoint and pick up a vehicle for their onward journey on the other side.

Through the gloom I could make out a watchtower draped in camouflage netting, with a Star of David Israeli flag flapping from one corner. There was a small wooden hut below the watchtower and another in the middle of the road, and between them ran a low barrier of plastic panels. Loitering around were a handful of soldiers, dressed as if for battle in metal helmets and body armour and with big guns across their chests. I’ve interviewed British soldiers before, and even been on exercises with them a couple of times, and felt totally comfortable with them. But they were ‘with us’, not members of an army that’s already caused the deaths of two foreign peace activists (Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall) and British news cameraman James Miller, and seems to have a habit of shooting first and asking questions later. I was a bit unsteady on my feet as I walked up the narrow corridor of wire fencing, maybe 10 or 15 feet high, that led from the taxi drop-off point to a turnstile, and it was only a little to do with exhaustion, the heavy pack on my back and the massive holdall of books I was carrying.

My backpack was as bulky as it was heavy – I looked like a perpendicular giant turtle – and what with that and the holdall, I got stuck in the turnstile. A man behind me guided me backwards and out, so he could pass my pack and my bag one at a time through the turnstile to his friend on the other side. As I pulled my pack back onto my back someone shouted Hey! It was a young soldier, watching from the tin-roofed breeze-block shack between the wire tunnel and the road. Already stressed about reaching Nablus so late and also a little embarrassed about holding up the people behind me in the queue for the turnstile, I was in no mood to take crap from anyone, especially someone (indirectly) responsible for the existence of that bloody turnstile. What? I snapped back, about a millisecond before I realised it probably wasn’t a good idea to pick a fight with a young man with a big gun guarding the entrance to a city I am not supposed to be in. But my tone must have been enough to persuade him that, body armour and gun or not, he would probably come off worst in a fight with me. Or, for sheer entertainment value alone, it was worth leaving me to struggle on my way. Whatever the reason, he waved me through, leaving me free to find a taxi to take me on to the city.

Sunday 24 September

I’m no longer on my own in the flat. Yesterday Samah took me to the university, where, of course, I’m supposed to be a ‘guest’ lecturer in journalism. The head of journalism was distinctly disinterested: I suppose we could use you one hour a week, after Ramadan, she said. As Ramadan starts within the next couple of days and lasts around four of the nine weeks I’m supposed to be here, that makes my presence totally pointless. And so much for all the preparation I’ve done before coming here – the people who’ve donated textbooks, suggested teaching materials and advised me on aspects of the profession I don’t know much about. She does have a point that I don’t speak Arabic and the students’ English might not be strong enough for them to follow me if I taught in English, but I’ll bet we could work out something, if she was that bothered.

Samah was less than impressed. I’ll take you to Zajel, she said. Zajel is a programme set up at the university to promote positive images of Palestinians. It runs a website that carries news stories giving the Palestinian perspective on things, and has pages on the history and culture of Palestine. It also arranges voluntary work placements and an annual Summer Camp for foreigners, so they can visit Nablus to see for themselves what life here is like, while giving local students, who rarely leave Nablus let alone the oPt, the chance to meet non-Palestinians who aren’t Israeli soldiers. The idea is, I suppose, to show that Palestinians are humans too and don’t deserve to live out their lives under occupation.

Samah introduced me to the head of Zajel, Ala’a. One of the first things he told me about was how, during some big Israeli operation a couple of years ago, the soldiers held him and his neighbours in his four-storey apartment block, in one ground-floor flat for something like nine days, while they used the top floor as a lookout post. The haunted way Ala’a told the story left me in no doubt that he wasn’t telling it to show how hard done by he is, or how ruthless the Israelis can be, but because it’s something that preys on his mind every single day. While we were talking, ‘Amira’ arrived. She’s Polish but she’s fluent in Arabic. She’s doing postgraduate research on conditions in Palestinian refugee camps; she’s visited them throughout the Middle East – Syria, Lebanon, Jordan – and now she’s come here to see what life is like in camps on home ground. She was hoping the university might be able to provide a guide to take her to one.

Amira – the name she uses in Arabic-speaking countries – had no accommodation fixed up, so Samah said she could stay in the Project Hope flat and, in a way, took Amira under the Project Hope wing. Today one of the local volunteers with Project Hope, a student called Ashraf, took us to two refugee camps.

Conditions in the camps are pretty basic. The ‘streets’ between the houses are just a handful of feet (one metre or so) wide, and the houses themselves aren’t exactly fancy; most of them look shoddily built in the first place, and run down as well. And we passed a couple of houses where what should have been the front room was given over to goats. But Amira said the camps were nicer than ones she’s visited in other countries. In Lebanon, for example,