Cafe 2

There are no raids by soldiers that night, and slowly the cafe fills up. Everybody is incredibly friendly as usual, and we chat in Arabic and English. People sit around playing cards or pool. Since I am not very good at either of these, I sit and watch them, write in my notebook and chat to Mosa and his friends. Mosa is incredibly generous. He won't let me pay for anything I have, although it is his job, it is his livelyhood. 'Tonight you are my honoured guest', he tells me.

I talk to a man in his thirties or forties, who is wearing a t-shirt with a Nike tick logo on. He is a taxi driver and has a blue id. Or rather he is a taxi-driver because he has a blue id, since it means that he probably lives in Jerusalem and go back and fore through the checkpoints, between here and Jerusalem and so on into Israel. It turns out that he can speak Hebrew as well as Arabic, and some English. He has probably learnt his Hebrew and English over time through talking to his passengers. He seems very easy going. At one point we are talking and I say something about 'Sunday', and I accidentally say Yom Ichad, which is Hebrew, instead of 'Yom Wachid' , which is Arabic. 'Do you speak Hebew?' he asks me. I hesitate and reply, 'Not really'. I ask him how many people in the bar (there are about 15 by now) have blue passes. 'I am the only one', he replies. Everyone else has a green Occupied Territory pass, which means that they cannot go to Jerusalem a few miles away, certainly cannot go into Israel, and cannot go to Ben Gurion airport if they want to travel abroad - they have to make the long arduous journey to Amman in Jordan crossing the river Jordan and passing through 3 border checkpoints.

I am wondering whether his easy-goingness has something to do with the fact that he has relative freedom of movement and that he gets to meet a lot of different kinds of people in his work - Israelis, tourists from the Europe and America. Which means that for the others who have no such freedom of moment, they are going to be bottled up, frustrated, and will have no real social meetings that will modify the negative images they develop of Israelis on account of the occupation. I must try and explore this theory a bit more, because it is just one more argument against the existence of the wall and the pass system.