Meeting my Cousin 2

...... and we talk for four or five hours. We sit in a cafe in the Moslem quarter, drink Arabic coffee and talk about Israel and Palestine, the refugees, why I am in Abu Dis., the prospects for peace, Hamas, Gaza. I tell him, 'I don't want to do tourism. I just want to talk to you'. 'Go on then', he says drawing back is chair. I realise he is quite a decent sensitive person, and that my picture of him as a kind of authoritarian bigot, which I had got from the email, was wide of the mark. I get the impression that he doesn't like me being in Abu Dis, he really doesn't like it, but beneath that, in a weird way he respects me for it.

It is amazing how for everything I report to him of what my friends tell me, he has a different corresponding point of view. He says the wall was necessary to stop terrorism. 'We had incredible amounts of terrorism. Now everything has changed'. He says 'the Palestinians' complain about road blocks but do not get up and condemn terrorism. 'If they did that, we would demolish the checkpoints and the wall tomorrow'. I told him how most of the people in Abu Dis can't come to Jerusalem. He claimed not to know this, or seemed not to believe me ('I am going to look into this and find out'). His main point is that there is no-one to negotiate with. 'We make concessions and we get nothing in exchange except more violence. We withdraw from Gaza in 2005, uproot 17,000 settlers with incredible difficulty and Hamas starts to fire rockets at our cities'. I talk to him about the blockade. 'We will let things through under inspection. But Hamas don't want that. They want to build up their strength again' to attack us.' And it goes on round and round. I say, 'You can start by talking to Mahmoud Abbas (the Palestinian president). You've got to start somewhere'.

'He is like you', he replies, 'If I was talking to him we could reach an agreement in an hour. But he is a captain without a crew. He can't deliver anything.'

All the time it is chicken and egg. That happens because that has happened. That has happened in response to something else. I can imagine what the Palestinians I talked to would say to each thing he says. I tell him about the prisoners. One of the men I had talked to the previous night had been in an Israeli jail for two years. He had told me that Israel was holding 10,000 Palestinians in prison. Peter says, 'If they will only release the Israeli soldier they kidnapped near the border with Gaza (3 years ago), that would have such an effect on public opinion here'. He thinks Palestinians complain but they don't want to admit responsibility for anything that has happened. 'If only they admitted that they were even 20 percent responsible, then we would have something to talk about, but they think we are 100 percent to blame. You can see there are some good things about Israel, it is not such a totally bad country. We have freedom of expression, lots of political parties, left wing and right wing. But in Palestine where is the freedom of expression, where is the left wing, where are the people who will getup and say that terrorism is wrong?'

I can see some of his points, he is quite decent and thoughtful, but at the same time static and suspicious. In a strange way what he is saying is a mirror image of what some of my Palestinian friends have been saying, down to the last phrase. 'Maybe there will be peace in two or three hundred years'. That is exactly what my flatmate Sarah's friend had said the day before.

At one point he said, 'You know everybody here recognises that there will be a Palestinian state sooner or later'. He says that some refugees will be taken back, a token number, but they can't all come back because otherwise if they all come back, Jews will be swamped. I kind of agree with that. People won't be able to repossess the exact houses their grandparents lived in. But they will have to be compensated for all the wretchedness of their dispossession and what they have had to suffer (I have yet to see a refugee camp. I am going to ask Mosa to show me one). All the time there is the fear of being overwhelmed, being driven into the sea.

At one stage, he says something that absolutely amazes me. 'You know, I don't think Israel will exist in a hundred or even fifty years'. He talks about demographics, how Arabs are able to wait and wait to get what they want. Maybe Israel was necessary, he says, to give us a breathing space, to allow us to recover from the Holocaust.

We talk about communication. I want to convince him that talking and human contact can overcome hatred and fear. I tell him about I have known in London, who have changed their minds about Jews as a result of me engaging with them, of not closing the door on them. I break down and start to cry. I sit there covering my face with my hands, and can't continue. He is very good. 'Drink some water', he says. I tell him I am proud to be Jewish. I think he has been afraid, judging from his email, that I was going to go over 'to the other side'. I told him that the side of Judaism that I was most proud of were the prophets, the philosophers like Maimonides. That is why I was doing what I was doing. At one point he leaves the cafe and goes out for about 10 minutes, whether to have a cry or not I don't know. He has always been more macho than me and he wasn't about to do it in front of me.

He admitted that building the settlements on the West Bank was a mistake, which is close to what Amos Oz the writer and peace activist has said. He said that building the settlements post-the 1967 war was 'the Devil's pact'. I told my cousin, 'even if you had to build the wall to stop terrorism, why the hell didn't you build it on the Green Line (the 1949 armistice line between Israel and the West Bank)? Why did you use it as an excuse to make another land grab? That only fuels the suspicion among Palestinians that you want to drive them out of the whole West Bank'.

I feel ok about him now. Before we left each other, we came to a conclusion of sorts. I tell him, 'You don't need to talk to me. You need to talk to Palestinians'. I tell him I know am man he can talk to. The Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association employs a man named Abid in Abu Dis, who documents and reports on human rights abuses here. He is educated and well informed and more importantly would be willing to talk to him. Peter says, 'I agree Palestinians and Israelis have to talk to each other, and for peace to come, something has to shift'. 'What is that something?' I ask. 'I don't know', he replies. And I don't know either.

Later on, when I get back to Abu Dis, I realise that there are huge practical difficulties about Peter and Abid meeting up. Peter as an Israeli citizen cannot go to Abu Dis, which is in the Palestinian territory (I have been told this recently - the Israeli army stops Israeli citizens from coming to the West Bank, will stop him at a checkpoint, or prosecute him if he tries to come here. It also meas that he can't come to towns like Bethlehem). And Abid, who has a green identity pass, cannot go to Jerusalem. My friends and I have worked out that there is literally nowhere where they can meet up to talk except the Dead Sea! Either that or in another country. That just sums the whole thing up. Maybe there will only be progress if Israelis and Palestinians meet up in Switzerland say, or somewhere like that.