Meeting with my cousin in Jerusalem

This was always going to be a difficult day. I have an Israeli cousin, who apart from an evening when we met up in London last year, I have not seen since 1968, when I stayed with his family near Tel Aviv. Since I was coming here, I wanted to arrange to meet up, but my email describing my intention to stay in a Palestinian town rather than Israel proper met with a very definite response:

..... The authorities discourage these initiatives for a very good reason. The organizers such as the Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association and others have a deeper political intent than you may realize. This is not about teaching English (they already have excellent teachers who have studied abroad) it is about using volunteers to spread the word about Israeli "repressions"; i.e. to undermine the already tarnished Israeli image abroad. All you have to do is read their guidelines in "encouraging" these volunteers to "share their thoughts". They forget to mention that from these villages suicide bombers have blown up countless innocent Israeli citizens over the years. Israel has a right under these dire circumstances to exercise security measures ....

So this left me wondering how the meeting was going to go, what we were going to talk about, whether it was possible or desirable not to talk about 'the situation', or how we would get on.

Lots of buses run from from Abu Dis into Jerusalem, even on Friday which is the day of rest in the Palestinian territories (because of Islam), as opposed to Saturday in Israel proper. It is interesting how the area (a short distance as the crow flies: the hill I can see from our balcony is the Mount of Olives, on the other side of it is Jerusalem) changes as we go along the road. The shabby and run-down streets and buildings of Abu Dis, the more upmarket stores of the next village of al-Eizaria (Bethany), and then a strange transitional area on the other side of al-Eizaria where Palestinians and Israeli settlers both go (I have heard stories of Palestinians going to work for Israelis on the settlements, just one other thing that is done in secret here because it is on the one hand taboo and on the other necessary life if you don't have any other work). If this town, the landscape changes, the road takes on the look of an up to date motorway just like in Italy, Spain or Australia. Then we come to a checkpoint. The bus slows down and pulls over. Two armed Israeli soldiers come on board, a man and a woman both young, and start going through people's ids. They look at my UK passport flicking through the pages in a bored way, and inspect the passes of the other passengers. One man, in his forties or fifties, overweight with a walking disability, is chucked off the bus for not having the right coloured pass. I get into a conversation with the elderly Palestinian man next to me. 'Bad', he says, 'these checks are bad'. We talk about the UK. He has a son that lived in the UK some years ago.

The bus starts off again and arrives in Jersusalem outside the 16th century walls of the old city, at the Damascus gate, which is the entrance to the Moslem quarter. My cousin Peter doesn't want to meet there. He prefers the westward facing Jaffa gate, which is 90 degrees round the wall. I walk round the wall and get there in about 10 minutes. He is older looking than I remember him, older looking than me I think although we are almost the same age (this gives me quite a lot of gratification because when we were both 16, he already had a black belt in judo and karate, and I was a neurotic insecure teenager with major feelings of inferiority. Now he is a bit overweight and I am quite slim and fit).

The Jaffa gate looks modern, cleaned up sterile, a sort of Walt Disney version of biblical Jerusalem. I start to feel angry and upset already. The whole thing feels awkward. I don't really know what to say. He starts telling me about the history of the place. We tag on to a free tour, which is being led by an American or an Israeli talking American English. I cannot bear it, I don't listen. The shops inside the Jaffa Gate sell all kinds of tourist tat. This could be Brighton or Southend. Eventually we decide to leave the tour. Peter wants to take me to see museums but I don't want to go to any of them. We are deliberately not talking about the 'issue', my being in Abu Dis, Palestine, the Palestinians. Everything becomes fraught. I realise I have left my hat at home and the sun is very hot. He thinks I should get a hat. But the only hats I see have Jerusalem printed on them. I don't want to rub it in the faces of my students and friends in Abu Dis that I can go to Jerusalem and they can't. And still worse, other hats have 'Israeli army' printed on. Everything is becoming a minefield. I notice that we are skirting around personal issues. The Jewish quarter, which when I last visited it in 1968 was a ruin, is now full of apartments, parked cars, shops selling tourist rubbish. We go to the Wailing Wall area but that is horrible as well, everything clean and sterile with neat ramps for the worshippers, lights stages, an underground prayer area with air conditioning. I want to visit the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque. Peter says it is out of bounds to non-Moslems on Fridays, but I wonder if he is just putting me off, and if I was here alone I could go there, or whether it is a rule of the soldiers rather than the Moslems.

We go to the Moslem quarter, which is the only part of old Jerusalem that has any sort of authentic atmosphere. We find a cafe and then we do start to talk. I suppose I have been afraid, I didn't know what was going to happen whether it would become a shouting match. I also have my old feelings of inferiority to contend with. Peter has been telling me about his work. Apparently, he is involved in a start-up company that is going to manufacture robots that will explore gas or oil pipelines, find hairline cracks and then repair them. Peter has always been involved in technology and our side of the family - my brothers and I - have studied humanities. There has always been a suspicion that what we have done is airy-fairy, less important and worthy of attention by comparison.

I start gingerly and then as it goes on, we talk more and more. 'You know the people in Abu Dis have a hard life', I begin.