Palestinian Time

Yesterday I got talking to a young man who has been living in America, like many Palestinians. He grew up here but now he is an American citizen. Still, the Israeli government counts him as a Palestinian so he can't come here via Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, he has to come via Amman. I asks him about how he finds Abu Dis since he has been away. 'Life here since the wall is the best', he says laughing ironically. 'Before we have some freedom here, now we have no freedom'. We start to talk about American businesses, Starbucks in particular. He is sure, as a lot of people are here, that Starbucks contributes vast amounts of money direct to the Israeli army. 'It is a Jewish company', he says. 'David is Jewish', says Mousa, who is also part of the conversation. This doesn't stop the flow. 'For every cup of coffee you buy, 15% goes to the Israeli army'. I wonder about this, I am sceptical that money would be paid directly to the Israeli army, it might be possible to find the annual reports of Starbucks to find out whether this is true or false. Probably the Director of Starbucks contributes money to Israeli charities, but I wonder how 27 cents out of a cup of coffe costing $1-80 can possibly go to the Israeli army without it figuring pretty large in some financial report or other. Given the reality of life here and what people experience day to day though, it is almost impossible to cut through the tangle of truths half-truths, rumours inventions that wind around this whole issue.

One of the most exasperating things about life here from a UK point of view, is the casual attitude to time. People make appointments to meet and then don't turn up or are late. Arrangements are vague, can be changed at the last minute, there is often a lot of waiting around. It is jokingly called 'Waqt Filistinee' - Palestinian time. There has been a lot of that in the running of our summer camp and the other teaching I have done. There has been a certain amount of chaos, we have had to organise our activities on a shoe-string sometimes, people tell me they badly want English lessons and then don't turn up because something else has intervened - a wedding or a party. It is surprising that we have achieved anything, but I suppose we have. We have managed to get some funding to create a garden in the grounds of the 'Dar al-Saddaqa' - Friendship House - where our summer camp has been. Nadeen, one of our teenage volunteers went to Ramallah and came back with a huge amount of baby trees, as well as spades and other equipment. Yesterday the kids started to clear the ground. One of the major problems here is the lack of water. Not a trace of rain since I got here (the rainy months if they happen are December January, a bit of February) and the heat has been unrelenting. What I am afraid of is that we are going to plant these trees and then no-one is going to water them and they will die, that will be awful. But there is a well in the grounds of the house, apparently there is water underground, so hopefully it will be ok.

Today, the last day of the summer camp, we are going to take some of the seedlings and planting them on a patch of land somewhere in the town that has been confiscated by the Israeli army. Apparently they confiscated the land because they want to extend the scope of the wall. The tree-planting will be a protest against the land confiscation.

A couple of days ago I went with Sarah to dinner at the house of Abid who lives near our flat. Abid is the worker employed by CADFA (Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association) employed to document and report human rights abuses here. His reports are then used by CADFA in the UK and abroad, to put an international spotlight on what is happening here. He is meticulous in his work, his knowledge of the details of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its origins, the serpentine ramifications of the day to day events an injustices is huge. He has spent four years of his life in various Israeli jails, and is amazingly unbitter about it. He must have a huge file about him.

We sit on the balcony of his large family house. He occupies one floor with his wife and children. Downstairs on another floor is his father, a very dignified man probably in his seventies. It is coming on to night and there is a merciful cooling wind blowing on to us. The balcony faces east. Ahead of us we can see a water-tower from the Israeli settlement of Ma'ale Adumim. Like all settlements it occupies a hilltop position. Abid says, 'It is our misfortune that we have always occupied the valleys. That was where the best land is. The Israelis occupy the hilltops where they can command the countryside'. We talk about politics. He has been a member of the DFLP (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine), a left-wing party that used to be allied to the Soviet Union. He says that the Palestinian Authority is totally corrupt, and Fatah the main party is especially corrupt. The government officials in Ramallah want to hold on to their jobs, and the flow of money that comes in from Europe and other parts. It also suits the Israelis, he says, to have what amounts to collaborators there. If the Israeli army withdrew, the Palestinian Authority would be overthrown, just as other collaborating regimes - the king of Egypt in the nineteen fifties - were easily overthrown as soon as their foreign backers were no longer there.

I ask him, 'You have talked a lot about the history of this conflict and the day to day injustices and fights that you have. But what is your vision of the future? What is the best possible outcome that you can imagine'. He says that the best outcome, one that he believes will happen eventually, is for a single democratic state, comprising Jews and Palestinians. It seems unlikely

now he says, but look at Europe Britain France and Germany in one union. How likely did that seem in 1945? Abid is a socialist and he has a non-religious point of view which I warm to completely. He thinks that in a sense all nation states are illegitimate. The Palestinians are burdened by a corrupt Palestinian Authority. The Israelis are also burdened with a government that keeps them afraid of the other side. All these conflicts are in the interest of business, of capitalists to keep them going.

He is also incredibly generous. 'I do not believe', he says, 'that Israelis should get on a boat and go back to the countries they came from. Most Israelis are second generation, third generation and have no other home than this. I do not have this idea that the Palestinians lived here "from time immemorial" and that the Jews are totally different and alien. There have always been settlements and conquests, mixtures migrations, one people after another: Greeks, Romans, Crusaders, Kurds, Turks ...' (This seems completely born out when I look at some of my students. Some are very dark, some are as fair-looking as Europeans. Palestinians don't look very different or different at all from Israelis).

Then he tells me about his great-grandmother. 'In those days, in the time of the Turks, the Turkish government used to take children when they reached the age of 15 and force them into the army. They would be posted to another part of their empire and often they would never return. They would be sent to Europe, or Egypt or Yemen. My great-grandmother had six sons. Five of them were taken by the Turks into their army and she never saw them again.'

I realise that his vision of one demcratic state for Arabs and Jews is what I also really want here.