There is a story about almost everyone I meet.

Almost everyone I meet either tell me a story or somebody tells me a story about them. There is a volunteer who also works in the community centre, she does painting and drawing with the students. Sarah said to me one day, 'Have you heard the story of H.?'. I had actually, from the CADFA (Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association) website. H. lived in a house with her aged mother and other family members. One day, soldiers raided the house because they were looking for students from the house next door. During the search, H.'s mother 'fell' hitting her head on the stone floor of the courtyard. She was suffering from a medical condition and she started to suffer a brain haemorrage. H. wanted to call an ambulance but the soldiers stopped her, holding a gun to her head. Her mother died.

I don't want to imply that the Israeli army is uniquely wicked. I have heard other similar stories which came out of the British presence in northern Ireland, and I am sure that when the Americans went into Iraq, at least some of them had the best of intentions. But the effect of occupation seems always to be corrupting and brutalising. There is a straight line leading from the initial presence, to Abu Ghraib or someone being beaten to death, or an 'accident' like this.
This was something that my cousin and I agreed on last week, the brutalising effect of the occupation.

There is a student at the centre called K. She is a very spirited woman, just completed her degree at the local Al Quds university. She writes articles in international Arabic newspapers, like Al-Quds Al-Arabi which is published in London. She writes on the human rights situation here. She has just been awarded a scholarship to study anywhere she wants in Europe. She has been asking my advice about where she can go to do a Masters on international human rights. I suggest going to SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) in London. Only some Israelis don't like the fact that she has been writing articles in an international newspaper (Sarah says that if it was onlhy a local newspaper, 'they wouldn't give a hoot'). They summon her to a questioning session at a checkpoint. They tell her that if she continues to write the articles, they will put her on a black-list, which means that she will not be able to leave the Palestinian territory (Israeli army controls all the entry and exit points both into Israel proper and also for people who want to or have to cross the river Jordan to get out via Amman). She goes home and writes an article about the interrogation.

At the cafe I go to the other night, I start talking to two kids. One is sixteen, the other is eighteen. The sixteen year old has been to our community centre. He has already been in an Israeli prison for six months, the eighteen year old has just come out of prison after two years. There are at present about 10,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel, some of them women, a large number of them kids, sixteen years old or younger. ('Ah', but my cousin says, 'They never tell you what they've done, do they?') I ask the younger one, what he had done. 'Just defending Palestine', he replies. It could have been throwing stones at an army truck, it could have been something else. Difficult to say, but it doesn't seem right, that young kids at that age should be put away for lengthy periods, and put in overcrowded cells, suffering bad food and all sorts of bad treatment, and then have to come out and pick up the threads of their lives again.

Last night, I run into Ahmed, a man I know who has a job in Ramallah, a town that normally is not very far away from here, only the other side of Jerusalem. Last night he is very agitated. On his way back from work, the road goes through a checkpoint. On this occasion, the army decided to close the road, no explanation given. The cars have to line up and wait until it opens again, several hours in this case at the end of a working day. 'What do you do when that happens?' I ask. 'We listen to our car stereos, get out of our cars, talk to each. The coffee sellers do very well'.
'Does it happen often?'
'Quite often on a Wednesday or Thursday night (the days leading up to the Friday holiday). On those days people are coming back to their houses from Ramallah. They do it to make our lives difficult, to rub it into our faces that they can'.

There are stories about everyone and everything, even car number plates, which I will talk about another time.