Visit to Nablus

Yesterday, I went to Nablus in the north of the territory. On the map, it is a long way north of Abu Dis which is near Jerusalem but in fact it is relatively quick and amazinglycheap to get there. I had to get a shared taxi to Ramallah, the capital of the territory, then another shared taxi to Nablus. The time taken for the two journeys was about the same - 45 minutes - despite the fact that the distance from Abu Dis to Ramallah is far less than Ramallah to Nablus. This is because of the system of checkpoints which means that Palestinian vehicles from Abu Dis have to take a widely curving route to get to Ramallah, away from the wall that sweeps eastwards, and away from the settlements.

The taxis drive rapidly along the roads going through dry and barren landscape, and ancient terraced hills, past settlements, and through checkpoints. There are checkpoints everywhere, before and after big towns, and sometimes for no obvious reason. Sometime cars drive through, sometimes they are stopped and whole lines bank up.

Nablus, an ancient city (Shechem), is poorer than the other Palestinian cities I have visited. Ramallah is quite economically lively partly because it is the capital of the Palestinian territories, Bethehem gets a lot of tourists and pilgrims. Nablus is very down at heal. It has a large old city with narrow roads and markets. People are anxious to draw me in to buy things, they are very friendly. Not many foreigners seem to come here. I am drawn into a second-hand book shop. I buy a book about the intifada, called 'Childhood of a people without a childhood'. During the intifada, a lot of fighting occurred here. There are still bullet-holes in the walls of the old city from seven years ago. And everywhere there are pictures of 'Shaheed's - martyrs - young men who have been killed fighting the Israelis. You can see them, kids who look as if they should be studying for their high-school certificates or university degrees. Some of them wear bands around their heads indicating the party they are a member of . I feel very sad. Outside a mosque, I see an inscription outside a mosque commemorating the names of the people killed during the fighting in Nablus. I stop and start to copy it down laboriously for later study. Some kids interrupt me while I am doing it. They want to know whether I support Barcelona or Real Madrid. Even here the same old global village operates along with anything else. I talk to one of the traders in the market who sees me photographing the posters of the martyrs. 'Things are much better here now', he says. 'Things are the best'.

Later I discuss with Khaled, sixteen year old student who lives in Abu Dis, about the men in the posters. 'What do you think of the freedom fighters you might call them, some other people would call them terrorists'. I think what some of the men I had seen pictured may have done, there were suicide bombings in Israel outside cafes and cinemas at the time of the Intifada in which women and children died. My cousin would certainly call them terrorists, I am determined to try and imagine what they would look like from a Palestinian standpoint. Khaled says, 'I admire those men, it is wonderful thing to die for your country. I would like to do what they have done'. He says that many young Palestinians feel the same. He is unconsciously echoing a Roman saying about how sweet and honorable it is to die for your country, and also ironically a saying of Joseph Trumpeldor an early Jewish settler who became a hero in the Zionist movement.

Khaled tells me about a new word that has been invented in Arabic, which disturbs and fascinates me. It is 'Yuhowwad', to make something Jewish, to 'Judaize'. It is used to describe a process such as is happening in Jerusalem, which was annexed to Israel after 1967, and where Jews are moving into the East part of the city, outside the old walls. It used to be totally Arab. Now it is mixed. Khaled says that all sorts of strategems are used to make it hard for the Arabs to continue to live there. 'A group of residents had to move because the Israelis said they were going to build a park. Every time a Palestinian wants to build a new house or an extension to their old house, they have to pay a huge amount to get a licence'. He says the Jewish settlers here and in the Palestinian territories get preferential treatment, all sorts of inducements to encourage them to move in: tax breaks, free water, subsidised fuel and travel, which the Palestinians don't get. So the overtones of 'Yuhowwad' chills me in a way, with its overtones of old European anti-semitism, but I see the justice in the word. Palestinians are just describing what they experience.

Khaled tells me how shocked and disgusted he feels when Israelis use religion as an excuse to grab land. We talk about excavations in the old city. He is suspicious about these. I too am worried about the way that the Holocaust is being used as a justification of very dubious Israeli policies. I have found a recent example: Israel is planning a building project in East Jerusalem on the site of a hotel once owned by the Palestinian leader in the 1930's and 1940's Amin al-Husseini. The plan is being opposed by the UN. As part of an effort to counter this, Israeli embassies are being instructed to publish a photograph taken in 1941 of Husseini with Hitler. It seems to me that by doing this the Holocaust is being cheapened. Some people who see it being used in this way are going to be encouraged to minimise or deny it.