Interesting discussions in cafe

I have been having some interesting discussions in the cafe where I have been going to meet my friends. The other day I went to Ramallah, the capital of the Palestinian Authority and bought an Arabic newspaper El Quds. In it was an article about a group of ultra-orthodox Jewish rabbis opposed to Israel who had been on a visit to Ismael Haniyeh, the head of Hamas in Gaza. He had been involved in a civil war among the Palestinians following the elections of 2007, and subsequently in the fighting against Israel this year.

We started talking about Hamas. Some of my students were in the cafe. I asked Jesus, a 15 year old student what he thought of Haniyeh and Hamas. 'He can f... himself', he replied making a graphic gesture. Who do you like? I asked. 'I hate all of them'. Jesus has a blue pass and lives in east Jerusalem. He tells me that in his area of the city, Jews and Palestinians live. 'Do they live together?' I ask (I wanted to know if they got on). 'Yes, together', he replied. I wasn't quite sure how well they got on. I have noticed that in the old city of Jerusalem, people seem to get on on a day to day level, as shopkeeper and customers or tourists.

Another student in the cafe disagrees with Jesus. He favours Hamas over Al Fatah the party of Mohammed Abbas the Palestinian President. He is younger than Jesus, has very good English his manner is very courteous and polite. His father is a doctor one of the most important people on the board of the community centre. He wants to be a doctor too when he is older. He asks me which Palestinian leader I like. I tell him I like Mohammed Abbas. He bridles at this. He doesn't like Abbas. 'Tell me one good thing that Abbas has done'. I tell him, 'Maybe he will be able to make peace with the Israelis'.

The young student objects to this. As far as he is concerned Abbas is a pawn of the Israelis, he does whatever they want him to do. Not only that but he has tried to crush Hamas and the Al Aqsa Martyrs brigade (the armed wing of Al Fatah). Hamas and Al Aqsa Martyrs brigade want to fight the Israelis - 'the bad ones' - but Abbas want to stop them.

The groups that this young student supports are the very people that are regarded in Israel and in the west as terrorists. My cousin last week told me about the suicide bombers in Israel, the explosions in cafes at the time of the second intifada, before the separation wall was put up. Everywhere you go you see pictures of 'Shahids' or 'Shahidas' - martyrs - on posters on the walls. They are people who have died during the different periods of fighting here. In Ramallah today, I saw a poster of a Shahid. In the picture he is holding an automatic weapon. He is a middle-aged man, looks like he could have been a shopkeeper or an electrician, and perhaps he was.

I talk to my friend Mousa about Arab leaders. The Arabs have only had three leaders, according to Mousa. Yassir Arafat the founder of the PLO, Saddam Hussein, and Abul Nasser the President of Egypt in the fifties and sixties. We talk about Saddam Hussein about his war against Iran and again the Kurds. I tell him about my student in London who was picked up off the street at the age of 14 and forced to join Saddam's army fighting the Iranians, and then later was tortured by his police before fleeing the country and becoming a refugee. Mousa said, that Saddam had made two 'mistakes': one was fighting the Iranians, the other was attacking Kuwait. Otherwise he was a very great leader. Why, I asked. Because he had stood up for the Palestinians. Arafat too was a great leader of the Palestinians. He had a vision and a strategy which Mohammed Abbas doesn't have.

He looks through the paper picking out stories. There is an article that says that two thousand Jews from France will come and live in Israel this year. Large numbers of Jews from Ethiopia have come to Israel. I have seen Israeli soldiers of Ethiopian origin in Jerusalem. Another article is about young Palestinian prisoners in Israel, under 18, who want to take their 'tarjihi', final school diploma while in prison. The Israeli authorities won't allow them to. There are about 1,800 of them.

I ask Mousa what he feels when he reads that Jews can from abroad to live in Israel, while he himself can't live there, can't go visit the see, or visit Jerusalem. He says he feels angry. 'What does the word Haq mean?' 'Justice', I tell him. 'There is no justice'. Then he asks me a question, which I have never actually thought of until now. 'If the Israelis invited you to go and live in Israel, would you go?'

I am surprised how definite and quick my answer comes out. 'No, I will never live in Israel as an Israeli'. Although I could. By the Israeli Law of Return, any Jew has the right to go and live in Israel. But it would be like spitting in the face of my friends here. I tell him, 'I will be a Palestinian. If you invited me to live here I will come. If you don't want me to come, then I won't come. I will be a Jewish Palestinian'. 'You are welcome', he says, with total charm.

Then he asks me, maybe the question was inevitable, 'Do you think you will ever become a Muslim?' My flatmate Sarah has been virtually asked this too. It is a sign of acceptance, because if people like you they wish you well, and to want someone to become a Muslim is to wish them well. I tell him that we believe in the same God but I like my own traditions. He tells me that all my traditions are already in Islam: the prophets like Moses and David are respected. He comes out with an argument that I have heard before in London many times. Islam is the true religion because other religions change, but Islam does not change. With Judaism and Christianity you have the old testament and the new testament, but Islam is the unchanging truth. I reply that God does not change, but human beings do, we are part of history and culture our understanding changes and develops, change is not a bad thing, it is inevitable. Yes, he says there are many cultures.

Conersations like this force me to think about what are my own values. I tell him, and this is what I do believe, which is that no one religion has all the truth, all religions have some parts of the truth but no single one has an absolute truth from which they can judge the others. It is difficult to have conversations like this in Britain. Many people are embarrassed to talk about beliefs and God. Here it seems natural. Sitting in a cafe, smoking Turkish tobacco, drinking coffee. In the corner a television screen playing Lebanese music, someone is praying on a mat on the floor.

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.

Second Pre-Wedding Party 4

The man top left who is dressed in the red coat and turkish looking fez, is job is to pour drinks for the guests. The drinks, hot black coffee or a sweetish cold drink is stored in the strange metal looking container. That is his job for the whole of the evening, and of all the people at a party like this, they have the grimmest expressions.

This is a very male type of social gathering. Sarah my flatmate has gone to a number of the female equivalent (called Hennas, which are like 'hen parties'). There the women do abandon themselves, dancing around in a circle and crying out. But they don't have the luxury of a live band or a famous singer as the men do, or an acrobatic troop of Dubke performers. The nearest the women are to the action on this occasion, is to sit on balconies and walls well back. Amidst all the men and boys there is one young girl aged about 10 who has decided that she wants to be up front close. And she does, braving the obvious disapproval of some of the boys there. She looks very nervous very harassed but determined at the same time. I admire here very much. I don't know if this sexual separation will ever change in this society. So many cultural things are built on to it. And it extends to religion here too of course, men and women praying separately, which is also the case in orthodox Judaism. In fact a lot of what I see is very similar to traditional orthodox / conservative Judaism.

Second pre-Wedding Party 3

At one stage the dancers form a tower, four men high and on top is the singer Naser Al Fares. The bridegroom, for whom all this is being done, is on the raised platform as well, and before they finish their performance, each member of the Dubke group stand in front of him close up and do their own dance for him. They are literally shaking trembling with the feeling of it all. Then the troup dance off the platform and out of the square. The music slows into a drone and Naser Al Fares gives an improvised praise song (long chords on the keyboards and the oud, his voice weaves beautifully melodically), a praise song in honour of the bridegroom, the family, Abu Dis and Palestine. The crowd shows its appreciation by clapping and cheering.

The music the band has been playing for the Dubke group has the rhythm I have heard before but has some modernist elements, some free-form riffs on the oud almost jazz like, but now another Dubke group runs on, and this group is more traditional. They are not dressed in elaborate silk shirts and kaffiyehs. They are dressed in what looks like traditional peasant smocks. And the music at this point is also more traditional. It reminds me of Greek or East European (Romanian, Macedonian) folk music, even a little bit like Irish. This must be an older more traditional form of Dubke. The leader of the group is holding a stick which he uses to direct the group. You can see the origins of this dance in folk music, peasant music.

Second pre-wedding party 2

There is an open square with the backs of houses and broken down walls all around. In the middle of the square there is a space where men are dancing frenetically. At the back is the band and the singer.

One of the things, the sad things, about occasions like this is that the sexes are separate. In the first party I went to there were no women there at all. They were having their own party with the bride to be. In this party, because of the fame of the singer, there are women here, but they are sitting well to the back of the square, on balconies and walls. They are listening to the music, clapping to its rhythm but not getting close up and certainly not dancing. The men dance in the central space, with each other, in circles or up close by themselves. As I walk in, a young student leads me to the central slightly raised area and I start to dance to the frenetic music, together with the one or two hundred men already there. There are also other men sitting on chairs watching. The music is fast with the same syncopated rhythm I had heard before. In front of the band, is Naser Al Fares himself, a tall rather gaunt man in his thirties or forties, singing with all his power, something he keeps up the whole night. He is incredibly charismatic. Some of our students are there, and the bridegroom, who is bearing carried on the shoulders of his friends.

Then there is a pause and the central space is cleared. A lot of anticipation people looking towards the entrance. And then then the Dubke group comes in, there are about ten of them, each one carrying flaming torches. Most of them are wearing black tunics with kaffiyehs round their waists, but this time there are others with white tunics. These are the acrobatic soloists. The Dubke group dance in circles, and the soloists do some amazing things: climb on to the shoulders of other dancers, spin somersaults in the air.

Another even more amazing pre-wedding party

If the first pre-wedding party was amazing (partly because it was my first one), this one that I went to last night - Tuesday 14th July - was absolutely overwhelming. The bridegroom's family must have been well-off because they hired one of the most prominent Palestinian singers in the whole territory Naser Al Fares to perform, with his band which apart from keyboards and drums included an amazing viruoso Oud (lute) player.
Just as before, my student friend Khaled came to collect me and walked me to the place where the party was going to be. He took me there but he didn't go in himself, because he is going to take his final school certificate next year (on which the future of every Palestinian student depends), and he is already working hard for it, even though it is the summer holidays. He has given me a wrist band, with 'I', a heart, and the Palestinian flag printed on it: 'I love Palestine'. I tell him it is a great honour to be able to wear it, and decide I am going to have it on my wrist. It will create some more problems for me coming back to UK through Israel. I cannot risk going through Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv with many of the things I have got here: names, telephone numbers, email addresses, photographs, anything Palestinian, or to do with the situation. I will not only get myself into trouble, get myself strip-searched and maybe barred from ever coming back here (which would be the worst case scenario for me), but I could get my friends into trouble as well. So I will have to behave like a criminal or a secret agent, even though I am neither of these things. I will have to email my photos to myself so I can download them to myself in London, then delete them from my camera, email contact addresses to myself and then destroy physical records, delete phone numbers off my Palestinian sim, and post anything that I want to keep to my address in London via the Israeli postal service. And then make up a fake itinerary to tell the people at the airport, which does not include having been here in Abu Dis (all assuming that no-one 'in authority' has been reading this blog).

...... Anyway Khaled walks me to the open courtyard where the party is happening, which happens to be near the community centre where I work, and then he goes home.

A sort of Stag Night: Pre-wedding party

Weddings are very frequent at this time of year. Everybody wants to get married in the summer, and every time there is a wedding there are pre-wedding parties. Since socialising is very sex segregated here, there will be parties for the bride attended by women only, and parties for the groom, for men only - a kind of stag night. Except that 'stag night' doesn't do justice to the party I was invited to last night. It was elegant, beautiful, joyous, not at all gross, and I was going to say all done without the aid of any artificia stimulants, apart from Arabic coffee, music, and the wonderful exuberant atmosphere

(I have in fact since found out that some people had been drinking in their houses. My informant, one of my students tells me that alcohol, which is officially haram here of course, can be obtained 'in secret' - so many things here are done in secret. You can get alcohol in Jerusalem if you have a pass to get there, in Ramallah where there are Christians, or there is also a place to get it in al-Eizaria next village along.)

Anyway it was a beautiful evening. The party is taking place in an open square which is part of the university complex. There is a stage on which there are amplified musicians: an Oud (Lute) player, keyboards, drums of course and a singer. An open space for dancing and then tables and chairs. Most of the students from the community centre are there. They all want to talk to me which we do in a mixture of Arabic and English, they pull me from one table to the next. There is an atmosphere of great excitement.

There is going to be a performance of the Dabke, the Palestinian national dance. Students from our community centre are going to perform. Before that the band starts up. Very frenetic and off-beat rhythmical. The basic rhythm is 4 in the bar: a quaver, crochet, quaver, and two crochets. da - daa - da - Da - Da da - daa - da - Da - Da. That's the basis of it, the rhythmic elaborations, the melodies, the words are built up over that. Some of the boys get up and dance, they stick out their stomachs and swivel their hips. I know what is going to happen. They are going to ask me to dance. They do of course, and I get up, they are in a circle around me, I let go of my inhibitions and dance with them clapping in rhythm around me. They are over the moon that I am doing this.

Suddenly some of the crowd rush towards the entrance. 'Al Aress, Al Arees', the bridegroom is here. A crowd of the grooms friends come in carrying him on their shoulders. They come to the front of the square in front of the stage, dance round him, still on the shoulders of one of his friends. The band singer sings a song of welcome. We sit down and watch. A gloomy faced man comes round giving each guest a cup of Arabic coffee, then throughout the evening another man, ornately dressed in red with a Turkish looking fez and a strange device on his shoulders (which looks like a shisha pipe but in fact dispenses drinks), comes round pouring out from the container a sweet tasting drink.

Then our student Dabke group comes on and does a performance that lasts for over twenty minutes. They are dressed in identical black shirts, and round their waists are tied a different coloured kaffiyeh - Arab headscarf. They do this dance and it is beautifully co-ordinated. The dance is led by Nadeem, one of the chief volunteers at the centre. The dancers link hands, sometimes they are in a circle and sometimes in a line. The lop-sided syncopated rhythm of the music seems to force their bodies outward and sideways. They kick their legs out and then sideways, first the left then the right in unison. They swivel their waists. Everything is beautifully choreographed. They surround the bridegroom, dancing round him. At one stage, Nadeem takes off his kaffiyeh and wraps it round the shoulders of the bridegroom. The dance is very physical very athletic, but not aggressive.

It is really hot tonight. When they sit down, the kids are perspiring heavily. There is more dancing. People do their own individualised versions of the Dabke, it is not like the beautifully co-ordinated performance we have seen, but there is fantastic energy and joy. Most of the music is up-beat, but there are some occasional slow romantic songs. I leave at eleven o'clock and walk down the hill back to my flat.

Next day, I talk to Sarah about it. She has been to the female equivalent, pre-wedding party for the same wedding, this time attended by women only. Their one has taken place inside a hall, with no live band, only recorded music. They have also been dancing. Sarah, who studied dance at university and is a dance teacher in London, thinks that the Dabke is similar to Irish dance, both have been used as ways to express national identity in a situation where people are occupied or oppressed.

In a way, I feel sorry that socialising is so segregated by sex. It is very different to the west. All men together and all women together create a particular kind of solidarity, strong emotional ties. It would be easy to misinterpret this, it is not the same as in the west, it is a different system. I am also sure it is very different in Israel too.