Nablus 101 (Episode 2)

Samaritans and Soldiers

(Top: Aurin and Marjolein negotiating a checkpoint, bottom: Samaritan boys )

Such has been the acceleration of events in the past few days that it has become difficult to find the time in which to digest them, but of the limited absorption I have thus far achieved there are several worthy of note. The first can be found beneath the gentle inquisition of my present thoughts on the winding trail of a pass high above the city of Nablus and under the labour of an early morning taxi as the rattling pistons of its diesel engine pull grudgingly at the bright yellow carcass and its contents behind them.

 Not long afterward, the same taxi creeps shyly into a tree lined lay by a hundred yards or so short of the impending army checkpoint. Myself and three friends step unreadily from the cab, the day is Thursday and a working day for most but thanks to our respective schedules, the weekend (along with the checkpoint), is exclusively ours, no tourists have come to Mount Gerizim today, and not many will.

Once on the kerb we hurriedly slap a finish on the flakey story we will give to the Israeli guards up ahead, and hope it holds together long enough for us to see the other side. The army are not famed here for their hospitality or understanding and the road to the summit of the mountain is littered with failed attempts to make it to the village beyond. In the event, my two Dutch friends know exactly how to make hurdles such as these and have come armed with their dumbest blonde smiles and camouflage their intelligence - to great effect - beneath a formidable arsenal of lipstick and eyeshadow. Their display of bubbling joviality is never even close to being threatened and before long we are walking the narrow strip which (somewhat unnecessarily), separates the planet's last Samaritan enclave from the world outside.

Once in town we quickly acquire two Samaritan boys who seem keen - for a few sheqels - to show us to the far side of the settlement. Our local guide Sami seems more than willing to humour them and I feed myself out just a little further on the serendipitous thread upon which this uncertain journey has thus far been conducted.

before long we find ourselves at the end of an unremarkable cul-de-sak which promises little before delivering rather more than that. At its end a stone terraced path jags its way gently upward over a semi arid waist to a pile of rocks about a quarter of a mile away, as we approach them it becomes evident that they are rather more hewn than our previous distance gave them to be and further still, enrolled within a high chain link cordon. A sign in both hebrew and arabic there gives a warning that needs no translation, no entry! The Samaritan boys give it no credence though, before peeling back the loose end of the fence and clambering up onto the tumbledown fringes of the ruin beyond.

The same ruin, we are told, has stood - and now lain - in one form or another for one and a half thousand years before now and as we navigate its gracious footprint we hold only our transience against its epoch swaying longevity. It is clear from the modern addition of two observation decks and some faded signage that the site was once open to tourists but such is the trial of the checkpoint that its splendour now stands idle as its delicate murals continue their gracious decomposition beyond the protection of those who would care.

After lunch we visit the compounded rock upon which - the Samaritans hold - Abraham made for the throat of his son before the intervention of god, and then head back for the settlement and the rather more earthly site of Nablus' only off license. At this point we make our only substantial contact with the locals, The Samaritans are only 700 in number and, given their faith's rejection of outsiders (recently revised to allow women from outside to convert and marry in), victim to a number of genetic abnormalities as a result of inbreeding, the most obvious manifestation of which can be found in their disproportionally large ears and improbably slender torsos. Before long we are once again crossing the thin religious line for home as our next outing stands just the far side of an evening's rest.

If the unexpected delights of Thursday fell with the pleasure of an unplanned party then Friday's offering struck with all the invitation of an ambush, so it was with mal-rested eyes that our alarms had called us forth to the pick up point in the centre of Nablus from where we were ferried to the olive plantations of a nearby town for a solid days picking at the expense of our ill rested bodies. The journey there had been too short for my heavy head despite the roadside military presence which repeatedly served to prod my lolling mind into a state of reluctant cognition. Not wishing to present the impression that I was unwilling to give up my time for the task, I feel obliged here to suggest that I was - rather - physically incapable of any meaningful contribution toward the harvest on this particular occasion. As it transpired, within hours the skies had sent us prematurely upon our way from the proverbial coalface with the first rainfall in seven months and in so doing, presented us with the opportunity to converse with our host family back at their home. The conversation - initially at least - idled pleasantly around the family before moving on by gradations and finally - and perhaps inevitably - to the troubles, with which even the safest subject can be made unsuitable for all but the very lightest of footsteps.

The farmers two adult sons led the conversation only in their father's absence, such was the canopy of his wisdom - which unfurled in all its complexity from the simplicity of his weather beaten bones during the course of that morning in the field - that one sensed a certain freedom there in their unchecked opinions. I will not attempt to record here, every facet of their reasoning but rather focus on the feeling of profound inadequacy and shame it left me with for the actions of my forefathers during that period when they saw fit to gave away another man's home without recourse to humanity.

Those two honest men, about my age if not a little younger, sat opposite me without blame or malice and, each with an intellect far in excess of my own, and lacking only the freedom that held them from a forum to use it, spoke themselves in ever decreasing circles, shedding every conceivable reason we could offer until they were left only with themselves and no more answers to the question; why? A question that they were asking all along, perhaps to neither myself or any of the other guests in the room that day but ultimately only of their own racked minds, and all in the fullest of knowledge that they would receive no satisfying answer, now or ever. Because there is none that will justify the invasion of their land, or the sound of the concrete cracking as the Israeli army drove bulldozers though the family home when they were boys. One has the feeling that those conversations were born of well practiced lips and spoken a thousand, thousand times, if not aloud then in the minds of every single Palestinian who has breathed air in the past 60 years, all of which diminishes in no way, but rather only increases their impact. I admire these people, their humanity and strength is such that I would fear to measure myself against them lest I fail even to register. The Palestinians are still strong, they have not forgotten and never again will I, what injustices have befallen them.

Nablus 101

First Class at Zawata

(Top: Students at Zawata village. Bottom:Teaching Tom)

Yesterday evening bought with it something of a late flourish as the barren roast of the post noon heat gave way to the playful gestures of an afternoon breeze which impishly joshed with the unweighted flotsam on the gritty wending way back down from Zawata village. Myself and Tom - another volunteer - had been up on the northern flank of the valley with which the city is cradled, giving an English lesson to a community group consisting of ten to twelve year old girls.

As this was my first class I knew little of what to expect and when we arrived we found the community centre locked, both Tom and our local guide Ali gave the kind of unconcerned gestures that suggested this was to be expected and confirmed as much when I asked them. Perhaps inevitably it was not long before our presence was noted and someone dispatched to fetch the key holder, at the same time we were slowly decended upon by our charges who trickled to our muster point from beyond the parched nowhere of the rock strewn crossroads over which the community centre presided. As we waited in the shaded refuge of the doorway one girl sidestepped playfully across the top step of the building's entrance as if on some precipitous ledge. With her back pressed firmly against the locked doorway she reached back through the bars across the window gripping both them, and the broken edge of the glass therein in order that she may hold her fragile sway and thus avoid plummeting to her imaginary doom, Tom demonstrated the significant peril her small fingers were in, a danger by which she was happily unmoved and she dismounted only under the gentile guidance of his hand.

As we entered the building it was with the omission of the four or five boys who had been present outside, when Tom later asked our guide why they had not joined us his reply was that they had simply been disinterested, as it was they preferred to play football in the road and when that no longer amused them, to beat at the classroom windows with plastic cable sleeving and sticks, perhaps it was they in their boisterous way who had holed the windows but it was not for this reason alone that we felt bad for their exclusion. 

The class itself was an overwhelming success, due entirely to the absolute enthusiasm of the students whose desire to comprehend was worn on the ripples of raised brows and in the brights of their attentive eyes. Tom Ali and I will return to Zawata on Wednesday and already the class promises to be a highlight of my timetable. 

As we made for the doorway of the community centre in Zawata ten to twelve fingers of evening sunlight pierced its aluminium skin, highlighting ruptures therein that had not been visible in the shadows outside, and pointed accusingly across the hall to the holed stud wall adjacent. They - and the broken glass - had not - it seems - resulted (*directly) from the actions of boisterous boys but something altogether more sinister.

 That the destruction wrought by shells had previously proved integral to the games of a young girl may seem an extrenuous observation to make at this point but none the less, leaves my mind still oscillating uncomfortably between two readings of its undeniable symbolism: had their presence somehow corrupted her childhood or had her unharmed and innocent proximity to such bullet hewn destruction rendered it somehow ridiculous and weak? Perhaps the answer lays - as often it does - somewhere in between the two.

*I later learned that the attack on the community centre had, in fact been carried out as collective retribution by the Israeli army for the stoning of settlers cars by some local children.

Nablus: A New Dawn

What exactly does that mean anyway? A New Dawn, does the reason I have chosen it here as the moniker for my first blog entry not lie in the contrivance of some kind of departure from my previous one, and the oriental life that accompanied it? Well everything about it speaks of continuity so I must hereby debunk any such disassociation: A New Dawn, the naive hope then, of a lasting resolution to the predicament with which my new home is afflicted? At the time of writing the fragile peace talks which may lead to such conclusions are on the very edge of the abyss with the refusal of Israel to halt the construction of illegal settlements in the West Bank, so no.... not that either. A New Dawn: the possibility that one may rise above the baseline of indolent apathy and into the realm of engagement through action in the area of perceived injustices against humanity? A self aggrandizing proclamation it is true, but an indulgence I will - for now - allow myself in the obvious absence of anything more fitting.

I have been a resident of Nablus for a little over 48 hours now and I do not claim - at this stage - to know it but the early signs are largely good. At every turn I have been offered the hospitality and kindness for which Muslims are famed (such has been the volume of offers to partake in the drinking of coffee, that I now take the unsolicited twitching of my caffeine embalmed limbs as a matter of normality), but to suggest that I have not already felt the undertones of hostility which come with the weight of heavy stares and distrustful intimation would be a mistruth, it is there and will inevitably show itself in greater form before too long. The key to enduring any such attention can come only with the breadth of understanding, which at present I possess, but not without the awareness that we are (most of us), raised in the cradle of narrow minded men, and under the trinkets of knowledge with which we are adorned, still crawl the folds of our ignorant skin.

A greater measure of my new reality will undoubtedly come this afternoon when I make my first journey out to teach, I - along with another Project Hope volunteer, will travel to a school across the city to give a two hour lesson there. More on this- perhaps - later.