Arrival

Safe and sound in the West Bank. I decided to set up this blog as I was advised that it wasn't a great idea to put my name to anything too 'political' which could be found on the web or my e-mail account. This might sound paranoid but I thought better safe than sorry, just in case I return here in the future- and having lied my way through Ben Gurion airport I feel justified in acting in a slightly shifty manner.

I arrived at Tel Aviv at around four in the morning after having spent several hours on the place devising a tourist 'itinerary' - if you tell Israeli passport control that you are here to spend three months working in solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank it is very possible that you will be plonked on a plane straight back to England- not a chance I wanted to take. I had devised a somewhat flimsy story about wanting to visit the Israel, Eygpt and Jordan for three months. Arriving at passport control I surveyed the dozen or so booths and plumped for the only one who looked capable of a smile, lauching myself towards her with my passport and an idiotic grin. She directly proceeded to quiz me about the details of my stay.

"You're travelling alone? For three months? Where are you staying?" She narrows her beady eyes at me and cocks her head to the side, rather like a chicken about to squeeze out an egg.
"And you don't have any Israeli friends? You're going to JERUSALEM? Where will you stay? Which sites are you going to visit?" Err... I blabbed something about seeing the Pilgrim sites and then to Eilat to go diving in the Red Sea, and then asked if she wouldn't mind stamping my visa on a separate piece of paper (Israeli stamps in passport bar access to many countries in the Middle East).

Eyebrows raise. "Yes it's possible". Then the witch stamped it anyway! "Welcome to Israel".

First stop Jerusalem, to a small Palestinian-run hostel in one of the many crooked back streets of the Old City. I spent a couple of days wandering through streets and souqs amidst an alphabetti spaghetti mix of Orthodox Jews, Armenians, Ethiopians, Fransiscans, Greeks, Muslims and Tour Groups in Yellow Baseball Caps.

I felt somehow obliged to do things the traditional way, and after hunting down the Stations of the Cross around Via Dolorosa ( a bit like Where's Wally for Believers), arrived at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, an amazing legoland of architechtural styles, and divvied up between the different squabbling Orthodox groups down to the last windowsill. I queued up, feeling a bit fraudulent, to touch the stone upon which the Good Old Lord was finally laid to rest (it felt jolly nice).

The romanticism of the Old City is somewhat diminished by the groups of gruff Israelis soldiers including young females, with enormous guns, and the airport-like security around the Western Wall and Dome of The Rock. So I was happy to retreat to the leafy shade of the Garden Tomb in East Jerusalem, where a lovely old charity shop-type English lady explained that, according to the Anglican Church, it was here in this delightfully English country garden. that Jesus was really buried.

To be honest I'm not bothered either way, but the Anglicans won it hands down for me- as well as setting the scene very atmospherically, you are able to really climb inside the tomb which has been chiselled inside a rock. And there were benches where one could rest one's weary legs and admire the verdant wonderments of Mother Nature. Lovely.

But I'm missing the point aren't I. I was only in Jerusalem to land and find my feet for a couple of days before travelling to the West Bank to the de-facto capital of Palestine, Ramallah, (Palestinians have always used Jerusalem as their capital until it was annexed by the Israeli Apartheid Wall in 2002) for a conference, and then the start of three months of mainly teaching-based work in another Palestinian town which I shall call 'A'. 'A' used to be a suburb of Jerusalem, but since the erection of the wall has been physically divided in two- the people on this side of the wall no longer have access to Jerusalem or any of it's facilites.

More on that soon. As I have just got here and met the family who have kindly put me up for the first week of my stay, I still have everything to learn about the place, it's history and the direct effects of the Israeli Occupation upon all who live here. But thusfar I can say that looking out of almost any window it is possible to see the Wall, an ugly scar of eight-metre high concrete, snaking its insidious way through the landscape of the West Bank.