Nice summer days (and some pictures)

The city has got cool again, literally. We had a few days last week of almost unbearable heat, though nothing like the heavy clamminess of Tel Aviv, but then there were a couple of nights of strong cool winds and everything is back to warm sun, blue skies and a gentle breeze. Yesterday it was so nice outside that I decided to bunk off the second half of my Hebrew lesson and go and sit and doze under an olive tree in the park. Apart from the heavy traffic on a nearby road, the sound of the American consulate's security guards' radios, two teenage girls listening to Eminem on a mobile phone and a mangy dog looking at me weirdly, it was almost Biblical.


This is a funny time in the Jewish calendar. We are in the three weeks between two fast days that commemorate, respectively, the breaching of the walls of the first Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587BC and the date they finally broke through and razed it to the ground.

The Temple was built by King Solomon in 957BC and for nearly 400 years it put Jerusalem at the spiritual, political and cultural epicentre of Jewish life. Its destruction, and the subsequent exile of the Jews to Babylon, was a calamity for the Jewish race (although it led to some marvelous literature of longing, especially in the Psalms) and even today traditional Jews tend to lay low during this period. They don't celebrate weddings, they don't get their hair cut, they avoid eating meat (except on shabbat when it is obligatory) and they don't listen to music. In the religious areas of Jerusalem you can see that life goes on but it's all a little more subdued.


In the yeshiva we are more liberal but we have been marking this period by looking at the effect of fasts on modern life. For many modern Jews, fasting means Yom Kippur, when almost all Jews, even non-observant ones, go without food and water for at least some of the 24 hours between sunset and sunset. The effect is slightly hypnotic, especially when combined with the liturgy of that day in the synagogue, and it can take you into an otherworldly place, away from the ordinary pleasures and annoyances of everyday life. Muslims say the same thing about the fasting of Ramadan. But - and this will come as a surprise to many people stuck in the synagogue that day - Yom Kippur is not meant to be sad day. If nothing else, for a moment or two it edges us a little nearer that strangeness we call God.


By contrast, these fast days are days of mourning and they remind me of how funerals, and especially the wakes or parties after them, also take us away from the "real" world for a while and help us reflect on where we are and what we are up to. I don't feel particularly evangelical about fasting (or about God, really) but fasts do make a powerful contrast to the way we often live our lives in the west. Our 24-hour cities, with their work hard, play hard mantras and busy weekends, sometimes make it hard just to take time out and think. And I think we are poorer because of that. And even if that doesn't resonate with everyone, being hungry for a day can also put us back in touch with people for whom hunger is much more of an everyday experience - even in London. And that can't be a bad thing.



Back in the real world, I have found a Hebrew teacher who lives near my house and I am going to her for an hour's conversation three times a week until the course ends. It is incredibly difficult to practise your Hebrew here as everyone loves to speak English and the first time you fail to make an adjective agree with a noun or, in my case, reveal that you can't say anything in the past or the future, they switch languages and refuse to go back. I have had three lessons so far and they're going well. The teacher is patient with my attempts to say something a little more complicated than "The pen is on the table" and we end up, I think, having some pretty in-depth conversations about life, love and the universe. Or at least that's how it appears to me.


The yeshiva course is ending soon and I am starting to think of my journey back home. As I am trying not to fly, getting out of Israel is a bit of a problem. I can't go back through Syria now I have been here. Crossing the Lebanon border is impossible with Hizbollah on the other side. And the passenger ferries that used to sail between Israel and Cyprus stopped in 2002. So the only solution is to bag a place on a cargo ship and I have found one that will take me.

The ship sails from Haifa to Piraeus on August 25. I don't know what it is going to be like or what it is carrying but it seems legit and they are happy to take me. My plan is to hop from Patras by boat to Bari and then by train up through Italy to Paris and then London. It will take about a week, though I may have to put the brakes on slightly so as not to have to catch the Eurostar on September 1. The only fares available on that day (it's a Sunday) are at Business Super Executive level and, really, I just don't have the right clothes for First Class.

I'm looking forward to being on the cargo ship. It will be three days of doing almost nothing except sailing through the Med. You eat with the crew but otherwise your time is your own and I'm planning to find a little sunny corner of the deck and work my way through a pile of trashy books, preferably not about Israel, Palestine or Jewish philosophy.


In the meantime, the weekend beckons again and a bunch of us are planning a trip to the beach in Tel Aviv on Friday. I'll come home for the lovely Jerusalem shabbat again. And, after that, it will be the last week of our yeshiva programme, that second fast day (on Sunday 10) and then, I hope, a few days scuba diving in Dahab on the Red Sea. If anyone has any Dahab tips, they'd be more than welcome.

The pictures, from top: my neighbourhood; the view from my flat; the home of the Israeli Philharmonic (x 2); a typical local house; Brits were not always so welcome here; posters for Jerusalem's live music scene; hoarding around a building site - the Hebrew says, "How to climb the separation wall" (not really); spotted in a chemist - does what it says on the jar, I guess

The city's other inhabitants

Jerusalem is full of feral cats and I thought I would take a photo of every cat I ran into in a normal day. It turned out to be harder than I had imagined. They tend to run away before you can get your camera out and it's like being on some sort of cat safari. But, apropos of nothing in particular, here are the ones that hung around long enough for their close-ups.

Some random thoughts

There's probably a scene in 'Being John Malkovich' - and if there isn't there should be - where time stands still, and things have felt like that here for the past few days. It's probably because, in week four out of six of living here, I am at that point where the novelty of everything has worn off but I haven't yet begun to appreciate the more subtle joys of the city. It will come and in the meantime I am content with things like doing the washing, sitting on my balcony with a beer and catching up on news from home.

In fact, for the first time this trip, last week I had a moment of nostalgia for everything British. It could have been G Brown's awe-inspiring defeat in Glasgow East (West? was it even Glasgow?) and the predictable back stabbing, attacks and denials that came out of the cabinet afterwards, but I suddenly fancied a cup of tea and some Radio 4. There's Radio 4 on the internet of course and, thanks to my neighbours Ben and Avi upstairs, I now have some Liptons tea bags, but in the end I couldn't quite do it. It sounds dumb but it seemed somehow wrong to bring a little piece of London life into my Jerusalem bubble so instead I sat and read my book for a bit and went to meet some friends. And anyway it would have been the 'PM Programme', which I always find irritating.

There's some stuff in the papers here about religious schools. The state funds a fair proportion of the costs of the Haredi (ultra-orthodox Jewish) schools and last week a law was passed in the Knesset excusing them from teaching maths, English and civics, which, I guess, frees up more time for Torah, Talmud and Aramaic. You don't have to be a diehard secularist to work out that there's something wrong here. Although there is plenty of beauty in the Torah and the Talmud - and plenty of stuff that can be applied to modern life - these kids also live in a modern state and they need a wider education than that. I mean, what if one of them wanted to become a doctor or a lawyer? It sometimes happens with Jewish kids... (Actually, according to another article in the same paper, ultra-orthodox students do incredibly well in SAT exams, thanks to a bunch of crammers that have sprung up to coach them through all those psychometric tests, so maybe I need to revise my opinions here.)

In the meantime, Obama has had his prayer nicked. I don't know if this was reported in the UK, but, if you go to the Kotel (the Wailing/Western Wall) you can put a little note in one of the cracks between the stones asking God for something. (In fact, if you are not actually in situ you can fax or email your message and someone will put it in the wall for you.) Obama, like all VIPs who come to Jerusalem, (actually, did Gordon Brown?) went to the Wall and put a note in, which was later nicked by a yeshiva student and published in Ma'ariv, a downmarket newspaper here. All the other papers have done that Guardian trick of pretending to be outraged at Ma'ariv for its invasion of Obama's privacy while taking the opportunity to reprint the note's contents. It's pretty bland but if you want to you can see it here. (And, yes, I guess I have made use of the Guardian's trick too - but you don't need to click if you don't want to.)

Personally, I think there is something a little un-Jewish about putting notes in the Wall, but, then again, I am not as moved by the Wall as maybe I should be. The main part just seems to be full of Haredi men (the women have to go into another area) who would have very little time for my way of living, praying and being Jewish. In fact I'm not sure if they would consider me Jewish at all.

Bulldozer #2

There has been another incident here involving a bulldozer and quite close to the yeshiva where I am now. We are all fine. There were lots of sirens and helicopters outside the window for a while but now it's quiet and we've continued our class - which coincidentally is on the relationship between Israel and the rest of the world. I guess that's how it goes over here.

Settling in


This sign is stencilled to walls all round my neighbourhood and I couldn't work out what it meant. First, I thought it was pointing the way to a bathroom as it was often on the wall of a synagogue and people like to wash their hands before praying. But then I looked it up and it turns out to be something more prosaic but no less significant.

It means "shelter" and it points the way to your nearest refuge should Ahmadinejad or someone send a missile this way. (I think we are out of range of Hezbollah or Hamas right now, but who knows?) I went and found the nearest one to my house but I couldn't see the way in and I don't really know if it's still in use. However there are quite a lot of old people in my area so presumabaly, in the event of an attack, I could follow the trail of slightly crabby women in wigs, zimmer-framing their way to safety and find out where to go.

When I looked up the word, I found that it was connected to the Hebrew root for "to take in, absorb, understand, comprehend". The word is more like "reception" than "shelter" and it was nice to imagine people welcoming you into this place of safety and making an effort to understand and comprehend where you came from. That was so much a value of the early days of Israel, with its waves of immigrants coming here to escape a dangerous life elsewhere and it is still an important Jewish value. Whether Israel as a society still holds those values dear is another discussion.

We are in our fourth week of Hebrew and it's going pretty well. We have all gained the confidence to talk in Hebrew, at least in class, and we are often to be found chattering merrily away with our present-tense verbs and phenomenally limited volcabulary. I think we are somewhere about the level of "I want to go to the shap to buyed the pencil" (infinitives turn out to be pretty tough in Hebrew) but we're happy and we seem to get our meaning across with each other. That said, the lure of English is always present, like some huge electromagnet under the floor, ready to pull us down from our Hebrew flights of creativity. The phrase, "In Hebrew [insert name here], in Hebrew..." (though in Hebrew, of course) is becoming a pretty regular request from our teacher.

I went to a concert last night with Zubin Mehta conducting the Israel Philharmonic. The programme was Bach (a cantata) and Bloch's 'Holy Service', which sets many of the synagogue prayers to some stirring music for orchestra, baritone and choir. You couldn't really imagine it in even the grandest of synagogues but it's a good piece nevertheless. I got the cheapest seat in the house, right up in the balcony, but as the concert hall was built in the 1950s or 1960s, the acoustic was great and I could see fine (though I still have no idea what you are meant to look at at a classical concert). When we came out it was still warm and there was a lovely full moon in the sky so I decided to walk home - until a cab came past and I flagged it down and jumped in.

Today I am saying goodbye to almost the last of my friends from the first half of the course, so it's a dinner out somewhere nice but cheap and some more fond farewells.

Oh, and Gordon Brown has been in town, but no one seems to have noticed. The traffic jams on the big intersection outside college were marginally longer than usual but that was about it. By contrast, Obama arrives today, which will be a very different kettle of fish. I mean, he might even say something anti-Israel...

Two walks and a cat fight


On Friday morning I took a walk through some parts of Jerusalem I didn't know. My starting point was a disused railway station near my house. The train once went all the way from there to Tel Aviv but people used to throw stones at it when it passed through parts of east Jerusalem. So a new station was built in the south of the city and now this little stretch of track is disused and wonderfully overgrown, with the rails all buckled from the heat.

The line forms part of a cut-through to the cafés and shops of Emek Refaim and, for about the first week or so, each time I crossed it I would instinctively look up and down to see if a train was coming. But I also found myself wondering where it led, so on Friday, instead of taking the minibus shuttle to Tel Aviv, I decided to see if I could walk down the track to the new station and catch the train instead.


It's not really geared for walking, especially not in flip-flops, but it turned out to be pretty magical. Like canals, railway lines take you through bits of the city you don't usually see and I like the fact you can peer into people's backyards, find yourself skirting little industrial estates and nose around in areas you would have never even known existed from the road.


I passed signal boxes, burnt-out railway carriages and bits of track-side equipment. At one point I found a small corrugated-iron shack that was obviously someone's home. And, under a road bridge, I came across an incredibly tidy pile of rubbish - some of it still in bin liners, but elsewhere little stacks of bottles, t-shirts, socks, things like that. The whole thing was obviously part of an someone's ongoing project to rescue what they could from other people's detritus. It was a small glimpse into a world of Jerusalem homelessness, far from the Jewish and Arab "villages" and their tensions, and it made me wonder how many people live here on bits of no man's land and who looks out for them.


But I also found myself thinking about connections, not only spatial ones, though this railway, the first in the Middle East, was the result of grand Anglo-French plans to link up the Levant, but also connections across time. Once I had worked out how to avoid the incredibly thorny plants that looked so sweet until they embedded themselves in your ankle, I noticed that every sleeper had the words "Colevilles 1933" embossed on it. And I started to reflect on those lanky boys from Surrey and Sussex who came out here in the 1930s as part of the British administration to bring civilisation - and new steel sleepers - to the pesky natives. They were met not by gratitude, but by Arab revolts and Jewish terrorism (or Arab terrorism and Jewish revolts - your call) and they must have felt a long way from evensong and tea on the lawn. It's hardly surprising they found refuge in a gin and tonic or six in the American Colony hotel.


But railway tracks and 1933 also have another, more terrible, resonance, for this was the year Hitler seized power in Germany and began a process that would eventually engulf Europe, and especially its Jews, and which would lead ultimately to the foundation of Israel. And, yes, to more Arab revolts and Jewish terrorism (or the other way round - again it's your call).

I got to the smart new Jerusalem station after about an hour and discovered that there's another reason most people take the shuttle: the train is a lot slower. But it runs through some beautiful countryside and is worth it just for that. We passed fields of melon and sunflowers and some sort of low-rise green thing that I think might be potatoes. And then, just around Beit Shemesh, suddenly everything was vineyards. And all of this nestled among low, sandy hills that could be straight out of the Bible.


I spent the afternoon on the beach with Tom's friend Na'ama, talking about life, drinking beer and eating shakshuka - a wonderful Israeli dish in which eggs are broken into a kind of ratatouille of tomatoes, peppers, onions, herbs and spices and the whole thing is baked in an oven. It's simple, delicious and totally open to variation (we had ours with little chorizo-like sausages mixed in too). And, as I discovered later that night, talking to someone after the Friday night synagogue service, everyone has their own secret ingredient. (His was sweet kiddush wine, which, as anyone who has ever tasted it will know, is a much better use of the stuff than drinking it.)

On shabbat itself, I went on another long walk that took me through some pine forests near my house and closer to the separation fence (wall, barrier... again your call) than I had imagined. The route took me past some very expensive-looking newly built condos, destined, I imagine, for Jewish Americans, and down into what I think is the Kidron Valley. And then I found myself in an small Arab district, indentifiable by the fact that there were cars going up and down and people in the streets. (Jewish Jerusalem on shabbat is like a ghost town.) And there, in front of me on the next ridge was the separation fence. (You can see bits of it along the far ridge in this picture. Click on the pic to make it bigger.)


Whatever your politics, you have to admit that the fence, in its concrete part, is ugly. And you get the feeling that it's meant to be that way. On the Palestinian side there is plenty of graffiti - apparently there is a Banksy somewhere but I am not sure where. But on the Israeli side all you see are tall concrete slabs.

I had just finished reading Tanya Reinhart's 'Israel/Palestine' and also this article in the LRB, both of which are highly critical of the carving up the West Bank that Israel appears to be engaged in and it was alarming to see the reality. But I am also aware of the counterargument that the parts of the wall that are concrete as against chain link (about 10 per cent) are there partially to prevent sniper attacks on nearby Jewish areas. And it reminded me of this poem that I came across a couple of years ago.

Where It's Really Dangerous
Uri Orbach (published originally in 2001)

In America, everyone knows that it is terribly dangerous in Israel now, and it is not recommended to travel to Israel.
In Israel, everyone knows that it is dangerous only in the territories and in a little bit of Jerusalem.
In Jerusalem everyone knows there is shooting going on, but only in the neighborhood of Gilo.
In Gilo everyone knows that it is dangerous, but only on Ha'anafa Street.
On Ha'anafa street everyone knows that it is dangerous, but not all along the street, just in the houses that face Beit Jalla.
In the houses facing Beit Jalla, everyone knows it is dangerous, but mostly in a few apartments on specific floors that get shot at occasionally.
In the apartments that get shot at, they know it's dangerous, but not in all the rooms. Just in the kitchen. In the bedrooms and bathrooms, on the other hand, it's totally safe.
In the kitchen that gets shot into they know it's really dangerous. But not in the entire kitchen. Just near the fridge and the toaster.
Those near the fridge know that where it's really dangerous is in the freezer, which is directly in the rifle sights of the sharp-shooters from Beit Jalla.
You can take milk and cheese out of the fridge part without getting hit - usually. Word-of-honor.
And in the freezer over the fridge part of the refrigerator on one part of Ha'anafa street at the edge of Giloh in Jerusalem in Israel? Oh boy, it's totally dangerous there. If you stand there and pull some frozen schnitzels out of the freezer, that's when you really take your life in your hands.
So for a few months, just until things calm down, we're not going to use the freezer.
Nu, so this you call dangerous?

When I got back I found No Name curled up on my bed. (Don't read this if you are eating.) I put him back outside but there are so many open doors and windows here that he was in again before I even got back to the bedroom. So I decided to leave it to Shuki.


At 6pm, Shuki walked in for his evening feed. He saw No Name and, with a burst of energy that was impressive for a 22lb cat, leapt on to him and grappled him to the floor. There was plenty of hissing and yowling as the two of them spun around in a kind of mad cat ball when one of them - my guess is it was No Name - erm, lost control of his bowels and, thanks to centrifugal force, an arc of acrid cat poo shot out over the floor, my sheets and the wardrobe. I yelled. They scarpered. And the rest was silence and, even now, a strangely lingering smell of bleach.

Unsettling fruit picture of the week



It's a water melon and it's yellow. What will these crazy Israelis come up with next?

It's a sort of end of term at the yeshiva today, with the first half coming to an end and a lot of people heading back home. I've made some excellent friends here and this evening a bunch of us are going out for dinner and a night on the town. Well, a Jewish night on the town at least - I expect to be in bed by 11. Here's a pic of my fellow ravers (plus teacher on the left) from Hebrew level Aleph Plus (that's one off the bottom, by the way, not somewhere above the top).


Tomorrow, I am going to be spending the day in Tel Aviv, hopefully at the beach, and then it's back to Jerusalem for the start of shabbat.

Thanks for your feedback on my previous post. I am very touched by all your comments and it has led to some excellent - and hopeful - conversations here.

And, just so he's not upstaged by a melon, here's an unsettling picture of Shuki.

Facts on the ground

I found myself sitting opposite this picture yesterday morning, in the room where we have morning prayers. It was part of a flyer that someone had put up on the noticeboard, for a charity that supports people in the army here, and it totally distracted me from the service that was going on around me.

It's not a comfortable image for many reasons but there is something beautiful about it. In fact, at first, I wondered if it was set up, the sort of thing Israeli photographer Adi Nes would do. (I have posted one of his most famous images, 'The Last Supper', below.) But, looking more closely, I think it is a real photograph of soldiers on patrol somewhere and the photographer just got lucky.


It represents, I think, a set of Israeli values that are still very strong here, and which I like a lot: the pioneer spirit, the sense of protecting each other, determination, outdoors-ness, strength - in fact the sort of things that Jews sometimes had very little of when they were in the ghettos and the slums of eastern Europe. (And, yes, the guy in the front is pretty good looking too.) But, as so often happens here, as soon as you have one thought about something, you experience something else which turns your view of the world on its head.

That something else was yesterday afternoon when I went on a tour of east Jerusalem, organised by the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, an activist group that basically does what it says on the tin. House demolitions are one way in which the Israeli state, through the army, punishes/contains Palestinians in Jersualem and the West Bank and they make me uncomfortable.

As I understand it - and I am very ready to be corrected - the demolitions fall into two types. The first is a kind of punishment meeted out to the family of a suicide bomber. The thinking goes that people will think twice about killing others and killing themselves if their family was likely to pay the price back at home. Right now, a proposal to demolish the house of Hussam Dwayat, the east Jerusalem resident who killed three people with a bulldozer in the city a few days after I had arrived, and who also died in the attack, is making its way through the courts. It's a powerful argument. Jerusalem (and Tel Aviv) is littered with places where people have died in suicide attacks. But at the same, it does seem to violate some fundamental principles (and, probably, international law) that stand against collective punishment. While there are plenty of Jewish Israelis who support demolitions, there are many, religious or otherwise, who see it as basically immoral behaviour. And it does nothing, I think, to help Israel's case.

But it is the second type of demolition that I find more disturbing. Because of the strange nature of the West Bank - which is still technically territory occupied during a war and whose status has not yet been finalised - and of east Jerusalem - which was annexed after 1967 but is riddled with areas of land that it is illegal to build on - many Palestinians here end up building homes without planning permission. And these can be demolished at any time, rather like someone's illegally built conservatory in a Tunbridge Wells back garden.

It is hard for Palestinians in many areas to get a building permit, and, according to ICAHD at least, demolitions happen with a kind of random regularity. Troops arrive at a building with a bulldozer (the irony of the bulldozer attack in Jerusalem has not gone unremarked in the press here) and, through a megaphone, give the occupants notice that their house is going be demolished. And then, unless someone secures a court order to stop them, once the occupants have left, they reduce it to rubble.

There are plenty of opinions about why the state does this - and I am trying to find an army or a settler group that might take me on a tour of the same area and let me hear their point of view - but the effect is to make life in Palestinian areas unimaginably insecure. And that is a terrible basis for building a state of your own.

There is also, as we saw, an excrutiating difference in the quality of life of Palestinians and Jews in east Jersusalem. Both groups are officially residents of the city and both pay taxes to the city council. Yet Palestinian areas often lack the infrastructure, such as sewage and an efficient water supply - and even pavements and traffic lights - that almost adjacent Jewish areas take for granted.

A particulary powerful example of this is the Jewish settlement of Ma'ale Adumin, which we also visited yesterday. Here, about 30,000 people live in a rather wonderful new town that functions as a suburb of Jerusalem. There's a sports centre and a shopping mall, the houses are well built and handsome and made of that lovely honey-coloured Jerusalem stone. And, on the edge of the Judean desert, there are lawns, palm trees, parks, fountains and two open-air swimming pools. It looks like a great place to live and the families there love it. Yet, just over a tiny wadi, on the next hill, is the Arab neighbourhood of Abu Dis (twinned with Camden, it turns out), where, again according to ICAHD, the water only comes on two days a week and which looks pretty much like a Brazilian favela. As we looked out across the wadi, I tried to imagine what it must be like to live there and see the sumptuousness of Ma'ale Adumin, just out of reach and where, for all intents and purposes, you are not allowed to go - although you are also a Jerusalem resident.

I am guest here and I am sure I don't undertsand the situation fully. But this morning, when I arrived for prayers, the picture looked different and I was sad.

Some random photos

Simmy's comment made me realise that pictures are good. So here are some from my trip so far. For some reason, I didn't take any in Damascus, which is a shame.

Click on any picture on this blog, by the way, to see it bigger.*

* I only just discovered that.

Brussels (obviously)

The train to Budapest

On the border with Romania

The Bucharest military museum

Setting off across Turkey

Aleppo

ditto

No Name in Jerusalem

My flat (with the washing hanging on the balcony)

A house in the German Quarter, just down the road

Shuki

Mehane Yehuda market

Gwen

Roger

The Jerusalem Great Synagogue

ditto

An Arab-Israeli boy, with bike

Looking down towards the Old City

The obligatory sunset shot