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.