CADFA visits to Palestine 2020

my motives ·         to learn more of the situation - & that happened; ·         to show support to the Palestinians - & that happened ·         to keep a promise I made to myself. When I was 10/11/12, I used to watch the telly. I saw a lot of the crap that was going on in Alabama & Mississipi. I said to myself that, if I was an adult, I’d have marched with Dr King. That never happened, of course, & nor did I go to South Africa, but, with this trip, I had the time, money & opportunity to stick 2 fingers up to apartheid. ·         to give em summat: Palestinian songs sung by my choir Raised Voices; I’m in the process of sending these to a bunch of groups in the West Bank ·         to have an adventure. (I was never in physical danger, but the suburb that I stayed in was ritually tear-gassed on Friday afternoon while my group was out. The flat I stayed in had empty tear gas canisters in a kitchen drawer. And all about me were tales of tear gas &

Spring tour basics The structure of the week was that every night we stayed in Abu Dis, & every day the minibus took us to places of interest. One way to describe Abu Dis is to say that it’s a suburb of Jerusalem; another is to say   it’s a village. Before the wall, one could drive from Abu Dis to a central part of Jerusalem in 4 mins; after, it took 30 mins. When our tour guide Abed was young, he went to college in a central part of Jerusalem & used to walk there. There were 11 in the group; four females; 7 males. The two main groups were 3 young women & 5 retired/semi -retired male trade unionists. One woman was about my age: 67; one man was black & London Caribbean; one woman was French Algerian & came from Paris; another was English Pakistani or mixed race. This last was from a small Muslim group that I’d never heard of before, not Sunni, not Shia. I’ve forgot the name of this group. Most were secularists; one was a Jew & probably secul

6).  Ramallah:  Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, and the Popular Arts Centre. From the museum we went to the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, where we learned from a brilliant presentation about the work that Addameer does to try to mitigate the desperate plight of those Palestinians who are taken prisoner.  The Association was founded by lawyers in 1992 after the first intifada, and provides free legal aid to prisoners, since Israeli lawyer costs are very high.  They document violations of human rights.  There are many forms of detention but they are all arbitrary, done without a warrant, by the army, from check-points or from people’s homes, this usually in the night time at around 2.00 a.m., when the family are in bed, a practice designed to maximise the fear and humiliation inflicted, particularly the humiliation of parents in the household.  The first difficult job is to find where the person has been taken, to inform the family

12).  Hebron, cradle of extremist Zionism, nurtured by the State. On our final day together in Palestine as a group, we went to Hebron.  As on all the other minibus journeys, when we crossed a fixed checkpoint along the road it was deserted and we could drive straight through it - it is only manned during the rush hours earlier in the morning and in the evening, to disrupt and delay people getting to their work.   I noticed another pattern - where there was a settler-only road going to an Israeli settlement, or going direct to Jerusalem, the junction would be laid out in such a way that the mixed or mainly Palestinian traffic would have to wait, even though it was much heavier traffic than on the other road; the settlers could drive straight across the junction with priority, but the Palestinians had to form a queue and wait; this was another example of the imposition of dominating force to create a little ritual of humiliation in the mundane act of driving along a

11). Armed settlers patrolling the countryside. On the next day we went out into the countryside, with a group of young men from the orphanage in Abu Dis who acted as assistants, though apparently for some of them it was their first opportunity to visit the beautiful valley we walked down, even though it was only a few miles from their home, because of their lack of resources and because of the dangers of attacks by Israeli settlers or the army.  They needed our presence to provide safety from such attacks.  We saw this soon after we arrived at the valley where it was crossed by a road near to the Israeli settlement of Kvar Ademim.  After a week of rain the week before, the river in the valley was a fast-flowing stream, unusually at this time of year, and many families had come down to enjoy it, and some youths were shouting and laughing as they swam in a man-made pool.  Suddenly a police car appeared and a group of armed police got out of it and started shouting in a

10). Settler occupation and abuse in the Old City of Jerusalem. We emerged from Al Saraya Street for a tour of the old parts of the Old City.  Every week houses get confiscated and given to settlers, and the struggle to keep properties, especially in the Old City, has intensified in the past decade.  This is partly because the main owners of property are not the people who are living in a house, and there may be deficiencies in the documentation as to the rightful owner.  Settlers confiscate houses and then claim to have bought them, they just throw the inhabitants onto the street.  Then the homeless Palestinians have to go to the Israeli court to try to prove that they own the house, but often they can be found not to have quite the right papers, for example if there is a slight variation in the names cited in the deeds. In 1967 a lot of Palestinian homes were confiscated under the ‘Absentee Property Law’ if the owners lived or had fled to other Arab ‘enemy’ cou