1. Abu Dis and the Apartheid Wall.

What follows is an my account of the recent spring 2019 Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association trip, which involved staying in Abu Dis for a week and being given a tour of some of the most important sites of Palestinian resistance against the occupation, as well as the opportunity to visit some of the famous places in the ‘Holy Land’.  We were asked to write a blog at the time, and it is typical of me to have failed to do so because of difficulties with the technology, not really being able to write on my phone, and then to have taken a long time, with a struggle to keep it coherent, to have produced such a long tract afterwards.  I would like to thank everyone involved in CADFA for the opportunity, and my friends, those who came with me on the trip who helped make it such a great experience, and those who encouraged me to go on it.  I only realised when I got to Palestine that I was visiting places that I had learned about, and sung songs about, from a very early age - some of the earliest other places in the world that I had known of, with ‘O little town of Bethlehem’, ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, and so on.  It was strange to visit these places, which despite my lack of any religion, and despite their being associated with such a story of sacrifice - the self-harm of the Deity, in fact - still have attached to their names in my mind some sort of  childish warmth and reassurance, at a time when they are all marred by the chronic warfare engendered by Zionism, with its settler-colonialist momentum and Palestinian resistance to it.

I have tried to avoid identifying individuals who helped us and gave their time to educate us whilst we were on this trip, to protect them from harm, and if this thus seems to communicate a failure to appreciate what they did, and their courage and their articulate presentations, I must state at the outset that I did feel immensely grateful and full of admiration and respect for them.

I have tried to keep to the chronological order of the experiences of the visit, adding my thoughts at the time.  These are coloured by my particular interest in the effects on people’s health and behaviour of past or ongoing abuse or experiences of domination, and the political implications of those effects, which stems from my years working as a GP in East London,.

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On the first day, we were introduced to the immediate environment of Abu Dis.  From where we were staying, the town seemed like a jumble of buildings, mostly modern reinforced concrete structures with facings of artificial stone, many of them unfinished, with water containers and thermal solar panels to heat the water on the roofs; there were a few old stone buildings, one story stone structures with low-arched roofs, some collapsing.  Between the buildings were gardens in various states of use, some of them containing chickens, donkeys, or old vehicle parts, and a few olive trees.  The town seemed to be strung out along a ridge, from which radiated some steep valleys.

The main campus of the Al Quds (Jerusalem) University was just down the road from where we were staying near the old centre of Abu Dis.  We  walked there and were addressed by a senior member of staff, accompanied by some ten students at different stages of their time there.  The university has 12,000 students now, but they and the staff face a difficult situation - 

    - the high cost of the fees paid to the university leads families into debt, which reinforces an individualist mentality and prevents struggle.  

    - Al Quds is the Arab university of Jerusalem, but this campus is now cut off from the city by the Separation Wall, many students have great difficulty getting here, the journey takes 45 mins instead of  5 mins, checkpoints can be long delays, students ID often problematic.

    - Israel refuses to recognise the degrees issued by the university, so graduates cannot get jobs.

    - there are frequent army raids with tear gas and rubber bullets.

    - Israel controls the finances of the Palestinian Authority and collects taxes; currently funds are being withheld from the Palestinian Authority to try to force it to stop supporting the families of prisoners, so all public employees are on half pay.

    - Schools in East Jerusalem are forced because of financial dependency on Israel to omit any historical or cultural references to Palestinian identity from the curriculum

The academic spoke of attempt to support students through students enrolled into solidarity work with 40hrs voluntary work in the community.  Counselling is available to students and there are also academic studies of trauma and resilience such as the Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative.

It was good to talk afterwards to some of the students, as we walked through the campus, which had pleasant gardens under pine trees laid out down a slope, and looked at some of the buildings, before ending up at a museum dedicated to Palestinian political prisoners.  This showed evidence of a recent raid by the Israeli army in which many of the exhibits had been damaged.  The building had a kind of expensive use of stone in the architecture and layout of the building, having been funded by a donation from an oil-rich Gulf state, which was somehow out of keeping with its painful, lacerating theme - the suffering of prisoners and their huge numbers and long sentences.  There were exhibits giving the life stories of some of the prisoners, particularly those who had been held for many years, and those who had died in prison.  Upstairs there was a display of art works done by prisoners.

My mind resisted the information of this litany of suffering - no doubt partly due to physical factors like the dim light, and my difficulty hearing; but it was also the intolerable thought that these students, who were so committed as to take time away from their studies to help us understand the difficulties they faced, would, unless things changed, some of them, perhaps because they are prospective leaders, or perhaps just by unlucky chance, and being caught up in events, go on to these prisons for their postgraduate studies in resistance and resilience.  It was a repulsive prospect, they seemed so young, and so inspiring in their hopes and their commitment to their education.

 I was glad to get back outside, when we left the university and walked a short distance to the Separation Wall, its huge concrete blocks obliterating the landscape in the direction of Jerusalem, until, after some five hundred metres, we came to a place where the Wall turned a corner and dipped into a valley.  From this vantage-point you could see it descend, then  curve up the far side of the valley, along the edge of the built-up area of Abu Dis.  The hilltop is the site of an Israeli military camp, which occupies the site of a large house commandeered by the army, on the Abu Dis side of the Wall, dominating the town.  Just out of sight, I think, was the place where the main street of Abu Dis used to continue into Jerusalem, the wide road is now blocked by the huge concrete blocks of the wall, so that what used to be a ten minute drive to the capital now takes forty minutes, as you have to drive miles to the east and then back again, or queue for a long time at a pedestrian check-point.  We stood on the ruins of a compulsorily demolished house which had been deemed too close to the Wall;  on the hillside opposite was a collection of buildings where the Arab owner had refused to leave his land, but had been deprived of electricity and water, as well as access to Abu Dis, as he was on the wrong side of the wall.   The land looked mostly unworked.  Nearby, closer to the wall, was a guarded house owned by an American who had hoped, or perhaps still hopes, to be one of the first of a large community of settlers there, if he had been able to take over all the land.  In the distance, just showing above the brow of the nearby hill, you could see the top of the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem.  Behind us, as the Wall carried on across the landscape towards Bethlehem, there was a significant part of Abu Dis where a large number of families had found themselves living on the wrong side of the wall, unable to get to school or work or shops without getting a permit every three months, a permit conditional on the outcome of surveillance.

I did not realise on that first day how appropriate it was for our visit to the Occupied Territories to be based in Abu Dis, where the Wall looms so massively and cuts through the town.  In fact, all week, wherever we went, it was to follow us, because it is a physical representation of the emotional drivers of the Zionist project and the emotional and psychological consequences of Zionism for those whom it expels, denigrates, and fears.  It was strongly present, for example, in the centre of Hebron, where identical structures surround a small island of the most rabid settlers and their army protectors.  It seems capable of spreading across the whole world as the crisis of neoliberal capitalism unfolds into further depths of inequality and injustice.