CADFA visits to Palestine 2020

9).  Occupied East Jerusalem:  the Al Saraya Centre.  Collective resistance to domination as a preventative treatment for the self-damaging behaviour of the oppressed. On the next day we visited the Old City in East Jerusalem, and this involved first alighting from the minibus by a section of the Apartheid Wall, to go through a checkpoint which was for pedestrians to enter Jerusalem, after having their IDs checked.  This took us about half an hour, and the experience was in essence like going through any other border control, with the x-ray machine for your bags, someone to look at your passport and so on.  The difference was in the horrible revolving metal gates which opened at irregular intervals when a light would suddenly change to green, of which one had to go through three, the generally dismal and prison-like interior, and the insolent and hostile attitude of the two young women behind the I.D inspecting glass partition, one of whom was...

8).  Domination expressed as power over the fate of dead bodies, and resistance to it. When we got back to Abu Dis, alighting from the minibus, we met a group of three young girls; one of them, aged about nine, was the daughter of a man who had been shot and killed by an Israeli sniper during a demonstration against the Wall.  As often happens when someone is killed by the army, his body was seized and was kept by the Israelis for a long time, before being suddenly returned with about two hours notice with the instruction that it must be buried that same night, but it had been so deeply frozen that this was very difficult to do.   This awful story reminded me again of Shalboub-Kevorkian’s chapter on ‘Death and Colonialism’ in her 2015 book, in which she cites Foucault as defining sovereignty as the right to kill, even after death - the power over the dead body establishes the difference, and the inherent inferiority, of the person who is made ...

7).  The resistance of displaced Bedouin communities to further displacement. On the next day, we were taken to visit three different Bedouin villages near to Abu Dis.  The first one, Wadi Abu Hindi, has a population of some 33 families, or 350 people, though it varies throughout the year, originally from the Beersheba area, evicted in 1948 towards Hebron and then forced further north in the 1960s.  Here, behind a fence, was a small school made of metal cabins which get very hot in the summer, built with international funding, and with a lovely small garden.   This is on land owned by families from Abu Dis, but nevertheless the Israeli army have declared it to be on state land and demolished the school and the houses in 1997.   The school has been demolished and rebuilt three times. Every year $25,000 has to be raised to pay lawyers to try to obtain an order staying further demolition for another year.  On the side of the valley, overlooking th...

5).  Ramallah: the tombs of Yasser Arafat, Muhammad Edwan and Mahmoud Darwish. On the third day we went  in the minibus to visit the secondary school and orphanage in Abu Dis, where we were greeted warmly by some of the teachers who showed us some of their pupils’ art work.  Then we were driven out to the east of Abu Dis near to the gates of a large settlement, Ma’ale Adumim.  We took the road to Ramallah, passing on its southern edge through Qalandia refugee camp, where a young man of 23, Muhammad Edwan had just that morning been shot multiple times whilst driving his car by Israeli forces on a house-arresting raid,  and left to bleed to death.  The main road had been closed for a while but was open when we went through, though  all the shops were shut as people were preparing for the funeral. We went first in Ramallah to the tomb of Yasser Arafat, which was guarded by two soldiers in decorative uniforms, in a stone mausoleum; I fo...

4).  The exhibition about the Wall at the “Walled-Off Hotel”. After walking along a much-painted section of the Apartheid Wall,  we came to the Walled-Off Hotel, which was financed by the British street artist Banksy in 2017, to mark the 100th anniversary of the British control of Palestine.   Carved into the concrete of the Wall opposite the hotel was the British Crown symbol, as found on letter-boxes, with, underneath it, “ ER….Sorry”.  The hotel contained a welcoming bar serving Palestinian beer,  a small art gallery and an exhibition about the Wall.   The Wall is 810 km long and cost $1.3 billion, and was built using materials and labour from the West Bank - it is not best conceived as a single barrier, rather as a set of local walls, checkpoints and colonies inside the West Bank.  The tall concrete blocks are characteristic of the urban sections of the wall, but other parts use trenches, electrified f...

3).  Aida Refugee Camp, Bethlehem. On the second day, we went to Aida refugee camp, just north of the centre of Bethlehem, the home of some 6,000 refugees, the ancestors of some of the 800,000 Palestinians - 70% of the whole Arab Palestine population - whose homes and villages, some 534 of them, were destroyed in 1948.  About 80% of these villages  remain empty, which adds to the bitterness of the refugees’ inter-generational campaign for their right to return to them.  The camp is entered under an arch on which is laid a huge replica key, symbolising this aspiration of its inhabitants to return to their ancestral homes.  Alongside the camp is a winding and particularly obtrusive section of the Separation wall, made of huge concrete slabs and watchtowers, one of which near the camp entrance, seemed to have been blackened by fire.  Nearby is a large poster depicting Aboud Shadi, an unarmed thirteen year old shot a few years ago from on...