I’ve been a bit caught up with what to do, how to plan it. This business of taking each day as it comes, not booking anything, making it up as we go along, this works in most places, but Israel, as we all know, isn’t most places. You can travel on Friday but not Friday evening because it’s Shabbat. And then the next two days it’s Rose Hashanah and you’re not going to go traveling then either. So you can make your pitch on Friday morning, put up your tent and stay put until the singing and dancing g is done and then do something else. Unless you’re in Palestine in which case… Rosh schmosh. Doesn’t matter. Which is how I came to be sitting in a café in Ramallah.
The West Bank. Palestine. The Occupied Territories. Settlements. This is where the confessional comes in. Before I came here, I didn’t really have a clue. Hamas. They’re in charge of the Palestinians, right? Well, no. Not here. They’re in Gaza. Gaza’s not here, it’s down south, on the coast. Here, the West Bank, is a big chunk of land roughly speaking between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea.
I remember being asked why I wanted to come over here.
“I want to have a look, have a sniff, to see what it’s really like”
Well, OK. So now let’s do it.
We are the luckiest people that ever there was. No wars, no fears, maximum freedoms, no grief. And we won the housing lottery, which gave us loads of free money. And the luckiest people in that demographic are the Jews. We get all that – and no one hates us for being Jews. (Well, increasingly it seems that they do, but so far…). We’re so privileged, us with our red – soon to be blue – passports and mostly we don’t even realise it. Spending our time on social media mouthing off about stuff we have no idea about like we’re the most important things around. I don’t know. Who am I to talk about that?
But anyway, more than anything this environment makes you realise that we really are the chosen people. Us with our white skin and European ease. This morning I was all double espresso, freshly squeezed orange juice – hold the ice – and croissants on Dizengoff Square and eight hours later I’m drinking mint tea in a sidewalk café in downtown Ramallah, the capital of the West Bank and effectively Palestine.
As soon as you make to go, you move out of the Dizengoff bubble. The central bus station is as scuzzy as bus stations always are. But there are armed guards and airport-style X-ray machines. To get to the West Bank it’s a bus to Jerusalem, then get from west Jerusalem to east Jerusalem to the Damascus Gate and then a minibus to the other side.
I was going to hire a car, but decided to go by bus, to sit next to real people, maybe meet some real people and experience what real people experience. Also, you can’t hire a car.
I had a Facebook exchange.
“So you’re gone from Stamford Hill to Bayswater?”
“Exactly, except you can’t go from Bayswater to Stamford Hill”
We, the guys in Israel, can drive into Palestine but no car hire company is going to lend you a car to go there. Can you imagine the insurance? “And what excess would you like on that, sir?”