Another relaxing day at Ruth’s. I could get used to this. In the evening we went to some neighbours who were intrigued by my trip to the West Bank.
They were immigrants – of course – but seeing as they’d been here since the 1960s… we can forgive them that. They were intrigued because they define themselves as “Left” and in truth, probably “Very Left”. Everyone here defines themselves as “Left” or “Right” and the labels only seem to relate to their position re ‘the situation’. No one seems to talk about health care and the other stuff that we talk about when we consider whether we’re Left or Right. I got the impression that most if not everyone here agrees on that stuff, and everyone agrees on what we’d call a Left viewpoint. Of course there’s healthcare. Of course you look after the vulnerable and the elderly.
Maybe it’s just that there’s so much rabbit about ‘the situation’ that no one’s got any time or energy for anything else.
One of the reasons my friends are so interested is that, as Israelis, they’re not allowed into Palestinian places.
I remember a few days ago,I had a chat with a mate about how I couldn’t hire a car in Israel and take it into Palestine. Like the smartarse who thinks he knows everything, I made a joke about going from Stamford Hill to Bayswater. (Sorry – a bit of a London-centric joke) and said that I could go from Stamford Hill (very Jewish area) to Bayswater (very Arabic area) but “you can’t go from Bayswater to Stamford Hill”.
Kinda wrong on every level. I could hire a car in Israel and take it into Palestine. Insurance might be grief, but I could do it. And out here people from “Bayswater” can go to “Stamford Hill”, but people “Stamford Hill” can’t go to “Bayswater”.
Even in the space of a few days, the pre-conceptions get overturned and the assumptions are proved wrong. It made me realise that, while I hate using this word, if there is apartheid out here, it cuts both ways.
There are roads you can drive down. And there are roads you can’t. The Palestinians can drive down the roads the Israelis can’t drive down. And the Palestinians can also drive down the roads the Israelis can drive down. Mostly though, everyone stays in their patch, not through anything other than the fact that people are basically tribal. We tend to stick with our own. (I grew up in a Jewish “ghetto” in north London. That’s just the way it was). But also it pays to be sensible.
We spoke long and hard about what it was like out there, about what the future held (their prognosis wasn’t good), and about what could be done to help ‘the situation’.
Could there be a “two state solution”? They doubted it, not in the current political landscape anyway.
What about, as the guide in the Refugee Camp suggested, a “one state solution”? They doubted it, because while that might work, it wouldn’t then be a “Jewish state”, it would just be a country where Jews lived.
What about… I don’t know. They supported Meretz, the Left-ist party, and like most people I spoke to criticised every inch of Netanyahu’s being, but really there wasn’t a lot of positive knocking about. There was, however, some very fine plum cake. And where there’s plum cake, there’s hope.