If Tel Aviv was all about good looking boys and girls silently whizzing around on electric scooters with the soundtrack being expensive laughter and chat, Ramallah is very different. There are a few women on the streets but it’s almost exclusively blokes. Groups of young-ish men mostly in their twenties hanging out, older groups of blokes inside cafes smoking hookah pipes.
I touch my ear and set off. Touch my ear because I couldn’t get the bloody earring out – what am I going to do? Ask for help? – so I wrap up my ear with a plaster. Better to look dead stupid than stupid dead.
There’s no point in writing this if I’m not going to be honest and when I got here and went for a walk I felt a bit uneasy. OK, quite a bit uneasy. I’d gone from a place where everyone’s a Jew to being the only Jew in the village. I felt everyone was looking at me, that they were sizing me up. In fairness, they probably were. A white bloke where there aren’t any white blokes, his ear’s wrapped up in a plaster and he’s wearing blue nail varnish. Really, you can’t blame them.
Mid-afternoon went for a walk. The streets are kinda busy, not quite bustling because it’s just blokes hanging around, but busy. After, I don’t know, ten minutes or so I decide that, whatever, let them look, you know. Walk, stop in a café, walk, stop in a café. The only time I feel really a bit like “Hmmm, not sure about this” is when I venture into the Old City ad maybe because it looks a bit like a scene out of the Liam Neeson “Taken” films, I think twice about it. It’s and old city like an Arabic old city: tiny little alleys, crumbling buildings, people hanging out of buildings. It’s not quite labyrinthine but I’m not sure Google Maps is going to help if I lose my bearings. And what if the plaster falls off? Maybe I’ll leave the Old City for another time. Like probably never.
And so I go back onto the main streets and that’s when it all goes a bit… normal. It doesn’t take long to feel more comfortable and all those “Be safe” messages from home seem a bit over the top. The roads are packed with cars but the cars. It’s a curious thing, when I was growing up, the local black men used to drive BMWs – this is a bit after the days of the Cortina Mk 2 1600E (“the black mans Rolls Royce” as it used to be called) – and it’s the same here. Loads of BMWs, some new but mostly old-ish, mostly with fat exhausts tuned to make maximum noise.
I’ve been here about four hours and when those fat exhausted Beamers backfire, I’m still thinking “Bloody hell, gunfire” and then a car with four blokes hanging out of it rolls by. Maybe that’s why all the women are indoors; because all the blokes are acting like twats. Skidding off the traffic lights, or just stopping in the middle of the road only to do a tyre skid start. You get your pleasures where you can, I guess.
I’m a bit hungry and start looking for something to eat. Joe’s told me of a place – Ziryab – and I find it but it’s a bit posh, a bit proper. All mosaic stairs and stone carvings. Maybe later, but for now I just want a bite. After a bit I find a small shack, a falafel joint. That’s the deal. Exactly that. So I make to go in and there’s two groups of lads, maybe early twenties. They look like the kids you see on the news, heads wrapped in a schmutter throwing rocks. They probably are the kids you see on the news throwing rocks. Or they could be studying sociology at the local college because they look like that too, but it’s funny what you think when you’re a bit paranoid. But, you know, if I feel a bit uneasy, well good, cos that’s why I’m here, so let’s get a falafel.
I look at them, they look at me. They shrug, I smile. They’re looking at me and, like I say, that’s fair enough because you don’t get too many middle-aged white blokes here, and then it’s my turn. I point, try to explain, laugh embarrassed and get what I want. As I turn to leave, falafel in hand, the terrorist behind the counter calls me back.
“Hey”
I turn round and he’s holding out a small paper bag. I reach out for it and he smiles.
“For you” he says, and inside the bag are a few extra falafel balls.
The later the night gets, the more the streets come alive. It gets darker, they get noisier. Sleep’s going to be an interesting one. I wander around doing the familiar bloke in a city dance – walk, café, walk, bar – and slowly (well, actually not that slowly) start to feel more relaxed, less like the bloke who doesn’t belong. I want to talk to some people. There’s no point being here and just looking in from the outside. I want to have a chat, have a chat about the important stuff but I also want to talk bloke bollocks, maybe to see if Palestinian bloke bollocks is the same.
Well, that didn’t take long. I go to Ziryab and there’s a group of blokes there – some working, some hanging around – and from one of their phones comes a familiar, universal sound. He’s watching a Real Madrid game and… off we go. And yes, Palestinian bloke bollocks is just the same.
“Liverpool!”
“No – Tottenham. Come on, Spurs, you know”
You’ve got to love football.
Back at the hotel though, that’s when we parked the bollocks and got round to the important stuff. And that was kinda hard and difficult and… something I’m going to think about before committing it to paper. Let’s just say, as stupid as it might look, I was glad my ear was wrapped up in a plaster.
You know, you could pick almost any period in history and it would be the Jews who were getting schtupped. You could go to any year, any century – literally, any year any century – and the Jews are getting killed, put in a ghetto, murdered, kicked out of here, kicked out of there. Sometimes turned into a lampshade. (Yes, I know it’s not only the Jews. But it’s mostly the Jews). Right now, right at this particular moment, it’s not the Jews. It’s the Palestinians.
Do I feel sad about that? Absolutely. Do I feel guilty? Well, maybe. But only as a human being, not as a Jew.