There Is No Reason

The workshops continue, and life outside The Valley of Peace goes on as usual. Inside, we can talk about peace and reconciliation. We can dicsuss photography and compliment good efforts. Outside, Aisha's brothers are still in prison.

I find her in the corner of the balcony trying to look inconspicuous.
"My brothers just had their second trial," she says under her breath.
"What happened?"
"They'll stay in prison until at least July, and then another trial."
She explained they had been arrested in the middle of the night, during my last visit to Jerusalem in January, on suspicion of planting a bomb. But Aisha's brother says as soon as he heard someone was planning an attack, he left. He had nothing to do with it. There's little evidence, but until the issue is settled, both her brothers remain in prison.

Aisha is afraid. "You can go home," I tell her, "If you need to. There's no reason to stay here..."
"What worries me," she answers, "is that the same thing will happen to my kids. I have small children, and I'm afriad that one night the Israelis will come to our house and arrest them, just like they took my brothers."

She sees the kids in this project like her own children. She loves them like they were her own, and it's clear she wants the best for them. She insists on being in the same room, though we offered her a private room. One night, at around 1am, I find all the Palestinian kids - boys and girls - walking with her from their rooms to a clearing in the woods around the guest house.
"Come with us!" she offers, "they're going out to dance."
"Don't you want to sleep?" I ask her, knowing she's exhausted
"Well, they want me to come with them," she explains. She is a mother to them all, some of whom have lost parents of their own, one assassinated, one accidentally shot during military incursions.

She just wants to find a breakthrough, she explains later of her reasons for joining this project. She simply wants to get this boy to talk, or this girl to sit next to an Israeli and have a normal conversation, or this boy to be the kid he once was before his father was killed. She doesn't think about herself, it's clear, she thinks about them and their own futures.

As Mazen says to us on the final morning "I don't want you to think like me, I want you to think for yourselves. I just want you to think about your futures, that's it."

This is the Valley of Peace

We all meet again in Wahat El-Salaam, only 12 children this time, to work on their photography. They learn not only the art of photography, but how to use photography to tell their stories - the real stories - to anyone who will listen. They are all asking questions about themselves, about the "other side." Noam photographs her sister's boyfriend at a military ceremony, smiling to the camera. "It's the first time I see a soldier smiling," Heba says. "I don't think if i took this picture, he would be smiling."

These kids are too young to be thinking about death, to be confronted with murder and sorrow, but it's all around them. It's in their families. It is their life stories. Wael's father was assassinated by the Israeli military. Sameh's father was a journalist killed while working in Nablus. Noam's grandmother was murdered in a bus bombing. "I can never forgive the man who killed my grandmother," he says openly "but I know we need to find another way." He's only 14.

There are moments when I panic, when I think all of this may not be worth it. We can't change things. We can't make a difference. It's easy to lose faith in this project. We are meeting in a bomb shelter, thick metal shutters hang over the windows in case of a rocket attack.

Even as we meet here and talk about peace, the world around us does not stop. There are still murders and assassiantions. There are still kidnappings. There is still chaos and disaster and the construction of the wall. Nothing outside is changing. Maybe we are very pleased with life in this little Valley of Peace bubble.

Other times, I hear their statements like "We'll kill, and they'll kill for the same reason. Maybe there's another way," and it reminds me (perhaps naively) why I'm still here. Why I haven't yet given up hope. The kids are used to this, by now they can talk about the death and the suffering casually, as though it were ordinary.

But me, I still want to cry when I see what has been made of their lives, what they have been forced into by the hands of others. All they need to say is "we want nothing to do with this," and I'll believe them.

Once Upon A Time In Qalandiya

We said it in the Western Sahara, "waiting for two days is nothing like waiting for 30 years." Here, I would say "waiting for an hour is nothing like waiting for 30 years."

You can no longer drive around Qalandiya. Every other road is sealed. Ar-Ram is split in two and even more isolated. I had never realised before, whenver I went to visit Khaled in his office, I was on the Israeli side.

Qalandiya is a processing plant for human goods, a funnel that attempts to identify and catagorise its traffic. You are identified as safe or dangerous, your bags x-rayed. You take off your belt and watch. Hold up your passport for inspection, smile, explain why you're here. The liht goes green, push the turnstile. These crossings are designed, in the words of the Israeli administration, as International Borders.

What's on the other side. Where does this International border lead? Where is the other nation? These are questions of logic and semantics, questions of identification, determining the meaning of the word "the" in UN resolution 242. We have to deal with this minutae, because the real issues are to big to see all at once.

The Municipality

Fareed calls Gaza “hell on earth…” It’s chaos, he says, 14 year old kids carrying Kalashnikovs.
“If you need one, let me know,” he offers, “I have a friend with two. His wife bought them for protection.”
“His wife bought two Kalashnikovs?”
“Yeah, but they’re not cheap…”
“What does he do that needs a Kalashnikov?”
“He works in theatre.”

Gangs rule the streets, kidnappings and killings happen on a daily basis, mostly through inter-family criminal feuds. The government has virtually no power there - look at Alan Johnston. It seems everyone knows who has him, even the British (they’ve made very little noise about his kidnapping) but everyone is also aware that the PA has nothing compared to the influence of the family that holds him.

For the first time, Fareed tells me, he hears Palestinians wishing the Israelis would come back to Gaza.
“We had work in their greenhouses,” they say “and there was none of this gang warfare.”
The Israelis, meanwhile, must be loving this decent into anarchy, and are happy to allow the flow of arms into Gaza. The Palestinians go on killing themselves, and any rockets fired into Isreal keep the Israeli public afriad, and the government in control. It's an ideal situation for the current government, who would be eaten alive at the first sign of weakness.

If all else fails, the Israelis can always invent their own reality. Fareed tells thestory of a Goethe Institute employee who was trapped in Gaza – he took four months of wrangling and paperwork to get her out. She was originally Palestinian, born in Gaza, but moved to Germany at aged 13. The Israelis had her on record as a Palestinian, with an identity card. She knew nothing about it, and after she entered Gaza for work, she was stuck. No Israeli permission to be in there, she now couldn’t get out. The Israelis insisted she was Palestinian. She insisted she was German.
In the end they had to process a Palestinian ID for her, and with that apply to be allowed OUT of Gaza. The Israelis finally relented, and gave her a four hour window during which she had to cross Allenby bridge into Jordon and never return.

(You are not who you say you are)

Looking out the window of his kitchen, he points to the building next door. “This is the last Jewish building on this road. The next one is Arab. See the new tarmac we have on our road? It ends at those houses. We get our rubbish collected regularly, they don’t. It’s open racism.” It’s a line in the road, not just figurative, but a physical line where the new tarmac ends and the old roads begin.

Side by Side: It follows you wherever you may go

Now with the workshops finished, there's a sense of relief and exhaustion. The first two days went well, the important things worked out, and we know what's missing. But there's still another six months to keep up this momentum, maybe this is the real challenge.

At the meeting following the first workshops, it hits me, once again, that the occupation here is something you can never avoid. There are moments of calm, when everything seems distant and the news is simply a collection of other people's stories, but sooner or later it will slap you in the face. I ask Leena, the Palestinian coordinator, whether she prepared the short report I asked for:
"I'm sorry, I couldn't think last night. My brothers were arrested."
"Your brothers were arrested? What happened?"
"I don't know. The soldiers came in and took them at night. I was so panicked, I couldn't get the reports done."

I also realised, finally, that there's never any need to ask "why" in these circumstances. Ask "why" and you're met with a puzzled look, exasperated, as if to ask "are you serious?"

Driving through Jerusalem with Sami, he explained he hadn't been since his papers were torn up during the first intafada. "Why?" I asked, and he just stared at me. Mohannad explained how he was turned away from Allenby bridge last time he tried to cross into Jordon. I asked him why, and he laughed. Someone explained the story the boy whose father was killed during an Israeli army raid into Hebron, and I asked why. "Why?" they replied. "What do you mean, why?"

Side by Side: Workshops begin

We all meet in St. Joseph’s monastery, Abu Ghosh, on top of a hill somewhere near Jerusalem. Fourteen kids, seven Palestinian and seven Israeli, all there to take part in a photographic dialogue. Each has their own goal: some want to show the other side what their life is really like, some want to speak to the world with their photographs, to show their view on the conflict, other simply want to learn photography.

Over two days, brief moments of panic as I start to realise how difficult this could be. Not everyone is coming from the same place, with the same ideas, not everyone is ready for the challenge of talking to kids from the other side. I speak to one Palestinian whose father, a well-known photojournalist, was killed during an Israeli army raid into Hebron. He refused to work with any of the Israeli students. But still, we knew that because he was there, he was there to learn something, to hear another perspective.

It’s difficult to keep the students focused, between talking to their friends and listening to music on their mobile phones. As the project manager, I can just sit back and watch as the photographers run through shutter speed, focus, composition with the kids. Over the course of two days, the students switch between inspired and anarchic every other minute. On the second morning, the other hotel guests complain that the kids were running around like maniacs until 5 in the morning. I didn’t hear anything. I slept soundly, with sporadic dreams of being shot and being taken hostage – this seems to be happening a lot lately.

In the conference room, we find yesterday’s notes ripped up and strewn on the floor, and across one sheet is written “Where are the educators?” I don’t know what it means. These are the challenges I hadn’t expected, but in between moments of fear and chaos, there are moments of inspiration when the kids seem to finally understand what they want to do with their photography.
“I want to learn to speak with images, not words.”
“I want to show the world what our lives are really like.”
“I want to try to understand the other side through their images.”

Side by Side: I wasn't born in Jerusalem

I’m back in Ben Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv, to continue my photography project with Palestinian and Israeli kids. Last time I tried to leave this country, I was interrogated for two and a half hours. They seemed particularly fascinated by my bag. “We can’t understand why you don’t have a bag with wheels…why doesn’t your bag have wheels?”
“Because I prefer to carry my bag.”
“So why do you have it on a trolly now?”
I just played along politely, without any of the smart answers running through my head. This time, I was given the interrogation on the way in. They seemed surprised that I hadn’t been questioned on the way in the first time I arrived only one month ago.
“You should have been questioned last time.”
“Why?”
“For…security reasons…”

Things have changed since last time. The place suddenly became more dangerous as the battle between Hamas and Fatah has spilled over from Gaza into the West Bank. I hear Faleh was shot not long ago.
“A friend was shot two days ago,” Khlaed explains. “Oh. You know him. Faleh.” I met him last time I was here. He works with Al-Tariq, the Palestinian institute for Development and Democracy, and is a committed peace activist. Not a new-age, soft, leftist peace activist you understand, but someone who has seen the horrors himself, been through the process of trying to make changes, and finally concluded that non-violent resistance and activism were the most powerful, and most effective tools. He was shot in the kneecaps – whoever it was that shot him wasn’t trying to kill him, just send a message. Now he was lying in hospital recovering.

I began to worry - not just for him but for myself. Khaled hadn’t told me earlier that he, as well as everyone else involved in this project, was active in Fatah. Now it seemed people like him were a target, and I often stayed in his flat.

That night, two of Khaled’s friends sit in front of an electric heater in his flat as he explains the story: (the short version) “We were all sitting around, it was late, maybe 2am. I said ‘let’s see the Saddam execution video’ so we looked online for the Saddam video. After a while, I got a call from Faleh. I immediately asking him ‘what’s wrong’ because his voice was very weak, but he just said ‘come over straight away’ so we dropped everything and drove straight there. When I pushed open the door at his house, I saw him lying on the floor in a pool of blood, like when they slaughter an animal. His kids and wife were there, looking at him, not knowing what to do. I tried bandaging him up, but eventually we had to go to hospital…[later] whoever it was, they knew exactly where he’d be, they knew his front door and what window he’d be standing at.”

Khaled and his friends then begin arguing the reasons behind the shooting, who they think was responsible. They each have their own theories: some say Hamas, some says another Fatah faction, some say Israeli undercover police. There are reasons for all of them, and each man had his own evidence. I tried listening, but could only imagine his family looking down at him, not knowing what to do. Faleh hoping his family was safe, maybe afraid of dying, maybe just afraid that his family was hurt. But they were looking down at him, the pool of blood expanding as they stood their, helpless, waiting for someone to show up. Outside the sound of a car speeding away.

Side by Side: Meanwhile, In Ramallah...

Earlier today, there were 3 attacks in the West Bank on Fatah officials: a kidnapping, the burning of a car, and firing of weapons outside a funeral, each designed to let Fatah know that if they didn’t back down, the situation in Gaza would spill over into the West Bank.

They were all supposed to be messages. Maybe the attack on Faleh was another message.

As we’re are all ready to leave for Abu Ghosh to begin our photography workshops, Khaled’s phone rings. He quickly switches the tv to Al-Jazeera and we watch, live, as the Israeli military rolls onto the streets. There are fire-fights in the streets, kids throwing stones at armoured cars, sporadic gun-fire. People are running through the streets with white sheets waving above their heads. The armoured cars move forward, they move back, they send in bulldozers to run over a few parked cars for no obvious reason.

Khaled seems most bothered by the cars. Sitting next to someone from Ramallah, he asks “Is that your car?” Khaled and the others in the flat begin to panic as the situation starts getting worse. They’re worried about their family and friends, I’m worried about anyone getting anywhere for the workshops now that the checkpoints are closed.

Every few seconds a mobile phone rings (everyone in this flat has at least two phones) with another panicked family member. “It’s okay, I’m in Ram.”
“No, I’m in Ram, it’s okay, talk to you later.”
“Don’t go to Ramallah! I’m in Ram, it’s okay.”
The only relief is the ring tones, punctuating the panic every few seconds, with an Arabic pop song, or that unavoidable Zamphir tune or, in Khaled’s case, a cover of “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)”

Every few minutes, people start come out of the shops and houses they’re hiding in, only for one of them to be shot and everyone to scatter again.

One of Khaled’s friends is speaking on the phone to his family in Ramallah. He can see, on the screen, what’s going on outside their door. “Stay inside,” he tells them.
“Okay, I think they’re pulling out” Khaled says watching the television.
“Oh, they’re pulling out,” his friend says into the phone,
“Oh, no, wait! They’re back!” Khaled shouts, hearing gunshots and watching more people scatter
“Stay inside! They’re still there!” his friend yells down the phone. It’s all feeding live into Khaled’s living room - we’re watching, hearing the police and ambulance sirens on tv, and now, outside the window of his flat.

I suddenly fear, as well as everything else, that this project is never going to happen. Qalandiya is closed, the only checkpoint any of us can use to get to the Abu Ghosh. If the violence spreads just outside the city of Ramallah, we’ll all be locked inside. For a few minutes, we each sit in silnce staring at the screen, each thinking his own fears and frustrations.

Khaled eventually decides to pack the car. The taxi drops us off at a smaller checkpoint just outside Ram and we carry the equipment, two flip charts, video projectors, photo albums, laptops, through in several trips. The Israeli soldiers don’t know what to make of me walking through the checkpoint, waving my passport, carrying two flipcharts under my arms. I smile and act chirpy.

When I come back through with the second load of gear, the guard motions for me to stop and asks “show me your passport”.
“I just showed it to you!”
“Oh, you’re the same guy?” he looks surprised.
There must be a lot of Palestinians crossing this checkpoint with flipcharts under their arms.