21st September
21st September 2007.
East Jerusalem.
My journey to Bethlehem this morning was a little more difficult than usual. Yom Kippur starts tonight, so the Israeli Army is very much out and about. As I walked up the hill towards the Old City this morning amongst a group of about fifty Muslim Palestinians who had just come off a bus that wasn’t allowed any closer to the city, the sight of me with violin and laptop bag amongst the keffiyeh adorned and enrobed faithful was too much for one Israeli soldier. I assume boredom may well have had something to do with, but I was stopped for a couple of minutes while my bag was searched, luckily not too closely as I had said I didn’t speak Arabic and wasn’t looking forward to them finding my teaching notes, and my violin inspected. As I have found with most of the Israeli Army personnel, they were very curt with me to begin with, but soon warmed up, and wished me a pleasant stay in Israel as I left. When asked whether I was enjoying Israel, I only mentioned half the truth and said, “I love it!” It was neither the time nor the place for the ‘but’.
As I emerged from the Bethlehem checkpoint on the West Bank side I was met with the sight of an empty road, fifty metres down which was an Israeli Army roadblock and on the other side of that there were several hundred, if not a thousand Palestinians. Friday prayers are a time when many West Bankers go to Jerusalem to pray at Al Aqsa Mosque, but due to Yom Kippur no Palestinians were being allowed to cross the checkpoint. Both of my taxi drivers both from and back to the checkpoint complained about this obstruction to their ability to exercise their religion by the religious festival of the ‘other side’. Needless to say, it wasn’t the time for holiday snaps, so my photo at the wall will have to wait.
I went to the Old City to spend some time online today as everything in West Jerusalem is closed, and met with a guy I’ve seen a few times who is in Jerusalem researching a PHD at the Hebrew University. Two of his friends later joined us, and we went up onto the roof of his hotel. The sight of the Old City at night was quite something.
One of his friends, I’d like to meet again as she’s here from South Africa working for a Christian Zionist organisation in Israel. Many people are now making comparisons between the South African Apartheid regime and the Israeli government so I’d love to ask her a few questions about that. She’s bound to have some interesting perspectives on it, being from inside the former and supporting the latter. Tact will be the order of the day for that one, I suspect.
