Alastair Mitchell

Bethlehem.

Apologies for the lack of blog activity recently, the reason is that I have not been out and about much, both as a result of having rather a lot on at work and being a bit ill over the last few days. These will both change soon however, so there will be some more things to write about in the coming weeks.

One of these will be the revisiting of some of the places I’ve already written about, with my family when they visit next week.  It will be interesting to see the change in these places, especially Hebron and Nablus.  The former is where the suicide bomber who struck the Israeli town of Dimona a few weeks ago is from, and since that event Hebron has been experiencing some of the collective punishment that has come to be expected from the Israeli army following events such as these.

Speaking of collective punishment, I see that today over 30 people including 8 children were killed in Gaza in retaliation for the Israeli killed in Sderot.  As I watched on television the lifeless body of a five-month old child unsuccessfully treated in hospital, it struck me how little his small body resembled a ‘terrorist’.  But now, perhaps, the ‘balance’ has been reset.  Normally it takes at least 5 to 10 Palestinians or Lebanese to pay the price for the live of an Israeli - sometimes, however, it takes many more.

The other place that I mentioned that will be good to check up on is Nablus.  A couple of nights ago the Israeli army killed, amongst others, one of Fatah’s armed group Al Aqsa Brigades there after having set him free as part of a recent amnesty, and in response that group has said it will now not respect the ceasefire they had previously been keeping.  If this actually happens it could be big news, for at the moment most people outside of Palestine seem focused only on Hamas in Gaza and are beginning to forget that Israel has other, bigger problems that are not only to its South.  Anyway, Al Aqsa Brigades are a sizeable presence in Nablus, so it will be interesting to see what affect this is all having.

The full-scale invasion of Gaza by Israel also looks ever more likely, so I suspect that either way this region will be on your frontpages a bit more in the coming weeks.  At least the Israeli Prime Minister has made it clear what he wants: ‘The only requirement we have from the Palestinians is stop killing innocent Israelis’ - I wish he could lead by example.

Bethlehem. 

I think the fact I had been imagining the moment I first saw the cooked heads, meant that when it finally happened, in some sense it was an anti-climax.  This is a sentence I doubt I would have written had I not been invited to join in the annual feast of a local family, as they enjoyed the traditional meal of goats’ heads, feet, stomachs and intestines.  Before I go any further, this is not as bad as you are probably imagining so do read on, unless you are particularly squeamish.

In honesty, I was as attracted to this occasion as much by curiosity as by outright desire, and I made sure I was hungry when I went so as to be able to pay the compliment of eating lots.  The dish is as follows, and is an approximation based on what I saw, and what I understood of what I was told.

Firstly, the stomachs and intestines must be washed thoroughly with a mixture of olive-oil soap and lemon juice.  The stomachs are then cut into pieces then sewn into small bags, filled with a mixture of rice, meat and sweet Arabic spices, then sewn shut.  Arabic haggis, you could say.  The intestines are stuffed with the same filling then sewn shut at regular intervals, just like sausages.  

The heads and feet then have all the fur burned off, are washed and put in a huge pot along with the prepared stomachs and intestines, which is then filled with water and boiled for between five and six hours.  This is done outside, on a gas burner attached to a bottle of gas as the pot is too big to be put on a homecooker.  The two nearby goats whose turn is yet to come, grazed happily nearby and I regret not taking their picture too.

Once the meat is ready, it is taken out and goats’ yogurt is stirred through what is now goat stock, to make a thin soup that is served in bowls with the meal.  All the bits of the animals are put on one large central platter, from which each person helps himself.  I say himself, as this dish is served to a table of men while the women, who have been preparing this dish since the previous day continue to bring a seemingly endless supply of new body parts to the event.

Frankly, I found the whole experience of eating heads more interesting than anything else.  I particularly liked the dark meat that runs down the outside of the jawbone, the tongue, the roof of the mouth and the eye-sockets (the eye-balls are one of the very few parts that are not eaten, though they are left to be popped out at the last minute).  Once all the edible matter had been removed from each head, great pleasure was taken from placing the head on the ground, smashing it open with a nearby rock, and accessing the brains, the softest part of the whole creature.  I could see why the brains are regarded as the best bit, though personally I found them a little too rich, like a strong pate with the unpleasant characteristic that fudge has of sticking to the inside of the mouth.  The rest of the head consisted of non-descript pieces of meat, fat and cartilage and could only be referred to as ‘the bit between’ two others.  The feet, I found to be very soft fat covered in rather thick skin, like thick ‘crackling’ that has been boiled rather than baked.  The ears seemed rather pointless, being thin sheets of cartilage without flavour – a bit of salt here would have done the trick.

More enjoyable than any of the above however, was the occasion itself and the honour of being invited to a feast that is only taken once each year, and which was presented to me with obvious pride.  This is a labour intensive and expensive meal to produce and is one that, like so much in Palestine, is centred on the family.  As my host said as we sat eating outdoors within the heavily built-up Deisheh refugee camp, “all around us is civilisation, but this meal takes us back to our natural state.”  There was a truth in what he said, but above all else I arrived as a curious guest and left as a satisfied and humbled friend.

Bethlehem.

One week on, and the snow seems a distant memory.  The cloudless skies now look down upon a rapidly warming land, where spring is in the air. The sound of bird-song by day, as the warm sun encourages new life contrasts with the sound of mosquitos by night.  Soon it will be time to start plugging in the anti-mosquito vaporizers to avoid waking in the morning covered in bites.  It is nice to have the windows open again too, though it is still too cold to have the balcony doors open at night.

I am sure the bomb attack in the Southern Israeli town of Dimona in which a civilian was killed this week made many headlines at home – what might not have also made the headlines was the rocket attack across the Gaza border, hitting a school, injuring three students and killing a teacher.  As we know, the firing of rockets across this border is supposedly at the root of the military action toward, and current siege of, Gaza.  The reason I suspect this particular rocket didn’t make many waves in the sea of global news is that this rocket was fired into Gaza by the Israeli army, and it was a Palestinian school that was hit.

In a single un-newsworthy event, this death toll of one is precisely half that of the two civilians killed by Gazan rocket fire in all of Israel, in all of last year - none have been killed this year, to date.

I wonder what the international view would be if, in response to this indiscriminate attack by the nation state in the Middle East with the most advanced precision weaponry, the civilian population of Israel was to be subjected to half that being endured by their equivalents in Gaza.  It’s a hypothetical question or course, because the civilians of Israel are conspicuously not under threat.  Nevertheless, answers on a postcard please.