Bethlehem

It’s amazing how easy it is to get around here. I went further into the West Bank today (East Jerusalem IS the West Bank too), taking a bus into Bethlehem. Over here, what should be a 30 minute ride can sometimes stretch into 1.5 hours, especially for Palestinians getting from one city to another simply because of Israeli checkpoints stationed between cities which by international law belong to the Palestinians anyway! An example of how they like to f*** with the Palestinians: Around Jummah time yesterday, we were trying to get into Jericho and we arrived to find a long lineup of cars at the checkpoint. The Israeli soldiers know the Palestinians are all trying to get to the mosque, and as my Palestinian driver explained, this intentional delay was a weekly occurrence. That's how it works here, even if Israeli-Arabs don't live in as destitute, tense conditions as the Gazans do, there is a subtle, sneaky personal campaign of oppression and humiliation being wrought by the Israelis.

Bethlehem was absolutely beautiful, much like the rest of this country, the landscape is extremely hilly and at the end of every street you discover an incredible panaroma. Bethlehem also has a fantastic service called the communal taxi, and I only wonder why more cities don’t employ this form of transport. 8-seater station wagons drive all around the city, picking up and dropping off passengers wherever they please, and only charging 2 shekels each. Cairo has an informal system similar to this, except we still pay according to the distance, no matter who you’re sharing your bus with.

My main aim in going to Bethlehem was to get a closer look at the Apartheid wall that the Israeli’s have built. I walked nearly three-quarters of a kilometre along this giant of a wall, built, according to the Israelis, to ‘stop terrorists from getting into Israel’, but instead it only serves to disrupt the daily lives of local Palestinians. Nevermind that it snakes along well into the West Bank territory, it was also ironically, built by Palestinian labour, so desperate for jobs, money, sustenance, that they have to resort to this kind of humiliation – building a wall for the enemy designed to ruin their own community. I will upload photos of some of the amazing graffiti on this wall later.