The other side

Nobody says a thing

On the bus it’s not like usual, no one talks. They’re all just staring straight ahead. 

In a seat by the aisle, a black woman with a headscarf wound to her scalp. Fine features, a long, religious skirt. Opposite, a blue-blonde Russian girl looking out of the window with empty eyes. Her rose wool dress, the one she chose this morning, outlines her thighs. Music plays – the driver’s – but nobody says a thing.

‘Shelach–is that yours?’

A crushed chocolate milk carton rolls past my foot. I look up. Is that yours? – an old man, maybe 60, wants to know. His brown, furrowed face buries exhausted granite eyes.

Everyone’s waiting. Nobody says a thing.

He has a kippa, the man – it’s black – he’s almost crouching in his seat. Who, he wants to know, has dumped their carton on the floor? His shelach? hovers, then drops like rock into a pool.

My eyes meet his, I just look back. Nobody says a thing.

Protest in Tel Aviv

Enough! War Crimes, reads the placard. Arab and Jewish Israelis protest the Gaza bombings, Saturday, outside the Ministry of Defence, Tel Aviv. Right, veteran Jewish activist, Yakov Manor.

Palestinian Israelis protest.

Yasam, police special patrol unit, and demonstrators.

Capitalist government will not bring security: Trotskyite group Ma'avak Sotzialisti – ‘Socialist Struggle’

Lift the siege on Gaza, reads the placard, centre. Right, in Hebrew: The Israeli government is guilty of war crimes. Arabic, foreground: Stop the bloodshed. Gaza won't bow down.

Enough of the massacre on Gaza (placard, right): members of Marxist party Da’am. The sign in the background says: Solidarity with the families of Sderot, Ashkelon and Gaza.

For those who died in Gaza today

East Jerusalem, lunchtime today. I’m in Wa’el’s restaurant, having coffee with Jamilah and Khaled. We’ve been driving these last two hours, just arrived.

I take Wa’el’s picture. He wants me to show him. I take a few more. I show him. ‘Good,’ he says politely.

I get a bit closer. ‘You look sad,’ I say.

Jamilah translates. ‘Yes, he is sad,’ she says.

‘Why is he sad?’

She asks him. ‘He’s sad because 120 people were killed in Gaza today. By the Jews.’

The market is closing. All the stalls are closing for those who died in Gaza today. ‘For the 150 – not 120,’ Jamilah tells me after speaking to one of those shutting up shop.

It’s Saturday, only a quarter to two, and normally the stalls would stay open until five. We walk back up to the Damascus Gate. The alleys are dark, shuttered and silent. A group of Israeli soldiers stands in front of us, faces curled into a sneer. Arabs and Jews are fighting in the Old City; they’ve started throwing rocks.

We buy water from a man who’s folding his last blanket of items away. ‘It was 200,’ he says. ‘The Jews killed 200 people in Gaza today.’

Most of them don't have bullets

Bethlehem, Christmas Eve. I’m at the Church of the Nativity in Manger Square with Tariq, trying to get into midnight mass. We’re pushing and being pushed. Tariq has a big film camera and a Barbie-pink press card he got from God knows where. All evening we’ve driven round the town, a simple route made circuitous by roadblocks, and he’s flashed the press card, and mostly the soldiers have let us through.

I have never seen so much hardware in my life – feel like I should be packing myself. There are vans of soldiers in camouflage, police on every corner, some in blue, others in green with black woollen headgear, pulled down to their eyes and up over their mouths, keeping out the cold.

At the entrance to the church nervous men in suits talk into their jackets and have curly white wires coming out of the back of their heads. Then there’s us, and about a million awestruck tourists from all over the world.

People from Bethlehem don’t really come here for midnight mass, says Tariq, although they’d like to. You need a ticket to get in, and those are hard to get – unless you’re a visitor or a politician, like the Palestinian president Abu Mazen, who’s coming here tonight. But Tariq got tickets earlier today, and he pushes me ahead of him, waving them at officials who are holding back the crowd.

In the church lobby it’s kind of frenzied, with a step-through metal detector, like an airport check-in speeded up with guns. ‘No photos,’ a security man says, and Tariq has to hand his camera in. He gets into an argument with one of the guards, and I stand there trying to look relaxed, thinking, Christ, just one bullet and there’d be a Rambo-style shootout in this place.

‘Don’t worry,’ says Tariq, looking at me. ‘Most of them don’t have any – how do you call them?’

‘Bullets?’

‘Yeah – most of them don’t have any bullets. It’s not like you think.’ He goes back to arguing with the guard.

I look down and see a little guy with a moustache sitting in a chair. He’s one of a cluster of officials, just kind of hanging around. He has on a navy flying jacket and holds a metal detector in his hand, which he keeps running over his arm-pocket zip and giggling as he sets it off. He tries it out on the buttons, and it goes off again. I catch his eye and giggle. His superior barks out something stern, but stifles a smile as he turns his head away.

The service is packed so we stand in the corridor, which is lined with bodyguards sweating into their suits. Tall men in dark overcoats pace about. Each politician or important person has his own security detail, Tariq says, and there are some here to protect the priests.

A wave of people pushes forwards. ‘Back! Back! Get back! Do you understand English? Get back!’ shouts one of the overcoated men, pushing us up against the wall, and a troop of black berets marches someone down the corridor, hurrying him through a side-door, which is then slammed shut. This happens several times. Each time a different man and a different style of uniform.

Abu Mazen arrives. He's feet away, walking smartly, with snow-white hair. His men rush him into the room and slam the door. Minutes later it opens again and the Palestinian president is hustled past us, into the service at the heart of the church.

Nobody is listening

I’m standing on Sderot Yerushalayim taking pictures, looking at Jaffa again, when a woman stops me and asks, ‘why are you taking a picture of that building?’

‘I like how it looks,’ I say. ‘It’s from the 30s and we don’t have buildings like that where I live.’

‘But why? There are many more old and beautiful buildings like that here. I can show you,’ the woman says.

Leora is from Bat Yam. She tells me that she volunteers in Jaffa, helping Arab women with their Hebrew. 

‘That’s nice,’ I say.

‘Yes. We are all God’s children. I give everyone respect. I don’t care who you are – Arab or Jew – I will work with everyone … if he doesn’t come to kill me, of course, then I come to kill him back.’

She points to my London-green parka. ‘You’re not cold in that?’

‘I’m ok,’ I say.

‘You know what I think?’ Leora puts one hand on my arm. ‘I think, oh my God, we live just 70 or 80 years. Oh my God, when we are young we are young, when we are old we are old. And in between, give us life.

‘We must live this 50 years that God gave us and enjoy, but nobody lets us. I told this already to the clever people but nobody is listening.’

Leora poses for a photograph. ‘You are very beautiful and very nice,’ she says. ‘You’re not Jewish, are you? You are? You light candles for Hanukah?’

She scrabbles in her bag for a scrap of paper and a pen. ‘Here is my number. We can sit and drink a coffee together. Call me – call me, whatever you need.’

Scent

Someone has been living in my apartment who smokes and I can smell him everywhere, in the sheets, in the bathroom, a strange ugly perfume that is not mine.

Yael has been here and she's cleaned for me. She left me flat chocolates on the table in a box, with a note: Welcome back!! Love! Yael.

I slept last night in fits, still in pain, so I had to get up and break one of my emergency valiums in half. I downed it licking the crumbs from my fingers like some London-dark desperado, even though here it's warm, and the sun shone a light I had to scrunch in half to hide from, in my oversize rented-out bed.