terrorgore

they just started using this multi-cannister gas grenade launcher that fires off 32 at a time in ni'lin. live ammo seemed to be coming in from everywhere. you can't see so much, from behind the cement part of the wall. but the boys up the front listen for the jeeps on the other side, & rain down rocks on the roof as they move on the other side, clunk, clunk, CLUNK, the sound incredible, take cover, boom. the soldiers can enter to our side of the wall through a gate in the fence to the right, but suddenly they appear to our left, & suddenly you are sprinting, running like hell, falling, scrambling over rocks & boulders uphill downhill through olive trees everywhere, there's a soldier 20 metres away from you, firing off live, there's still gas flying all around & you can't see shit.

fear, it don't come close.

i struggled on the ride out of the village that night, seeing the bright lights of ramallah appear in front of us, where the occupation might never have occured, if you squint just right. back in to another bubble, of haram-pushing dive bars & divier western knock-off restaurants. we smuggled bottles of taybeh in the service to our friends in azzoun & drank them by candlelight in abdullah's half-finished home. the army put the road block to the main entrance back, because apparently the boys were out throwing molotovs yesterday. azzoun! didn't know you had it in ya. non-violence as strategy versus principle, i dunno, let's talk about it some other time, sa? you laugh when you hear this stuff, like when the soldiers gas themselves by accident at demos, but then the idea of the shebab growing up in the midst of this shit chills me. the PA police is back in the village now, but that's also another story for some other day i guess.

we returned home to a three-hour face off with a new recruit we'd left in the house, a man of appalling nature & i'm pretty sure is not all there. i don't know if he just became a vessel for everything building up inside of me, but i think i woke up the neighbourhood screaming, & would have hit the guy if people hadn't intervened. i really didn't know i had rage like that - kinda sketched me out to be honest - or that there are people like that in the world, & how the fuck they end up in my corner of it. people for whom the idea of helping people probably appeals on some theoretical level, but are completely at odds with the social - that is, overall - aspect, of it. we had no qualms about asking him to leave. he is gone now.

dear friedly deported last week after arrest in east jerusalem. the police not above a few boots to my stomach as i tried to pull them off her, but with six batshit bastards that signed up for the shit - unlike soldiers - carting her kicking & screaming in to a van, yeah fuck, what you gonna do? i have been spending more time in the capital - it really is ugly, outside of the old city - since, coming to terms with the situation's futility. house invasions, demolitions, armed settlers strolling freely through palestinian streets, surveying what american real estate interest groups ensures their soon-to-be new land. my heart fucking aches for east jerusalem. the guy who has ended up managing the situation in sheikh jarrah looked seriously petrified at my suggestion of actually speaking with the al-gawis, the family we are staying with in the street now since settlers took over their home in august. i have less & less patience for people who make no effort to learn arabic, or at the very fucking least, communicate with these people we came to stand in solidarity with. maybe i expect too much, i dunno, i see the cynicism shit activists foster in the palestinians, something we probably all fuel on some level.

i find myself becoming ever more critical of the work around me, the west bank starting to feel like one big humanitarian aid circle jerk. the existence of groups like US Aid & UNRWA & their largest 'achievements' relinquishing israel of its responsibilites under international law, to its occupied territories. development seems more or less impossible, whilst i find it impossible not to draw too many ugly question marks over the desirability of our notions of development, as though stuck in some stupid second-wave feminist, middle-class white standard of ... standards.

i know i'm not alone in this feeling, nor is my own group above the critical eye. ISM priding itself on its greater proportion of direct action work, bravado, stupidity, whatever you want to call it, we seem to see ourselves above & beyond the countless "observer" groups present here, some of them going so far as to receive payment or sport functional, multi-pocketed jackets bearing whatever acronym they've adopted. but are we? i know our presence helps on the ground, in small & often indefinable ways, but sometimes it just seems like we are kidding ourselves, on what is probably an equally selfish endeavour. nobody comes here without falling madly in love with the place & its rawness, madness, immediacy, stripped to the bone, we stay because we want to help those we love, but also because they help us, in ways our homes in the west never could.

it's one thing getting gassed at a demo, it's another seeing the military rain gas cannisters down on a village.
it's still fucked at the demos, but i guess everybody who goes to them knows what they're in for, weighs up the pros & cons of suffocation effects before heading out.

we were in askar camp interviewing a woman whose sons were arrested in a raid the other night when we got a call saying the settlers were attacking iraq burin. saturdays are busy here. in my non-existant perusal of the torah, i guess i missed that part telling thee to invade the nearest palestinian village on thy day of rest, but yeah, saturdays we are pretty much waiting for the call to come in from any number of places to say that the settlers are getting their territorial zeal on. last saturday 50 of them came down & started praying on the hill just opposite iraq burin, before taking up stones & hurling them at the kids who had gathered to watch from the other side of the valley. the kids returned the attack with more rocks, the army showed up &, amazingly, kindof did their job for once & drove the settlers back.

today, arriving in the village, there were no settlers to be seen. but you could hear the gunfire on approach. the dude who drove us pissbolted back down the road & left us standing there, the air thick with smoke & gas, boys running past us with rocks in their hands. a boom erupted & something whizzed past my head, another boom, i saw the gas cannister go past. jesus fuck! i've never seen these long-range ones in action before, generally at the demos they fire them up on an angle, they lose some momentum before they fall amongst you, but these were like bullets, aimed like bullets. i saw something explode in front of us, i guess it was a soundbomb, but i've never seen them ignite like that. but what the fuck would they be doing throwing grenades in a village?

eyes streaming, i saw faces huddled around the windows of the houses nearby, thinking it would probably be a good idea to get inside one. to the left i could make out the jeeps, to the right boys, faces masked, scrambling for more rocks. something was on fire. matthew pulled me off the road & we were running through a cactus patch up to higher ground, the jeeps now where we had just been, leaving the village finally & firing more gas as they went.

the shebab come, victorious, joined hands marching up the street singing & chanting, allah akbah! hard to believe iraq burin's a fatah stronghold. they swarmed around us, asking for my number & where we're from, it's all you can do not to grin at these boys.

in which i attempt a day off, fail, miserably, sort of. the olive harvest at last drawing to a close, & at repeated cajoling of everyone around me to take a fucking break, myself & one of the more attractive members of my team headed off in search of the main nerve of the unknown adversity: that yawning chasm, tel aviv. commence beer at 9 sharp in the a.m. upon arrival in jerusalem, securing a ride to self proclaimed gay capital of the middle east. dangerous lunacy, deep behind 'enemy' lines and temptation for deliberate freakout too great. beer! beer! drugs on a beach with sudanese refugees, gaza an hour away & hopes of carefree activist 'day off' in tatters as it becomes a race against the mounting panic at inexplicable surroundings & wobbly slide in to the gutter. i had not drunk since i've been here & i've been here a while. what fucking bubble have i landed in? people are riding fixies & there's soy milk in this cocktail. people are enjoying relaxed lattes on stylish sidewalk cafes, & i am a fucking collaborator. madness. rampant immodesty! jesus god, we're right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo, & someone is giving booze to these things!

wind up heaving, blubbering, billowing mess at le cafe de anarchiste or whatever the cunting fuck, man pontificating down the mic re: artfuck-angled photos of water resources of nablus & qalqilya, re: lack thereof. hey man, doncha know i fucking know those people? i know those people drinking shit for water, me, blubbering shit for brains at the back of that bar in tel aviv, & no, no, no, NO.

the fear, i fucking have it!

anyway, we went to a beach, me & the boy, & to find some kind of silver lining to such a perilously grim cloud, & sand in places where sand should never be. tel aviv will have her way though, awakening to find our possessions somewhat lighter than before & generally whipped up, stripped down, fucked sideways by this monster of a city, so at odds with everything i've come to hold right & true. the only hope now was escape. execute quick, don't think! soldiers everywhere, all going off to work in the west bank. follow them home. nablus. how will i ever leave you?



last week there was a wedding, today there was a funeral. a man was thrown from his car yesterday when he was rammed by an israeli jeep in a village near here. i wonder how many more visits i will have to make to rafidiya hospital. his body was covered in blood. the soldiers, after ramming his car, had gone on to beat his convulsing body while they screamed at him to stand up. when farmers approached the scene they were forced back at gunpoint, & it was an hour before the military ambos arrived, by which time he was already dead. we squatted in what small corners of shade there were outside the mosque with hundreds of men from the village, to watch the coffin be carried out over a sea of black hair now marching down towards the cemetary.


this fairly amazing thing happened last week, wherein the DCO (shadowy body in charge of land management in the west bank, & generally fucking palestinians out of theirs') actually - get this - actually agreed to return 30 dunums of annexed land to iraq burin from the neighbouring settlement, following those fiery weekly demos the village plays host to that i mentioned last time. tuesday i rode a galloping - GALLOPING - horse bareback up a mountain with some of the villagers to start planting baby olive trees on the reclaimed land. czeching out the settlement's website the other day i discovered i could make a donation to its jerusalem or new york office - tax-deductible, no less.


there has been much settler violence this week, & kids with guns throwing their weight around, a million other things, but, i think i am out of words. every time i learn a new one in arabic i swear it squeezes an english out.

throwing myself thirstily headlong in to everything like nothing in the before times, certainly no pursuit i got paid for, submerged, consumed & fuckennnnnn in loveeeeeeeeeee with this country. am now international co-ordinator for ISM [how the hell did that happen?] & am in charge of a bunch of shit with three - THREE - phones, sickboy style a la porno. the last international co-ordinator took a week off in greece & found himself detained at the airport, deported & declared an enemy of the state of israel upon attempt to re-enter. i fucken hope they gave that to him in writing, no?

i do kindof move through the chaos on that same kind of hazy cushion-effect as when you are falling in lurrrrve, guidebook cheese notwithstanding, but fuck, it's not even that, i can't put it in to words [if there are english words for this place they are not forthcoming, but my arabic is pounding along], of course punctured by frustration & disbelief & drawn-out spells of eerie, eye-of-storm waiting [waiting seems like some kind of definitive palestinian condition... waiting at a checkpoint, waiting for a visa, waiting for soldiers to inevitably come, waiting, waiting, waiting, no wonder we're all smoking four times more than 'back home']. i would like to lay out some decent sequence of words but am seriously relishing the total lack of time, possibility to stop & consider much of anything other than the immediate & practical [& i am pretty bloody taken with the current immediate + practical]. it's just being engulfed by something you are so flippin passionate about, not looking in but right up fucking in it, breathing & drawing & drinking it in & sweating & punching & pissing it out & there is nothing fucking unnecessary in my life right now, there's nothing i do, think or speak of other than what i care about, because everything i am doing is for what i believe in.




demo in iraq burin, shebab charging at the soldiers while myassar screams through her megaphone. there is something a bit fucking raw, watching a fiery, hijab-less woman egging on, nay, screaming orders at a hundred boys with stones in their hands.

so in somewhat irrelevant news, obama has stepped up to the plate of the great Middle East Peace Farce, so far succeeding only in managing to force a smug-looking netanyahu & sour-grapes abbas to risk serious cooties & shake hands with one another. it's kind of hilarious to watch 'slong as you can utterly detach yourself from it. it's almost nice to visit the magic far-away tree land where fish drive cars & israel & palestine can co-exist. the representation of the whole Thing as some kind of conflict where each side is on even footing - now we go live to our man in downtown ramallah! & what do you have to say to that, mister fuckstick from tel aviv? - is only furthered in these Diplomatic Affairs that actually amount to less than nothing out here [obama's office is obviously also located in the same never-never land where israel might actually, oh, say, withdraw to the 1967 borders & settler militias wouldn't be out with homemade rockets faster than you can say "greater israel"]. yeah it's the only game in town, but one guy's playing with no cards. i laugh, because i don't want to punch things.

abbas, the palestinian authority president, is caught between a rock & a hard place, with the option to either come off instransigent & unwilling to negotiate, or as a betrayer of the palestinian cause [already setting himself up to fail having to backtrack on a refusal to negotiate without an established settlement freeze]. meanwhile, the fantastically intransigent leadership of israel can puff himself up as statesmanlike & willing to compromise, as long as he keeps the potential negotiation pot at a low simmer.

besides the question of how well various corrupt arabic governments would get on without its jewish neighbour to point fingers at, the same goes for israeli society itself. the raison d'etre of israel is that jews are persecuted. if we can suspend reality for a moment & picture arabs & jews becoming mates & inviting each other over for dinner & borrowing each others sugar & power tools, who is the enemy which unites russians, yemenis, ethiopians, sephardies & how many other millions of ethnic jews, the secularists, the zionists, the ultra-ultra-super-turbo-charge-orthodox? will they all still be content to live in a society dominated by the askenazis, with no palestinian question left to ponder? & what indeed of the one million "arab israelis" - palestinians - still living within israel's borders? how will israel's economy get on if the average $US3 billion of "aid" money that flows in every year slows to a trickle? what will all those pro-israel lobbyists in america do for a living if israel is calm? & how in the name of fuck will the israeli government appease all those zionists extremists that shoot their own leaders at the slightest concession?

of course israel doesn't want peace. israel would implode if there was peace.



ok, enough yakkety yak! there's a fat wad o' pictographs up on crackbook, if you wanna take a gander.



^from palestine, with love.

ha ha ha, my inability to talk to israeli soldiers without images of the awesome hate sex we could be having swimming in front of my eyes, is getting ridiculous. REALLY. i don't know any other people with this problem. it is probably better than the blind anger a drowning man probably feels before he is pulled under, that i otherwise feel, when dealing with them.

coming back from azzoun tonight, that village i told you about with the shitwater settlement-proximity problem, where the army's been invading & imposing curfew several nights a week [which they had done again today, so we had to sneak in to the village + attempt to czech it out] we saw soldiers making two men kneel, execution-style at a checkpoint, yelling halas! halas! at the driver & jumped out to see what the fuck was going on. they shackled the men & put them in a jeep, not a helluva lot we could do [hopeless. HOPELESS. nggggghhhhhh] but ended up hanging around for hours trying to mess with the soldiers as they were pulling heapsss of cars over to search them, on this, the first night of eid [end of ramadan], in the hopes that we could distract/piss them off enough to forget about arresting palestinians on their national holiday for a bit.

they got pretty aggro, waving the guns at us they like to swagger around with & probably fall asleep hugging. it was good. cars full of families drove by, peering at the soldiers too busy to notice them, & the two white girls hanging out at some buttfuck nowhere checkpoint in the west bank. i asked one of them what kind of music he was in to. he stared at me, dumbfounded.
"c'mon," i said. "we're gonna be hanging out together, let's get to know each other."
silence.
"this is a closed military area. you mahst leave. you think ah'm joking?" he said.
"nah serious, i just wanna know what music you listen to."
"gogol bordello actually," he said. "now move, before i ahrest you."

sometimes, being a sex-starved girl in a muslim country does funny things to your head.

i didn't get to bethlehem, or my greasy mitts on a skatingboard you will be vurry sorry to hear! the former on account of the frustrating, humbling, but kindof charming obstacles that ramadan, & various holy days of the week, present to public transport & general movement in israel & the occupied territories [bona-fide antidote to the whole Insta-Grat GOTTA GET THERE NOW! YES YOU CAN! Thing], the latter on account of the going price for a board in the only skateshop in al-quds [the arabic name for jerusalem] a perverse 900 shekels. what the hell? did the wood come from the bloody holy cross or something? get tae fuck.

i did make it to jaffa gate in time for the "rabbis for human rights" demo + associated weirdness. big turnout [though held at the most touristy gate to the ole city it's hard to say how much of the crowd gets picked up on a huh? what? kinda wave] & swell to see so many israelis not down with jewtown on the eaaaasssstiiide. less great for impromptu counter protest [associated weirdness enter stage left] of twenty or so teenage zionists [goddd it still feels weird using that word, hearing it back in the beforetimes usually only in conjunction with "9-11 CONSPIRACY!", "freemasons run the country", etc etc - BUT - i assure you, they do exist] who rocked up & started singing something in hebrew, loudly, mockingly, near where i was standing. the weirdest part? where pretty much everyone kind of stood around looking uncomfortable but Unsure of how to act on this development. me, i wanted to deck the little shits [shutup, I'M SO TUFF]. it was when they joined hands, dancing round in this circle, singing/yelling to whatever particular brand of hate-filled bullshit it is that they're in to that i couldn't really deal with what i was watching anymore, &so when an israeli woman sidled up to me & murmured in my ear that their noisy circlejerk was a holy, boys-only one, i grabbed anna, one of the other ISMers & we shoved our way in to the circle & sat down, cross-legged, starring at each other in a circle of these be-hatted haters chanting around us, trying not to contemplate whatever level of bizarre... bizarreness? bizarrity? the scene was reaching, when i felt hands gripping my shoulder & a soldierboy appeared in front of my face, telling me i "mahst moove along, or you will be ahrested."
"what the fuck? we just wanted to sit down, arrest them, they started it!" says i.
"i will, i will, soon. but you mahst move, or i will ahrest you."
"you can fucken arrest them, then fucken come for me!" [eloquent lass that i am. YA FUCKENNNN FUCKENNNNNNNNNNN]
suddenly one of the glasgow lot appeared in the circle & grabbed me & anna. instinctively we joined hands, & somehow, we are dancing around the soldier, FREE, FREE, PALESTINE! FREE, FREE, PALESTINE!, him, the orthodox kids, all starting to look really confused, me laughing, for lack of any better way to react & oh, inexplicably, a bunch of rave kids all dressed up as clowns appear out of nowhere, what is going on, they pour in to the circle & the zionists disperse, running, run home to your flock! & i feel another hand tugging me, pulling me back towards the demo. it was one of the organisers, i couldn't understand what she was saying but managed to ascertain that she was Not Pleased with our counter-counter demonstration fucking up the low-key vibe [while this had been going on, a man spoke quietly in hebrew in to a microphone about fifty metres away, the crowd looking solemnly on]. some palestinian man was shaking my hand, some american guy telling me i am very brave. i thought we'd just sat down. yeah, jerusalem/al-quds unsettles me a great deal, tear gas, soldiers, proper fucking opposition i can deal with, but it's that horrible tense cloud that hangs over the city, i cannot. i slept on the street at sheik-jarrah again that night, & when i woke the next morning i saw one of the settlers standing on the hanoun family's roof, with the torah in the one hand & a gun in the other. the same day an orthodox settler in east jerusalem shot two palestinians, one thirteen, one forty, with a shotgun that he is allowed to carry. their offence was apparently that they were standing near the poor fellow, & god, i guess he felt "unsafe".

fucksakes.

not knowing enough of israeli activism as a whole [that is, israelis who object to their government's treatment of palestinians, ranging from anti-settlement to anti-israel altogether], i can only go on what most of those i've met have said, & the resounding impression that, despite knowing, seeing the atrocities committed, there is the attachment to their home - the only one they've ever known - that runs just as deep. & really, coming from a country myself, where niggling thoughts [ranging from niggling to flat-out remorse] of "what the fuck am i doing here in the first place?" & that tired "go back where ya came from!" catchphrase [the same choice choice o' words from a soldier yesterday - i really hope he was yelling at me, not the arab] from which no body or group really seems safe, but offers very little insight to where we should really go the fuck back to, given that i was born, grew up in, & have a frustratingly static bond with a place that i feel is not rightfully mine. it's this notion of "identity", national or otherwise, that for some seems to lend such irresistable weight to the commitment of hideous fucking things, 19th century pogroms, the cronulla riots, or the internal displacement of 800,000 palestinians. for example.

australia's well-discussed "lack of identity" [&so lack of one to defend, outside a few too many shit-eating flag-toting shit-for-brains] could practically be seen as advantageous in this light, were our just as celebrated flag o' Multiculturalism [with a capital fucken MMMMMMMMMM! sayeth the regional tourist bureaus] not planted on land that was already by the sounds of it pretty rich in culture & getting on just foine thankyouverymuch, & ruled by governments that did not see fit to make genocide a crime until 2002. though i probs wouldn't be dropping the g-bomb here, 'ethnic cleansing' is a phrase i am pretty happy [happy? uh. comfortable? comfortable ethnic cleansing? confident? shit. you get the pitcher] to use in reference to what's happening here & would be just as um, correct [THAT'S RIGHT] in relation to the stolen generation.
[ok i just looked it up & forcible transfer of the children of one racial group to another does in fact constitute genocide, under the geneva convention]

not that i am really thrusting in any direction in particular with this rattly train of thought you might find yourselves aboard, best beloved. second-class, no doubt, where the windows are rusted over, the loos smelling vaguely of turps & the carriage coming to a halt in some part of the countryside where you sit for a good fifty or so minutes, across from a man hugging himself, each arm grasping the opposite shoulder, muttering in his sleep, waking only to sit bolt upright & ask if you think god can use the internet. no, israel is not south africa or white australia, & comparisons, however much of a bang you get from indulging in one every once in a while, negate too much of each issue & make my brain feel like it needs a cold shower.

but i digress [THIS JUST IN!], sorta. returning to nablus again, jaw clenched & fists balled, only to be called away again post-haste to susiya, in the opposite end of the west bank. susiya was once a small palestinian agricultural village in the arid lands of the south hebron hills until the israelis discovered the remains of an "ancient synagogue" on the sight & unceremoniously cleared everybody out. oh! well. if it's archaeology. go right ahead & build a settlement there, mish mushkiden!. the former inhabitants moved in to the nearby caves, until the army came in & blew up the caves, so now they all live in tents [they are not allowed to build permanent structures you understand], fertively grazing their herds of sheep on land that was, & technically still is, theirs. ISM has been staying with the families there for a few years now, doing as much as we can to protect them from the crazies from the settlement, & the soldiers who are allegedly there to protect both sides from each other, but spend a lot of time hanging out with the settlers & have actually been known to give the settlers their own guns when they run out of bullets. which is not a helluva lot really [what we can do about it, that is], it gets so fucking distressing sometimes when you see how much you really. can't. do. it is surreal, to bring up a word i abuse about fifty thousand times a day here, the whole scene is small enough to fit in a camera frame, our tent on one hill, the soldiers camped on the next hill, the settlement, its neat little detached houses with neat little picket fences, a vision of suburbia plonked in the desert, the hill after that, not six or seven hundred metres from where you stand.

sometimes "outposts" appear beyond the gates of the settlement, a single construction that heralds either impending expansion of the settlement [cutting straight in to palestinian land & illegal even under israeli law], or the presence of the "hilltop youth". this brand of crazy is one so zesty i struggle even to comprehend. they're these kids that are against just about fucking everything except god, his land, & getting closer to it, by whatever means necessary. they shun the guv'ment, for all its puddin-footin' around solving the arab "problem" for once & for all [where they actually reckon three million palestinians should just fuck off to i have no idea, maybe a gas chamber] & even scorn most settler councils, believing all of "israel" - from the nile to the euphrates, apparently! - ought to be embraced, not from behind the fences of a settlement, but out in the open, for it is rightfully theirs to be cultivated. some bizarre concoction of organic-farming, land-lubbin hippie ideals mixed up with militant nationalism & religious fervour, baked at forty degrees celcius & served on a bed of complete & utter xenophobia. delicious!

anyway, it was one of these that had appeared on a nearby hill & the army had come to dismantle last week, along with a few others at the west bank, mostly likely to have some "results" to show obama when netanyahu meets with him at the end of the month, & he can say "see mr obama? we are freezing all settlement expansion, boldly striding towards peace! yessir!" which would be pretty awesome, if they meant & anything by it [$500 on NOT FOR SHIT sherlock] & the "price-tag" [what??] policy adopted by settlers, in that every time one of these outposts are removed, a nearby palestinian village must be invaded to make up for it or whatever. got yer pitchfork? ok, let's go! so i arrived in susiya the day after a bunch of these maniacs had come down to invade the village, burning some of the tents, only to see that the outpost had in fact been rebuilt overnight, bigger than before, apparently with the help of the army. yessir, mr prez! we get results!

fortunately nothing so retarded happened while i was there. i got picked up from yatta, a slow, dusty nowheresville by machmoud who i'd be staying with & taken off-roading across the fabulously rocky, arid landscape [not so fabulous for the tiny shitbox that had to be push-started i dunno how many times] to susiya. machmoud has two camels, two wives & a clan of wild children. slothing about bedouin-style in the tents all day, playing with the kids, sitting up on watch all night [we watched the hilltop yoof have a party with a bonfire & guitars - did i mention surreal? i wanted to go over there, SO MUCH. it is so so so utterly fucking bizarre, it really feels like they are these dehumanised monsters, the settlers, yet, they are people with families & hopes & thoughts & shit as well. anyway, we were watching them hawk-eyed awright, because apparently last time they had a party they came & cut down thirty-five olive trees], then getting up before dawn to go with the shepherds to graze their flock, lest soldiers come down & start some shit.

it seems to depend largely on how bored they are. yesterday they were pretty bored, so they came down & started some shit. given that this is turning into an essay, ( here are some PICTURES )

on a slightly unrelated note, drifting in & out of sleep in the tent yesterday i could have sworn i heard all these fighter jets zooming overhead, but wasn't sure because i think i was dreaming about gaza & could have been making it up. talking to mohammed jihad [as in, first name mohammed, second name jihad, i'm not making that up] later he said yeah, F-16s, one of them crashed not far away. well i thought he was telling me about something that happened months ago, or maybe full of it, til i got back today & czeched the news. bizarro, hey? & very sad.

this eljay is a good thing for me to have just now, it's the only time i get to sit down & attempt to process everything coming in. kudos to anyone who read this far.
xo

sup eljay, what of the surreal world? me, yeah i'm ok. back in nablus after being coaxed out by the bright city lights of jerusalem for a demo a few days ago, that got ugly enough to fuck you off, but not really ugly enough to be anything satisfying. satisfying? as if faced with my red-black-&-green hula hoop [gyrating hips for solidarity! yeah!] the IDF might have just thrown down their weapons & gone off to do whatever bored, slightly ridiculous-looking eighteen year olds aiming M-16s at a peaceful protest go off to do. i had failed to notice the border guards' arrival, attempting to fend off that Other Occupation, that um, uh, can i use the word patriarch without sounding like a fuck? i would just love to stop feeling like a Purely Sexualised Being, for a few minutes, maybe the minutes i'm facing down soldiers that fuck up your country. yeah wow, my life is so hard, you know? jerusalem youth seem kind of facetious, like just getting on with your life under occupation is preferable to resistance, like back here where i seem to get treated with equal parts incredulity & respect, & everybody gives a fuck. it was a relief to get called back to bil'in, arriving - home? - back on my own turf, anyhow - in the west bank.

i was in jenin yesterday, visiting a theatre project started in the refugee camp there a few years ago. it is really. amazing. UHMAZING. problems beyond incredibly problematic things like you know, basic survival, such as the vast majority of kids in these camps growing up with post-traumatic stress & other serious nasties, tend to fall in to the background. but it's terrifying, you know? older generations can remember life before 1948, or life before 1967, or whatever, but you've got kids growing up now, & grown-up kids, that don't actually know anything else, & they don't dream about being rock stars, when there's rock star matyr posters allovertheshop..... anyway the theatre is working incredibly fucking hard to counter this notion. refugee kids can be drama fags too. they get hassled a lot [read: burnt down twice], camps are pretty conservative places - girls can't ride bikes there lest they lose their v-plates on one [like actually] - so mixed gender classes are slighly haram.

we got called out to asira al-qabliya today, a nearby village with a settler infestation [what else is new?] where these batshit zionist fucks like to come down, masked in - no really - kuffiyehs & terrorise the palestinians, like some kindof sport. when we got there the army had intercepted the settlers, only to turn around & start firing live ammo & tear gas at the village.

here are some pictographs for yr consideration, because stories are better that way.


it was very beautiful, looking the other way.


kids wiv guns coming down to say hallo.


this kid got hit by a ricochetting bullet. he was real tuff. & will probably be imprisoned by the age of sixteen.

there were settler attacks all over the west bank today so we're on kind of high alert for the next few days. i'm hoping to get to bethlehem tomorrow to paint the wall [THE WALL.] & into EVIL WEST JERUSALEM to buy a decent board. this is a hush-hush mish, if you saw the amount of "BOYCOTT ISRAEL!" posters in the flat you'd get why. & i dig, you know? no fecken occupation, not on my watch, not with my money. but forgive my sceptacism & bear with me for a minute, as long as countries with deep pockets continue to line israel's [or as me & one of the girls started callin it, voldemort, ha, ha], & as long as there are, you know, people people [& indeed hundreds of thousands of palestinians] alongside gun-toting zionists in israel, what the fuck good is my mis-aimed sweatdrop of an economic punishment going to bring down? zilch, or as they say in arabic, fish. israel is not the new south africa, sure, don't buy israeli dates or whatever the fuck, but don't think you're committing yr good deed for the day in doing so.
i'm kindof antsy truth be told. scum-sucking settler swine, fucking city kids thinking my fat ass's common property, Full-On-Activist flatmates, oh my.

scrambling over rocks on the slopes around nablus this morning, totally all moses leading some invisible flock. glorious!

demo in bil'in, got tear gassed to fuck, some girl handed me an onion - apparently it's good to take in a huge gulp of something pungeant to remind you that you're still breathing. not being aware of this, & her miming for me to put it up to my face, i stand there with fire in throat & gushing eyes trying to peel off layers to put over my eyelids like some kinda mid-demonstration cucumber beauty ritual.

brand new mates with basque anarchists, & about a zillion kids who think the holes in my ears are the greatest trick they ever saw.

back to nablus to serve food at iftar for disabled people, so i guess, anytime anyone ever questions my integrity or some shit, i could always hold up the photo of me feeding handicapped kids in palestine, like, yeah? really? hahaha no seriously, it was really awesome.

walkin home munching sunflower seeds with this pretty great crew of middle-aged hens from ISM glasgow that seem to consider me their collective offspring, like yeah, i could go some shisha, some nice folk stick their head out the window like hey, you wanna smoke? their kids teach me how to count to ten in arabic then dragged me out in to the street to play with them & found an old board so i ended up showing about twenty kids how to skate [yunno, 'smuch as i do].

falling asleep under a full moon. warm&runny. yeahhhh. this place, surely under my skin.

we met two guys on the side of the road today, fossicking for scrap metal. we asked them what they were doing, & they said they get a good price selling the stuff to the israelis, to use on the wall.
"seriously?" we asked them.
"what else can we do?" they said. "we have to eat."


it's this kindof thing that is the most confronting [though totally unsurprising]. the resistance is tired. people are fucking tired. too many people are in jail. too many people have been jailed, raided, shot at, beaten, evicted, humiliated, pissed off, & peace deals & international laws mean fuck all out here. in the villages around nablus most of the talk [& there is always truckloads of that] is not even of demos or actions or court battles or whatever, it's "how can we pick our olives without getting shot at by settlers or arrested by soldiers, & have enough money to eat?" there's a settlement near here with a pony club, a fucking pony club, & five k's down the road people have lead poisoning in their water.


this place burrows in under your skin, lodges itself in the back of your brain & sweats out through your pores, i fall asleep every night thinking about demolition orders, woken by the call to prayer from three mosques, all slightly out of sync, echoing around the hills. but i just walk around kind of dumbfounded. i think i've actually gone completely stupid.

i have giant bug bites [i think i am allergic to whatevs kindof mosquito they have here] all over me in exciting places including, but not limited to: both elbows, eyelid, boobies, back of knee, palm of hand, top of middle finger, almost all of my neck, feet. my nose is sunburnt too! i am Hot Shit. i don't think i will be meeting a nice jewish boy anytime soon.

i sleep out on the roof of the ISM flat which is now my home in nablus, a town in the north of the west bank. the israelis call it a bomb factory on account of the townsfolk's rocket production+launching proficiency during the second intifada. there is a military base perched up on a hill overlooking belata, the town's biggest refugee camp. the IDF can sniper people in the camp from the base & sometimes they do. we have only one contact in the camp & he's a huuuuuuuuge douche, it's pretty obvious he's only using us for his own political wranglings, & apparently you can't go in & talk to people on your own because kids think you're a spy & throw rocks at you. but, yeah. this camp is home to some thirty thousand people & i think we need to single out another contact amongst them.

contacts. contacts. everything here seems to involve contacts. we need more in a'zun, this place near the wall that's being encircled by settlements. we went there yesterday & i can't believe we don't have a base or much of anything there. the whole town has been scheduled for demolition to make way for a hyperspace bypassroad to join two settlements together. we had to get in through a tiny back road because these gigantic earth mounds have just appeared on the two main roads leading in to town, cutting off all the trade that comes in to the village. the settlers' sewage water spills in to their water source [this happens all over the west bank. most of the water sources are on the palestinian side, but are taken for purification in israel & then sold back at exorbitant prices] & apparently they are using one of their playgrounds as a landfill. now the palestinians have to buy their water back from the israelis, some of them spending 60% of their income [which is usually, on average, supporting eight other people] on water. they don't even have demos in this town & they've arrested fifteen teenage boys in the last two weeks on charges of throwing rocks. they were all sixteen or seventeen, a year off finishing school pretty much. they do this on purpose so they never finish their education. how in the name of fuck is this happening?

there are posters everywhere here of dead young men holding kalashnikovs. i used to physically hurt just reading about this junk in the paper yunno? there was a demo outside this prison here in the west bank yesterday, i can't remember its name, but it has ten thousand political prisoners inside. little kids were punching the walls, climbing the walls, the IDF on the other side rammed their own fucking jeep into the gates to try & get them down, they loaded tear gas rifles but didn't fire them. i learnt the other day the ISM actually succeeded in preventing part of the apartheid wall from being built. it appears to come down to pure economics. one metre of the wall [the wall itself being not a wall per se so much as a chain-link, electrified fence] costs something nuts like twenty thousand shekels to build, so they kept going back & cutting it in the same places constantly, delaying the company who held the contract for the fence from finishing it in time & forcing the israeli government to keep renewing the contract until every company fucked out & said they wouldn't do it anymore.

sometimes i go to the village of be'lin for night patrol. they have big demos every week, so the IDF come in to the village at night arresting kids for throwing rocks. if i am arrested here they can hold me for twenty-four hours without charge. if a palestinian is arrested they can hold them under "administrative detention" for six months with the option to extend [& they usually do]. 40% of palestinian men will be in jail during their life, if the guy you're talking to hasn't, he's got a brother/son/father/whatever in there. & guys are getting arrested in be'lin every week. so every night they patrol the village, watching for soldiers that come in from the nearby base. you sit on the roof of a half-finished house, smoking shisha & talking shit, watching the fires flickering through the bushes on the next hill over, where israeli troops stand guard on the other side of the wall. & you watch for jeeps, & you wait.

here is me on the roof. it's very wonderful up there. specially during call to prayer.

"dude, we're stopping in at be'lin, we need new donkeys."
"what?"
"the donkeys, they're getting tired, we need fresh ones."
"uh, be'lin doesn't have that many donkeys dude. i think there's like one, & they kind of need him."
"are you serious?"
"yeah."
"ok, i'm gonna have to make some calls."

Israeli forces evict the Hanoun and al-Ghawe families from their Sheikh Jarrah homes

we slept outside the house last night with family members, who have been camped across the road from the house every night since being forcibly evicted in may, as a sign of protest & solidarity. impending strategic judiazation [gosh i could put that in capitals... Impending! Strategic! Fucken Judiazation!] of this neighbourhood means 28 other palestinian homes in sheikh jarrah will probably not be around for much longer. the settlers claim ownership based on land possession from the ottoman era. despite being land in east jerusalem that has been palestinian territory since being given to refugees in 1948. dun mess with the israel land administration huh. they'll fuck yo shit right up.

if you drove past you'd think there was some kinda street party going on. everybody making iftar, coffee & shisha goin around, kids beatboxing [PALESTINIAN RAP BATTLES, that's right] & flashing christmas lights strung up everywhere, like albania shaking off years of communist doomgloom architecture with licks of bright orange paint!

the families were incredible. palestinian kids are fucking amazing. they don't cry when they fall down, or at all really. i met an egyptian-australian guy who works for the U.N. in darfur; a cypriot activist who knew so much of the ugly nuts&bolts of settlement/land ownership law in this place i talked to for a good two hours before realising he was not, in fact, palestinian; a very grand old sheikh, head of the hanoun family, telling endless hebron jokes that apparently make even less sense in english than in arabic [what did the hebron do when he saw a garbage truck? he thought it was a supermarket!]. "brigeeeeet?" he rumbled. "you arrr veeerry welcome. you must learn arabic."

yes sheikh hanoun, yes, i must.

the settlers have installed cameras & security guards, apparently they have knocked down the dividing walls between the houses to make a mansion. i cannot imagine what it is like to come & go every day seeing people sleeping on mattresses across the road.

i start training in ramallah tomorrow.

arrived in jordan this morning after a really surreal night in the UAE, dipping in to bizarre dreams & out in to the haze of desert heat. the UAE, for all its anthropological interests, terrifies me somewhat.

jordan seemed unimpressed when, asked for my address in the kingdom, replied 'uh, allenby bridge?' [border crossing to israel]. got a ride to the border, had an hour to wait before the bus to the israeli side [they shoot at you if you walk apparently] & sat flirting with the jordanian border guards who decided not to stick me with departure tax. fucken bonussss. about half the israeli defence force appeared to be sprawled out in the passport control office. it felt like walking in to a bizarre high school dance [& indeed, every single person there was younger than me], girls huddled around one desk, gossiping & shooting looks at the boys, mucking around with assault rifles on the other side of the room.

they searched me, all my stuff, asked me what my father's name is, where i've been, what i'm doing here ['visiting the holy land'] & why i've got an arabic phone number written on my hand [yeah, i'm big in jordan] but compared to the six or seven hour fuckarounds people have told me about it was ok & they were fine not to stamp my passport.

i met up with a lot of really incredibly fucking rad & clued-up ISM people who told me lots of stuff about not getting arrested & dealing with night raids & tear gas & generally just, fuck, yeah, this is happening. 'how long you staying?' they asked. 'couple of months' i say. 'good' they say. 'we need long-term people. but set a date to leave. otherwise you might never do it.'
there is a bar on the west [israeli] side of jerusalem that we went to, called uganda [where the holy land coulda been]. going in to west jerusalem was very surreal.

last night we went out dancing to gypsy music. mustachioed men & sashaying hips, is this Night Of Revelry On A Rooftop Bar By The Seaside an advert for the med or something? i feel so desperately uncool! teach me how to be mediterranean like youse! woke up with a fuzzy head & two german girls in their underwear were asking me if i wanted something to eat.

/sip of apple tea.

it is too hot to do anything during the day.

retreat in to safe haven of p-unit's house for a couple days before diving back out in to the world. dunedin is the opposite-most point on the globe from london. i enjoy this quite a lot. nope! definitely not in london. or canberra. it was a bit "gotcha!" leaving when i did, i dunno, every. single. time. i leave somewhere, i feel like i'm just starting to get my head around the place, but maybe this is just because i know i'm leaving.

drinking that much before leaving was kindof inevitable but not overall a Good Plan. [what would i do, when some chicky babe wants to spend at least one of her last six hours in the country before Saving The World, Getting To Know You? um, i fuck her, right?] tipping my pack upside down on the floor in my parent's house was kind of hilarious to see what i'd managed to pack/forget. packing yr room up an hour before yr meant to go is kind of hilarious. upon leaving my apartment for the last time, my sister pulled up, only to scream that she'd been waiting fifteen minutes, for me to get fucked, & drive off. radness. i started muttering like a fifteen year old, i hope i get shot in palestine, then she'll be reeeaaaally sorry. but not really. so i found a cab, with an awesome cabdriver from eritrea, with an even more amazing accent. he had the radio on, bleating about the Amazing Godwin Grech Not-Scandal. it's kind of like watergate, but where um, nothing fucking happened. i can't imagine what it must be like for our friend from eritrea.

arrive at airport, pissbolt for plane, fall asleep. they didn't stamp my new passport on arrival. my parents are visibly Old now, which is sad & confusing. dunedin is modelled on edinburgh, i guess to ease homesickness of the many scots who settled here. the house sits atop one of the steep hills clustered around the bay, also harking back to whoever's resolve it was, who arrived on the site of what was to be scotland's capital & declared "i'm gonna build a city right fucken HERE." admirable! the sea looks much more like the sea here though, as opposed to a calm sort of haze, visible only a particularly clear day.

overnight bus to antichristchurch tomorrow [no time to visit the two-four-sevs boys, tragedyyy] then melbourne in time for miss megan's birthday! perth for a night & sponging off the luverly rekapitulacija, then thirty-six hours in kuala lumpur. i didn't realise it was that much when i booked the flights, has anyone ever been there? i'm hoping to dump my pack & czech out the town. &&&& CONSTANTINOPLE, HO!
i have been starting to feel kinda wary about how much harassment i should expect as um, me, by myself in the middle east. i dunno, usually i go boldly wherever the hell it is i want to go but the sheer volume of warnings/hysteria i'm receiving is starting to make me feel slightly less Intrepid than usual. i'll be covering up, & have a pretty good head on these shoulders, i think my biggest problem is just that i'll talk to pretty much anyone, & it makes me sad to think that i'll be going places where i maybe, simply, can't do this. i dunno. i really hope not. i guess i find out when i get there.
but, my excitement is HUGE. i am pretty ready to go off a deep end.
i am going to write my little heart out, i am so very excited about it. i had tea with a childhood friend the other day, & told her i never thought i was very creative or anything, to which she laughed. a lot. reassuring.



i like taking photos of things before i eat/drink them. it's like saying grace! without jesus.


does anyone still read this? i am pretty much writing for myself nowadays, but it'd be nice to know if anyone else is gettin a bang out of it too..

gen: rogo! [yelling over amazing crackly thai opera music] rogo! you know bridget is leaving next week?
rogo: what? where you go?
gen: she's going to the middle east.
rogo: ah! italy!
gen: no, no, middle east! palestine!
rogo: palestine? [mimes machine gun] but they shoot each other!
me: i'll make them get along! [mimes love heart] they'll be friends!
gen: she's going to save the world!
rogo: oh! good!

STOP PROCRASTINATIN' && FINISH YR ZINE BRRRRIDGET





boys huh.


so this slightly ridiculous thing happened today, this guy that me & liz like to stalk occasionally struck up a conversation with me in essen. we call him India Man, because we like to pretend, nay, choose to believe that he splits his time between india & australia, travelling over there to do aid work, & brings back fair-trade goods to sell to raise money for the orphanage he works at there. oh & he wails on guitar, & scorns dairy [of course] - almost to the point where he ordered a bagel with cream cheese one time & it was all i could do to stop myself from blurting out "but you're vegan, silly!"

anyway, he clocked me working on my zine & said something, which somehow resulted in him producing a poem - a poem - that he sheepishly confessed was inspired by yours truly, during a fleeting flirtation i had with red hair a couple weeks back.

caught on heartless punctured cheek, lifted by slender chunked chain
burnt on phosphorous trace grain - i stand hard going up,
lost side-ways by bye smile beaten under steel stepped tread
stamped under capped toe thread - i ride ridge going up
gloom-groove helmets to rim - stop

[that was part of it anyway]

what was even slightly more ridiculous that sitting at the table just behind him was this guy i'd tried, faulteringly, to hit on in the phoenix the week before. i hadn't wanted to or nothin nah'm'sayin? but liz & simon were all GO TALK TO HIM GO TALK TO HIM GO TALK TO HIM.
okay, okay, okay, so i go talk to him. & suddenly it just seems really fucken tedious yunno, like Hello, I Am A Member Of The Opposite Sex Talking To You In A Bar. i had no idea what to say so i said something about the animal lib patch on his jeans, then said something about not eating animals & how great it is, then asked him what he was reading [life after capitalism? yeah. exactly.] then had no idea what to say so to escape the yawning chasm of Awkward Silence i saw closing in i showed him my new tattoo then grabbed my beer & ran off, all awwww c'mon man, you gotta give me somethin to fucken work with here! why am i so incredibly bad at this stuff? i can handle all manner of weird shit, but talk to a cute guy in the phoenix? ohhhhhhhh no suh. not for all the tea in china.
anyway i didn't really think much of it, it was kind of funny actually, but anyway the dude must have had a nasty case of girlfriend & gone off & told her who thought it was REALLY funny & decided she needed to start bringing the guy in to my work - no joke - every. single. day. after that, to sit there with him &
stare
at me, all, you tryina cut my grass bitch?
no joke, like two or three times a day, every day, since that day.
i make a point of going up to serve them every time & smiling a lot.
actually it is kind of massively entertaining, to contemplate just how much of this kind of dramarama is going on, at any table in this cafe [or any in the world], at any given time. kinda like how ya get a bang out of going in to pretty much any workplace & knowing that at least two of the people are shagging & trying to pick who it is. [funfact: not me, actually - ZOUNDS - i'm good, thanks - meanwhile, my asshole-of-an-attractive-supervisor has been negging the hell out of me [weird as, since a, i don't have/need this "bitch shield" they speak of & uh, b, wow, tell me i'm SHIT. that gets me RUULLY HOT.], until i called him out on it. this might seem like a Nothing to you fabulous women of the world, but to bored-at-work-bridget, not pandering to this kind of tomfuckery was some sortof very slight triumph]


anyway i'd come in feeling like i'd just been punched in the face or something, having just come from seeing waltz with bashir again [& fuck damn it doesn't get easier, not that it is not probably my favourite film ever, but um, jesus], to end up knee-deep in the best conversation i've had with a member of the opposite sex in weeks, with India Man, & SnotBoy & his girlfriend were sitting at the table behind us glowering [oho! she'll think twice before she tries to have a nice conversation with a stranger again!] & canberra is really all pretty fucken retarded like that, no? meanwhile, universe: next time you want to chuck a rad-seeming guy in my direction, could he please show up sooner than four days before i leave the country? cheers heaps.

what the fuck is that? a glimmer on the horizon? b jumps planes & re-pieces her self-esteem like a motherfucker. guess i have always been a doin-shit kinda person, as this deep, dark, five months of Ugly, give or take, grinds to a close i still gotta shake pretty hard to get them heebie-jeebies offa my back. but this is a past i plan never to reconcile with my future, a deleted scene, a mistake I could make only once, at odds with an otherwise glorious journey.

i got interviewed by these kind of awesome teenagers the other day for their amazing technicolour zine [no shit, they got sponsored by Felt n shit]. as an artist. me. apparently [maybe being like one of three people painting stencils in this town makes me banksy or something]. & general all-around perpetrator of Interesting Shit [yeahhhh, seriously all i gotta do to feel rad is look at myself through the eyes of a seventeen year old]. it was cool if only for the fact that it reminded me of something dion said to me once & i took to like a cat on heat, about my life as my art. which is wanky as fuck, & maybe it’s kind of shit that so much of any of my creative endeavours require me to draw on experience as inspiration, but... but damn. isn’t that what our life is? a fucking work of art?

"Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don’t surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment."

cheers kafka

TWO WEEKS!