Ramallah for real: Taybeh Oktoberfest 2007

By Tom Kenis

We’re in a small village called Taibeh, a stone’s throw north of Ramallah. Here, an eponymous brewery was set up in the middle of the nineties by two Palestinian brothers, returning from the United States in the optimistic wake of Oslo. Since then, among connoisseurs and casual drinkers alike, their brew has gained an unshakable reputation. It’s on sale, bottled or draft, in most of the bars and restaurants of Ramallah, Bethlehem, and East-Jerusalem. Select places as far West as Belgium offer it, perhaps logically since the latter country’s hop, together with local spring water, is what gives Taybeh beer its distinguished taste.

For a number of years now, the village of Taibeh has hosted an ode to song, traditional Palestinian debke dancing, ‘oud play, and of course the flow of fermented malt. Lots of it. Ten shekels for a half-liter pint. Get your Taybeh. This year, because of impending Ramadan, the festival is pushed forward by a month. Einstein arches an eyebrow, then lowers it again to indicate that the explanation has satisfied him. He quickly crosses out a few equations and folds away his notes.

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Image: ©2007 Khaled Diab. All rights reserved.

Further reading:

The refreshing taste of revolution in Ramallah

Ramallah for real: a different generation

By Tom Kenis

I am horrible at time-keeping. It is eight o’clock, and I’m standing at the bar. Muhammad, the bartender, greets me with a smile. “Kif halak?”

“I’m fine,” I say, scanning the room. Ol’ Blue Eyes stares down at me from the wall, framed black and white. Welcome to Sinatra’s. On weekdays you can hear The Voice, crackling from a small array of speakers, while you check your Gmail over high-speed Wifi. At present, only a handful of people are present, including the two girls who’ll be stamping concert goers’ wrists shortly. They have yet to take up their position at the door.

It’s eight o’clock, and I’m standing at the bar, as I said, horrible at time-keeping. After two and a half years still a rookie. I cannot not be on time. Silly me. Frankie Boy shakes his head with the disapproving cool that only a twentieth century crooner-icon is able to muster. From the patio a murmur of sound-checks and last-minute cable-taping is carried in by a spiky draft. Summer evenings around these hills can be deceivingly chilly. Frank Sinatra doesn’t sing Stormy Weather. He merely tuts, and goes about his business hanging from a nail in twenty-first century Ramallah. I, the tutee, decide by taxi to quickly backtrack to my abode and pick up some textiles.

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Ramallah for real: bigger than Jesus

By Tom Kenis

Are the Spice Girls in town?

No, not really.

Lebanese pop-singer Nancy Ajram, then? Or perhaps eighties one-hit-wonder Charles & Eddie? If no one else can help you, and if you can find them,… maybe Palestinians hired the A-Team? Quite unlikely.

And yet, the sulphuric tang of ignited powder abounds. There floats an excitement that is difficult to explain otherwise. Today, Ramallah is falling over itself, people dash about in thrilled flurries, and firecrackers litter the sound-spectrum. It’s the day of “tawjihi”, the proclamation of final-year high school student’s results, a local SAT or baccalaureate if you will.

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Ramallah for real: just a regular town

By Tom Kenis

I got the job. The phone interview with a crackly connection, one time zone away, had gone well. Belgian development money would pay for me to go and support a small organisation that’s active in the field of women’s rights, youth empowerment, and democracy.

As I was packing my bags, TV news blared out the increasingly alarming vital signs of Yasser Arafat. I had just about finished packing those bags when the curtain finally came down for the old man, and an era ended. It was November 2004.

Goodbye Belgium. My odyssey to the Palestinian territories had begun.

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Photo courtesy of Tom Kenis. Tom's website is at http://www.sasshay.com/

The long road to Hebron

By Khaled Diab

The quickest way to get from Ramallah to el-Khalil (Hebron) is via Jerusalem – a journey that should take just over half an hour.

But the Israeli occupation in all its infinite wisdom provides Palestinians with the unavoidable opportunity to take the scenic route, along secondary roads, via Bethlehem – a journey which takes two hours, assuming you don’t have to stop long at the checkpoint and there is no heightened state of emergency.

While the rest of the world goes about its business at increasingly break-neck speeds – the Maglev train in Japan can go almost as fast as a plane and Paris is now only an hour away from Brussels via a high-speed rail link – the Israeli authorities have enabled the Palestinians to go about their lives at a more leisurely pace.

Who needs a high-octane-rapid-burnout career when they can, instead, simmer slowly in the bubbling frustration of unemployment and poverty? And if you have a job, why overwork yourself dashing from one appointment to the next, when you can stop and smell the flowers, or admire the midday sun as it hangs perpendicular over your sweating brow while you kick your heels at a checkpoint?

And don’t forget the flora and fauna. Look around you and marvel at the growing forest of settlements that have been planted on almost every hilltop and in many valleys, and why not follow the wild growth of the security wall as it cuts through people’s backyards and land?

All this, and much more, you can do, as a Palestinian, on the long roads between Palestinian towns.

The Israelis believe the checkpoints and road blocks are justified because they prevent would-be suicide bombers from crossing into Israel and murdering Israeli citizens - I had lunch at a roadside cafe near Haifa where a large attack had occurred and, while there, Tzachi admitted to me that he sometimes thought about the best place to seat his children so that they would be shielded from a possible attack.

The Palestinians see them as yet another form of collective punishment that may slow but not prevent a determined extremist from getting through, especially since the back ways are often left unguarded. In addition, they are bewildered why, if Israelis are so concerned about their well-being, do they build so many vulnerable settlements on Palestinian land and push more Palestinians to extremes? A couple of Palestinians I met went so far as to suggest that this was part of an elaborate policy to make daily life unbearable for Palestinians, to 'encourage' many of them to leave the land 'voluntarily'.

Splitting the Palestinian atom
For me, the journey was a chance to have a long chat with my companion from a Palestinian NGO. He spent the first part of the drive tracing the course of the settlements which have mushroomed up on much of the available land between the Palestinian towns, penning them in and inhibiting their future growth.

A practical illustration of the atomised nature of the West Bank – which is supposed to represent the heartland of a future Palestinian state – is that every few minutes, my companion would have to switch between his Palestinian and Israeli mobile phones when he needed to talk to his colleagues and the group of European NGO activists we were due to meet in Hebron.

My companion is the third generation of his family to live in the Kalandiya refugee camp, which is home to over 10,000 registered Palestinian refugees and was established in 1949, shortly after the armistice in the first Arab-Israeli war. Israel considers it to be part of ‘Greater Jerusalem’. “The camp still witness clashes with Israeli soldiers and frequent stone throwing incidents,” according to UNRWA.

My companion pointed out the densely populated and walled-off camp as we drove past it. “It’s often hard to sleep,” he confessed to me. “Israeli soldiers regularly patrol under my window late and I hear armoured cars passing all night.”

I realised just how fortunate I am: not only do I have a land (two, in fact); I am also free to travel the world and am more mobile in my Palestinian companion's land than he is.

The Hamas factor
The conversation drifted to Hamas and I asked him whether secular people and Christians were finding life harder in the wake of the gains made by the Islamist group.

“Hamas respects the plurality of Palestinian society. In fact, a lot of Christians voted for them,” was his response. He explained that, despite their Islamic platform, Hamas were less bigoted against Christians than most Fatah members and hangers-on, many of whom were little more than thugs.

The Palestinians, both Muslims and Christians, who voted for Hamas, he said, did so because they were sick and tired of Fatah’s corruption and the criminal gangs that lived off it.

He acknowledged that in Gaza, where Hamas rules the roost, things had become a lot more conservative and restrictive than in the West Bank, but this was also down to the religious and social dynamic that has been gaining ground there. And, I would imagine, the desperate economic situation and the fact that Gaza is the most densely populated place on Earth also play a role in making it so stifling.

I asked why then was the Christian population of Palestine dwindling. He said that life under occupation was miserable for all and that masses of Palestinians have fled and are trying to flee the country. He explained that Christian Palestinians, who are generally better-educated than their Muslim compatriots and have more connections with the outside world, find it easier to get out. I found this was a partly satisfactory explanation. But I imagined with the growing politicisation of Islam, it was also becoming more uncomfortable for Christians.

I asked him if he was not afraid of Hamas’ vision of, one day, creating an Islamic nation. “Not really,” he shrugged, expressing his belief that the party was committed to the democratic process and so whatever goals it achieves “will occur in the context of the democratic process”.

He contended that, much like the religious Jewish parties in Israel, Hamas may succeed in pushing through some Islamic elements but Palestinian society will remain secular because Palestinians prefer that system of government.

©Khaled Diab. Text and images.

Guns and wreaths and the face that failed to launch a nation

By Khaled Diab

On a twilight stroll through the still rather deserted town, everyone we came across was incredibly friendly, warm and welcoming, striking up conversations as we walked past and the children asking me to take photos of them. Our 'outlandish' appearance and my accent meant that our progress through the streets was rather slow at times, as we stopped to chat and press the flesh.

Ramallah today has grown to merge with a neighbouring village. Once it was little more than a village itself, but the 1948 refugees made its population swell. It is surrounded on just about every visible hilltop by settlements, some of which are so close to Palestinian homes that all that separates them is a thin brick wall or they can actually see each other through the windows. This leaves very little wiggle room for the increasingly crowded town to expand and the locals told me this makes them feel trapped, surrounded from all sides by Israel.

The closures, restrictions on movement, the difficult economic situation and the encroaching settlements have led to a gradual depopulation of the area, according to one local I met. Usually, the ones who can leave are the more educated and cosmopolitan, and that is one reason why the Christian population in Palestine has dropped significantly.

A little out of the old town, we heard a series of loud gunshots. A little further up the road, a couple of men were emptying out their guns into the open air to express their grief at the death of their fallen comrade whose wake had just taken place in a nearby building. "There goes a week's wages," Tom observed, having earlier explained to me how expensive bullets were because they were often purchased on the black market.

When I pointed my camera at the two men with the guns, their colleagues who were standing behind us tsk-tsked and told us to stop, and not to shoot. Not really in the habit of defying (or even being near) men with smoking guns, I lowered my camera carefully as if it were a weapon.

The Egypt card had served me well so far, so I tried to reassure them by saying: "Don't worry, I'm Egyptian - I just want to take a photo."

To my utter surprise, the demenure burly man who had just been communicating to me with steely coolness softened dramatically and he became all welcoming. "Go ahead and take your photo," he said in the same sort of voice as an Arab offers tea to his guests. To help faciliate my task, he called out across the street to the men with the guns telling them to fire their guns for the Egyptian. One of them was grumpy and unco-operative - probably didn't like doing tricks for strangers - but the other one was only to happy to oblige. Unfortunately, his gun kept jamming or a car would pass in front of the camera, so it took a few attempts and the result still wasn't perfect.

Following the fireworks display, we walked around the posher part of town. Ramallah has a fair amount of ostentatious wealth floating about, judging by the fancy houses and flash cars about. The Edward Said Conservatory, Tom told me, has built up quite a reputation and graduates talented musicians. Israeli conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim still comes to perform there at least once a year, infuriating the Israeli right.

The city has a few gaping craters where buildings were demolished by the Israelis, such as when they destroyed a police station after the lynching of a couple of their soldiers on a mission. Many of the walls and shop fronts bear posters of some of the thousands of political detainees being held by Israel.

We went to the 'Muqata'a', which had variously been a British camp, an Israeli prison, the PA's nerve centre, and became an Israeli prison again when Arafat and a group of his dedicated supporters were besieged there. It's interesting that both sides have their own conspiracy theories about his death: some Palestinians think the Israelis found a way of poisioning him and some Israelis believe he died of AIDS and was a closet homosexual.

Rebuilding work was well advanced and a lot of the destruction that Israel had wrought on this symbol of Palestinian weakness, hopelessness and fortitude. A small mausoleum is almost complete for the face that tried, but failed, to launch a nation.

©Khaled Diab. Text and photos

The refreshing taste of revolution in Ramallah

By Khaled Diab

On Friday morning, I set off to Ramallah. While I was waiting for the bus driver to return from Friday prayers, a group of young lads hit off a conversation with me.

They had got to Jerusalem by jumping out of the minibus just before the check point and taking back routes. On the journey back, there would be no problem because the Israeli military didn't really care who entered Ramallah.

Like so many other Palestinians I have come across, these younguns informed me eagerly that they loved Egypt and Egyptians - believing the celluloid myth that we are all friendly, kind-hearted, care for others and have a wicked and biting sense of humour.

In fact, travelling around this land has made me somewhat self-conscious because I seem to draw attention as if I were some kind of minor celebrity - nothing major, just someone who features in a crappy soap opera about a bitter, generations-old feud between two families: a rich and powerful one and its poor cousin.

The boys who worked at a shopping mall in Ramallah joked with me about their dead-end lives, smoking, Egypt and wanting to get out of Palestine. "Take me to Europe with you. Everything here is so messed up - the occupation is humiliating and the PA are pimps!" one of them maintained.

A do-good busy-body type standing near by decided to give them his Shekel/Dinar's worth. "How are we ever going to build a country, if every young person wants to get out and is going to bad mouth it?" he asked, although he was not actually interested in a reply.

I could not really blame the young men for wanting to flee the misery and madness around them - who wouldn't? In most of the Occupied Territories, if I recall the stats correctly, unemployment is running at over 50%, the majority of the population lives under or near the poverty line and they can barely move from one town to the next without an Israeli permit.

Just before I got on the bus, I got a message from Tom, my Belgian friend who lives and works in Ramallah for a Palestinian NGO, informing me that there had been a gun battle the previous night and the city was not only quiet because it was Friday but was also dead because of a curfew on shops and businesses.

When I arrived, Tom led me through Ramallah's semi-deserted streets. Most of the shops were shut, or had their shutters down but were working surreptitiously behind doors left ajar for their customers. The so-called 'strike' was apparently by order of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Tom suggested that we sit out the strike in his favourite cafe. En route, we chatted about his work and life in Ramallah.

Inside the cafe, we met a group of his NGO friends, such as Gareth, an Irish lawyer with Al Haq, a Palestinian human rights organisation, and Emma, a Palestinian-Brit with Save the Children.

First bottle up against the wall

With the cafes shutters down, it felt like we were in a kind of American prohibition and clandestinely drinking a toast to the revolution of Palestine's best beer. Al Taybeh, whose slogan is 'taste the revolution', is a quality local poison and a successful Palestinian export.

When I told one of the punters that many Israelis find it hard to believe that Palestinians drink alcohol, he retorted: "They'd better believe it. Israeli beer is so bad that even Israelis don't drink it. Our is good enough for us and good enough for export."

He said that the Israelis lived a few kilometres up the road yet they knew very little about the realities of Palestinian society. To him, this was proof of a willful ignorance - he believed Israelis would rather not know because that makes living with the occupation easier.

We sat around discussing Israeli abuses of human rights, the security wall, Tom's theory that an Egyptian pyramid could not have been possibly built in 20 years (at which point, we all got out our phone calculators to disprove him). Gareth provided us with access to his on-brain log of weird legal precedents under eccentric English common law.

The cafe's colourful Palestinian owner gave me his political punditry on everything from the Sykes-Picot agreement to the wall in Israel and now in Iraq. "Who are the Israelis trying to kid?" he asked eagerly, his eyes blazing with excitement. "The man who shot the policeman yesterday was a car smuggler. If criminals can get around the wall, do the Israelis really think it will keep out a determined killer? The wall is about land, not security."

©Khaled Diab. Text and photos.