Journeying Through Palestine

I went to Palestine, to the city of Nablus in the West Bank (under Israeli military occupation) for a holiday, from September 18th to October 6th – one day before the Hamas attack and the ensuing genocide Israel is carrying out against the trapped people of Gaza.

I lived in Nablus from June 2012 to August 2013, spending the first two months teaching music at summer schools as part of an initiative by a charity called Music Harvestand then as an Arabic student at An-Najjah University in Nablus during my year abroad from a degree at SOAS university.

Nablus is a beautiful city between two mountains, Gerizim (home of the Samaritans) and Aybal. The people are so friendly, hospitable, and generous, and I don’t think I have met such patient people either. We were really looked after. Our neighbours became our second family there, opening their home to us whenever we wanted to come. Our whole flat was furnished by another friend who called people he knew to ask if they had anything spare.

The Church of Jacob’s Well, Nablus

The trip in September was the first time I had been in ten years. I was nervous about the trip – Israel’s violence in the West Bank had steadily escalated since May 2021, when they had launched their last major attack on Gaza. At the time, Palestinians had united across the West Bank, Israel (‘1948 lands’ as Palestinians say) and Gaza in a general strike, and a number of small militant resistance groups had emerged. Israel, in turn, had targeted these groups, who had launched attacks on Israeli military bases and soldiers.

The result – in around 2 years, around 60 people had been killed in Nablus by Israeli military raids and operations. Around 240 had been killed, before October 7, in the West Bank. Most of these were bystanders, caught when Israel targeted the young resistance fighters, most of whom were in their late teens or early twenties. Posters of these young people are everywhere, testifying to their memory and a city in mourning for those who died trying to resist Israeli crimes against their people.

So I was nervous of the violence, amongst other things. But once I was there, I was so glad to be back. Nablus, like all of Palestine, is under threat. My friend and I stayed with a friend and his family. We visited families we had known – everyone was so happy to see us, and prepared feasts for us. Our old teacher and his wife made musakhan, one of my favourite Palestinian dishes, and more. He is from Jenin, which has seen devastating Israeli violence in recent months.

I went to a Catholic Mass with a Muslim friend of mine for the first time in Nablus. The church was the church of St Justin – born in Nablus in 110 and martyred in 165. An ancient church. The priest was Spanish, I think. It was fascinating to observe the Catholic Mass in Arabic. My friend had never been to a Mass and wanted to come with me. He turned to me when they did the collection asking why they were collecting money, and I said they do that for the church, and he gave a donation. We went to have coffee after the Mass and spoke to the priest and a couple from the congregation, a very elderly man and a woman, who thought me and my friend were married, asked us to come back every week! I said we couldn’t. I wanted to stay and ask more about the Nablus Christians, but didn’t get the chance to return the following Sunday.

I also visited Jacob’s Well – the well where Jesus met the Samaritan woman is under the church, where you can go and drink the water. This Greek Orthodox church is close to Balata refugee camp, the biggest camp in the West Bank, which suffers horrific levels of Israeli violence on a regular basis. The Israeli army accompanies settlers who come to visit a tomb nearby called Joseph’s tomb, and the army often raids Balata camp at the same time, often injuring or even killing residents, or raiding homes and smashing everything up. Someone I knew was killed a few months ago. He had worked at the Jaffa centre in Balata when I was there, where I taught violin as a volunteer. The army killed him in November when they raided and he fought back with other residents.

The priest at Jacob’s Well is in his eighties and replaced the last priest, who was murdered by Israeli settlers in 1979. I heard that they killed him next to the well with an axe after warning him he needed to vacate because the site was rightfully theirs. The current priest has painted biblical scenes which cover the walls of the church, and in one of them, he depicted the late priest with the settler raising his axe over him, as though in a biblical scene. The doorman is Muslim and local, and he was the same as there ten years ago. He said there had been escalating violence in the last few years, with tear gas fired into the grounds, and the priest tended to call him whenever something happened, as the Palestinian Authority won’t help when it comes to violence by Israelis. I told him my sister was having a baby soon; he gave me some water from the well, which had been blessed for the baptism.

What has happened to Palestine and the Palestinians was a horrific injustice which continues. They should never have been forced out of their homes in 1948 - what gave Britain the right to sign their land away?

75 years on, Christians need to stand with the people of Palestine and call out the ethnic cleansing, as well as Israel’s apartheid system and occupation.

Most of all, Christians need to unequivocally call for an immediate ceasefire and call what is happening to Gaza what it is – genocide, collective punishment, and the result of Zionist ideology, which has not been critiqued properly by Christians here.

The failure of the collective West to impose any boundaries on Israel, especially since the Oslo Accords in 1993, has led to the genocide we are witnessing now. Acting as though it is okay to ignore Palestinian rights, or that it’s just a given that they don’t have rights, whereas the Israelis do, is not an okay stance for Christians - or any human being - to take.

Untitled, Mustafa al-Hallaj

Lunar House Dispatch

The most significant thing was the heat. There’s no shade outside Lunar House beside one straggly tree some distance from the entrance, so the sun – on one of the first of what will be many uncomfortably hot days this year – was shining directly both on those of us vigilling, and on the dozen or so people waiting outside for a friend or relative to come out. It is good to have someone waiting for you, because then you can be sure that someone will know if you’ve been detained and are not allowed to walk out again. Those whom the Government does not regard as having a right to be present in the UK, and who are known to the Home Office but are not in detention, are often obliged to report to Lunar House or another building monthly, biweekly, or weekly. At any of these regular visits, they could be detained, and since a couple of weeks ago – timed handily for the recent local elections in the hope that at least a few Tory councillors might keep their seats – the Home Office has begun a new wave of detentions in preparation to deport refugees, against their will, to Rwanda. While we were there, only those who had arrived irregularly since January 2022 were eligible. At the time of writing, all those with previous failed asylum applications are eligible as well, so thousands of people living in this country are now under the continuous threat of being forcibly detained for an indeterminate period in order to be sent to an impoverished, authoritarian country they may know nothing about, thousands of miles from Britain and, probably, from the country they were born in. So, when you report to Lunar House, it is good to take someone with you. It is not a building designed to make you feel comfortable.

Lunar House, Croydon

We had come from the European Catholic Worker gathering, and were a mix of nationalities, but mostly resident in the UK. Some of us held signs and placards we’d made the previous day, which were overwhelmingly positively received – several people asked to take photos of or with them. Meanwhile, others distributed leaflets at the door informing people about the Rwanda plan, mitigating the danger of people being caught entirely by surprise and pressured into agreeing to things without the presence of lawyers, which seems to be the Home Office's favoured tactic. The leaflets, produced by Action Against Detentions and Deportations, carry this information and phone numbers for law firms and activist groups in the hope that detainees will then be able to contact people who can support them. Perhaps half of those going in accepted a leaflet, and fewer stopped to chat; some will have known they were not at risk, some will have assumed we were Home Office employees, and others will simply have wanted to get a stressful experience over with as soon as possible. Those we did talk to were unanimously happy to meet friendly faces outside the building.

About four policemen were stationed outside the front of Lunar House all day, presumably in case our leafleting should inexplicably turn violent. Two stayed in the car, and two – clearly very bored – spent a long time talking to us. They were very insistent on asking exactly how we were organised and by whom, which they insisted was just by way of making friendly conversation. Whether this reflects a lack of talent for intel-gathering or merely a lack of talent for conversation, I’ll leave for you to judge. Their tendency to stand between us and those we were giving leaflets to could similarly be put down to a lack of spatial awareness sadly common in the force. Certainly, when questioned, neither of them had the first idea what the Rwanda plan, which they were there to help implement, actually was. Still, their presence was no more futile than any other project of our border system, the purpose of which is precisely to create needless difficulties for particular people in order to clearly define who our country is for. Certainly, the continuous police presence, the two or three security staff at every entrance and exit, and the gigantic tower block itself cannot be cheap, but hostility is important enough to the Home Office to justify the expense. If we provided anyone with useful information our presence was worthwhile, but it was worthwhile too if all we did was counteract that hostility with our solidarity. I always come away from anything involving the Home Office feeling deflated – faced directly with the whole monstrous infrastructure of hate our country has created for itself, you ask yourself what use you could possibly be in resisting it. But, of course, that’s what they want you to think. If nothing else, we can choose to be there and wait – vigil – with those who are forced to wait there, and make ourselves part of a slightly better place.

[If you would like to wait there yourself, a continuous presence is needed outside Lunar House to carry on the leafleting – get in touch if you can help.]

What Your Right Hand is Doing

A few weeks ago, a group of pregnant women were driven into the desert by Tunisian authorities and abandoned there. Their phones were stolen, and if the Tunisian authorities followed their usual practice they were left with little or no food or water. If they were not beaten and tortured in detention as Black African migrants in Tunisia often are, that was the extent of the concessions. In all likelihood, such generosity had not been made to the hundreds of others from whom the pregnant women had been separated when they were arrested in trying to leave Tunisia to reach Europe by boat in order to claim asylum. If you are a European citizen, this was done for your benefit – the EU gave upwards of €100 million to the Tunisian government between 2015 and 2022 for the purpose of strengthening its borders, and last year proudly announced a ‘strategic partnership’ with the increasingly authoritarian regime, pledging €1 billion as part of its program of cutting off routes for refugees by outsourcing the necessary violence to the North African countries from which African migrants usually depart. All this fits very well with the British government’s own policy of hostility towards refugees, and it has raised no objection. There would, of course, be no need for refugees to pass through Tunisia anyway if British and European governments provided them with safe and legal routes, but we have chosen instead to turn the Sahara, as well as the Mediterranean, into a graveyard. The Tunisian authorities out of sight, the women started to walk back toward the coast.

Refugees, William Kentridge, 2018

Days later, I happened to be one of the people on shift with the Alarm Phone. The Alarm Phone primarily exists to support migrants crossing the Mediterranean – people travelling, usually already at sea, can call the number, and if they are in distress the team on shift can relay information about the boat to coast guards which are generally reluctant to rescue boats of migrants from the global South, to civilian rescue ships, or failing that, to commercial vessels. A degree of pressure can be placed on authorities to refrain from human rights abuses if they know that an external observer is aware of the situation. The work of the Alarm Phone is vital and undoubtedly saves lives, but there is always a limit to what it can do remotely in the face of persistent governmental efforts to restrict any civil measures to make the crossing safer. On this occasion, a man who had managed to evade capture to a sufficient extent to have retained his phone, and was now accompanying the group of women, was in contact with us. One of the women was about to give birth, and he wanted us to contact NGOs who might have been able to help. No relevant NGOs were able to operate in the area; we could offer nothing except the numbers of local health authorities which the group, after their recent encounter with Tunisian authorities, were understandably reluctant to call. We heard nothing from them for a while.

This took place a few days before Ash Wednesday, when Catholics heard at Mass the Gospel reading advising us, less on what we should give, than on how we should give when we do so. When you give alms, do it secretly. When you pray, do it secretly. When you fast, do it secretly. The King James Version refers, strikingly, to the recipient of our prayer as ‘thy Father which is in secret’. For most British Catholics, this is a free choice. We live in a democratic country with a law which acknowledges, even if it inconsistently practices, an obligation to secure our rights. Part of our privilege – especially those who are citizens, and those who are white - is that secrecy is not imposed on us. It is easy for us to avoid persecution; we can live our lives in public view and it is up to us how much we do in public. For the many people whose presence in this country is criminalised by our immigration laws, who cannot legally rent or work, who cannot make themselves known to authorities without grave consequences, secrecy is not something they can opt out of. Jesus’ own situation had more in common with theirs – toward the end of his ministry he could not heal or preach in public without the risk of apprehension by political authorities. In that way he is closer to them, just as we know that the itinerant preacher is closer to the poor than the rich. Our ability to live openly is another thing that separates us from the child refugee, the adult fugitive, the member of an occupied people who God was when he came down to us.

From Tunisia, the man contacted us to say that, as the baby started to crown, he had carried the woman giving birth on his back to a road, and found her and another woman with her a taxi to take her to a hospital. After walking for days through the desert he had found strength to carry a pregnant woman; having narrowly avoided imprisonment and abuse by authorities he had exposed himself to the risk of capture for the sake of a woman and child to whom he owed no special obligation.

His act of heroism will never be known, let alone rewarded, because he remains one of the thousands of people obliged to remain hidden due to the threat of persecution. Probably he still faces the lethal crossing, and then years of the dehumanising bureaucratic nightmare of European asylum processes, the end result of which may well be the decision that there is no sanctuary for him here.

His act of heroism was not unique; marginalised people cut off from mainstream protection and support are obliged to rely primarily on solidarity with each other. I think of the two migrants we know to have drowned this time last year rescuing others from the sea before any help arrived. We should use such privilege as we have as usefully as we can, but must keep in mind that, when it comes to the experience of those crossing borders, we are the ones at the periphery. We all know of the grandstanding charity of the powerful – the kind that has its place on television – which imposes a narrative convenient to power, of a global poor indefinitely dependent on the generosity of the global rich, concealing the unjust relations which create the need the charity only partially fulfils. God is in secret; God’s work is done in secret. If our work does any good, it will do good just to the extent that it was done without regard for the approval of power, which usually means that it will remain obscure. So be it – the more we are in secret the closer we are to God, and to the people to whom he is closest. Perhaps this is all to say just that we should expect to find him where he told us he would be, but I find that I need to keep being reminded.

Untitled, Mustafa al-Hallaj, 1967

This article was originally published in the Easter 2024 issue of the London Catholic Worker newsletter.