I’m looking at the floor because there’s nowhere else to look anymore

I’m looking at the floor because there’s nowhere else to look any more. It is brown-red and made from cement. Discoloured in places, chewing gum pressed into its surface. At least, I think it’s chewing gum. I control an urge to fall down upon the floor, to feel its smooth stone, to feel its dust, to press my face into its cold comfort. But I won’t because I know that, if I do, they might I-don’t-know-what me.

This floor has felt the shuffle of endless feet over the last four years, felt those feet force themselves over its warning floors to the security machines and search areas ahead. Lines of people, patiently everyday, submitting to the architecture of the checkpoint, squeezed through cattle cages, cramped between bars, sent across this floor for the impertinent approval of occupiers.

I am looking at the floor because there’s nowhere else to look any more. I cannot look at the walls, covered with the language of occupation:
‘Insert your documents into the window and await further instructions.’
‘Deposit your bags in the conveyor belt, stand back and await further instructions.’
‘Keep the terminal clean.’
I cannot read these signs any more, especially not the one over there that reads, ‘Emergency Exit.’ There are some I can’t read anyway, written in those block capitals, another angry order.

I am looking at the floor because there’s nowhere else to look any more. I cannot look into the faces of the people waiting beside me. In front there’s a mother, a baby lolling over her shoulder, its eyes fixed by my foreign face. The little boy there, no more than eight, carrying a box of chewing gum for sale, hopeful my foreign pockets will hold change. The pretty young girl behind me, dressed in blue, heading for school. The teenager leaning on the bars, his first moustache faintly showing, an echo perhaps of his father – where is his father?

I am looking at the floor because there’s nowhere else to look any more. I cannot look at the soldiers who hide behind bullet-proof glass, whose orders distort the intercom, who target these unwanted citizens. I cannot look at this soldier, just a youth, as he interrogates the young woman in front – Where is your brother? Where is your father? I cannot look at that other soldier, her feet up on a soft chair, insolently idle on her mobile, talking in a tough voice about something.

I am looking at the floor because there’s nowhere else to look any more. I cannot look outside, beyond the cages, to the cars crawling past soldiers who carry weapons like magic wands, turning princes into frogs. I cannot watch as families are kicked out and the search begins for they-don’t-know-what. I cannot face the watchtower, standing sinister with battlefield views over the wall, the concrete strips of the wall, each one connected like Lego to the last, the least imaginative construction, the efficient architecture of control.

No, I can’t look anywhere else any more so I am looking at the floor. This brown-red cement floor, the foundation of this prefabricated building, this prefabricated checkpoint, this prefabricated state.

Apricots

I’m eating her apricots.

They’re all I have left.

They’re fleshy and sweet and soft from time. The innards make my fingers and my mouth sticky. Every ravenous bite reminds me of her sweetness. But she’s long gone.

‘You’ll want these,’ she’d said, as she threw me the bag of apricots. That was almost a week ago and now, reluctantly, I agree that she was right. I didn’t want to eat the apricots, the last of our love, but I’m going to have to. I’ll intend to save one or two in her honour, but I know that I’m going to eat the whole bag and then all I’ll have is gut trouble. It’s one of those times in life when a metaphor imposes itself so strikingly that you can’t do anything about it. You know that you’ll fulfil the misery of the metaphor and your life will disappear down the wrong course.

I’m down to the last one already. I’ve eaten so quickly that my fingers are sticking together and my mouth is dripping with juices. The bag hangs like a sling shot, heavy with the last fruit. After this there will be nothing left of our love except an empty bag and my gut trouble. I take the apricot out of the bag and admire it. It seems to be the most delightful apricot that ever grew. It’s perfectly globoid, perfectly coloured, perfectly scented – a temptation of biblical proportions. It is without blemish bar a single mole near the stalk – like she has above her mouth when I kiss it.

She could have simply left me quite alone with nothing more than a goodbye if she had wanted to teach me a lesson, but she wanted me to suffer. She understood the metaphor. She knew that I would be forced to devour the apricots one by one as my hunger overtook my love. Yes, she knew about the metaphor already. She wanted me to see the bag and the apricots, to feel the pangs of hunger as they grew and grew, to smell the delicate apricots as they teased my taste buds. So she had thrown the bag down in the hole with me, after she pulled up the ladder.

‘I’ll be back in a month,’ she said, ‘If you really love me then you won’t be tempted, but if you don’t, then you’ll want these.’

Then she threw the apricots down.

Butterfly Home

There’s a hill overlooking Jerusalem that you can get to in a couple of hours. The view from the top is splendid and so peaceful. So a friend and I headed out there one morning, to get away from the city dust. We took bus number 185 to the end of the line, which set us down at the bottom of the hill in a small village. We reached the summit just as the heat was becoming stronger and rested under the shade of a few olive trees. Neither of us said a word, but just admired the view of the white city, the hills and the valleys spread out before us in the sparkling sunlight. Then, as we caught our breath from the walk and the beauty, we were surprised to see an old man approaching us carrying an urn and some glasses.

‘Good morning. You want tea?’ he asked.
I looked over at my friend, ‘Thanks. That would be lovely.’
Dropping a tea bag into each glass, the man poured us the most fragrant tea, scented with cinnamon. As we held the hot glasses, he stood with us, looking out over the city.
‘Do you live around here?’ I asked with interest, for there was no habitation on this particular hill, just the old olive trees and the view. The old man must have walked a long way just to give two tourists a glass of tea. The old man didn’t move his gaze from the valley below.
‘No, my home is down there, do you see? Where the red roofs are.’
My companion and I looked down on the bright new villas that he indicated.
‘Oh that’s beautiful!’ I exclaimed.
‘Not for me,’ the old man answered, ‘That is my home, but I haven’t lived there for sixty years. Those houses are new, other people live there now.’
‘Settlers?’
The old man didn’t say anything.

We continued looking down in silence, but the view had changed and the air suddenly became a little stifling. After a moment or two more, the old man shuffled behind us with his urn and sat down. I took a sip of tea. It tasted good, sugar and cinnamon. I took the tea bag out of the glass and hurled it in the direction of the settlement. It flew towards the sun, glinting with its moisture, before starting to dip down towards the earth. But as it did so, something happened. Its spinning arc evened out and it began to return, to home in on us. Startled, I ducked as the tea bag flew back at me and my companion. Then it landed gently in front of us, on a rock. It was the origami of a beautiful butterfly, with iridescent wings and drops of tea for eyes. It sat on the rock before us, a miracle.

We turned around to look for the old man, but he had disappeared.

The Bus Ride

In the bus station everyone is waiting. Buses are coming and going and we could jump on any one of them. But we don’t. We always wait for the bus that we have bought a ticket for, the one that we intended to catch when we arrived at the bus station. It seems perverse that, in a world where pretty much everything else gets fucked up, we are so militant about catching the buses we bought tickets for. I reckon we should be forced onto almost any bus except the one we intended to take. That would make more sense here.

I tried explaining that to my girlfriend, on the phone, as my bus left the bus station. She was waiting for me at the restaurant and was pleased I called. But then she got angry so I hung up, my bus heading into the night, god knows where.

Quarter Farthing, Half Peasant

Quarter farthing, half peasant,
Walks into a lonely pheasant,
Two of each and four of none,
When time and tusk is said and done.

The fallow rumble of the tweed,
Whilst my hands and feet do bleed,
The twisted wrench of father time,
Is bitten in the wind of rhyme.

Distant cross of twitchy tales,
Are floating in the foaming gales,
All is one and one is fun,
When in the nighttime death is done.

Shadows on the wall are deep,
And crowded all about are sheep,
I cannot hear the thrust of knife,
As twitchy wench departs this life.

It could be me, it could be thee,
And devils in the wake make three,
For thine is twine and mine is crime,
And now her blood soaks in the grime.

I cannot sorrow, sorrow tell,
For one and all is raised and fell,
Ditchy death departs at dawn,
And this house is to be forlorn.

The Gaza Freedom March report

In December 2009, over 1,300 international peace activists arrived in Egypt expecting to travel through Egypt to Gaza and to break the siege. The march brought together all kinds of groups: feminists, Vietnam veterans, worker’s unions, Palestinian solidarity groups, Israeli journalists, Jews, Muslims, Christians and atheists – our diversity epitomised by Hedy Epstein, an 85-year old Holocaust survivor.

The Gaza Freedom March was organised by The International Coalition to End the Illegal Siege of Gaza. This organisation was formed after Israel’s 22-day assault on Gaza in Winter 2008-09. The coalition conceived this march as part of a broader strategy to end the Israeli occupation by targeting nonviolently its flagrant violations of international law from the house demolitions and settlements to the curfews and torture. But, on our arrival, the Egyptian authorities prevented us from gathering together as a group and revoked our permits to travel to Gaza.

We protested the decision: some members of the march went on hunger strike, 300 people from the French delegation made an encampment outside their embassy for a week. Eventually, one of the groups who helped organised the march, CodePink, opened dialogue with Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of the Egyptian President. After some negotiations, it was announced that two buses would be allowed to go to Gaza. This made a mockery of the stated reason for our detention in Cairo: our security. Furthermore, the Egyptian foreign minister made an announcement to the effect that the Egyptian authorities had vetted the members of the march and these 100 were the only people who had genuine humanitarian aims for Gaza. Having been involved in the chaotic process by which the list of the 100 was created, I can state categorically that this was not the case. I was telephoned in the evening of the 29th of December and told I had 5 minutes to provide two names of people who would represent the United Kingdom. This was farcical: I had no particular mandate to speak for everyone who came from the UK – I just happened to be the person they had the telephone number of.

This process created a rift among the marchers; in many ways the Egyptian government played the game very cleverly. They gave us just enough room to make our protest, but ensured that it didn’t spread beyond the confines of our visit. Then they drove a wedge between the organisers who accepted Suzanne Mubarak’s offer and the vast majority of the marchers who were angry that not everyone would be allowed to go to Gaza.

As it happened, I ended up on the bus bound for Gaza. As we sat in the bus waiting to leave, one of the organisers of the march in Gaza called. He said that he didn’t want us to come like this; the march was supposed to be an act of solidarity and shouldn’t be divisive. Hearing this, I got off the bus, much relieved.

After another day of protests in Cairo, I decided to get the night bus to Israel to see the conflict for myself.