4hr English class

I think I have largely down played the work of Project Hope both on this blog and in my mind. In reality I could have done none of the things in Palestine that I have done without the organisation. Even yesterday when I was out of the city of Nablus I only gained access to the things I did because of my links to PH. The friend who took me on the trip I met through teaching a class organised by PH and all of the people we met during the day knew of the organisation. We meeting strangers for the first time it is an immediate way to gain credibility and acceptance. It also means that whatever I do reflects back upon the organisation but this should never present a problem. Anyone who makes the organisation look bad doesn't deserve to be here.

The class for toady was scheduled to take place between 9.30 and 13.30. I knew that I couldn't just deliver two of the normal types of class one after another and that I needed to do something different. In the booklet I had given these four hours were to be mainly focusing on grammar. Four hours of that would have destroyed us all. I tried to think of a project that would take up most of the time and also cover at least some of the stuff I was supposed to. In the end I decided that we needed to use English in a more realistic setting than a classroom and that being stuck inside for four hours on a glorious day would be a bad idea. So the class were given the task of being tour guides for the city of Nablus. They would take me to 7 different points around the city and at each different point one of the class would need to explain in detail the past, present and future of the location. Between each point another member of the class would be required to act as a tour guide and describe what we were seeing as we walked along. An inspired idea! I figured that this would be one of those ideas that worked pefectly theoretically but would be in disaster in practice. I wasn't entirely sure how the class would feel speaking English to a small group in the centre of the city. The activity turned out better than I thought it would do and wasn't the disaster that it could have been. The biggest difficulty was trying to get all of the class to speak and not allowing the stronger members of the group to monopolise the conversation. All of the group did speak and I'm sure our conversations were much more meaningful and less contrived than they would have been inside the classroom. I also learned a lot about Palestinian attitudes towards many things in Nablus including the education system and the existence of a class system. With the hierachy going from the camp inhabitants to the villagers to those who live in the city to the rich outsiders who only spend the summers in Nablus.

On these occasions it is better in many ways not to have a translator. This way the class are required to make themselves understood just as I am. After the class I went with a few of the group to the Saturday Market in the city centre. This was after breakfast at my favourite place in the old city. I have no idea what it is called or how to find it half of the time but the omlette and yoghurt are fantastic. If I were to do the tour guide activity again I need to make sure that there is a stop for breakfast as I don't think most of the class had eaten and it was sort of expected that they would. I didn't know this before hand but I do now! The Saturday market was a bit like a car boot sale with endless amounts of junk but there are bargains to be found, or so I'm told. For that you need to get there early.

We went to the very centre of Nablus where the roundabout is to have a coffee and sit down for a while. Being elevated above the street was perfect for people watching and seeing what was going on. It was also a good place to talk about life in Palestine and how it changes. At the moment the city is very quiet and I am here in a time of peace and security. Between 2002-2008 Nablus was effectively like the wild west. Gangsters controlled the streets and those with guns had the power. There were regular shootouts in the street between Palestinians and in 2002 the Israeli's invaded. Though Palestinians I have spoken to have little time for the Palestinian Authority now because they promise a lot and deliver very little they are grateful for the fact that they managed to control the armed groups by bringing some security. That this was partly due to the move to incorporate them into the PA is another story... but basically they didn't disappear they got uniforms and pay cheques.

People here are enjoying life a bit more at the moment as there aren't many incursions by the IOF and some of the checkpoints have been removed(some are no longer operational that I saw last summer). So people feel safer and can move around a bit more freely. This makes them grateful and so less likely to complain about the other things they don't have- though the checkpoints and incursions should never happen in the first place! This is all part of the cycle. When they decide to push for more of the things that they are entitled to they won't get them and there will be another intifada (uprising) composed, of course, of armed groups. These will then be brutally put down by the Israeli's with massive overwhelming force. In the 2002 invasion people were effectively imprisoned in their homes for 8 days with no power or water whislt the city was surrounded and tanks looked down from the hills above. Many people were killed for daring to look out of their windows. Just imagining what it must have been like knowing how brutal the IOF are is a very scary thought indeed.

So the Palestinians rise up and are crushed (because they have no chance of winning- they cannot compete with F16's and tanks) and then because of the fact that they have dared to rise up they are even more brutally oppressed than before. So the checkpoints that disappeared come back, there are more incursions and more land is taken. Meanwhile the defeated militias who were humilated take to the streets again and we are back to being in the wild west. Everyone I have spoken to here thinks there will be a third intifada as that is the stage we are approaching in the cycle and nothing in the political 'peace' process is likely to stop it. The Palestinians will then be cast as the villains again as they fight for what should be their's anyway. Just like we saw in Gaza over Christmas.

Israel continues to build settlements because they can then say they have removed one of them in return for giving the Palestinians something. This is a nonesense. They shouldn't be allowed to be used as baragining chips as they simply shouldn't be there in the first place. When there is an another intifada everything goes back to square one, just look at the map and see how much Palestinian land has been taken away, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6a/West_Bank_&_Gaza_Map_2007_(Settlements).png/482px-West_Bank_&_Gaza_Map_2007_(Settlements).png
the land controlled by the Palestinians is usually shown as the West Bank but this is clearly not the case. The wall snakes in and steals territory by de facto annexation and the settlements ensure that the West Bank is not a coherent whole. So year on year more and more land disappears.

When this is the case why would anyone wish to invest in the region? Like the Palestinians I see very little hope for the future.