Artikel om Sveriges utrikespolitik under Bosnienkriget

Så blev den äntligen publicerad, min artikel om Sveriges utrikespolitik under Bosnienkriget. Det mesta i artikeln är hämtat från min examensuppsats i historia i Oxford och det känns bra att äntligen få lite lön för all den möda som jag la ner i samband med att jag skrev den här uppsatsen. Det känns också bra att jag får möjlighet belysa ett ganska mörkt i Sveriges nutidshistoria. Sveriges agerande under Bosnienkriget är långt ifrån så hedervärt som många svenskar gärna vill tro – och Carl Bildt var knappast den fredens ängel som han gärna vill framstå som. Bildt var en “appeaser” av Chamberlainska mått som anpassade den svenska Bosnienpolitiken efter det som stod på dagordningen i London, Paris och Bryssel.

Här är länken till artikeln:

http://www.tidskriftenarena.se/text/2011/02/markus-balazs-goransson

Security check

I painted the Swedish weather pretty black in my previous post. This was perhaps a bit too hasty. The past week has been blessed with the most amazing sunshine and autumn colouring. It’s like an artist’s hand has swooped across the country, turning all the leaves of all the trees orange, yellow and crimson red – while colouring the sky light blue with streaks of white . When you live in Sweden you’re not exactly spoiled with beautiful weather – indeed, you have to crawl through half of the year in darkness and ruthless cold – but on days like these, I feel overwhelmed by the simple, staggering beauty of it all. Which is also why I posted some pictures of some of our gorgeous landscape.

But that’s not why I write. More exotic to me than the Swedish autumn was the security check at the Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, that I had to undergo two weeks ago, and which I said in my last post that I would tell you more about.

The security check was quite the experience. Thorough is just the beginning. It took an hour and a half and led to the complete repackaging of my belongings (thankfully, though, I was spared the full body search).

I arrived in the departures hall two and a half hours before my flight, and found myself at the tail end of a long line of Hasidic Jews (who were travelling to New York City on a chartered plane, as one of them kindly informed me). Hundreds of overdressed men with peyos (curly sideburns), identical round hats and heavy black overcoats were crowding in front of me, making me wonder how I’d ever make it to the first security check on time. But luckily the Israeli airport knows how to handle its security efficiently. At the head of the human snake were five or six young girls, who briefly interviewed each passenger, sending them on to different security tracks based on their answers. There are six tracks in all. Track 1 is pretty much reserved for Israeli Jews; track 6, I think, is for the bearded Arab unfortunately called Osama.

I was questioned by a young, cheerful girl, who was all friendliness and smiles and asked her questions with the kind of enthusiasm that makes you think she is personally interested in your answers. This is how our conversation went:

“Hello! Where are you flying to?”

“My final destination is Stockholm. But I’m stopping over in Budapest.”

“So are you Swedish?” (she smiles and her eyes become big with feigned interest)

“Yes, I’m Swedish.” (she checks my passport to make sure).

“So what were you doing in Israel?”

“I was visiting my girlfriend. She’s studying in the Ulpan (the school for Modern Hebrew) in Jerusalem.”

“Oh fantastic! How did you like Israel? Did you enjoy it?!”

“Yeah, I really did. It’s a fascinating country.”

“Do you speak Hebrew?” (she’s still smiling from when she asked the previous question, even though she has completely changed the topic)

“Uh, no, not really. Only the very basics. Like ‘shalom’ and ‘todah’ (thank you)”. (she nods and clearly makes a mental note).

“Okay, really only the very basics…” She says, lowering her gaze.

Apparently I failed the test – nevermind her enthusiastic smiles – as she sent me packing to security track number 5, the second lowest. None of the Hasidic Jews joined me. Only an Israeli Arab with a resigned look on his face.

If the smiling girl was the first station in the security process, the second station involved a massive X-ray machine of spaceship dimensions, into which all my luggage was fed. It was truly an enormous machine – and it made a loud cracking sound when it scanned my possessions, as if it was chewing on them, before literally spitting them out onto the baggage slide behind.

A bit concerned at the rough treatment that my belongings had received, I picked up my bags and continued to a set of counters where another young woman (they were all young women!) was waiting to give my check-in luggage an even more thorough inspection.

Wearing latex gloves and an expression of clinical professionalism, she asked me politely to unpack my big trekking backpack, one item at a time. With penetrating attention she then examined each piece of my possessions, holding them to the light and even using a bomb detecting device to ensure that no bomb-making residue was left on my reading light or mobile phone rechargers. She also removed the lid of a jar of Swiss chocolate spread that I had received as a present (I didn’t tell her it was a present) from Kathrin’s sister, and used a needle to extract a sample of the suspcious substance for chemical analysis in a machine nearby. All this she did with that cool, clinical courtesy that surgeons probably employ as they cut you open.
Her coolness however broke somewhat when she unwrapped a plastic bottle of olive oil that I had procured in the Palestinian city of Nablus.

“Where did you get this?”, she asked with some haste.

“In Nablus. In a market place.”

“What is that? Where is Nablus?”

“Uh…”. I was really puzzled that she didn’t know Nablus, the biggest city in the West Bank. But then I remembered that it also has another name.

“Schem. I got it int Schem”, I said, giving her the city’s Jewish name.

“Schem!? What were you doing in Schem? How did you get to Schem?”

“By car. There was no problem.”

The revelation that I had been to Nablus, and what’s more, purchased a bottle of olive oil that I wanted to take with me on my flight (!), caused no small frenzy behind the counter. She called her manager (who, surprisingly, was male), who came over to personally inspect my olive oil, removing a sample from it, which he smelled and submitted to the bomb detecting machine behind. He asked me whether I had purchased the bottle myself or received it as a gift, and helpfully informed me that passengers had in the past accepted gifts in good faith that turned out to be bombs. I said that I had bought the oil myself and wanted to give it to my mom as a present. He checked my passport, confirmed that I was Swedish and that my strange middle name (Balázs) was acceptably European, and then let me have my contentious olive oil.

As a result of this in-depth inspection, all my stuff – from my socks to a camel figurine bought in Bethlehem (thanks God they didn’t ask me about that one) – had been placed in a mess in a plastic box, so I had to spend a good few minutes putting it all back into my backpack in order. The woman with the clinical expression asked me courteously if I needed help packing, and also helped me a bit with the zippers when she felt it was taking me too long.

Then she escorted me to the fourth station – the check-in – where I registered for the flight but was told that I had “too many stickers left” on my passport to be able to leave my luggage with them. Instead I had to haul my luggage over to a special luggage deposit a hundred metres away – a deposit which apparently catered to risk elements – consisting of a big luggage wagon parked in a service elevator, guarded by an old man in suspenders who sat on the floor looking deathly bored. I felt that my luggage had already received sufficient special treatment and didn’t really need to be transported on a VIP elevator, but I appreciated the efficiency of the processing and the fact that all the security staff had been impeccably polite until now.

The staff continued to be polite, but their efficiency fell into doubt, at the next station, where they screened myself and my hand luggage. At this station I found myself in a line with a lot of Europeans, a few Israeli Arabs and one lone Filipina who looked rather out of place. The Europeans were mostly German and French and wore suspiciously bland and loosely hanging clothes. I reflected that this was probably the “presumed Western political activist” line, and that the Arabs and the Filipina had been thrown in for good measure. The line was not particularly long – not longer than at the security checks in normal airports – but it moved terribly slowly. A troop of five or six young Israeli girls were checking the persons and carry-on luggage of every passengers in minute detail. They had us move through the security arch several times and sent our luggage through the X-ray machine several times, after which they scanned our feet with bomb detectors and (naturally) unpacked our bags, checking and scanning each of our possessions as well. The whole processing took forty minutes for me – but it took longer for others, whose baggage gave cause for concern and obliged them to remain for additional checks and questioning. Some ten people were moved ahead in line because the long processing time put them in danger of missing their flights.

Having arrived in the departures hall in good time, I was in no such danger, and strolled on happily from the security check on to the seventh and final station – the passport check (the third one) – where another young woman kindly avoided to stamp my passport before sending me onward to the gates and my awaiting flight to Budapest.

The upshot of the long and thorough security check was that no one was concerned about the excess weight in my luggage. My hand luggage was never weighed (nor were its dimensions measured), and I also do not think that anyone would have minded if my check-in bag had contained a few too many kilos; dealing with it would just have taken a lot of additional time.

I didn’t mind the massive security check too much – nor did I really care that I was profiled as a potential security threat. God knows the Israelis have reason to be afraid and I think they are quite right to be extraordinarily cautious, provided that they treat the passengers politely and respectfully, which they did in my case. Maybe I would have felt more annoyed and frustrated if it had been my third, fourth or fifth time flying out of Israel. I imagine that internationals who fly to and from Israel frequently might feel differently about the 1-2 hour long security check.

A trip up north

My trip to the Middle East is over. I’m writing from Sweden, where a decidedly Swedish weather reigns. The skies are cast in remorseless gray; the trees have dropped half of their leaves; and all the time there is this unrelenting drizzle.
Talk about a climate shock – in Israel it was 35 degrees and sunshine, almost every day.

I spent my last few days in Israel with my girlfriend’s former host family in the far north. After she had finished high school, Kathrin went to Israel for six months, to live with an Arab family in a Christian village near Lebanon. The family, whom she had never met before, turned out to be one of the most loving and hospitable imaginable, and welcomed her as a daughter and sister of their own, forging a powerful connection that will surely remain until the end of their days.

Having heard a lot about them, I looked forward to finally meeting these people who have meant so much, and done so much, for my beloved Kathrin. Since Israel is a tiny country, it took only about four hours to make the journey there. Nevertheless, we saw many celebrated places on the way, such as Jericho (for a second time), the fertile Jordan Valley, the western stretches of Jordan, Tiberias, the Sea of Galilee and the rolling hills of Galilee. The Sea of Galilee wasn’t terribly exciting. It matches neither its name nor its reputation; it’s a lake – and a small one at that – and not very beautiful. But the Jordan Valley was spectacular, as was the landscape in the Galilee, with its steep, plummeting hills, covered with low trees and vineyards.

The village where my girlfriend once lived is a stone’s throw from the Lebanese border, hugging a hilltop in a lush landscape that once yielded large tobacco harvests. Today the village has no industry of its own, and many of its inhabitants have to commute to earn a living. Others don’t work, but have taken to drugs – a big problem that affects many Israeli Arab communities, where employment prospects are generally bleak.

Kathrin’s host family turned out to be even warmer and kinder than I had imagined. They were all smiles and friendliness, and it took about two seconds to connect with them. I wondered at first what it would be like to drop in on them like a visitor that they had never met – but their kindness, generosity and warmth dispelled such worries. As a guest, I was treated to delicious food (a lot of it, more than I could bear), and it felt like we became friends for real. They even invited me to their eldest son’s wedding.
Sadly, I had only two days in the north, before I had to leave to the airport and back to Sweden. I wish I had had more time in the Galilee, and, of course, with Kathrin, whom I never want to leave. But my tickets were booked, and at home a lot of obligations were waiting for me.

I would have one last adventure before returning home, however – at the airport security at Tel Aviv Ben Gurion International Airport. This was very exciting and interesting. I’ll write about this in a final post in the coming days!

Express travelling

I’ve been too busy to write for many days now. I’ve been travelling like a backpacker on a tight schedule – visiting Bethlehem, Jericho, Akko, Tel Aviv, Qumran, Jaffa and the Dead Sea in the space of a week. My mind is a mess of impressions and thoughts that I really want to write down.

The past few days I’ve wondered what I actually get out of travelling. I’ve passed through seven places in six days and seen countless exotic things, including places that are the stuff of Biblical legend. But has this really enriched my life? A good book seems to be far more enriching – and far more cheaply and quickly consumed. My generation has elevated travelling to the most meritorious of pursuits, but I think that much of our penchant for it is just a drive for escapism.

But then again, during my express tour through the Holy Land over the past week, I have collected a lot of impressions and experiences that give flesh to things that I had only ever read about before.

Such as Bethlehem, the birth-place of Jesus and one of the holiest cities in Christianity. In my mind it was always associated with the image handed down to me at Christmas celebrations: a tiny clustering of people and animals huddling around a new-born Christ, in a peaceful (though damp and crowded) manger. I definitely did not imagine it as a loud, large and congested city, crowded by cars, locals and Christian pilgrims arriving on bus shuttles. I also did not realise that the birthplace of the Lord Saviour had been transformed from its humble origins into a gargantuan, dog-ugly fortress of a church, which renders futile any attempt to imagine the important event that took place there two thousand years ago.

The same with Jericho. Before travelling there, I had only two associations with this oldest, lowest (located at 258 m below sea level) and possibly hottest city in the world. One was the biblical battle where Joshua made the city walls collapse by having seven priests blow in seven trumpets around the city for seven days. The other is also a biblical tale: that of Jesus fasting in the mountains above the city for forty days and forty nights, successfully resisting various temptations proferred to him by Satan. The other day I saw how vast, flat and hot Jericho is, and that it sits on an oasis near the Dead Sea and just beneath some very rocky hills. I also learned that this town is both an important tourist attraction and a major fruit producer, its bananas and dates exported via the Jordanian border all over the Middle East.

Seeing the biblical sites “in the flesh” really brings home that these places too exist outside legend, in time and space like everything else – that their history and significance were not fixed when a scribe attributed a certain event to them. It also makes it easier to appreciate the extent to which the Bible is a dialogue with a landscape, its message composed under the inspiration of the events, stories and traditions that emerged in this area. These are very obvious point, but being helps me to grasp them better.

Travelling here has also added colour to the things I have read about in books and newspapers. I knew about the millions of Russian immigrants living in Israel, who immigrated here en masse in the early 1990s – but that’s very different from walking through Tel Aviv and Akko and hearing more Russian spoken than Hebrew or Arabic, or realising that in many parts of Israel my meagre Russian will serve me better than my English. I was also astonished to find a Russian liquour shop in Tel Aviv, which, aside from innumerable vodka brands, also sold one of my favourite Ukrainian beers: Obolon, which tasted just as good as it did last year in Kyiv.

Then there are of course the many eye-opening conversations that you can have en route. In Bethlehem, we stumbled into the vice-chancellor of the local university – a generous and open-minded La Sallian Brother from New Zeeland, who showed us around the beautiful campus and talked about the challenges of running a university in the West Bank. He described the harassment that commuting students frequently face at checkpoints (including the story of one student from Gaza, who was blindfolded, handcuffed and deported to Gaza in the middle of the night, even though the Israeli army conceded that she did not constitute a security threat), and the great resilience that all students must demonstrate in order to push through with their degrees. He described his vision for Bethlehem University, saying that peace may seem distant right now, but that the day that it comes, Palestine will need a lot of educated, enlightened and resourceful people to steer the new state.

In Bethlehem, we also spoke to a wood-carver, who runs a little shop selling olive-wood carvings with Bibilical themes behind the Church of Nativity. He was mild, soft-spoken and enormously kind and hospitable. He took us around his shop, explaining the different steps in the manufacturing process: from finding the right branch (whole olive trees are never felled for carvings) to adding the finishing touches to the little figurines. He also invited us to watch the sunset from the rooftop of his house, where we could see the entire city and the valley below. He told us that he moved to New Zeeland some fifteen years ago, because he wanted his children to grow up pure at heart and not be affected by the conflict, and had come back home only for a few months this year, because his old mother was ailing and because he longed to celebrate Christmas once again in Bethlehem. Tears welled up in his eyes when he told us about the olive groves that he had lost when the West Bank Wall was built – but then he quickly dried them and said with spirit: “I don’t want to talk about politics. I hate politics”.

Travelling also creates a reserve of impressions that can be called upon later, when reading a book, watching the news or having an engaging conversation, for instance. It creates a mental landscape that gives words heard or read a greater meaning. Next time I read about the Crusades I’ll for sure picture Akko, with its fortress walls, curved streets and citadel, all erected by Crusader knights. Tel Aviv, too, will be rescued from the fickleness of free imagination, and acquire a firmer shape in my mind thanks to my brief visit there. The fact that I went to Qumran – the site where a Jewish sect penned down the Dead Sea Scrolls two thousand years ago – will moreover help me to imagine more vividly the life that an ascetic community led here during Roman times.

Finally, thanks to travelling around, I begin to understand how tiny and crowded this contentious land really is, and how close the places that make headlines around the world are to each other. While I’ll of course never grasp the reality that people here face, I now have images, stories and faces to go with the things I see in the news. The West Bank Barrier is not an abstraction – it’s phyiscally there, expropriating people’s land and cutting people off from their fields, schools and hospitals. Ramallah and Bethlehem are so close to Jerusalem that they are practically suburbs, yet are separated from that city by the Wall and massive checkpoints. In West Jerusalem, furthermore, I sat in a youthful and hip café, where I had a plate of decent pasta and a refreshing drink – and found out later that it had been bombed twice during the Initfada, killing a lot of young guests. These are all things that rattle me, and call into question the attempt to use language to sum up the conflict. Reality overwhelms the narrative. While I’ll never understand what it’s like to live here – travelling does provide a useful complement to what I read in the press.

So, I guess that there are some merits to travelling, though I think that travelling should be combined with a lot of reading. It’s good that so much has been written about this place.

Unfortunately, I only have a few days left here. Then I have to go back home to Sweden, which is both very cold and fairly dull. I’ll try to write another entry about my final few days in this fascinating land.

A weekend getaway to Palestine

Last Friday, it was Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar and a day when a nation-wide curfew descends on Israel. All public activities cease, including traffic and television broadcasting, and people are relegated to their homes or synagogues to atone for their sins. The belief is that God on this day will determine every person’s fate for the coming year. So the pious Jew pulls all stops and prays and fasts intensively, hoping to beseech God and render his judgment as benign as possible.

The result is a day of utter boredom for the non-devout. I imagine that non-Jewish Israelis must sit at home on Yom Kippur, playing board games and eating leftovers. Fortunately for impatient internationals like myself, Palestine is just a stone’s throw away, and offers an excellent refuge for those wanting to escape isolation. My friend who lives in Jerusalem, and some colleagues of hers, had the excellent idea to cross the Green Line and use Yom Kippur as an excuse to do some sightseeing in Palestine. They kindly asked if I wanted to join. I said yes, of course, and off we went on a fascinating tour through a landscape redolent of history.

If it were not for its Israeli shackles, the West Bank could really become a top-notch tourist destination – at least for travellers hunting for historical sites, beautiful landscapes and succulent meals. It is a tiny parcel of land – much smaller than my home province in Sweden – but infinitely rich in historical patrimony, cultural tradition and geographical beauty. Plus, its decent roads and small size make it easy to get around by car and public transport (provided the checkpoints are kept open). So if you don’t want to stay the night, you can easily make day trips to virtually anywhere on the West Bank from Jerusalem.

We chose to spend the night in Palestine, and nestled down in a captivating little village just outside Nablus, where the wings of history turned out to be flapping incessantly. The village was Sebastia – today a minuscule community perched on a high hilltop, but two thousand years yonder the glorious capital of Samaria, whose fame stretched so far that even Alexander the Great paid it a visit (and destroyed it at once). Like everywhere in the Middle East, history has piled up in layers in Sebastia. The ruins dotting the village include structures from the Canaanite, Israelite, Hellenistic, Herodian, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader and Ottoman periods. To mention just a few, there is a Herodian temple, a Roman comeo complete with pillars, a Crusader Cathedral, and the supposed tomb of John the Baptist – and all this despite the fact that only a fraction of the area has been excavated, on account of the political troubles in the West Bank.

Political troubles indeed hamper a lot of things in Palestine, and so also in Sebastia, where the once flourishing tourist trade came to a complete stop during the Second Intifada. Today it has picked up a little, but few tourists still make it to the village. According to the owner of a souvenir shop we visited, there are occasional visits by bus-loads of Ukrainians (who quickly visit the village church and then leave), Taiwanese (who are excellent customers) and Chinese (who are not, saying they can buy the same souvenirs made at home more cheaply). But despite this business is still very lean.

The Italian Cooperation (the development branch of the Italian embassy in Tel Aviv) is trying to turn the tide. In a project that finished three years ago, it invested a large amount of money in renovating a complex of beautiful old buildings, turning it into a wonderful guesthouse, where we spent one night. The old character of the buildings has been maintained (at least on the outside; the inside of our room was filled with Ikea furniture) and you have a fantastic view of the valley below. It was indeed brilliant to stay there – and fairly cheap too (only 24 euros per person). Still, it was sad to see that we were the only guests, and to hear from the caretaker that business was generally very slow.

In every place that I have visited so far in Palestine, people have been incredibly friendly. I mentioned earlier the couchsurfer in Ramallah, who took hours out of his time to show us around his city, and treated us with such warmth and generosity. Wherever I have been, people have come up to me, inquiring curiously where I’m from, often inviting me for food, coffee or tea. They seem to take it as a matter of pride to treat guests well. In Sebastia, we were given a sumptuous three-course dinner in a restaurant, whose owner threw in the grapes, tea and water pipe smoking for free. The generous man appeared every ten minutes in his white shirt and black trousers, clasping his hands and asking if everything was alright, or whether we needed more food (nevermind that we were struggling to finish even half of the Goliathan portions placed before us). The next day, he caught us as we were walking down the main square, and invited us for coffee and mineral water in his café. He refused to let us pay. “Of course, we’ll pay,” we insisted. “This is your business.” But he replied that “friendship is more important than business”.

Nablus was our next stop after Sebastia. The biggest city in the West Bank, it is a myriad of large white apartment buildings, shooting up like mushrooms on the slopes of a steep valley. In the centre of the modern urbanity is the old city, which has been turned, almost in its entirety, into a lively and colourful market, where everything from fresh vegetables to fashionable veils is being sold. We didn’t have a very strict plan for our time in Nablus, so we mostly strolled around in these parts. We enjoyed a delicious lunch in an up-market hotel, paid a visit to the famous Nablus soap factory (whose olive oil-based soap is so sought-after that it’s even smuggled into East Jerusalem), ate some of the city’s celebrated knafeh (fried and sweetened cheese) and looked at the countless martyr posters plastered across the stone walls.

Nablus is famous also for its Turkish baths, so at one point the other guys and I decided to break off from the tour group and indulge in some relaxing men-only steam-bathing and body scrubbing. We headed over to the old, rather claustrophobic, Turkish bath house (apparently built in the 13th century), with its low ceilings, narrow passages and bathing chambers chock-full of large wet men. It was my first visit to a Turkish bath and I found it thoroughly relaxing. There was a steam bath, a hot-air sauna, and a heated stone floor, in addition to numerous hot and cold showers. I got two tortuous body scrubs; first from a two-metre tall buffalo of a man, who insisted on going all-out on my back with the rough side of a sponge; then by a professional “scrubber”, who could have used a good scrubbing himself. It turned me red all over, but it was also exceptionally refreshing.

So far I have travelled a lot more in Palestine than in Israel, but that will probably change soon. On Friday, I’m planning to go to Tel Aviv – Israel’s business capital and largest city – and later I’m hoping to visit Haifa, Caesarea, and Akko, on the Mediterranean coast, and Eilat, on the Red Sea coast. But Palestine continues to attract, and on Saturday, I’m heading to Bethlehem. After that I would also like to visit Jericho and Qumran, where the Dead Sea scrolls were found.

Occupation and sterilisation in Hebron

The centre of Hebron is surreal and terrifying. It was so strange and overwhelming to see this schizophrenic place with my own eyes. As I walked along the streets, my senses were heightened, but I couldn’t really process what I saw. It felt like I was walking in a dream, or on an empty movie set. Like in every place that has recently experienced a war, the legacy of violence is stark and in your face. I was reminded of the ruins, craters and graves that I saw when I visited Srebrenica four years ago. Yet, unlike Srebrenica, there has been no attempt in Hebron to move past the divisions. Instead, the divisions have been frozen and institutionalised, and today Hebron is relatively quiet only because people are kept physically apart.

A handful of Jewish settlers (800, in a city of 170,000) have moved into the heart of the city, and to protect them the Israeli army has created “sterilised zones”, where the movement, residence and business of Palestinians are sharply restricted. On parts of some streets, Palestinians are allowed to pass; when they do they walk swiftly with their heads down to escape notice by Israeli settlers and soldiers. Other streets are completely closed to Palestinians, who cannot work or walk there. They are technically allowed to live in some buildings, but their front doors have been bolted shut and they can enter and leave their houses only through back windows or over rooftops. The Jewish settlers who live nearby harass them regularly with impunity. The Israeli army division stationed in Hebron is there to protect Jewish settlers against Palestinians, but is not authorised to protect Palestinians against settler violence, which is frequent and vicious. Six hundred Israeli soldiers and border police are protecting the eight hundred Jewish settlers in Hebron. The Palestinian police are not allowed to enter the sterilised zones, so there is little if no protection of Palestinian rights. All Palestinians who could escape have escaped.

In one courtyard, where a thick stench of trash and rotting food hangs in the air, fifty Palestinian families used to live. Today only two remain. They live in a building scarred by violence, where the front door is blocked and the windows are covered with iron bars and metal nets. They enter and exit through a back window which leads to the Arab part of the city. The courtyard in front of their apartment used to be full of life but is now covered in trash. Alleyways leading from the courtyard are blocked with slabs of concrete and giant rolls of barbed wire. An Israeli soldier is standing nearby, eyeing us uneasily as we move around, listening to our guide, who explains the history and character of the conflict in Hebron.

A friend of mine, who works in Jerusalem, generously arranged for me to join a tour of Hebron organised by the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence. This organisation works to expose abuses committed by the Israeli army in Palestine by publishing testimonies from soldiers who serve or have served in the Occupied Territories. The founder – a large, bearded man who wears a kippa and calls himself orthodox – led our tour and was himself stationed in Hebron during much of the Second Intifada. He said once in an interview with a Swedish newspaper that as a soldier he rarely questioned his orders or actions, but when he later re-entered civilian life he was unable to square 95% of what he had done with his conscience. And so he started this NGO, which today has grown into a large organisation that carries an important voice in Israeli politics and regularly draws the ire of right-wing groups. It has collected over 750 testimonies, and aside from tours to Hebron and the South Hebron hills, it also organises presentations, lectures and other publicity drives intended to expose the nature of the occupation.

The founder, Yehuda Shaul, took us around deserted streets in the now Jewish parts of Hebron, showing us destroyed architecture, boarded-up Palestinian homes and the ubiquitous presence of the Israeli army. He explained the military logic behind the occupation, and stressed two messages. Firstly, he insisted that there is no such thing as a “good occupation”. The Israeli public soothes its conscience with the myth that the Israeli army is a moral occupying force. But to be effective, he argued, an occupation will always involve serious abuses of the rights of the occupied people. This is irrespective of the virtues and morality of the individual soldier: the military logic and the pressures of the situation will force him to distinguish between categories of people, and to treat certain categories as security threats, and thus deprived of rights.

Shaul emphasised that most of what the Israeli army does in the West Bank follows a clear logic. The purpose of the occupiers is to maintain the occupation and to ensure the security of settlers; Palestinian rights are treated as secondary to, or even as conflicting with, this chief objective. The army is there to protect the Jewish settlers, and it will therefore refrain from intervening against settlers who abuse Palestinians. Moreover, the army believes that it can pre-empt violence by keeping the Palestinians on their toes, and it keeps them on their toes by disrupting their daily life (for instance, by arbitrarily questioning and arresting people, confiscating their ID cards). Indeed, Shaul said that the current army division in Hebron is under explicit orders to disrupt the daily life of the local Palestinians. Further on, he described how soldiers during his time in Hebron would break into homes of Palestinians, snatch with them young boys, and then force them to walk in front of their vehicles while they were on patrol. This was not done out of cruelty, but to prevent other Palestinians from throwing stones at them, and in this it was effective. In other words, the military logic carries a dark underside, and it is this underside that Breaking the Silence wants to bring out into the open. Another interesting point was that the Israeli army during Shaul’s service in Hebron had adopted a new concept of urban warfare, which redefined the notion of the urban space. Instead of looking at the urban area as a matrix of fixed barriers and passageways, the troops were to redesign the area according to their own needs. That is, they were to move through walls, using sledge hammers or explosives. This really caught the enemy off guard, though it of course also made life unbearable for the Palestinians.

Deterrence, we heard, is a watchword of the occupying troops in Palestine. This poorly defined term can be used to justify a lot of abuses, as long as they inspire fear and prudence. Shaul, who served as a grenade launch operator in Hebron during the Second Intifada, recalled how he promoted deterrence by blasting buildings where Palestinian militants were based, or were suspected to be based. Enemy fire was always answered, and if immediate retaliation did not dissuade them, grenades would be fired pre-emptively as well. Since a grenade launcher is not an accurate weapon, it usually took 5-6 shots to strike the target, with each shot destroying and killing everything within a radius of 8 metres.

The other message was that the Israeli public must take responsibility for what is being done in Palestine in their name. There is a large moral price tag to the occupation, and Breaking the Silence insists that the Israeli people must face up to that. Shaul said that his organisation does not advocate for the lifting of the occupation, or indeed for any other specific political agenda (“there is no political to-do list at the end of our tours, presentations or lectures”), but simply wants the Israeli people to take onboard the moral cost of the occupation carried out in their name. “Where is the red line?” He asked, saying that there needs to be a debate about the occupation and the moral price that Israelis are willing to accept. There can be no occupation without abuse, and the people need to own up to that and take responsibility for that, was his main point.

Needless to say, Breaking the Silence is not loved by all. I picked up a brochure outside the revered Hebron synagogue (where the patriarchs and matriarchs – except Rachel – are said to be buried) entitled: “Inequality & Discrimination in Hebron. In contrast to the false, anti-Jewish, and anti-Israeli propaganda, here are the real facts.” It says among other things that “Israeli leftist organizations such as B’tselem, Machsom Watch, Sons of Avraham, and Breaking the Silence love to tour the city with groups of Israelis, non-Israelis, and diplomats, inciting against the Jews of Hebron by giving false, warped presentations”. Unsurprisingly, our tour group was not met cordially by the settlers. One of the organisers told me that many settlers shouted abuse at us in Hebrew, and that she could see hatred in their faces. At one point, a group of settler children, aged 7-8 years, took a hose and sprayed us with water as we passed a settlement. Two of them ran after us and punched, kicked and jumped on Shaul, calling him names. I was disgusted, not because of their obvious hatred, but because they were so steeped in this sense of self-righteousness and impunity that they felt safe and entitled to attack a group of adult visitors.

Hatred and self-righteousness lie thick in the air in Hebron. Another testament to this is the grave of Dr Baruch Goldstein, which we visited in a Jewish settlement nearby. Goldstein was a Jewish settler who opened fire on Muslims praying in the Cave of the Patriarchs Mosque in Hebron in 1994, killing 29 and wounding more than 125. The massacre triggered riots in the city and marked the beginning of the process of separation of Arabs and Jewish settlers. Goldstein was himself killed with a fire extinguisher when he tried to reload his Galil rifle. Despite his heinous crime, his grave carries an homage: inscribed on the stone are the words: “He gave his life for the Israeli people and the Torah… His heart is pure and his hands are clean”. There was previously a monument around his grave, but it has been taken down after legislation was passed in the Knesset banning monuments honouring murderers.

I found the visit to Hebron deeply disturbing. In this city, the collective punishment and degradation of Palestinians is stark and incontrovertible. Six hundred Israeli security personnel guard eight hundred Jewish settlers, who live in Hebron in violation of international law (and in certain cases Israeli law as well). Palestinians have had to clear out of their shops and homes to make way for these illegal settlements; meanwhile Palestinians who live near Jewish neighbourhoods, or have to pass through them, continue to face arbitrary violence, while Israeli soldiers stand idly by. In the Arab parts of the old city, settlers have moved into top-floor flats, while Palestinians live below, with nets stretched across the streets to catch the garbage that settlers throw at them.

The settlers often claim that they have a right to return to ancient Jewish lands, but they disregard that the lands they covet are in occupied territory and thus off limits under international law. Their arguments should have no purchase outside nationalist circles. Nevertheless, the Israeli government washes its hands, saying that it is captive to a powerful settler lobby, while the international community fails to enforce principles that were developed to promote international peace and stability. Worst of all, these illegal settlements continue to fuel the conflict, contributing to violence and to the militarisation of both Palestinian and Israeli society. Three hundred thousand settlers on the West Bank ensure that tensions are kept alive, and that a peaceful solution to the conflict moves even further away.

It’s difficult not to be outraged by the situation in Hebron. The visit brought home some of the injustice and intractability of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the structural logic and powerful interests that sustain it.

First impressions of the Holy Land

Through my girlfriend’s dorm room window on Mount Scopus, I see the sand-gold coloured buildings of Jerusalem rolled out before me. I’ve been here for only three days and my mind is a chaos of impressions and thoughts. Jerusalem, not to mention the Holy Land as a whole, cannot be summarised neatly. No doubt this passage, and all the others that follow, will have something schizophrenic and undigested about them. This is truly a place where different identities, different traditions, different worldviews live side by side and rub against each other, sometimes exploding in mutual rejection, otherwise maintaining an unharmonious truce. On both sides of the main fault line too, there is a diversity of cultures and political visions (tensions can run high between different groups of Palestinians and Israeli Jews as well), making it even more difficult to say something about the situation that’s not trite or simplistic.

Tel Aviv Ben Gurion airport is only a three-hour flight from central Europe (I stopped over in Budapest), and there is much in Jerusalem that reminds me of home: the ease of getting around on foot or public transport, the types of shops lining the streets (not to mention the falafel and shoarma eateries) and some of the people you meet. But there is also a lot in this holiest of cities which is decidedly unlike any European country I have visited. Maybe I’m over-generalising, but I feel that in Europe religion is kept mostly out of the public space; you might see bearded Orthodox priests in Kyiv, imams in Sarajevo, or cloaked women in Malmö and London, but such dress is fairly uncommon and anyway an expression of individual faith rather than a serious attempt to bring religion into the public sphere. By contrast, in certain neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, and in parts of the old city, religion is very much in the air, and religious beliefs regulate, at least in part, how people dress and behave. I read that in ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods, visitors (especially women) should make sure to wear plain and properly covering clothing, because they might otherwise be spat at or stoned. In other situations, people, including more liberal Jews, might attract charges of “unbelievingness” if they fail to follow certain rules in public places (a group of children chided me as a “non-conformist” or “recreant” when I was taking photographs of the Western Wall – nota bene, from outside the sacrosanct Western Wall square – on the day of the Jewish New Year). While Israel is in many ways a secular and multi-cultural society, I find these obvious limits on that secularism fascinatingly and exotically non-European.

I look out the window again and see the golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock break the rays of the evening sun. Flanked by its sister building, the Al-Aqsa mosque, it stands in the midst of the now Israeli Old City, posing as a stark reminder of the heterogeneity of this most coveted of world cities. From here, on the eighth storey of a building on Mount Scopus, the Old City looks peaceful and beautiful; yet, that tiny area – the Western Wall square and the Temple Mount – is one of the most contentious places in the world. My secular, agnostic mind is processing and trying to appreciate the depth of the religious passions at the heart of that contention, and trying to understand the place of those passions in the largely secular politics of the region.

I caught a glimpse of the other side of the struggle when I visited Ramallah in Palestine yesterday. I imagined this de facto capital of the West Bank to be a remote and inaccessible place, but there are buses going there every 10-15 minutes from outside one of the gates in the Jerusalem Old City. If you have a Western passport you can travel there relatively freely these days, although you might face some harassment at the checkpoint when re-entering Jerusalem.

I went to Ramallah with my girlfriend, Kathrin, and we were both so taken with the city. Devastated by the Israeli army during the Second Intifada (which started in 2000), the city today has few picturesque buildings left standing, but I was so charmed by the liveliness, movement and friendliness on the streets. Our visit coincided with the Muslim holiday of Eid, and while this meant that most shops were closed, the streets were full of peddlars and people chatting, eating and moving about. People were incredibly friendly. Assuming we were Jewish (don’t know why), several people came up to us and shook my hand (sometimes Kathrin’s too), greeting us with “Shalom” and “Happy New Year!” (it was Rosh Hashanah too, the Jewish New Year). A couple of teenagers invited us for coffee or tea, and when that didn’t work, and after they had heard that I was from Sweden, for “Whiskey or Absolut”. A lot of people said “welcome, welcome”, both as a greeting, and as a way of saying good-bye.

What really made the trip, however, was Saed, a local Couchsurfer, who generously offered to show us around his hometown. Incredibly kind, friendly, articulate and fluent in English, he took us to the main sights in town (Yasser Arafat’s mausoleum, the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, the grave of the poet Mahmoud Darwish, the remnants of the old town, and other things) and to a beautiful, remote refuge in one of the olive orchards lying in the hills outside the town. He also introduced us to the best falafel I have ever tasted, a great Palestinian dessert consisting of fried cheese and sugar, and impressive Palestinian beer that definitely lives up to its name, Taybeh (meaning “delicious”). It was fascinating to listen to his stories of growing up, studying and working in Ramallah and elsewhere on the West Bank, and though our visit lasted for less than a day, I feel that I’m very much richer for it.

Ramallah is relatively prosperous and stable by Palestinian standards. Tomorrow I will travel to a more contentious place together with a former classmate of mine who’s working here. Hebron has been the site of a lot of tension and is a place rarely visited by tourists. Partly for that reason I look forward to seeing it with my own eyes. My next entry will be about this trip!