Dennis Fox’s Weblog

Jaffa’s  hot and humid today, just the weather I’d hoped to avoid but knew I wouldn’t be able to. I’m here, though, to spend the next week traveling with the latest Health and Human Rights Project delegation from Jewish Voice for Peace, a national Jewish organization working to help end the Occupation. The H&HRP started as the Jewish American Medical Project, a project of the Boston-area group I loosely belong to, Visions of Peace with Justice in Israel/Palestine. Visions last year became JVP’s Boston chapter, and the original medical focus expanded to include more areas of concern.

This one’s a small delegation, just 8 in all, one of us not yet here. Four left Jaffa this morning for East Jerusalem; the three of us remaining met with a couple of people at Physicians for Human-Rights Israel, the project’s primary Israeli connection. We heard current details about the Occupation’s health implications for Palestinians on the West Bank and even more in Gaza, where the situation is deteriorating steadily. PHR has visited Gaza a couple of times recently, to meet with Palestinian doctors. They also gave us a new PHR report on health issues in unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Negev, which my class should find relevant in a couple of weeks when they begin to look at the interplay between law and justice within Israeli society.

[Last time I was here, during the two-week tour I took with Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, our group spent a day with a PHR mobile clinic in the Jenin refugee camp. I wrote about it here, with some photos.]
After this morning’s meeting, wandering around old Jaffa, we bought “toasts,” essentially panini or grilled cheese sandwiches filled with cheese, olives, vegetables, hot sauce, and more. The storefront we stopped at was run by a woman who spoke Hebrew to us and Arabic to the few regulars who fit inside. A co-worker, maybe a relative, wore traditional Muslim head scarf, but the seller didn’t, and at one point asked the other woman if her shirt let too much skin show. Standing there, listening to the different languages, then eating on a picnic bench overlooking the Mediterranean listening to both both Arabic and Hebrew around us, I found myself thinking that maybe co-existence is still possible, despite everything. Or at least that’s how it struck my uncharacteristically hopeful mood.

I know more Hebrew than the JVP people I’m traveling with, which comes in useful here in Israel. Starting tomorrow, when we go into the West Bank, my minimal Arabic won’t be as helpful. Fortunately, one delegation member is fluent, another comfortable, so my own efforts to sort things out won’t be crucial.

Right now I’m in the lobby of our hostel, Beit Immanuel, which is a Messianic center whose religious efforts are interesting  to observe but not all that relevant to the hostel aspects. It’s a cheap place to stay, clean, convenient if you want to be in Jaffa. And free Wi-Fi.

JVP delegation members will be blogging at the JVP site, if you’d like to read other takes on our visit. [Update: Alan Meyers has just posted a long account of what we've been doing so far, much more detailed than I expect to do here.]

And here, something unexpected: a tornado over the sea, heading for Tel Aviv, which we just ran up to see from Beit Immanuel’s roof. An omen?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Israel/Palestine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.