Ramallah and Bil’in From Up High
I met my Arabic teacher this morning on the top floor coffee shop in the building where Stars and Bucks is down closer to the bottom.
The view from the top was pretty impressive, both down at Al Manarah Square…
and out in several directions.
There was an especially good view of the Jewish settlement of Psagot overlooking Ramallah, which I also photographed two years ago from just beneath it.
After my class, and after picking up my nicely folded and ironed laundry (wishing I could just do it myself at some non-existent laundromat), I took a bumpy 30-minute service taxi to Bil’in for my two-day visit with Rateb. Rateb stayed at my place in Boston last year while he spoke at local universities about how the Separation Fence puts much of Bil’in’s land on the Israeli side for the benefit of expanding Jewish settlements.
After tea and fruit, I went up to the roof of Rateb’s house to get a view of the encroaching urban landscape. This photo shows Modiin Illit’s apartment buildings beyond the Separation Fence, with Bil’in in the foreground. Modiin Illit is now a large, ultra-Orthodox city.
This other neighborhood is further to the left, with construction in progress that Rateb says violates a court order.
The Israeli Supreme Court has also ordered the army to move the fence closer to the settlements in at least one location, but so far the fence hasn’t budged.
Here’s Rateb on his roof, Modiin Illit hazy in back.
Tomorrow is the weekly nonviolent protest march to the fence, which is routinely met by Israeli tear gas, rubber bullets, concussion grenades, and more. (See my 2006 description of one example, and related photos.) I’m hoping to avoid the latest Israeli creation, the “Skunk” liquid the soldiers spray on everyone in sight. It’s supposed to be incredibly foul smelling, and takes a week to wear off. The liquid, an Israeli creation, is likely to be a best-seller worldwide.
In the meantime, I’ll try to get to sleep while the music from a village wedding fills the air, apparently for the next couple of hours. During the half hour or so that I was there with Rateb and others, there was a non-stop debka presentation by 8 costumed young men for the groom, the only guy there wearing a tie. Maybe 150 or more men and boys watched, the kids running around, sometimes other men jumping in to dance until the groom danced with each of the performers and then again after that. This was an all-male event, the women elsewhere. The actual wedding and second wedding party take place tomorrow, Rateb tells me, more or less at the same as the regular Friday afternoon protest march.
The party’s ecstatic dance reminded me of an Orthodox Jewish wedding’s separate male and female dance sections. The debka reminded me of my own folk-dancing past, right down to the costumes, except of course for the Palestinian colors.
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