Dawn. Nice. Yawn, Shower, hotel breakfast, watch the sun on the horizon and the chatter of the hotel's Palestinian owners who sip tea while watching television. Last night Al-Jazeera was the only thing worth watching, although perhaps my opinion may have been different had I actually known arabic and was not able to only view the pictures. Although - Palestinian basketball was also being televised, and certainly that is a curiousity worth remembering across this world.







Outside an Arafat face glared and grinned at me from a squalid little park buried between a four lane motorway. Debris was scattered everywhere, but so was traffic and the human factor of so many people on their way to somewhere. Business is definitely not dead in Palestine; quite the opposite. Indeed these people are certainly not banished to their homes.
Downtown in the morning I wandered into the town square to see three tall backpacks in a tight clutter on the sidewalk, their human masters staring wide-eyed left and right. Tourists are getting through. Newly arrived, it seemed. I headed right and up some stairs, noting the large numbers of posters for the Al-Aqsa Brigade plastered on the walls and doors in Nablus, almost as much as Jenin.

With the aura of Nablus' morning markets fresh in my head, and having seen what I wanted, I caught a taxi and asked for them to take me out of here. We drove for a bit through the not too badly shaken city centre, but soon arrived to large motorways which were carved into pieces and dotted with large mounds of dirt. Bulldozers had been active here. Soon enough, to my right was a large structure which was badly damaged from something or other(tank shells? Bulldozers? Missiles? All three?), its concrete wall filled with holes as swiss cheese; spray painted across it was 'DEATH TO SHARON'. One block later I asked the taxi to slow down so I could get a photo.





Even though the large thorouhfare continued relatively uninterrupted in front of us, the taxi driver made a right turn up a narrow steep gravel road and wound into residential areas. Around thin hill roads, with children and goats scattering, we wound in the same direction. He made a left turn and then stopped abruptly - ahead of us I could see the back end of an Israeli APC. He sighed, put the car in reverse, and wound around another way. Eventually we stopped at a clutter of minibuses and taxis, and ushered me out. Hm, quite a short ride to reach Ramallah.

I played dumb, pointed in a direction, and asked where Ramallah was. They smiled and pointed in the same direction. I wasn't sure where I was going but soon enough discovered it - a sea of people, partitioned by a chain link fence. 20 metres from a small outpost the throngs of Palestinians waited, and waited, while they had their documents processed to enter and exit Nablus.

When my turn came I was treated with dignity. "Good Morning," the soldier said politely as he looked at my foreign passport. IDF may be cruel and callous to the Palestinians, yet when it comes to other nationalities they use the first rule: do unto others what they do unto you. Following their rules, I encountered no problems with them. And even in these tense times, days after a major suicide bombing attack perpetrated by people from this town, their treatment of people did not seem exessively disrespectful. Of course, that comment must be taken in the context of how inherently disrespectful apartheid is.

And indeed the word 'apartheid' would pop into my head again as I passed through the checkpoint, me thinking I am deep in the territory of the Palestinians; and indeed I was, yet what would happen to pass before me but a massive Israeli Egged bus, their bus system, all air-conditioned and finely painted, taking Israelis to and from their settlements perched on hills and surrounded by chain link here in the West Bank. Indeed the irony is immense: the Palestinians are corralled like cattle, forced into limited living areas by their conquerors; yet the conquerors themselves, living in such an insecure part of the world, unable to make peace with their conquered spoils, are forced into very similar gated communities. On the surface at least, this is what it appears to be.






A shared taxi took me along the Israeli road for the most part as we headed south to Ramallah. Ushered out of the taxi outside of that city as well, the checkpoint was well dug in and the city's perimetre very diligently encircled by a chain link fence. It felt like I was entering an amusement park - or a prison. Or a zoo.

Ramallah, through Jerusalem, to Tel Aviv.



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