Lenten listening: Around the Sun by R.E.M.

R.E.M. have often suffered from being widely listened to but rarely heard, and never more so than with this record. Almost universally panned, Around the Sun actually consists of invariably good songs, a point borne out by how they sound live. Admittedly, this not a band record as such, and its energy is sometimes exhausted by production which smoothes a few of the edges that make R.E.M R.E.M. Still, listen through the polish to some elegant and intimate lyrics, sweet if restrained melodies, and some of Stipe’s most giving vocal performances.

Best track: Wanderlust

Lenten listening: About a Boy by Badly Drawn Boy

I don’t buy many soundtracks. This one came bundled with my wife when we got married. But it’s actually rather excellent. The stand-out pop tunes, Silent Sigh and Something to Talk About, are eminently hummable, although it’s Damon Gough’s instinct for the cinematic that really makes this album rewarding on repeated listens. His is a playful, George Martin-esque kind of drama, best evidenced in the instrumentals but in fact definitive throughout, notably in the gorgeously orchestrated song Above You, Below Me.

Best track: Above You, Below Me

Lenten listening: Alone in the Dark by Steph Macleod

Steph Macleod’s voice is one of the most instantly recognisable I’ve heard. In this, his debut EP, he deals only obliquely with his artistically formative experience of coming off the streets, going dry and meeting Jesus. For me this increases its appeal rather than lessening it. The luscious title track is a tender acoustic love song, at once effortless and earnest. This is possibly surpassed in emotional intensity by track two, Grace, in the voice of a tormented killer wrestling with his conscience in isolation and fear, paranoid and desperate. And you know that when he switches from first to third person - “Is he gonna jump or shall we push him?” - he’s singing about voices he still has no difficulty hearing. Of course, an artist struggling with darkness is hardly a rarity, but it’s the combination of pain-forged rawness with an almost wide-eyed guilelessness as the colour returns to his world, that makes listening to Steph Macleod’s so life-giving.

Best track: Grace

Lenten listening: A-Lex by Sepultura

On this 18-track epic, bracing thrash gives way to unselfconscious silliness (Beethoven medley anyone?) yet remains thoroughly satisfying throughout. In both veins this is unmistakeable Sepultura, sounding more comfortable in their metallic skins than ever. Occasionally there is a tendency towards riff tetris, in which every 8-bar chunk slots a little predictably into the next, but somehow this never becomes enervating. In fact, as a unit it is the most coherent album Sepultura have released since the departure of Max Cavalera, and several of the songs deserve to be Seps classics.

Best track: The Treatment.

Lenten listening

Part of my Lent thing is to listen to music. Really listen. Listen like I listened when I was a kid and could only afford one CD every blue moon. Listen even when I think I've decided such and such an album isn't very good, but it's there so I should give it another go.

You see, sometimes I prefer discovering new music to listening to music I already have. So I've set myself a rule: I can't listen to any album beginning with B until I've listened to everything beginning with A. You'd be surprised how rewarding it's been already, having listened to seven albums beginning with A!

And strangely, something that someone said recently in the wake of Whitney Houston's death has stuck with me, about how we tend to disrespect and certainly fail to appreciate the artists that impart colour to our lives. So I'm going to post some reviews here and on Amazon to say thanks! Why not?

Obama's monumental error

If you'd asked me even three weeks ago whether Palestinians seemed interested in the statehood bid at the UN, I'd have said not really. But it seems that America's masochistic diplomacy has quickened the long dormant Palestinian street.

Jericho residents march in support of the 194 bid, Wednesday.

When I was first in Palestine in 2004, politics was regularly the first thing people talked about. Over the past couple of years people's weariness and justified cynicism seemed to have won the day. But during the past couple of weeks, there has been a palpable change, people immediately asking me what I think about the statehood bid, and increasingly going on to express their own qualified support for it. Barnaby Phillips on Al Jazeera just cited a poll showing 80% support for the bid.

This support is invariably coupled with an almost amused reference to Obama's rapid descent from 'Yes we can!' to 'No you can't'. His sanctimonious lecture about a shortcut to peace was not only offensive in its replication of Lieberman's narrative, reminiscent in fact of his pre-election AIPAC speech, but it was painfully patronising. People here know that they are contending with facts on the ground not with UN decisions on paper, and the 89 binding resolutions Israel has ignored testify to the limitations of the latter.

"We want a state in Palestine, not a seat in New York" one person in Jericho told me as he strapped a flag to a lamppost.

But what are their options? As is often said, you can't talk about the division of a pie with an interlocutor whose mouth is full and whose hands are already on the remainder. Obama dismissing the school bully and the little kid to sort it out by themselves is an outrageous snub that people feel acutely here.

Worse than this, instead of punishing Netanyahu for his intransigence and demonstrating that US aid comes at a price, it has given him free reign to pursue that which he has single-mindedly pursued since taking office: a state of play on the ground in which Palestine is literally nothing but a nearby market for Israeli goods, populated by people with no rights and no representation. To say this is unsustainable is, sadly, optimistic.

A balloon flying over Bethlehem Sunday.

Of course, the statehood bid was never in itself going to solve this, and poses more questions than it answers, not least with regard to the representation of diaspora Palestinians. However, it has successfully demonstrated the imbalance of power, the sheer asymmetry of the imagined conflict here, and the extent to which Israel has all the cards.

America's hapless and weak intervention has not disguised this reality. Contrast Obama's sermon, or that of the sickeningly mealy mouthed David Cameron, with the morally consistent, forthright, and common-sensical speech of Turkish PM Erdogan. No-one will be fooled. Even the Israeli press has been confused, assuming there will be a sting in the tail. I'm not so hopeful.

But America's increasingly incompetent support for manifest injustice may have the effect of galvanising a previously wearied and divided people for whatever comes next.

Persistence and resistance in Palestinian Christian uses of scripture

The metaphor of the Bible as a contested territory is not original. NT Wright uses it powerfully at the start of his epic New Testament and the People of God. In the light of this image, it is possible to see the attempts of Palestinian Christians to settle upon an interpretation of scripture, one that does not concede to the interpretations of those who think their land really belongs to the Jews, as an important textual intifada.

Arguably, however, this struggle - as with many resistance movements - threatens to make the most impoverished even less secure in their textual land. The Palestinian farmer turfed off their land is less concerned by where borders fall and sovereignty is asserted than by retaining the rights derived from the fact that he grew up on the land, has made the land fruitful, and expects his children to inherit the fruit.

Likewise, the textual felah is the Palestinian Christian who does not have the time or language with which to engage in protracted debates about the meaning of various texts, but who cares deeply about the Bible as addressed to them as Christians, and who performs it every Sunday through liturgy. This person is under threat as much from the exclusive focus upon interpretation as from a specific exclusive interpretation itself.

Performing scripture in worship is to claim it as one's own canon. To say 'it means so-and-so...and that's all that matters' is to rob others with different interpretations, and to rob those for whom interpretation is secondary. Contesting the Bible as territory, subject to the interpretations of the most gifted theologians, is perhaps necessary, but it is not the only way to claim this land. Does not the person born in a land, tilling it despite its rocks and thorns, have an inalienable claim to it that does not depend upon the territorial compromises of the powerful? Can Palestinian theologians begin by affirming this relationship while engaging the interpretative enemy? Can we say at the outset that the person who uses scripture to worship God has an inalienable claim to that scripture that is not dependent upon their intellectual assessment of it?

One evangelical friend summed it up like this for me:

"When you interpret only, the text is away from you - you don't own it. When you chant it you own it. From time to time I go to the Orthodox for a wedding or funeral, and when I saw them chant Psalm 91 they were with tears in their eyes. For them if it is about Israel, it is about them. The Old Testament is their text as much as the New."

Bethlehem's "marginalised minority"?

Rowan Williams recently described the Christians of Bethlehem as a "marginalised minority". This is not only incorrect, but possibly a damaging comment to those it aims to help.

Of course, the Archbish should be commended for using his good offices to highlight the difficulties Christians face in a number of places in the region, about which he clearly knows a great deal. But to characterise Bethlehem as "very definitely a place where Christians are a marginalised minority"seems to be gratuitous hyperbole.

Certainly, some Christians here do contribute anecdotes to a narrative of persecution for which there will be a ready and well-resourced audience in the West. This position may be the outworking of frightening or alienating experiences, of which there are undoubtedly some, though very often even these concrete examples are drawn from Jerusalem's charged melting pot, not Bethlehem. What's more, in other Palestinian towns such as Nablus, which used to have a healthy Christian minority, Christian communities may indeed face extinction, and Christians here are aware of that.

But it seems to me that the Palestinian Authority and other stakeholders in Palestinian public life bend over backwards to demonstrate the distinctively Christian character of Bethlehem and its satellite towns of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala. Regardless of more altruistic motivations, it would be politically masochistic for them to do otherwise as the Palestinian national cause benefits a great deal internationally from being recognised as more than a Muslim struggle.

This political will might be demonstrated by three very different examples: the official and ecumenical endorsement of Bethlehem Bible College's 'Christ at the Checkpoint' Conference last year at which Salam Fayyad himself spoke; the reservation of the Mayoralty of the town to a Christian; and the appearance of Hamas officials at the Syriac Orthodox church in Bethlehem immediately after the massacres in Iraq and Egypt over the Christmas season explicitly to reject sectarian violence. Whether or not this is the outworking of genuine fraternal feeling is to some extent beside the point.

I might tentatively add another impression from the field. Where I have heard Christians express a sense of insecurity in Bethlehem specifically, it often seems somewhat reminiscent of the kind of defensiveness of established local populations in the face of immigration. The reason for the loss of a Christian majority here is of course related to the respective fertility of different communities and to emigration, but one mustn't forget that the population of Bethlehem was swollen by mostly Muslim refugees in 1948. The 'old families' of Bethlehem do not always look with affection upon them, and even some in-comer Christians drawn from families who arrived in the 20th Century have reported ill-feeling toward them from the established Christian families of Bethlehem. Tellingly, the attitude of Nablus Christians, among whom I lived for a couple of months in 2004, was never as defensive as that which sometimes I encounter here.

Promoting this narrative is risky. I recall recently listening to priest Jamal Khader (also Dean of Bethlehem University) assert the need to think of Palestinian Christians here not as a minority at all. I understood him to be saying that Western and local Christian anxiety about the plight of Palestinian Christians in particular, as opposed to Palestinians in general, may contribute to their 'othering' in the eyes of Muslims, and thus potentially undermine their persistence in the land which is presumably the Archbishop's goal. Some Christians may have a short-term interest in being thus othered, but Father Jamal would suggest, I think, that most do not.

Christian Palestinian sociologist Bernard Sabella has found that Christians leave the town for one overwhelming reason: economic hardship as a result of the occupation. This is wholly borne out by my interviews and informal conversations with Christians here, even those who are defensive and most aggressively sectarian. The Archbishop wishes to help Christians here, clearly, and in order to do this he must continue to challenge the Occupation and the theologies which support it, without giving succour to the defensiveness and Islamophobia which can prove dangerously divisive.

Multiculturalism revisited

The massacre of dozens of young people in Norway was evidently motivated by some perverted attempt to protect a national, European or even Christendom 'identity' in the face of a perceived encroachment of an Islam bent on world domination.

Bearing in mind how reminiscent this paranoia is of early 20th Century anti-Semitism, we should be very careful to reflect on how our dominant discourses may contribute to the formation of modes of thinking which make hatred, fear and ultimately extremist violence, even mass violence, seem necessary to some. 

I’m not simply talking about the obvious candidates, those whom Breivik cited in his manifesto such as jihadwatch et. al. Europe’s leaders of late have played a populist frostiness towards immigrants, and attacking a government’s laxity in the face of immigration has become the norm for oppositions. Of course, leaving aside France where a disturbing authoritarianism has taken hold of the mainstream, the consensus is not explicitly anti-immigrant or culturally chauvinist as such. When Merkel announces that “multiculturalism has failed” or Cameron proclaims its consequences as deep segregation, it’s hard outright to dismiss their thinking. 

Where they transgress however is in insisting upon adoption of a centrally-defined identity as a prerequisite to immigration. The right to cohabit in a space becomes about being one sort of person and not another sort, rather than abiding by the law which demarcates officially acceptable behaviour. That this provides fertile soil for racist ideology and fear-filled hatred is clear. 

Furthermore, there is a naivete to the post-multiculturalism consensus as a measure of multiculturalism is a fact of life. Taking culture to be all of the socially communicated symbols and norms a person integrates into their psychological development, the cultures of an Anglican aristocrat in Yorkshire, a Liverpudlian Catholic docker and a North London Jewish shopkeeper in 1910 would have seemed as mutually unintelligible (and potentially threatening to one another) as any of the combinations in our globalised 21st Century. The interaction of such different people has led to the demise of some group identities and the flourishing of new ones, and that's natural.

Cameron likes to allude to hospitality which involves a measure of reciprocity. He’s right, but do we want people, in return for hospitality (a right which of course has been won through the blood of colonised peoples), to pledge allegiance to the Queen or assert a centrally-defined British identity which will be as foreign to the people on my terraced street in Insch as to Afar nomads? Of course not, and the point is that it is the people on my street that will be actually providing hospitality, not ‘Britain’ or ‘Europe’.

The goal is not integration or assimilation and certainly not segregation, but is willing participation in local community life, perhaps even through the expression of origin cultures. This is no less difficult than it is necessary, and it certainly cannot be enforced from the centre. Instead, it falls to local communities to find ways of including the other, making space for and hearing from new arrivals and working out how different cultures can benefit one another. While it is unclear how national or European-wide policy-making can make this happen, unlike perhaps more accountable and democratic local government, I believe that the prevailing national identity discourse is hugely risky. It makes this kind of urgent hospitality to the other seem unnecessary or even treacherous, and a change of tone is overdue.

Chutzpah

I can't quite believe what we just saw between Obama and Netanyahu. The former's careful diplomatic hospitality was met with a forthright and quite unmistakeable snub.

Every issue with which the so-called peace negotiations are apparently concerned was effectively pushed off the table. Obama's call last night for contiguous 1967 (-based) borders was flatly contradicted by the PM. Obama's recognition that the US will have to deal with whomsoever the Palestinians elect was met with Netanyahu again contradicting him by saying there can be no peace agreement with, er, the people they're fighting.

Meanwhile, the biggest refugee problem in the world was equated with the counter-expulsion of Jews by Arab countries who were of course 'absorbed' by a country needing an ethnoreligiously defined Jewish majority. Plucky little Israel was invoked despite the manifest military supremacy which they enjoyed from day one. And of course, the fact that Palestinians are still being forced from their land to make way for the last old fashioned Eurocolonialist project was completely ignored. It was a masterclass in shameless hasbara.

Had you told me this is what Netanyahu was going to do beforehand I would have said great - Obama won't stand for another such insult, surely?

I wish I could be sure.

Palestine: Obama's second chance

Obama's much lauded 2009 speech in Cairo was encouraging if only because it ended the 'them and us' rhetoric which characterised two terms of 'crusading' Bush incitement.

And precisely for this reason the complete lack of initiative shown by his regime on the Middle East has been as much an insult to the intelligence of Palestinians as it has been a disappointment to their aspirations.

Despite Netanyahu's constant nose-thumbing, the US has singularly failed to reign in the vulgar - at times brutal - excesses of a militarised state which feels it can act with impunity, let alone advance an idea which promises to break the deadlock.

Obama's speech today certainly fails to do the latter, but we should perhaps dare to hope that it hints at the former. All he is doing is taking America closer to positions established in international law, and more importantly, to the moral claims of people who have been systematically forced from their lands by American tax money.

Streamers and fireworks are of course not in order, but contra Hamas, Obama has made an implicit promise long absent in American presidential discourse: we will not accept or support Israel's effective claim to Palestinian lands occupied since 1967.

We must not expect an end to the mealy-mouthed urging of restraint on both sides or the chumminess with a man whose hands are soaked in Palestinian blood and whose mind appears addled by fear and power. Still, rattled perhaps by the moral weight of Sunday's protests, he has drawn a line in the sand which is clear to all sides.

A promise gives him a second chance, and if he keeps it he may well lose his office. He would prove himself a more impressive character for it.

Intifada 2.0?

Black flags in advance of Nakba Day in Bethlehem this week.

According to news reports and coffee shop chatter, forthcoming Nakba Day demonstrations will launch a new intifada. Thanks to social networking, this time it's organised from the outset.

Facebook groups and apparently viral SMS messages are calling for Sunday's demos to be the start of what proponents hope will be the Palestinian Spring. There's even a promo video.

Palestinian Muslims pray on the pavement after Israeli police bar all under-45s from the Old City of Jerusalem today.

Following the qualified successes of the Arab Spring, Palestinians are being encouraged to recommence the concerted resistance characteristic of the first and second intifadas and, despite the reservations of many, some are hoping and believing that this time it really could work. The inspiration from Egypt is that no repression can be total in the electronic age - although Mubarak wasn't quite as adept at e-Hasbara as his Israeli counterparts.

In any case, there are two problems with this. The first is that it may just be what Netanyahu has been crying out for: a chance to delegitimise Palestinian attempts at declaring statehood (though Palestinians will point out that statehood in a territory as unviable as the West Bank cannot really be worth the wait). The second is that, despite the new unity deal, Palestinians do not share an endgame other than desiring the freedom to live normal lives.

Oh, and there's a third problem. Fatah/Hamas. One appears compromised and visionless, and one is etched on the mind for its defenestration of opponents.

The ball is obviously in Israel's court and, as Stephen Sizer points out, the question it still won't answer is this: of the Occupied Territories, Democracy, and Jewish statehood, which are you willing to give up? Hopefully, the Third Intifada will force the question rather than burying it.

Apologies to Tam

When Tam Dalyell described Tony Blair as 'by far the worst' Prime Minister he'd observed from the Commons benches, I put it down to (not uncharacteristic) hyperbole. After all, my first job as a sabbatical-elect at Edinburgh was to take him to task for describing Blair as 'unduly influenced by a Jewish cabal'.

However, on Blair I should have taken him more seriously. In addition to what we already knew, only this week we learned the following:

• That, while telling Bush that his government was intent on regime change in Iraq, he was telling his officers quite the opposite.
• That his government was lending material support to brutal suppression of dissent in Gaza.
• That his government's unprecedented civil liberties encroachments were, surprise surprise, unnecessary - a 'symbol of hypocrisy' around the world, no less.

And now he is lecturing the Egyptians, whose government's oppression his did nothing to alleviate, on the benefits of gradual modernisation.

Tam, you were absolutely right. And, likewise, you were right when you said: 'that since Mr Blair [went] ahead with his support for a US attack without unambiguous UN authorisation, he should be branded as a war criminal and sent to The Hague.' That he used a progressive social democratic movement to do all of this compounds the crime.

But, rather than writing the man off as a vicious lying weasel with blood on his hands, we should seriously ask whether his messiah complex clouded his judgement. Can 'diminished responsibility' be taken into account in a war crimes trial?

UK won't recognise unilaterally declared state?

Putting aside the fact that the two-state solution is less viable now than airborne pigs, Alistair Burt's comments that Britain won't 'recognize a [Palestinian] state that does not have a capital, and doesn’t have borders' is absurd.

For a start, one doesn't fail to recognise Eritrea because it has a border dispute with Ethiopia. Statehood and final status are different things. Burt's comments are even more preposterous in the light of Israel's own failure to define its borders, while the UK effectively recognises Tel Aviv as Israel's capital, in denial of its claims to Jerusalem. One should assume that, according to Burt's logic, Israel shouldn't be recognised as a state.

Of course, all of this ignores the facts on the ground. What kind of state would Salam Fayyad be declaring? Would residents of the West Bank settlements accept residency of Palestine? Would Palestine have control of its own borders, roads and natural resources? Would they control tourism on the Dead Sea? If not, then you can call it a state or, in the words of one 1990s Israeli government hawk, 'fried chicken', it's no real change.

If the international community genuinely wants to see a two state solution work, negotiated or unilaterally declared, then it will involve material support for a potentially bloody transition, and there doesn't seem to be any enthusiasm for that.

Given up on the Grauniad

Has the proudly independent Guardian recreated itself in the image of any Murdoch paper circa-2002?

I fear so. Take today's headline:

Revealed: Lib Dems planned before election to abandon tuition fees pledge

It turns out that the Lib Dems considered what would happen if they ended up in coalition talks with the Tories and decided tuition fees wouldn't be a deal-breaker. Judging by what they managed to get out of the Tories, I'd say fair enough.

The Guardian headline of course paints the Lib Dems as conniving sons of bitches who screwed us to get into power. But this compromising is precisely the kind of politics that they, and we Greens, have effectively been campaigning for by supporting PR, and they seem reasonably good at it. Labour were authoritarian, militaristic and incompetent, and their worst policies were quickly overturned. Yet the left which they completely betrayed seems to be running back to them, with the Guardian leading the charge. It used to be the Times that would be the New Labour banner-waver, but the Guardian has made its peace with the pseudo-left simply because they aren't Tory. That they're echoing the Daily Mail in bashing the Lib Dems should give us some pause.

Don't get me wrong, the economic direction of the Coalition is, I think, very dangerous. I would much prefer to be criticising this. Instead I find myself defending the Lib Dems from misguided criticism that threatens to end the prospect of electoral reform for a generation.

New blog

Just to let you know that I'm starting a new Anthropology-oriented blog here. I don't intend it to be too weighty or dense but more of a repository of reflections from the field. Hope you like it.

I haven't yet decided whether or not to keep boxologies up and running.

The normalisation of fascism in France?

I don't use the F-word lightly. I have no wish to dilute the horror of fascist ideologies by associating them with just-a-wee-bit conservative politicians: to do so is too easy and probably counterproductive. But from this distance the current French regime seems clearly to be 'on the spectrum'. Fascism views the nation as a natural reality possessed of an absolute identity, and is willing to deploy coercive violence against dissident individuals to retain this identity. Simply put, the law is being deployed to reinforce the notion that some people groups are the right kind and others are the wrong kind.

At the same time as the high-profile Roma scandal is making the headlines, the suppression of the Israeli boycott campaign progresses apace. I received an email from the French EuroPalestine campaign which highlights the forthcoming trial of Alima Boumediene-Thiery, a member of the French Senate, because she participated in a BDS action in Paris a year ago. This constitutes, apparently, "incitement to racial hatred" as well as a breach of the curious statute: “discrimination against the Israeli nation”. The notorious plaintiff is Sammy Ghozlan whose apparent assessment of Judge Richard Goldstone is that he is "scum" and "a bastard", and who compares Obama to Pharoah who "transformed the Jewish people into slaves". He's entitled to express his opinions, but the irony is his astoundingly mainstream crusade to silence the BDS campaign.

The trial is something of a test case and some fear it is politically motivated. Boumediene-Thiery has been active on issues relating to immigration, Islam and Islamophobia, prison conditions and so on, all rather hot issues in Europe's latest pariah state. She is also an outspoken critic of successive Israeli regimes, having secured the successful vote in the European Parliament in 2002 on suspending the preferential commercial agreement between Europe and Israel.

Meanwhile, activists themselves are due to be in court to defend (wait for it) the posting of this video on their EuroPalestine site. Apparently Ma'asara mayor Mahmoud Suleiman's comments are "criminal" and EuroPalestine are therefore complicit.

Sympathisers in France are being asked to repost the video on their sites and being urged to write to the State Prosecutor requesting that they too can stand trial.

Peace talks, you say?

The majority of Palestinians have no representation at the talks.
Israel’s representatives are currently engaged in acts of war against the Palestinian people even as they sit at the table.
Abbas has nothing to give or concede except Palestinian legal rights – everything else has already been conceded.
Netanyahu has much to gain in making a gesture toward peace and blaming Abbas and coalition partners when nothing happens.
Unlike the Mitchell who brokered the Good Friday Agreement, this Mitchell has done nothing to address the asymmetry of power and voice.
Any sustainable two-state final status agreement would require third party military reinforcement, and no-one’s offered it.

Doing the right thing

Earlier this week Caroline Lucas asked the Government whether it intends to launch a public inquiry into the fatal toxic waste dump in Côte d'Ivoire in 2006, in which British companies are implicated. She received a dismissive negative from Richard Benyon, a DEFRA Under Secretary of State.

Just thought you'd like to know.

The Islamic Republic plays catch up

So we heard nothing from Tehran for most of last week as Turkey stole their thunder in the rhetorical war against Zionism. And what's more, Turkey commanded the world's sympathy in a way Iran somehow never has.

Now they're attempting to catch up, realising that being caught on the wrong side of this spat makes them look ridiculous. Unfortunately, it puts the Gaza protestors in a tricky diplomatic position. Ahmadinejad and his completely counterproductive sabre-rattling is the object of scorn among many Palestinians I've spoken to, whose memories of being a pawn in an regional scramble for a piece of the pie have not faded. "They're Zionists too", as one friend put it, referring to the region's powers.

The Free Gaza Movement will surely never accept the cover of the Iranians, but such an offer may create a damaging fault-line between those who believe that such a military defence is an overdue and legitimate assertion of Palestinian sovereignty, and those whose desire is for continued nonviolent civil disobedience in the hope that, as with South Africa, the truth will out. If even one skipper decides he wants to take the Iranians up on their offer, an exchange in the Eastern Med between Israel and Iran seems dangerously likely.

Iran's intervention could therefore be the Macguffin that advances the plot of Israeli victimhood in the international community, and consigns this moment of momentum and opportunity to history. But we shall see.

Peretz: Israel not as bad as Iraq suicide bombers

Marty Peretz's remarkable article in the New Republic shows just how close to the bottom of the barrel Israel's apologists have to scrape this week, and we should perhaps be encouraged by that.

He writes: "I am sorry to break the gloom, but I don’t think that the death of nine highly aware intruders into a war zone is actually a tragedy. The death by suicide bombing of an old woman in a mosque in Iraq or of more than 75 people at a volleyball game in Pakistan … these are true human catastrophes. But the fate of the Islamic jihadists was a mishap, nothing more than a mishap".

The number of errors is striking: the boats were not in a war zone, they were in international waters; the dead were nonviolent activists acting in self-defence, although if he wants to call this "jihad" so be it; thirdly, contrary to his suggestion that nobody would say Israel started it, to claim anything other than that Israel began the fighting is ludicrous. In any case, when does the fighting begin? When the concussion grenades are fired? When pirates actually board a ship? Or when those on the ship attempt to prevent their access?

That such a wilfully lazy presentation of events should be allowed in the proudly Zionist NR is no surprise. But it is astounding that an article should be printed in which Israel is being compared favourably with suicide bombers in Iraq, even if such an implication is presumably inadvertent.

So let's spell it out for Mr Peretz. The suicide bombers in Iraq are the enemies of every government in the world, they are viewed by the international community of the empowered as criminals and they are being pursued by the world's mightiest military. Israel, meanwhile, is the largest recipient of US aid, a "good friend" (as we are reminded with nauseating regularity) of the Western economic powers, a trading partner, and, as the refrain goes, 'the Middle East's only democracy'.

Israel: 'the West' in miniature?
Which brings us to the key point. I have heard Israelis describe their borders as the point at which the West meets the East. In an unabashed claim to orientalist we-feeling, Israel portrays itself as 'our' outpost 'over there'.

The cultivation of solidarity between Israel and their Euro-American allies on cultural grounds can be observed in self-presentation at home and abroad, and this is not wholly cynical. Israel's image of itself is as a 'Jewish state', and Jews and Judaism have contributed immeasurably to our cultural life (as they have, incidentally, to Islamic and Middle Eastern culture). What's more, the powerful in Israel are almost exclusively Euro-Americans. The symbiotic link between Israel and the West is manifested materially but it is bound up deeply in a shared imagination.

But in its Zionist incarnation, as Akiva Orr ably demonstrates, Israel retains less of the Jewish than of the imperial. Zionism makes more sense as a Eurocolonialist endeavour than as a nation's pursuit of self-determination. Its ability to use the rule of law toward ethnic cleansing is, I suppose, the civilisationist project distilled.

And that, alongside the material support of our governments, is why honesty with regard to Israel is of the utmost urgency: we are very directly complicit in their abuses. I have argued elsewhere that Zionism simply could not have prevailed without the support of Westerners, especially enthusiastic Christians. So when we criticise Israel it is not because they behave worse than the Burmese Junta or Kim Jong Il or Al-Qaida militants. It is because of our investment in their crimes.

The parallels with apartheid South Africa are compelling and we should perhaps heed Yitzhak Leor's bold argument that Israel's is the more barbaric of the two systems. The resilience of black resistance was eventually met by the robust (if derided) support of people in the most complicit countries, including the UK. Monday's horror may yet prove not to have been in vain if it motivates the kind of clear thinking necessary to draw Israel's day-to-day strangling of the invisible other, and our prejudicial sympathy, into the light.

Marty Peretz has lent us a hand.

The Flotilla's last stand

You may know that one ship, the MV Rachel Corrie, was delayed in port for technical reasons. She has departed and you can follow her progress here.

Will this stand?

Israel has long used terror on the populations under its control in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This I have witnessed with my own eyes and the historical record is pretty clear. And yet I confess to being astounded by this morning's attack of a Free Gaza Movement convoy in international waters, in which 10 humanitarian activists appear to have been killed.

Israel's public information on fatal incidents is often wrong, and often changes once the facts become undeniable, as happened with the killing of two Palestinians at Awarta in the spring. But on this occasion even their immediate spin is feeble. The people whose boat we just boarded in international waters to thwart their effort to bring humanitarian aid into Gaza again..."were dead set on confrontation"!

This is not a typical oppressive state. This is not Saudi Arabia, North Korea or Burma, whose regimes brutalise their own. This is a belligerent anomaly whose agenda is the slow but irrevocable crushing of those who dare to have roots in the land they have conquered, who will be starved out if they cannot be driven out, who will be legislated off their land if they don't accept the law of the almighty incomers.

The story of states is almost always soaked in blood: Israel's birth is nothing compared to that of the USA. Our countries have no moral high ground. But if we care about justice and freedom we should no longer be cowards in the face of the vile acts perpetrated in the name of the Middle East's only "democracy". If Obama has any guts, this is his moment to prove it.

Freedom and watermelons

Caroline Lucas described the 2010 Westminster manifesto as "left-wing plus", an apt description of a boldly redistributive platform, causing some to compare the party to a watermelon: green on the outside but deep red where it matters.

We should indeed view our party's contribution in essentially materialist terms, concerned firstly with the most sustainable solution to the basic economic problem of scarce resources and (supposedly) limitless demand. What's more, if we lose sight of the materialist grounds of politics there is the danger of becoming dangerously authoritarian or quixotic and irrelevant.

And I would add that, if we are socialists, we should be quite unrecognisable as such to the rhetoricians of class struggle, of big, centralised statism, and of bureaucratic unionism. We should not be a party that despises markets, neither should we deny the elegance of the price mechanism, even if we are rightly suspicious of their use in capitalist quasi-libertarianism. In fact, it is perfectly possible to articulate our aspirations in libertarian terms, because there is nothing neutral or natural about the disconnect of people from land, of wealth from the production of resources. Any interventions to restore this link could justifiably be viewed in terms of responding to market failure.

Importantly the shared core of Green politics is actually quite simple: a belief in entropy, a belief that growth is far from an adequate indicator of prosperity, that we now have to refuse to keep growing and growing if we don't want to undermine the ability of our species to live freely and securely on planet earth. Is this socialist? Well it's anti-capitalist, but I'd not like to go much further than that. The manifesto was exciting precisely because it took such a broad view of freedom, understanding that sanctifying economic growth in a world governed by entropy is a system of collective masochism in which the poorest suffer first.

Of course, the Green Party should be a place wherein we find space for the conversations that are not being had elsewhere, about the effective hierarchy of rights, about personhood (animal rights, abortion, bioethics), about the role of nations and supranationalism in a world that needs localism more than ever.

However any policy positions in these areas shouldn't define us as much as our profoundly countercultural economic position. Beyond that, our other distinctive could be hospitality to a genuine plurality of views.

Comrades, get a grip

ID cards have been scrapped. The third runway at Heathrow has been scrapped. Capital gains tax will be restored to 40%. In 2011 those earning under £10,000 per year will be removed from income tax. Electoral reform is on the table.

Had any of these measures been taken six months ago, the libertarian left would have been celebrating a more enlightened turn for the Labour party. Instead, the Labour party stood against each of these policies, excepting their deathbed conversion to a slightly more proportional system of voting.

I confess, it sticks in the throat a little that the Tories will be delivering all of this instead, but it has less to do with some Disraeli-esque calculation on Cameron’s part than with the genuinely accommodating nature of an unprecedented coalition deal. Even if it’s all blue from here until 2015, Labour simply would never have legislated for these policies and we should allow ourselves a moment’s celebration.

So why are my left-leaning friends so downcast about the new order? The party that took us into an illegal war with Iraq is out of office, but instead of giving ourselves a few days to celebrate their demise, talk has immediately turned to a Lib Dem sell-out and Tory cuts. As a neat bit of PR, the Greens are offering a year's free membership to anyone switching from the other parties, those who may feel disaffected by the new Liberal-Conservative pact. One Green friend of mine posted as her Facebook status that it’s “as if the past 13 years never happened”.

It did happen, and it was disastrous. For all the improvements in human rights legislation and public services, we emerge from years of bloody foreign policy, authoritarian domestic policy, and an economic policy that was hopelessly short sighted. It's over, and my heart is glad!

But perhaps this is all secondary to the larger point that our new government is based on a new pluralism, a new inclusiveness that says ‘21st Century’ to me more clearly than any hate crimes act ever will. For all the cynical (if enjoyably witty) comment in the press this morning, I experienced the Cameron-Clegg 'love-in' as a refreshing change from vicious sniping, if nothing else.

I'm not going to get carried away. The Tory brand is rightfully beneath contempt in Scotland. If Thatcherism stole England’s soul, it battered and bruised our social body. But good policies are good policies, and bad policies are bad policies. So far, a mere 48 hours in, the latter have replaced the former, and I’m unashamed to be pleased at that.

On the other hand

I suppose it's possible that Labour support could rally in the wake of this decision, in which case it could work for the Union. It'll be interesting to see how the SNP play it.

Con-Dem Nation?

The Tory-Lib Dem coalition was by no means my preferred option, but it was always the most likely option. I regret it a little, but there are several reasons for considering it a potential advance for British politics. Well... we'll come back to the 'British' bit.

My main regret about the last few days is actually the manner in which a largely honourable and dignified process has been spun in the press (with the help of Malcolm Rifkind et al) as some kind of grubby deal. The angry mob has been exercised on internet forums and news comments threads, most definitely representing little Britain, not Big Society.

For coalition talks in a deeply adversarial political culture they were, to my mind, both genial and efficient. But that's the past. More than anything I am delighted that a deal could be struck between quite hostile parties without it deteriorating into some kind of slagging match (again, excepting Rifkind and his ilk). It is the best advert for proportional representation, for consensual government and for a political culture of inclusion.

On the nitty gritty, it remains to be seen how stable this deal will be in the long term. Liberal Conservative Social Democrats. That doesn't quite work for me. On the up side, the sun is shining on our civil liberties for the first time since 2001. New Labour have been the most authoritarian and invasive regime of modern times, and I do not mourn their passing in the least. Meanwhile, with nothing but a rizla between the Tories and Labour on foreign policy, it's excellent that the Lib Dems, whose voice on war and international relations has been by far the most enlightened in the Commons (perhaps with the exception of George Galloway) will be there to critique any militaristic project at its earliest stage.

Further, the concessions that the Liberal Democrats have gained from the Tories are very encouraging. The ludicrous increase of the inheritance tax threshold has been ditched, alongside the £150 marriage "gesture", and more significantly, we are beginning to take baby steps toward electoral reform. We wait with bated breath to see what else they managed to secure.

On the other hand, most of the ugly features of the old politics are still with us. There's little stomach among either party for the giant strides required to prepare for a post-carbon, post-peak oil economy, the electoral reform on the table is nothing but a gesture at this stage, and many will feel their vote was doubly wasted with this outcome. Meanwhile, we may see a dramatic withdrawal of money from the UK economy in order to cut the deficit with devastating effects for stability, alongside the inevitable and painful cuts in public services.

Perhaps the most significant change, however, will be the effect upon the Union. It is hard to see Liberal Democrats north of the border partying tonight. Perhaps Clegg can be so successful as a Deputy PM that Lib Dem losses on ideological grounds are made up by gains on pragmatic, managerial grounds. Even so, we now have a huge gulf between the political centres in London and Edinburgh respectively, and softly unionist Labour supporters are going to consider independence with new eyes as they get used to being out of power in both nations. The Lib Dems federalist plans may struggle to find a home in the new order.

It may not be the condemnation of the Scottish Lib Dems, but of the United Kingdom? It really could be.

Progressive alliance

Assuming this alliance goes ahead, I'm just not sure sidelining the SNP is very sensible. On several key concerns the SNP and the LDs especially agree. This will be something of a red rag to Salmond's bull (no double entendre intended) and creates a second front which the alliance would have to defend.

Rifkind says...

"The idea that the two parties that suffered most in this election, that were rejected by the electorate, that in the case of the Labour party lost a hundred of its seats, should put together an illegitimate government, this is the Robert Mugabe style of politics. It's exactly what Mugabe did you know, he lost the election and scrabbled to hold onto power."

Yes, Mr Rifkind, Labour cadres are currently beating and murdering poor Tory activists all over the country, their leader is unable to pose any challenge due to widespread intimidation and having been violently attacked himself, and there's no free media to represent their cause.

Silly, silly man.

Quiet times and noisy times

Those familiar with the Evangelical Lexicon will have encountered the term "quiet time". It's a big deal. In fact, I once had a conversation with an evangelical girl who demonstrated that her Anglican upbringing wasn't really Christian because she hadn't known what a quiet time was.

Now it's a bit of a misnomer - it doesn't exactly do what it says on the tin. "Quiet" is not merely an adjective here, it's part of a proper noun, as in a quiet time, wherein, rather than being still and listening Quaker-style, the emphasis is often on cramming as many Bible verses as possible, and praying, by which I mean petitioning God.

Hence, in my evangelical days, I got unbearably tied up in issues of propositional assent as I read, the quiet of quiet time wholly absent as my reason waged war noisily on itself. Even when I had the energy to get beyond a few verses of morally suspect quasi-history, clunking translations of 3000 year-old poetry, or letters that clearly weren't written to me, I would think: but do I really believe it?

Reading Brian Brock's 'Singing the Ethos of God', I encountered his exhortation to have a "first-person" relationship with scripture. For the one who claims its heritage, the Bible is not an object consisting of truth claims but an ensemble of our community's stories and songs. Participation in these stories does not require propositional assent but in fact it requires a kind of active use, an active embrace, whether this is one of acceptance or of resistance, like that of a wrestler.

So I tried it, singing a number of Psalms each day, and the effect is remarkable. It is not that singing glosses over the verses one would rather didn't exist, but it opens up particular sorts of human experience as inhabitable worlds. I vocalise another's resistance to God and it becomes mine; my voice expresses another's hatred of a vicious foe, and I enter their world as guest; I revel in another's experience of intimacy with God and, as the inheritor of their song, so I find intimacy.

Brock views the best engagement with scripture to be this inhabiting of its thought world, eschewing the usual attempt to bring it into ours as a textbook. His approach recovers something our literate culture has largely lost by objectifying texts as something one either 'believes' or rejects.

In biblical terms, this is a form of idolatry, and thanks to Brian Brock I'm having a go at repentance.

Predictions

OK, this is a mug's game but as a bit of a geek it's incumbent on me to have a guess at what we'll wake up to on Friday morning:

1. Deep down I fear the Tories may get a small absolute majority, with their polls performance apparently hardening and the Lib Dems faltering. But in virtue of Brown's last stand I shall optimistically give the Conservatives 286 seats, leaving Labour on 254 and the Liberal Democrats on a healthy 81 seats, with about the same vote share as Labour.

2. Seats I'm personally interested in include Dudley South, which I'll call for the Tories; Gordon which will stay Lib Dem with a big swing to the SNP and a smaller one to the Tories; Aberdeen South, which I'll controversially return to Labour's Anne Begg; and Edinburgh South which Fred Mackintosh will take for the Lib Dems, with Labour dropping to third place.

3. As for the rest I am cautiously optimistic that enough Labour and LD voters will switch to the Greens to keep out the Tories in Brighton Pavilion, and that Poplar and Limehouse will be George Galloway's latest scalp. Ever the optimist, I will take a deep breath, cross my fingers, and predict an Adrian Ramsay rally, taking Norwich South for the Greens. I would have called Perth and North Perthshire for the Tories but their candidate seems to have been a little calamitous.

box goes Green

For many it's a tough call in Gordon: an experienced and competent incumbent Liberal Democrat; an articulate and engaging SNP candidate; and a proven Labour councillor who stood against the Iraq war. Barney Crockett even boasted that the current government is the most "redistributionist" since Atlee's in '45: you don't hear that from Mandy.

But none of them will get my vote this time. The Green manifesto is a remarkable, challenging document that promises to change the rules of the game not just the players. They will not get in here, as in many constituencies, but for me it is important that they get as many votes as possible, votes which will encourage the party to focus their sparse resources here, to field candidates in future, and, locally, to challenge the outrageous political consensus on Trump's desecration of our natural inheritance.

The clincher was this elegant precis of Green political philosophy from Patrick Harvie. In an era in which discredited statism has made space for technocratic neoliberalism, the Greens offer a vision of prosperity that goes beyond growth and acquisition, a vision of personhood that is more nuanced than that of competitive, self-interested monads, and a vision of politics that is robust, radical and desperately needed.

Ben White: The colonisation of Palestine (in microcosm)

Ben White's excellent analysis of the recent story of Beit Sahour and Har Homa settlement.

Guardian spins against Clegg

I'm not quite sure what The Guardian think they'll achieve by portraying Clegg as having flip-flopped on coalition. As far as I can tell he has consistently stated that going into coalition with third-place Labour and allowing Brown to remain PM would be ludicrous, which is common sense. He has not said that he wants to go into coalition with the Tories, but that they, as the anticipated bigger party, have a stronger claim to government, and to having their man at the top.

A new housemate

Don't get me wrong, the rapid and remarkable ascendancy of the Liberal Democrats over the past view days is a good thing for democracy. Among the three main parties at Westminster, they have consistently proposed foreign policy that shames the narrow militarism of the other two, alongside what I take to be the most sustainable economic approach, and the greater willingness to countenace serious reform. What's more, alongside Gordon "I'll take responsibility for everything except what went wrong" Brown, and David "I met a black man in Brighton" Cameron, Nick Clegg really was refreshing on TV. So, a good thing.

But not a very good thing. It is a measure of just how narrow the debate has become that the third party stand out most on things like changing the electoral system and having a witty economy spokesperson. What's more, people's excited response to 'Nick' is rather like the water-cooler chat after Channel 4 introduced an entertaining wildcard into the Big Brother house. Just when everyone was coming to their senses and reaching for the remote, along comes someone unexpected to make the other residents (whom we deride) squirm.

Now, if there's not going to be a meaningful contest of ideas then at least make democracy entertaining. Thank you ITV for our first three horse race in a generation or two.

But our thirst for "a little bit different" shouldn't be sated by a change of personnel: there's still hope that our politics can become more meaningful than reality TV.

Illegal settlements and all that

Amidst the depressing fog that descended in the wake of meeting the displaced residents of Sheikh Jarrah, one clear question emerged: should Palestinians base their claims to the land on others' laws?

The lesson of apartheid South Africa would suggest not, but the brutal deployment of Israeli laws by Israelis to destroy the lives of Palestinians, such as in Jerusalem, is not the only issue. More widely, when Palestinian claims to the land are articulated firstly according to international law they are on much shakier ground than they need to be.

This is not to say that the legal case isn't strong. The Geneva Convention relating to population transfer provides some cover, as does UN Resolution 242. But law tends, perversely, to favour the already strong, those who make it and those who can afford to mine it for advantage. And of course, law can be deployed to exacerbate injustice, as in the case of Israeli absentee laws or the infiltration regulations passed yesterday (which being almost beyond the pale even for Israel, have been taken out of the regular court system and placed within the remit military tribunals).

International law is no exception, and promises the unsettling prospect of some kind of international police force, which will always be the de facto role of the superpower's military.

The legal argument also ends ups inverting the moral argument, which is this: Palestinians belong to their land, it is not simply that land is 'owned' in a narrow legal sense by Palestinians. Land which has been inhabited and worked (owned is too weak a word) by Palestinians for generations has been appropriated by 'legal' and 'illegal' means, with no regard either for the persistence of Palestinian relationships with the land, or for the livelihoods upon which it depends, and has characteristically been accompanied by racist violence and the deployment of a foreign police force in favour of the thieves. The Tent of Nations is only exceptional for the residents' ability to resource a legal battle, not for their possession of deeds or their manifest right to remain on the land.

Of course, this would be impossible if Palestine was not effectively a series of Bantustans under the ultimate sovereign authority of Israel. Perhaps the legal argument should be reduced to: you have no jurisdiction here.

With this truism asserted, settlers who manage to buy land from those who belong to it at present should be given Palestinian ID and residency status, they should be subject to Palestinian police (until the dawn of a single democratic state in the whole territory), and they should of course be prevented from bearing arms. This takes at face value the bizarre claims of one settler I spoke to who said he wanted to live at peace with his Palestinian neighbours and that there was nothing ideological about his residency in the West Bank, despite the fact that Efrat (his home colony) was built, and is intended to expand, on Palestinian agricultural land.

This expansion of Efrat is a good place to end. Currently the colony has an application with the Israeli court system to pursue further building. Palestinians haven't been allowed to access and work the land in question for several years, therefore the community claims it as vacant public land, and Israeli law would seem to agree. Israel should have no jurisdiction here, but taking this for granted, the courts will not consider the case in terms of the overwhelming injustice of turfing people off their land, because this has already happened. Law follows might, and that's why it's such a treacherous friend to the powerless.

'Infiltrators'

This could be the most disturbing development in Palestine in some time, and that's saying something.

The irony is of course that "infiltrators" will not apply to those Israeli citizens who have taken others' land, settlers. No, it will only apply to people who are in their own country, or spouses of people in their own country.

I am genuinely shocked by this.

Hearts and minds

WikiLeak yesterday released footage of US troops gunning down a dozen Iraqis including two cameramen. It is truly horrific but you can see it here. I can't say I was surprised by the footage itself, but the really shocking thing is the fact that the US military told Reuters, whose cameramen were killed, that the operation was basically normal.

The footage is there for all to see, but if you'd rather not, it goes like this. It is taken from a US helicopter and comes with the recorded dialogue between soldiers in the helicopter and command.

The patrol spots a group of a dozen or so men walking together in a seemingly relaxed fashion in the helicopter's gaze, but they are identified as a potential threat. Mistaking cameras for rocket-propelled grenades the helicopter opens fire killing most of them, leaving one of the cameramen crawling around desperately injured.

When they assess the damage they report back a successful operation. Shortly thereafter a van pulls up, as it happens with two children in the front, and men get out to carry the cameraman away. For no clear reason they open fire on the van, killing the adults and leaving the children struggling for life.

Finally tanks arrive, one of which drives over a body, causing mirth among the soldiers in the helicopter. Foot soldiers want to remove the children to a nearby military hospital but their request so to do is denied. Instead, they should be handed in to Iraqi police. One of the crew say: "Well it's their fault for bringing kids into a battle."

Just another Friday in the Holy Land

As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, "If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace - but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side."

Today we walked the Via Dolorosa with Christians from all over the world. The ratio of Palestinians to internationals was smaller than in previous years because of the reduction in the number of 'worship permits' Israel made available. At each corner troops and police asserted the Empire's ownership of the city, arresting some of those too zealous in their expressions of dismay, although at one point some scouts carrying a cross managed to breach a cordon adjacent to the Holy Sepulchre, asserting a different Sovereign.

Poetic resistance aside, Jerusalem's Palestinian Christians remain in this 'Friday of Grief', as the Arabic for Good Friday would render it. While Palestinians behind the wall are able to compartmentalise, to some extent, the effects of occupation and day-to-day life, the situation for Jerusalemites is one of permanent limbo. Since they rejected Israel's offer of citizenship in 1967, which would have conceded their rights under international law to residence in a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, they have been subjected to a form of collective punishment for this insolence.

Sheikh Jarrah is but one example of this selective use of a law which offers less protection than pain, the ongoing expansion of settlement blocks another. But the city is not only held in a constrictor's coil, it has a cobra's venom is in its veins.

Education deserves particular attention. It is not permitted to build a Palestinian school in Jerusalem. Hence overcrowded domestic properties deliver this curriculum under the jurisdiction of the Jordanian awqaf. If you want a reasonable number of teachers per pupil you'd better go to an Israeli school where it is illegal to teach the story of Palestinian displacement. If you want your child to retain their Jerusalem residency then they need to present a diploma from each year they've been at school, and these must be consecutive. If not, when you graduate, you are denied the right to live in your home city. What's more, if you graduate from the highly respected Al Quds University your degree is not recognised by Israel, while degrees from the far more controversial Islamic University in Gaza are recognised. It isn't trespassing on sacred turf.

And back to that turf. Villages and towns around Jerusalem, such as Jaba, have had their main entrances closed under the wholly untenable pretext of security. The effect is that Palestinians now may take hours to reach their own agricultural land via checkpoints into and back out of Israel, making its management almost impossible. And, you guessed it, when land is not being worked regularly it can be claimed by the Israeli state.

On the Mount of Olives I saw where the wall has cut off one Palestinian home from the resident's mother's home. Householders can stand on their roofs and talk to one another, but to visit takes well over an hour. Nearby, as compensation for being pulled out of Gaza, militant and heavily armed settlers have been given Palestinian land and a vacated police station in a Palestinian area on the mount of Olives. As in Sheikh Jarrah, children now play under the eyes of those who despise their presence, and under the barrels of their guns.

Where is the way out? There's migration, either to the West Bank, still divided into cantons by Israeli controlled roads within Israeli controlled borders, or abroad if you can afford it. There are other options. East Jerusalem has 5000 drug addicts, an enormous proportion compared to the the West Bank, and the pressure of life in limbo creates only very few alternative escape routes. Jerusalem is a place of contest in which one side has all the power. It is a place where tension is so heightened your hair stands on end. A Jerusalemite child is not allowed, in short, to be Jerusalemite unless they jump through the Empire's hoops.

All of this is because, as Netanyahu claims, Jerusalem is Jewish. One of the enduring mysteries of a world in which Zionism is tolerated is how it can be acceptable for Israeli politicians explicitly to declare their desire to establish a Jewish state with a Jewish Jerusalem as its capital, and for western governments to assent. Imagine if Abbas tomorrow changed the PA's agenda to claiming an Islamic state with Jerusalem as its capital. All hell would break loose.

I guess it's because they look like us. They're democratic Europeans, we suppose, and they even have minorities to prove it. And, we continue, let's face it, it's hard work living next to those other people, whom tourists are told by operators to avoid if they can. It's dark, dangerous and smelly in their parts of the city, evidence of their sub-us-ness (rather than that they receive a fraction of the municipal spending Jewish areas receive). One friend of mine met a European tourist who'd accidentally booked a hotel room atop the Mount of Olives. She was petrified.

Perhaps the conflict is best explained as the Western freedom charade in microcosm. Israelis have the money, they have the guns, they have the civilisationist narrative, they have the religious zealots who justify their violence through recourse to canon. Palestinians have their ties to the land, but these are being severed and corroded, and we only pay attention when a bomb goes off.

We in the west have made the error of making sense of the conflict here as a two sided contest with almost equivalent claims on each side. This is a nonsense. While we must recognise the root causes of tyranny, which lie in European soil, we must also call it what it is. Israel has no moral, legal or historical justification for the way it behaves.

So back to the Via Dolorosa. The message of it, in the light of Resurrection, is one of hope and victory through total defeat. But right now it feels that those admirable Palestinians who refuse to resort to violence as they protest are being crushed and being ignored. The desolation of Good Friday and Holy Saturday really means something here.

And off to pray

I was back in Sheikh Jarrah today, and spoke to some of the Hanoun family. They're living in a tent down the road from their house, now the home of a Jewish settler family, apparently from New York. Police evicted them in the middle of the night, 2 August last year, threw them and their furniture out onto the street, and moved the settlers straight in.

In 1948 several such families fled Talbieh, in what became Israel, and the Jordanians who then occupied the West Bank offered the land in question, considered public land, to these Palestinians. The UN helped build their houses, and the families paid rent to the Jordanian government. When the Israelis took over in 1967, they claimed ownership of the land on the basis that it was still technically 'public' and insisted that it had once been owned by a Sephardic organisation.

It's only recently that evictions have begun, this despite residents obtaining evidence that the land was in fact owned before 1948 by a Palestinian. One family we visited are living in a tent on the grounds of their erstwhile home, while a settler lives in the house on their own. An old lady we met, aged 70, was evicted in the early hours of the morning with her husband, who was sick and wheelchair bound, and who died days later.

It occurred to me as I watched the settlers return from post-Pesach prayers at around noon this afternoon, that they must take their god very much for granted. Settlers have private guards, funded by an American multi-millionaire. Daily these people eyeball those who have been displaced for their warped ideology. They see the old lady, they see the absence of her husband, they see the children whose beds now give rest to other children, who are growing up homeless and around heavily armed Zionist militants, and then they go and pray.

[The Gideon Levy article on this is a must. As is the end of Amos 5.]

Bullies

Seeing as none of the major networks seem to have reported this I thought I'd at least share it with my friends.

Yesterday a hundred or so Christians making their way from Bethlehem to Jerusalem to celebrate Palm Sunday refused to show their IDs on their way through, making the point that freedom of movement in one's own land is a legal right. Having allowed them through the first section of the checkpoint, soldiers confined the protestors to the no man's land between the checkpoints where they were detained and, according to a friend there, began to beat demonstrators. 15 arrests (or 16 depending on reports) were made, including Abbas Zaki, a senior Fatah official close to Salam Fayyad.

The consequence was a complete closure of the checkpoint, preventing Palestinians and internationals alike from getting through. As we waited to get through there was a sense of disbelief that the collective punishment for an entirely nonviolent demo could be so severe. The checkpoint remained closed today, although it is possible to go through a different exit so the only reason for maintaining the closure is to maximise inconvenience. A pretty pathetic kind of reprisal.

This is the way it goes here. Have a blessed Holy Week.

In Sheikh Jarrah

What an odd place. In Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, recently arrived Jewish Israeli residents have made themselves at home flying Israeli flags. I just saw two orthodox Jewish men walking down the main road towards the Kings' Tombs and the American colony, shadowed about 20 metres behind by an enormous chap with a startlingly large rifle. I thought to ask him for a photo for my blog, but the expression on his face wasn't entirely hospitable.

His machine was particularly fierce but, for those who haven't been in the 'Holy Land', guns are very much part of the scenery, although less so these days inside Palestinian Authority controlled areas. Travelling through 'Afula earlier, several young women were negotiating the combined challenge of handbags and heavy weaponry. The combination of haute couture - not always that much of it - and Galil assault rifle can be a surreal one, reminiscent of those old fantasy shoot 'em up games.

Sheikh Jarrah, meanwhile, remains the focus of weekly demos by the peace movement and locals. For more on the takeover of properties in the area, Ha'aretz has an interesting article.

Holy Week in the Holy Land

Holy Week began for me last night. A priest friend took me to a production at the Maronite Church in Nazareth, where children from the Catholic school in Raineh took the congregation through the final days of Jesus' life.

I have to say I was blown away. Interspersed with readings, the performance consisted mostly of symbolic reenactments of the Passion accompanied by choral music, much of which was taken from Fairuz's Easter collection. The director, Samer Kheshaiboun who teaches at the school, got a phenomenal response from the young children in the choir. I have rarely heard such sensitivity to dynamics from a kids choir, and a couple of hours into the service they were still giving it laldy.

But probably the highlights for me were the Fairuz numbers rendered by a 19-year old singer called Ahlam Khoury. Though the dramatic sequences were iconographic, her voice rendered them tantalisingly imminent. A voice with immense strength but all the dexterity needed to make each quarter-tone interval count, and I mean count to the point of goosebumps and tingles. As she sang Al Yom Ollika I could have cried.

Even better, none of the soloists forgot that they were narrators, servants of a story. It was a lesson in performance, particularly of sacred music. They transported the congregation from the attitude of an audience to that of participants in something sacred, confidants of God, bearers of a mystery. It was that special.

In Israel

The experience of Palestinians or Arabs in Israel creates a range of unique tensions, making it difficult to know whether or not it should be considered part of the same narrative, the same tapestry as the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Some of the themes are the same. The issue of internally displace persons in Israel is given little attention but is clearly part of the larger Palestinian refugee issue. The classic case of Bir'aim, in which villagers agreed to vacate their village for use by troops on the condition that they could return two week later, is typical in so much as no return has ever been allowed, despite a 1952 Supreme Court ruling in favour of the villagers. Many of the villagers now live in nearby villages and (bizarrely) are able to return to their old churches for weddings and to bury their dead.

A slightly more distinctive issue is that of unrecognised villages. According to a priest I was speaking to this morning, an estimated 170,000 people live in villages which pre-exist the establishment of the State of Israel, but which were never recognised by the government. As such they are unable to build, and live ancient houses or in shacks. They are registered in neighbouring towns and so pay taxes, but receive no amenities, and live in a precarious legal grey area. The mixed village of Ras al-'Ain in Galilee is a case in point. The Christians there are trying to build a church, not least to establish the fact of their roots in the village, to say 'we belong here'. It may prove to be something of a test case.

However, perhaps the most critical issue for Palestinians in Israel is that of education and identity. I spoke to a teacher who says he often has to persuade some of his pupils that they are Palestinian, that their roots are in the land, and that the discrimination they experience as non-Jews demands the articulation of their own story. But this is complicated. A recent law has withdrawn state funding from any organisation that allows any representation of the Palestinian story of the Nakba to qualify the triumphalist celebrations of independence day. So schools, even schools without Jewish students, are forced to avoid the defining story of Arab Palestinian identity in the 20th Century. When Holocaust denial is legislated against, it is ironic and tragic that Nakba denial is legislated for.

These are issues that will not go away even if Palestine gets its state tomorrow, and could even be exacerbated. The pursuit of a single democratic "state for all its citizens" in the Holy Land is by far the best solution, one in which conflicting narratives are taught alongside each other, in which Jews and non-Jews are equals such that demographic majority becomes an irrelevance, and in which land is viewed as a shared responsibility rather than an exclusive right. It is also perhaps the only solution in which the Palestinians of Israel can enjoy a happy ending to their story.

Tent of Nations

One of the highlights of my journey around the Holy Land so far was my visit to Daoud and Daher Nassar's farm near the village of Nahali. When the IDF first came to their door in 1991 they were served an order to vacate three quarters of their family's land, but being one of the few families to have been issued and retained their title deeds from the Ottoman era, they've managed to hang on until now.

Meanwhile, illegal settlements surround the farm, and Daher told me they never leave the farm unattended. If a settler managed to park a caravan on their land the legal wrangling would become a whole lot harder. Settlers have occasionally vandalised their property. On one occasion, settlers uprooted 250 trees, but a Jewish organisation in the UK supplied 250 saplings to replace them.

Their story of living under a territorial sword of Damocles is by no means unique here, but their response really is. As you enter the farm there is a sign saying "We refuse to be enemies". They host children's summer camps, reconciliation work with Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals, and run a women's centre in the village down the hill. For these activities they have called their farm the Tent of Nations.

All of this is in the context of a sense of interdependence with the land. It is this reconceptualisation of the struggle to retain land, not simply as territory or property but as the very source of life, that strikes me as particularly profound. In the Christian narrative, the bond with the land is one of our few fundamental human callings, and it's something that the Nassars proudly fulfil. I believe anyone who senses that the modern world has torn them from the land could learn a way of living at Tent of Nations, the 'political' ramifications of which could be transformative anywhere. But in Palestine it is the gospel.

Israeli fear

One of the most moving talks at the Christ at the Checkpoint conference was that of Sami Awad, Director of the Holy Land Trust.

He recounted a trip to one of the Nazi death camps, a visit he naturally found distressing in its own right. But his epiphany was when a group of Israeli school children were brought into earshot by their guide, whose detailed account of what the Nazis did to their Jewish ancestors would have penetrated the thickest skin. The guide then moved to explain that, after 2000 years of Christian anti-Semitism, the State of Israel was the place in which Jews could take refuge, the only place Jews could call home. The twist was this: but you're still not safe. Your Arab neighbours would do to you as the Nazis did to your ancestors, and it is only through the might of the Israeli Defence Forces that we can have a normal life.

The epiphany was Israeli fear. No wonder a would-be Israeli government needs to talk about security, people are insecure. No wonder some young people enthusiastically undertake to do their national service, and no wonder they behave so often like animals. They believe there's a latent genocidal desire on the part of today's Arab Other, just as there was lurking in the background of Christendom.

Sami Awad wasn't seeking to understand for understanding's sake, but because it is the narrative of the oppressor that lies at the root of oppression, and narratives can change. Of course there's nothing like fear for creating very scary monsters, and I would imagine there are plenty of people living in Palestinian refugee camps for whom the distinction between an Israeli and a Jew is trifling technicality. Likewise, the rhetoric of Ahmadinejad: a Nabulsi was explaining to me today how damaging to the Palestinian cause this kind of cheap bombast is.

But perhaps this is another reason why demos are useful. It brings children face to face: the ten-year old I wrote about with the courage to claim what is rightfully his, and the child who, a decade earlier, had been standing frozen to the spot as a teacher told him that he was hated, that he could trust no-one, that his life depends on the machines of death.

More from Nablus

A Nabulsi shopkeeper just told me that two labourers were shot dead near the Awarta checkpoint, just a couple of hours ago. He said they were tending the land there and were shot unprovoked. The official line is that soldiers were attacked with pitchforks and gunned them down. Who knows. Two Palestinians carrying gardening equipment deciding to attack soldiers a stone's throw from a settlement? Perhaps we'll hear more.

Speaking to a chap in church this morning, there's a belief that the Israeli strategy is to provoke a third intifada so that they can escape the pressure currently being applied - if rather equivocally - by the US. It's a pretty credible thesis.

I should say, Nablus is a picture this afternoon. Bustling, colourful, warm with a breeze. The sight of people doing people things, selling their wares, keeping their children under control, repairing their cars, becomes a life affirming, positive picture in this situation. The mundane takes on a rare profundity.

I also had a good conversation with a student at An-Najah University. She said day to day life here is much better, but that the political situation, though less immediately destructive, is undermining all hopes of long term reconciliation.

One final observation: Fatah aren't just more dominant here than they were, Hamas have practically disappeared. Or should I say, they've been disappeared. Even in the student council nobody openly represents the Islamic Resistance. All the martyr posters are of Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade members. All the flags are Fatah or PFLP. It's quite weird, bearing in mind the dominance of Hamas when I was last here.

I would imagine Fatah are storing up a fair bit of resentment for the future.

How long?

I’m in Nablus for the first time since the end of the intifada when regular military incursions, curfews and cordons, and militant resistance were the order of the day. Nablus today is, at least superficially, more peaceful. But it would be a stretch to say the situation’s better than it was.

I hitched a ride with the Bethlehem Bible College Choir who had a gig in my old church in the Rafidiya district. I was invited to sing the setting of Psalm 13 I dedicated to those people of Nablus who’d been such an inspiration to me, and it was a huge honour to be able to do so. It was a particular pleasure to see Violet again, a lady stalwart of the church whose stories of a childhood in Mandate Palestine kept me entertained for hours one afternoon in the summer of 2004. Alas, tonight she said, “Things here improve and they get worse, it’s up and down. But now it’s worse than ever. There is just no hope of peace, really no hope."

Getting some food and kunafa after the performance, people in the street seemed neither festive nor downcast. As I walked into the old town to find a bed, there weren’t many people around, the faces on the faded martyr posters seemed a little forlorn, the flags - now seemingly representing Fatah a little more than before - fluttering with less vigour. Perhaps it was Violet’s words that made me perceive my surroundings in this way, or the very visible expansion of settlements on several of the hilltops as we drove into town this afternoon. But the lack of music or street corner chatter was conspicuous, and the young man cycling in erratic circles while shouting at himself as I entered the gloomy streets of the Old Town seemed to provide a strangely resonant image of desolation.

In any case, it’s hard to stay optimistic when locals are pessimistic. After my uplifting story about the boy at the demo yesterday, I read that a boy was shot dead at a demo today.

I’m spending the day here tomorrow. I’ll maybe pick up something more positive from my friend who works at the aptly named Project Hope.

Meanwhile, I'm left with Psalm 13. "How long, Oh Lord?"