Before today we had mainly been relaxing for 2 days, preparing material for the campers (lectures, labs, ect), shopping, getting our internet up and running (thanks to Mike, a roomate. And ours is better than the other apartments, but we don't tell them cause they might come down and take our bandwidth) We also got to go down to the ORT technichal school where we'll teach for the first 2 weeks of the course (due to an israeli student strike a few months ago which pushed back the end of classes at hebrew university) as well as Hewbrew University (the new campus, which houses the science, math, and engineering buildings) and the classes that we'll be using. We also got a free lunch and Hebrew University. Should I keep a running tally of free meals on the trip....? Yes, yes I will. Including dinner my first night in, our grand total is.....2. Not much, but it's a start. As confucious said, "Even the longest journey begins with a first step." Or some shit like that.
Before I start, I will be stating things a fact which are things that were stated to me as facts. I'm not saying they facts, but it's was told to me, and I'm gonna get bored of writing "they believe" every sentence. I'll get to my opinions in a later post.
Anyways, we were bused around for the morning by the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). They generally take a very pro-israeli stance and fight the demolition of palestinian homes. Over 18,000 palestinian homes have been demolished since the 1967 war, almost always because they were built without a building permit. The building permits however are extremely difficult for palestinians to get because israel does not want palestinians to prosper or expand in any way. (again, their opinions) We then go on a tour of jerusalem to show the the state of the palestinian people.
We begin with some fantastic views of jerusalem.
The first picture is Mt. Olives cemetary which is a famous jewish cemetary. (I should mention here that we're kind of taking an outside-in discovery of jerusalem, so a lot of these sites I haven't seen yet and found out the significance of, so I apologize when I say "so this is site X, apparently it's kind of a big deal) The next photograph is of the temple mount, and you can also see the walls of the old city. After that are two photograph of the security wall that israel has built to stop the movement of terrorists into israel. We travel next to the garden of david, run by israel in a palestinian neighborhood. And acheological peice of land, it was allegedly a garden for kind david back in.....well, way back, I don't know when. Here we can see some soldiers with their M16s at the location, as well as our tour guide suleiman's grandmother's house, which is not in very good condition, which is next to the garden. She is often harassed by the Israeli government to get her to move out of her house.
As we travel further we get a better view of the temple mount, the al-asqa mosque (which according to one of our instructors emray (sp?) who is turkish, is the second most visited muslim site after a site in mecca, I can't remember the name of it now), as well as the walls of the old city, and a greek orthodox church (which our instuctor Ted, who is an American-Greek pointed out, but is in the distance in the picture because of my slow camera work.)
Next we visited the security wall up close and personal. A you can see, there is a lot of grafiti on the wall. We are told that it will electrocute you, and that is not made for security reasons. The last two give you a good perspective on the size of the wall.
(also, apologies for some pictures being not rotated. It's almost 4am. I'll clean things up later.)
After this began the more depressing part of the trip. As we traveled into the palestinian neighborhoods and eventually into the west bank, the areas became noticibly more run-down. There were empty houses, horrible roads, rubble, and trash everywhere. It was very noticable as soon as you went into the neighborhoods. Worse still is the houses that have been demolished. This photograph is of a 7 story house that held 21 families.
As the tour guide pointed out, not only our houses demolished, but the rubble is left there, making it almost impossible to build again without a lot of work. Our tour ended at a house to hear a palestinian story of home demolition, and were given and free lunch of rice, chicken, and mediteranean salad (free meal count: 3)
The speaker unfortunately told a very sad story about his pursuit to own a home. He graduated from college and traveled to saudi arabia to work. When he returned with enough money, he hoped to build a home. He attempted to get a building permit 3 times (each costing $5000) and each time was rejected for a different reason (the last of which being that he forgot 2 signatures). After which he gave up and built the house on his own. The israeli military came to his house, beat him, arrested him, and demolished the house in front of his family. The ICAHD came to his aide, and got news attention at the site. Vollunteers helped to built the home while his family lived in red cross tents. Once they finished the frame of the house in about 3 weeks, the israeli military came again, destroyed the house, and took their red cross tents. His house was destroyed 5 times before they changed it into a center for ICAHD and demolition awareness. It was the building we were sitting in to hear him speak. The building still has an order from the israeli government to be demolished.
On our way back from the west bank we were stopped at a checkpoint. An israeli officer came into our bus with and M16 to check all of our ids. He first was upset with one of the instuctors for taking a photo, and was using some harsh words with us in hebrew, even though we were continually telling him we spoke english, and he obviously could speak english once he finally started talking to us. He was not a very happy dude. It could have been the long pants in the heat, who knows, but it wasn't a pleasant experience.
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