Day 4: Into the West Bank

Above: Panoramic of the Jerusalem Old City Walls (Damascus Gate on left)

Accompanying one of the other guests at the Faisal, I'm up early for a spot of tourism before the planned Circus business. (Tiyen is a Chinese-Californian guy teaching science in a shitty inner city London school. His sense of humour and optimism has me in stitches, "The GCSE A-C pass rate is 20% - at least that means there's no pressure on us" and, "The kid that threw a pencil in my eye that meant I had to go to casualty... he was just really unlucky").


Above: The Via Dolorosa

Heading into the Damascus Gate and down the Via Dolorosa (the path that Jesus took when bearing the cross), it's only minutes until we're at the most sacred Jewish place in the world: The Western Wall. It's the site of the First Temple, before that was destroyed and the Second Temple was constructed. That was duly knocked down by someone else, before Herod's Temple was constructed on the same site - a hugely more grand affair, and the western wall is considered the closest accessible point to the site of the original temple. It's hard to feel holy when there's a steady stream of tourists heading straight through. And this is the low season.



An hour further, up the Mount of Olives (where it's believed the second coming of Jesus will take place), we expectedly get ripped off at the cafe at the top and look out across Jerusalem. (When Jesus does make it here, hopefully he'll have words with the cafe owner). There's no peak as such, at the top, there's a mixture of residential and derelict buildings and people go about their daily lives. Fairly underwhelming so far.


Above: The view from the cafe at the top of the Mount of Olives, looking back over Jerusalem. The dude will tell you about the view but fail to mention there's a huge fuck-off tree in the way.

Back to the hostel, I finally meet the rest of the circus. (I'd spotted the rest of them, but Ruth just forgot to introduce me to them.) We prepare to leave to meet the Circus's main contact in Palestine - a lady by the name of Susana. Every time I've asked for information in the past about our planned circus tour, I'm just told that Susana will be sorting it. Every time she is talked about by Ruth and Annie, you can feel a deep respect and reverence. Hopefully I won't fuck it by accidentally breaking wind at an inappropriate time. I remember the main rules to follow: "Greet how they greet and don't look, touch or taste the girls".



So the circus troop of five white girls, one big white guy (Mauro the cameraman) and a little Chinese guy, carrying a colourful assortment of Circus pariphenalia in comedy oversize bags head down to the Arab bus stop and hop onto a number 36 - headed through the infamous wall blockade from Israel to Palestine. Passers-by look on with amusement. Obviously very few tourists head this way - the bus driver and the other Arabs on the bus are keen and eager to help. We're relying on them telling us which stop we need to get off at. After a last minute dash to rescue the forgotten kerosene for the fire acts in the circus show, the bus takes off. There is much talk about do's and don'ts along the way. Make sure you have your passport. If an Israeli guard asks you where you're going, say you're going straight on through to Jericho as a tourist and absolutely do not say that you have Palestinian friends. I'm told the Israelis don't like the idea of foreigners listening to the Palestinian side of the story.


Left-to-right: Laura, Ruth, Jo, Annie, Jen

With much language confusion about where we should be getting off, we're there. We didn't even notice when the bus went through the wall security checkpoint, we must have been lucky.



When we arrive, Susana is not in. Her husband, Farid lets us in. A deeply solemn man with little expression - we attempt polite conversation. Conversation is awkward and fragmented as his English vocabulary is limited and we often repeat ourselves several times.. all of us talking slowly and doing that thing where for whatever stupid reason, you put on a slightly foreign accent and inflect the end of each sentence upwards at the end as if asking a question.

Like a gameshow, we take turns to ask him questions in slow, broken conversation in safe, non-offensive subjects like family and travel - attempting to His responses are defiant, reinforced with a wisened accent and each carefully constructed with limited vocabulary resembles a principle of life or a proverb from a fortune cookie. Every now and then he cracks a joke with straight face. I ask him, "Have you seen the circus show yet? I have not seen it".

"Yes I have seen it. You are very lucky." And there is a slightly overforced laugh from the rest of us.

He picks on me and tells me that his youngest daughter (too shy to come out from hiding) will love me because she loves the Chinese, kung fu and Bruce Lee. Before I get the chance to explain that the only Chinese I know is from working at a takeaway for a few years (vocabulary to include swear words first, followed by numbers and popular food orders), he's gone away and fetched a piece of paper and a pen. I'm ordered to write down his daughter's name, "Saalma", in Chinese. I jot down some glyphs that might vaguely resemble something Chinese, and bank on the fact that real Chinese people don't come by these parts very often.

The men attempt a pretty good chat on football (could have been sketchy considering my knowledge of football basics is perhaps only slightly better than my knowledge of Middle Eastern politics), and then I manage to pull out a corker by telling him Palestine is very beautiful.

"Yes it is very beautiful, but only for the tourists. The tourists cannot feel the suffering, the people here suffer terribly."

In the following 8-person 20 second silence that followed, my own tourist ass curls up and dies right there.



Susana arrives - her pale skin (later revealed that she is from Croatia), wearing a traditional headscarf and a permanant expression of concern and seriousness in a quarter-frown. Ruth and Annie, the circus veterans light up like a kerosene clown on fire. It's immediately obvious that a bond between these people had been made at some point that maybe one day I'll understand. "It's so good to see you, the kids have missed you so much!", and a young boy and even littler girl come bouncing through."

Our hosts whip up some magnificent food, talk at one point does cover a friend of a friend who actually had been killed in a car crash earlier that day, and Mauro and me get ready to head back through the checkpoint to the Faisal Hostel in Jerusalem. Susana and Farid have four children, and it's too much to ask of them to put up 7 of us, where the sexes must be segregated and most of us are strangers.

I'm bricking it - it's two noobs trying to get back through the wall, and we've heard the stories of Israeli guards checking photos on a camera to confirm whether you're a tourist or not. Susana has ordered taxis for us - one to drop us off this side, and another to pick us up on the other (taxis are either Palestinian or Israeli and do not cross the checkpoint). "If they ask you what you have been doing, say you are tourists coming back from Jericho." At this time of night, the checkpoint looks deserted. Walking through two full-size rotating gates, there is a window and an x-ray machine with the conveyor belt in operation. Having removed our valuable memory cards and DV tapes from our equipment already, we pass them through the machine. In the window, there are two kids, probably 18 and 20 as a guess - both with automatic rifles. They peer at our passports and we wait for ages in a small section between two gates marked "Further Inspection Area" (which gives me flashbacks about a latex glove nightmare I once had) and after a long wait the door clicks and we're through. On the other side of the checkpoint, we suddenly realise we're in the middle of nowhere, but thankfully, the taxi that Susana ordered has been waiting patiently for us to get through.

We get in - and with my heart still racing from the checkpoint negotiation, the taxi takes us to a completely different place to where we want to go. "I had the call from the hospital right?" - we had no idea what story Susana had spun for us to the taxi driver. "Um, no Damascus Gate please", hoping he'd totally forget about the hospital, because he was starting to seem suspicious. He turns the car round obligingly, and asks us where we're from. "Ah London, London! Yes", he exclaims, "Jimmy Carter! Yes?", and with brain still in be-very-careful-what-you-say mode, I assume it's some kind of test.

"Uh... No that's America. England is um... Winston Churchill".
"Ah! Tony Blair!"

As I try and figure out whether Tony Blair had good foreign policy in terms from the Israeli standpoint, I realise I don't know enough about what I ought to considering the situation and make a point of asking Mauro stuff on the way back since I never really got it before, I just knew there were some pretty unhappy people on both sides of the wall and some violence here and there.

He spelt it out for me, and here's how I get it, and I totally apologise to anyone reading this who knows all about this shit, because I'm learning on the job. The British Mandate split the area into Israel and Palestine. Israel had the support of the US and the UK, and a wall was built to prevent Palestinians from entering Israel. Israelis could go where they wanted. That explained why the Israeli-manned security checkpoints are for the way out and not the way in.



Mauro is a 40-something-old Chilean journalist who does director work for the Panorama-equivalent out there. He's doing his Masters in documentary-making in London, and the video documentary on the Circus that he is making will be the first one that he will have done everything for. (Camera, sound, directing and editing... the whole shebang.) He knows his shit, and he's often told tales about some of the horrific things he's covered. After the hairy checkpoint experience, we're that bit closer and into the night, we bounce ideas off each other for the different stories we wants to tell via our corresponding mediums. As he talks about it, I catch him a couple of times with tears of emotion and excitement welled up in his eyes. This is a passionate man - dedicated to his art, his children and the job in hand.