I’ve been working away without access to the internet for a week, but have been meaning to do a “meme” – ie to share seven random facts about myself, as inspired by Kate at The Manchizzle.

1: I love travelling and will take any opportunity to experience interesting parts of the world. I’ve done a fair bit of backpacking and have spent time travelling alone or with company in south America, south and southeast Asia, Australia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. I have also lived in France on two occasions, for a total of 18 months. I’m well aware how lucky – and self-indulgent – this makes me but I’m struggling to quell my restlessness.

2: I’m particularly obsessed with everything Indian…the place, the food, the music and its history. My dad was born and brought up there and his Anglo-Indian family lived there for about five generations. At the moment I’m devouring the books of William Dalrymple, and planning my fourth visit there in a couple of months.

3: Despite 1 & 2, I don’t have a great record with passports. Once I managed to board the Eurostar before realising it was still in my student bedroom in Manchester. Thankfully this was pre-9/11 and I managed to travel to the French Alps and back without even being checked.
My passport caused me problems again on the way out of Israel in October. This time the security staff – who are notoriously difficult – simply didn’t believe it was mine because my hair is now back to its natural (dirty blonde) colour. They took it off me, and I had four scary officers quizzing me at once about visas, trip dates and purposes for travel, before having to go through lots of extra checks.

4: I can turn my eyelids inside-out. I’m not sure quite how I discovered that.

5: One of my favourite foods is porridge, which I’m aware is very strange. My top track is probably Pepe Braddock’s Deep Burnt, and one of my favourite bands is Radiohead. Their 1995 album The Bends also happens to be the first CD I ever bought.

6: My strangest journalistic experience so far has got to be interviewing the mother of a young man who had died the previous day of leukaemia, while his body lay in an open coffin about two feet away. There were still beer cans and glasses all over the place from the party his friends and family had thrown around him – in accordance with his wishes – on the night of his death. It remains the only time I’ve seen a dead body. How lucky does that make me…?

7: I used to play lacrosse for Wales. Yes, I went to a posh school. But that didn’t stop them arranging a fortnight’s work experience for me on a factory line – filling bubble bath bottles with soap – when I said I was thinking of a career in marketing. I’m grateful to them now.

Most people realise by now that the news we get in the West is filtered, controlled and censored – both subtly and sometimes overtly – before it gets to us. This can be as blatant as army or police PRs telling journalists what they can or can’t put out there, or as subtle as individual reporters, photographers, and picture and news desks deciding what to run and how to present it.

These days, in our cosseted, permanently-outraged, safe little world, those in control of our news media have decided that blood, gore and death are too troublesome for the sensitive viewers – even if they form and important part of a particular story.
While I agree that there is no need to run shocking pictures or video of such things every day, surely by protecting people the editors are actually covering up some of the stuff that could sway opinion…?

And so it goes with Gaza. For a start, foreign journalists aren’t being allowed into the territory while the Israeli forces bombard and fight on the ground in their quest to crush Hamas. Secondly, the most popular mainstream media in the UK – BBC, and the Tory and tabloid press – inevitably swallow the Israeli line about what started the conflict. Thirdly, the images that are mainly used, while still shocking, certainly don’t tell the whole story.

Yesterday I was mucking about on the Flickr photo-sharing website and chanced upon the work of a photojournalist who calls himself nineteenseventy6.
This guy happened to be doing something else in Gaza when the bombardment began. His images are incredibly powerful and should be seen…..there is blood and random body parts on some but they tell it how it is – at least for the Palestinian residents.
This to me is the real value of documentary photography, and working independently, but I very much hope he gets them seen away from Flickr…can’t see them being used on CNN or Fox anytime soon though.

EDIT 29/1
Ok, so I’ve just been informed that this guy was in fact a hoaxer who has been lifting other people’s pictures – a pretty unethical and pointless thing to be doing. Indeed his Flickr profile has been deleted. I don’t know if this is true or not but rather than ditch this post altogether, I’m going to leave it up – I’m just sorry that I don’t know who the real copyright holders of these images are so I could link to them instead.
If he really was a fraud then I’m glad that Flickr has disabled his account and hope that the rightful photographers got their work seen and helped spread the word about what really happened over there.

Like any journalist, I have a tendency to be fairly cynical about the motives of those in power. Perhaps I am being disingenuous then, when I wonder if there could be any connection between the timing of Israel’s rather brutal air attacks on Gaza and Israel’s forthcoming general election, in February.
There is a perception that wars often do wonders for unpopular governments – although Blair’s Iraq War may be the exception. From what I heard while in Israel, the Likud party that leads its government coalition is none too popular with the more nationalist/religious members of its electorate – a section of society that wields a lot of power and seems to be growing.
Many settlers, religious people and conservatives seem convinced that the party is basically corrupt, in thrall in western governments and too soft on the Palestinians (oh the irony).
Could there be some connection between this fact and the timing of the onslaught? This is not something I have read anywhere so far in the analysis of these events.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not condoning Hamas’ attacks on Israeli communities – I don’t believe in violence as a mean to achieve anything. I just can’t help but ask myself: why now?

“We call it ‘beautiful resistance’. It involves using theatre as a means to overcome the ugliness of occupation and to reclaim our humanity.”
That’s how Abdelfattah Abusrour, founder and director of the Al Rowad Centre at Bethlehem’s Aida refugee camp, explained the children’s arts project his team has been running for the past 10 years.
“We don’t want our children to be put in a corner where their only response is violence. This is our way of saying we are human beings and equal partners for making changes in the world.
“We want to break down the stereotypes and show another image of Palestinian culture.”
Abusrour was born in the refugee camp, which was built by the UN to take displaced Palestinians in 1950. Over the years it became clear that they would not be going home, and the UN-issue tents were replaced with small houses.
Today, almost 60 years later, it’s one of three camps in Bethlehem and 22 in the West Bank. There are also eight refugee camps in Gaza, 10 each in Jordan and Syria and 12 in Lebanon.
As he walked me through the warren of narrow lanes that make up Aida, Abusrour talked me through some of the figures. The 5,000 people that call the 27,000 sq m camp home today come from 41 different villages, most in the Hebron and Jerusalem areas.
Two-thirds are below the age of 18. There are no green or open spaces so children must play on the streets or in community centres like his to pass the time. The camp now stands in the shadow of Israel’s separation wall (below).

A staggering 77 per cent of adults in Aida are unemployed – compared to a West Bank average of about 55 per cent. Four out of five people live on less than a dollar a day.
Al Rowad means “pioneers” in Arabic. “The idea was to create the possibility of something beautiful and safe for the children – we were fed up of our children just being statistics. We have lost 26 people in the second intifada, of whom five or six were under 18. They were shot by the army.
“We are well aware that Palestinian children are only every portrayed as stone-throwers and full of hate as if they were born like that,” he says.
“To me, theatre seemed a great tool for restoring our humanity, otherwise we would be living in a jungle. We were born under occupation and are living under occupation and naturally people do try to resist.
“We wanted a beautiful and human way to do this while keeping our humanity intact. When people practice violence they lose part of this humanity. That’s the message we try to pass on to our children here. We want them to be positive changemakers not negative ones.”
Abusrour returned to Aida in 1994 following nine years in France. He holds a PhD in biology and medical engineering and lectured at Bethlehem University when he first returned, before coming up with the idea for Al Rowad and putting his own money into the project.
Art projects running at the centre include photography and video production, but theatre is the main one. Young people from the drama group have toured in Europe and Egypt over recent years.
Abusrour says: “We were one of the first in Palestine to use theatre as a way of resistance.
“The children can throw stones on stage and if they want to be a martyr they can act it out on stage.
“When they want to be alive they can wake up. It’s a safe and positive way of addressing certain issues.”

It’s not always obvious from the coverage, but among Jewish nationalists there have always been differences in politics – with some opposing the occupation, obsession with military might and the building of settlements.
Their voices may be quieter today than those of the hardliners, but some self-proclaimed zionists are desperate to reclaim the ideology from those they accuse of hijacking it.
American-born rabbi Arik Ascherman is one such individual. He describes himself as a fervent zionist but his attitudes could not be more different from those living in communities like Hebron.
As director of the Jerusalem group Rabbis for Human Rights, which marked its 20th anniversary this year, he spends his time protesting against injustice wherever he sees it.
Over the years he has become a thorn in the side of the Israeli authorities, with his efforts to stop demolitions of Palestinian homes in east Jerusalem and the West Bank – often standing in front of bulldozers as a human shield.
He plants olive and fruit trees to replace those ripped up from Arab land by militant settlers. Every year he and his supporters protect Palestinian farmers from attacks during the olive harvest. He has been attacked a number of times by settlers, who regard him as a traitor to the Jewish – and zionist – cause.
Ascherman is in despair at the radicalism that now dominates zionism and how the ideology has been “twisted” to justify what is happening in places like Hebron.
“For me the real zionism today is creating an Israel which reaches our highest Jewish values,” he says.
“And yet I look around me and cry out at what is happening to Israeli society – I look at the suppression of the Palestinian people – the home demolitions, the settler violence and I ask myself, ‘Is this what zionism has come to? Is this what we created the state of Israel for?’
“To be demolishing the home of this or that person whom we never gave a fair chance to build legally?
“The way to be a true zionist is to work for a better Israel. There is a false equation that if you voice any criticism of Israel you are delegitimising Israel at some level. I believe the opposite.”
He mission, as he sees it, is to remind Israelis that there is more to Judaism than dietry laws and keeping the sabbath. There is in fact a long tradition of respect for human rights.
His group calls for an end to the occupation, and acknowledges that all settlements are illegal.
Ascherman says: “We want to show Jewish Israelis that there are alternatives to the very dominant nationalistic understanding of Judaism.
“We want to make them realise that from a Jewish point of view there is a much more humanistic way of understanding our religion and treating our fellow human beings, wherever they are from.
“Who’s doing more for the long-term security interest of the Israeli state: The people who demolish homes and take olive trees? Or the people who stop demolitions and plant olive trees?”
Seeing so much suffering has not caused Ascherman to question his zionism, although he no longer believes the Jewish state’s claim to moral superiority.
“It reinforces my belief that this is a country fighting for its soul, that Zionism is fighting for its soul, that Judaism is fighting for its soul. But nothing, even after the terrible things I’ve seen, causes me to call the enterprise into question,” he explains.
“There is no fun in working every day in the darkest corners of a country that I love and a society that I love. But as a Jew, as a rabbi, as an Israeli, as a zionist, I’ve always wanted to believe that we’re better.
“Recognising our failings only reinforces my commitment to save the soul of Judaism. I see this as the moral thing to do.
“The real zionism should be working for an Israel that is not just physically strong, but also morally strong. That’s the right thing for its survival and is also the right thing to do.”

Dahoud Bader was only six when the Nakba happened, but he remembers his experiences of it vividly. The little boy was woken by his mother one morning in May 1948 and led away from his village, El Ghabsiya. They walked east, as soldiers advanced from the west and south, fleeing for their lives with many of the other 700 residents of their community. Eleven villagers were killed by the soldiers.
El Ghabsiya was declared a closed military zone in 1951. Despite a court ruling a couple of months later that residents had the right to return, they were physically prevented from doing this by the Israeli army. Government bulldozers destroyed all the houses, leaving only the mosque standing to this day. Villagers who attempted to visit the mosque have been arrested for trespassing onto state land.
This all happened so long ago now that it’s tempting to ask why it still matters. But the experiences of this one small Galilee village were shared by many other Palestinians.
In 1948 and the years immediately afterwards, 800,000 Palestinians fled their homes or were expelled and forced to become refugees. Of the 150,000 who remained inside Israel after the turmoil, about a quarter were internally displaced. Their land was taken over by the state for distribution to Jewish immigrants.
It’s the downright injustice of the situation that still rankles campaigners like Bader. “Every village has its own story but the common thread is the expulsion of people, the destruction of houses and the confiscation of ownership,” he says, admitting that although his group speaks about rights there would be difficulties in implementation.
He says: “We understand that Israel has created facts on the ground. Maybe I don’t actually want to come back to my house, but I have the right to come back and to decide, just as I have the right to compensation.
“We aim to have the right to come back to our destroyed houses and villages and to rebuild once more. We don’t think there is any justice in confiscating these lands. We aren’t being treated equally by the present absentee law, which we don’t understand. There is no such law in any other country.
“We are now citizens of Israel, the supposedly only democratic state in the Middle East. But democracy should mean equality. How can I understand democracy if I don’t have rights to have back my land? If I can’t live where I want? If I can’t go back to my destroyed village?”
Today, new homes are being built on what used to be El Ghabsiya. They will be sold to new Jewish immigrants from Iran and Iraq.

They are there but not there at the same time. Almost a quarter of the Palestinians living inside Israel – that’s more than 300,000 Israeli citizens – are officially deemed “present absentees”.
It’s a quirk of Israeli law that bothers Mohammad Zeidan, of the Arab Association for Human Rights, a great deal. “They are present when it comes to their duties but absent when it comes to their rights,” is how he describes it.
The situation for so-called Israeli Arabs – or 1948 Palestinians as some of them call themselves – is more complicated than that of their compatriots living in the West Bank and Gaza.
During the upheaval of 1948, more than 520 Palestinian villages were destroyed and their inhabitants internally displaced. Not recognised officially as refugees, they were granted Israeli citizenship in the early 1950s.
Today, their descendants are often subtly discriminated against but lack adequate representation. “Oslo showed us that you cam have a peace agreement and not equality,” says Zeidan. “The struggle for human rights within Israel is not necessarily connected to the situation in the occupied territories.
“Israel sees us as citizens and the Palestinian authorities don’t deal with cases on this side of the border.”
There are important issues that need highlighting, though, such as the plight of the present refugees. Israel’s Absentee Property Law, which is still on the statute books, deems that any property from which the owner was absent from Nov 1947 to May 1948 – in other words the period of the war – became the property of the state. Those affected, the displaced who fled their villages with the intention of returning once the turmoil ended, found themselves landless and without rights – present but absent at the same time.
It’s just one example of the bias against Israeli Arabs that Zeidan claims can be broken down into four types.
“First is legal or direct discrimination – when the system itself talks about Jewishness as a criteria for rights. Jews get more rights in Israel than non-Jews,” he explains. “An example of this is the citizenship law, which gives any Jew living anywhere in the world the right to come and live in Israel.
“Then there is the unique status of Jewish organisations. The Jewish National Fund, a kind of NGO, is involved in land distribution. Even if it used to be my father’s land and they have built a house on it, I have no right to buy but Jews from Brooklyn do.”
Indirect discrimination occurs when those who are exempted from national service are denied benefits as a result.
Institutional bias is visible in the Arab areas of towns such as Nazareth or East Jerusalem, where the roads are in poorer condition and the school budgets lower than those in neighbouring Jewish quarters.
The final kind of discrimination relates more to public racism. Research by universities in Israel have shown that almost two-thirds of citzens believe civil rights such as the right to vote should be withdrawn from Palestinian Israelis.
Such issues, often forgotten amid the daily crisis of life within the occupied territories, will continue regardless of what happens in the peace process, according to Zeidan.
“Ninety-nine per cent of Palestinians living within Israel would stay here, no matter what happens,” he says. “This means this probem will continue even after the general Palestinian problem is resolved.
“Those who are looking for stability within the Middle East must take this into account. They need to recognise us as a minority and address the Jewishness of the state, because that is the source of this problem.
“It legitimises in the minds of the majority that it’s okay to discriminate against the minority – an indigenous minority. We believe we are the owners of this place and deserve better treatment from the state.
“The vast majority of people living here today are immigrants and Israel is trying to develop a system to push us to the margins in all aspects of life.”

It’s a charge I heard numerous times while in Israel. “This country is meant to be a democratic state but there’s only democracy if you are Jewish. For everyone else it’s a Jewish state.”
This time it was Palestinian Israeli activist Nadeem Nashif who was saying it. As head of the Haifa NGO Baladna, it’s his job to highlight the bias within society against Israel’s Arab minority. It’s a never-ending job.
Nashif’s complaints range from the cosmetic – the fact that the state’s flag carries the star of David, symbol of the Jewish faith, to the exclusion of the 25 per cent of Israel’s population that are from religious minorities – to overt, tangible discrimination against Arabs.
“The state’s main agenda is to serve Jewish people in Israel and abroad. But we are excluded from all decision-making. We have Arab people in the Knesset but they are never part of the coalition – we will always be in opposition so have limited influence.
“Most discrimination is not something very clear by law though. A few laws are clearly for Jewish people but most discrimination is there between the lines,” he says, launching into a list of his complaints.
Palestinians make up a fifth of the population in the original 1948 boundaries of Israel, but own just three per cent of the land. Similar imbalances exist in the country’s higher education system and within many workplaces.
One reason for this that really makes Palestinian Israelis angry is the way it is embedded into the social fabric. Many jobs – even those as basic as working in shops and restaurants – are only given on condition of military service. But Palestinians are exempted from national service.
This exemption means they lack a special social security code that entitles Israelis to special benefits such as access to education, land rights, jobs and benefits. Orthodox Jews are also exempted from army service. The difference is that they are still awarded the magic code.
“Putting that condition in your job ad is therefore a subtle way of saying this job isn’t for Arabs,” says Nashif. “Arab graduates find it very hard to find good jobs, even if they have the same grades as Jewish applicants. People would rather have Jewish employees. There is a glass ceiling for jobs.
“If you are lucky enough to get to university that is. There is less investment in our schools and when you finish you get more basic jobs. Because we don’t serve in the army we get fewer possibilities. It’s harder to get dormatory places at university, and to rent or buy property.”
He believes his people are also fighting for their own identity in a country that tries to deny their right to exist as a cohesive community. Nowhere is this more evident than in schools, where they are educated separately from Jewish Israelis and other Arab-speaking minorities such as Druze and Bedouin, but still have no freedom over what they learn.
Nashif says: “As a community we have no influence over what is taught. Teachers have to go through a screening process with the secret services…the first thing is you have to be a ‘good Arab’. You can’t be into politics, not into Palestinian identity or an activist.
“Even once you are in the system you have to preserve your job, and your behaviour is monitored. If you do anything wrong you will lose your job. Teachers are afraid of losing their jobs and being left without any benefits.
“Anything connected to Palestinian identity or thought is not taught. Our textbooks have a Zionist narrative. It’s a very colonial approach.
“We don’t learn anything about ourselves, our own history or culture. We only learn about Jewish culture. It’s good to know about that but we should also look at our own culture and past.”

Israelis and Palestinians not only inhabit different worlds. They live different historical narratives as well.
Few Israelis are even aware about what Palestinians call the “nakba” – the so-called “catastrophe” entangled with what Jews see as little short of a divine miracle: the 1948 creation of the Israeli state.
The Tel Aviv NGO Zochrot aims to educate Israelis about the flip-side to this “liberation” of the Jewish people – the destruction of hundreds of villages and displacement of more than 250,000 Palestinians.
It publishes maps and leaflets in Hebrew marking the Arab villages that were destroyed to make way for what is now Israel, in the hope of spreading some kind of understanding of the historical impact on the situation we see today.
It organises tours to destroyed Palestinian villages and arranges testimonies from refugees and Jewish Israelis as well.
Activist Eytan Bronstein believes Israeli education is severely lacking in this respect. “Our schools simply teach that there was a war initiated by the Arabs, which they then lost. They teach that the repression we see today is the price the Palestinian people should pay for this, because they don’t want us here. The word Nakba is never mentioned, left alone explained from the perspective of the Palestinians.
“Israelis only learn our own historical narrative and many people don’t know anything about the other narratives that exist.
“Knowing about it is the first step to acknowledging what happened to the Palestinians and the fact that they are still suffering. This acknowledgment is essential if Israeli Jews are to take responsibility.
“It doesn’t mean that we are the only ones who should take responsibility, but we have played a big part in what happened to the Palestinians and what continues to take place today.”
According to Bronstein, most Israelis genuinely believe that today’s conflict is about nothing more than Palestinian people not wanting Israel to exist. But Zochrot doesn’t just want a better understanding about the history. To them, the logical next step is taking responsibility and making some kind of amends.
“When we talk about responsibility we need to talk about actions. We have some suggestions of how this could be done,” he says.
This period of Israel’s history is understandably touchy for many – “it touches the very nerve of our being” is how Bronstein puts it. He claims that efforts have been made to cover up the darker side of his country’s beginnings, with testimony from refugees hushed up by Zionists and resistance to education projects like his. Zochrot – whose members are routinely accused of being traitors and dubbed ‘self-hating Jews’ – wants to put together teaching materials to be used in schools but know that few teachers would be willing to broach the issue.
“The problem for many is that if you acknowledge that refugees exist, the next step is surely the right of return. We support that right of return but we need to think how it could be done,” he explains.
“We have to acknowledge the right of return – people have to be given the choice to return or to accept compensation or the choice to resettle somewhere else. Many wouldn’t want to return after all these years. But they need to be given some economic advantage in lieu of their land – studying free at a university built on their own village for example, or given apartments in a building on their land.”

It’s taken 26 years of fighting for the West Bank village of Rummaneh to be connected to mains electricity. Elders from the community, near the city of Jenin, have been asking the Israeli authorities for mains power since 1982. They were finally connected to the grid in March this year.
The excuse had been that providing electricity would pose some kind of security risk to a nearby military base. For almost three decades villagers have relied on generators – expensive at the best of times but prohibitively costly when oil prices rose sharply over recent years. In this impoverished corner of the economic basket case that is the Palestinian territories, more than two hours of electricity a day was out of reach for the 4,000 people of Rummaneh.
Getting connected took a huge amount of perseverance and only happened because local man Hussam Spehat (above) speaks fluent Hebrew.
“The impact on the local economy and the local people was enormous. The Israeli occupation interferes with every bit of our daily life,” he says. Rummaneh was cut off from neighbouring villages by the Israeli separation barrier in 2000, the first section of which cut through the community’s land. Spehat was one of the founders of the Rummaneh Charitable Association in 2006, set up to help local residents who are suffering as a result of the fence.
As well as providing financial and practical assistance to widows, the families of prisoners and those who have lost relatives as a result of army action, getting connected to the electricity grid was a top priority for the association.
“The army continually refused to give us power – each time it was a different justification but it was always related to security. I’m surprised that connecting a village to mains power could harm the security of a strong state like Israel,” says Spehat.
“They made promises which were continually broken – in 2005 the French government gave Israel money to connect us but it was never done. In 2007 there was a checkpoint moved here and they started talking about a miltary base. All last year they kept saying it would happen next month, next week.
“Then, at the beginning of 2008 I managed to get the phone number of the electricity company in Jerusalem. I started calling them 10 and 20 times a day, until they were sick of us. In March we were connected.”
Water is another issue for this, and many other rural communities. Locals claim that after pressure from the Japanese government, the army agreed to allow 11 villages in the area 250 cubic metres a day from the Jenin aquifer. So far they have yet to see more than 40.
“Again this is blamed on security, as is everything else,” spits Spehat.
Then there is the loss of land. Spehat’s family lost 17 of their 250 dunums to the security barrier and now watch Israeli farmers on the other side tending their crops. He says: “They took all the good land from our villages and left us the mountain land. We are not allowed to build anywhere near the wall so this area is practically worthless.” He pauses and half smiles, wryly.
“The only good thing about this wall is that it separates us from the settlers and now don’t see them. In the past they have killed local olive farmers, uprooted our trees and desecrated our mosques. At least that is not happening in Rummaneh anymore.”