I wake up before it is light and get out of the shed. The atmosphere feels pretty much the same as it can feel in any Mediterranean country just before dawn. There is a bit of light coming out of the back of the distant mountains, but the sun is still hidden behind them. There is a very special orange-green colour in the sky that becomes bluer higher up from the mountains and into the rest of the sky.
Slowly, it gets lighter and lighter and the stars disappear in the day light.
The air is deliciously fresh and clean. I go back to the shed and I meet J. outside it; he has gone out to contemplate the dawn as well, and is now coming back, ready to prepare breakfast for everyone.
While we prepare breakfast together we agree that we should ask M. for a lift to get out of the “realms” of this settlement and then make ourselves available to go wherever we may be needed, now that other people from the EAPPI are taking over in here.
People start coming out of the shed called by the smell of food and we all have breakfast. M. will take us to his house so we can use his washing machine and his shower. We were not expecting this even remotely. Shower and washing machine!
So after breakfast we say our goodbyes and get on the car, because M. has to go back home and then to work.
On a car with an Israeli number plate now and an Israeli citizen at its wheel, we get absolutely no trouble at the gate. M. is free to choose the most convenient gate to go to the city where he lives. We quickly get on to an Israeli road, very similar to any “A” road in the UK, only with hills on each side of the road as if a small mountain had been cut in the middle in order to build this road. M. explains that they do that when building the roads where only Israeli citizens will be allowed to drive so that they will not see the conditions in which the Palestinians are made to live – with their “rocky roads”, as J. had politely put it, the “vehicles” they are allowed to drive, and the sheds they use as houses after demolitions.
Once in his house, he lets us use her internet, his washing machine and his shower. This gets us ready for our next trip.
Tomorrow J. and I are going to a village in the mountains, to the North of Nablus, where horrible things happen, we’re told… Years ago the settlers from the settlement established right next to the village threw them out, by terrorising them. They would invade their village in the middle of the night destroying what they could if the time they would be there, they poisoned their well, only source of water for the whole village, and they burnt the electric generator, that the NU had donated them, in some of these incursions. They would stone whoever would come in their way and a killing happened. The inhabitants fled the village and there was a lot of local and international media attention, but, knowing that when this faded, they would be faced with the same terror situation, they only agreed to go back to the village on condition that there would be a continuous international presence.
Usually this continuous presence is provided by the EAPPI. But these days they are having a meeting of all the people “deployed” in Palestine and they all want to attend. So they have asked us to “cover” Yanoun while they are in this meeting. This is our next “assignment”.
