I receive a call saying that E., an Israeli activist who comes here regularly to get information about incidents that need to be reported, will be coming today for a visit. It will be a change I look forward to: I will finally have a conversation in English, after two days of speaking a word at a time and trying to make sense of people’s gestures.
E. comes with a journalist from Ireland that asks me lots of questions while E. talks to the villagers in Arabic. It’s clear that the journalist has no idea what this is about. He even asks me if I am not afraid of being with so many Palestinians on my own. When I overcome the shock his question has left me in and I manage to understand what he is on about I answer: “Look, they venerate us. The only thing that makes me feel unsafe is that outpost there and the settlers that inhabit the three settlements that we can not see”. He doesn’t even know where the settlements are, why they are there or why we are here. But he has not come here to see what these people’s day to day lives are like. He has only come here to take pictures of the proof of the incidents H.’s cousin was talking about before, so he doesn’t even listen to me and he cuts me off to ask what I saw when the settlers burnt the olive trees. I start to tell him that I wasn’t here then, that we can only stay here two or three days at a time but he turns round in the middle of my sentence, already ignoring me.
E. takes his journalist to the field where the Israeli settlers have recently burned all the olive trees that were a good part of the village’s livelihood and that’s the end of this week’s visit.
