Nearly time for bed.

There is so much to say, and unfortunately I am too tired to say it with any of the vim and vigour it deserves. The bastard wall deserved its own post. It crept up on us when we weren't looking and my heart jumped out of its little socket when its glowered at me.



Would you like to look at a pretty picture when we recover together? Then I will tell you a little story...





Are you sitting comfortably? Then I will begin. So, we are heading for Kiryat Shimona, out of East Jerusalem towards Jericho and up the Jordan Valley. Remember (if you ever knew or cared) that between here and Jericho and around and beyond, we are in the West Bank, well inside the green line, but swarming with settlements and flash roads lined with stony hills, and much much poorer Palestinian villages, somewhere on the sidelines.







We stop for water. We pick up 3 hitchers (it's a tic of mine, can't help it). They are cute girls, very hippy, a bit frekkly and stuff and very very young - and from a settlement. They ask us if we fancy a dip in a remote hot spring on the Dead Sea, nearly on our way. Fine... We judge a bit of a line with them ie they are just kids, and they are so painfully ignorant of their own history and politics it is rather eerie.





The hot springs are precisely that, the place looks nice and pretty, Liz floats a bit, then stings a bit (inevitably), then gets a bit pissed off with it all stinging and we want to get on with our day now. Bringing the hippy chicks back towards a main(ish) road from this obscure place (not wanting to leave them out to fry) I ask them whether we are still in the West Bank (we crossed a checkpoint, and I am aware that the green line extends about half way down the Dead Sea).



They have absolutely no idea what I am talking about.

Nada.

Ok, I say, you know Jericho is a Palestinan town, right? "Where?" That big fuck off town right there in front of you? "Oh you mean (insert Hebrew to fit)". Yep, Okay ... "That's not Palestinian. That's an arab town now [in tone of great concession] but it used to be Ours." Right. Sack full and cats come to mind. So what about where we are now? "Oh, this has always been Ours." (airy gesticulation that encompasses much of the Dead Sea, West Bank and possibly even bits of Jordan). Jericho is Jewish in about the same way that London is Roman.



I find this all rather worrying.



There is a particular kind of Steiner vibe about this very particular kind of (oh dear I don't wish to generalise and I may be a about to, help help) Israeli youth. Great fabrics, soft pastel colours, fab sandals and a kind of scary big hole in the middle where the powers of reason roam in other mere mortals.

Liz, bless her tolerance chats kindly to them when I spit out mean little comments on the sidelines every time they say something more than usually irritating.

It was a bit of a relief to get shot of them and zip up the Jordan valley on our own. The checkpoint out of the West Bank was grim, but had nowhere near the impact of the Wall. This was because there was not a non Israeli soldier in sight, other than ourselves, and after all they were so cute, right? in their natty little khaki uniforms, and so smiley to us as they waved us through with our neat UK passports ... and they couldn't have been move than 18 years old,.. same age as the lovely girls ... they might even have been at the same schools... with the same blind spots in their educations,.. and they had guns ... lots of big guns...

Suddenly I was glad not to be Palestinian.

But I would not entirely want to be an occupier either.




[A Point of View: Nice, but dim]
PS

Oh, and by the way, our route north up the Jordan valley and up into the Golan Hights from East Jersualam isn't possible if you happen to be Palestinan and from the West Bank. You could do it if you were Palestinian and from East Jerusalem but it would have taken you considerably longer, if at all. And that is without floating anywhere.