fugitive peace

Home after a long day in Ramallah interviewing Fatah people about whether their party can ever get it together. It’s like listening to Marxist student politics (which, after all, is what Fatah started out as). Long rants about local committees, district committees, regional committees, ad hoc committees, sub-committees; the central committee, the higher committee, the revolutionary council; protocols, rules and constitutions; agendas both hidden and explicit; struggle, unity, fawda (chaos) and fitna (strife); the cadres, the party, the movement, and the national interest, which someone is always either pursuing or undermining, and often both at once.

During a break in the schedule I paid my first visit to Yasser Arafat’s new mausoleum, completed last autumn (above). It’s an austere, brilliant pearl incongruously plopped in the middle of the ramshackle Muqata complex, the presidential headquarters: a cube-shaped mausoleum at the end of a long plaza, with mosque off to one side. The whole thing is dressed in pale Jerusalem stone, which makes it impossible to look at in sunlight without getting an instant headache.

Inside we are spared a Lenin-like mummy and squadrons of goose-stepping troops. Instead a single soldier standing astride two rifles - presumably one for him and one for Abu Ammar, should he ever be resurrected - guards the tomb itself, which is inscribed with Abu Ammar’s dates of birth and “martyrdom”. [Update June 18th: a reader writes: "There are normally two guards (in equally ill-fitting suits) standing over Arafat’s grave. You must have caught one on a pee-break." ] In Palestine a martyr is anyone whose death, even if it was by natural causes, is linked with the struggle, though in Arafat’s case maybe it’s a nod to the popular conspiracy theory that the Mossad had him infected with HIV.

This evening I got back to Jerusalem, went to dinner, and came home to find that someone had, with a cardboard head and pair of arms, transformed the letterbox outside my building into a robot.

In Jerusalem any odd behaviour can usually be explained by a nearby festival belonging to one or another religion. But I’ve run through all the possible Christian, Jewish and Muslim dates and come up with nothing.

I haven’t been posting for a while, and I’ve drawn up a backlog of things to write about, so over the next few days I’ll be putting them up as I write them.

Today’s local moment: I was driving through a roundabout (US: traffic circle) in East Jerusalem when I very nearly crashed into a police car that had decided to take a short cut by going around it the wrong way.

In Britain a cop would only do this with in an emergency, with his sirens blaring, and still stop to make sure there was nothing he might crash in to. This being an Israeli cop, he didn’t seem to be on any urgent mission; he just didn’t feel like standing behind all the other cars.

In Britain a policeman could get fired for such an offence. Israeli police seem to think it’s their prerogative. In fact, even here it’s somewhat eccentric behaviour, but they allow themselves more licence in Arab areas than they would elsewhere.

In Britain I would have tried to get the car’s licence number to file a complaint, but I wouldn’t dare raise my voice. This being an Israeli cop, I stuck my head out of the window and roared at him, “What are you, insane?” He barely glanced at me, as if to say, “Yeah, and so what?” And we both drove on our separate ways.

In Britain I would have told my friends about it. Here, who cares?