Photos: © Nigel Parry and Kifah Al-Fani. Graphic by Nigel Parry.
The Israelis are here to prevent anyone from getting close to the mountain itself. They were armed la Allah (intensifier used in colloquial Arabic, lit. "to God") - another painful reminder of last September's clashes. I really didn't want to think about that again.
Demonstrations are the same everywhere you go. When I was living in London, I went to several: in Wapping during the printer's strike, in Trafalgar Square outside the South African Embassy, in Grosvenor Square outside the U.S. embassy, and in Brixton during the poll tax riots, to name a few. A not uncommon situation is that the police have been completely hyped up for the event, deployed in far greater numbers than the situation requires, and convinced that every one of you is a dangerous pinko fag anarchist that is just dying to burn an effigy of the Queen/Pope/Prime Minister before throwing a Molotov cocktail at them. In other words not a good recipe for "keeping the peace".
Here, the Israelis have come up with a way of solving this major problem that plagues police forces around the world. The police aren't here. Instead, they're standing a few hundred yards away, and Israeli soldiers from the Givati paratrooper unit are here to make sure everything goes smoothly. Their riot control equipment is a little unorthodox for a demonstration situation. Why bother with plastic batons and sheilds when you can bring M-16s with sniper's sights and belt machineguns? Why play Space Invaders when you can play Quake?
A prayer call rings out. The Muslim participants - most of whom seem to be 30 to 40-year-old men - went off to pray (left). I heard one journalist telling another, "Stand up here behind the soldiers, when they start to bend down to pray you'll get a good picture." That's of course what it's all about: theatre. Looking at the battalions of poised Israeli soldiers and journalists, it seemed likely that the ones holding cameras were praying too, probably for as much blood as possible to increase the value of those hungry rolls of 35mm film.
I anticipate the first stone from a brightly keffiyah-clad Palestinian youth and I imagine the first bullet from a khaki-clad Israeli soldier, knowing that the meeting of the two will only leave - as Peter Gabriel sings in Biko - "one colour dead."
I came here today to see whatever reality is holding up its sleeve but at the same time I don't want to be a witness. Although on one level all this seems to be happening outside me, inside I am down on my knees next to those answering the prayer call, praying to God that all of this one day soon would be resolved.
But of course, I am shaken out of my angry thoughts by - of all things - two soldiers I photograph (pictured right). Aware I am photographing them, one points his finger at the other and smiles. The other feigns being shot. They both grin and a whole row of their friends explode with laughter. Although I find myself laughing with them, it is not a comfortable chuckle. I feel disturbed. Who knows where humanity begins and ends? They are fooling around now but ten minutes in the future they might be shooting people dead.
I've seen other soldiers in other situations kicking little Palestinian schoolgirls, being the crassest racists at checkpoints, and pointing guns at children. And, of course, I've heard the many stories of my friends who have been tortured. Those, especially, are hard to forget and reconcile with this image of "the lads, just doing their job."
If anyone at all is to blame for this situation, it must first of all be the successive Israeli governments that can't see that their ideology is doing something really dirty to the psychological health of their own citizens. Putting these young men here is wrong. If I was an Israeli, and had to do national service, what would I be thinking about being asked to do this very political job that would be done anywhere else by police - actually no, by private security guards - in a sickeningly political manner?
The more I think about the answer to that question, I guess that I just don't know. For one, they have passed through an educational system that has transmitted a very idealistic and paranoid view of their country's place in the world. I didn't. In the almost fifty years since the creation of Israel, this tiny country has been involved in several wars. Mine wasn't.
Forget the questions about who started these wars and why. When you consider that every extended Israeli family has lost at least one member, you begin to see that we have entered a nasty tribal realm where a psychological neurosis of survival has made issues like justice and political solutions irrelevant. What makes this conflict so interesting is that the Palestinians, who of the two sides have borne the majority of the human cost of all these wars - in dispossession, death, injury, and the loss of control of their lives - are in a similar psychological boat. The difference between the two crafts is that Israeli boat has a place to dock.