The students began to leave the university in buses around 12pm today. I joined bus number 3, armed with a 35mm camera, short and long lenses, a video camera, films and tapes, Palestinian and Israeli press cards, and a 1991 Gulf War gas mask, the latter untested to date in teargas. A total of four large coaches and two small minibuses left, although one of the coaches got lost along the way, thinking the other buses had gone to Ma'alufiyyeh.
At the newly-errected permanant Palestinian Police checkpoint on the way into Ramallah from Birzeit (complete with 6x4 foot image of Yasser Arafat that lights up at night, so you know who to thank for yet another checkpoint in this Palestine) the buses were stopped. Students working with the security forces must have phoned ahead from the university. They have no better information to give them I guess.
The police there - if you can call khaki-clothed, Kalashnikov-carrying individuals "police" - don't know what to do with us. So, although the buses are left behind, we walk on, heading towards Ramallah, about a 15-minute walk. The intention is to go to Ma'alufiyyeh, on the other side of Ramallah along the road to Jerusalem. This is the arena of choice for confronting Israeli soldiers since the September 1996 clashes and the Jebel Abu Ghnaim protests in Spring 1997.
I notice Usayd (pictured above in the left of the smaller photo), a friend of Yasser Abdel Ghani, a Birzeit student shot by Israeli troops on 25 September 1996. It took him until 6 February 1997 to die. Whenever I go to document and cover these events, I find my eyes searching out these people. You know, as you all head down to the place to confront the Israelis, that whole galaxies are passing through their minds. Very primal, unconscious forces produce these situations, and the addition of a painful layer of personal trauma can only agitate these forces.
The students begin to realise they aren't going to make it into Ramallah, as one Palestinian soldier/policeman has been rabbiting on into his walkie talkie while shadowing the students. They will be waiting to block the passage through to Ma'alufiyyeh. So, a quick decision is made, and the students head off in a western route towards Beit El settlement. This is bad from the point of view of the desired protest, as the three hundred students walking through the city would have been sure to swell their ranks to at least triple that number by the time they got to the intended site.
We get there pretty quickly, the few Palestinian police on the way not really able to do much except ask them nicely to go home. As I walk up the long road to the traffic roundabout ('circle' in American I believe), I am amazed at the organisation that goes on during the walk. Rocks are moved into the road to keep the Israeli soldiers' vehicles at bay, bottles and stones are picked up, and garbage skips overturned to suppliment the rock barracades. And it's not just guys doing this, women are very much in evidence. All the photos in this diary entry were digitally captured off a video tape so I could get all this on the Web quickly. When I get the 35mm film processed, I'll add some 'real' photos (!) illustrating what I'm describing.