"the lost post"

Well, isn't this odd? I found this post sitting in the "saved" area, where it must've went went Blogpost crashed. I'll post it, not because it's anything novel, but just so it looks like I'm posting more often. It's a little bit different than the other political rant I posted.

I've fallen a bit behind, partly due to having walked about 30 miles over the past two days, partly due to having shot almost 300 photos over the past two days, but mainly because my Firefox browser is acting up and wasn't letting me do much of anything online. So I've switched back to Evil Empire™ Internet Explorer, and I think that this will work until I figure out what Firefox was doing wrong and how to fix it.

It's too bad, really, because I was fired up to do a big political post based on some casual observations I made yesterday. Well, the rage has cooled, but I still want to relate the glimpses of Palestinian life under Israeli rule that I saw yesterday:

In the bustling David St. Market in the Old City, a Palestinian merchant was getting hassled by two IDF soldiers and an Israeli police officer; from what I gleaned from the conversation and the gesticulation, the merchant had left stuff (probably trash?) out in front of his shuttered store when he went to afternoon prayers. When he came back, the Israelis--armed with automatic weapons and dressed in body armor, by the way--made sure he knew the price for violating the law.

• Later, in a nearby and similar market area, another trio of armed Israelis (two IDF, backing up a Israeli police commander) were hassling another Palestinian merchant because the scarves he had hanging out in front of his stall were dangling too low--a tall man would have to duck his head to avoid the scarves brushing against his hair.


• Earlier in the day, I took a bus tour of greater Jerusalem. On the bus, you get a pair of headphones you can plug in to get a pre-recorded narration (in your choice of eight languages) of all the sights the bus passes on its route. Time and time again, the narrator mentioned where brave Israeli soldiers "took" locations in combat--never mentioning that they "took" these locations from the Palestinians who owned the land--or where ruthless Arabs (Jordanians, most typically) mercilessly slaughtered innocent Jews/Israelis. There's that saying about how history is written by conquerors; it's not just history--it's tour guide narration, too. Palestinians do not exist on that tour; they were the previous occupants, who somehow left no forwarding address. I was half-tempted to switch to the Arabic language version, in hopes that the Palestinians would exist there, but listening to the English narrative was like watching faceplant videos on Youtube: you're horrified by it, but you can't stop.


• Later on, I was walking through another market area, and in a bigger stall that looked like some sort of tailored-goods store, an altercation had started up between several IDF soldiers and one of the merchants. Again, the IDF soldiers are armed, and an older guy--some sort of officer--had intervened and things weren't looking very promising for the merchant. I have no clue what was going on, or why, but for the third time in the day, I wondered what it would be like to scrape by as a lower-class merchant at the whim of guys with guns who can cause you all sorts of problems if they don't like the way you dispose of your trash, or how you display your merchandise, etc.


• Finally, I was walking back to the hotel past the Damascus Gate--which is the entrance to the Old City that butts up against Arab East Jerusalem. There is a taxi stand there, and then a whole bunch of signs that I interpret as "no parking" or "no stopping" signs, and as I was walking past, a Palestinian teenager runs up and yells to another guy in front of me (all I caught was "yulla! yulla!" = "go! go!"). The guy runs to a cab--parked in what must be the no parking area--and fires up the engine to make a quick getaway... too late. A pickup truck with three Israeli police screeched to a stop, boxing in the cab. The Palestinian driver tried to sneak past the truck, whereupon one of the Israeli police jumped out and angrily started shouting and pointing at the Palestinian, one hand on his gun. The incident ended with the cops pulling the guy out of his cab and writing up some sort of documentation--a ticket, or a court summons, or something. Like the tailor incident, I surreptitiously took some pictures, but another touristy-looking guy wasn't so circumspect--he was blatantly photographing the whole incident. The cops didn't seem to care.

So there you have it; in a day when I wasn't looking for evidence of the grinding oppression that Palestinians experience on a day-to-day basis, I had it thrown in front of me, several times. The Israelis have the guns, and the power, and if they don't like something a Palestinian is doing, they intervene. And they don't care who sees it.

If you have any questions why I do what I do, hopefully this post will be something of an answer.
And so you have something to look at after reading all that politically-charged observation, here are some pretty (and a couple not-so-pretty) pictures:


(well, blogspot has a pretty awkward way of adding & moving around pictures in posts, and I just lost one of the ones I had posted. I'm not going to mess with trying to fix it now, so here's the rest)

I call this one "This is not your land"--this was the police intervention on the illegal parking

This is the Western Wall plaza. All the cleared ground in this area was, before the 1967 Six-Days War, a Palestinian neighborhood. That neighborhood was bulldozed to make the plaza. I'm sure the Palestinians got over it--hey, Israel even built a nice, wooden ramp so all the non-Muslims who want to visit the Temple Mount can do so!


The order of these pictures got messed up, as I wanted this picture to be before the previous one. Anyway, this is a HDR-composite photo of the Western Wall. The people look ghostly not because they're ghosts, but because I put three exposures together in order to get the dramatic sky and saturated color tones.

The entrance to the David St. Market, just east of the Jaffa Gate into the Old City.

Zion Gate, on the southeast side of the city. The only post-processing I did on this picture was to correct some perspective distortion--I did nothing to the woman sitting; she was stock-still long enough so that her image is razor-sharp, while the woman walking past is merely a blur. Pretty cool of her to model like that for me.