Day trip to Dead Sea

Picked up Yael in Jerusalem for a drive out and down towards the Dead Sea. With the recent rain, the desert was tinged an emerald green. The plan had been to stop off at St. George's monastery in Wadi Kelt, however we found the road blocked by the gate of a new Jewish settlement, so we circled back to the junction of the Good Samaritan, where there is a small museum. Two employees of the Parks Authority were sitting outside, leisurely puffing on a nargilla (waterpipe).

Yael got talking to them and we discovered that, yes, the road to the monastery was now blocked (despite the large official signs announcing this well-known tourist site) and that the army had closed off the other roads for travel by car. One of the Parks employees proved to have unusually left-of- centre views, and he told us that basically the Jewish settlements were stealing all the land in the area and that 120 bedouin communities had already been evicted. His own view was that this was very unfair, that the situation would be a lot better if everyone would agree to live together peacefully.

Yael, who has spent most of her life working for human rights organizations, is pessimistic about the country's future, and is mulling emigrating to Spain, asked him what he thought of the idea. He said that he himself had two European passports but that, unlike most of his relations, he was planning to stay here, come what may.

We continued down to Ein Fesh'ha on the Dead Sea, where there is national park with a visitor center. Several families of American ultra-orthodox Jews were there, enjoying the fine weather and attempting to herd their many children in Hebrew, English and Yiddish. There were also some Palestinian families bathing in the pools at the park (this is, after all, Occupied Territory). A film explained some of the phenomena of the park area and the Dead Sea, which, it said, is receding at the alarming rate of 3 meters a year.

In Jerusalem again, we stopped off at the American Colony hotel, whose courtyard has the best English language bookshop in the country (it's a sister of the Educational Bookshop on Salah ad'Din street, and run by the same family). I asked the owner if the promised copy of Arundhati Roy's new book had arrived and he reached up to a top shelf. I also bought books by Han Kang and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

We spent some time chatting with the bookshop owner. Fortunately there has been no further harrassment since the police arrived last year, arresting the owners and confiscated any books that appeared to them vaguely suspicious, though it seems the cops were unable to read either Arabic or English. Yael asked her usual question about whether she should flee or remain in the country, and he said that she ought to stay - that Jewish leftists and Palestinians need to stay around and mount a concerted joint struggle for change.