I visited Israel and Palestine for Christmas. What a strong experience !

I have a friend who has been doing a volunteer job in Haida camp in Palestine since September and I thought I might visit her to see with my own eyes how the conflict and the situation really is in Israel and Palestine. I followed the conflict and I knew the big picture but what I saw there was somehow quite different than I first imagined.

This is my arrival at the Tel Aviv airport. Entering the territory was very easy. I wasn't controlled but what I found strange was that instead of stamping my passport, I received a paper that I couldn't loose that authorized me to stay in the territory for a period of 3 months. I learned later that it was a measure that the Israelite government took to avoid the Jewish who are citizens of other countries and who visit Israel to be caught at the frontiers of other countries.

Here is a picture of me when I visited Jerusalem. It is taken from the Mount of Olives. I was residing at Bethlehem which is at 6 kilometers of Jerusalem and is in Palestine.

Israelites don't have the authorization to enter Palestine and Palestinians cannot go freely in Israel. There are strict controls to go from on side to the other. This is the checkpoint that you have to go through to enter and leave Bethlehem. As tourists, we only have to take off any piece of metal and go through x-rays scanner. We also have to show our passport and the paper we received at the airport that allows us to enter the Israelite territory. For Palestinians, there are extra checks like fingerprint scanning. As for the Israelites, they just don't have the rights to cross the border. Their own government forbids it.

Here is a picture taken from the Palestinian side. You can see the Jordanian mountains. What stroked me is how close the feel and look is with Jerusalem. On the other hand, we are only at 6 kilometers from there but there is the checkpoint and the wall that separates these two worlds.

There are many tags on the wall but these two ones, even if they're ugly, they caught my attention. Linux and Bitcoin are in Palestine also.

Here is an example of the kind of messages you can read on the wall. I had the chance to meet someone while she was tagging something. I asked her if she would let me take a picture of her. She seemed happy and accepted.

This is the Banksy museum. It is also an hotel. The museum presents the history of the wall with the conflict being present at every moment. As you can see, this museum faces the wall. Also, a night in the hotel costs 300 euros. Needless to say I didn't have the money to take a night there. That's something very striking in Palestine. How total poverty is right next to opulence. It is even more striking afterwards.

That's where the Palestinians manifest every Friday. They go there and throw stones every Friday to manifest against what they consider as an occupation of their territory. The Israelite army answers with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Here is another hotel. And if you think 300 euros per night is expensive, this is nothing compared to the price you would pay if you went into this hotel. What is really weird is that the houses you see are the Haida camp. That's where you can find the Hezbollah and the Hamas. When you see images of Palestine in the news, they're either taken from the manifestation place or in camps like the Haida camp.

When I entered the Haida camp, I saw a football field in which were playing a brother and a sister. The girl asked me to join them and to play with them. Which I did. They allowed me to take pictures of them.

This is another places where stones are thrown. But by children this time and it is situated in the Haida camp. The Israelite army also reciprocates with rubber bullets and the air in the camp is often saturated with tear gas. I went three times in the camp during the week I stayed there and it was enough for me to smell the gases once.

This is what the streets look like in the Haida camp. I met someone called Ahmed who lives there and he told me what most of the Palestinians I met also told me which is that their land is being occupied and that they are resisting. What stroked me was that even in this difficult situation, I could see that he and the others remained humans. I couldn't help but think that if they were born in Belgium, some of them whom I had a very good vibe from the very beginning would be friends and we would drink beers and have fun in pubs in Belgium.

The travel wouldn't be complete if I didn't go on the Israelite side also and go meet and talk with some Israelites also. So my friends and I went to Haifa and we met Yehuda (Juda). He is Jewish and lives at Haifa. He also works in a place called German Colony. I talked with him and he gave me his viewpoint which I'll try to summarize here. The Jewish/Israelite history is a tragic one. Those are people who were either slaves, in war with more powerful enemies than them or in exile. And once in exile, they were constantly rejected by the countries in which they were until the point where there was a genocide. So, they are quite afraid of what other nations could do to them. Also, he told me that even though he hopes for a better future for both, Israelites and Palestinians, he was still afraid of Palestinians as he was caught in a terrorist attack when he was 9 years old and he remembers clearly the death of other people in front of him. I really sympathized with him and as for Ahmed, I thought he would be one of my friend if we both lived in Belgium and I was pretty sure he would like Ahmed too if they both didn't have to wear an history that resulted in a wall.

This last image is the Nativity Place at Bethlehem by night. So it is in Palestine but not in a camp. This was kind of a surprise to see that most of Palestine is like that even though it is not as well decorated. The camps are more like the exception even though you can clearly see that Palestine is poor compared to Israel. It was a surprise for me because I imagined that all Palestine was like what I was seeing in Haida camp. But more importantly, there is what I took out from this travel and it is mostly a new thought I would like to share. On both side of the wall, I had the impression to see the same humans than the ones I'm used to see in Belgium. And that raised a question. We are all trying to build something on top of our differences. That something should unite us all. The problem with this approach is that if someone didn't built that something (yet?), he cannot be united with the rest of us ... It is a problem as new born people come every day but if I'm right and that we all share something from the very start because we are all born human. We all have some emotions, were born from a mother, have a similar brain that allows us to think somehow the same, maybe we can flip around what we are doing. The question I asked myself is : What if we built differences on top of something common ? Meaning that we could always fall back on that common humanity if the differences make us misunderstand each others. We can talk about it in the comments if you like. :)