Categories: uncategorized
Date: 08 October 2005 23:36:35
It's been an odd weekend.
And I mean really odd. Riot police, blockades, squatts, meetings all seem normal right now, compared to this weekend.
I'm back in Manchester, where I spent most of my life, with a set of friends who I tried to stay in touch with even after I moved to york and failed dismally. Most of the times I've returned to Stockport have been for funerals. So going to Stockport with new friends from York/Bradford/Swansea was decidly odd.
We went to a Martin John Nicholls concert, which wasn't what I'd expected. Instead of being him stood at the front singing, he took us through the songs, what inspired him to write them, his experiences of Palestine. I know about Palestine. I can do Palestine, I've done the lectures, read the pamphlets, I can shoult "FREE PALESTINE" with the best of them, I can hold my own in arguments with Zionists. I love hearing about it, but it's generally all the same. It's crap, Isrealis do crap things to Palestinians, Palestinians do crap things to Isrealis, we screwed it up in the first place, America is doing it's fair share of screwing now...
But it's different now.
Because, yesterday, I got a phone call. My plane tickets for Palestine are booked. So, I spent the first half of the concert getting increasingly terrified, then, during the second half I realised that in any normal situation my response would have been 'i want to go to palestine'. And now I am going to Palestine. Oh shit.
We leave on the 27th December, and return on the 8th January, not altogether sure how I'll fund the trip, but I guess I'll find a way. Apparently the worst case scenario is that I spend a week in a youth hostel in Jerusalem on my own. Which would be amazing and terrifying.
In fact, the whole thing is amazing and terrifying.