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How I remember it, with some writer's licence. Photos mostly plagiarised from the net.
The second morning I was scrubbing oil filters in the desert heat of a large industrial plant. They were corrugated metal and did not scrub easily. For hours several of us casual workers stood around water tanks scrubbing. Towards the end I lost patience with listening to two soldiers grumble about Arabs and got into an argument. One was an English Israeli who had served in the IDF, the other a UN peacekeeper, more obviously Swedish than the day before. They didn’t like Arabs. Arabs, and Jews, had been kind to me.
We entrenched our opposite views. Jack said the bottom line was that Israel had beaten the Arabs in war with a superior army. Sven, fresh from Lebanon, said (only not so politely) that I should be suspcious about Arab motives, particularly their sexual motives.
This was true...in precisely two out of hundreds of encounters. The third man who tried it on with me during my travels was a retired English public school bursar, and boastful paedophile, who wanted me to join him on a trip through Hezekiah’s darkened and lonely underground tunnel in Jerusalem. I didn’t propely spot any of these offers for what they were, nor those who offered for who they were. Thankfully some sixth sense stopped me accepting them. Or perhaps it was the grace of God, acting on one occasion through an unexpectedly hostile gang of Palestinian children who scared me off seeking the house of the old man who’d stuck his hand in my pocket and invited me to drink whisky with him. I'm not quite fully describing this. #metoo.
I was young and naive. I didn’t know I had autism. I knew to suspect tourist scams, but on the whole I took people at face value and just thought they were being friendly in a locally acceptable way. Thankfully they usually were. Most of the Arabs I met as a solo traveller were genuinely hospitable and generous and wanted nothing from me beyond the honour of welcoming a foreigner. So were most of the Jews. They invited me, a stranger, into their homes, fed me meals, begged me to take their photo, welcomed me to their country, taught me their language, smiled and laughed with me, asked me to call them if I ever needed help. This lesson in how to treat foreigners in Britain made Matthew 25 familiar.
Work over, we were pointed to changing rooms and showers. I showered for an hour. The grey oil stains never left the clothing I wore that day. Afterwards I found I was alone in the building. Not having been fed lunch, I was ravenous. I’m afraid I snaffled some matzos from a fridge before I made my way to the exit gate.
Click for Part III.
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