Day 7 Jerusalem Old City

Socialist Resistance no8 | page 15

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

I set off for Nablus today. The first step is to get a taxi near Damascus gate, go to Qalanda checkpoint and change to another taxi to Jabba. This journey rivals anything Alton Towers has to offer - it is spent dodging potholes, other taxis and pedestrians.

We have to walk to get to the Jabba checkpoint, where we are made to stand on the side of the road for 20 minutes and then told by soldiers that the checkpoint is closed for the day. We wait and argue. Some young people explain they have exams, but nobody is let through. I wait for 2 hours.

Then more soldiers arrive, and push people back from the checkpoint, saying "get back where you have come from". This from an occupying army!

Every few minutes an Israeli car, probably from a settlement, is waived through the checkpoint. People ask me to tell people in