Pilgrimage for Palestine

… Pilgrimage for Palestine hit London Parliament Square on a hot 30th March at 2pm. There was amazement and some tears as we paused in Hyde Park, after thirteen days of walking, talking, poetry, generous hosts, massive support, huge donations, canals, rivers, injury, iftar, mild disagreement, rapture, waking every day at 3.30am.

We paused and waited for the Red Rebels. We being myself on foot, my wife Alice, Nick Bilbrough on bicycle (Hands Up Project founder,) Rowland Dye and Sue Luger, the support team, on foot/van. And a number of supporters who had joined us for the last leg.

We moved closer to Parliament Square and waited for the Rebels. They appeared, moving very slowly as they do, as if in shock, dressed in Renaissance velvet red. We followed them into the square, traffic and sunlight and tourists and towers – and Palestinian flags. Right round went the rebels, and we followed, dazed and amazed, stopped at Winston Churchill and began to speak, as Zionists chanted and flung unspecified liquids. A drunk man took our side and wanted to attack them, and was gently diverted. I gave the key round my neck a last kiss and touched it to my forehead, then handed it to a girl in traditional Palestinian dress.

This was the key I was given in Bristol by Feda Shahien on the 18th, thirteen days before, the day the sham ceasefire finally collapsed. All along the way it hung round my neck on a strip of cloth from a Palestinian shawl. It is the key to Feda’s grandmother’s house in Palestine, from which she was evicted by the Israelis (that part of history does not exist in Israel.) Once, in Reading, the key fell off. I was speaking at an event at the University, reading poems by Palestinian children collected by the Hands Up Project. The key untied itself from its cloth and fell to the floor, and the floor nearly gave way beneath my feet as I realised they key could have fallen off when I was walking along the canal and been lost.

The Kennet and Avon canal rescued us from heavy roads all the way from Bath to Reading. Then the roads claimed us again for one hectic and racist day, when for a moment near Datchet I thought all was lost. Union Jacks everywhere, and a smooth guy rolled past, filming us, saying, ‘No thanks, not in Datchet.’ Then we picked up the Grand Union canal all the way to Paddington.

As well as the voice of the roads there is the voice of the waters. These are the two modes, the two speeds of Britain. One is trucks and tar, the other swans and reflections. We can’t always choose, but it’s great good fortune to be chosen once in a while by the slower and brighter one. Here the people are almost all supporters, news was sent ahead on the Boaters facebook page and one person ran out to catch us up and give us money. Only one boater expressed fear of the ‘foreigners.’ The ones he dreaded were the ones who fed us every night at iftar, the breaking or ‘opening’ of the fast. Every night we visited a mosque, or once a restaurant, once somebody’s home, to join or at least listen to the prayers, to talk, to be thanked, to thank, to praise and be praised, to witness the crowds of men kneeling together, the sea-rhythms of their devotion. (Women in another room, or the other side of a screen.) First, at sunset, one date and a drink of water. Then ten minutes of prayers and prostrations. Then – the feast. Quicker than the eye can see, food is distributed to hundreds of people – always us first, the pilgrims. Afterwards we talk and present books of poems. We have learned wonderful things: how the Quran is like a flower, how the Woking mosque, oldest in Britain, was built by a Jew, A Muslim and a Christian; how Ramadan is a time to be ‘minimal,’ how Adelard of Bath, in the 12th century, was the single portal between Christendom and Islam. All the time back in Bristol the mother of the project, Aumairah Hassan of the Bristol Palestine Alliance, andher husband were contacting Mosques ahead of us and finding us hosts for the night. Ghazala Manzoor, our social media artist, was proliferating our posts and video diaries.

But, as I said, on that day we set out from Bristol, from Saint Mark’s church in Easton, sent off in Bristol style with passionate speeches, on that day the Israelis, who had never really kept the ceasefire, finally broke it. The brief illusory calm, the dream of reprieve, was smashed, heavier bombs than before, an even more complete blockade of the starving people. We were in touch all the way with Ashraf Kuhail in Gaza, one of the Hands Up teachers. He described the heavier shaking of the ground, the evaporation of hope. Yet still he continues with teaching games, making colourful pictures for the children to name. His exhausted daughter Lama still tries to learn. Horrible news accompanied us – executions, evacuations, annexation. What could we do but keep walking on, meeting with poetry groups and Palestine groups in Bath, Bradford on Avon, Devizes, Swindon, Newbury, Reading, Maidenhead and London. We said we were calling through the soles of our feet to the soul of Britain. Britain heard us and answered it was sick to death of the slaughter, burning with shame. In Newbury the mayor welcomed us in all his brass, and Steve, a Green Councillor, briefly flew the Palestinian flag from a window of Town Hall. Al Jazeera filmed us as we were welcomed into the town in the rain, and the mayor (who has been criticised for this,) opened up the council chambers to the bedraggled supporters. The tv cameras arrived just after we’d shaken off a furious ex-soldier who continued to call us terrorists and traitors even after I’d cried out, ‘God save the King!’ Is this also the voice of Britain? I guess so, but a stronger voice wants justice for the Palestinians.

The waters of the canal, at their overflows, thunder into the Avon and the Kennet, and then the Kennet pours fire into the Thames, swirling like Arabic writing. What is the roaring of the waters saying? To my ears it is the sound of justice, the promise of truth and justice – one day.

The Pilgrimage continues, we have now formed ourselves into an ongoing group that will plan events and further pilgrimages, always seeking to call through the poetry of young Palestinians to the heart of Britain.