The world is full of anomalies. It is hard to describe how I feel sitting on the balcony of the Palm Hostel in Jerusalem overlooking Damascus Gate and its conjugal Palm trees. I mailed by camera home yesterday and I am hoping that the universe will deliver it safely to my doorstep. I am leaving Palestine with nothing but my experience. My videos must follow me by post because of security at the airport. I found out too late that my footage will not back up to DVDs so mailing the entire camera was the only way. It is a hard disk which means the hardware that stores the footage is inseparable from the camera.

But what now? I'm not really sure how to go about my normal life anymore. It takes a trip like this to shake all your perceptions of reality and render you perplexed and even more restless than before. So I think all I can do now is upload some last pictures because I don't know what else to say. Maybe I will write one last post in a few days when I am in the states and have digested some things.

I went to a demonstration today in Jerusalem against the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah. Here are some pictures.

Sunset in Nablus.

Pictures from a demonstration in Iraq Burin, a village outside Nablus where land has been confiscated for the building of settlements. Unlike the villages of Bil'in and Nilin who have been organizing for years, the people of Iraq Burin just started demonstrating regularly in the past few weeks. Yesterday there were about 150 people, with some 25 internationals. The action quickly turned violent with soldiers firing rubber coated steel bullets, possibly live ammo, and long range tear gas missiles (not the rubber canisters they normally fire in Bil'in). Boys were throwing stones. Thirty soldiers were attacking us from the hills. The terrain is rougher here than in Bil'in. I tripped and fell as we were running away from continuos volleys of gas and fire.

On Sunday I spent the night on a street in East Jerusalem.

Two families, in total 53 people, have been evicted from their apartments in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem/Al Quds. They have set up a tent outside their home and some of the older men sleep there every night to show that they are determined to stay. I came, along with a Turkish girl volunteering at the International Solidarity Movement, to hear their story, and to be present if the new occupants of their home or Israeli police tried to harass them.

If you ever visit this country, you will quickly become familiar with a type of sensation that feels something like paralysis. Never did I  feel this more than my night in Sheikh Jarrah. I could hardly speak to the evicted tenants under the tent that was now there home. What was I supposed to do? There was nothing that I could do here. "This is now our kitchen," an older man pointed to a plastic table with a kettle and some plates on it under the tent. "Would you like some Arabic coffee?" Three teenage Jewish boys walked by smirking at us. A Palestinian man shouted at them. In the seized apartment, I saw a man attaching a camera to the wall. I looked over at the guy sitting next to me, staring intently, with strong energetic eyes at this man putting a camera outside the home. As if he was trying to monitor strangers in his neighborhood. I took the man up on the Arabic coffee and he started to tell me the story of his family's eviction.

In 1948, after the creation of Israel, the Hanoun and Ghawe families were made refugees. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) gave them these homes from which the Israeli government has now evicted them. Since 1972, Jewish settlers have been waging a legal battle to take ownership of these properties, ultimately succeeding two weeks ago. They forged legal documents which allegedly proved that this land in Sheikh Jarrah was owned by Jewish residents during the Ottoman period. The families fought hard to continuously appeal the settlers claims to their land until they finally received an eviction notice this past February. On August 2, after six months of refusing to leave,heavily armed Israeli police broke into the Hanoun and Ghawe homes, shattered windows, and threw the residents out onto the street. Within one hour, the new tenants had arrived and occupied the homes.

What should I have said to all this? "I'm sorry"? I tried uttering this and then I immediately felt ignorant. Ignorant for thinking that somehow these words could make things better. Because they don't. The last thing these people need is my useless pity. The Turkish girl with me was similarly speechless. She took out a pack of cigarettes, offered me one. I smoked three. I've never smoked in my life. When I was inhaling, I just wanted to cry. I missed my family so much. I couldn't cry though. What was the point of crying when, after all, I have a home to go back to?

It was cold that night. I was wearing a sweater over my long sleeve, and I had wrapped myself good in a blanket. I was sitting in a chair until early in the morning. The police came by two times throughout the night with their blue sirens flashing. Both times they just looked out at us and then left. Around 3am, the Turkish girl had to go to the bathroom. One of the sons took us to the hotel room where his mother and younger brothers and sisters were staying so that we could use the bathroom. A small room for a mother and four children who until two weeks ago were sleeping inside their home.

This is how these people are literally made strangers in their own neighborhoods, to their homes and farms.

A lot has happened since my last post. My workshop ended on Friday. first let me tell you about that.

I almost wish I had had another week with these kids. Sometimes I forget how deep a passion I have for theater. The day of the performance, I went to Bil’in again to demonstrate against the nightly raids and arrests that have been happening in recent weeks there. I was wary to go because I wanted to rest and take it easy before my students performed in the evening. But I decided to go. There was an Israeli press group at the demo so there was relatively less tear gas. Tear gas and chemical water cannons are probably not the best for your nerves on an opening night, but I promised myself that this would be part of the package for me in coming to Palestine. To be present and to show solidarity, this is important to me.

There was something refreshing about coming back from Bil’in and walking into the theater. Seeing my students, doing a dry cue-to-cue with lighting, running through sound cues, working beats with my actors, this is sublime. My love affair with theater and acting is a volatile one. Sometimes it feels unsustainable. But on Friday, it brushed me with an old familiarity. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry bellowed from my students' mouths like smoke and made shapes in the air. 15-year-old kids became creatures chasing a dark legacy, crawling in blue light and engaging with exile, dislocation, emergence, and fierce pride. Of course this was a vision that only materialized when I was watching the piece. In the end, the performance was very rough and unpolished. A work in progress in every sense. One more week would have been enough. But I didn’t come to Ashtar to give a performance. I actually came because I was curious. I don’t know if they know it, but I didn’t teach those kids a damn thing. It’s really not that hard to make interesting pictures with bodies in a performance space. Especially if you are as talented as many of them were. The truth is that I was curious about kids who live here. Curious about how they relate to a fraught history. I wish I could have spent more time with them.

I saw a Barbie doll with hijab being sold in a shop yesterday. Hijabi Barbie's knockers are as big as those of White Barbie. Just as over-proportioned. The only difference between White Barbie and Hijabi Barbie is the Hijab part.

Edward Said, can I get you to break this one down?