Barton Hill blogger shares stories from Palestine

Barton Hill-based community activist David Mowat visited the West Bank in Palestine for the first time in 1991. His curiosity led him into the Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem, during the period of the first Intifada (Arab uprising), when the Israeli Security Forces (ISF) fenced off the entire camp. While there, David was hit by a rock that was aimed at an Israeli soldier. “It’s not an experience that you ever forget,” he says.

That first visit was life-changing. Up until that point, David had focused his activism on inner-city justice and empowerment in Barton Hill and across Bristol. Now he turned his attention to the people of Palestine, and has been visiting regularly for almost 30 years.

David’s new blog, Gaza:life stories, includes a small but growing collection of stories from the Palestinians he has built up friendships with over recent years.

“I’ve made friends with people in Gaza. They’re not political, just people who want to live,” David says. “The Gaza Strip has been under siege for 13 years and its people feel very cut off – from the rest of Palestine as well as the world. So I keep trying to find imaginative ways to tell stories so that others can hear, giving relief to the mental siege.

“I am always trying to connect people to each other across divides and I advocate for an end to the occupation. The injustice and suffering for Gazans is clear but there is no long-term peace for Israelis either as their government maintains its blockade and disproportionate assaults on the people of Gaza, who will always resist.”

David Mowat during a visit to Palestine in 2006, monitoring the detention of a West Bank Palestinian who had been picked up for not having a permit to enter Jerusalum. Photo supplied by David Mowat.

One of the stories on the blog that David finds particularly moving, entitled The death of my father, was written by a woman called Reem. Reem begins with the line: “My story must reach the whole world for everyone must know how the Israeli occupation kills those who were once safe in their homes and who themselves have never sinned.”

She describes the incident where an Israeli missile hit her family home, killing her father, as “a wound still bleeding”. Her family continues to live “under siege”, facing hunger and intimidation.

David’s father, Hugh Mowat, was in Palestine with the British Army in 1946 with little to do except travel about, and was impressed both by kibbutzes and Arab hospitality. After retiring in 1980, he began visiting Israeli and Palestinian Christian communities every year. He would give talks back in England, telling stories from a Palestinian perspective.

“My father was passionate about reconciliation and I always had a lot of respect for that,” says David.

Palestine became more of a priority for David after completing a walking pilgrimage from Bristol to Jerusalem in 2005. The journey took five-and-a-half months, and when they arrived at Bil’in village in the West Bank, they were met with tear gas as villagers resisted the Israeli imposition of the separation barrier that was taking much of their land.

“It was a full-on experience,” says David. It was the year of the last presidential election where Palestinians elected Mahmood Abbas, the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, following the death of Yasar Arafat in 2004.

During this period, David was a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). A Palestinian-led, non-violent movement “committed to resisting the long entrenched and systematic oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian population”.

From then on, he would follow in his father’s footsteps by making regular trips to Palestine. He worked with the Quakers as part of their Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel, using a model that involves local presence in the West Bank combined with international pressure to end the military occupation of Palestine.

David, third from right, played trumpet at the Nablus Music Festival in the West Bank with the Chai For All ensemble. Photo supplied by David Mowat.

David is also a trumpet player, who regularly plays for residents at Lincoln Gardens care home in Barton Hill. In 2018 he performed at the Nablus Music Festival in the West Bank as part of the show Longing  Belonging and Balfour, where music and spoken word are used to tell the story of the Balfour Declaration in 1917.

That was the year when British foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, gave support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, leading to the creation of Israel. At the same time, Balfour promised to uphold the rights of the indigenous Arab population, a promise many Palestinians feel was broken. Palestinian, Jewish and British first-hand accounts are used to capture the complexities of this historical moment.

David is unable to visit Gaza at present, due to the blockade and the global pandemic. It is for this reason he feels it’s important to share these stories now: “I’m hoping these stories reveal a side of Gaza to the reader that they wouldn’t otherwise see.”

Read David’s blog by visiting www.gazalifestories.wordpress.com 

Main photo by Islam Khalid

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