11.05pm: Jaffa Gate, Old City, Jerusalem.
Far from the madding crowds flowing out of Jerusalem’s ancient stone walls, a white car was waiting at the bus stop down the hill, ready for the first leg of our journey to another holy city, one less trodden by tourists: Shechem (or Nablus, as it’s commonly known). Kever Yoseph, the Tomb of Joseph, son of Jacob, lies in the center of Nablus, which has a population of over 160,000 souls, making it the largest Palestinian city – and also one of the most hostile. In brighter days Jews could worship there freely but the Kever now falls under Palestinians Authority Area A and is thus forbidden for Israeli citizens to enter the city. The only way there is under cover of darkness – and with an army escort. So be it.

11.40pm: Ofra, West Bank.
Within seconds of getting out of the car, an American in his 20s ran towards us, gleefully waving a book in the air--On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society--whilst muttering clichés about wimpy ‘liberals’. Welcome to Ofra, one of the first West Bank settlements established by the messianic right-wing Gush Emunim movement in the 1970s. We were early for our bulletproof bus but, in true Israeli style, we had to wait an hour before boarding. On the pavement, the atmosphere was starting to get festive, with a mix of starry-eyed settler youth, mainly from the central and southern West Bank, whose knitted skullcaps and long peyos dangled alongside those of the Breslav Hassidim, some of whom sneaked into the Tomb in 2003 in defiance of the military, leaving seven with gunshot wounds. But not everyone had registered with the authorities, a necessary requirement for entering ‘enemy territory’, leaving dozens stranded. It was too much for one teenager, who threw himself under the bus, narrowly missing its wheels.

12.13pm: Tapuach Junction, West Bank.
Word had spread that there was going to be a knisah [entrance] to Joseph’s Tomb, and the Tapuach checkpoint was packed with over 100 people trying to get in. Some had given up hope and resorted to davening in the middle of the road, whilst some ingenious haredim attempted to hide in the luggage compartment of our bus. Things were getting serious. It had been several months since the last Knisah, and it seemed like Joseph had never been so popular; “There’s lots of pent up demand,” said the American rabbi sitting next to me, who had prayed at the Tomb twice before--once recently with an army escort, and another time more freely in the 1990s, before the days of checkpoints and intifadas (and with half as many Jewish settlers in the West Bank).

12.55pm, Huwara Village, south of Nablus.
After leaving Tapuach, we found ourselves in a convoy with three other buses flanked by army vehicles, all of which soon came to a halt at the next Palestinian village where Jewish pilgrims were trying to outsmart the bewildered border police. Aizeh balagan. We took a right past the notorious checkpoint to which the village lends its name, and that serves to keep would-be terrorists from Nablus at bay whilst maintaining a virtual siege on the rest of the city. We climbed the hill in the direction of the Elon Moreh settlement (not a place I thought I’d be returning to so soon after my last jaunt there).

01.24am: Army checkpoint, somewhere east of Nablus.
The 50 people on the bus burst into song and chants of “Od Yoseph Chai” and “Yoseph, Yoseph, Yoseph HaTzaddik” as soon as we burst through the checkpoint. “It’s nothing physical, they just want kesher [contact] with the Tzaddik,” said the Rabbi. “It’s ridiculous. This is our land and we have to sneak in at the middle of the night.” The irony escaped him that the Palestinians in Nablus/Shechem feel the same: This is their land, but are barred from traveling freely inside it whilst settlers zoom through the checkpoints and freshly-tarmaced roads and with ease.

01.39am: Joseph’s Tomb, downtown Nablus.
We officially arrived. The tomb itself is a shadow of its former glory, covered in ash and rubble after being partially destroyed by Palestinian riots in 2000, but that didn’t dampen the euphoria of the crowd, who filled the building’s central chamber with songs of exultation. Outside, the streets were deserted, save for our bus and two army vehicles straddling them. I get the feeling that if the locals wanted to take a potshot at us, it wouldn’t be too difficult.

For once, I found myself in agreement with the rabbi: The situation was ridiculous. As exhilarating as it is to visit the resting place of our forefathers, the price to pay is steep: soldiers putting their lives on the line, whilst Nablus and the rest of the West Bank are on lock-down. No one wins. It’s a similar story at the resting place of Joseph’s mother, Rachel, sliced out of Bethlehem by the ominous separation wall, and the Cave of the Patriarchs in the walking Kafka novel that is present-day Hebron. Jews should have access to our holy places, but it makes me wonder if the apparatus of checkpoints and settlements encircling them help ensure our rights to them or the opposite? The experience of the last 41 years is less than conclusive.

02.27am: Evacuation, Joseph’s Tomb. Soldiers with loudhailers round up the excited worshippers, no easy task when half of them are tucking into the steaming cholent that appeared from nowhere (via Bnei Brak). After a pause at Tapuach, a hitchhike arrives and we’re homeward bound.

04.19am: Jerusalem, Israel. The car pulls in near King George Street, passing Israeli teenagers wandering home after a night on the town. I glide up the four flights of stairs, take off my Nike Air trainers, painted black by the soot from the Tomb, and head to bed to ponder the night’s surreal events.

Itamar: as seen from above Labels on the plastic bottles of Giva’ot Olam’s (admittedly delicious) goats milk yogurt describe the farm’s location as ‘The heart of the Shomron’, the Hebrew name for the northern West Bank. What the labels don't say is that the farm is completely illegal: one of over 100 settlement outposts erected without authorization from the Israeli government. The farm’s ‘mother’ settlement—Itamar—was authorized by the Israeli government, but is considered illegal under international law because it's built on occupied territory. Both Giva’ot Olam and Itamar are partly constructed on land privately-owned by Palestinians (and that’s according to data from the Civil Administration in the West Bank).

Giva’ot Olam is nothing short of a green oasis. Surrounded by rocky hilltops, and an arduous hike from the nearest built-up area (itself home to less than 700 people), the farm is run according to organic principles of environmental sustainability and motivated by a strong Jewish faith. The lush green grass that carpets the hill is home to free-range chickens and calm, happy goats whose pens are free from the nauseating stench that typically emanates from Israel’s intensive dairy farms.

On the surfaHappy Goats: make good milkce, Giva’ot Olam is a peaceful place where the still air is only disturbed by the sounds of the sheep or birdsong. It is also one of the biggest producers of organic yogurt and eggs sold in Israel (although I didn’t see a single hen roaming outside when I visited—apparently they get let out to exercise at certain times of the day). But these hilltops aren’t those of the Galilee or the Judean Hills: They are in the middle of the West Bank, lying just east of Nablus, the largest Palestinian city (or “the largest Arab city in Israel”, as the American rabbi leading our propaganda tour described it.)

“A guy called Avri just took his trailer there and started living here, he did the same thing in other places too. People came to live with him and then he moved on to settle other hilltops,” explained Moshe, an American-born settler who was one of the first Jews to settle a nearby hilltop over 20 years ago which became known as Itamar. Moshe, with his M16 strapped tightly to hAll Along The: organic watchtoweris back, described the farmer, Avri Ran, as a ‘pioneer’ and the ‘father of the hilltop movement’.

A few weeks ago I met another American-born settler living in Bat Ayin who was keen to extol the ecological virtues of his small, religious community, oblivious to the irony within the ethical contradiction of his choices. How can one be ‘environmentally sustainable’ whilst living on occupied territory? As tasty as their yogurt might be, buying products from Giva’ot Olam or other West Bank settlements inevitably means buying into the ideology of eternally conquering territory regardless of the cost to the Jewish State.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great thing that more Israelis are going organic: Side effects of the Zionist dream to ‘make the desert bloom’ have turned farm animals into chronically-sick meat machines, and resulted in the pollution of the country’s scarce water and soil. Sales of organic food rose by 30% in Israel last year, and organic systems now account for almost 5% of the country's total agriculture. There's no question that Israelis needs more organic farms, but they should build them in their own country and not in the West Bank.

Gil Peled: knows how to get resultsOne thing Israelis aren't short on: Talk.  So it’s a reassuring sign of the times that whether it’s climate change, the rapidly shrinking Dead Sea, or the way urban pollution effects everyday quality of life, the environment—HaSviva—is becoming a much more common topic of conversation.

It hasn't always been that way. Gil Peled, an Israeli architect and green building consultant, explains, “Now everyone is aware of environmental problems, but when we had suicide bombers up the road it was the last thing on people’s minds."

Fortunately, converting talk into action is precisely what Peled’s Eco-Housing Pilot Project has been doing. Like so many people in the country, Peled lives in a stone-brick apartment block erected two generations ago when the national priority was ‘building the land’ rather than ‘saving the planet’. But what sets Peled’s building in central Jerusalem apart from the others nearby is that the residents have reduced their ecological footprint by over 30% since the project began in 2002.

The trademark stone floors and thin walls work well in the summer, letting heat escape, but that same lack of insulation becomes a burden during the icy Jerusalem winter. I’m not alone in huddling around an electricity-hungry portable heater from December to February. Not exactly what the Jewish Agency promised… And when it comes to recycling, if there’s a deposit box for newspapers or plastic bottles at the end of the street then you’re one of the lucky ones.

Jerusalem's Eco-Housing Pilot Project: shows that it's possible to turn talk into actionNu, so how is it possible to ‘green’ a 50 year-old building, not to mention stubborn stuck-in-their-ways Israelis? For Peled, the most important thing was to green people’s attitudes. “It’s easy to jump on technological solutions, but it’s really a matter of changing people’s behavior,” he says.

Now, with the full participation of the ten apartments in the building, they have succeeded in reducing their resource consumption via simple changes like recycling, using energy-efficient appliances, and harvesting rainwater from the roof to feed plants in the garden—itself a reclaimed patch of wasteland. “The place was very neglected and in disrepair and we’ve taken responsibility of our environment,” says Peled.

The Eco-Housing Project is the first—and remains the only—green apartment building in Israel. Peled notes that it’s much easier to design green housing when building from scratch, pointing to a number of independent projects in the Negev and Galilee doing just that. However, he argues that “detached housing is, by definition, un-ecological” because of the roads and infrastructure needed, not to mention the extra space required in a land-scare country.

The building, which over 20 people currently call home, has seen tenants come and go, but their enthusiasm hasn’t waned. “They didn’t come here because they were ‘green’, but when they arrived they understood that there is something special here,“ explains Peled with satisfaction.

Jerusalem of Green: Bustan Brody community garden Downtown Jerusalem is cluttered enough at any time of year, but rarely more so than this past week. Posters for cleaning services and chametz sales imploring people to burn, sell, or otherwise dispose of their leavened bread in preparation for Pesach were pasted on lampposts and notice-boards on every street. Jews are generally partial to consuming food rather than throwing it away, but this time of year is the exception to the rule.

Only a few minutes from my apartment is another exception to the rule: A place where Jerusalemites come each week to throw away their leftovers, no matter the season. Down at Bustan Brody, part of a city-wide network of community gardens, ecologically-minded Israelis bring their unwanted food to dump on the compost heap. The volunteer-run garden is a green oasis in the midst of five-story apartment buildings—an area which was once slated for development during Ehud Olmert’s stint as Jerusalem Mayor, in a bid to reduce the city’s budget deficit by selling off public plots of land for construction.

“We took responsibility for our own backyard, that’s a revolutionary concept,” says Abba Zavidov, one of the founders of the Bustan, which lies within easy walking distance from the Prime Minister’s official residence. “If we’re going to talk about sustainability then we need to prove it can be done. People bringing their kitchen waste to compost at the garden is a great way of showing how."

In Jerusalem, organic refuse like kitchen scraps and garden clippings make up around 40% of the city’s solid waste. If not recycled via composting, it typically ends up contributing to more of the brown landfill mountains like those straddling the road from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, which trick you into thinking that you’re still in the Judean Hills instead of speeding across the (once flat) coastal plain.

And God Said, "Are You Gonna Eat That?': compost in the holy land But it’s not just the Festival of Matzo that inspires a frenzy of food disposal: Figures published last week reveal that folks in my native Britain throw out one-third of all food they buy each year, including over four million apples. And they don’t even have Pesach as an excuse. Waste on such a huge scale has been partly fueled by cheap food culture and marketing ploys like ‘two-for-one’ offers, which encourage over-consumption.

I hope that Rabbis in Israel and the Diaspora will be using their sermons during the Jewish festival of freedom as an opportunity to reflect on the merits of environmental responsibility in a world where not everyone can take their food for granted. In any case, composting can offer a green solution to the stale matzo and indigestion-cookies due to be littering kitchens across Israel next week.

שלום עכשיו: organizing stickers for peace nowAnother week, another protest against Israelis on University campuses. In the last few years, Jewish students have become accustomed to campaigns against virtually anything Israeli–from avocados and computer chips to professors. But this time it’s an Israeli peace activist who found that she was unwelcome at the University of Texas’ Hillel House, where she was due to speak yesterday.

Hagit Ofran, from Peace Now, the left-of-center group which campaigns for a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, is due to give a series of talks aimed at Jewish students entitled, "Israel at 60: Settlements, The U.S., The Peace Process, and the Last Chance for a Two State Solution." An alternative location at the University was eventually found after Texas Hillel pulled out, but the incident underlies tensions between Jewish students on US campuses.

One of the organizers had this to say: “Texas Hillel is supposed to be a space for Jewish students, however, and we will work with Hillel staff and involved students with whom we may differ politically to hold Texas Hillel to its stated commitment to pluralism… we care about and support Israel but do not feel represented by the current dominant mode of Israel advocacy, which we find to be counterproductive.”

Hagit Ofran: banned from hillel

Earlier this week, I chatted with Ofran in the back of a minibus as we made our way from Jerusalem to a Tel Aviv exhibition marking 30 years since the Peace Now movement was founded . Mild-mannered and articulate, she’s proof that you don’t have to see eye-to-eye with someone to hold a civilized discussion.

Last year the Zionist Organization of America tried to expel the Union of Progressive Zionists, who organized Ofran’s speaking tour, from the Israel on Campus Coalition following their links with another Israeli peace group, Breaking the Silence.

There is a heavy irony surrounding the decision of a Hillel House to bar a visiting Israeli, not to mention the efforts of far-left anti-Zionist groups who have been calling to exclude academics and other Israelis from campus life. It brings to mind the delights of Israeli Apartheid Week and the occasional noises made by a handful of my brethren in Britain—before I made aliya last summer—under the banner of ‘Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods’.

Regardless of what position one takes vis-à-vis Israeli politics, it’s a sad day when those who love Israel find themselves adopting the same defensive tactics as those who don't.