'A plan made from all the pent-up views of everyone I talk to'

Baptist church member David Nelson had hoped to travel to Israel, but with few flights available, he embarked on an alternative - cycling from Yorkshire to Downing Street to deliver a message to the Prime Minister about Israel/Palestine

At the start of November I had hoped to travel to Israel, to further my understanding of what being in Israel/Palestine is like, to listen to people I passed, to feel, to absorb. Both sides, West and East Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv, and also the West Bank if it had been possible to get insurance.

But it’s not very easy, and flights on most airlines are cancelled all the time. Now they’re cancelled to the end of December, and soon that will be kicked on a further month. Yes yes, El-Al… but the prices are sky-high.

Instead, I developed an alternative plan. A plan made from all the pent-up views of everyone I talk to.

I have acquaintances amongst the Jewish community of North Leeds, and North-West London, who feel the trauma from ‘7 October’; and who sometimes express and who feel so deeply within themselves the victimhood that comes from being Jewish.

I have many friends who whilst standing full-square against all that happened a year ago, also stand in shock and in anger at what is happening each and every day now, the killings and the desecration of a tiny strip of land.

I’m not playing both sides, because I don’t have to play both sides. Everyone hates, capital letters hates, the news each day of another (fill in your number of choice) deaths from airstrikes, or ground troops, or however it chooses to happen on any particular day.

My plan, now thankfully completed, was to cycle from the north of England where I live, down to Downing Street in London. The googled cycle-distance was 398 kilometres, a shade under 250 miles.

Because on Friday 8 November, when I rode into the heart of Westminster, London, it was a coincidental 398 days since 7 October.

And that terrifies me and it terrifies my friends, because that’s simply a number too vast to grasp. Our remembrance silence every November extends for 120 seconds and it feels quite a long time; now make it 398 seconds.

Or imagine walking 100 metres, the length of the long side at Wembley Stadium, and then doing it again, and again, and again for the full 398 metres. It’s a more than significant number or period of time or distance.

Imagine being a hostage…

My plan (this bit was not successfully completed) was to see the Prime Minister, to deliver a personal message. In the end it wasn’t face-to-face, it had to be read out opposite the Downing Street gates and then put in the postbox.

But I am completely certain that I was right to attempt this, over a journey that took more than five days on a bike that hasn’t been used this way for 35 years and with a body that’s not been challenged like that for a similar amount of time.

Because without fail, every person I spoke to on that journey believed the same.. that an end must come now, that what is happening is terrible.

Every night here we go to sleep comfortably in our beds, and every night if we were in Gaza we’d be wondering if that would be the night when the bombs and drones came for us, because assuredly 40 or 80 or more will be dying every night.

It’s not scarily prophetic to say this, but it is disturbing to write so. For on the morning after I arrived back home in the north of England, the morning news, then on Day 400, was indeed of a further 55 killed.

Please! What is this gaining us, to take it to Day 401 and 402 and 403 and …?

Deep down I’m more and more convinced that ‘Doing Nothing is No Longer an Option’ although it feels as though our Government are struggling with this concept.

You and I, we all need to be speaking out from the depth of our faith, from the pain in our hearts, from simple decency. And if I can lug myself on two wheels to ‘that London’ in my holiday week…
 

David Nelson is a member of a Baptist church in West Yorkshire. He has travelled to Israel and the West Bank on 3 occasions in the past 24 months

He is a supporter of Amos Trust, a small creative human rights organisation based in the UK and registered as a charity. Their principal area of work is supporting partners in the West Bank and Gaza.

Their UK-wide Christmas tour began at the end of November.

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