Friday, February 17, 2006

Don’t try moving house in Palestine.

I asked H. the other day to translate some words for me from English to Arabic. Among them was the phrase ‘move house’. H. looked slightly bemused for a second, then smiled and asked, ‘how would you move an entire house?’ In Arabic there is a word for moving your possessions and living somewhere else, but the phrase ‘moving house’ doesn’t exist. This is probably because most people live in their parents’ homes, until they build their own homes, rather than ‘moving’ per se.

We also discovered, much to H. amusement again, that there is no word or phrase for military incursion, despite the frequency of them in the West Bank.

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