Dispatches from the Holy Land

Palestine in Pieces: An Interview With Kathleen and Bill Christison

2009-10-24T12:58:00.005-04:00

This interview was originally published by Counterpunch.

In 1979, Kathleen and Bill Christison retired from the CIA, where they worked as analysts. Ever since then, they've had an unorthodox retirement, to say the least. With only a couple relatively brief interludes, they've dedicated what could have been years of relaxation to fighting perhaps the most uphill battle imaginable: trying to bring the plight of the Palestinians to the public eye. The newest addition to the Christison canon is Palestine in Pieces: Graphic Perspectives on the Israeli Occupation, published in August by Pluto Press. During this decade the Christisons have made a habit of visiting Palestine at least once per year; they returned from their most recent trip earlier this month. Since the couple warned against the potentially endless nature of a conversation over the phone, I elected to send them a few questions via email, which they were gracious enough to answer.

Jeff Gore: Kathleen: In a recent interview with Laura Flanders on GRITtv, you said that based on your travels to Palestine over the past half-decade or so, you believe the situation of the Palestinians “has gotten worse, every year.” Given that the interview was conducted before your latest trip, would you still say this today, considering the downgrade or closure of several checkpoints this year, and, according to the New York Times, “a sense of personal security and economic potential...spreading across the West Bank?”

Kathleen Christison: This is an extremely important question. The supposed closure of checkpoints throughout the West Bank and what is being widely touted as an opening of economic potential are a fiction—a huge scam perpetrated by Israel and the U.S., intended to make it look to the world as though Palestinians are now prospering, that the Palestinian economy is thriving and Palestinian society is now content, all thanks to the beneficence and good will of the Israelis. The media—not just the New York Times, but other print and electronic media and various opinion-molders like Thomas Friedman—have fallen for this scam and indeed have been knowingly participating in it.

The objective is to delude us all, including the Palestinians, into thinking that a new era of peace and prosperity is dawning in the West Bank because Palestinians have stopped terrorism and Israel has responded in good faith by easing restrictions, all in contrast to the situation in Gaza, where all the misery is supposedly the fault of Hamas because it refuses to recognize Israel and refuses to end violence. We are meant to forget that the occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem continues and is continually being reinforced, that Israel launched an unprovoked murderous assault on Gaza early this year, that Israel continues to dominate ever aspect of Palestinian daily lives.

In actual fact, things are no better for Palestinians in the West Bank, and in many cases they are worse. We’ve made two trips to Jerusalem and the West Bank this year, in April-May and October, and we’ve seen no substantial improvement in the situation Palestinians face on a daily basis. Despite the supposed removal of many checkpoints, most remain, and all can be reimposed at a moment’s notice. OCHA, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which has kept careful track for the last several years of Israeli movement obstacles, just issued a report indicating that the numbers of obstacles, which include checkpoints, roadblocks, earth mounds across roads, and gates blocking roads, had been reduced in recent months hardly at all—from 618 earlier in the year to 592 now. OCHA also suggests that there’s a good deal of subterfuge in Israeli reporting: although the Israelis promised the removal of 100 roadblocks by the end of Ramadan and issued GPS coordinates for these supposedly vanishing obstacles, OCHA did an on-the-ground survey and could confirm the removal of only 35. In numerous instances, the Israeli GPS locations weren’t even in the West Bank.

It’s true that there has been some improvement in a few showcase locations. The cities of Jenin and Nablus are rebuilding after the terrible destruction there during the Israeli siege of 2002 and 2003, and there’s a bit more economic prosperity. Even in Hebron, which lives under siege from the most vicious of Israeli settlers, some market areas are reopening. The most notorious checkpoint, Huwara just south of Nablus, has been opened up somewhat so that Palestinian cars may now drive through and people no longer have to walk through. But this is classic colonialism, designed to make things just enough better to take the edge off the anger of the colonized: you fill the natives’ stomachs and hope they become tame, that they won’t want to resist your oppression, that they’ll forget that they have no freedom, that they still live under oppression, always at the mercy of a colonialist oppressor who has no intention of relinquishing his domination or ending his exploitation of the oppressed and their resources.

The “model cities” in Jenin and Nablus and the “model checkpoints” such as Huwara are the exceptions in the Palestinians’ grinding life under occupation. Movement from one area to another is still severely restricted. Most West Bank Palestinians still cannot visit Jerusalem. Those who have work permits to enter Jerusalem must still wait for hours in endless lines to enter the city and pass through multiple security checks, including biometric checks that leave a record of when they entered the city and whether they have exited by the end of the day. Israeli settlements continue to be built and expanded on confiscated Palestinian land. The road network connecting the settlements to each other and to Israel, on which Palestinians may not drive, continues to be expanded, cutting off increasing numbers of Palestinians from each other. Palestinians are still harassed and physically attacked by aggressive Israeli settlers. Olive groves and other agricultural land continue to be confiscated, destroyed, burned, either by settlers or by bulldozers clearing land for more settlements or for the Separation Wall. Construction of the Wall is proceeding, cutting off more Palestinian land from its owners.

Non-violent protesters who demonstrate regularly against the Wall continue to be shot and killed or imprisoned. While newly trained, spiffily uniformed Palestinian security forces patrol city streets during the day, Israeli forces control the night and therefore control the entire territory. They conduct middle-of-the-night raids in villages throughout the West Bank, arresting young Palestinian men on suspicion merely of being Palestinian, beating or even shooting anyone who resists. In Jerusalem, where the Netanyahu government is currently concentrating its harshest oppression, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians continues quite openly. Palestinian homes continue to be demolished for no other reason than that they are in Israel’s way—in the way of the Wall’s advance, or of the next new or expanding Israeli settlement, or of Israel’s efforts to depopulate the land of Palestinians and create a Jewish majority. Palestinian families continue to be evicted from their homes so that Israeli settlers can live in them.

The catalog of horrors is long, and it is not ending, despite the hypocritical claims by the New York Times and others of an increased “sense of personal security,” despite all efforts by Netanyahu and the Obama administration to make us think peace has come. The occupation continues, and more harshly than ever. As Israeli journalist Amira Hass recently put it, the occupation “completely shrinks people’s lives,” and this has not changed.

JG: What are the advantages and disadvantages of being a white Westerner traveling in the Occupied Territories?

Kathleen & Bill Christison: Although we feel very comfortable among Palestinians, and have always felt very welcome, at the same time we always feel some embarrassment because we’re there basically as voyeurs watching other people’s misery. In fact, we feel we’re helping by bringing the Palestinians’ story, the facts of the occupation and what it means for Palestinian daily lives, to public attention in the West, but it’s still hard to get away from the feeling that we’re invading other people’s privacy by watching them line up at checkpoints and taking pictures of them, or watching them sob as their homes are demolished. Or, as happened to us once, talking to a man scheduled for surgery in Jerusalem who had been waiting for days for an Israeli permit to get into the city and who cried as he told us his story and asked us to take a picture of the medical certificate that attested to his need for surgery and should have provided his entrée to the city. We’ve told his story, but we knew, and he knew, that we couldn’t do anything to help him and that we would ultimately be able to go home to our comfortable lives in the U.S. while he waits—waits for his permit, waits for his freedom, waits for a decent life.

This is the principal reason, incidentally, that we’ve decided we won’t take any royalties or other profits from our new book, but will donate them to organizations that we feel most benefit the Palestinians. No book on the Palestinians will ever make much money in the first place, sad to say, but the idea that we personally should make any money because we’ve been witness to other people’s misery is unacceptable to us.

JG: I've always thought that the strongest argument for the two-state solution -- and against the one-state solution -- was Michael Neumann's assessment of Israel as unwilling to “abolish itself.” On the other hand, Kathleen, you've written critically about Neumann's remarks and advocated a single democratic state in Palestine. Ruling out any precipitous fall in American power, any miraculous surge in power of the Palestinian governing body, or God forbid, any catastrophic regional war, in what scenario can you envision Israeli Jews consenting to a binational secular state; to changing their flag, national anthem, even the name of their country?

KC: I have to say I object to the premise of Michael Neumann’s argument—that we should or should not pursue one or another solution simply on the basis of whether it meets Israel’s desires. I think, on the contrary, that we should pursue a solution for no other reason than that it is just, for both Palestinians and Israeli Jews. A two-state solution—which at its very best would give Palestinians a state in less than one-quarter of their original homeland and at its most likely would give them a non-viable, non-contiguous state in little pieces constituting quite a bit less than one-quarter—is simply not just. I recognize that realists like Michael disdain “dreamers,” as he’s called one-state advocates, as naïve and maybe other-worldly to be talking about unrealistic, impractical concepts like justice. But I don’t think, first of all, that it’s really so naïve or even futile to advocate and work for justice—justice does prevail on occasion. And, secondly, I think perpetrating gross injustice is ultimately totally impractical and cannot endure: a two-state solution, to my mind, is so grossly unjust—not to say also unlikely because Israel doesn’t want that either—that it is also impractical.

So my preference, if we’re faced with a situation in which Israel is not willing at the moment to “abolish itself” but is also not willing to give the Palestinians anything, not even a non-viable, cantonized state, is to work for the most just solution, which is a single democratic state in which Palestinians and Jews would live as equal citizens with equal access to the instruments of government and a constitution that would guarantee the equality of everyone. (I would not, by the way, call this a “binational” state, which I see as a state that maintains some de jure separation between the two peoples. This is something I fear would perpetuate the power imbalance and perpetuate Jewish domination of Palestinians. Although nothing would be easy for the Palestinians no matter what solution is pursued, a single integrated state with constitutional guarantees of equality would more readily assure them of some kind of political and economic parity.)

Those like Michael who argue on the basis of what Israel would not want to do are arguing from the premise that might makes right, that might makes a reality that we cannot counter, and that simply because the powerful party in this conflict doesn’t want something, it won’t come to be and none of us should even speak about it. This is absurd. Who would have expected in the mid-1980s when liberals throughout the world were fighting a seemingly futile battle of sanctions against apartheid South Africa, that the very powerful white leadership of that country would decide in the next few years to “abolish itself”? Who would have expected at that same time that the very powerful Soviet Union would “abolish itself”?

My crystal ball isn’t clear enough to be able to lay out a precise scenario, but I believe that Zionism and the racism and injustice inherent in it simply cannot endure and that Israel will collapse of its own weight at some time in the future, hopefully in our lifetime. No empire has lasted in history, and gross, systematic injustice does not last either. I also give Jews greater credit for having a conscience, for caring about justice and caring about the injustices perpetrated against the Palestinians in the name of world Jewry, than Michael or others like Uri Avnery do, who criticize us one-staters because we don’t seem to realize, as they say, that Israeli Jews will always want to screw the Palestinians if they all live in the same state. I just don’t buy that. If white South Africans and Soviet appartchiks could relinquish power voluntarily and non-violently, then I believe Jews will ultimately be led by their consciences to do the same.

My bottom line is, I don’t think we can or should shut our mouths about a just peace settlement—or, even more importantly, deliberately limit Palestinian options by refusing to speak about the possibilities—simply because Israel might not happen to like it, which is what I see as the principal argument of the anti-one-staters.

JG: Similarly, in your travels, what impression have you gotten from Palestinians as to which solution they advocate?

KBC: It’s hard to make a definitive judgment on this, but it is fair to say that support for a one-state solution is growing among Palestinians. Polls of Palestinian opinion still show this support in the minority, but growing. Many Palestinians whom we’ve talked to still favor two states and specifically reject one state, either because they fear Jewish political and economic domination in a single state or because they are closely enough connected to the Palestinian Authority that they are unwilling even to think of any alternative to the PA’s official support for two states, which is the position that gives them entrée into negotiations and whatever favors are bestowed by the U.S. But an increasing number of our acquaintances now more explicitly favor one state. They are increasingly dissatisfied with the PA’s position and its acceptance of the two-state solution, all of which they see as collaboration with the Israeli oppressor and a betrayal of fundamental rights in return for no benefit whatsoever for the Palestinians.

Much of Palestinian thinking is formed more around the possibilities than strictly on the basis of preferences, which is to say that as long as the two-state solution was the only alternative held out to the Palestinians, support for this option was quite high, but the more the possibility of a one-state solution is talked about—and, of course, the more the likelihood of a real, independent Palestinian state ever being formed in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem has receded—the more Palestinians are willing to think about and advocate a single state. As it has become clearer and clearer to the Palestinians that Israel under its current leadership has no intention of ever withdrawing from the occupied territories and no intention of allowing Palestinians any sovereignty in Jerusalem, support for a single state in all of Palestine has grown. More importantly, Palestinians increasingly recognize that their demand for the right of return is ultimately incompatible with a two-state solution, in which only limited numbers of refugees, if any, would be allowed to return to their homes and land inside Israel and the vast majority would have to be accommodated inside the tiny Palestinian state. It’s unlikely that an enduring peace settlement will ever be forged that does not address and provide a fair solution of the refugee issue and the right of return.

JG: In my recent interview with Jonathan Cook, he spoke highly of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement, saying that in his view, “there is no way to end the occupation unless Israelis are made to see that they will pay a heavy price for its continuance.” Would you agree with this? If so, how would you respond to criticism about harming “innocent” Israelis with a blanket boycott or sanctions? Or is there even such a thing as an “innocent” Israeli when it comes to the issue of Palestinian suffering?

KBC: We do indeed agree with Jonathan on the wisdom of BDS and the notion that Israelis must be made to pay a heavy price for continuing the occupation if there’s to be any hope of ever ending it. As to whether “innocent” Israelis might be harmed by a blanket application of BDS, we would ask where one should draw the line on what harms Israelis. Does it harm innocent Israelis to cut off or cut back U.S. aid to Israel—which would be the ultimate sanction? Under a long-term ten-year agreement, the U.S. gives, not lends, Israel $3 billion of military aid every year—in cash, at the beginning of each fiscal year—plus additional increments of economic aid and loan guarantees on a year-by-year basis. Aid of this magnitude and given under these terms obviously greatly helps the Israeli economy. It also gives Israel virtually total impunity to commit whatever atrocities it wants against the Palestinians without fear that the U.S. will cut it off. So if we’re worried about harming individual Israelis, we have to worry about the guy in an electronics shop who is harmed economically because he no longer gets the subcontract for some airplane or tank part, but we also have to worry about the innocent Palestinians—the literally millions of innocent Palestinians—in Gaza particularly, but elsewhere as well, who are being killed by those airplanes and tanks and other military equipment that Israel uses with the impunity granted it by the U.S. If blind justice weighs these two groups of innocents and the harm done to them on her scales, we believe she would conclude that the “innocent” Israeli is after all not so innocent.

Although it may be clearer how the scales should balance when we’re talking about military aid, the same factors must be weighed when we deal with boycotts of non-military products and academic and cultural boycotts, and we think the same conclusions must be reached: ending Palestinian suffering at Israel’s hands is a more worthy, more just objective than saving the economic hide or the jobs of any Israelis. Maybe you’re right that there is no such thing as an “innocent” Israeli when it comes to Palestinian suffering. In a democratic state—democratic at least for Israeli Jews—all Jewish Israelis are responsible for the injustices and the killing and the atrocities visited upon the Palestinians. They elected the governments that have carried out these policies and actions; they have failed to put an end to them; they live in a state established on the suffering and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians over 60 years ago. We Americans are just as responsible for the killing and atrocities visited by U.S. forces on Iraqi and Afghan civilians and in past eras on civilians in places like Vietnam, and we would not claim that sanctions against the U.S. were unfair, even if these caused us to suffer personally. Perhaps this should be the criterion: that innocence lies in greater measure with the people being oppressed and bombed and occupied, and we must be more concerned with ending harm to them than with causing incidental harm to individuals in the oppressor-occupier nation.

JG: In your new book you briefly compare Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to the U.S's treatment of Native Americans. That said, I was wondering if you had an opinion on how to respond to one of the peskier questions addressed specifically to Americans that nobody seems to be able to answer. The question is: what right do I have to criticize Israel as a “colonial” or “settler” state when I am a descendant of colonists and settlers myself, enjoying the spoils of theft from an indigenous people?

KBC: This is indeed a difficult question to answer, and there is for sure a measure of hypocrisy in criticizing Israel without also rectifying our own nation’s sins. But we don’t believe that one injustice, even when perpetrated by our own country, imposes an obligation to remain silent about another injustice or requires that we stop working on Israel’s injustice until we’ve resolved the United States’ unjust policies. In fact, having acquired a conscience about what our country did, and continues to do, to our own native population has given us, we feel, a bit more moral authority from which to demand that the United States stop giving Israel the means—the political, military, and economic support—with which to commit a similar atrocity against the Palestinians.

We all pick our battles in this life, and we happen to have picked support for Palestinian rights as our battle. We did this initially from a position of considerable—and, we would acknowledge, shameful—ignorance about the history of U.S. treatment of Native Americans, but our focus on the Palestinians has helped open our eyes to the Native Americans’ situation, and we’re now more conscious of the need to work for justice for both peoples. If we personally continue to devote more of our attention to the Palestinians, this is because it’s a more easily resolvable situation and because we’ve already invested 30-plus years of our education and work in it. But to repeat, whatever inequity exists in our own allocation of attention, whatever hypocrisy exists in demanding of Israel what the U.S. has not done for its own native population, does not put any obligation on us to give Israel carte blanche to continue its oppression unopposed.

JG: Kathleen, in the GRITtv interview you described losing interest in the conflict for a few years before returning to it due to its "haunting" nature. Could you describe that in more detail, or in other words, what has compelled you to keep writing on behalf of the Palestinians for three decades, despite their situation growing increasingly worse over that time period?

KC: Maybe it’s precisely because the Palestinians’ situation has grown worse that I’ve been so “haunted” and so compelled to continue working on this issue. Although I had worked on the Palestinian question for several years before Bill and I left the CIA in 1979, I never actually met a Palestinian until the late 1980s, when I began interviewing Palestinian Americans about their attitudes toward Israel—which ultimately led to my book The Wound of Dispossession. It was only by doing these interviews, and doing a lot of reading on the history of Palestine-Israel, that I really learned the Palestinian story. And I was and continue to be shocked at how horribly that story has been distorted in the United States and the rest of the West. For me—and for Bill too—it’s been a kind of crusade to bring this story to greater public attention. The Palestinians are such a graceful people and the injustices perpetrated against them for six decades and more have been so horrific—and so deliberate—that we both feel we can’t give up.

JG: For those who don't have time or means to visit Palestine, but want to help the Palestinians, what would you suggest is the best thing that they can do?

KBC: This may be the most difficult of your questions to answer. The usual route, talking to one’s congressmen, is an almost totally futile pursuit on this issue. The Israel lobby, in all its aspects, has Congress so sewed up that it’s almost impossible to get any attention if one is talking about Palestinian rights or demanding concessions from Israel or advocating anything other than the current so-called international consensus on two states. We both think that at the popular level in the U.S. there’s been an upsurge in support for the Palestinians and a greater willingness to criticize Israel. This has been particularly true since Israel’s assault on Gaza early this year. But so far this change in viewpoint hasn’t reached up to the political level, meaning in the administration and Congress, because there simply aren’t enough people willing to mobilize, visit congressmen, write letters to the editor, etc. But this is what’s needed. We need to educate ourselves on the issue so that we can educate others, join whatever solidarity organizations exist in our areas, gain some political muscle by increasing our numbers, work together, lobby congressmen in numbers, write letters to the editor, force the media to pay attention to what’s happening on the ground, call out Israel’s supporters everywhere for their moral blindness, sign on to the many petitions and letters to politicians that circulate on the internet. In general, make ourselves known, make our position known, and make noise!

From Boycotts to Bil'in: An Interview with Jonathan Cook

2009-10-09T13:52:00.002-04:00

An edited version of this interview was originally published by The Electronic Intifada.

Jonathan Cook is a British journalist based in Nazareth, the largest Arab city in Israel. His latest book, Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair, was published by Zed Books in October of last year. Jonathan was kind enough to take the time to answer the below questions, many of which surfaced after recently spending some time in Palestine myself.

Jeff Gore: On your website you state that "There are striking, and disturbing, similarities between the experiences of Palestinians inside Israel and those inside the West Bank and Gaza." This is definitely true, but the Occupation has persisted for long enough that it seems there would also be some noticeable differences between these two groups of Palestinians. The last thing I want to do is refer to Palestinians as animals--that has been done enough--but I cannot resist making a Darwinian analogy to a species split between an island and a mainland, becoming more and more dissimilar from each other as they evolve in accordance with their new surroundings. With that said, how does the outlook of a Palestinian citizen of Israel differ from that of a Palestinian living in the Occupied Territories?

Jonathan Cook: The “striking similarity” is in Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians inside the areas it controls. It has sought to apply a very sophisticated form of divide and rule. From the outset inside Israel, Palestinian citizens were referred to not only as Arabs, to undermine their identity as Palestinians, but also as “the minorities”. Israel’s primary goal was to accentuate a series of subgroup identities – Muslim, Christian, Bedouin and Druze. The last sectarian group was officially awarded the status of a separate nationality, with its own education system and requirement to serve in the army alongside Jews.

But even within these main categories there were further separations: between those in recognised communities and those in unrecognised communities; between those who were internal refugees, and had therefore lost all rights to their property, and those who weren’t; between those who lived in the “mixed cities” and those in self-contained Arab communities; and between the main geographical areas: the Galilee, the Triangle and the Negev. On top of that, Israel has accentuated political differences, cultivating a series of splits between the main Arab parties to the point where even the Islamic party has two hostile wings.

The Palestinian minority inside Israel started to wake up belatedly to this game in the late 1990s, during the Oslo process, for a variety of complicated reasons set out in my book Blood and Religion. The result is a recent unprecedented reassertion of Palestinian identity as a way to circumvent these other crippling sub-identities. Nonetheless, it is an uphill struggle and far from won.

Interestingly, just as the Palestinians inside Israel realised they needed to create unity, the Palestinians in the occupied territories succumbed to Israel’s divide-and-rule game. Israel used the Oslo process in particular to foster similar kinds of division, using the carve-up of the West Bank into a series of zones – Areas A, B and C – to interfere in Palestinian life in different ways. That process was taken a step further with the split both between the already-heavily divided West Bank and Gaza Strip and between Fatah and Hamas.

JG: Compared to the West Bank and Gaza, the occupied Golan Heights gets scant media attention - my guess is because there is far less "action" there. When I visited the Syrian village of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan, I encountered no checkpoints, saw street signs in Hebrew, and found that the Syrians enjoyed substantially more liberties there than the Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza. The last substantial flare-up of Syrian anger in the occupied Golan was over a quarter-century ago (the general strike of 1981) and the Intifada still remains a distinctly Palestinian struggle. What do you think are the reasons for this relative quiet in the Golan?

JC: The main reason is that the Druze in the Golan, unlike the Palestinians in the occupied territories, are not struggling for national liberation – they are waiting for the Syrians to negotiate their return. A Druze intifada would be pointless because the small Druze community in the Golan does not want to run its own affairs. In a way, the Golan Druze are in a very similar position to the Palestinians inside Israel. Both are in a sort of political limbo, awaiting direction from the larger national group to which they belong.

Also, it should be noted that the settlement drive has been a relative failure in the Golan, most of which is empty. The settlers are hardly visible and certainly not encroaching on the Golan Druze in the way settlers are in the West Bank.

JG: Awhile back I was involved in a debate about the effectiveness of the weekly protests at the separation wall (or fence, in this case) in the Palestinian villages of Ni'lin and Bil'in, which often result in airborne stones and teargas canisters. Supporters of the protests say that it is a symbol of the indomitable resistance of the Palestinians, a sign that they will not be quieted and that Israel will never be able to rest easy as long as it remains an illegal occupier. Besides, it's better to do something than nothing, right? Yet its detractors say that it gives trigger-happy Israel soldiers the perfect excuse to shoot and kill, that they look forward to it every week as some sort of military game or target practice. One friend of mine likened it to a pointless "animalistic dance" in which two peacocks strut up to the fence and flaunt their feathers at each other, then retreat, week after week. Another criticism of the protests is that they attract "war tourists," usually twenty-somethings that like the adrenaline rush of dodging rubber bullets (and the subsequent bragging rights) without feeling any genuine interest in ending the occupation. What's your take on this?

JC: I think the question needs taking apart a bit. I can’t see what relevance the motives of the tourists who turn up at the protests has on the legitimacy of civil resistance as a strategy for Palestinians, so let’s put that to one side. I also think it’s an insult to the courage and sacrifice made by the Palestinians who attend these protests to suggest they are simply “preening”. True, the media often represent this as a battle between young hot-headed Palestinian stone-throwers and over-excited Israeli soldiers. That’s largely a fiction. On the Palestinian side are to be found a cross-section of the resisting community, including its leaders and many middle-aged villagers who have families to support. It takes a great deal of bravery to stand off regularly against heavily armed Israeli teenagers, a significant number of them Jewish religious fanatics raised to believe they are fighting a holy war and many of the others raised to believe that the “Arabs” are a primitive, barbaric people. It may be true that some of the soldiers enjoy getting the chance to use their weapons (isn’t it always true of some soldiers?) but again I cannot see why that should determine whether it is a good idea for the Palestinians to stage the protests.

As for the question of effectiveness, the answer is that the protests have undoubtedly been successful. The naked violence that Israel is forced to unleash against the protesters, and the subsequent raids to arrest the protest organisers, indicate just how much of a concern they are to Israel. In the case of Bilin and elsewhere the protests have successfully led to a change in the route of the wall that has restored to the villages some of their desperately needed farm land. The protests are also an important way for ordinary Palestinians to feel they have some agency in the conflict, both against Israel and in forcing a different agenda on to their corrupt national leadership. In the tearing down of the wall between Gaza and Egypt, for example, ordinary Palestinians showed what a much more concerted campaign of civil disobedience could achieve. If Israel deepens its apartheid rule in the West Bank, such campaigns of civil resistance are almost certainly the face of the future.

JG: On the other end of the activist spectrum, how important do you think the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement is at this stage in the conflict? Are Palestinians - both in Israel proper and the Occupied Territories - supportive of this idea, even considering their dependence on the Israeli economy?

JC: It is a hugely important development in the struggle for Palestinian self-determination. Certainly I think its moment has arrived.

This is a Palestinian grass-roots initiative that cannot be bought off by Israel in the way the Fatah leadership was bought off by Oslo. It empowers Palestinians by allowing them to set the scope and agenda of their struggle, such as by demanding that artists respect their call not to perform in Israel. It offers a practical way for people outside the region to show solidarity with the Palestinian struggle by heeding that call and thinking creatively about how to implement BDS in their own countries. In the controversy and debate it generates it offers a chance to engage and educate those who are at the moment only vaguely aware that there might be problem here. And if BDS gains more momentum, it could really harm the Israeli economy. In fact, in my view there is no way to end the occupation unless Israelis are made to see that they will pay a heavy price for its continuance. The US could do that overnight by withdrawing its huge subsidies to Israel. I’m not holding my breath. Instead BDS gives all of us the power to show Israel that the occupation does not pay.

As for the issue of wider Palestinian support, it is still early days for BDS. In my experience, many ordinary Palestinians in the occupied territories and inside Israel are not yet sufficiently aware of the campaign or its potential importance. Some may also take some persuading that the outside world, which has aided and abetted their persecutors for so long, is capable of providing a solution. But my impression is that interest in and support for BDS among Palestinians is growing all the time.

Regarding the issue of economic dependence, I am not sure that that is such a big factor. In South Africa, where most blacks were dependent on the white economy, significant numbers still favoured a boycott. Active involvement from Palestinians in the Israeli economy has been largely ended by the walls being built to imprison them. True, there is a great collective dependency on humanitarian aid among the Palestinians, but that will not be greatly affected by BDS.

JG: Since you live in Nazareth, you're in a rather unique position as a journalist sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. Considering that the Israeli government is not reluctant to arrest, censor, or deny entry to those fundamentally opposed to its policies, how have you survived professionally in Israel for so long?

JC: There are two reasons.

First, I really am no threat to Israel, so why would it risk drawing attention to my work by making an example of me? Like other journalists whose reporting challenges the official consensus on Israel, I am excluded from the mainstream media. I write either on the internet for western readers who already know things are bad here (hopefully I can fill in some of the details they don’t fully grasp) or for the Arab media, which most westerners regard as unreliable. Early on it looked briefly as if I might break out of this ghetto. I started writing commentaries for the International Herald Tribune, a sort of globally syndicated version of the New York Times. Israel’s lobby groups in the US moved into action very quickly, getting their footsoldiers to write complaints to the newspaper on a scale the paper had apparently never seen before (nor probably since). I was soon dropped. Israel really doesn’t need to exert that kind of pressure itself: there are lots of organisations doing this stuff very successfully on its behalf.

The second reason is that I am married to an Israeli citizen, even if one from the Palestinian minority, and I therefore have Israeli residency. If Israel tried to bar me from the country, I would have a right of appeal to the courts. The law would almost certainly be on my side, mainly because I am a westerner (it would be different were I a Palestinian or Arab) and because it would be difficult to show I posed any sort of security threat.

JG: Given that you've been covering this issue for nearly a decade and have written three books regarding Israel's policies, what advice can you give--besides marrying a Palestinian--to freelance journalists interested in writing about this area of the world?

JC: Well, first of all you have to make a choice: are you going to report according to a ready-made script for the mainstream, or are you going to write it as you see it but struggle to get noticed or earn a living wage? Neither option is easy.

For those choosing the first path, the problem is that this is possibly the most reported conflict in the world. There are lots of journalists out here and most are very experienced, at least at writing the same safe reports designed not to offend either Israel or their news desks back home. Just getting your foot in the door is hard.

Anyone wishing to follow the second path better be resigned to staying on the margins of the media. There is rarely money in reporting critically about Israel. At least I was lucky that I could draw on savings I had accumulated while working at the Guardian. That’s a luxury most aspiring young journalists don’t have.

The third way is to abandon this traditional model of journalism and blog. There are still possibilities, though rapidly diminishing ones, to locate oneself in a West Bank community (though not in Gaza, because Israel controls all access) and send back eyewitness reports. You’re not going to become Seymour Hersh or Robert Fisk, but you can still make a difference as a rare witness to what is going on.

JG: How and when did you first become interested in the Middle East, specifically the issue of Israel/Palestine?

JC: It was a gradual process that took over a decade. I became interested in Arab culture during a backpacking trip to Morocco in my early 20s. Later I got my first, faint taste of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the Oslo years when I crossed over from Jordan for a three-day visit to Jerusalem. While I was walking along the Old City walls, I was surprised to see a group of Israeli soldiers beating two young Palestinian boys, maybe 12 years old, for no apparent reason. It certainly disturbed me, although I can’t say it greatly politicised me at the time – like most tourists, I suppose, I put it to the back of my mind.

A vague interest in the Middle East solidified into a more obvious concern while I was working in the foreign department of the Guardian. I started to sense that the paper’s coverage didn’t seem to be giving the whole picture of what I was seeing on my travels. Assuming the fault lay with me, I then did a two-year, part-time MA in Middle East politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. By the end I felt even more strongly that the media were failing. I chose as the topic of my MA dissertation land problems faced by Israel’s Palestinian citizens in the Galilee. It was during the research that I began to conclude that much could be understood about the regional conflict from Israel’s approach towards its Palestinian minority. I was surprised no one else appeared to be reaching such a conclusion, at least not at that time. Eventually, in 2001, I decided to leave my job in London and move to Nazareth to write a book about Israel’s treatment of the minority at the start of the second intifada. I expected to complete it in a year. It took five – and I am still in Nazareth eight years after my arrival.

JG: What's your favorite Palestinian dish? Conversely, have you brought English cuisine into any Palestinian homes?

JC: I’m a big fan of the no-frills, “peasant” dish majedera. For those who don’t know it, it’s green lentils and rice cooked in caramelised onion stock, usually served with an Arabic salad of chopped tomatoes and cucumbers seasoned with mint.

I wouldn’t inflict English cuisine on anyone, least of all the people of Nazareth.

JG: What do you like to do when you're not working?

JC: Play a nonsense game with my two-year-old daughter.

Some Closing Remarks

2009-08-30T13:46:00.005-04:00

Since the previous piece was written for a specific audience within a specific word limit, I feel I should add a few more thoughts about my experience in Palestine and Israel before I put this blog to bed. That is, until the next Middle Eastern adventure—I'm positive there will be another one.

I would be lying if I told you that I went there as a political activist. I didn't, although I wouldn’t blame you for thinking so judging by the tone of my inital posts. Really, I went there as a person looking for new experiences in a part of the world that I find incredibly interesting. And of course, being an aspiring journalist, I decided I would write about it. As far as work goes, the writing came first and what little activism I did came second. Such is the egotism which many writers share.

I was thinking I would return home charged up and ready to dedicate my life to helping the Palestinians, perhaps by educating my fellow Americans on the matter with the hard-earned credibility of someone that actually went there. And maybe some sort of campaign like that is in my future. But that requires a stationary dedication, and what this trip did above all was make me want to see more things and meet more people. As far as the Middle East goes, Syria is at the top of my list right now. As for the world in general, I have many places to stay thanks to the amazing network of international folks I met there. Switzerland, here I come!

The fact that things seemed so...normal out in Palestine also had the subtle effect on implanting this "It's not that bad" mentality inside of me which softened my burning indignation at the whole affair. I know that this perception is not accurate, that it is a totally different reality for a Palestinian in occupied Palestine than a white international. And I know things could easily get worse at the drop of a hat—as they have before. But I still, almost all of my memories from Palestine have been pleasant, of going to weddings and bars and the juice shop on the corner, watching movies at the French-German cultural center or playing basketball at the church. Even the tours and exhibits of some of the most fucked-up things imaginable were enjoyable because of the company that I was with. I will look back on this trip fondly, perhaps a bit too fondly.

Now back in America where alcohol and skin are plentiful once more, I am already feeling the itch to return to the Holy Land. You'd be surprised at how much happier and freer you can feel without most of your possessions. And now they're all back around me, needing attention and maintenance. The bills need to be paid, this rat-infested old house needs to be cleaned, and deadlines need to be met. Immediately thrown back into the grind, it was if I never left—luckily I've got plenty of keepsakes tacked up on the wall behind this computer monitor to remind me that yes, I really was there. And someday, hopefully soon, I'll be back.

Thanks for reading!

****************************

A couple quick plugs:

*Keep an eye out for a book titled Fast Times in Palestine, written by a fellow American, Pam Olson. I'm admittedly envious of Pam because she's actually doing what I've only dreamed of: writing a book about her experiences in Palestine and making presentations about her time there to American audiences, including the staff of Google earlier this year.

*My friend Rami, who so graciously gave me his entire bedroom (along with his wardrobe) for the last ten days of my stay, is part of an exciting Palestinian grassroots group called the Dalia Association, which accepts no money from the international community. This is done in order to preserve the Palestinian character which is often diluted when funds with strings attached are presented for the "benefit" of the people. Check out their website at www.dalia.ps to see some of the wonderful things that they're doing.

From America, Looking Back at the Holy Land

2009-08-27T12:42:00.002-04:00

The following piece was originally published in Flagpole Magazine.

Before I went to Palestine and Israel – also known collectively as the “Holy Land” – I was partial to the Palestinians because of the suffering they endure under Israeli occupation. Soon I realized the error in this thinking: I only appreciated them for the circumstances they live in, not for who they actually are. So after supporting the Palestinians from afar for so long, I decided to live in the Palestinian city of Ramallah over the summer, partly to test myself. Would I actually like these people that I supposedly cared about so much?

In short: yes, I really did. Palestinians are some of the most caring, hospitable, curious people I have ever met. Many a time walking the streets of Ramallah or Nablus, I would get a hearty “Welcome!” from a person I had never met and would likely never see again. Whenever I sat down in a Palestinian home – whether it was a modern, well furnished structure or a dusty tent with mattresses for seats – I was invariably offered tea or coffee. Everyone seemed to have wanted to know my name and where I was from. And to think that I was told I’d be killed out here!

It was fitting that I was handed a copy of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia during my stay there. At some point on the long bus ride from Ramallah to Jerusalem, I came across this passage: “A Spaniard's generosity, in the ordinary sense of the word, is at times almost embarrassing. If you ask him for a cigarette he will force the whole packet upon you. And beyond this there is generosity in a deeper sense, a real largeness of spirit, which I have met with again and again in the most unpromising circumstances.” If the “Spaniard” was replaced with “Palestinian” in this passage, there’d be no truer description of the people that I had the good fortune of living amongst.

Their qualities rubbed off on me – for example, it was in Palestine that I learned to share. Having lived with unrelated roommates for the past six years, I was accustomed to having my own shelf of food from which I would prepare my own meals which I would eat on my own. Yet in Palestine it is borderline insulting to eat in front of somebody without offering them some of what you’re having - fruits, cookies, and crackers were regularly thrust in front of me by the natives. This kind of unconditional generosity, free of the soul-deadening rationalizations that we Americans are so used to performing, not only compelled me to change my own behavior but also restored some of my lost faith in humanity – cliché as that sounds. And judging by the fact that I saw not one homeless person in Palestine (compare this to Israel, a country with nearly ten times more per capita income than the West Bank - and also many more homeless people), I have a strong feeling that this culture of charity is not merely a gift reserved for foreigners, but a strong social glue that has allowed the Palestinians to persevere under occupation for so long.

Of course, there are less appealing things about Palestinian culture. Their curiosity is charming and endearing, but there are times when you just want to sit in the park without being bothered. Their caring and hospitality is touching, but can also be intrusive and even clingy – true privacy is rare in Palestine. And as much as I rag on Western culture, I never appreciated it more when I learned about how relationships work out here. If you’re a Palestinian man and the father of the girl you want to marry decides he doesn’t like you, it’s over - no matter how deeply in love you two (you and the girl, that is) really are. And you’ll probably never get to speak to her again. Want to have a woman stay overnight, even if she’s just a friend? Forget about it.

Yet despite these unsavory aspects of Palestinian culture, I still fell in love with the Palestinian people. In my eyes, they ceased to be an abstract victim and instead became a multitude of real people who not only weep and grieve, but laugh and sing and dance like you’ve never seen anybody dance before.

What about Israel? I was there, although not as often as I had planned. Surely I already knew that traveling between two hostile entities on a regular basis would be no piece of cake. But I soon learned that the political NGO I was volunteering with had mostly research-based work to offer me – not something I came halfway across the world to do -- so I largely abstained from going to their Jerusalem-based office, especially because the trip involved an arduous chain of bus rides and a trip through the infamous Qalandia checkpoint, which is like a more draconian version of airport security. Thus my trips into Israel became more of an occasional travel than a professional commute.

What I will say about Israel is that its own suffering is evident through the palpable fear and tension in the air. The amount of automatic weapons you’ll see on an average day in an average Israeli city is staggering – far more than I saw in any Palestinian city. Every bus station in Israel bristles with metal detectors; even going to a gay pride parade in Jerusalem or a shopping center in Tel Aviv required me to empty my pockets, spread my arms, and consent to being patted down by a security officer. And it doesn’t help that Israel’s leaders are always exaggerating their precarious position - when I arrived, I had just missed what the government had deemed “Doomsday Drills.”

Politically, my views changed only in that the solution to the conflict now seems more elusive than ever. The internationally agreed-upon solution is “two states for two people,” based on borders that existed before the Six Day War of 1967. But now, knowing the size, multitude and utter permanence of some Israeli settlements in the West Bank, as well as the strong Palestinian connection to many villages that now lie in Israel proper, I am inclined to think that one unified state would be the most just solution. But Israel and the Palestinian territories are so, so different that it boggles the mind to think of how this single state would actually work.

So if you asked me about my trip to Palestine, I would depress you with talk about borders or peace plans or statehood. Instead I would tell you about the Palestinian boys on the street hustling various cheap candies, or about the complexity of the Arabic language that is both maddening and alluring. I would talk about the gorgeous sunsets that overlooked gorgeous landscapes dotted with olive trees, the mouth-watering smell of a sizzling hunk of shawerma, the unmistakable scent of Turkish coffee, the marvelous texture of Dead Sea mud, the unappreciated beauty of the Golan Heights, the perfection of Mediterranean water, and on and on and on, until I reach the inevitable point of telling you that you should come with me the next time I go.

Nettles Nasser: Magnetism Personified in Palestine

2009-08-20T06:04:00.003-04:00

I first met Nettles Nasser while standing in the queue at Qalandia checkpoint, where he had garnered the backwards gaze of a cluster of people waiting to hustle through the turnstile. "Barack Hussein Obama is my president!" he shouted to the Israeli guard tower to our left, holding his American passport above his head, ostensibly hoping that his status as an American would make the line move quicker. Thankfully, there was no response from the Israeli silhouette peering down at us. Seeing that I was obviously a foreigner, Nettles turned and struck up a conversation with me, about something I can't remember—perhaps I was just the first inductee into his small American club.

Nettles himself is Palestinian by heritage, but completely American by nature—his accent (and hyperassertive attitude) is like that of any New Yorker. Turns out he was born and raised in Patterson, New Jersey, a place which boasts the second largest Arab-American community in the U.S. after Dearborn, Michigan.

After a good twenty minutes waiting at Qalandia and another forty spent on the bus from Qalandia to Jerusalem, we had spent enough time together to for me to find out a few more things about him. He said he was trying to start up a boxing gym in Ramallah for Palestinian youth; back in the States he had trained amateur and professional boxers for over a decade and a half. He was aspiring boxer himself once, until he fell off of a ride at a water park and sustained some nerve damage that effectively ended his own boxing career.

I was intrigued enough to keep in contact with him. So a month and a half after our first meeting, we met again at the Minarah in central Ramallah. The following narrative should serve as a good illustration of Nettles' personality.

As I approach the Minarah, I call Nettles on his cell phone and tell him that I'll be there in less than a minute. We agree to meet at the Arab Bank. "I'm wearing a red shirt," he tells me. Soon I'm at the Arab bank and there are plenty of red shirts floating by, but none of them are filled with anybody resembling Nettles. I flounder around for a bit until a familiar Yankee cap catches my eye about fifty meters across the roundabout. I approach, and sure enough it's Nettles, wearing a black t-shirt. "What's with this red shirt business?" I ask him as we shake hands, mine somewhat limp with confusion. "Ah man, I wanted to come up behind you and scare you, but I couldn't find you," he says.

I had mentioned going somewhere to smoke an argeela and chill for awhile, so we begin to walk in the direction of the Ramallah First Group, a place somewhat like the Palestinian version of the YMCA, except with much more smoking. Somehow we get into a conversation about women. "I'm definitely not the prettiest guy in the world, but I get with good-looking girls. You know why? One of 'em said it best: 'You've got a magnetic personality.'"

If you didn't know Nettles, you would think he was cocky. Maybe he is a little bit, but you could also say that he was merely expressing the truth, evidenced by a fifteen minute walk more jam-packed with human interaction than I had experienced in Palestine thus far. In between talking with a Palestinian from Texas and the first black couple I had seen in Ramallah, he filled me in on his past, ranging from the tragic water park accident that left him temporarily paralyzed to the time he met Beyoncé Knowles, and in true Nettles fashion, asked her to come over to him for the autograph, rather than vice versa—something that true Beyoncéphiles wouldn't have to think twice about.

Undoubtedly some of this magnetism is generated by Nettles himself, but some of it also seems cosmically coincidental in nature. I'll give you a couple examples. Only a minute into our walk, Nettles and I happen to come across a scuffle between two Palestinian teens. He takes a fatherly stance between the two boys, with an arm around each, and tells them that Palestinian brothers should not fight amongst each other, then says a couple things to each in Arabic as the boys cool off. As we continue along—then double back the direction we came after realizing that original destination would be too far on foot—a young boy of about eight, bolting through the crowd excitedly, just happens to take a hard fall right at Nettles' feet. The boy, after remaining on the ground for a moment in a stunned, wow-did-that-really-just-happen mode, brushes himself off without a whimper and looks around at his audience. "Aw, habibi," says Nettles affectionately, then leads the kid to a cooler at a store next door and offers to buy him a soda. "I love my Palestinian boys," he says after the beaming boy walks off with his hard-earned orange soda. "They're the toughest kids on Earth; they don't cry for nothin."

At that point I reflected on how much more interesting my life would be if I walked the streets with Nettles all the time.

Finally we arrive at an adequate meeting/smoking place, the Stars & Bucks at the Minarah where we had originally met. As I sit down to my hookah and Nettles his iced coffee (he doesn't smoke or drink), I ask him what brought him here. At first, he says the Israeli assault on Gaza motivated him: "What I saw was unacceptable." But not long after, he gives me a more personal (and more believable) explanation for his coming to Palestine. "I saw a video of my grandmother, she got frail, I haven't been here in nine years. She's sick. So I came here because of her and because of what happened in Gaza." Thus Nettles is currently staying with his grandmother in the village of Bayt I'nan, about nine miles northwest of Jerusalem.

He then moved on to the subject of teaching young Palestinians to box. "These kids are bona fide fighters. Society has made them the way they are."

I soon learn that what Nettles wants to do is not just start a boxing gym for Palestinian youth, but to put together a Palestinian boxing team that would compete in the Olympic Games. "I really believe [that if] these guys get a gold medal winner, it'll open the doors for them to have their freedom, to have their state, to do something big," he says to me. At first I think I've waded into some terrible tragedy; that Nettles hadn't even realized that Palestine was not even technically a country and thus they would be ineligible for the Olympics and therefore Nettles is wasting lots of his time and money. But I find out later that Palestine is in fact recognized as a country by the International Olympic Committee and that Palestinian athletes competed in the 2008 summer Olympics. I'm guessing it was easy to overlook, considering that there were only four total Palestinian athletes, none of whom advanced to any televised medal events.

Currently heading the Palestine Olympic Committee is a man named Jibril Rajoub, formerly Yasser Arafat's National Security Adviser and now the man that holds Nettles' fate in his hands. Nettles shows me his folder of newspaper clippings, recommendations, and resumes that he aims to show Mr. Rajoub when they finally meet. The optimal outcome for Nettles is for Mr. Rajoub to fork over some Palestinian cash to build a gym and maintain a training program that would produce Olympic-caliber Palestinian boxers by the time that 2012 rolls around.

Time is not on Nettles' side: for the past few months, he’s been living off of money earned back in the States. He spends a few hours a day at a downtown Ramallah gym coaching a handful of young men in the art of boxing, but he offers this service pro bono. He says that once he runs out of money, he may have to go home.

After talking a bit more about religion, politics, and music—Nettles spent at least two full minutes trying to find out the name of a Jay-Z and Coldplay music video that was on one of the cafe TV screens—he took me to the downtown gym where he coaches aspiring boxers. Whether he does it because he has nothing better to do while waiting for Mr. Rajoub, or because he has a big heart, I don't know. I suspect it's a combination of both. Although I had a devastating file mix-up that made over half my pictures from Palestine disappear, these two survived:

Nettles Nasser.

Nettles and his Olympic hopefuls. No smiles allowed here.

Now that I’m back in the States, I'm keeping in contact with Nettles over Facebook. I can imagine the drama of the wait—one day his prospects look "bleak," while the next he's hopeful that he'll be able to meet with Rajoub. I can only wish him the best, because by his estimates, he should be out of money right now.

Keep at it, Nettles. I'm really looking forward to seeing those Palestinian flag boxing trunks come 2012.

A Critical Letter Regarding My Introductory Essay, With My Response

2009-08-16T15:33:00.005-04:00

The following letter was published in the July 15, 2009 issue of Flagpole Magazine under the title "Differences on the Holy Land." (On the Flagpole website, my response can be viewed in the "View Comments" box.)

I read with dismay Jeff Gore’s article about his sojourn in the Holy Land [June 24]. It is too bad that while in college not long ago he did not study more history. His article suffers from either lack of history of Israel or from conveniently omitting historical facts and events. He connects the founding of Israel with the Holocaust. Well, long before the Holocaust Jews living in the diaspora longed to go back to Israel, their ancestral land, and join their brothers who lived there for millennia. Yes, there were always Jews living in Israel (or Palestine), even in East Jerusalem and Hebron, the sites of so-called settlements! Jews were either expelled from these places (from East Jerusalem by Jordanians in 1948) or killed in pogroms by Arabs (as in Hebron in 1929). He does not know that the area was partitioned by the UN in 1947 into two states: a Jewish state of Israel and Arab state of Palestine, and that Arabs rejected this partition and attacked Israel in 1948!

Some of the Palestinian refugees were expelled by advancing Israeli troops, but most were told to flee by their Arab leaders. Does he not know that Arabs were the aggressors in the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and that their intent was to eliminate Israel and push Jews into the sea? That is how Israel came to “occupy” the West Bank and Gaza! Gore should also know that under Jordanians Jews did not have access to their holy sites in East Jerusalem and that many old synagogues were destroyed at that time as well. Under Israeli rule, everybody, Muslims, Christians and Jews (and others) have free access to their respective holy sites, with the exception of Mount Temple. Two mosques were built on top of ruins of the ancient Jewish temple, and this made Mount Temple a holy site for Muslims. Though Arabs insist (and rightly so) on religious freedom and free access to their sites, they do not allow free access to Temple Mount to Jews! Gore does not even know that Israel withdrew from Gaza four years ago; otherwise he would not claim that Gaza is still occupied by Israel.

As far as so-called discrimination against Palestinians goes, the presence of checkpoints (and the fence) does prevent terrorist attacks. Unfortunately, relaxation of passage through the checkpoints invariably leads to terrorist attacks. Many of the Arab houses in Jerusalem were built without a building permit, so they are actually illegal. By the way, the Israeli Arabs have all the rights, though not responsibilities (they do not serve in the Israeli army), of other citizens of Israel. Why is it that it is okay for these Arabs to live in Israel, but the West Bank and Gaza would have to be judenrein (or Jew-free in Nazi parlance)? As the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, said recently, most Israelis are in favor of a Palestinian state provided that they receive reciprocal recognition of a Jewish state (i.e., without the presence of so-called four million Palestinian “refugees”)!

I think that Gore should devote more time to studying history from other sources than Jimmy Carter’s most recent book. I also recommend that he spend some time living in Israel among Jews.

Last but not least, it is one thing that Gore does not know history, but it is quite outrageous that you as Flagpole journalists let this go. Have you ever heard of fact-checking and responsible journalism?

Dr. Jaroslava Halper

Athens

***********

Dr. Halper,

Because our interpretation of the history surrounding the conflict is so fundamentally different, I hardly expect to change your mind with this reply to your letter. But I feel that your arguments reflect exactly—and to your credit, quite concisely—the flawed reasoning that has kept the American public ignorant of the true nature of the conflict for decades. Thus this response is mostly for the benefit of the (however small) audience that may be reading this.

I had planned on addressing every single one of your points, but because of time constraints and new commitments over here I’m just going to put up the limited amount which I wrote late last week (and naïvely thought that I would finish).

You write:

Jews were either expelled from these places (from East Jerusalem by Jordanians in 1948) or killed in pogroms by Arabs (as in Hebron in 1929). He does not know that the area was partitioned by the UN in 1947 into two states: a Jewish state of Israel and Arab state of Palestine, and that Arabs rejected this partition and attacked Israel in 1948! Some of the Palestinian refugees were expelled by advancing Israeli troops, but most were told to flee by their Arab leaders. Does he not know that Arabs were the aggressors in the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and that their intent was to eliminate Israel and push Jews into the sea?

Let me point out the intellectual dishonesty of grouping of millions upon millions of varied individuals into one entity – “The Arabs.” This is an age-old technique that makes it easier for one to justify Israeli crimes against the Palestinians. When actions taken by self-serving Arab governments are pinned to an entire people, it makes these people appear like accomplices to actions that they had no part in whatsoever. This is especially pertinent considering that no Arab governments in the region – as Israel’s advocates love to point out – have a democratic system of governance. What if in my piece I had said that the Jews were oppressing the Palestinians? It would quite rightly never have been published.

That is how Israel came to “occupy” the West Bank and Gaza! … Gore does not even know that Israel withdrew from Gaza four years ago; otherwise he would not claim that Gaza is still occupied by Israel.

I’m not sure what the quotes around the word occupy are supposed to signify. The United Nations and Barack Obama have both recognized the West Bank as an Occupied Territory. When Israeli checkpoints can be found not on the border between Israel and Palestine, but smack dab in the middle of Palestinian territory…how can that not be considered an occupation?

I admit my error in calling Gaza an occupied territory. The reality is much worse – it is now a besieged territory. After flattening over 4,000 homes and taking over 1,400 Palestinian lives, Israel has not allowed one brick or bag of concrete into Gaza—a full seven months later! The essential thing to know here is that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza does not in any way mean that they have ceded any substantial control of it, as evidenced by the Israeli jets patrolling the Gazan skies and the Israeli boats patrolling the Gazan shore.

Many of the Arab houses in Jerusalem were built without a building permit, so they are actually illegal.

Did you read my piece?

“In 2004, the Jerusalem Municipality, in a 20-year “Master Plan,” endorsed the maintenance of a 70-30 ratio of Jews to Arabs in order to preserve “a firm Jewish majority in the city.” Thus, it is little surprise that Palestinians find it nearly impossible to obtain permits to build homes in East Jerusalem. When they build anyway, their homes are declared illegal and eventually demolished.”

Permits, laws, codes…these are man-made creations with no implicit morality, as you well know. If an Arab government was in charge, and disproportionately denying Jewish permits for building based on the law they invented, would you accept that? Of course not. The modern state’s distinction of something as “illegal” – whether it is for drinking beer at the age 19 or for building without a (nearly impossible to obtain) permit – must be critically examined before it is accepted.

By the way, the Israeli Arabs have all the rights, though not responsibilities (they do not serve in the Israeli army), of other citizens of Israel.

What are the reasons behind this exemption? A Jewish friend in Jerusalem tells me this rule exists for security reasons. It makes sense – what’s to stop a conscripted Arab soldier, upon seeing his fellow Palestinian Arabs killed and maimed, from turning his guns on his own platoon? Secondly, Arabs are not the only group to enjoy this exemption – those Jews who consider themselves “ultra-Orthodox” are also granted a pass from the IDF.

Why is it that it is okay for these Arabs to live in Israel, but the West Bank and Gaza would have to be judenrein (or Jew-free in Nazi parlance)?

This is flatly not true. Take a look at this recently-published article in Haaretz:

“Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on Saturday said that Jews would enjoy freedom and full civil rights in a future Palestinian state, according to a report in the Aspen Daily News. ‘Jews, to the extent they choose to stay and live in the state of Palestine, will enjoy those rights and certainly will not enjoy any less rights than Israeli Arabs enjoy now in the state of Israel,’ Fayyad said in response to a question from former CIA director James Woolsey at the Aspen Institute's Ideas Festival.”

As the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, said recently, most Israelis are in favor of a Palestinian state provided that they receive reciprocal recognition of a Jewish state (i.e., without the presence of so-called four million Palestinian “refugees”)!

The core reason that the Palestinian leadership has been reluctant to recognize Israel as a Jewish state is because of the implicit assumption that non-Jews will be treated as second-class citizens. Keep in mind that many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have family and friends in what is considered Israel proper, so what goes on beyond those 1967 borders is still of profound interest to them. Could you imagine what would happen if the U.S. government formally declared America a Christian state? Or dare I say, if Germany declared itself a White state? Would you believe that these new states – even with laws proclaiming a policy of nondiscrimination—would really treat everybody equally? This is more of a philosophical than a factual objection; you may believe that Israel is a special case and that these comparisons are unfair at best. Personally, I believe the identification of a democratic state as “for” a specific ethnic/religious group is utterly poisonous.

Also, I should say that I’ve never opened Jimmy Carter’s book.

A Not-So-Palestinian Attraction in Palestine

2009-08-13T05:32:00.001-04:00

After catching the triumphant final showing of the play "Fragments of Palestine" at the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, two friends and I were lucky enough to hitch a ride back to Nablus in a van piloted by the ambassadors of the French-German cultural center in Ramallah. Although I knew we would have the liberty taking a more scenic route back in our private van, nothing prepared me for the scene that we encountered on the outskirts of Nablus.

Among the derelict ruins of an amusement park, situated between a deserted Israeli checkpoint and dungheap-ridden mountainside, was a massive old jetliner propped up for display.

What kind of airplane is this? Where did it come from? How did it get here? Who owned this jet? Is it Israeli?

I asked my father, a quarter-century veteran of the airline industry and lifetime aviation enthusiast, if he could help me do some detective work as to the history of this plane. He says it's a Boeing 707, no doubt, but probably due to the subpar quality and quantity of my photos (my judgment, not his) it's hard to know more. So he posed the question on a popular aviation forum. A couple folks have guessed that this may be the B707-328 that formerly belonged to the Israeli Air Force and was supposed to be converted into a restaurant in Moshav Elifelet, but aerotransport.org has its current status listed as "Part out, derelict at TLV [Tel Aviv Airport]." Did some bizarre business dealing bring the plane from Tel Aviv to Nablus without the site's knowledge?

It seems so. Some further digging found a webpage which details the status of all of the 707's owned by the Israeli air force.⁴⁰ Sure enough, a plane with registration number 118/4X-JYK—the same jet discussed in the previous paragraph—is listed as "wfu Nablus 2000." In the acronym-heavy world of aviation, "wfu" stands for "withdrawn from use."

Assuming this is indeed the same plane, would some intrepid journalist—someone who is spending much more time in Palestine than myself and has at least some knowledge of Arabic—like to take up the challenge of finding out how this plane changed from Israeli to Palestinian hands? The best way would be to hunt down a man named Baslan Al-Fares , or his cousin, 'Abd a-Salam al-Fares, who used to run the amusement park that now lies barren because Israeli restrictions on movement made it a near-impossibility for many Palestinians to get there:

Because of the difficulties in reaching Al-Badhan, people have stopped coming to the park and we were forced to close it. In order to reach the park from Ramallah, for example, it would require passing 4 checkpoints: 'Atara, Za'atara, Huwara, and Al-Badhan. It's a continuous nightmare that takes an entire day and is not a pleasant trip.

To me, it's both tragic and exciting that there seems to be so many stories in Palestine that remain untold to the rest of the world. Don't get me wrong: I am definitely not the first blogger to touch on this derelict park with its derelict jet—for example, I found a post regarding this on the blog of Skip Schiel, a photographer who less than a year ago came to the University of Georgia to exhibit some of his shots from Palestine.

The Differences Between Here and There, Pt. 2

2009-08-10T18:13:00.002-04:00

And now for the second installment of my series on the miscellaneous little differences between Israel/Palestine and America.

- Since this is the Middle East, it doesn't really rain. During the summer it never rains. I wonder if the weather channels out here just close up shop when summer arrives; I've had over two months here and not felt a single raindrop. Since water is precious out here, and since Israel is not afraid to collectively punish the Palestinian population for individual crimes,³⁹ almost every Palestinian rooftop is adorned with large black tanks with reserves of water in the event that Israel decides to turn off the tap. In Palestine the water delivery system is much less modern (and hence less dependable); in East Jerusalem, for example, the water infrastructure dates back nearly a half century to the Jordanian era. Depending on your political sympathies, this could be evidence of either Israeli apartheid or Palestinian laziness, though I haven't the information to make either judgment as of right now.

- Because of the constant sun out here, there is little need for a machine dryer when it comes to laundry. Everybody (in both Israel and Palestine) hangs their clothes out to dry, which has the effect of adding to the rustic charm of the place. Beware high winds, though: my brother's jeans ended up on an opposite rooftop after a forceful gust sent the whole drying rack toppling over.

- It's been awhile since I got my SAT scores, but I'm pretty sure that I didn't find out about them through a major newspaper. Here the results of the big SAT-esque test, called the Tawjihi, are published in Al-Ayyam, the second-largest daily in Palestine. The senior year of high school here is the most intensively difficult—unlike America, where the final year of high school ranges in character from honeymoon to joyride. But with great struggle comes great celebration upon success: my English lessons at Al-Am'ari were interrupted by fireworks the morning that the results were released. I've also been told by a rising Palestinian senior that elective classes simply do not exist and he'd be looking forward to going back to school a lot more if there were girls there—public schools out here are usually sexually segregated. Bummer.

-Does your city feature traffic cops like this guy? I think not. (Fast forward to the end for sentimental slow-motion!)

- If I'm surfing through radio stations back in the States, I will waste no time in skipping over the familiar drone of a pastor reading the Bible. But here in Palestine, the Qur'an is sung, and if done by a skilled vocalist, it is a truly beautiful sound to behold. When the call to prayer is issued through the megaphones bristling from the spire of the local mosque, the echoing song gives the whole moment a profound, lyrical quality that almost makes you want to convert to Islam in that very moment. In America it would be considered intrusive and tacky for a church to broadcast its sermon over a two mile radius with megaphones. But here, it’s not only expected but welcome—to me at least. (It is very possible that these fond feelings of mine only exist because I know I will spend no more than a few months here.) Interestingly enough, in Hebron, Israeli settlers attempt to drown out the call to prayer with patriotic Jewish songs blasted from loudspeakers of their own. It's a darkly comical experience, to say the least.

- Much earlier in my summer I had quoted my Swiss friend making this bold assertion: "There are no homeless people in Palestine." Surprisingly enough, that held up to be true as far as I can see. Throughout the course of my trip the only homeless people I've seen have been in Israel, a country which has a much higher per capita income than the occupied Palestinian territories and is lauded for being the only democracy in the Middle East. In Palestine I have not seen one single person slumped over in the street in a destitute manner that suggests that they have nowhere else to go. This is due to a complex cocktail of factors, but central to this phenomenon, I believe, is the Islamic faith. Islam strongly forbids drug use, which makes it much more difficult to find alcohol and any other illicit substances—which are so instrumental in keeping somebody homeless—around these parts. Also, as I mentioned before, people here are unconditionally generous and giving, no matter how little they have, which has roots in Islamic teachings. Thus, if you happen to see a beggar in Palestine, you can know for certain that this person is a scam artist. If only it were so easy to know in America.

- On a similar note, you won't find any gambling—at least out in the open—in Palestine. In Israel, however, orange booths vending lottery tickets can be counted on to appear once every few blocks. Would I be so presumptive to think that this paragraph and the previous one are related?

- Above is the police department located on Ein Misbah street, just outside of the Minarah. Notice the heavily political nature of the signage, something that you won’t find in the police departments of most other countries. You'll also learn in little time the three major political icons of the West Bank: Mahmoud Abbas, or "Abu Mazen" to the Arab world, the current president of the Palestinian Authority (at left above); Yasser Arafat, the iconic and now deceased Palestinian leader (at right above); and Marwan Barghouti, a man currently jailed by Israel who headed Fatah's armed branch during the Second Intifada and is widely believed to be elected the next Palestinian president—if he's ever released.

- Lastly, back to the question of alcohol: in Palestine, it's either sold in big "international" towns like Ramallah and Bethlehem, or it’s sold in the rare Christian village. Taybeh is the most famous of these Christian villages, seeing as it is home to the only brewery in Palestine. Nablus, a less-visited but much larger city, does not have any alcohol vendors whatsoever. On the other hand, Israel's rules regarding alcohol are as lax as that of any European city: when my brother and I were in Tel Aviv, we cracked open our tall boys and proceeded to drink on the streets.

A Taste of Arabic Pop Culture in Palestine

2009-08-07T07:48:00.001-04:00

One of the most depressing (or comforting) experiences that an American can have is to travel halfway across the world expecting (or fearing) an exotic, alien culture only to encounter the exact same cultural idols and hear the exact same mindless songs that happen to be dominating the American airwaves at the moment. The world largely seems to be following America's lead when it comes to popular culture, which may just be one of the most depressing developments of the 21st century—seeing ancient customs trampled under the onward march of narcissistic fantasies, reality discarded for the sake of a hologram, truth discarded for the sake of a lie. Perhaps Henry Miller had a divine flash of prophecy when he wrote this way back in 1930: "America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit."

Okay, so I still have some negativity issues.

Yet my faith in humanity was somewhat restored when I came here to Palestine and encountered a vibrant Arabic music scene. Not to say that it's not subject to the same market forces as American music—perhaps the most widely listened-to stuff here is just like the stuff back in America, meaning that the more popular it is, the dumber it probably is. But even if the lyrics somehow manage to scrape the bottom of the intellectual and moral barrel that America's popular music inhabits (L-l-l-lick it like a lollipop...), it still sounds more authentic; computers have not run amok on the landscape of Arabic music as they have back in the States. Not to mention that the male performers of Arabic songs actually sing—and beautifully—rather than shout.

At weddings and parties in Palestine, the music is usually accompanied by a robust dance known as dabke (pronounced DUB-KAH). Although I still haven't participated in a dabke session yet, it looks like the most enjoyable dance on earth. You stand shoulder-to-shoulder with your mates and, in a manner of touching fraternity, extend your arms outright to grasp their shoulders and they do the same. Then you let your legs do the rest as the line bounces and bends festively in different directions. I've seen a couple dabke shows so far, but my camera has been completely unable to handle the responsibility of taking an adequate picture in the Ramallah Cultural Palace, so the only image I have to offer of this amazing dance in action is a shot of the shabaab in Nablus kicking up dust with a particularly rowdy dabke session around a tricked-out car which unfortunately fell just outside the frame.

So let's get back to the music. What's popular in Palestine right now? Let's just say that the summer of 2009 belongs to Tamer Hosny. No poster is more prevalent on Palestinian streets than the one advertising Tamer's new album, and you know what? It's actually pretty good.

Below is a video of Tamer in action. It doesn't take much listening to realize that "habibi" is one his favorite words, which is the standard fare for any Arab singer. Though it literally translates to "my darling," the term "habibi" can roughly be equated to American pop's use of "baby" when used in a musical context. And while American pop seems obsessed with sex, Arabic pop is undoubtedly obsessed with love - although I won't discount the possibility that buried deep, deep within these songs may be some sort of erotic message.

Speaking of erotic messages, I had quite the unsettling experience on a bus full of fourth graders during a field trip from the English camp the other day. Please read on, it's not what it seems!

We were on our way to the swimming pool in the village of Bir Zeit. Since the trip took about a half hour, popular Arabic music videos were played over the bus's AV system for the kids to watch and sing along to while we waited to arrive. All of the music videos were obviously geared towards children, except for one by a Lebanese singer named Haifa Wehbe. Scantily clad in lingerie, she "plays" with a three year-old boy throughout the course of the video, feeding him, blowing bubbles with him, even bathing him with an air of sexuality that makes it quite obvious that the video is not really directed at the hearts of young boys, but the penises of grown men. Would anyone else consider the below video evidence of some sort of subtle, yet insidious child abuse?

Finally, I will say that although I have not spent nearly as much time in Israel, it seems to lack a comparably independent popular music culture—on all the Israeli buses I've ridden on, the music coming out of the speakers is usually in English and often something I've heard before. But let me stress that I am talking about popular music—I imagine that Israel has just as vibrant of an underground music scene as any other industrialized, middle-class country full of bored youth.

The Palestinian Refugee's Dilemma

2009-08-04T05:27:00.001-04:00

When someone asks me where I'm from, I answer with “Florida.” Although I was born in California and currently live in Georgia, I spent 17 out of my 23 years in the suburban swamp of east Orlando. I learned to ride a bike there, opened my Christmas presents there, went through puberty there, got my first car there, graduated from high school and college there...and on and on. It was where I was raised, where I had most of the experiences that made what I am today. Thus it seems logical to call Orlando, Florida the place that I am from—to me it's the most accurate answer.

On the other hand, when you ask a Palestinian where they’re from, you're likely to get the name of a village that neither they nor their own parents have ever set foot in. Not to say that there is no family lineage there—this village was almost assuredly a place that their grandparents fled or were kicked out of in the wake of Israeli advances during the wars of both 1948 and 1967. Take Haifa, for example. This port city is now the third-largest in Israel and was the site of considerable violence during the creation of the state in 1948. Due to this tumult, many Arab residents fled the town. By October of that year, Haifa had shed more than 90% of its Arab population, or around 56,000 people.

Now let's guess that over the course of the past sixty years, half of those people produced three children each. Each of those three children produced two children each. The result is hundreds of thousands of people descended from these original refugees from Haifa. No wonder every Palestinian I meet seems to be from there!

But wait, why is it that they say that they’re from Haifa, even if they've never been there and are not allowed to go there?

To address this heavy, complicated question, I should start with a quote from Elias Chacour, a Christian Palestinian who was pushed out of his home in the Galilee by Jewish forces prior to 1948:

Mobile Western people have difficulty comprehending the significance of the land for Palestinians. We belong to the land. We identify with the land, which has been treasured, cultivated, and nurtured by countless generations of ancestors. Some of our trees were planted more than a thousand years ago... Other trees in our village were closer to two thousand years old. People in our generation plant trees for their children's children.

If Chacour really is speaking for the majority of Palestinians in this regard (which I believe he is), then it is no surprise why Palestinians cannot forget about these places, the homes of their grandparents lined with olive trees rather than concrete walls. More than three-quarters of a million people fled from places like these in the period preceding and during the 1948 war. These were villages located in what is now considered Israel proper, villages that once existed or perhaps still exist but with a different name and demographic makeup. Although the outline of a future Palestinian state is drawn around the West Bank and Gaza, virtually all Palestinians have a much broader geographical concept of what "Palestine" is.

Consequently, if you talk politics with a Palestinian or a hard-left international, you may not hear the name "Israel" once. When asked about this, they say that using this name legitimizes an illegitimate state based on ethnic cleansing; that it's ignores the huge amount of Palestinian history and heritage that lies in what has been claimed by Israel. So they choose to call it "'48" instead. Let me give you a couple examples.

Example 1 (Palestinian): "We have to get special permit to go into '48, which the Israelians* usually deny us."

Example 2 (hard-left international living in Palestine): "I have to go to '48 tomorrow to try and renew my visa."

If you were confused about why Israel is always asking for "recognition" as a Jewish state, or perhaps even more confused as to why Palestinians could not simply "recognize" Israel, perhaps this has made things a little clearer for you.

Over sixty years later, many of these refugees—and their children, and their children's children—still live in camps, in one of the longest temporary arrangements in the world. As I said before, these refugee camps are the economic equivalent to the "ghetto" in American cities. In these dilapidated U.N. buildings live people that are still, after sixty years, waiting to return to their homes. Many Palestinians still have the key to these old homes in Israel proper—hence the huge symbolic significance of the key seen on statues, posters, and artwork around these parts.

Is it respectable, understandable, admirable that these Palestinians still have not given up this hope of returning? Or, after sixty years, is it quixotic and self-destructive to maintain such unrealistic hopes? I think there is truth in both assertions, although I think the case for the second statement becomes stronger with each passing day. Especially considering that very, very few people would be able to return to their land and encounter it just as they left it. Their houses have likely been bulldozed, a new Israeli village could have been erected there, or possibly, an Israeli Jew and his family is living in the very home that their great-grandparents built. Like seeing a former lover in the arms of another man, it must be infuriating and saddening for a Palestinian to learn that his olive trees are being pruned by another man—and improperly!

Secondly, consider that the state of Israel is now old enough that generations of people have been born there, people who should bear no blame whatsoever for the plight of the Palestinians just as I should bear no blame for the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans. We have no control of where we are born and what we are born into. So if a Palestinian family was allowed to return to a patch of land and a home that their grandparents owned in the '40s, it may imply evicting a Jewish family, a family with children that would be confused as to why they now have to leave everything they know. Another mass of refugees would be created and the cycle of suffering would continue.

This remains one of the greatest tragedies of our time. Surely the Palestinians can claim a right of return, but can this right be exercised humanely, in a manner that treats everybody fairly? I'm not sure. In fact, it could leave both parties dissatisfied, especially the diaspora Palestinians who realize that "return" does not mean an actual return to their home but a permission slip to move into the West Bank or the Gaza Strip.

But many of those in the camps still cling to this hope of returning to their land, despite the growing mountain of evidence that suggests the infinitesimally small odds of such fantasies actually coming true. The physical evidence of this is striking: the buildings in the refugee camps are not maintained, nor decorated save for political graffiti (see below for an example). The young man who led us through the Jenin refugee camp told us that the surroundings were kept purposefully shabby to serve as an omnipresent reminder that these are not their homes and thus any efforts to build a permanent community here would be forfeiting their real homes to the Israelis forever, which they could never do.

Is it worth living one's whole life waiting, in squalor, for something that may never occur? Is it worth subjecting your children to this condition for a political principle? I would say no. But remember how different our cultures are, especially when it comes to the perception of time. To me, the egocentric Westerner, the only time that matters is the span of my own lifetime on this earth—thus, sixty years is a long time to wait, a terrible waste of my lifetime. But when I present this thought to a Palestinian, the response usually goes something like this: "The Palestinians have been around for thousands of years. Sixty years is nothing."

***

This is one of the darker pieces in the Dheisheh refugee camp, which is chock full of depressing, macabre graffiti. Thanks to Paul Chambers for this photo; when I toured the camp - in Bethlehem, the grafitti capital of the West Bank - I was without my camera and this was one of the shots I wish I had taken.

*Perhaps the most annoying thing about the average Palestinian’s English is his tendency to use the term “Israelians” when referring to Israelis, an error which usually goes uncorrected.

Growing Up (Too) Fast in Ramallah

2009-08-01T22:00:00.002-04:00

"One shekel. Please. Just one shekel."

You'll be lucky to walk from the main bus station in Ramallah to any destination in the city without hearing this sales pitch from some adolescent Palestinian boy waving a pack of gum or a bag of candy, doggedly following you, tugging on your shirt sleeve, persisting even after you've said "la" (Arabic for "no") more times than you can count on your two hands. Not only are these boys incredibly persistent, but intelligent: they cater their pitch to internationals, speaking English when the customer is obviously a foreigner.

To be honest, it's really not that much that these kids are asking for: one shekel equals only slightly more than 25 US cents. And you're not just giving money away—you're getting something out of it. So why not give them a break? Especially if these poor boys are so destitute that they're reduced to whittling away the golden years of youth hustling on the streets?

While it's rational to think that these Palestinian boys are doing such dreadfully soul-draining work out of necessity, I've been told many times by many people—both internationals and native Palestinians—that these boys are just the tools of shady businessmen who essentially pimp them out to sell cheap candy and give them a meager cut of the day's earnings. One story I heard involved one of the boy saying something along the lines of: "Please just buy this last pack of gum so I can go home."

Because my Arabic is shamefully nonexistent, and since the average English skills of these Palestinian boy-hustlers is understandably nonexistent, I could not really investigate the validity of these claims through the boys themselves. All I could do was issue the quasi-bribe* of offering to buy their candy on the condition that they let me take a photo of them holding their merchandise.

This young man was a regular fixture of the bus/service station. While the #18 bus to Jerusalem idled, waiting to fill up, he would often make an appearance in the aisle, brandishing a bushel of candy bags filled with assorted gummy treats. One time I thought I had rid myself of him, only to be scared the shit out of when he knocked on my window and pantomimed his sales pitch from the outside.

When Naomi Klein wrote about "disaster capitalism," she declined to mention that the class of disaster capitalists extends far beyond the realm of rich, white Fortune 500 bigwigs. Here are two younglings (including the only girl I've ever seen on the hustle) selling bubblegum in the heart of an Israeli checkpoint. The Qalandia checkpoint bristles with opportunistic salesmen—for example, I've seen young men walk up to the windows of waiting cars, trying to sell pillows.

Other common items for sale include these little stickers containing various Qur'anic verses. One day I'll be able to actually read what they say.

These two runts were the only ones to get over two shekels each from me, and perhaps unsurprsingly, were the only ones to run off without even giving me the product I had bought. But then again, it's quite possible that they thought I was just paying for their picture.

This kind boy was one of scores of Ramallahans selling 25 cent popsicles out of Styrofoam coolers that all look eerily the same, down to the worn corners and the half-torn-off stickers.

This was the popsicle boy's friend who is looking less enthused because I held firm and didn't buy anything from him. I pointed to my mouth occupied with popsicle chunks as proof that I had no room for gum. It's bullshit, of course, but I feared setting an overly charitable example that would have all the boy salesmen in the parking garage coming my way.

Still, he let me photograph his merchandise: TAIJIXING (JIN LONG JIAN) chewing gum, probably made at the cost of a hundredth of a cent per pack. How intriguing it would be to trace this box from China to Palestine.

*Prefix "quasi-" added to make myself feel better about what are undoubtedly out-and-out bribes of children.

Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus...

2009-07-29T03:30:00.002-04:00

Before I came here, to Palestine, I made a Skype call to my friend in Nablus and asked her if there was anything specific I needed to wear. Also, would it be a no-no to bring a skateboard?

"Don't worry about it. You're a guy—you can do whatever you want," she replied.

Once actually in Nablus hanging with said female friend, I suggest going the Turkish bathhouse that I had heard so much about. But alas, I forget—women are only allowed one day a week at the bathhouse, and today isn't her day. I'm wearing a T-shirt, my arms are thankfully bare under the Middle Eastern sun, but hers are covered past the elbow; she doesn't want to be stared at, or worse, talked about.

If I were to try and pinpoint the biggest difference between American and Palestinian culture, I would settle upon how vastly different the lives of men and women are here. Everything from schools to weddings to swimming pools are likely to be sexually segregated here (though not nearly as severely and strictly as in places like Saudi Arabia). Men hang out with other men, and women hang out with other women—for the most part.

Internationals like myself are not immune from these cultural pressures. For example, my activities yesterday consisted of teaching an all-boys class at the Al Am'ari refugee camp, then hanging out with two other men at an apartment where female visitors were not permitted (a rule which just might have had something to do with my own eviction), then paying a visit to the legendary Baldna coffee shop, where the air is filled with a heavy combination of fragrant smoke and testosterone. There is no sign that reads NO WOMEN ALLOWED, but no such sign is needed—women do not come here. The unwritten rules are clear: this is a place for men to play cards, drink tea, and puff on argeela late into the night.

I am not, however, going to jump on the "look how oppressed these women are by their religion/culture" boat just yet. It is tempting to come to this conclusion when, for instance, you visit the swimming pool at Bir Zeit and see that the men's pool is spacious and equipped with slides while the women's pool is tucked out of sight—it's a small, slideless, tarp-covered thing.

You ask: is it hard to be a woman in Palestine? International women will almost invariably say yes, but Palestinian women are more likely to say no—at least this is my impression from scattered conversations. They say they choose to wear the hijab, they choose to cover their bodies, and even if their swimming pool is smaller, they enjoy having their own space where they are not going to be stared at by men.

But one could easily argue that the reason that men are likely to stare at them is because they have almost never been allowed to see women's bodies due to the culture they live in. Just like the denial of alcohol to teenagers in America creates immature alcoholics, so does the denial of women to unmarried men create scores of sexually repressed guys who may just masturbate at women from behind trees, or may just wait on the bottom floor of an apartment building at night, flashing his penis at any international girls that walk by. (True stories; since unmarried Palestinian women are definitely out of the question—remember, people talk and everybody knows each other—international women bear the brunt of trashy sexual advances by Palestinian men.)

It could also be argued that these women regard their sexual repression as "choices" for the preservation of their own pride, when really, forces larger than the individual make any other choice dangerous or outright impossible—like a gun to your head at the voting booth. It's a frightening proposition for a woman to abandon the safety and familial respect that comes with keeping to tradition, and so for the sake of her own mental health, she gradually begins to regard these customs as her own choices, lest she feel like a prisoner for her entire life.

Of course, the whole thing is so nuanced and complicated that what I just presented is undoubtedly a false dichotomy of the issue. Since I've been here for only two months, and since I am a man unexposed to the vast unknown of the lives of Palestinian women, I'll reserve further judgment.

The Martyrs of Nablus

2009-07-26T03:01:00.001-04:00

Below are some pictures of some common signage on the streets of Nablus, the largest city in the West Bank and one of the most interesting places on earth. During the Second Intifada many Palestinian fighters—some of whom would become "martyrs"—came from this very city. (I refuse to call them "terrorists" unless they had attacked civilians.) Those who died in combat are featured on posters which almost invariably include two components—a picture of the Dome of the Rock (the second holiest site in Islam) and some sort of heavy weaponry in the deceased's hands. It's pretty dark stuff, but to be honest, I'd rather look at this stuff than advertising any day.

I personally think that armed struggle against the Israelis by the Palestinians is pointless and self-destructive—the Israelis have much bigger, better-functioning weaponry than the Palestinians, and more of it. Not to mention that life only got more difficult for Palestinians after the Second Intifada—they now have more trouble moving from place to place and finding jobs than they ever did before.

Not to say that I do not understand why Palestinians would take up arms against the Israelis. As I said before, it’s difficult to contemplate forgiveness and non-violent struggle after your family and/or friends are killed by a “smart bomb.” Still, understanding does not equal endorsement, especially in this case. Given the malleable nature of the young mind, I find it tragic that in both Palestine and Israel, kids are growing up in societies that glorify warfare.

You'll notice that the gentleman above is rather popular, being featured in four of the five shots I’ve provided. This guy is known as "Spider Man," and he is without question one of the most famous martyrs in Nablus. Rumors are that Spidey's family is rich; hence the large number of expertly-crafted posters of him all over town. The story surrounding his death is that he was providing cover fire for one of his mates when an Israeli jet dropped a bomb on him. Perhaps it was the fact that he was felled not by a $2 bullet, but by a $20,000 bomb, that has gained him such posthumous admiration.

Glorious, Glorious Golan

2009-07-24T03:01:00.001-04:00

A couple weekends ago I somehow ended up with the good fortune of being paired up with two beautiful ladies to go research one of the most beautiful areas in the world—the Golan Heights, north of Israel proper. Since my case study on the Jordan Valley petered out for various reasons, ICAHD assigned me to help out with this one.

The Golan is the unsung occupied territory, garnering much less international attention than the Palestinian territories. The occupied Golan Heights was once Syrian land—indeed, virtually all the Arabs in the Golan still regard it as Syria—that was annexed by Israel during the Six Day War in 1967. The only thing marring the unbelievable beauty of this land of cherry and apple orchards are the untold amount of landmines lying beneath vast swaths of the territory. You'll become very familiar with the murky yellow DANGER! MINES! sign after only a few minutes in the Golan.

Most of the Arabs in the Israeli-occupied Golan are of Druze heritage, which I'll leave you to research because I don't feel like making the effort to describe it all here. Let's just say that like Jewish identity, Druze identity is a mix of ethnicity, religion, and social tradition.

While I was there, we did a considerable amount of solid work, but we also had a lot of fun. Our crew-of-three saw a local hip-hop show with seizure-inducing lighting, muscled a rented car over rocky roads between the ruins of houses, skinny dipped in the Sea of Galilee on a moonless night, barbecued kebabs of "young sheep" while sitting in an apple orchard, enjoyed succulent just-picked cherries from a local farmer, had millions of interesting conversations over millions of cups of aromatic Turkish coffee, posed atop the carcass of both an Israeli and a Syrian tank, and of course sang along to sentimental American childhood favorites ranging from Alanis Morissette to the Backstreet Boys. I could say more, but I'm getting to that point where I know that writing about life is cool insofar that it does not consume so much of your time that it makes your life less fulfilling – and consequently, less worthy of being written about!

Since the theme of this post seems to be laziness, I thought it'd be fitting to share my political and journalistic findings in the Golan by copying a lengthy email that I just sent my superior at ICAHD. Why write the same thing twice?

J---,

...As far as getting testimonials from people pushed out of their homes by the Israelis in '67 (which is the Syrian narrative echoed by everybody we talked to), we didn't get any - because we learned that virtually all of these refugees are in Syria at the moment. A--- probably told you that she is planning on talking to these refugees once she gets settled in Syria. We did talk to a few older men who were there in Majdal Shams when the Israelis invaded, but none of them were actually displaced, and Majdal Shams didn't see much action because most of the fighting was happening in the plateaus to the south.

We were reminded over and over again that the population of the Golan, which was something like 130,000 before the war, had plummeted to only 5,000 after the Israeli army had emptied almost all of the towns except for the five Druze villages in the north, of which Majdal Shams is one. There were a few reasons that were offered for Israel's decision to let these Druze villages be, the main ones being that a) Seeing as the town had already been razed to the ground twice by the French and Ottomans, the population decided they would rather live under occupation than flee and risk their village being destroyed a third time. b) Israel's desire to cultivate a special relationship with the Druze for their own political ends.

I'm sure you're somewhat familiar with this, as well as the parallels of oppression in both Jewish and Druze history. Taiseer Merei from Golan for Development told us that originally Israel had wanted to create a Druze state which would encompass parts of the Golan and what is now the north of Israel proper. This would be done, according to Dr. Marai, to legitimize Israel's ethnocracy by creating a similiar state, which would imply that this is the norm in the new Middle East. Dr. Marai also mentioned that Zionist planners had long coveted the Golan - even before '67 - for its considerable water resources.

In my opinion, the most interesting things we learned on the trip were not about 1967, but 2009. That is, the Occupation here in the Golan is of a softer, more accommodating form than in Palestine (only as far as the Golanis do not resist, surely the Israeli boot is still on the neck, but with much lighter pressure). A think a good analogy between occupied Palestine and the Golan is that of the difference between the fictional dystopias of 1984 and Brave New World. In Palestine/1984, the people are controlled through brute force, while in the Golan/Brave New World, people are lulled into loving their masters and are rarely punished because their opposition never materializes. The Syrian Druze may not be as loyal to Israel as the Palestinian Druze living in Israel proper, but they still enjoy health benefits and access to higher education in Israel. Most of the street signs here are in Hebrew and Arabic. One young Syrian - who was going to college in Haifa - told us that there were more doctors per capita in Majdal Shams than anywhere else in the world (unverifiable fact, but interesting nonetheless). As we talked with more and more younger people there, we got the feeling that many of the new generation of Syrian Druze would rather be occupied by Israel than be back under Syrian rule. If the Golan were returned to Syria, they could face fewer economic opportunities and poorer healthcare, among other things.

Besides the religious and cultural parallels between the Jewish and Druze people, we were also told that the Israelis give the Druze greater opportunities because they can afford to. This is because the Syrian Arabpopulation of the Golan - which is predominantly Druze - is only 21,000 people (there are an estimated 18,000 Israeli settlers in the Golan as well). Finally, just as the Palestinians are worse off after the second Intifada, the Syrian Druze are better off because nothing of the sort ever occurred. The last major act of resistance by the people of the Golan was over a quarter-century ago - in 1982, there was a general strike for six months. But ever since then, things seem to have been pretty quiet. Still, in the rare instance that poltiical opposition appears in the Golan, it is swiftly and quietly crushed. Many of the older men we spoke to had put considerable time in Israeli jails.

Despite their "good behavior" and relatively small numbers, the Syrian Arabs in the occupied Golan are undoubtedly treated like second class citizens. The Israeli land authority, Minhal, has allowed virtually no space for the villages to grow outwards - the designated outer boundary of the village was drawn almost exactly along the lines of existing housing. So instead, the people of Majdal Shams have to build in between and on top of each other. Nazeh Brik, the architect we spoke with, said that this crowding was having a negative psychological effect on the population - it was making people more "tense" and "aggressive" - although I will say that the people we met were invariably awesome.

The Syrian Arabs also pay a higher premium for water than their Jewish neighbors, and at one point, the Makarot - the Israeli water authority in the Golan - wanted to tax rainwater collected by farmers, since they considered it property of the State of Israel. Ridiculous, isn't it? From what we were told, Syrian Arabs have to pay nearly four times as much for their water than the Jewish settlers there. If only I could get my hands on something more official to verify this...

The greatest flaw of all of our research was that our interview subjects were not really a good representation of the whole population. The atheist Druze community, which by any reasonable guess is no more than 10% of the population of Majdal Shams, made up probably 75% of our interviews. You know how it works - the first person we meet there is an atheist, who refers us to another like-minded person, who refers us to another like-minded person, etc. We didn't get to talk to any obviously religious Druze - you know, the ones wearing the white snow-caps and donning the curly mustaches - which is unfortunate.

We did, however, spend an evening in a Jewish settlement and spoke with a professor and published author who said quite interestingly that the whole dispute between Syria and Israel over the Golan really boils down to a strip of land alongside Tiberias Lake/Sea of Galilee. Because the lake has actually changed shape since 1967, Israel would somehow still control its entire shoreline if exact borders (based on global coordinates?) were reinforced, according to this professor whose name escapes me now - A--- definitely knows.

Overall, I would echo a common sentiment that the occupation of the Golan Heights is more economical than ideological. The place is incredibly, incredibly interesting and utterly gorgeous and I could easily write you an email about the Golan that makes this one look like a Post-It note, so I'll stop here.

And now for some epic pictures from our epic journey:

From this vantage point near the dormant ski resort, you can see the lands of Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.

Trudging amongst the ruins of one of the hundreds of Syrian villages razed in a two month period following Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights.

Our homeboy Omar poses on the hood of a Syrian tank featured in a memorial park for Israeli soldiers killed in the wars of '67 and '73; this place is called the "Valley of Tears." Not far away from the tank are speakers with button-activated recordings which regale the listener of Israeli heroics during the 1973 war, replete with majestic background music.

Meanwhile, no more than a hundred meters in the distance an abandoned Israeli tank looks sullen and confused as to why the Syrian tank gets to be placed at the Israeli memorial.

Majdal Shams: undoubtedly the jewel in the crown of the Golan's Druze villages and perhaps the coolest place in the Middle East. Have you ever eaten a crepe with labaneh inside? You haven't lived until you've tried it!

Just one of the many riveting landscapes you'll encounter along the Golan's roads, which may be the closest you can get to the white-knuckled fantasies embodied in car commercials. That is, you get curvy, mountainside roads with a lushly romantic environmental backdrop and little to no police presence.

A bullet-riddled, deserted mosque just outside the ruins of the aforementioned town.

The inside of the mosque was covered in graffiti of all political stripes, with plenty of bizarre apolitical stuff to boot.

Thanks to the two aforementioned beautiful women for these pictures, and for some interesting shots of our Syrian friend Nihad's mine-riddled backyard, visit his Flickr page.

Playing Teacher in Al-Am'ari

2009-07-22T12:44:00.001-04:00

As I mentioned before, my lower output as of late can be attributed partly to my decision to spend two weeks teaching English to boys living in the Al-Am'ari refugee camp in southeast Ramallah. I'm nearing the end of week one, so I'll give you my impressions and nuggets of insight that I've gained thus far.

A refugee camp in Palestine is the equivalent of what is called the "ghetto" in American cities. The camps are often regarded as the "bad" areas of town by the more affluent, middle-class Palestinians. Case in point: when my ex-roommate was stuck at an impromptu Israeli road blockade, he called me and asked me to teach his English class—which was to start in 20 minutes. Since I was obviously unprepared for the day's lesson, I mostly improvised with the Palestinian teens in the class. One of my time-killers was to ask them for directions—in English!—to the Al Am'ari camp, as I was to start teaching there soon. Many of the kids shook their heads and told me I did not want to go there. "They are bad people, not like us, not like people from Ramallah," one of the boys said.

Class identity often supersedes religious, ethnic, and even family identity. One only has to listen to the middle-class white man, insistent about his racial tolerance, talking about the difference between "good" and "bad" black people. When you dig a little deeper, invariably the "good" ones are the ones have clawed into the ranks of the middle class, the ones who learned to pay their mortgage and shun welfare checks like responsible adults.

The refugee camps, with their politically-tinged squalor, are the perfect breeding ground for ideas of violent struggle against Israel and "martyrdom.” Of course there is a huge amount of resentment towards Israel from all Palestinians, but it is especially pronounced among those living in the camps, quixotically hoping to return to the homes that the Israelis kicked them out of in the momentous wars of 1948 and 1967. Another more detailed, probing post on this matter is forthcoming, so I'll leave it at that for now. I mention this because some of the favorite activities of these little ones (fourth and fifth graders) is to construct surprisingly sophisticated pistols out of notebook paper, contorting rubber bands into the shape of the Palestinian flag, or to doodle renditions of the ubiquitous “Hanthala.”

This is the only job I've ever had in which my lack of a skill has been integral to my hiring. My bosses liked that I couldn't speak any Arabic. With no Arabic skills, I could give the children the total “immersion” which is often cited as the key to really learning a language. Meanwhile, my co-instructor (technically, she's a volunteer) is an amazing 17 year-old Palestinian girl who speaks five languages, including Urdu and Russian. She also keeps the class in line—I'm a terrible disciplinarian.

Yet I'm getting paid, and she's not!

One of the best things about this job is the location: the commute is on a slight downhill that remains virtually constant from the Minarah at the center of the city. So I hop on my skateboard and coast and weave through traffic—which is a pretty huge rush, even at 7:15am—then break off to a lesser road and ride the rest of the way to the camp. I'm guessing the skateboard gives me an extra twenty minutes of sleep in the morning, which is crucial considering my average bedtime as of late hovers somewhere around 1:30am. When the school day is over I usually hitch a ride with my co-workers back to the city center.

I don't think I'm fit to teach kids this young. I lack that goofball affability and giant heart that works so well with these kids. And to be honest, I don't get excited about teaching basic concepts – “What is this?” [pointing to a crude illustration of an apple]—which is all these kids really understand at this point. Their English vocabulary probably consists of over a hundred words, but they are generally incapable of forming sentences with them. Whenever I work with kids, I deal with this giant, crippling guilt complex that bludgeons me mercilessly for not being the teacher that these kids deserve. Teaching truly is one of the most difficult jobs on earth and I can say without hesitation that the vast majority of them are not paid nearly enough.

Despite my perceived inferiority, I definitely scored some massive cool points with the kids due to my skateboard and my donation of the beloved basketball that I had become so familiar with over the last month. I yielded to the swarm of hands when I got out the skateboard, and the kids played with it for a couple days until one of the little ones skinned his wrist absolutely raw and I knew that it should stay in the teacher's room. The basketball games have been ridiculous free-for-alls in which the "big kids" consisting of me and a few male volunteers beat back a horde of twenty or more boys all screaming the name of whoever has the ball. Fitting to the location, only one of the hoops on the court is functional and has no trace of a net.

The kids—like pretty much all Palestinian youth—have an unquenchable curious thirst for the details of my life and barrage me with questions about everything from my marital status to if I like wrestling to if I love Palestine. I can tell that they want to teach me Arabic, seeing as they continue to speak it to me knowing full well that I cannot speak it. Just today a group of them was trying to get me to recite a Muslim prayer which, if completed, essentially amounts to a conversion to Islam.

Speaking of Islam, I'd guess that about 60% of the kids in class have a name that is—or is derived from—that of the prophet Mohammed. I have four Mohammeds, four Ahmeds, one Ahmad, one Hammed, one Mahmoud, one Allah, etc. etc. If I've forgotten their name, I'll just spit out "Mohammed" and usually the child in question turns his eyes in my direction. Could you imagine if similar naming customs revolving around Jesus existed in America?

Last but definitely not least, the classes are separated by sex: there are three girls classes and two boys classes. This is a necessary concession to the conservative social culture predominant in the poorer areas of Palestine.

Tomorrow is our field trip to the swimming pool in Bir Zeit. I wonder if the boys and girls will be separated there too. To be honest, I'm secretly hoping for that: not to toot my own horn, but I'm not in the mood to deal with the adoring shrieks of dozens of middle school girls.

Encountering Shabaab in the City of Kanafeh and Martyrs

2009-07-19T06:57:00.001-04:00

This weekend I—along with tens of thousands of other people – took a bus to Nablus to attend a street festival surrounding the setting of a new world record: the unveiling of the largest kanafeh ever made.

What is kanafeh? Only the best dessert ever invented. It’s a pastry that is essentially made of flour, sugar, and cheese and cooked in giant pans over huge coil burners. It's not for everybody—the haters, as I call them, think that it is much too rich; they say it is "like eating pure sugar." But fans of kanafeh are not shy about expressing their fierce love of the golden, mouthwatering, multi-textured, succulent dessert. Are you listening, American entrepreneurs? Open a kanafeh shop in your neighborhood and make a fortune—I guarantee it!

Arriving an hour after the official start of the festivities, I learned that the 1.5 tons of kanafeh were wolfed down within a matter of minutes in an anarchic free-for-all; some people even vaulted themselves into the tray and mushed their feet around in the stuff. I'm not sure if this was out of some chaos-induced primal instinct or just the rumor that there was a set of keys to a brand new car submerged somewhere along the 75 meter long runway set up to house the record-setting pastry.

After hearing of the totally brutal and unceremonious consumption of the kanafeh, we (a crew including myself, my British ex-roommate, two Americans, and a Swiss) were less disappointed that we had missed the event. We headed over to one of the most famous kanafeh places in Nablus, where a sizable crowd was clustered around a pan of kanafeh, which has the socially magnetic power similar in scope to a keg at any college party in America. Which reminds me to tell you that alcohol is not sold in Nablus, so if you absolutely need to drink there, make sure you bring the booze in from outside and drink it inside–with the curtains closed! I cannot overstate the importance of that last part. If there were two words I could use to describe Palestinian social culture, they would be: "People talk."

After trying to savor our squares of kanafeh the best we could, and after talking to two indefatigably curious students from Al-Najah university for what seemed like forever, our group headed towards the biggest park in Nablus to smoke argeela and chill out for a bit, given the stress of pushing through crowds for the past hour. Although our presence as foreigners in Nablus had already turned a few heads in the streets, it did little to prepare us for what happened at the park.

Within a minute of entering the park and strolling up to the table of argeela vendors, we were surrounded by at least twenty Palestinian teenagers all clamoring to have their picture taken with us. One boy in the crowd was wielding a clunky disposable camera coated in some sort of thick waterproof plastic shell; he pointed and shot as I put my arm around two, three, four of the shabaab (Arabic for "youth" which often used when addressing a group of boys).

At first the experience was a bit flattering. Here was our 15 minutes of fame! We were getting our hands shaken and our pictures taken; we were like a rare celebrity sighting to these kids who were utterly bubbling over with enthusiasm. Curiously enough, the park seemed to be filled only with shabaab—no females and very few older men. But then again, perhaps my perception is such because my line of sight was completely blocked by a wall of teenage boys.

When we sat down in the grass to smoke, and as our 15 minutes became 30, then 45, and as the shabaab swelled to probably over 60 boys, the experience became much less charming. While we sat on the ground and passed around the argeela hose, we were encircled by a towering crowd of gelled-up, peppy Palestinian teenagers with ridiculously tacky belt buckles; they stared at us like we were completely nude. They all were chattering, shouting, pressing in on our backs—on the left, a guy played us a guitar riff (someone mentioned that it was a cover of Akon) while on the right, some guy unfurled his pet snake to show off. The testosterone in the air was nauseating.

The overdose of attention was making us feel more stalked than loved at this point. Finally, we decided to take the touchy step of getting park security to tell the shabaab to scatter and leave us alone. When the walkie-talkied guard showed up to tell off the shabaab, it was obvious that it was in response to our own request, and I sensed that some of these stares of adulation and wonder in our direction had morphed into something more like confusion and scorn. Unfortunate and tragic, yes, but at least the crush of bodies was gone and we could chill in relative peace.

Yet no later than a half hour later, the shabaab had somehow managed to surround us again and they seemed louder and closer than ever. A dose of fear crept into me, wondering what this keyed-up crowd of boys that had us utterly surrounded would do now that they knew we wanted them gone. I offered one of them a grape and he took it unsmilingly and crunched on it in such a way that the juice squirted onto my face. Probably a coincidence, but a storyteller cannot resist making such connections. I was starting to feel very uncomfortable amongst these Palestinian Guidos—they could not be described as hostile, but I'm not sure they could be described as friendly at this point either. Finally, when a pebble from God-knows-where landed with a clang on the ashtray of the argeela, we made an exit from the crowd not unlike beleaguered politicians pushing through a mass of paparazzi and press.

Special Guest Blog: My Mother on Airport Drama, "Moo-Moos," and More

2009-07-16T21:14:00.001-04:00

My apologies for the long delay in material for those of you ravenously hungry for my writings from the Holy Land. Most of the dearth can be attributed to two major recent events: my eviction from my charming Ramallah flat and my decision to spend the next two weeks teaching English to Palestinian boys from Al Am'ari refugee camp in Ramallah. A post on at least one of these developments will be forthcoming, and it will likely be the one less interesting to you gossip hounds out there. But hey, you may just get lucky...

I should also mention that it is difficult to write regularly, cleanly, and at length when my time here in this incredible place with incredible people is limited; my first priority is personal experience, then in a close second, is to spend time writing thoughtfully about such experiences. So ironically, I have more to write about than ever but have little time to do so.

Now that that's out of the way, I'd like for you to remember that recently my mom and brother flew halfway across the world to visit me out here. I gave a sampling of my brother's magnificient pictures from the trip, but the familial contributions to my blog are not over yet! Below is my dear, sweet mother's account of her trip to Israel and Palestine, a piece which I've been anxiously anticipating for days. Because of the fact that most of the drama of her trip revolved around the flights to and from here (as is usually the case with standby travelers), the content reflects this accordingly.

I love you Mom!

I am been planning on visiting my son in Ramallah for several months now and narrowed down the dates to the 4th of July weekend, (as there normally isn’t much business during this weekend & of course I didn’t want to miss a lot of work) My youngest son decided it was also be fun to go. After several days of delays in travel we were finally on our way on Friday July 3rd. I was flying from Orlando and Dan from Tampa, where we would meet in LGA, then take a cab to JFK onward to Tel-Aviv.

Since this was my first time in many, many years traveling on a standby pass. that I was so stressed out about the trip and making the flight that when I went to the kiosk to print my boarding pass I left my purse with all of my money, passport, etc in it. I strolled up to security and when I reached to grab my purse, panic struck!!! It was gone, I then raced back to where I had pulled my boarding pass and hastily asked the young gentlemen, he then said” I already turned it in” I then found the nice “red coat” Delta man who kindly handed it back to me. The trip could of ended right there, as luck was on my side I retrieved my purse back and sat in first class all the way to LGA.

After meeting my son and taking one of the many hundreds of cabs in LGA to the JFK airport we both were calm that everything was going our way. Life was good and we were heading out of the country by evening. After a casual lunch and a few drinks, we headed toward the boarding area a few hrs prior to the flight departing. The flight had plenty of seats to accommodate all standbys. We were getting our bags ready and watching the standby board for our names with 15 min prior to departure. Our names were never cleared, I said to myself, this can’t be happening. They shut the doors and said “that’s it” due to weight and balance, the standbys will not make this flight. We were told that the cargo was a #1 priority and that we were left behind. I walked up to the gate agent and said “ I only weigh 118 lbs, I am sure that won’t affect the weight of a huge jet, would it???? Then Dan and I started to think about that movie, “Final Destination” where the kids got off the plane and then saw it blow up mid-air. Maybe there was a reason we weren’t supposed to make this flight. People started to leave the gate areas making alternative plans, (ours was possibly to find a hotel by the Hudson river and spend the weekend watching the fireworks) Then out of the blue there was an announcement, “All standbys come by to gate 16. People were running huffing and puffing to get back to the gate. Oh no, this was a false alarm, we were not getting on. The pilot was no, yet the plane was still at the gate. What the heck was going on? Is this some kind of trick? Are we on candid camera?? Yes, passengers were stupid enough to leave again and yes once again everyone was called back to gate 16. This was like a 3 ring circus with no clowns. Emotions were now running wild, one man had a breathing machine. We were lucky someone didn’t have a heart attack. 1 ½ hrs later, believe it or not, all standbys were boarded and yes in business class. From champagne to your own personal movies, a luscious meal, and a reclining chair almost like a bed, life couldn’t be better. I then asked myself, why did I give up this type of travel, oh yeah, I believe it was because I was no longer married to an airline employee.
12 hrs later we arrived in Tel-Aviv. I felt rested and ready to go. A nice gentlemen retrieved my carryon bag from overhead and Dan and I were on our long walk to customs. Upon arriving at customs, yes you guessed it, I was missing something else. I asked Dan, “where is my laptop” He answered probably in the plane. I couldn’t believe it, I just got that laptop about a month ago and now it was gone. We turned around and raced back. Dan decided he was going to be the hero and ran down the winding hallways to go back to the gate. After about 10 min, he came back, empty handed. I was furious and I said I would get it myself. I started running thru an airport I had no idea of where I was going. Jetlag or just plain old PMS set in and I was lost, confused, and crying. A older man with a cart told me to hop in and we picked up Dan. He took us to the front of the customs line for crewmembers and then to lost and found. We found my laptop. I then gave this Israeli a big hug. My first experience in Israel was a good one. We were met by my eldest son, Jeff, and went on our way.
During my trip here, we visited Tel-Aviv, (of course the Mediterranean Sea) a few night spots, Jerusalem, Nablus(where our goal was to see the cows head with the sunglasses on) I failed to tell you that because of the strict dress codes for woman in the Palestine territories I was forced to wear a moo-moo dress for several days& a shawl over my arms. This dress could have been worn if I was 9 months pregnant. Think about this ladies, if you wore a turbo on your head, you never have to fix your hair. I still didn’t think was a good enough reason and by my final day I said enough is enough, I am not wearing that stupid dress. I was wearing shorts and a normal shirt. I didn’t care if I was arrested. We were off to the Dead Sea. Everyone kept saying, “its too hot to go there” I told my boys, we WILL GO there and you will like it. I don’t care if you are hot, so we went and had a great time.
I had planned on staying one more day, however while the boys were out playing basketball, I received a message on the computer from my ex-husband (by the way we are on good terms and get along) so I knew he was thinking of my best interests & told me that the flight that I had planned on leaving tomorrow night was full and it may be days before I were to get home. This can’t be, I need to get back to work. I can’t be stuck somewhere where I can’t wear shorts and tank tops. It was less than 4 hrs to flight time and we were on the Palestine territory. Getting a cab and across this territory to the Israeli territory in that amount of time and arriving in time for an international flight was told to me by one of his roommates as impossible. Well then I thought impossible means “I CAN DO IT” Another roommate arrived home and I asked him if there was any way of making this. He made some calls and was able to come up with a friend who was a cabdriver that had Israeli plates, however could come to Palestine, pick me up and take me the back roads to avoid numerous checkpoints getting me across the border to the Israeli side on to Tel-Aviv. He didn’t arrive until 845pm and I was supposed to be at the airport at 930pm. My sons friend said he only spoke Hebrew and Arabic, oh boy am I in trouble, Believe it or not, when I got in he spoke very good English and we had a nice conversation. He now admitted he had only taken this road once before, in the daylight. That should have been my first clue. After numerous wrong turns and asking in Arabic directions to the airport, I thought I may never make it to the airport. These roads were dark and winding. I could have been dumped off the side and my body could of never been found. However that thought was only in my mind for a minute. I just met this man, however I trusted him with my life. Our first checkpoint, we breezed on thru. Now it was time to go thru our final checkpoint into the airport. My Arab cab driver was smart. He put a CD on of Hebrew music and we whizzed thru. In my opinion he looked more Jewish than Arab. I arrived at the airport with just minutes to spare. I was so thankful that I could of kissed him, a hug would have to do. All of the people that I had met were so nice on my trip.
After numerous checkpoints at the Tel-Aviv airport and getting drilled on what I had done in the past 4 days I was ready to get into the USA. Yes, I flew back on business class also, met a few new friends on board and then decided this was the only way to travel internationally. Thanks to my dear ex husband for this trip. I enjoyed my short stay aboard, however it is always nice to get back home.

The Differences Between Here and There, Pt. 1

2009-07-13T04:31:00.001-04:00

Naturally, most of my blog postings have focused on the more exciting events that have punctuated my time here. But now I think I should spend a little time providing some more details on the small...uh, details that serve to remind me that I'm in a foreign country. Since I've spent more time in Palestine than in Israel, the focus will probably be weighted accordingly.

- In both Israel and Palestine, for some reason flushing toilet paper is taboo—the pipes here are a bit pickier, I suppose—so most bathroom trash cans wisely have lids on them. One particularly touching memory from my Ramallah flat: gaggingly prodding through the beastly stench of the bathroom wastebasket, looking for a relatively clean piece of toilet paper to use after realizing too late that we were out of it.

Once you do flush down your business, the toilet explodes with a torrent of sound and water that puts our timid low-flow American toilets to shame. Finally, after leaving the commode refreshed (or disappointed?), you should remember to turn off the light switch which is invariably located outside of the bathroom.

- While driving in Israel, you'll notice that a yellow traffic light precedes both red and green lights. In other words, start your engines...
As far as Palestine goes, there are not many traffic lights to be seen; speed bumps are the traffic control measure of choice. There is a disorder that is almost delightful on the streets of Ramallah—although the Palestinian Authority employs traffic cops, these beret-wearing officers don't stop the bustling crowd from spilling out onto the streets and walking nonchalantly through busy intersections, a skill which I picked up rather quickly. Palestinian drivers are experts in the nuanced language of the horn, communicating a surprisingly diverse spectrum of feelings and desires just through a few well-timed taps.

-Self-explanatory...

- In Ramallah it is not uncommon to see young boys with arms around each other's waists or shoulders, walking down the street together in quasi-embrace. As the boys grow up and become men, this inter-male affection gradually evolves to an exchange of kisses on the cheek. The sort of skittish homophobia that pervades American boyhood is not present here, but make no mistake: it's not easy to be gay in a predominantly Muslim society. (Though if you were an openly gay Palestinian, unquestionably the best place to be in Palestine would be Ramallah. Here the stark social edges of Islamic culture have been softened by the large—and profitable—international presence in the city.)

- And who could forget about the ubiquitous presence of automatic weapons? Almost invariably they are wielded by soldiers in both territories, although you'll see many more AKs on an average day in Jerusalem than in Ramallah. I've only been disturbed by them on the rare occasion that I've seen them wielded in the hands of people wearing street clothes.

- In Tel Aviv, porno is practically given out for free, while it is nowhere to be found in Palestine. (Ok, so I haven't been looking, but I'm fairly certain that the entrepreneurial Palestinian that set up a porno shop would be jailed—and that's if he was lucky. And in the "Hamastan" of Gaza, well, that's a pretty good way to commit suicide.) True, there is a place called "True Love" right next door, but its warmly-colored shelves are filled with corny Valentines and stuffed animals, not freakishly large dildos painted with stars and stripes.

- In America, a hookah is usually shared among two or more people. Here, Palestinians can be found sitting around a table each nursing their own. At first I thought this was a strange anomaly in the pattern of sharing that I had noticed among Palestinians, but now I get the feeling that these sessions last for hours at a time, necessitating the copious amounts of argeela smoke.

to be continued....

Horseplay and Hoarding at the Dead Sea

2009-07-10T09:13:00.001-04:00

As promised, here is an account of my trip to the Dead Sea.

I had already planned on going, but saved the trip until my mom and brother got here, especially because Mom had reiterated, more times than I can count, her view that this visit was her #1 priority on her short trip.

In some aspects of my life I am an insufferable micromanager and a perfectionist, while in others the utter lack of planning I do for large events is quite staggering. The latter was the case in coming to the Dead Sea, where I had taken some offhand knowledge from a friend somewhere along the lines of "You can go through Jericho" and went from there. It was easy enough finding a service bus to Jericho, but once there I was just as clueless as your average foreigner at Disney World. Outfitted in sandals, khakis and sunglasses and speaking horrid Arabic, I found myself no different than the stereotypical tourist, in the pathetic scenario of getting out Mom's travel guidebook (with ISRAEL emblazoned across the top, I made the effort to make this title disappear as quickly as possible when I pulled it out of the bag) and pointing to the Dead Sea on the map. A crowd of young Arab men had gathered around us at this point, all chattering, until who must have been the Don of the taxi mafia broke into the circle to speak with us in English.

The arrangement was that we would give him the round trip fare up front and that we would call him at one of the two phones holstered to his belt once we wanted to be picked up. In any other place that kind of scheme would have had my inner voices shouting "RIP OFF!" and "SCAM!" at a deafening tone, but Palestinians in general had earned my trust up to this point so we (OK, who am I kidding, my Mom) forked over 120 shekels and hopped in the taxi, which was driven by a younger Palestinian man, who must have been one of the Don's underlings.

Since I had made no plans whatsoever as to where exactly on the Dead Sea we would go, I had to try and communicate to this taxi driver that we wanted a place with showers and food and chairs. Unfortunately, the words "shower, hotel, restaurant" didn't do much, so before long he handed me a cell phone and on the other end was a woman's voice, speaking an American-educated English to me. Through this middlewoman the driver had enough information to drop us off at an aptly named "TOURIST RESORT," to which I was admittedly happy to see after being so shamefully unable to communicate.

Despite the fact that the resort was in Palestinian territory (per 1967 borders), we were greeted by proudly flapping flags of every nation except for Palestine. Most prominently displayed was the flag of Israel: we were in what was essentially an Israeli outpost in Palestinian territory. How can the Palestinians develop their economy, as Mr. Netanyahu purportedly wants, without having control of their own tourist attractions? Yet just as the Palestinian vendor has no qualms about selling Israeli produce, so did the taxi driver have no problem taking us to this Israeli outpost. When you are trying to make enough money to feed your family, there's not much room for politics.

I'm including irrelevant details for the sake of chronology, so I'll fast forward to the beach itself. Actually I should call it the shore–“beach” is too generous of a word, since it evokes feelings of comfort and softness. The shore of the Dead Sea is composed of hardened dark sand that scorches the unsandaled foot mercilessly. Not to mention the sharp, cruel little rocks cemented into this sand that make the ensuing dash to the water a mild form of torture.

But once in the water, your feet sink into a marvelous slippery mud that has the texture of thick taffy, though much slicker. My brother and I had no qualms in declaring it "the best mud on earth" after only a couple minutes of kneading it between our fingers in a hypnotic trance.

We recalled Mom reciting from her guidebook that the mud was good for the skin, and sure enough, some of the first tourists we encountered on the shore were slathered in the stuff. Once we felt the magnificent mud between our fingers, we followed suit. My brother and I rubbed each other's face and back so that we didn't deprive any patch of skin from this once-in-a-lifetime pampering (In case you were wondering, we're both straight.) Like a good brother, I dropped some mud down the back of his shorts, and he—in a totally disproportionate retaliation—stuffed some in my ear after innocently pretending that he wanted to get a spot that I had missed on my face. Putting my own finger in my ear only pushed the wad of mud perilously closer to my eardrum and before long I was in a panic, on my hands and knees trying to knock the mud loose from my skull and barking orders at my Mom and brother to find a sharp object for me to pry this Godforsaken thing out of my ear.

After it was all over we had a good laugh about it.

As expected, once in the water—which was very warm—we were afloat. I made the mistake of wetting my hair in it, which allowed the salt-laden water to trickle into my eye. This made me half-blind for about thirty minutes. Getting the water on your lips isn't too terrible; it numbs them a bit and puts a strange (I won't go as far as the guidebook’s assessment of "foul") taste on the lips. Luckily I was spared the experience of getting it in the nose, which my brother said was the worst.

The last hour or so was spent wallowing in the above quicksand/mud pit, making mud crafts, slathering ourselves in layers of the stuff, and trying to squint our eyes enough to convince ourselves that the half-submerged sibling was really some wretched-looking amputee. At this point the hoarding instinct had kicked in, and my brother and I started scooping globs of the metallic miracle mud into empty water bottles we had found strewn about the shore.

What else? I recall hearing my mom trying to salvage a conversation with some Palestinian men by asking them about Michael Jackson. I remember the eerily colorless gift shop lined with every sort of cream and makeup known to man, all with some trace amount of the Dead Sea in it. I remember that the signs were in four languages: Hebrew, Arabic, English, and Russian. And finally, I remember that the return taxi worked out just as planned.

I should also say that my inner ear is permanently stained grey. Thanks, bro.

A Selection of Stunning, Scintillating Shots Sizzling With Significance

2009-07-08T05:08:00.000-04:00

It seems like only yesterday that I had the surreal experience of meeting my mom and brother in the metallic expanse of Ben Gurion Airport. Now, my mom is safely back in the U.S. and a few hours ago I bade farewell to my 19-year old brother, Dan, at the Jerusalem central bus station as he left for that very same airport. How the time flies.

With the help of a trusty Canon and a natural photographer's eye, Dan left behind some amazing pictures, a small selection of which I've included below for your viewing pleasure. The locales pictured are the Old City, Tel Aviv, the Dead Sea, Ramallah, and Nablus - in no particular order. (Can you guess which are from where?)

My young and talented sibling is currently looking for work, so if you know anyone in the continental U.S. (no joke - as the son of an airline employee, my brother flies for free) who is interested in the service of an up-and-coming photographer, have them email danbgore@gmail.com.

Although most of my time spent with family was spent showing them places that I was already semi-familiar with, I did get to experience the Dead Sea for the first time. A post on this is most likely forthcoming...

Breaking the Silence South of Hebron

2009-07-07T14:12:00.002-04:00

Note: I apologize to my legions of fans for the delay in material; my mom and brother flew out to visit me on Friday evening and I've been preoccupied with showing them the Holy Land since then.

A few days ago some friends and I took a tour of the hills south of the city of Hebron in the West Bank. The tour was given by Breaking the Silence, a group of former Israeli soldiers who speak about the conscienceless things that they did to Palestinians in the name of “security” during their time in the military. I suspect that many of them view this project as some sort of repentance for their sins, and I also suspect that to some of them, it will never be enough.

As our bus plowed southward from Jerusalem, the scenery was of secondary importance. What held my interest were the anecdotes of our two ex-soldier tour guides, who shared priceless insights into a military occupation that I had only heard about from the Palestinian side. The former soldiers were interesting specimens, one resembling a Brooklyn hipster, the other a dreadlocked hippie.

Before I go any further, I should mention that the military is one of Israel’s most revered institutions. If you are an Israeli citizen, military service is compulsory: three years for a man, two for a woman. Refuseniks are pretty rare in Israel. I knew an Israeli girl back in college that boasted that not one of her dozen or so cousins had less than a fantastic, life-changing time in the army. It’s easy to imagine why: the camaraderie forged in the classless ranks, the heft of a weapon at the ready, the sense of importance reinforced by friends and family (“Don’t worry about it soldier, it’s on me.”), and most of all, the very little actual danger that they face. The Israeli Defense Forces, wielding such disproportionate power in relation to the Palestinians, is rarely on defense. Thus they can have their cake and eat it too, basking in the glory of the armed service without enduring the grueling hell of actual war.* Thus, it is no surprise when Hippie says over the bus intercom that to most Israelis, serving in the army seems “like some computer game.”

In addition to a general sense of adulation for the army among the Israeli public, there was the chest-pounding assuredness and the pep rallies within the army itself that made the soldiers feel not only better, but unflinchingly right, even when protecting illegal Israeli settlements or torturing Palestinian prisoners. Hippie recalled his commander saying that “There is no better feeling that killing a terrorist,” then subsequently passing out photos of “terrorists” taken right after they had been killed by the IDF. “We were taught that all Palestinians were our enemies,” he said.

Brooklyn pointed out a small Israeli military outpost as we climbed a hilltop. As we passed, he mentioned that this outpost – “Hilltop 840” – only requires six soldiers to adequately man it. Yet when he served there, he did so with seventy-nine other men. Way overstaffed and consequently, bored out of their minds, they “practiced” on the locals by tying up, holding, and barging in on people who were unfortunate enough to be Palestinians living in Hebron. Even more unfortunate were the Palestinians that happened to live near Israeli settlements. No matter what the circumstances, “we have this mindset that wherever Jews are, we should protect them,” Brooklyn said.

Hippie then reclaimed the mic and told a story about his division’s hunt for a man wanted for the murder for three Israeli settlers. They knew where the man lived, but every time they arrived at the house, he was nowhere to be found and his family said they didn’t know where he was. While on patrol one night, Hippie saw that the wanted man’s house was abuzz with activity. The fugitive’s family – amidst a cluster of Israeli soldiers – was moving all of their belongings outside. He found that his fellow soldiers had decided to “punish” the family for their lack of cooperation by forcing them to clear out their house entirely, then put all their belongings back in, just as misbehaving soldiers had been forced to do with their foot lockers in boot camp.

Another little-known cruelty of the Occupation is the restriction of Palestinian movement. Hippie had no shortage of examples here:

-Palestinians were stopped on the road and questioned at length; sometimes their licenses were confiscated to be “examined” and “returned later.” The newly unlicensed Palestinian is back on the road when he is stopped by another IDF soldier asking for a license. The Palestinian describes in detail the soldier who confiscated his license, but to no avail – he is fined, or…

-…the IDF soldier reaches under the hood and takes the spark plug out of the car so that its Palestinian owner cannot start it. Later, when the Israeli army is feeling generous, the Palestinian is presented with a large bag filled with scores of electric fuses. “Here, you can have it back,” the soldier says. The Palestinian does not even know which one is for his car.

- A Palestinian farmer is stopped by an Israeli patrol. It seems that he has already been warned about driving on this road (since he must get to his crops, however, he has no choice). The IDF soldier orders him to turn the car off and takes the keys. The car is then left on the side of the road, perhaps to be used later as an improvised blockade.

When talking about Israel and Palestine to the uninitiated, or the “other side,” it’s common for Palestinian supporters to brandish their critiques garnered from leftist academics, to play them as their aces. Yet no matter the soundness of the scholarship of fellows like Finkelstein and Chomsky, they are not over there in the thick of things; they are easily dismissed as ideological, dogmatic academics disconnected from the events on the ground, just as the left dismisses fellows like Alan Dershowitz. Yet when armed with testimonies from Israeli soldiers—people who have been there, on the other side—the argument to end the Occupation becomes infinitely stronger. With this said, I feel that Breaking the Silence is one of the most important assets that the pro-Palestinian movement can utilize to work towards an end to the Occupation. I highly recommend a visit to their website, www.shovrimshtika.org, and taking a look at soldiers’ testimonies. If you’re actually over in Israel or Palestine, try and wriggle your way into one of their tours. (Even if you’re told that the tour is full, as my friends and I were, show up anyway, as there are bound to be no-shows.)

*An exception to the general rule of Israel’s military dominance: the country's ground incursion into Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Israeli soldiers suffered relatively heavy losses against an intelligent and wily Hezbollah resistance.

Hope and Misery in Jenin

2009-07-04T11:00:00.001-04:00

With two Americans and a Canadian in tow, out of Ramallah and off to Jenin to I went for another Sunday excursion. We were going to see the play "Fragments of Palestine" at the Freedom Theatre, an intriguing Palestinian cultural landmark located right on the edge of the Jenin refugee camp. As I mentioned before in the tail end of my post about Sebastia, the camp in Jenin was host to an onslaught of bulldozing by the Israeli army in 2002, which flattened a staggering amount of the camp, leaving thousands homeless.

After two hours of cramped, hot bus rides I'll say that the most memorable sight along the way was a cow's head ripped in half at the jaw, the top half being hung from a hook by its nose so that the roof of the cow's mouth and its molars were facing the street, facing our bus. This was no anomaly: one, two, three equally freakish half cow-heads adorned the porches of the markets in the village preceding Jenin. My roommate had told me earlier that this is done by the butchers to show that their meat is fresh.

When we arrived, we were told that the director of the play had some visa issues with the "Is-rah-ay-lees" (the proper Palestinian pronunciation) and the play had been postponed until later next month. We should have called the theatre beforehand. But, keeping with high standards of Palestinian hospitality, a young man named Mustafa invited us inside the main office and gave us some history of the theatre. For the sake of length, and because the Freedom Theatre has its own web site, I won't go into too much detail. I will say that the roots of the theatre lie in a program started by an Israeli Jew named Arna Mer Khamis, who recruited scruffy boys from the Jenin refugee camp to act in plays that she directed in the early 90s. However, she died of cancer in 1995 and the program died with it, leaving the young actors with nothing but anger and deprivation once again. In 2004, the Washington Post published a tragic story on how these rising stars, suddenly without the direction of Khamis, became fighters and "martyrs" during the Second Intifada.

Unsurprisingly, the Freedom Theatre is heavily funded by European donors (including that extra-special friend of Palestine, Sweden). There were comfortable couches, a large flat-screen TV, a computer lab...and a prominent portrait of Che Guevara in the lobby. "A hero to the Freedom Theatre?" I asked. "A hero to everybody," replied Mustafa, smiling. Mustafa is an openly liberal Palestinian; his difference is somewhat evident by his afroed hair and laid-back demeanor. As he smoked a cigarette he talked about his desire to push the Jenin community gradually towards more progressive stances on social issues, which would mean less sexual segregation and more liberties for women, among other things. But the process is slow, and in order to avoid appearing like a holier-than-thou foreign entity, the Theatre still operates in a somewhat conservative fashion. For instance, there are specific days for male practice and specific days for female practice. "We want to get on their level and bring them up with us," he said.

He showed us a brief film about the Theatre, in which there was a compelling bit in which Palestinian girls talked about their lives with surprising candor. "We go from our father's home to our husband's kitchen," said a teenager, to a chorus of agreement from her girlfriends. The girls complained about being cooped up indoors, having their dreams stifled—indeed, if you ever come to a Palestinian city, you'll notice that perhaps 80% of the kids walking the street are boys.

Mustafa led us into a snazzy editing suite and showed us a film made by some of his young Palestinian pupils. Each of the filmmakers had a father that was physically disabled; the effect of this on their relationship with the father was the focus of the film. One father had been beaten so badly that he had been reduced mentally to the level of a five year-old, while another had a bullet permanently lodged in the top of his skull.

After the tour of the theatre was over, Mustafa agreed to give us another tour: this time, of the Jenin refugee camp. Oh look! Here come pictures to take some weight off of the beleaguered writer...

Off we go! If I can speak like an asshole for a moment: doesn't this shot totally look romantic in a desolate, "post-civ" kinda way?

Criticize the UN all you want – they’re often the only international organization to be seen in these rougher parts of the world.

One of the many interesting murals scattered about the town. This shot features the oft-seen symbol of “Hanthala,” the ragged boy with his back to the audience, empty hands crossed behind his back. This simple illustration has come to signify the plight of the millions of Palestinian refugees hoping to return to their homes that they left, or were forced out of, due the conflicts in 1948 and 1967.

A tombstone dedicated to those who died in the Israeli bulldozing bonanza of 2002.

A tattered banner outside of the graveyard. Mustafa tells me Saddam Hussein is a hero to the people of Jenin. Why? Saddam doled out money to the families who had their homes destroyed, as well as the families of "martyrs." Curiously, the manner in which these people became martyrs earned different sums from Saddam. From the UK Telegra ph: "Payments are on a strict scale: £350 for a wound, £650 for disablement, £6,500 for death as a "martyr" and £17,000 for a suicide bomber."

A poster depicting one of the martyrs. Mustafa tells me that the posters are placed on the outside of the home in which the martyr's family lives. In Nablus, the especially wealthy martyr's families can pay to have the poster encased in glass and lit throughout the night.

Walking through the narrow, labyrinthine "streets" of the camp. Mustafa says that the Israeli soldiers were scared shitless in these tense, narrow, unknown little alleyways during the Intifada. I'm even a bit nervous at this point; the Palestinians here are a bit less welcoming than those in Ramallah.

Walking up the wide avenue (courtesy of the Israelis; they built it to make it easier for their tanks to traverse the area) we came across this energetic group of rowdy boys. Seeing the camera in my hands, they clamored to be both behind and in front of the lens. They looked at the digital previews of the shots they just took, never to see them again...

Best of all, they let us try out their slingshot! And you thought Palestinian boys merely threw stones.

Sure, it's cute when a ten year old points a fake gun at you, but when an eighteen year old does it without smiling, then puts the said gun to his head, its more than a little disturbing. At that moment I was especially thankful that we had Mustafa with us.

Note: Many of the Freedom Theatre's excellent films can be seen on their YouTube page.

Thanks to linguistic extraordinaire Sarah Grossblatt and Fusha aficionado Paul Notar for these photos. I had taken some of my own, but they're currently trapped in my comatose laptop.

Naomi Klein Comes to Ramallah

2009-07-02T01:25:00.001-04:00

Last week the air was abuzz with talk of a leftist celebrity coming to Palestine. Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, was coming to Ramallah to speak.

Most interestingly, she was coming to speak on behalf of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement, which aims to apply the same multiform political pressures to Israel as was applied to apartheid South Africa two decades ago. The hope is that this international pressure will become so great that Israel would have to end its occupation of the Palestinian Territories along with the preferential treatment of its Jewish population at the expense of its Arab citizens. The fact that most people view apartheid as a conquered foe or a relic of a bygone era is a testament to Israel's mastery of the PR game and its staggeringly powerful political lobby in the United States. You only have to be here for a day to recognize that Arabs are systematically, institutionally discriminated against, to say the very least. If this isn't apartheid, I don't know what is.

When the magic day of Ms. Klein's speech arrived, I met up with some friends from Jerusalem and headed towards the auditorium of the Friends Boys School to grab a seat. Luckily, I got there early enough; it wasn't long before the place was packed to the gills and people were sitting in the aisles. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the faces in the audience were those of white internationals. There are a lot of us here in Ramallah, for better and for worse.

I was unaware that Klein was Jewish herself, which allowed her the privilege to criticize her fellow Jews for taking a narrow view of "never again to us" rather than "never again to anybody" after the horrors of the Holocaust. I think we should all have the privilege to say these sorts of things, to speak our minds, but in the current sociopolitical atmosphere, you will likely be buried under an avalanche of shrill, defamatory responses if you dare to say such a thing as a non-Jew. Which, interestingly enough, has led to a debate among leftist Jews themselves as to whether this wielding of the "Not so fast, I'm a Jew too" card is simply another strain of the same notion of Jewish specialness that is often used to legitimize the terrible things Israel has done to the Palestinians.

I'm sad to say that Naomi Klein is a more compelling writer than a speaker. This whole talk of her "enrapturing" the audience—God, what a melodramatic word—is utter BS. My British roommate went so far as to call her "annoying." She made good, albeit not terribly original points about the situation in Israel and Palestine; perhaps the most interesting aspect of her talk was an element of pathos: she was "ashamed" of the fact that she did not jump on the BDS boat sooner and said it was nothing less than "cowardice" that had stopped her before.

I had not given the BDS movement much thought until the speech, and so I mulled over the implications of such a movement. What troubled me most were the sanctions. After all, the left loves to point out that sanctions never seem to work, that they punish the ordinary citizen rather than the despot ruler; as proof of their barbarism the left points to the death of over half a million Iraqi children over the course of the 1990s because of tight U.S. sanctions.

Of course, Iraq and Israel are totally different countries, but could putting the pinch on "ordinary, everyday" Israelis be justified in the name of a political end? I asked Ms. Klein this, and she didn't quite answer my question until much later, when in response to another question, she pointed out that 94% of Israelis supported the war on Gaza.Combined with the fact that Israelis largely voted for rightist parties during the election, it seemed that Klein was trying to say that with regards to the Occupation, there are no innocent Israelis. Its murky territory to get into, no matter how damning the evidence. I'm still wrestling with it myself.

Klein's relative boringness was made more obvious when Omar Barghouti, founder of the BDS campaign, sat alongside her at a table onstage to field questions from the audience. While her replies were long-winded and often rambling, Omar's were magnificently precise. I believe he is Palestinian, but if I had never seen him I would have thought that he was a German scientist. He made it clear to me for the first time what the concept of "normalization" actually means: any joint activity between Israelis and Palestinians that is not a means towards ending the Occupation amounts to a "normalization" of an unjust situation, which is unacceptable. I agree with this wholeheartedly.

I left the building a supporter of the BDS cause, with "D" in first, "B" in second, and "S" in a distant third. Given the tragedy of people maimed and killed in completely ineffective protests, it was nice to see a concrete, comprehensive initiative aimed at ending what is nothing less than a criminal Occupation.

Loose Ends and Personal Updates

2009-06-30T06:50:00.001-04:00

After a month in the Holy Land, I thought I'd tie up some loose ends and give a personal update of sorts.

Besides knowing how to count from one to ten and a few essential phrases, my conversational Arabic is still very basic. Ramallah, the most "international" city in Palestine, is a terrible place to try and learn Arabic; even when you say "marhaba" or "salaam aleikum" to somebody, they will likely reply in English. I assume they like to impress foreigners. Seeing as I will only be here for another month and have no formal training in Arabic, let alone the Palestinian dialect, it’s difficult to justify delving into the language when I already spend enough time sitting indoors writing this blog and will be back in an English-speaking country in the blink of an eye.

However, I plan on taking lessons in Modern Standard Arabic when I return home, and already I am envisioning spending another summer here, studying the Palestinian dialect at Birzeit University, which two of my roommates are doing currently. The language is well known for being a bitch to learn, for lack of a better word. To me, this is part of its appeal, along with the sheer beauty of it, both in speech and in writing. If I want to both read and write Arabic, it essentially means learning two languages. I could learn only the Modern Standard, also known as Fusha (pronounced FOOS-HAH), but speaking to Palestinians in Fusha is roughly the same as speaking Shakespearean English to an American; it comes off as partially incomprehensible and slightly arrogant. So if I want to actually hold a decent conversation with a Palestinian, I should also learn the local dialect – known as the "colloquial" form.

Given my lack of Arabic skills, I've come to the conclusion that the biggest social benefit of this trip has been meeting and making connections with the large variety of internationals here—the French-German cultural center near the city center is one of my more frequented hang outs—rather than the Palestinian population itself. Of course, I love talking to Palestinians when I can, but my shame of appearing ignorant of the language and culture makes me feel "paralyzed," in the words of another friend of mine. How does one pull off this international journalism thing, anyway?

You may have noticed that there are not many pictures of people, nor are there many names mentioned in my blog. I've done this, for the most part, to protect the people I'm talking about. I'm probably being paranoid, but I'd rather not cause anybody else to be interrogated on their way out of Israel and not be allowed back into the country because I blabbed about something that they said or are involved with. Also, I’m hesitant to take pictures of friends who I haven't known for very long, and I loathe appearing like a tourist. Some of these are not good excuses, and are especially not befitting of an intrepid journalist, but I struggle with it nonetheless.

My work with ICAHD is slowing to a crawl after I completed the East Jerusalem tour flyer. Considering the pain of going to the office in Jerusalem (it takes an average of an hour and 45 minutes to make a 6-mile journey), I only go out there if I have to, which at the moment is rarely.

The Jordan Valley study is proving more difficult than we had imagined. We're realizing that we are going to need our own car to be even moderately successful in doing what we want to do in that sparsely populated desert, and it's unclear if ICAHD has the funds to cover the costs of car rental. I know I don't.

Thus most of my "work" out here so far has been simply soaking up experience and knowledge for both mine and the blog's sake, writing about my time here, hoping to educate about this incredibly interesting- and incredibly misunderstood—part of the world. And if you guessed, perhaps from the volume of writing and its suspiciously good punctuation, that writing this blog takes up a good chunk of my time, you'd be right.

Overall, I am mulling over the notion that this conflict will play a big part in my life from here on, whether I am talking to my fellow Americans about the situation here, or writing articles about the conflict, or once again coming out here to be in the midst of the Palestinian people. Which brings me to say that my views or "biases" on the conflict have only been strengthened by what I've seen so far. The injustice here is obvious, but unfortunately, the solution remains elusive. An end to the Occupation would be a nice start.

For those of you wondering, I am eating well out here. My British roommate is a skilled cook, and just the other night, I sat down to this feast in Ramallah (not pictured, unfortunately, is my lamb's liver sandwich):

I'm planning a more comprehensive post on food later on. Until then, brace for envy when I show you this picture of the scenery from my evening walk home.

Adventures in the Jordan Valley

2009-06-29T08:21:00.002-04:00

Even the rush of air outside the car was hot. Rather than providing a respite from the heat, cracking the windows was like opening a recently-used oven. A charming quirk about midday Middle Eastern air, I suppose.

Here I sat in the backseat of a Mitsubishi, wedged in tightly with two American comrades, taking in the sun-scorched landscape of the Jordan Valley along winding mountain roads. As we pushed further and further away from the major population centers, dusty golden hills laid out endlessly before us, punctuated by Palestinian tents and double-fenced Israeli settlements.

In the front seats were two Israeli women, probably in their mid-to-late twenties, clad in black, one with a camera and one with a notepad. Both carried an air of battle-hardened confidence that suggested they had already been through a lot, both together and separately. If I had to guess at their political leanings I would say they were anarchists, though I didn't ask. People with such determination can be intimidating.

The women were part of an organization called Machsom Watch, a human rights group whose members—all Israeli women as far as I can tell—stand at Israeli checkpoints throughout the West Bank and record what they see. Similar to what Copwatch does in America, Machsom members write reports, take pictures, and record video of the treatment of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers at checkpoints.

I was introduced to one of these women (to be known from here on out as “the writer,” the other will be called “the photographer”) through a contact at ICAHD that recognized our mutual interest in the Jordan Valley. My main project for ICAHD at the moment is the construction of a report on how Israel exercises control over the Palestinians in "Area C" of the West Bank. The Jordan Valley, the large strip of land alongside the river of the same name, comprises the vast majority of Area C and a sizable portion of the West Bank itself. Recently, many villages in the Valley have been issued demolition orders by the Israeli military. Also, some of these rural Palestinians have lost their lives to stray bullets from Israeli military exercises; it seems like gradually the whole area is destined to be composed of either Israeli settlements of "closed military zones."

At an ICAHD meeting a couple weeks ago, I had volunteered to cover the issue since it sounded like a unique, unsung part of the Occupation that would provide good journalistic fodder. But not long after I wondered what I had gotten myself into: the villages are far out, spread out, and I speak virtually no Arabic. Luckily, I was paired with an Arabic-speaking fellow ICAHD volunteer for the assignment, but it didn't (and still doesn't) solve the first two problems.

Finally, though, we had an "in" with people with an interest in the Jordan Valley and their own private car. We were off.

Our first stop was a Palestinian home not more than five hundred meters from an Israeli checkpoint. There we pulled into the rocky driveway and the writer approached the man of the house, who was wearing a keffiyeh the proper way: on his head. A few exchanges in Arabic and before long, we were all sipping coffee and sitting in plastic chairs arranged in a circle. Three children—two boys and a girl, ranging in age from 8-13—sat alongside the father, soaking in the conversation. The oldest boy possessed that fascinating quality that many Palestinian boys have of acting much older than their real age; a contemplative intensity mixed with tactfulness.

During the conversation I sat dumbly and mutely listening to an alien language and the occasional braying of a donkey in the distance. I badly want to learn Arabic. Thankfully I was filled in as we got out of our seats: the family has already had two homes demolished on the property (evidenced by the rubble in the distance), and luckily, has evaded a demolition order for their current house because the structure was built before 1967. Yet they do have a demolition order for their livestock pen; they showed us both the pen and the piece of paper that sentenced it to the same fate as their two previous homes.

After that was over it was back into the stiflingly hot car and off on the road again. The writer pointed out that these cinder block signs had only recently gone up all over the Valley:

These signs were all placed at the driveways or entrance roads to Palestinian homes. We guessed that perhaps this was the first step in an effort to scare the Palestinians off in order to spare the effort of pushing them off the land. From an apolitical outsider's perspective, it would seem that the Israeli military wants to construct the biggest firing zone in the globe.

We pulled into another driveway, this time towards a series of tents opposite a livestock pen. Once again, a few words and we were invited inside.

Although I couldn't participate in the ensuing conversation, I was still quite absorbed. The situation this family lived in was pretty raw. There were five or six small children, two women, and an old man cramped into this tent that was swarming with flies. An infant was asleep on a quilt on the ground (there were no beds), despite that fact that flies were buzzing about her face, crawling on her cheeks and mouth. A bowl of rotting eggplant sat on top of a refrigerator that didn't seem to have any electrical power coming to it. Outside of the tent, an adolescent boy riding a donkey sauntered by, occasionally smacking the animal on its neck with a stiff wooden plank.

Despite their obvious poverty, the family still gave us the remarkable hospitality characteristic of Palestinians. After chairs were provided for us, they all sat on the ground. And before long, a platter with six steaming cups of tea made its way into the tent. Although this family, as it turns out, hadn't received any demolition orders, they lamented the fact that they had to pay exorbitant costs for water—the water supply of Area C is completely controlled by the Israelis (the pumps have barbed wire fences around them). As you may guess, this arrangement has been good for Israeli settlers in the area.

Which leads me to our next stop: an Israeli settlement. The Machsom women wanted to see if any growth in the settlement was happening—an issue that not only resonates with local Palestinians, but worldwide. Before we arrived, however, we came across this wonderful oddity on a hilltop nearby.

The photographer muscled the surprisingly resilient car up the rocky slopes, kicking up a massive cloud of dust, until we reached the abandoned tank. No telling the origins of this beast—1948? 1967? Jordanian? Israeli?—but it was fun to look at and pose with nonetheless. Scattered about the ground, weighed down by rocks, were these military-issue cardboard cutouts:

At this point we were right next to the eastern border and could see the hills of Jordan not far off in the distance. We snapped a couple more shots and moved on.

As we neared the gate of the Israeli settlement, the Machsom women debriefed us on our new identities: we were just tourists, looking for a health-food store that we had heard about. At the gate, the writer smilingly exchanged Hebrew with the Israeli soldier who stood guard, and we were let in. At that moment I envied the women for being Israeli Jews: the privileges that it allows an activist and a journalist regarding this issue are incredible. Not only does it allow access into places forbidden to most, but it nullifies any allegations of anti-Semitism that have become so common among the increasingly paranoid "defenders" of Israel across the globe.

To be honest, the first homes in the settlement didn't look much different from the trailer parks characteristic of redneck America; there was even a shirtless man standing outside one of them. As expected, there was no shortage of water here—the settlement bloomed with greenery. (My fellow Americans and I learned, as we were driving throughout the parched Valley, to easily identify settlements in the distance by this feature.) As we wound around the trailers, we came upon a construction site with a few men walking about. Bingo.

We feigned wonder and excitement to the builders about the hardened-sandbag structure and soon met a young American from Florida at the site. I asked him how he had gotten here, and he replied that it had been through the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms program.

"Oh really? What do you grow here?"

"Nothing actually. They just used it [WWOOF] to get people to come out here and help them build." *laughs*

Despite this initial deception, the young man from Miami said he was having a fantastic time, better than he ever could have imagined if he had been actually growing food. As for our own story, it didn't hurt that one of my colleagues is attending Brandeis, a largely Jewish private university. We were just traveling, innocently taking in the beauty of Israel...

Still, I was glad to be gone once we left—I hate having to lie. To quote Mark Twain (who, ironically, had harsh words for Palestinians): "If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything."

Our last activity of the afternoon was a checkpoint watch – the Machsom women's expertise. Because of Israeli military regulations, we parked at least a hundred meters away from an outpost flying an Israeli flag and what appeared to be – but could not have been – an anarchist flag (I found out that this was the flag used by this particular battalion/unit/whatever you call it) and strolled up towards it.

The soldiers were familiar with the writer and, occasionally flashing looks our way, talked amongst themselves. Meanwhile, Palestinian cars and people trickled through without much problem. This is a perfect example of how an observer, simply by being present, alters the natural state of a system and perhaps gets a false impression of the normal state of affairs. In science, this is plainly called the observer effect.

To put this theory into a concrete framework: Israeli soldiers are much less likely to give Palestinians a hard time when there are possibly influential internationals or fellow Israelis watching; there exists no greater privilege for being white than in the occupied Palestinian territories. Thus, watching the checkpoints is a win-win situation: either the mere presence of a non-Arab watcher allows the Palestinians an easier time through than they would normally get, or if the Israeli soldiers are bold/dumb enough to mistreat them with somebody like us watching, there will be recorded data on it, which will be presented to the world, which will ultimately help the Palestinian cause.

It's also quite easy to argue that the sheer existence of the checkpoints amounts to a gross violation of Palestinian rights, but unfortunately, the public discourse—similar to the limited focus on illegal settlement growth rather than illegal settlement existence—is not quite at this level yet.

Despite the fact that the soldier had told the Machsom writer that the police were on their way, she stood there unflinchingly. She warned us to step aside if we wanted to avoid any implication if the police did arrive.

At this point I was a fierce admirer of these women.

Fortunately, we stayed only another fifteen minutes and left. We repeated the process at another checkpoint, and then we were back on the road to Zaa’tara Junction, where we would catch a service taxi to Ramallah. What a day.

A special thanks to friend and expert baller Paul Notar for these photos.

Note: the Machsom photographer's excellent pictures - all relating to Israel, Palestine, and the Occupation - can be found at www.activestills.org.

Gay Pride in Jerusalem

2009-06-26T08:03:00.008-04:00

Earlier this week, I heard that a Gay Pride parade was to be held in Jerusalem. Seeing as I've never been to a Pride parade ever, and seeing how the parade has caused plenty of tension in Jerusalem in earlier years,I decided to check it out.

The streets a half an hour prior to the march. The calm before the gay storm...

This noble Israeli policeman is ready to defend the public from the bloodthirsty gay hordes, akimbo style.
The security stations at the front of Liberty Bell Park, where queers and liberal-minded sympathizers gathered before the march. Boys in one line, girls in the other, patted down, scanned, bags checked. In Israel you get used to these kinds of security checks; it's also something you have to go through at any major bus station.

A "rabbi" talking to the press.

The rowdy drum brigade that kicked off the march.

Anyone good at reading upside-down Hebrew?

A drag king and queen try to hype the crowd up for the march.

And off we go!

The oft-seen Israeli-gay hybrid flag. To me, it's some of the most tragic irony I've seen yet in this country: a flag of tolerance joined with one of intolerance. Explain? A state that feels existentially threatened by a growing Arab population, a state that has devised ways to keep a Jewish majority at the expense of other people - that seems pretty intolerant to me.

A pretty nifty, epic banner...once again, translation from my massive Hebrew-speaking audience would be nice.

The most disappointing part of the march. This sad old man was the counterprotest, and judging from the fact that this city is the holy meeting place of three somewhat homophobic religions, I expected a much larger anti-gay presence.

The socialist bloc of the march, which was the only one that took the initiative to chant anything. Another disappointment of the march was that it was rather tepid; really it was just a walk down King David St. from one park to another. I didn't want to see bloodshed or rioting, but some passion would have been nice.

Oh well, I can always entertain myself in other ways.

My Gripe With Palestinian Culture: Littering

2009-06-23T05:57:00.001-04:00

After a few days in any Palestinian city (including East Jerusalem) you'll probably have the pleasure of seeing a native casually letting his empty bag of chips or falafel wrapper drift to the ground. And after a couple weeks, you'll become so used to it that you no longer snicker, nudge your fellow international friend, or stare with mouth agape when it happens again.

The littering is rampant here. It's really tragic, because I can imagine it is one of those little things that reinforces racially-tinged arguments of why the Jews are better fit to occupy the land.

When I ask my more well-traveled roommates about this, they say that it is a problem in the whole Arab world. The German says that during her trip to Syria, she visited public park-spaces in which the trash was ankle-deep. The Briton remarked that during his time in Jordan, he saw families simply leaving all their trash behind when they were done with their picnic at the park.

Recently, I met an American here who was volunteering with an organization that hopes to "strengthen youth leadership skills” or something like that. Put in concrete terms, it encourages Palestinian teens to improve their community with a variety of social works projects. Thus I wasted no time in nudging him to nudge the kids to undertake some sort of community clean-up operation.

Prepare for some imperialist arrogance: the core of such a hypothetical program would have to be an aggressive education and public relations effort to instill better habits in the Palestinian community. Otherwise, it won’t be long before the city is once again coated in trash.

Palestinians could easily argue that they have much bigger things to worry about, and I probably shouldn't impose judgment on a culture that is not my own. Yet when Palestinian farmer Daoud Nassar lamented the times he's heard Palestinians using the Occupation as an excuse to do or not do certain things, the rampant litter was his first example.

Perhaps it’s some lingering OCD that finds this so bothersome, or perhaps it’s the fact that these Palestinian cities are so beautiful save for this one nagging blemish that is relatively easy to fix. Either way, below are some pictures regarding the issue for your...enjoyment?

Taming the Cynic Outside the Old City

2009-06-22T03:38:00.001-04:00

Walking back from the ICAHD office a couple days ago with a fellow volunteer, I somehow ended up at what was called the "Big Hug" of Jerusalem, which was essentially a gathering of peaceniks of all races, religions, and nationalities near the Damascus Gate of the Old City. Since my bus to Ramallah leaves from the Gate, I figured I'd check it out before I headed on home.

The gathering featured almost every stereotype of the hippie known to man. There was finger painting, hand-holding, singing, acoustic-guitar playing, vague exhortations to love and peace...and plenty of photographers to take pictures of it all. The sight of the two event organizers hugging, one obviously a Muslim and the other obviously a Jew, was an especially irresistible photo op. Much like a well-constructed Facebook photo album makes a party seem more epic and memorable than it really was, I'm guessing that these photos will serve the same purpose in inflating the effectiveness and size of the event.

(Prepare for a jarring shift to present tense...)

While I sit there placidly munching a slice of watermelon, an internal, cerebral battle is taking place; the cynic (who made an appearance in the previous paragraph) is on the attack. The cynic believes that events like these are utterly pointless exercises in futility, feel-good orgies of self-congratulation full of people afraid to do actual work. The cynic points to the two Palestinian boys looking puzzledly downward at the white people on their hands and knees dipping their hands in paint and pressing them to a cloth. The boys are probably wondering what this will do to take away the checkpoints, the humiliation, and the deprivation.

The cynic admittedly has a point, and he used to handily win battles like these.

But another part of me, the idealist, senses the genuine goodness in the air, even if it is expressed in corny sing-alongs and cliché phrases. The idealist understands that a true solution to the conflict will ultimately happen in the hearts and minds of Palestinians and Israelis, not well-educated internationals. In other words, peace cannot be imposed from outside. And so little by little, completely apolitical demonstrations of affection and acceptance will chisel away at the hardened shells of bitterness and contempt between the two peoples.

Let's not be fooled, though: years of such chiseling can be undone by one well-placed bomb blast or home demolition. Enter political activism...

The Tent of Nations and the Clash of Ideologies

2009-06-21T05:53:00.001-04:00

Yesterday night was spent in a Spartan bed swatting away mosquitoes under a tent that looked like the standard commission from a foreign aid agency in Africa. Not to complain: after all, I was here by choice.

Where exactly was I? The “Tent of Nations,” a Palestinian-farm-turned-political-cause just south of Bethlehem. After going to my first Shabbat dinner in south Jerusalem the previous night, I met an American girl who told me about the place and invited me along. So the next day – after paying an obligatory visit to the tourist-loaded Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem – we took a shared taxi southward, hopped off on the side of a road, and took a short hike to the farm, which looks over the Palestinian village of Nahalin.

The farm, run by the Nassar family, has a rich and interesting history. It was started by the first Nassar in 1916, who made a home in one of the many caves dotting the property and began planting grapes on the land. Mr. Nassar was one of the few Palestinians to register his land with the ruling Ottoman Empire, which most other Palestinians at the time neglected to do to avoid paying taxes. This documentation proved invaluable a three quarters of a century later in 1991, when the Israeli military tried to evict the family from their land. The Nassars guess this was done because the farm is located in an inconvenient place for the Israelis—right between two Jewish settlements in the Gush Etzion Block.

Despite the irrefutable proof of his family's ownership of the land, the legal battle over it has persisted for nearly two decades; to date the Nassar family has spent over $140,000 in legal fees. These Palestinians are difficult for Israel to handle—they have taken an explicitly non-violent stand ("We Will Not Be Enemies" is chiseled into a stone adjoining the front gate) and have strenuously jumped through all of the legal hoops that the Israeli court system has set up for them, leaving no weaknesses for Israeli lawyers to exploit. Although Israel doesn't have much regard for international law,it still wants to project the image of an enlightened and fair legal system within its own borders. After all, if Israelis themselves begin to doubt the moral fabric of the state, Israel is in big trouble.

The history of the farm was told over cups of sage tea by Daoud Nassar, the second-youngest of nine children and a tireless campaigner for his farm's cause. He lives on the farm along with his mother and the volunteers who come to stay and work on the land through the WWOOF program.

As night fell the walled, uniformly built Israeli settlements around us seemed to have switched on every light possible, while we only had two hours of electricity provided by a generator. Because the farm is located in Area C of the West Bank, it is completely under Israeli control. Thus the Israelis have forbidden the Nassars any access to the electric or water grid as another tactic to try and force them out. They have even offered the Nassars a blank check for the property, which was refused. "The land to a Palestinian is like his mother," Daoud said. "I cannot sell my mother."

Before long the generator switched off and we were in darkness; Daoud turned up the flame on a waiting kerosene lamp. Meanwhile the lights of the Jewish settlement of Neve Daniel burned steadily and brightly into the night. With that, I reflected on the judgments we often make of people through the circumstances they live in. For example, an American ignorant of the political situation surveys the landscape here and sees the sturdy-looking, well-lit, smartly designed Israeli settlements. Perhaps a half mile away to the west is a dimly lit Palestinian village which looks like an accidental pile of buildings.

I think it would be quite easy for this hypothetical American to take this landscape as proof of the hopeless backwardness of the Arabs and the triumphant, enterprising nature of the Israelis. When looking at the situation of the Palestinians, a socialist could see inequality and oppression, but the capitalist could see laziness. Of course, both are taking guesses based on their political biases and both traits are possible. But how often do we make judgments without knowing the whole story? How many Israelis living in Neve Daniel know that the Nassars spend most of their night in complete darkness not because they are stuck-in-their-ways peasants, but people pointedly denied electricity by an occupying power?

I think I'll try and close that very large can of worms before I go any further. Suffice to say that Daoud was quite critical of his fellow Palestinians as well, lamenting the fact that most volunteers on his farm were internationals rather than Palestinians, and that Palestinians sometimes use the Occupation as an excuse for actions (or inactions) that are totally under their control.

The evening on the farm was rather peaceful. I watched yet another stunning sunset; this time I swore I could see the Mediterranean, swallowing the pink ball of light slowly, but surely. Slightly nearer were the glittering clumps of light from the coastal towns like Ashkelon and Ashdod. Before the sunset I helped to feed bushels of hay to the horses and goats (Goats have the most darkly cartoonish eyes. The flattened oval of a pupil looks as if it was supposed to reproduce via some process similar to mitosis, but then was frozen in the first stage.)

A couple mangy dogs—only a couple with names—followed us around the property. (This was one of the first obvious signs—besides the cross on the wall, of course—that the Nassars were not Muslim, but Christian. Because of the Prophet Mohammed's harsh words for dogs, few Muslims own them.) Often getting into some sort of disagreement, the dogs made the most vicious growling noises at each other. If I were an avant-garde musician I would have been on my hands and knees with a microphone to the dogs' snouts, then retreating to a laptop to remix and master the hellish noises.

All the while, we were accompanied by a breeze that gave the whole scene a serenely majestic feel. I imagine it had much more practical benefits for the volunteers toiling in the midday sun.

I left the farm inspired by the Nassars' non-violent, non-confrontational approach to even the most naked oppression. Their kind of resistance makes sense at this stage in the conflict—after all, the Israelis have the most expensive, destructive toys that the military can buy, and judging by the ruinous state of the Gaza Strip, it’s obvious that they're not afraid to use them. (When they heard the shelling of Gaza in the distance earlier this year, Daoud and his brother "put their frustrations to work" and built a new cistern.)

But I admit that if half my family were killed, if my home were destroyed, and newly homeless, I ended up at a squalid refugee camp...and if the perpetrators had the nerve to claim that they were the victims, and then the world actually believed them...it would be tempting to pick up a rifle.

A Trip Through the Qalandia Checkpoint

2009-06-18T05:58:00.003-04:00

The military checkpoint is one of the most salient features of Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories. High on the list of the average Palestinian's grievances, the Israeli checkpoint is like a nightmarish version of airport security—even longer lines, pickier metal detectors, and a heavier blanket of humiliation. And like airport security staff, the soldiers manning these checkpoints are bored and pissed from the monotony of it all; recently I saw a soldier behind the glass-paneled booth listening to an IPod.

According to the Israeli government, these checkpoints exist for security reasons. But not all of the checkpoints lie on the Israeli border: in fact, many are smack-dab in the middle of the West Bank. The only logical rationale for these checkpoints in the thick of the Palestinian territory is to protect the Israeli settlements there, which are illegal by international law. Yet regardless of where the checkpoints are, all of them make life more difficult for Palestinians.

To get from Ramallah to Jerusalem (where the ICAHD office is), I – along with Palestinians who have Israel’s permission—have to go through the Qalandia checkpoint. Since I’m an American, my stamped passport suffices as permission. Depending on when I go, it could take from ten minutes to an hour to pass through. Before I walk you through this process, let me give you a few lowlights I've encountered so far in the barred, metallic halls of Qalandia.

- A middle-aged Palestinian man has to pass through the metal detector one, two, three times. Beep. Beep. BEEP. After the first couple beeps he takes off another accessory or article of clothing. After the third he complains to the Israeli soldier behind the glass—but he is ordered to do it again. He flashes a pained smile at his friend standing in front of me, and his friend laughs and says something in Arabic. Meanwhile the line swells behind us. BEEP. The man then lifts his leg up in the air to the glass, then pulls his pant leg up to show that he has no firearm or knife strapped to his ankle. Finally he is let through.

- A Palestinian woman passes through the metal detector. BEEP. She tries again. BEEP. "Take off your shoes!" barks an Israeli voice over the intercom—in English. I wonder if this poor woman even understands English...

- I wait almost a half an hour in one of the lines. When I finally make it through the turnstile, to the metal detector, I place my backpack on the conveyor belt for the X-ray machine. It doesn’t move. I soon learn that the machine is not working at this station—there was no warning before I got into line. A woman with her purse finds this out as well. So we have to trudge back out and get a different line, and wait another half hour. I wonder if it would have been that hard to put up a sign that said "X-Ray Machine at this station not operational—if you have a bag, please move to station 3 or 4."

I'm sure as the weeks go on I'll have more touching vignettes to share. Now begins my photo presentation on Qalandia:

The Qalandia checkpoint is a brief break in the giant wall that snakes in and around the West Bank, built by Israel ostensibly for security reasons. Here is where automobiles have to pass through.

To pass through in an automobile, you're going to need an Israeli license plate. But it still doesn't guarantee a smooth go-ahead, especially for Palestinians coming into Israel to work or see family members. That’s right, there are plenty of Palestinian Arabs that live in Israel – which casts some serious doubt on the official rationale for the Wall’s existence.

A Palestinian plate. You're not going to get through with one of these. You're just going to have to...

...park in this here lot and walk over to that white building. You're going through the checkpoint on foot, I'm sorry to say.

If you're lucky and arrive during a slow period, the first line may look like this.

But its more likely that it will look something like this.

Looking back at the barred tunnel-cages which mark the first control stage of the checkpoint. The only way to know if you are getting through the turnstile is whether it jarringly locks in front of you or lets you pass and saves the aforementioned fate for the poor shmuck behind you. Proceed carefully.

Now waiting in the second line, looking towards the watchtower in which an Israeli guard supervises the crowd. To my right are several different ports which split the line once more, leading to the final stage of the checkpoint.

The "line" in one of the ports. As time drags on, Palestinians not only get agitated with the Israelis, but with each other. Ahead is the second turnstile you must pass through, with the same silent, brute language of admission as the last one.

If I had some serious cajones I would have here a picture of the Israeli soldiers behind the glass, checking my passport. Taking pictures is not a good idea here, and when I do pass through this checkpoint it’s for a good reason: I have somewhere to be and would rather not be held and interrogated. Basically, once I pass through the turnstile I place my bag on the X-ray machine and go through the metal detector. Then I turn left and present my passport and visa stamp to the soldier sitting in an office on the other side of the glass. Thankfully I’ve had no problems so far.

Looking back at the checkpoint after my exit. Whew! It's over.

Ramallah seen from the other side of the wall.

The #18 bus from Ramallah to Jerusalem waits to pick up its passengers that it unloaded on the other side of the Wall, probably about 45 minutes ago. Also, if you have a car with a Palestinian plate and parked on the other side, you'll complete the rest of the journey by bus.

Of course, this whole tedious, harrowing process is unnecessary when you want to come back the other way.

For a well-written and comprehensive story on Israeli checkpoints, check out a piece called “Checkpoints Take Toll on Palestinians, Israeli Army” published in the Washington Post. Here's an excerpt:

As the Palestinians inch forward, armed soldiers standing behind sandbagged concrete walls shout orders to have bags opened and their contents dumped on the ground. On one recent morning, soldiers demanded that a man squirt shaving cream from an aerosol can to verify its contents. They ordered another man to rip the red-and-silver wrapping paper off a box to reveal what was inside: a doll for his granddaughter.

Finally, in a personal update, I sprained my ankle yesterday playing some two-on-two basketball with Palestinians over at the Christian church in Ramallah. It may have had to do with the terribly tattered skateboarding shoes I came here with. This is sprain #3 for the right ankle, and as of right now she is being iced and elevated. The prospects for entering next month's Streetball tournament are not looking so great, but we'll see. You should stay tuned here—despite my immobility at the moment, there's plenty more to talk about.

An Afternoon in Ashdod and a Reflection on Israeli Manners

2009-06-16T14:44:00.001-04:00

Today I took an hour and a half bus ride out to the Israeli coastal city of Ashdod to meet up with a friend that happened to be in the Holy Land as well. When I arrived, I encountered a full blown shopping mall with two floors and dozens of stores all staffed by ridiculous amounts of attractive, shapely women (and oh yeah, a bus station). Luckily it wasn't as huge as the Jerusalem bus station/mall combo, which made it only moderately maddening to find who I came to meet up with.

Once finally united my friend and I walked down to the beach, which featured a few macho men working out in the blinding sun. In the distance to our right could be seen the Port of Ashdod, bristling with ships and ruddy metal cargo containers. According to my friend—an Israeli-born Jew with family in Ashdod—the dockworkers at that very port receive a better salary than any other proletarian worker in the entire country. But my friend also says that Israeli Jews as a whole are poorer than most people think.

Here's a token picture of the beach (Believe it or not, this is the most exciting photograph in the set):
After taking a dip in the absolutely perfect water, we went to a beachside restaurant to eat lunch. Although the level of service seemed pretty standard to me, my friend remarked that the waitress was an above average specimen, considering that Israelis are not known for their cheery devotion to customer service. With that, the wheels started turning in my head and I thought back to a couple weeks ago when I bought an Israeli Orange SIM card for my phone and watched an old American woman essentially plead the Israeli woman behind the counter to help set up her phone.

I also thought of the first Israeli I talked to when I arrived in Tel Aviv, who said frankly that Israelis are sometimes "rude." Indeed, the general impression I've gotten from the Israeli public is that of an unsmiling brusqueness. Compared with my earlier bubbling assessments of the generosity and kindness of Palestinians, you may be inclined to think that my political bias is quite obviously framing the way I look at these two peoples. But I challenge you to come here and see for yourself. And who's to say that Israelis are not actually softies behind that tough exterior?

On a different note, I think I overestimated the average Israeli's English-speaking skills—many awkward encounters today. My fatal error was assuming a close political relationship between two countries implied a close cultural relationship, but now I'm seeing that outside of the familiar venues of shopping malls and bars, Israel is actually a pretty foreign country.

A Tangent-Ridden Account of a Visit to Sebastia

2009-06-15T10:23:00.003-04:00

This past weekend my roommates and I decided to head out to the Palestinian village of Sebastia (via Nablus) after hearing about a music festival going on there. We also wanted to go there to see ruins that date back 10,000 years. The town has been touched by many an empire over the millennia—Alexander the Great destroyed it in 331 BC, and Pompey rebuilt it three centuries later. (OK, so men under their command destroyed/rebuilt the town. Alex and Pompey were likely supervising from the shade.

Back to the modern era. As soon as we stepped out of the shuttle, a local man named Mosleh took us under his wing and became our unofficial chauffeur with a hospitality that may seem unusually excessive by American standards. But this kind of thing becomes expected in Palestine; most of the people here seem incapable of the cold calculus and rationalizing that keep American hearts closed.

The first place that Mosleh led us to was the courtyard of the Al-Kayed Palace, where a five-piece band was playing traditional music near the reflective windows. Alongside an old man who plucked and bowed a stand-up bass with an impressive intensity were two men expertly playing a beautiful guitar-like instrument called the oud, which is commonly used in Arabic music.

After that was over, the crowd began the pilgrimage towards the other side of town for the main event in the ancient amphitheater. We took these shots on the way; the first is a view of the main courtyard in the village. The second depicts some graffiti advertising the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Palestinian political organization with a Marxist-Leninist ideology. The DFLP broke off from the more militant and well-known Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1969. No telling how much of a hold the DFLP has here among the Sebastian populace, but I will say that after a trip through the Nablus market, capitalism seems alive and well in Palestine.

If I had to wear that, I'd be pissed too. If only I had seen him earlier I would have known that there was also a wedding happening in town, and thus spared myself some embarrassment.

I heard music coming from the large hall near the ruins pictured above, and I thought it was another music venue for the festival. When I entered the room, it was a colorful (and very stuffy) zoo of dancing and clapping, but I noticed something—of the scores of faces I glimpsed, none of them were those of fellow men. Within seconds a woman was wagging a finger at me and I knew I didn't belong in that room, so I darted out. The segregation among the sexes as nowhere as severe here is in, say, Saudi Arabia, but it still takes a Westerner some time to get used to.

The ancient amphitheater, filled with people, looking upon the Norwegian band Peevish Penfriend. We ran into these very nice fellows at a bar in Ramallah a couple nights later and I learned more about Norway in an hour than I had learned in my entire life. Did you know that Norway levies an 80% tax on oil revenues and pumps it into a massive state pension system? Did you know that this very Norwegian pension system is also recognized as a powerful investor, owning two percent of the entire European stock market? Did you know that in 1944, 350,000 Nazi soldiers were stationed in Norway, anticipating an Allied landing on the Norwegian coast rather than at Normandy?

Well now you do.

A few from the cheap seats, which are not as uncomfortable as they look. This shot was taken before the show started; these seats filled up shortly after. Snacks were ridiculously cheap - I munched on an ear of corn that cost me about 25 cents.

This two-dimensional picture doesn't nearly do justice to this majestic view. Here I am looking upon the hills north of Sebastia. Over the mountain lies the village of Jenin, which suffered a barbarous onslaught of destruction and demolition by Israeli bulldozers in April of 2002, in the heat of the Second Intifada.

I'll end this post with a telling testimony of an Israeli bulldozer driver that was part of the said operation that, within 72 hours, razed more than 300 homes and left 4,000 Palestinians homeless:

"For three days, I just destroyed and destroyed. The whole area. Any house that they fired from came down. And to knock it down, I tore down some more. They were warned by loudspeaker to get out of the house before I come, but I gave no one a chance. I didn't wait. I didn't give one blow, and wait for them to come out. I would just ram the house with full power, to bring it down as fast as possible. I wanted to get to the other houses. To get as many as possible. Others may have restrained themselves, or so they say. Who are they kidding? Anyone who was there, and saw our soldiers in the houses, would understand they were in a death trap. I thought about saving them. I didn't give a damn about the Palestinians, but I didn't just ruin with no reason. It was all under orders.

"Many people where inside houses we set to demolish. They would come out of the houses we were working on. I didn't see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9. and I didn't see house falling down on live people. But if there were any, I wouldn't care at all. I am sure people died inside these houses, but it was difficult to see, there was lots of dust everywhere, and we worked a lot at night. I found joy with every house that came down, because I knew they didn't mind dying, but they cared for their homes. If you knocked down a house, you buried 40 or 50 people for generations. If I am sorry for anything, it is for not tearing the whole camp down.

"I didn't stop for a moment. Even when we had a two-hour break, I insisted on going on. I prepared a ramp, to destroy a four-story building. Once I steered sharply to the right, and a whole wall came down. Suddenly I heard shouting on the radio: 'Kurdi, watch it! It is us!' Turns out there where our guys inside, and they forgot to tell me.

"I had plenty of satisfaction. I really enjoyed it. I remember pulling down a wall of a four-story building. It came crashing down on my D-9. My partner screamed at me to reverse, but I let the wall come down on us. We would go for the sides of the buildings, and then ram them. If the job was to hard, we would ask for a tank shell.

"I couldn't stop. I wanted to work and work. There was this Golani officer who gave us orders by radio—I drove him mad. I kept begging for more and more missions. On Sunday, after the fighting was over, we got orders to pull our D-9's out of the area, and stop working on our 'football stadium', because the army didn't want the cameras and press to see us working. I was really upset, because I had plans to knock down the big sign at the entrance of Jenin—three poles with a picture of Arafat. But on Sunday, they pulled us away before I had time to do it.”

An Update on My Work With ICAHD

2009-06-14T06:52:00.001-04:00

After almost two weeks here and no postings regarding the nature of my work with ICAHD, questions from friends and family are understandably beginning to trickle in: "Are you actually working?"

To answer, my work for the organization up until today has been tech-oriented stuff that the group needed done and that I volunteered for. I tweaked the ICAHD Facebook page, uploaded pictures, and recently designed a draft for a flyer advertising the organization's tours of East Jerusalem.

That's right, this beauty was designed with Microsoft Word.

Of course, I didn't come halfway across the world simply to sit inside tapping away at a computer, painfully drawing lines with the touchpad of my laptop. This was simply interim work while I waited for the contacts for my main project, a case study of small villages in the Jordan Valley. Today, an ICAHD staffer finally got back to me with some names and numbers. So now (hopefully) the real work begins.

Another intern (who speaks decent Arabic, thank God) and I will be going out to Palestinian villages out in the Jordan Valley, investigating reports that the IDF is using these villages for urban military training exercises—often while the people are still in them! The flagship example of this is the village of Aqaba, in which the mayor himself is paralyzed and wheelchair-bound because of these careless exercises. We may not be going to that village specifically, but we will be out taking pictures and talking to the locals, essentially providing a reflection of the larger problem with concrete examples and human faces.

It's essentially journalism, which is why I'm looking forward to it!

I figured I'd end this post with some tragedy-tinged comedy, so take a good look at the fascinating flyer below and reflect....

How Soap is Made in Nablus

2009-06-13T07:43:00.002-04:00

This morning my British friend and I traversed the Palestinian city of Nablus, darting amongst the throng of people in the bustling market and soaking in the rich culture and history of Nablus’ Old City. Since he had spent some time in the city working for Project Hope, he gave me a tour of the area, which included a peek into the makings of acclaimed Nablusi soap. A few words of Arabic and some hand gestures to the men of a downtown factory sufficed to let us inside for a look at how it’s made.

First, the giant vat full of stuff that looks pretty putrid, fetid...the word "curdled" came to mind as well. I immediately thought of Brad Pitt jumping into a dumpster, sloshing around in bags of human fat, when I peered at this chunky, beige-yellow cocktail. But like an ugly caterpillar morphing into a beautiful butterfly, this stuff will eventually be refined into elegant, silken soap bars.

That white surface that these two men are standing on is essentially one giant bar of soap. The questionable-looking soap solution from the vat is poured onto the floor into a level sheet which covers an impressive area, with a square footage probably greater than that of the average Palestinian home. Then, reddish gridlines are drawn upon the soapen floor, marking the lines where the workers will cut to make the bars of soap that will be put on the market.

The men cutting the soap use what is essentially a long X-Acto knife tethered to their waists, which is done to help steady their hands for a job that is, well, exacting. They start at one end of the floor and gently shuffle backwards with the blade until they reach the end of the floor. Then they turn around, move three inches to the side, and repeat.

Stacks of soap bars sit in the adjacent room, all in different stages of maturity. The soap must age for about a month before it is suitable for sale. The smooth floor has taken on a waxen layer of soap itself, prompting the workers to warn us to watch our step on the way out. Unfortunately, none of the soap bars were being wrapped while we were there—the Briton tells me it is done at a mindboggling speed.

This is but a tiny taste of this wondrous city; I could probably write thousands more words about the place although I had only spent perhaps a total of twelve hours there. It has a much different feel than Ramallah. The air of history is palpable; you are given clues to it in the beautiful Arab calligraphy carved into marble slabs. The culture is arresting because it is much less international (Westerners, you will be noticed) and less socially liberal—alcohol is not sold here. Posters of "martyrs" are everywhere; some as young as teenagers are shown bristling with weapons accompanied by Arabic script and the date of their death. Unsurprising, given that Nablus took perhaps the greatest hit from the Israelis during the Second Intifada.

I didn't get to take any pictures of the aforementioned market, which is a story in itself, but I plan on returning and taking plenty of shots. In the meantime, here is my quasi-stream-of-consciousness account of the one-of-a-kind place that is the Old City market:

heads of lamb floating in tupperware tub, stray cats darting amongst garbage, burlap bags of tobacco alongside burlap bag of cigarette wrappings that said tobacco was scavenged from, olives and capers in well-worn fishing buckets and two-liter soda bottles, children with goods hoping for eye contact, children of curiosity hoping for conversation "hello, where are you from?', posters of young palestinian men with their guns, ancient cobblestones worn smooth by millions of footsteps, man at the freshly-squeezed juice stand with a nubby thumb and something like a fingernail growing out of the tip, empty produce boxes (many from Israel), whole cow's heads (some decorated with hats and sunglasses) hanging from hooks to show that the meat hanging alongside it was freshly slaughtered, mountains of produce, tunnels strewn with goods, packed with bodies.

A Geographic Primer on Israel/Palestine

2009-06-11T10:59:00.002-04:00

Below is an email I sent to my extended family a few months ago regarding the trip out here. The last thing I want to do is write extensively about a situation without providing any context, so I wrote this in an effort to give an idea to the uninitiated in my family of the place and history of the conflict.

******************************
Family,

I thought I'd give you an idea of where I'm going to work this summer (which is the Jerusalem area in Israel/Palestine), for those of you who may be unfamiliar with the geography of the region. Hopefully the images should work on your email - you may need to give your browser permission to show them.

Below is a map of the Middle East. Israel is the small maroonish colored country NW of Saudi Arabia. You'll notice inside Israel is a white splotch of land - that is the West Bank, where most Palestinians live.

Moving down to a more detailed map of Israel itself. Although the white shading suggests that Israel is within those red boundaries, it also exercises nearly complete control over the neighboring West Bank and the Gaza Strip (near the Egypt border).

You'll notice Jerusalem, where I'll be working, is right on the border between Israel and the West Bank. East Jerusalem is mostly populated by Arab Palestinians. It's largely agreed upon that because of historical, religious, and demographic factors, East Jerusalem must be the capital of any future Palestinian state. Yet demolition of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem by the Israeli authorities is at an alarming level right now. We hear about Palestinian terrorist attacks in Jerusalem, but the causes, the motives behind these attacks are rarely mentioned - usually because it is not politically correct to say that Israel's demolition of Palestinian homes, torture of Palestinian prisoners, and humiliating treatment of Palestinians at "checkpoints" within their own territory probably play a major role in driving somebody to blow themselves up.

Of course, I don't want you to get the wrong idea and worry - at this point in time, those kind of incidents are very rare. One of my friends in the West Bank told me that people are tired of fighting - even though the reasons to fight stare them in the face every day.

I will be staying in Ramallah, just north of Jerusalem, shown on this map as "Ram Allah."

Below, looking at the West Bank itself. Unfortunately, the West Bank and Gaza are not recognized as sovereign countries, but "territories" occupied by Israel since the war of 1967. Israeli settlers in the Palestinian territory (illegal by international law) now number in the hundreds of thousands in the West Bank.

One of the biggest challenges posed to the viability of a future Palestinian state is not simply corrupt or inept or bickering Palestinian leadership, but the fact that the West Bank now has blotches of Israeli settlements connected by roads (which only Jews can use) which slices the territory into several pieces. These settlers are largely motivated by extreme religious Zionism, which quotes religious text to claim the right to what they believe is ALL of historical Israel or "Eretz Israel" (map of which can seen here). Unfortunately, the Israeli army has mostly protected these settlers despite the illegality of what they are doing.

So that's all I have for now. Feel free to talk to me if you have any more questions...

Love,
-Jeff

Playing Basketball Without a Hoop in Downtown Ramallah

2009-06-10T05:58:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, while my British roommate and I were strolling about downtown Ramallah, we encountered a rare sporting goods store, so I seized the opportunity and bought a basketball. It wasn’t a compulsive buy: I had just met an American who was also into shooting hoops, and we half-joked about entering Ramallah’s “Streetball Challenge” around the same time next month, featuring a hefty grand prize of 10,000 shekels (over $2500) and a sweet “Nike

I didn’t think the decision to forego the bag would have anything other than an infinitesimally small environmental effect. Besides, I wanted to dribble the ball around, get a feel for it.

Yet within the first fifteen minutes out of the store, the ball had touched probably five different pairs of hands. Left and right, at the sight of the basketball triggered an automatic “pass it to me” hand gesture among the males of the Palestinian population.

When the first man-on-the-street, a middle aged, bald-by-choice man with a goatee, asked for the ball, a part of the distrustful American in me reared its ugly head: “You gonna give it back?” I asked him. “Of course,” he said in clear English; obviously he had spent some time in America. So I passed it to him and we converged on a street corner near the Minarah, the city’s centerpoint marked by statues of lions.

While he dribbled, he talked about working and living in central Florida – coincidentally, where I’m from—for about fifteen years. Curiously enough, he would pause his story intermittently to cat-call at women as they went by. I wondered what his goal was – from what I’ve heard, even the most secular-looking Palestinian girls don’t sleep around.

So I asked him what the point of it was, seeing as he wasn’t going to get any. But he retorted with something along the lines of “Are you kidding? There’s more fucking around here than in America…I’ve fucked so many hos here.” While he elaborated on how Ramallah girls were prone to getting nasty, he stopped again to dish out a “Hey baby” to somebody not even close to womanhood.

“That’s a twelve year-old girl, man,” said my British friend incredulously.

“I wasn’t looking at her, I was checkin’ out her mom!” he replied.

We look back at the girl and see her mother at her side, covered from head to toe in dark clothing.

A bit demoralized by the experience, we walked in a daze towards the Old City and encountered the familiar sound of vendors shouting at the top of their lungs at the produce market. One of them, a deeply tanned man probably in his late forties, saw the ball in my hand and gestured for it. By this time, Ramallahans had gained my trust so I flung it to him without a second thought.

Rather than juggling, dribbling, and finally returning the ball, he beckoned towards me. “Come on,” he said in rough English. He wanted me to guard him. It was on! The surreality of it didn’t take long to sink in. Here I was, tenaciously guarding a Palestinian produce vendor who was dribbling a basketball amongst apricots and watermelons, all against a backdrop of decrepit looking buildings. I felt like this would a perfect scene for some corny movie about cultural understanding.

When it comes to basketball, defense is my forte – the man got a few dribbles in before a well-timed swipe put the ball in my hands. Then I juked right, crossed over to the left, and spun around him towards a nonexistent goal. Our brief bout of tender manliness was over, and he stretched out his meaty hand with a smile. “Welcome,” he said, a common refrain among Palestinians upon seeing a Westerner walking their streets.

The Politics of House Demolitions; Photos from Jabel Mukaber

2009-06-08T18:33:00.003-04:00

One of the most wonderful things that ICAHD does is rebuild Palestinian homes that have been demolished by the Israeli government. The benefit is tangible, obvious, and immediate—unlike the results of many other activist endeavors. Unfortunately, the new house is in danger of being re-demolished for the same reason it was demolished the first time around. Still it buys the family vital time, years perhaps, to provide their children with a place to sleep and basic protection from the elements. After all, there are thousands upon thousands of demolition orders for Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem alone, which are conducted completely at random.

Why would there be so many thousands of homes in East Jerusalem slated for demolition? Well, they’re considered illegal by the Israeli government. Okay then, why is there so much illegal building going on in East Jerusalem? Could there not be a valid reason? Before we go any further, consider this vitally interesting tidbit of information:

The Jerusalem Municipal Plan of 2004 calls for the maintenance of a 70-30 per cent Jewish-Arab population balance in the city in order to preserve “a firm Jewish majority in the city” via the planning process.

In what other country would this policy be even remotely excusable? Let's make a few slight adjustments to put this in perspective.

The Atlanta Municipal Plan of 2004 calls for the maintenance of a 70-30 per cent Caucasian-African American population balance in the city in order to preserve "a firm Caucasian majority in the city" via the planning process.

Is this analogy unfair? I'd love to hear an argument on this.

Although it is often dubious to ascribe definite motives to actions, it seems logical that the Israeli government would prefer that the city of Jerusalem, straddling the border between Israel and Palestine, be "de-Arabized." Of course it would be a PR nightmare for Israel to launch an outright ethnic cleansing campaign, but there are many other means to get Palestinians out of this holy city.

One of the most effective tools used to achieve this goal is a stringent (but selectively enforced) legal code. If Palestinians build an addition to an existing home to accommodate a growing family, it is usually decreed "illegal" by the zoning authorities, and the entire house is demolished.

Recently, a home in the Jabel Mukaber neighborhood of East Jerusalem suffered this exact fate, and a large Palestinian family was left homeless. And, to try and tie this back to my original point, ICAHD built them a new house. Out of gratitude, the family threw a party with what little they had, and I was invited although I hadn't arrived in Israel in time to participate in the actual building of the new home. I enjoyed my soda and cookies, no matter how undeserved they were. When I stepped outside, I took some pictures...

The new home. Nothing fancy, but a home nonetheless. On an unrelated note, the refrigerator inside had a poster of Hulk Hogan taped to it.

Looking back on the sunsplashed road from which we came.

...And panning 180 degrees, looking out on Israel in the foreground and the West Bank in the background, the beige wall being an extension of the "separation barrier" between the two.

There's no shortage of (adorable) children around here, which is a lingering, looming concern of the Israeli government. Called the "demographic timebomb" by some, the Arab population of Israel and the Occupied Territories (or what I've been referring to as "Palestine") is growing faster than the Jewish population, jeopardizing what is called the “Jewish character” of the state.

Natural models!

On Being an Ignorant Leftist Foreigner

2009-06-07T20:28:00.001-04:00

When my bus from Ramallah arrives in Jerusalem, there is a sense of relief activated somewhere inside of me, then a counteracting jolt of shame. An unsettling emotional cocktail.

I don’t know how many times I’ve criticized Israel, yet here I am reaping its benefits: I really don’t have to learn its language, I don’t have to fill out any immigration papers, and like parts of America, I get preferential treatment because of the color of my skin. If a car full of Palestinian Arabs tried to go through the same checkpoint that a few German internationals and I passed through the other day on the way here, they would be promptly turned around, at the very least.

Now sitting here in a relatively affluent-looking shopping plaza in the Jewish quarter of western Jerusalem, in Israel proper, I feel somewhat at home. English is being spoken, hippies are playing acoustic guitar across the walkway, and a mute beggar with a dent in the back of his head is going from table to table communicating through the jingle-jangle of his change cup. The only difference between here and home is the Hebrew lettering on some of the storefronts and the occasional Israeli Defence Forces soldier (all looking in their early twenties) sauntering by in olive green fatigues. Still, I’m guessing that many more tourists – many of them fellow Americans -- are on this city block than in all of Ramallah.

In Palestine the barrier of both culture and language is noticeably thicker. Surely, I didn’t do enough homework regarding the Arabic language, but even if I did, I would have been completely unprepared for the Palestinian dialect. Palestinians are also familiar with English, but theirs is limited and less openly spoken. Not knowing the language of a place can put one in a terribly compromising position which can turn even the most extroverted, confident person into a bumbling, self-loathing fool.

This dichotomy reminds me of my first unaccompanied trip overseas, to Barcelona a few years ago. I was supposed to meet a group of friends at the Sants Train Station, but when their train finally arrived, they didn’t. There was no way for me to get a hold of them. Hours passed, hours during which I realized my Spanish was totally inadequate for real world conversation. It was getting dark. Finally in a panic I followed a group of Americans onto the subway to a very touristy part of town, each side of the street lined with the signs of American icons like KFC, Subway, and McDonalds. At home I would sneer at (but still hypocritically indulge in) corporate food, the symbol of a diseased mentality, a broken food system. But here I welcomed the neon signs with open arms, pieces of home. I was safe from the vast black gulf of the unknown, an unknown which loses its adventurous, exciting quality when you are alone for the first time in a foreign country, at night.

Walking through the streets of Ramallah, I am hardly social with the Palestinians I came here to help. I make eye contact, nod, wave, say “marhaba,” and they do the same, but I hope they say no more than that. The embarrassment of moving into an Arab city yet knowing only ten words of Arabic is massive. Stupid American. The feeling is similar to being at an office in which I’ve neglected to learn the name of somebody I’ve worked with for six months, and so I simply scurry out the door of the break room so to avoid any discussion that would reveal my dirty little secret, which the coworker already knows. In Ramallah it is the same coward’s conundrum, having to choose between displaying ignorance or arrogance, of initiating a doomed conversation, or not talking to somebody at all.

This is the familiar dilemma of the Western leftist, a person ideologically conditioned to sympathize with the poor, dirty, and oppressed, but socially conditioned to and emotionally attached to familiar middle-class customs and surroundings.

Early, Early Morning in Ramallah and the Arabic Language

2009-06-06T06:20:00.002-04:00

At around 3:45 in the morning, a song sliced through the still air outside and darted in through the open window, yanking me out of sleep. A man was singing over some sort of powerful loudspeaker.

The dawn prayer. This early?

Just as I was doubting the accuracy and sanity of the prayer scheduling, a rooster cock-a-doodle-doo-ed in the distance after respectfully waiting for the song to end, which was marked by a loud “beep” of a dial tone. I guess these things are done over a speakerphone. Sure enough, the black of the sky began to lose its bold purity, and gave way to the creeping light. Dawn comes early here.

(My Swiss friend tells me that once, in another Palestinian town, she heard the song of prayer interrupted by the sound of the performer’s cell phone going off.)

Ramallah is not as conservative as the larger West Bank city of Nablus to the north, but it is still a predominantly Muslim city, which means that one can expect to hear prayers sung five times a day from each major mosque in the city. The aforementioned dawn prayer is called fajr, or in written Arabic,

الفجر

Arabic is an interesting (and incredibly daunting) language. It is read right to left, and like cursive, the shape of letters change when they are linked to others. There is a dizzying array of different Arabic dialects: for example, there are sizable portions of Egyptian Arabic that are incomprehensible to Palestinian Arabs, and vice versa. Buying an introduction-to-Arabic book is practically useless without some sort of accompanying audio, as the Anglo-fied Arabic words leave little clue as to their pronunciation.

The Arabic spoken here is tied heavily into the Islamic faith, the phrase “inshallah” (“God willing”) being much more heavily used than a simple “aywa” (“yes”), much to the annoyance to internationals having difficulty pegging natives to a definite time and place to meet. The importance of time is not as pronounced here, which I would guess developed as a survival mechanism of the Palestinian psyche in response to being occupied by the Israelis for decades upon decades. How depressing it would be for a Palestinian to count off the days that he has been ruled by a foreign power, to count off the minutes and hours that he is waiting at an Israeli checkpoint. As seductively clever as that idea may be, however, I have a feeling that Palestinians have been this way long before modern Israel was even dreamed of.

While sharing an argeela (what Americans call a “hookah,” or what Britons seem to call the “hubbly bubbly”) on the balcony, my British roommate and I discuss the neurosis of time-obsession. He says there is no better example of the difference between the West’s and East’s emphasis on time than in the English and Thai languages. English features multiple different tenses to describe the past and future – had gone, have gone, will have gone, will go, should go, did go, etc. – while, according to him, Thai only features one tense (“I go to Boston twenty years ago; I go to Boston tomorrow”).

Time, in many respects a social necessity, still has enormous potential to be utterly enslaving. One only needs to look at the Blackberry-addled, "time is money" culture of America in which people are always looking at their watches, so worried about the future that they are incapable of enjoying the moment that is right in front of them. Because most of the American day is rigidly scheduled in advance, there is little room for the moments of spontaneity that are the most likely to create lasting memories that are looked upon with fondness and excitement.

So while sitting on the porch, watching the sunset over the valley, drinking a Taybeh (THE Palestinian beer), talking with my roommate, the urge to maximize my productivity, to do something, is understandably—and gratefully—weak. Of course, there is much work to be done...but not right now.