1948, every day

For photographs of the past couple weeks: http://community.webshots.com/album/551493898liIGUc

After a week of traveling with a Birthright Unplugged group, I’m sitting in a beautiful apartment in Ramallah, watching the BBC report about Israeli incursions into Gaza.

And staring at a blank computer screen.

What is happening to the Palestinian people is so wrong, so clearly wrong, that it’s hard to know what to say.

Because I can’t just start at the Israeli bombings and cutting of electricity, food, and water, and the abduction of more than 25 Palestinian parliament members and a third of the cabinet, which is in response to the killing of two Israeli soldiers and the kidnapping of one, which was in response to the killing of dozens of Palestinian civilians, including Huda’s family on the beach.

I can’t just start at the lack of salaries for one third of the Palestinian population, which is a result of the government having no money to pay its workers, which is a result of the banks refusing to transfer money into Palestine, which is a result of the United States’ direct threats to banks and the rest of the world’s complicity in that, as well as the worldwide boycott against the democratically elected Palestinian government.

I can’t just start at the world’s unequal and mostly unconditional support for Israel, the media’s participation in the propaganda war, the fact that the law of force has consistently trumped the force of law, as a Palestinian friend often says.

I can’t just start at Israel’s refusal to engage in real negotiations with Palestinians over the years, the constant expansion of settlements and working out of agreements with the US that are then offered to Palestinian negotiators on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

I can’t just start at the military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem in 1967, which continues until today.

The truth is that 1948 is a tragedy unfolding every day. The expulsion of at least 800,000 indigenous people from their land, and the establishment of a state based on religion and ethnicity, is an injustice that plays out in each moment of each day in this land.

This is not a political doctrine. This is not rhetoric. When I say that the events of 1948 continue to unfold each day, it is not a figure of speech. Yesterday I sat in the living room of a man who was in first grade when Zionist forces came to the outskirts of his village and began to shoot. He recalls bullets flying over his head, the killing of two of the village’s residents and the resulting fleeing of the rest. He remembers his father gathering up the family and the donkeys and leaving their ancestral lands, only to flee a few kilometers to where he now lives, as an Israeli citizen with fewer rights than other Israeli citizens because of the simple fact that he is not Jewish. He spoke about the land in the village, the places he played at 6 years old, and his eyes welled up with tears.

We then went to visit his village, Al Lajun, which has been taken over by Kibbutz Megiddo. We walked with him and two men in their 80s, along paths whose stones had been the stones of the houses. Each place we walked, one of these men, who were in their 20s in 1948, would point and say, this is where the Jabrin family lived, this is where Mahajne lived, this is where Mahamid lived. The pomegranate tree remains, the cactus remains, but the rubble from the houses has been flattened into the landscape and covered over with pine trees planted by the Jewish National Fund.

The people from this village, even those who are Israeli citizens living just 10 minutes away, are disallowed from returning to their land. 1948 is a tragedy happening today.

I sit in refugee camps with people who dream of having the right to choose where they live. 1948 is a tragedy happening today.

I find myself in a conversation with a Jewish Israeli man who runs a restaurant and bar in a building that used to be a mosque. He knows the village’s history, he knows that the former inhabitants of the village, the builders of the village, live just up the hill in a new village unrecognized by the Israeli government. He knows all this and he says that the past is past, that we must think about the future. Which is what most people with power say. After you have stolen something, after an injustice in which force has made you the “winner” and someone else the “loser,” it makes sense that you would want to forget the past. 1948 is a tragedy happening today.

So as the Israeli tanks assemble on the borders of Gaza and begin a massive incursion, I think also of Adnan’s tears as he remembers a pre-Israeli incursion into his own village. And I wonder how we can talk about one thing without talking about everything. And yet I wonder how we can deal with anything when we’re trying to deal with everything. The state of Israel will not become secular or democratic by tomorrow, or next week, or next month, or next year. How do we stop this incursion into Gaza, or the next one, or the starvation of the Palestinian people by the world community?

I don’t have clear answers. I’ve been pondering effectiveness and frustrated with myself and the Palestine solidarity community for not figuring out how to mount an effective campaign about anything. Because things here only get worse and worse for the Palestinian people, and the Israeli government is quite skilled at keeping the Palestinian community in crisis mode. And the rest of us in reaction mode. So if Israel kills dozens of people in Gaza in the next few days, and then they stop, the world will thank them for stopping, justify collective punishment, and forget about anything that happened before.

So what can we do? In general, we need more creative and public actions, everywhere, to draw attention to the political crisis here that has led to a humanitarian crisis.

In the short term, let’s figure out how to get money here. Friends who have never asked me for anything before are starting to ask if I can help them or find others to do so. I have a critique of aid work and bandaid solutions both in theory and in practice, but when my friends can’t afford food and medicine, I’m not sure whether this critique can stand.

In the long term, please please please figure out how to isolate Israel from the world community, to force them to stop what they’re doing. I think the boycott/sanctions/divestment movement has some potential. It has worked in other places. Pressure your local supermarkets to stop buying Israeli goods or at least to label them so that consumers can choose which oranges to buy. Pressure your universities, religious institutions, companies, and municipalities to stop investing in Israel Bonds, Israeli companies, or American companies like Caterpillar who continue to supply Israel with weapons. Pressure the US government to let the banks transfer money into Palestine, to pay the public school teachers and all other government employees who have been working without pay for 4 months.

And if you have any creative ideas, please let me know. We can work together.

-Hannah

Did you see Huda?

“Did you see Huda?”

Everywhere I go, this is the first question people ask.

“Did you see Huda?” They are asking if I’ve seen the pictures. They are asking if I’ve seen the footage of the 12-year-old girl pounding the sand next to her dead father’s body. They are asking if I know that this girl lost her entire family while trying to have a nice day at the beach. They are asking if I know that the occupation in Gaza is more intense than ever, that the Israeli government/army murders more and more people each day without consequence, that the world continues to blame Palestinians for engaging in a democratic process.

“I saw her, yes.”

Twelve people killed that day, 6 the next, 14 the next. And the shelling and bombing continues. Fatah blames Hamas, Hamas blames Fatah, and young men from each party find themselves fighting each other in the streets of Ramallah as the cars drive around and the drivers laugh and say, “For about 2 hours each day it’s like this, then everything goes back to normal.”

I learned how to say “divide and conquer” in Arabic the other day. The Israeli government must be sitting back and laughing over how well things are going for them these days. Israel murders civilians, annexes land, builds the Wall, prevents money from entering Palestine, watches the Palestinian population slip into dire poverty and begin to fight each other, and the people have yet to rise up with violence against Israel. Or even any kind of effective nonviolent campaign. People are talking, sure, but that’s about it. They are talking, and they are trying to survive (its own form of nonviolent resistance). They are talking about how Olmert and Peretz are worse than Sharon and Mofaz, how people are unable to live now, how they don’t know how they will continue with no salaries and no cooking gas.

That’s right, there’s no cooking gas in much of the West Bank now (I don’t know about Gaza but can only imagine things are even worse there). One Israeli company supplied all the cooking gas for the West Bank, and announced last month that they would no longer do so. Most people I’ve talked with have no idea why. My friends in Dheisheh refugee camp said something about the Palestinian Authority owing money to the company and this is punishment. I have no idea whether that’s true or not. Either way, the people are suffering.

I was talking with my friends about the importance of boycotting Israel, both a worldwide boycott and a Palestinian boycott, and we repeated a conversation we’ve had many times before.

“We can’t boycott Israel,” they say. “We can’t live without Israel.”

“You can boycott some things,” I say. “You don’t need to buy Tapuzina [Israeli juice]; you have Marawi [Palestinian juice].”

“Sure,” they say, “we can buy Marawi, but what will that do? All the basic necessities come from Israel. They’ve taken our water and now they sell it back to us, the electricity is from Israel, the gas is from Israel, what can we do?”

And so, in the absence of any hope for change from external political campaigns, they blame Hamas. Not everyone, but some people. They tell me that Hamas is unwilling to compromise with Fatah, Hamas doesn’t want a solution, even that Hamas is starting to become corrupt like Fatah was. Or maybe not exactly like Fatah was, but apparently many Arab and Muslim countries have offered money to Palestine, and there hasn’t been a way to get it here. The United States has threatened banks that transfer money to Palestinians and people who have tried to bring large sums of money through Rafah have been turned away (so much for an “open border” that’s supposedly not controlled by Israel). So individuals have been bringing small amounts of money, not enough to help all the people, so Hamas takes the money and distributes it to Hamas members in the form of small relief items (again, I’m not sure how prevalent this is, it’s just what I’ve heard…).

And meanwhile, everyone says, meanwhile the children are suffering. “I didn’t vote for Hamas,” one friend told me, “and my children certainly didn’t vote for Hamas.” “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Even if you did, why is that a reason to make you suffer?” It’s strange to find myself defending Hamas to my Palestinian friends, but of course I’m not suffering from a lack of basic necessities. Most people here are more practical than ideological, so of course they’ll think about all possible ways to change their situation. They can’t change American foreign policy, they can’t change Israeli policy, so they look closer to home and wish that Fatah and Hamas could come to some agreement that might be accepted by the world.

I’ve asked people what they think of the proposed referendum. Most seem to think it won’t lead anywhere, for one reason or another. One friend spent ten minutes trying to convince me of something I already believe: that consensus is the best way to make decisions. If Fatah and Hamas agree on something, he said, there is some hope. If the proposal goes to the people without the approval of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, even if 99% of the people vote for it, one person blows himself up in Tel Aviv and Israel will call all Palestinians terrorists and Palestinians will find themselves in a situation they all too often encounter: They will have made huge compromises, put in writing their willingness to give up some of their rights for the sake of peace, and this will become the new status quo, the new bottom line, as Israel continues to refuse to give up anything because not every Palestinian individual is behaving as they think he should.

Of course, all of this is my thinking, my construction of the political story based on conversations with people who aren’t all thinking this way right now. They are thinking about where there next meal will come from. They are wondering when their next paycheck will come. They are trying to figure out how to get from one place to the next through roadblocks, checkpoints, rising gas prices, and a permit system that is more restrictive than ever.

And they are thanking God for what they still have, thanking God that they are not Huda.

Did you see Huda?