Dear friends,
This will be more of a “blog” than my usual e-mails. No deep thoughts or political analysis, and not a publication-style essay. Just a little “Hello from Syria” message after three weeks of being here and not writing.
What prompted me to write, to connect across the ocean to where most of you are, is that my host father told me this morning that he had just seen a report on Al Jazeera about a 20,000 person protest in the US, something about a military training school. When I realized he was talking about the SOA (School of the Americas) I got excited. “The SOA protest was on Al Jazeera?” I asked incredulously. I can only wonder whether it finally got some decent media in the US this year as well or not. [For those of you who don’t know the SOA: soaw.org]
So… I imagine you might want to hear a bit about Syria. I came here to study Fus’ha (written/classical Arabic) for a month and to live with a Palestinian family that I met when doing Re-Plugged work here last February. My class is in Damascus, but the family lives in the extension of a refugee camp 20km outside of town called Khan Eshieh. It is super quiet and peaceful out here, something that I loved for the first week or two as I took the time to study and read and sleep, but I’m starting to feel a bit stifled by being in such a rural area (even though I go to the city every day).
Damascus is a beautiful city, and is the oldest capital in the world. The market in the old city attracts foreigners and Syrians alike, all of whom are pretty much considered tourists in the market. For the most part, Damascus feels like a very Arab city with less foreign influence than other cities I’ve seen around here (Beirut, Amman). There are still no McDonald’s anywhere to be found, although there is the new KFC phenomenon.
Life is very affordable here. It costs me 30 cents to get into the city from Khan Eshieh. Food is cheap, education and healthcare are subsidized by the government for Syrians and Palestinians (most of the new Iraqi immigrants do not have the same services). While the government has changed a bit over the years, it is still pretty socialist and fully secular. It’s one of the more stable countries in an unstable region, and people generally seem pretty happy.
Which makes the Big Brother feeling a little confusing. There are pictures of the president (Bashar Assad) everywhere – on billboards, houses, stores, cars. I hear from people that there are secret police in more places than we might think. The government collects people’s names and ID numbers when getting on certain buses and going into certain buildings. There is definitely some sort of norm that people are expected to fit into, and then within that is freedom for diversity. Most people seem to happily fit into that norm. Not me. Part of it is just familiarity, I’m sure, but I feel more comfortable in Palestine than here. The major reasons:
1. Palestine. While most people here are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and are quick to criticize Israel, I can’t actually tell anyone that I’ve been there. See, the Syrian government prohibits people who have been to Palestine from coming here. Why? Because it’s all occupied by Israel and they see it as normalizing relations with Israel. So if they see an Israeli stamp on a passport (which could mean you’ve been hanging out on the beach in Tel Aviv or doing solidarity work in the West Bank or anything in between), they will deny you entry. So I have to keep a low profile about where I’ve been and where I’m going from here (my host family knows, of course, as do many of the other Palestinians I meet, but I can’t talk about it openly in Arabic class, for example, or even to taxi drivers – I’ve heard stories that may or may not be true of people getting turned in by taxi drivers and deported).
2. Being Jewish. I don’t understand the situation enough yet to know whether folks would be comfortable with my being Jewish, but my assumption is usually not. In Palestine people are more directly harmed by Jews on a daily basis, but there is also more contact in general, and thus more awareness that not all Jews are Israeli, not all Jews are Zionists, etc. Here I’m not quite sure that’s the case. So I’m worried that if I tell people I’m Jewish it could reflect badly on my host family, or that people might assume that I’m a spy. I could be wrong.
3. Gender. My hair is short. In Palestine, this often causes people to do a double take, or even sometimes to assume at first glance that I’m a man but to change their minds once I give a subtle cough (I do this sometimes when I know that men who are sitting next to me assume that I’m a man, because there is generally far less personal space between men in the Arab world than in the US and far more between men and women). Now, in Syria, I find that people don’t even look twice. I am almost consistently perceived as a man – and usually a Syrian man. Incredibly, I’ve found that even when I speak people often do not change this assumption (if I speak more than a few words, of course, they’ll hear my accent and figure out I’m not Syrian, but will still often think I’m a man). It’s interesting in many ways, but in such a gendered society it can also be awkward, like when the driver of a shared taxi orders me to squeeze in the front with him and another guy in order to let women get into the body of the car. Or when a man giving me directions puts his arm around me to push me in the right direction, something he clearly would not have done if he thought I was a woman. So I have to decide on a pretty constant basis whether to try to keep passing as male or to make my gender clear… I have more empathy right now for my trans friends than I ever have before (though of course it’s not the same and is only temporary for me).
I’ve also been sick for much of my time here, which I’m sure isn’t helping. First a cold, then stomach issues which seem (knock on wood) to finally be getting better.
The best thing as of late was my meeting a friend of a friend, a young woman who is a breath of fresh air in a way that almost makes me too un-self-conscious. She’s Syrian, but has gotten very interested both in Palestine and in Jews, having questioned her society’s assumptions about Jewish people. She’s planning to do Master’s work researching relations among Muslims, Christians and Jews in Andalusia, in pre-48 Palestine, and today in the Middle East, and how these relations have been affected by war. You can see how we might connect? So the other day we got together and I showed her a bunch of pictures of Palestine on my computer, occasionally saying, “Ramallah” and “Gaza” a little too loudly as I excitedly pointed to pictures I had taken. We’d look around nervously, but nobody was paying attention to us. We also talked about synagogues, Reconstructionist Judaism, and anti-Zionist Israelis.
I have another week here, then I will likely go to Lebanon for a few days and then make my way back to Palestine.
And that’s my update from Syria.
For those of you who I know, please send me your news. My being sick these last couple weeks has led to being homesick as well, and it would be great to hear from you.
Till soon,
Hannah
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Friday, November 07, 2008
What We Know (aka why we must confront Zionism and boycott Israel)
What We Know
(aka Why we must confront Zionism and boycott Israel)
by Hannah Mermelstein
November 7, 2008
Story #1:
A protest tent in the middle of a neighborhood. Thirteen Palestinian families wait for Israeli authorities to demolish their homes in the coming days; dozens more live under constant threat of home demolition, though there is no telling if and when it might happen. After the demolition, the Israeli government will send these Palestinian families the bill for the demolition and the cleanup. Why is this happening? Officially their homes are “illegal.” Officially, each of the families has requested and been denied permits to build on their own land over the past several decades.
Story #2:
A 14-year-old Palestinian boy and his friend are arrested for seemingly no reason. They are not charged and are not told why they have been arrested, but are beaten severely for five hours as the police threaten that they will inject the kids with HIV and dump them on the beach to die.
Story #3:
A group of right-wing Jewish Israelis marches through the neighborhood that they are trying to “Judaize,” yelling “Death to Arabs” and throwing stones at Palestinian homes. They set homes on fire, sometimes with the residents still inside, and several homes are burned to the ground. The Palestinians who try to resist are arrested and held; the few Jewish attackers who are arrested are released right away. The police refuse to investigate and they tell the Palestinian residents there is not enough evidence to charge the attackers.
If you have some familiarity with the situation in Palestine, you might be thinking, “Occupying soldiers can be cruel” or “Hebron settlers are crazy/criminal” or, like Jimmy Carter, “There is apartheid in the West Bank.” You would be right, but incomplete. In fact, all three of the stories above took place inside Israel, and the Palestinian victims are all citizens of the Israeli state. The policies we so often attribute to occupation have actually been the cornerstone of Zionist practice since the inception of the movement.
The problem is not a few bad settlers or soldiers, nor is it, at its core, the ongoing military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The problem is Zionism. The problem is the false idea that a country can be democratic while it defines itself not as a state of its citizens but as the state of a particular group of people, regardless of citizenship. Under Israeli law, I, as a Jewish American without Israeli citizenship, have more rights to land in Israel than the Palestinian people who are from there, including both the Palestinian refugees around the world AND the Palestinian citizens of Israel.
We know these things. In the past several years Israeli leaders have talked more and more openly about the “demographic threat” of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. They talk about population transfer, about Judaization of the Galilee and the Negev, about the need for a Palestinian state so as to once and for all get rid of the “problem” of Palestinian people (the current Palestinian citizens of Israel would theoretically, in a two state solution, either move to the Palestinian state or give up all national rights within their own homeland).
We know these things. We know it is not just about occupation. We know that there is a contradiction between supporting secular democracy in the US and supporting an exclusivist Jewish state in the Middle East. And yet many of us still refuse to publicly acknowledge that Zionism is a form of racism, a form of colonialism. Many refuse to apply the term “apartheid” to Israel unless speaking only of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Many either think that working against military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is enough, or that it will necessarily lead to a broader analysis of the issues at large.
But it is not enough, and it will not automatically lead towards anything beyond itself. We must work to end the occupation, yes, but this must be within, and not before, a context of support for overall justice, equality, and self-determination for indigenous people.
To paraphrase a friend of mine, Zionism is able to survive primarily through the promotion of its ideological narrative, so this is where we must attack it, particularly in the Western world. Our task is to expose the contradictions within Zionist ideology, particularly liberal Zionist ideology, and to make it clear that Israel must choose between being a Jewish state and being a democratic state.
Our task is to support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. [You can read the call, reasons, and demands at bds-palestine.net.] To those of you who say BDS against Israel will never work, remember that people said the same about South Africa. But things change, things always change, for better and for worse. We live in a dynamic world. Zionism will not end tomorrow, nor will any US political leaders make any significant strides towards anything resembling justice without a change in US mentality from the bottom up. This is a long-term and grassroots struggle, and it starts with our own moral consistency. It starts with open opposition to ethnic exclusivity. It does not require great political sophistication or memorization of every important date in the history of colonialism and nationalism in the Middle East. It starts simply with what we already know.
------------------------------------------------
There have been many BDS successes already, from the UK to South Africa to Canada and even to the US. Congratulations to the Somerville Divestment Project and others who worked on the ballot initiative in Massachusetts that received overwhelming support in Somerville (62%) and Cambridge (73%) on Tuesday. While the question was not specifically about boycott, it was about one of the major demands of the BDS call: equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel. The text of Question 4 follows: "Shall the State Representative from this district be instructed to vote in favor of a non-binding resolution calling on the federal government to support the right of all people, including non-Jewish Palestinian citizens of Israel, to live free from laws that give more rights to people of one religion than another."
(aka Why we must confront Zionism and boycott Israel)
by Hannah Mermelstein
November 7, 2008
Story #1:
A protest tent in the middle of a neighborhood. Thirteen Palestinian families wait for Israeli authorities to demolish their homes in the coming days; dozens more live under constant threat of home demolition, though there is no telling if and when it might happen. After the demolition, the Israeli government will send these Palestinian families the bill for the demolition and the cleanup. Why is this happening? Officially their homes are “illegal.” Officially, each of the families has requested and been denied permits to build on their own land over the past several decades.
Story #2:
A 14-year-old Palestinian boy and his friend are arrested for seemingly no reason. They are not charged and are not told why they have been arrested, but are beaten severely for five hours as the police threaten that they will inject the kids with HIV and dump them on the beach to die.
Story #3:
A group of right-wing Jewish Israelis marches through the neighborhood that they are trying to “Judaize,” yelling “Death to Arabs” and throwing stones at Palestinian homes. They set homes on fire, sometimes with the residents still inside, and several homes are burned to the ground. The Palestinians who try to resist are arrested and held; the few Jewish attackers who are arrested are released right away. The police refuse to investigate and they tell the Palestinian residents there is not enough evidence to charge the attackers.
If you have some familiarity with the situation in Palestine, you might be thinking, “Occupying soldiers can be cruel” or “Hebron settlers are crazy/criminal” or, like Jimmy Carter, “There is apartheid in the West Bank.” You would be right, but incomplete. In fact, all three of the stories above took place inside Israel, and the Palestinian victims are all citizens of the Israeli state. The policies we so often attribute to occupation have actually been the cornerstone of Zionist practice since the inception of the movement.
The problem is not a few bad settlers or soldiers, nor is it, at its core, the ongoing military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The problem is Zionism. The problem is the false idea that a country can be democratic while it defines itself not as a state of its citizens but as the state of a particular group of people, regardless of citizenship. Under Israeli law, I, as a Jewish American without Israeli citizenship, have more rights to land in Israel than the Palestinian people who are from there, including both the Palestinian refugees around the world AND the Palestinian citizens of Israel.
We know these things. In the past several years Israeli leaders have talked more and more openly about the “demographic threat” of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. They talk about population transfer, about Judaization of the Galilee and the Negev, about the need for a Palestinian state so as to once and for all get rid of the “problem” of Palestinian people (the current Palestinian citizens of Israel would theoretically, in a two state solution, either move to the Palestinian state or give up all national rights within their own homeland).
We know these things. We know it is not just about occupation. We know that there is a contradiction between supporting secular democracy in the US and supporting an exclusivist Jewish state in the Middle East. And yet many of us still refuse to publicly acknowledge that Zionism is a form of racism, a form of colonialism. Many refuse to apply the term “apartheid” to Israel unless speaking only of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Many either think that working against military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is enough, or that it will necessarily lead to a broader analysis of the issues at large.
But it is not enough, and it will not automatically lead towards anything beyond itself. We must work to end the occupation, yes, but this must be within, and not before, a context of support for overall justice, equality, and self-determination for indigenous people.
To paraphrase a friend of mine, Zionism is able to survive primarily through the promotion of its ideological narrative, so this is where we must attack it, particularly in the Western world. Our task is to expose the contradictions within Zionist ideology, particularly liberal Zionist ideology, and to make it clear that Israel must choose between being a Jewish state and being a democratic state.
Our task is to support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. [You can read the call, reasons, and demands at bds-palestine.net.] To those of you who say BDS against Israel will never work, remember that people said the same about South Africa. But things change, things always change, for better and for worse. We live in a dynamic world. Zionism will not end tomorrow, nor will any US political leaders make any significant strides towards anything resembling justice without a change in US mentality from the bottom up. This is a long-term and grassroots struggle, and it starts with our own moral consistency. It starts with open opposition to ethnic exclusivity. It does not require great political sophistication or memorization of every important date in the history of colonialism and nationalism in the Middle East. It starts simply with what we already know.
------------------------------------------------
There have been many BDS successes already, from the UK to South Africa to Canada and even to the US. Congratulations to the Somerville Divestment Project and others who worked on the ballot initiative in Massachusetts that received overwhelming support in Somerville (62%) and Cambridge (73%) on Tuesday. While the question was not specifically about boycott, it was about one of the major demands of the BDS call: equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel. The text of Question 4 follows: "Shall the State Representative from this district be instructed to vote in favor of a non-binding resolution calling on the federal government to support the right of all people, including non-Jewish Palestinian citizens of Israel, to live free from laws that give more rights to people of one religion than another."
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