Gaza: Day 18

*At the bottom are suggested resources and action items for Gaza.*


Eighteen is a significant number in Judaism. It means life. Today is day 18 of Israel’s war on Gaza. More than 935 people in Gaza are dead, with thousands more injured. Taking the total population into account, this is equivalent in US terms to about 200,000 Americans. That’s right, two hundred thousand Americans dead in less than three weeks.

I turned on the news for an hour yesterday. Across the bottom of the screen, over and over again, ran the statement, “Israel says only targeting Hamas, not civilians.”

#1: Bullshit! A third of the people murdered so far have been children alone. The equivalent of 65,000 American children. The Israeli army is not so sloppy as to miss its targets 300 times. Are they deliberately killing civilians? Perhaps it is a matter of semantics. I’m not so sure they said, “Let’s kill Miyasar Abu Maatak and her four young children today,” but they certainly aren’t trying NOT to. In other words, at best, the Israeli army is targeting no one, and therefore potentially hitting everyone.

#2: Huh? Only targeting Hamas, not civilians? Suppose someone bombed the US and then tried to justify it with, “We are only targeting Republicans, not civilians.” If you protest, “But the two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, most Republicans are civilians,” the response would come: Sure, but Republicans are in control in the US, and therefore should be held responsible for every crime committed by an American while they are in power. (I am not even talking here about the massive war crimes committed by the US government itself, which gives much more legitimate reasons for bombing the US).

And so, once again, we are in the twilight zone. Where houses, schools, universities, and mosques are fair targets. Where Israel can close all entrances and exits to Gaza and then become indignant that people dig tunnels to transport necessary goods between Gaza and Egypt. Where Israel claims to be humanitarian because it stops indiscriminately bombing for up to 3 hours a day (and even during this short time, people are not safe; on Sunday 14 people were shelled and killed in these hours). Or because it drops leaflets as a precursor to bombs, warning the residents of Gaza to leave the area. Leave what area? Nowhere in Gaza is safe, and the people are closed in from all sides.

I watched the new for only an hour yesterday, and cannot get the images out of my head. Parents crying over dead children. Injured children being rushed to the hospital in ambulances, in taxis, on foot. The interview with a 16 year old boy whose mother and four brothers were killed in the attack on the Samouni family in the Zeitoun neighborhood last week (soldiers forced the entire family into one house, supposedly for their safety; the next day it was bombed). Were there 30 people killed there? 70? Accounts vary, mostly because the Israeli army will not allow journalists or ambulances to approach the neighborhood. One young EMT, exhaustion and trauma written all over his face, explained to Al Jazeera how he and others were able to enter a few houses yesterday and pull out the injured only after parking the ambulance 2 kilometers away from their intended destination and passing by 9 dead bodies on the road. Are these bodies counted in the 935? What about those in the houses the EMTs did not reach?

I saw these images, heard the stories, and heard the desperate pleas of Gazans and internationals (UN officials, EU parliament members, and more), the smug assertions of the Israeli army that their operations are going well, and the smirking George Bush as he once again blamed Hamas for the actions of the Israeli army. I wanted to throw something at the television. After less than an hour of news, I, a nonviolent person by disposition, felt my anger and hatred lead me to thoughts and desires I rarely have, some of which would actually harm me and my loved ones. I can only imagine what people living through this horror must feel. Or Arabs and others throughout the world with less personal connection to the enemy, be it Israelis, Americans, or Jews. I must admit I have little concern at the current moment for Israel’s safety, but if Israeli leaders have any concern at all for their own people’s safety, what the hell are they doing?

The princess of Dubai, a humanitarian official with the UN, gave an exacerbated interview in which she talked about the anger of the Arab streets and the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza. “What scares me most,” she said, “is that the news is repeating itself day after day, and those in the West can just turn it off.”

Shortly later, I turned the television off. I couldn’t bear it anymore. But we must not turn off our opposition. Running across the bottom of the screen, right after, “Israel says only targeting Hamas, not civilians,” is “World protests continue over Gaza war.” It is important. It may not seem like it right now, but whenever this does stop, it will be sooner for the protest. The people of Gaza cannot afford our inaction.

Take action:

US Campaign to End the Occupation – info on lobbying, protests, and more: www.endtheoccupation.org
Donate money for emergency supplies: http://www.mecaforpeace.org/
Media monitoring / letters to editor: http://www.writetruth.org
Buy a Gaza t-shirt, or 10: http://247463.spreadshirt.com/-/-/Shop/
This is more long-term, but no better time than now to launch a boycott campaign against Israel: http://bds-palestine.net/

Recommended articles:

“What You Don’t Know About Gaza” by Rashid Khalidi: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/opinion/08khalidi.html?_r=2&em
“A 14-year-old in Gaza Has One Question: Why?” by Eyad El-Sarraj: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/01/11/a_14_year_old_in_gaza_has_one_question_why/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+--+Today%27s+paper+A+to+Z
“Hello, this is the IDF” by Muhammad Ali Khalidi: http://www.counterpunch.org/khalidi01052009.html
For more about the attack on the Samouni house in the Zeitoun neighborhood: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/10/gaza-zeitoun-attack-deaths

Recommended sources for constant information:

Al Jazeera: http://english.aljazeera.net/
Blog of Sameh Habeeb (journalist in Gaza): http://www.gazatoday.blogspot.com/
Democracy Now: http://www.democracynow.org/
Electronic Intifada: http://electronicintifada.net/
Free Gaza Movement (the folks who have been sending boats to break the siege for a few months now): http://freegaza.org/

And more. A good combination of news, resources, and action: http://gazasiege.org

Gaza continued

Dec 29, 2008, 11:30pm in Palestine

The death toll in Gaza has reahed 350. 1650 injured. I wonder how the injured are counted. Are these people who reach the hospital? How many others must there be? We watch the footage on the news of children screaming, men and women wailing, fathers with tears streaming down their faces as they kiss the heads of their dead
infants. We see the destroyed buildings. A university, a pharmacy, a police station, a house...

I just sent a text message to my friend in Gaza (the same one I wrote about the other day, the university student), asking how she was. Her response: "We're out of home now because it's ruined. Dad and brothers injured." I tried to call and she didn't answer. She then wrote, "Please!! I can't say a word now but we're fine. Take care." I wrote and said I am so sorry, that I will continue to write to people in the US and to protest. I asked her if there's anything else she can think of that I can do, knowing there probably isn't. I offered to get her a phone card if she needs credit. "What can a phone card do," she wrote back, "with my dad's leg! It needs operation. I don't want more than safety. I want you to know I appreciate you."

I was supposed to go to a friend's house this afternoon in the northern West Bank. She was going to cook me lunch for my birthday. When I got to the area she was unable to cook or think or do much of anything. She grew up in Gaza and most of her family is there. Last night when she talked to her brother in the middle of the night, a bomb had just exploded nearby and the children were all screaming. They are in Rafah, very close to the border with Egypt. Today she has been unable to reach him.

Please, please, stop what you're doing and go out on the streets in protest. Write to your newspapers. Especially those of you in the US. Today everyone I talked to told me the US streets are silent. That there are protests all over the world (people talk about a huge protest in London that got a lot of media attention here), but that the US is doing nothing. I tell them about the many e-mails I've gotten in the past day of protests scheduled in New York, Boston, DC, San Francisco, etc. And yet, it is not enough. Nothing is enough.

But please, do not continue as usual. 1.5 million people who have been under siege in the largest prison in the world for months, even years now, are now being bombed indiscriminately. We have ignored Gaza for too long. Every day, every hour, every minute counts.

I will pray that the rain and clouds continue through the night. Yes, the people fleeing their homes who are now outside may be cold and wet, but the Israeli army is also having difficulty, apparently, bombing in this weather.

This is insane.

(For anyone who still thinks this attack is a response to Hamas rocket attacks of the past few days, read this Israeli article about how the attacks have been planned for months: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1050448.html)

For US folks who don't know where to look for actions: endtheoccupation.org

Gaza

Today, 271 men, women, and children who were alive yesterday are now dead in Gaza. More than 900 are injured, including 180 critically. The death toll is rising as more people are dug out from under the rubble, and the Israeli government promises that the attacks will continue, and asks its people for patience.

Patience in the face of massacre?

I was on a tour yesterday with the Israeli organization Zochrot. We visited Ras al Ahmar, a Palestinian village in the north close to the Lebanon border, that was destroyed in 1948 and all its inhabitants expelled. We heard the news from Gaza while on our way there, and the leaders of the tour remarked, “Today we talk about a Nakba [catastrophe] that started 60 years ago, and that continues as we speak in Gaza.”

When we arrived back to Tel Aviv in the evening the bus was continuing on to an Israeli protest against the bombing. There are demonstrations and calls for revenge throughout the Middle East. Hamas, who hasn’t carried out a bombing against Israel in almost four years, is calling for a third intifada, a militarized intifada, including suicide bombings.

When I first heard the news yesterday, standing in Ras al Ahmar in front of a landscape of Lebanese mountains, I tried to call my friend Summer, a Palestinian student who has never been able to leave the 140 square miles that make up the Gaza Strip, despite several times being accepted to foreign programs and even being granted visas.

My phone calls wouldn’t go through. Finally, I got her on the phone for a few seconds before the line went. The text message I received from her just afterwards said: “There’s shelling everywhere, more than 120 killed, it’s horrible here!”

When I finally talked to her late last night, she told me she had been in a meeting on a roof when she saw the first F16 drop the first bomb in her area. She went inside. The windows were shaking. Her sister was at the university when a bomb hit. “The bombing is everywhere!” she said. I asked if it was still going on and she said she wasn’t sure, the last bomb she had heard was a half hour earlier.

When I talked to Summer last week and asked how she was, she said fine, and was her usual cheery self. When our connection failed in the middle and I had to call her back, I asked, “Did the electricity cut out?” “Electricity?” she responded. “No, of course we don’t have any electricity; I’ve been talking to you in the dark the whole time.” She went on to tell me she’d waited in line for hours the day before for bread, and hadn’t found any. “They say a truck might get through the crossing tomorrow,” she said hopefully.

At the same time, John Ging, the director of the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza said: “Two weeks ago, for the first time in 60 years, we ran out of food.”

This was all during a supposed “cease fire” which meant Hamas was not attacking Israel at all, and Israel was not committing daily bombing massacres against the people of Gaza. But the slow massacre of siege, border closing, lack of fuel and electricity and bread… that was all part of this “cease fire.”

So Olmert’s statement that “[t]he quiet we offered was answered with mayhem. Our desire for calm was answered with terror,” is almost laughable. If it weren’t for 271 dead and 900 injured. If it weren’t for the Bush administration’s statement that the people in Gaza are “nothing but thugs” and that Hamas is to blame for Israel’s largest massacre since 1967.

When I see the footage, and then read these statements, I am speechless with sadness and rage. I cannot respond. But Mourid Barghouti, in his 2003 book I Saw Ramallah, has already responded:

“It is easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic trick: start your story from ‘Secondly.’ Yes, this is what Rabin did. He simply neglected to speak of what happened first. Start your story with “Secondly,” and the world will be turned upside-down. Start your story with “Secondly,” and the arrows of the Red Indians are the original criminals and the guns of the white men are entirely the victim. It is enough to start with “Secondly,” for the anger of the black man against the white to be barbarous. Start with “Secondly,” and Gandhi becomes responsible for the tragedies of the British. You only need to start your story with “Secondly,” and the burned Vietnamese will have wounded the humanity of the napalm, and Victor Jara’s songs will be the shameful thing and not Pinochet’s bullets, which killed so many thousands in the Santiago stadium. It is enough to start the story with “Secondly,” for my grandmother, Umm ‘Ata, to become the criminal and Ariel Sharon her victim. ...

The houses built on top of ours gallantly declare their willingness to understand our odd predilection toward living in camps scattered in the Diaspora of gods and flies, as though we had begged them to throw us out of our homes and to send their bulldozers to destroy them in front of our very eyes. Their generous guns in Deir Yassin forgive us the fact that they piled our bodies high at the sunset hour there one day. Their fighter jets forgive the graves of our martyrs in Beirut. Their soldiers forgive the tendency of our teenagers’ bones to break. Israel the victim polishes its hot, red knife with the sheen of forgiveness.”

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*There are protests all over the world right now. Please find one where you are.*

Caution: Settlers Ahead

"As a Jew, I was ashamed at the scenes of Jews opening fire at innocent Arabs in Hebron. There is no other definition than the term ‘pogrom’ to describe what I have seen.” This quote from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert came just before I returned to Palestine two weeks ago. In Syria and in Lebanon, I watched as Al Jazeera correspondents reported live from Hebron, showing settlers burning houses and soldiers standing by and watching.

One of my first stops upon return to Palestine was to the Salfit region in the north, quite far from Hebron, to visit friends. I wasn’t thinking about the settlers. I visited a friend whose house is surrounded by the Wall, and asked how things were going. “They,” she pointed towards the settlement behind her house, “have attacked us twice this week.” In the middle of the night, the family had woken to the sounds of stones hitting their house. This has happened before, but not usually twice in one week. No settler has ever been punished for throwing stones at their house, though they have broken windows and water tanks.

I stayed in the area and woke up in the morning to the news that settlers had attacked a nearby village, spray painting racial slogans and stars of David on the village’s mosque. I have seen stars of David painted by settlers before, mostly on the walls of Palestinian shops and homes in Hebron, but I am still taken aback each time I see it. Do they not remember Kristallnacht? Or do they specifically remember Kristallnacht?

Another friend told me she had been on a bus the week before that was stopped by Israeli soldiers. “You should turn around and go a different way,” said a soldier to the driver. “There are settlers up ahead waiting to attack.” So the bus turned around, went a different way, and narrowly avoided a different attack by a group of settler women gathered on the side of the road with stones.

Somehow this story is the most frustrating to me. When settlers attack, Palestinians get punished / sent home / re-routed. It is as though the settlers are a natural phenomenon. They could place a sign in the road saying, “Caution: Settlers Ahead” and it would seem as natural to the soldiers as a sign saying “Caution: Storm Conditions Ahead” or “Caution: Road Curves Ahead.” It is as though the condition of settler attacks is unpreventable.

Of course, it is easier for a soldier to re-route a busload of unarmed Palestinian people largely accustomed to occupation than to move a group of armed settlers used to getting their way. But if the Israeli government, with the 4^th largest military in the world, wanted to control a few (or a few thousand) extremist settlers, I am confident that they could. This is not about a natural phenomenon, an inevitable occurrence, an inability of the Israeli government to reign in their population. It is a lack of will.

So when the prime minister of Israel says that he is personally offended by the settler attacks, when he calls them pogroms, one wonders why the Israeli soldiers largely stood by and watched, or even accompanied the settlers on their attacks. One wonders why the perpetrators are not in prison (unless they also attacked soldiers). One wonders why the settlers have not been removed. And the answer is simple: These settlers serve the interests of the Israeli government. I am not sure the government is always thrilled when the situation gets out of control like this (and then reflects badly on Israel in international media), but in general, having a small group of right-wing extremists deflects attention from the root causes of the problem, and deflects responsibility from the government.

Indeed, many Israelis view these settlers with disgust, and think, “If only these people would move out of the West Bank, we would have peace.” The settler movement often retorts, “What is the difference between land we came to control in 1948 and land we came to control in 1967?” Their conclusion (that Jews should fight for exclusive control of all the land) is quite opposite from mine, but the analysis is the same.

And this is why there are three Israeli soldiers for every Israeli settler in Hebron. Because if the settlers were to be removed, and “peace” did not magically appear, then people might start to ask, “Wait, is there another problem?” People might start to realize that occupation is not defined solely by presence of settlers (Gaza is experiencing the worst of occupation right now, though the settlers left more than three years ago). People might start to realize that there are Palestinians inside Israel who are treated less than equally, to say the least. People might start to realize that half of the Palestinian population has never set foot in any part of Palestine, and that more than two thirds are not permitted to live in their original villages. In other words, people might get to the core of the issue.

The ideological settler movement is, in many ways, holding together the fragile house of cards that is Israel. It has worked for a while, but it will not work forever. In front of this house we can add one more sign: “Caution: Collapse of Zionism Ahead.”

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P.S. While settlers are not jailed, these Israelis are: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNjggLhQo6w

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Hello from Lebanon

Dear friends,

Thanks to all of you who responded to my last note from Syria. I wrote it while sick and a little down, so I just want to say to any of you who are thinking of visiting Syria, please do. It is an amazing place in many ways. Yes, I feel more comfortable in Palestine, but I have no regrets about my month in Syria. I’m now back in Palestine and my reports will likely start to take on their normal form again, but first, here’s another in the style of a travel blog, this time largely from Lebanon.

After my Arabic class ended, I left for Lebanon for a few days. I went to the bus station in Damascus, got in a shared taxi, paid $15, and was in Beirut a few hours later. Easy as that. There are street signs on the highways near Damascus with arrows pointing in different directions and the words “Lebanon” “Jordan” and “Iraq”. It reminds me of the arbitrariness of borders, and of how small this region is. I often think of Syria and Jordan as huge countries because they’re many times the size of Palestine and Lebanon, but Syria and Jordan combined are only slightly larger than Texas (which is a large state, yes, but it’s one of 50).

In my car ride to Lebanon (as in my car ride from Syria to Jordan the following week), there were several nationalities represented in the car: Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, and American. When the Iraqi man heard that I was American, he began to talk to me in fluent unaccented American English. “I was an interpreter for the US army,” he told me, and began talking about all the medals he received. I was taken aback at first, and admittedly judgmental of someone working with the army, but I was also curious. I asked him why he started working with them, and he thought I asked why he stopped. “Too many threats to my life,” he said. “So now I’ve been in Syria for a couple years, and I’m trying to get to America but they say they don’t have me in the system anymore and won’t issue me a visa, even though I worked with them for 3 years and got all these medals.” We talked a bit about his status in Syria and how he’s able to go to Lebanon (he has work there as an engineer rebuilding some of what Israel destroyed in 2006). I asked him again why he chose to work with the army. “It’s not just about the money,” he said, “though the money was good.” He went on to say that at the beginning of the war, most of the interpreters were Arabs from other countries, not Iraqis. He heard many stories of slight mis-translations leading to what he called “unnecessary killings” (I would argue all the killings are unnecessary), and he wanted to try to help. He is Iraqi, and speaks excellent English, so he thought he could save lives, and indeed, feels that he did.

As we crossed the border into Lebanon, I was struck by its beauty. I was there last February, when the mountains were all covered in snow, a different kind of beauty. But the greenness this time, the different colors in fact, were gorgeous. We weaved in and out of the mountain roads, and I started to see billboards for tattoo removal and other signs that distinguish Lebanon from Syria. And then, of course, the destruction. I remember reading about the Israeli bombing of the only road from Lebanon to Syria, but the sight of the bridge, or rather the pillars with no road on top, still undergoing reconstruction, was eerie. I imagined people in their cars plunging hundreds of feet to their death in the rocky ravine below.

This abrupt entry of memories of war into otherwise normal life would be repeated again and again in the coming days. Sitting in traffic, a driver would point to the bombed bridge next to us and say, “Traffic wasn’t like this before the summer of 2006.” Walking to a fancy café in the evening, my friends would tell me how they walked there once during the war and were terrified. When we arrived at the café they told me the whole area had been closed during the war. “Was the Lebanese army here preventing people from entering?” I asked. “No,” they said, “the army wasn’t allowed in either. Hizbollah controlled the area.”

You can’t walk or drive in Beirut without seeing destruction, construction, and a plethora of martyr posters. Except for the hairstyles and clothing, it’s hard to tell if the martyrs are from 1976, 2006, or sometime in between. I walked by one poster that at first glance looked like another martyr poster. A young man wore military gear and held what looked like an automatic weapon. Then I noticed the word “paintball” at the bottom of the poster. It was an advertisement. Strikingly similar.

I took a day to visit the south with my friend. I spent only about a half hour in each of Saida, Sur, and Bint Jbayl, but even the ride was worth it. I saw the hills with olive groves and thought, “This looks like the rural West Bank.” I saw the sea to our right and thought, “This looks like the road between Haifa and Tel Aviv.” I saw the specific shade of green and thought, “This looks like Jenin.” And of course, it is all of those things. And probably, had Israel not taken over in 1948, northern Palestine today would look quite similar (almost like it does now, but without all the Hebrew and red rooves).

We arrived in Bint Jbayl, the town that successfully resisted a ground invasion by the Israeli army in 2006. Many buildings still show the scars from bombing, but mostly life just continues. I realized that while I think of Bint Jbayl and Qana (which we also drove through) as sites of resistance or massacre, they are first and foremost places, like any other, of daily life. I looked up at the mountain and thought about how Palestine (Israel) is just on the other side. As I walked around with my Palestinian Lebanese friend who will likely never set foot in Palestine, I again thought of the arbitrariness of borders.

In Beirut I went to a play with my host and the kids from the Palestinian organization she works with. It was a story of a family from a fictional island who has many adventures traveling by boat around the world, but they are always trying to find their way home. I asked my host later if it was a reference to the right of return for Palestinian refugees. For Palestinians, she said, and Iraqis, and everyone else. I wondered if the actors were Palestinian, or Lebanese, or Iraqi, knowing how ethnically divided Lebanon is. But I was then comforted by the thought that it doesn’t matter, that one thing I like about Lebanon is that it seems to have a strong, or at least visible, progressive scene that does cross those boundaries.

As I got ready to leave for Syria, my friend said she would love to come to Damascus with me, that she had never been. She had been talking about it for days and I wasn’t sure why it wasn’t set in stone yet. She finally convinced her mother to ask her father. His response: No, the situation is too uncertain. “The situation?!” my friend asked angrily. “It’s been the same for 30 years!” Yes, her mother said, and it’s too uncertain. We never know what might happen.

I think about the concept of security, something most certainly missing from people’s lives in Lebanon and Palestine, and something largely present for people in Syria and Jordan. I had a conversation with a Palestinian friend the other day in which he said, “I don’t like Syria. You always feel like Assad is breathing down your back, you can’t say what you think, especially if it has anything to do with him.” I argued, “But people there live mostly happy, secure lives, with government services (health, education) provided. And Palestinians there too.” He agreed. “Sure, in Lebanon the Palestinians’ conditions are awful, the law discriminates openly against them, but they are free to speak and associate as they want. I prefer Lebanon and Palestine to Syria and Jordan.” I had a similar conversation with another friend, but with the opposite perspective: “Talk is nothing. So what about freedom of speech if we don’t have our basic needs?” This is of course a simplification of the countries in this area, but it’s an interesting context to think about.

Of course, there are certain things that do cross all the boundaries, that unify all the people of the region, and that once again remind me of the arbitrariness of borders. Right now, there is one that stands out to me most: Turkish soap operas (dubbed into Arabic). :)

Hello from Syria

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

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.

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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."