Tuesday, 26th September 2006
Six entries for six people (Israel: Part 6)
And so, the time has come to close out my feelings about my Israel / Palestine trip. I thought six entries for the six people in my travelling group was an appropriate place to stop, and to try to lighten the load I shall fill this with random memories of why, no matter how difficult and intense the trip was, I still wouldn’t change it for the world. I learnt a lot, just not what I expected. This is an entry for the fun and the laughter that we held onto, no matter what.
Up until we went to the Dead Sea, I was convinced I would never step foot in that country again, but that day was such a pleasurable mix of emotions that I felt my stubborn head be swayed. We started the day at Qumran and then walked for what felt like hours in the searing 40/45 degree heat to a resort. I learnt then that hijab makes a lot of sense, because those scarves, coupled with a bottle of water, meant the walk was actually pleasurable. The air is thick there (it’s the lowest point on earth after all) and there is no humidity, so your only real foe is the potential for burning if your skin is not fully covered.
Frankly, the woman that ran the resort that we got access to the Dead Sea via, was an inhuman monster. On the upside she served great Moroccan food. On the pinnacle of that upside - floating in the Dead Sea has to be one of the funnest of fun things I have ever done! There was so much joy in that day that I don’t know where to start for fear of recounting every little detail and boring you. But let me say that having mud fights and covering yourself head to toe in that glorious brown goop, baking yourself dry in the searing heat, and then floating as you wash the mud off you is more fun than I could ever convey. Also, something that will forever make me smile, is the juxtaposition of me in my bikini and ink, and H & L in full hijab. All of us laughing and mud bathing and floating together. It can work, you know?
Night had fallen by the time we had walked to the bus stop and I sat by myself on the kerb, enjoying the stillness and warmth of the night after such a wonderful day. Occasionally cars and trucks would speed by and somehow they fit into the haunting, soothing, melancholy that was the night. Suddenly I saw something white, almost glo-in-the-dark, scuttling around insect-like on the road and got as close as I dared before calling J over to investigate with me. It turns out it was a scorpion which elicited much screaming and giggling and the leaping of most of the party onto the plastic seats of the bus stop. A little while later H’s arm, complete with extended forefinger, suddenly appeared over my shoulder, “iiiiiiiiiit’s baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!” she intoned, as if she were the voice for some horror movie. And this time I leapt a mile into the air and screamed like the little baby I am.
Another high was our evening in Tel Aviv. We walked from the bus station into Jaffa, and strangely, on that small walk, Tel Aviv reminded me of seedy, down-town LA - just a safe version of it. There are too many guns in Israel for you to be afraid, if that makes any sense. We ate at a restaurant in Jaffa overlooking the sea, and walked back along the beach into Tel Aviv. The inky, black, night-time Mediterranean was still so warm and the breeze so embracing that I felt to throw myself into it. There it made sense, if only for a moment, it made sense. Then we looked up and on the other side of the promenade was Mike’s Place, the bar the British suicide bomber targeted a couple of years ago, and suddenly the world stopped making sense again.
Several times in the new city of Jerusalem we saw a fantastically mad woman shouting that she was the King of Kings and that Israel was a whore who would be saved by a woman. She had on white flowing robes and a staff which she rapped on the floor for emphasis. Clearly she was suffering from Jerusalem Syndrome and for some reason, my desire to follow her around for shits and giggles resulted in J and L deciding that I was The Light. Well, that and the strange things that kept happening to my camera when I would try to take pictures of Jesus stuff. It started with a spinning light, in the shape of a halo, above the mausoleum inside the Church of the Sepulchre that marks the site Jesus is supposed to have been crucified. At first I thought I was going crazy, so I asked L if she could see it, to which she responded that I was being called by God. I rolled my eyes and noticed instead how satanic sounding Greek Orthodox services are. Later, when we were in Bethlehem, L decided to anoint me from the holy water in the Church of the Nativity. She then promptly anointed herself and declared herself my first follower. I tried to punch her as we ran out into Manger Square laughing.
And so what is it, this trip that seemed so long and made everything seem so different when I got back home? This trip that I still can’t call good, but only intense. What is that time that seems so long ago now? What is that place where peaceful rooftops are irreconcilable with the human life in the streets below? What is that country that I barely know but felt so deeply when I was there? I can’t answer any of my own questions, but one thing I can say is that the alley cats were friendly, even if no humans were, and a Crazy Cat Lady is glad for that.
Monday, 25th September 2006
The Israel Problem (Israel: Part 5)
I recently came across a book I had to have. (I’m always coming across a book I “had to have.” I recently quit a job at a bookshop for a few reasons, but a factor was that I didn’t make any money: all my wages went back to him because of books I “had to have.”) It is called “The Palestinians” and is a beautiful cloth bound book from the late 70’s with words by Jonathan Dimbleby and photographs by Donald McCullin. In the introduction, Dimbleby talks of how in simply formulating things as “the Palestinian problem” we reflect our own bias and prejudice about the conflict. And so, whilst I also believe that we see what we want to (which is why the world exists in multiples) I truly think there is an Israel problem which manifests itself quite peculiarly in a nations inability to view anyone as human, each other included. There is such an overwhelmingly obvious self-fulfilling prophesy going on: you hate us, and we hate you for hating us, so we will abuse you before you can do so to us. This seeps over into the way they deal with each other since I am aware that a lot of the bad treatment we received wasn’t actually personal, it’s just the way they are.
Yet imagine you have forced someone to watch whilst you hack up their children into small pieces, fry them in butter and then pop them in a bagel with some cream cheese for a swift lunch time munch. Imagine too that when you are bought to trial you are acquitted and allowed to walk free because fate is just like that sometimes. Imagine then that instead of leaving the area, you stay in town and perform the same crime, with the same outcome, again and again and again until you have eaten 85% of everyone’s children. And to add insult to injury, imagine that you manage to get a restraining order on the whole town, so they can stare in hatred, but they cannot touch. I say this because I am certain this person must exist and that I must look the double of them, since this is exactly how people looked at me when I was en vacance.
Mostly the feedback I have had to these missives has been really positive; people have thanked me and asserted their desire to go and see for themselves. That’s all I want. But one response, from someone calling themselves a “real Zionist”, was to agree that there was no Palestine, that there never was and never will be. They also said that all “Nazi Arab Scum” should die. That’s a paraphrase of course, because it was a comment on an IMC site where these words have been posted, and from which I navigated away immediately, flinching, and when I went back a few hours later, the comment had been deleted. But it did remind me of the graffiti near the Jaffa Gate, on the way into the new city of Jerusalem: “Death to Arabs” scrawled over and over. And it did prompt me to write this entry. Until then I had been unsure if I wanted to say what I say here, if it needed to be said, but they ensured that it did.
So from that graffiti memory I am reminded of the guy that called us terrorists. And from there, I remember us walking home, laughing and happy after a nice meal, and a man started shouting at us in Hebrew, finally resorting to English with the proclamation that we would be dead by morning. Then I remember the guy that spat at us as we sat eating our falafel. The one that shouted and spat at me after I made the stupid mistake of saying thank you in Arabic and not Hebrew. (I was in the Christian Quarter and so hazarded a guess incorrectly.) The ones that spat at us as we simply walked by. And all the other people who never did anything with their mouths, except to silently twist them, and merely sent an overwhelming amount of hatred our way. There was so much hatred constantly levelled at us that when someone was merely rude, I was delighted. I can’t imagine how difficult it is to constantly live with that much atmospheric oppression, but suddenly it makes perfect sense that the fantastically beautiful (Christian Palestinian) man who worked at the hostel, with the big, oceanic, blinking eyes and wide, wide smile, never left it.
Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem) is an amazing place and I would urge all to go. You zigzag from room to room through a long, thin building and at the end, with your heart full of all the pain that we inflicted, the building opens up into a terrace overlooking a great valley. Very literally the walls of the building open out like a funnel and you feel a huge release of emotion as you follow the lines of the building to allow it to channel out all of the awful sadness you picked up inside the museum. Afterwards, you feel so fragile from it all, you feel such a great surge of empathy for one of the greatest tragedies of modern history. But then you look up and notice that one of the soldiers over there has his hand on his gun, much like some men grab their penis for support, and he is looking at you like he wants you to die. Suddenly everything is gone.
J said that Israelis don’t want my sympathy. The Israeli mindset, according to J, is that they can live alone. That they can be completely independent, which is, of course, a false idea. No one can be entirely independent, and if an individual can not, how on earth can a nation? Especially not an industrialised one; for starters, where do they get their oil? But then too, they have the “invisible” support of the Americans which makes it easier to believe they can wall themselves in and stand alone. J says there has been a massive investment in the “New Jew”, that they wanted to get away from the idea of Jews as being somehow weak. This over-identification with military thinking is something Yitzhak Laor articulates wonderfully in a recent LRB. The problem is that if you don’t invite someone to care about you, which is what treating everyone really badly means, you lose friends and make enemies. Or, at best, you lose friends and make people entirely indifferent to your cause.
A part of me used to be troubled by my inability to be able to support the Israeli cause. An angry ex once screamed at me that I always champion the underdog, which whilst being a fair comment, is not the reason why I have always had Palestinian sympathies. The other night L cooked a thank you meal for J and we all gave her gifts and later, when just the three of us remained, we got into yet another discussion about it all. I suddenly realised why her justifications and reasoning were familiar - it’s the rhetoric of colonialism with an extra helping of “Manifest Destiny” for the overly acrid taste. I realised I can’t support Israel because Israel is the last overt remnant of colonialism. I either have to say I think it is okay to invade another people’s land and establish a new country, or I have to say that it isn’t.
It isn’t.
And I don’t care if there was not an actual land called Palestine nor people called Palestinians. What there was was a land, full of people, who had lived there for generations. That Native Americans didn’t “own” the land in a European sense doesn’t mean they didn’t live there, didn’t belong, didn’t exist. That South Africa is a modern, European invention doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been occupied since the dawn of time, long before Europeans ever came across it. I don’t care if the Palestinians were serfs exploited by rich overlords, the point is that they were there and they were living and they are bound by their own history to that land. It is theirs by way of actual lived experience, because those bleached white mountains contain the bones of their immediate ancestors and there is no thousand year gap between the dates on the graves. They have lived and died there for a very long time, and that is enough.
(Although it shouldn’t be necessary to say this, I feel obliged to emphasise that I am not arguing against the creation of a space for Jews; what I am arguing against is the way it was created, and the way it has behaved ever since.)
A few months back I got into an enormous argument with an Islamic Fundamentalist that goes to my school. I will eternally thank her because she unintentionally helped me to draw the line where liberal, cultural relativism absolutely must stop. Some things are just wrong, regardless of how they are couched and justified with the “culture” argument. And so if I am to continue to condemn the persecution of religious minorities by Muslim states, how am I not to do that to Israel? And so if I think that Iranian Jews should be given equal rights in their country, how am I not to feel the same way for the religious minorities that exist in Israel and the lands it occupies? Either I find something to be true or I do not.
An Israeli reader of my recent journey said it is naive to hope for one state in which Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze and so on live together in equal status. That may be the case, but the creation of Israel was also naive. He said, “You can’t just stick people together and hope for the best.” But what was the creation of Israel if not that? I’ll take a tenuous, naive hope over an oppressive nightmare, however real and more eternally likely the latter might be. And I know the Israelis don’t want my pity, but let me tell you that you don’t have to live in such an abyss of hatred. Remind yourselves that you concocted that reality, and in remembrance of that construction, try for a better one. It is possible.