Circumstance landed me on my feet looking at the sky through olive branches on the first harvest day in one of the most beautiful Palestinian villages I’ve seen. I don’t believe we were in an area in any real danger of soldiers or settlers, although we could see the wall from where we stood. I suspect we’d been requisitioned as a novelty or as free labor, though the family we picked for seemed well off.
But I didn’t mind—there are far worse ways to spend a day than trying to decipher the peculiarities of the regional accent of women who don’t ever leave their homes by more than a few miles. They were large women, country women, and they asked us over lunch if we “did a regime.” They asked us about our families and we talked about the end of the Ramadan TV series and we named the Arabic singers we knew. They pointed to my nose piercing and asked me if I could take it out and if it hurt, after informing me that it is haraam.
He pointed at the nearby settlements and made references throughout the day such as “Oh, these aren’t new settlements. These are old settlements.” Or “Those settlements are on the Israeli side of the wall.” He was trying to legitimize the settlements, to say “Yes, I’m politically correct. Some settlements must go. But these—these are ok.” But doing so was legitimizing the electric fence that runs through this family’s backyard, the extra checkpoints they must go through, the permit they’re required to get to harvest their olives in the other side of the wall, and effectively the entire oppressive system itself. While differentiating between the degrees of evil that settlements are may be useful at a negotiating table, it has no place at the table of these simple villagers that they’ve set for us with fresh bread and hummus and eggs and vegetables.
4 comments:
I'm intrigued by the Israeli guy. How was he interacting with the Palestinians? How were they responding to him? It seems like he seemed *too* comfortable just moving between oppressor- and oppressed-society and showing how "politically correct" he could be. I'm also led to wonder whether it's possible to extricate yourself from blame (and blameworthy emotions, etc.) if you're a part of a society like Israel.
(so when you're not on gmail, I will be commenting on your blog...)
You can't expect a salty old man follow point for point your stance as a "young radical". I am surprised to hear you talk about how he should have been more religiously sensitive by keeping his shirt on. I mean, I think its clear that you don't think religious niceties need to cut both ways.
I am assuming that this old man is a secular Israeli, and if he correlates religiousness with backwardness, while I don't agree with him, I can't say his point would be without merit.
The fact he was there, and trying to drag others there, that he saw this as a duty. I am not sure I'm for arbitrarily razing every settlement that crossed an imaginary line drawn in the dust forty years before I was born. If we are willing to go to that point, why not go back a few more decades say that Israel as a Jewish state shouldn't exist. Why not go back a few more centuries and say that the land of Israel should be all Jewish, including the Transjordan.
I don't know--this old man was doing a good thing, more than most people would do. He's an old man, in some ways trapped in the past certainly, but he's doing more than most people with new, actually politically correct ideas. And I think that should be applauded more, even if we don't agree with some of the less comfortable things he says.
hey shira
im curious how you're thinking these days about women in palestinian/arab society(ies)...you used the word regressive in this entry, though likely sarcastically/ironically... but i am still curious. im thinking about it because i am in a class called 'race discourse in the americas' which deals a lot with "subjective modes of understanding", aka, how societies/ideologies by definition think other societies/ideologies are immoral/oppressive/backwards, but that whatever behavior it is, like killing twins in ibo african society pre-european colonialism or human sacrifice by the aztecs, makes perfect sense within the worldview of the culture that does it.
on another note, i just read a book about the 'racial origins of feminism in the united states', the relevant part of which was about white women's historical aspirations to do missionary work, liberate, be 'moral mediators' and do peace-keeping. so-- a very different note, but a lot of new stuff for me to think about in terms of the origins of the socialization process i underwent which resulted in my interest in any range of 'activism'// healing and bettering.
I LOVE YOU
from the book i was talking about, titled white women's rights by louise michele newman, to clarify:
"what the future holds depends on our learning to undo feminism's historical complicity with racism and imperialism; in subverting the unproblematic construction of the West as morally superior to the nonWest because it treats its women better ( i.e., the "west is best" reflex)."
she then goes on to give examples of how this judgement informs representations of breast-feeding debtaes in the US, as well as the UN women's conference at Beijing as well as 'patriarchal abuses in third world countries (e.g., the wearing of the bourqa in afghanistan, the ban against women driving cars in saudi arabia; the practice of female genital mutilation in egypt, etc). in short, feminists must find ways to challenge patriarchy without reinscribing discourses of western domination or white superiority. "
i actually dont like that last sentence, i think it too easily dismisses the 200 pages of small font of her book which describe how white women created their power, thorugh a discourse of feminism, explicitly at the cost of other groups' rights, i.e., nonwhite ( including nonwhite females)
food for thought
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