whats right about birthright?

article in The Nation

2008-06-30T14:22:00.001-07:00

I wrote this a few months ago for a campus magazine, and it found its way to The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080609/tevah

2007-12-01T10:26:00.001-08:00

Dear Readers: this will be my last post indefinitely. I write from Istanbul; getting through Israeli security couldn’t have been easier. I will be going back to Palestine at some point in the future, inshallah. But I don’t know when, and I don’t know if I’ll be using this blog. Thanks to all of you for reading it. I’m sorry if any of the content here was painful, not well thought-out, poorly written, or otherwise offensive. I may make a zine or maybe even a book with details and entries that never made it online, so keep an eye open!

With Peace, Until Next Time

2007-12-01T10:01:00.000-08:00

Lately everything has felt like a movie. Personal situations seemed on their way to resolution. The semester was ending. I said goodbye to each of my friends one by one. The peace conference was coming up. Violence might have been building; or it might not have been. Is there going to be a third intifada after Annapolis? was the question on the tip of everyone’s tongue. The PA put sidewalks barriers up around the Manara and tried to regulate traffic flow. Maybe if the streets were clean in Ramallah, and the pedestrians sidewalk-bound, the world would believe that the PA can control society’s extremists. Meanwhile, I forgot my passport for the first time the night of Annapolis when we drove Rosi to the airport on settler-only Highway 443, and the soldiers didn’t notice we’d only given them four passports for a car of five. I put my communist-colored kaffiyehs and poster of George Habash in a box and mailed it home with my Palestinian olive oil and subversive books. The “Today in Palestine” daily email digest started arriving in my spam box instead of my inbox, as though anticipating my departure.

I was working on crossing items off the list I’d been carrying around for four months. One was to meet David Shulman, Ta’Ayush activist, professor at Hebrew University, and author of Dark Hope, the book that likely inspired my blog—though I was too shy to say so. I visited him at his house in West Jerusalem- a beautiful house of a bohemian style that made me nostalgic for Vermont. I hadn’t seen décor so appealing and familiar since I left the States. I’d been in many living rooms full of pink furniture, fake flowers, and god’s name stitched in sequins on the walls. But I felt like a traitor for liking his house, and in my thoughts his house came to represent Israeli society. I feel comfortable in it because it is American, and that in itself is a problem. What is a Jew from Iowa, who speaks English in his home, doing living his American life in Palestine? He’s trying to destroy the occupation from the inside out. But is he part of the problem, or isn’t he? I’ve been told by ISM that coordinators in Nablus refuse to work with Israeli activists, as though they are existentially too problematic. Usually this reluctance frustrates me to no end, but sometimes I can empathize with it.

I was walking in the direction of the old city. “Take a right out of the house,” David had told me, “and then just follow whichever streets down until you see the wall of the old city. You’ll recognize the wall, right? Just ask for ha-ir ha-atikah if you can’t find it.” “Thanks, I can probably handle it,” I joked, remembering how I used to be fluent in Hebrew, and I headed out. I was wandering at a leisurely pace when the building to my right stopped me in my tracks. I’ve been there a million times, I muttered out loud. Green gates opened to an arena of stairs that my body remembered sitting on. I didn’t know what the building was, and I didn’t know why I’d been there. I stood and stared for a few minutes, searching unsuccessfully for memories, and kept walking.

Moments later, my phone beeped. The text message read: “Reports of violence at Birzeit- true or not?” it was from a friend at Ma’an News. I called him and asked what he’d heard. “The university’s been closed until further notice,” he said. “It has something to do with fighting between the student president of Fatah and the student president of PFLP.” I called a friend of mine for more information. He gave me a long detailed story that was half fact half speculation half rumor half fiction.

It all began over the celebration of Palestinian Independence Day, November 15^th, a day considered a joke at best, an insult at worst. Yet a day we had off from school nonetheless. A Palestinian girl had told me earlier, “Fatah wanted all of the celebrations for itself, and PFLP tried to get involved, and there was a fight.” A few people were taken to the hospital. PFLP was rumored to have been “looking for revenge.” They went after the head of Fatah in Birzeit village. They may have stabbed him; they may have tortured him with argileh coal. Or he may have been smoking argileh, and fell on his own coal when he was stabbed. The next school day, that very Tuesday morning, Fatah was armed, I heard. There may have been shooting on campus.

I was walking streets of the West Jerusalem neighborhood I last walked as a Modern Orthodox 11-year-old, talking on the phone with my Palestinian friends about factions fighting in Birzeit. Past and present were trying to synthesize. It was all, of course, connected.

They say that history is circular, and on that day I felt it. I’d attended Jewish day school in Jerusalem for 9 months, years ago. Recently I spent three months in Ramallah, breathing occupation and anti-Zionism every moment. Seeing my old neighborhood again was a final reminder from life. Don’t think you can get away with a simplistic view of things, it was telling me. Don’t for a minute think you’re getting let off that easy.

I had begun to believe that Israel doesn’t really exist, or that it exists only as an imperialist occupation. Force them out like the French were forced out of Africa, or the British out of India, I thought. I talked to fellow Birzeit students about how all the world had to do was recognize that Israel was no different. But Israel is not the occupying arm of another country; it has nowhere to go home to. It is a strange modern culture that I may dislike, but its existence can’t be denied, no matter how much I wish we could take it all back.

I also experienced circularity in showing the friend of a friend around Palestine for two days. She’d been studying in ’48 since the summer and was thrilled to visit. She wasn’t a Zionist, but she didn’t yet know exactly why not. Being in the West Bank confirmed all the suspicions she’d had all summer while being fed propaganda, she told me. I dragged her to Hebron the day she arrived after an impromptu Occupation 101 with OCHA maps, and the next day we went to Tulkarem and visited a friend and his family. She was in love with Palestine from her first glimpse of Ramallah; she was horrified by the militarization, by the eerie feel of Hebron, by the highway signs with the Arabic blacked out. And she was charmed by the Palestinian cab driver who offered us a free ride to my apartment because we spoke a little Arabic, and by the friend’s family who served us delicious food as soon as we arrived and tried to persuade us to spend the night. We watched the sunset from their roof sipping sweet cardamom coffee. The rest of the evening, she had a dreamy look on her face, and I remembered my own enlightenment and my own enchantment.

Azoun

2007-11-13T22:16:00.000-08:00

The power is out inside and the rain is pouring outside. It’s the first rain of the season, locals have been telling us all day, and the season is not starting subtly. We drink tea by the light of three slim white candles that Majid has glued to the table in their own wax. The convergence of the dark, the rain, and the curfew isolate us to an extent rarely experienced in the modern world.

The atmosphere is intensely hectic despite that rain and candles should evoke romance and old-fashioned black and white movies. Two young men have been arrested today, two in a long line during the past week. Everyone in the room is on the phone. One is shouting about the absurdity of the power outage, another is enunciating clearly the names of the arrestees to a lawyer’s organization, and I am talking to my mother, who happens to have called at a strangely suitable moment. Though I wouldn’t normally answer a call in someone’s living room, tonight I add my voice to the buzz.

She’s catching me up on the Palestinian news she’s getting at her end. Ma’an news agency has suspended operations in protest of the detention by the PA of one of its directors, she tells me. Having started a search as soon as I told her where I was going, she now lists everything she found about Azoun. There are two; she had to guess which one I was in based on the context of the search results. In other words, she could tell by the arrests. She describes the news stories across the ocean into the phone, and then she asks the stunning question of why, did I know why all these arrests and curfews were happening?

It occurred to me I didn’t know the back-story, and we hadn’t asked. We’d been briefed when we arrived, but all that stuck out in my memory of the meeting earlier with the possible mayor of Izbat at-Tabib was the peculiar flavor of the tea. Feeling strange about having forgotten to ask why, I voice it in Arabic into the semi-darkness in a lull. I regret it immediately as the tone that comes back at me is defensive and nearly angry.

In asking my mother’s question I’d carelessly left it phrased the way only an outsider would phrase it. If you listen, you’ll hear the story, without having to ask why. They’ll mention that the army is afraid because they’re constructing a new part of the wall, or construction is under way on a settler road. And sometimes there will be no story. Even if not meant to insinuate, only to obtain information, the question why denies the arbitrariness of the occupation. Worse than that, it also runs the risk of putting responsibility for oppression on the oppressed themselves. “What have you done to perpetrate, to deserve their wrath?” it says. The latter problem is nothing new—I have been aware of that since the beginning, and have learned how to delicately avoid the implication of accusation in my speech. But the existential offensiveness of the question hadn’t impressed itself on me until now. Even if the question is "Why have they subjected you to this particular injustice?" the answer is because they can, because they have power and they abuse it, but above and beyond the answer that matters is "for no reason at all."

collaboration as a bad thing

2007-11-03T00:42:00.000-07:00

“Everyone in that village is a collaborator,” I’d heard someone say about the place where we picked olives, the most beautiful and serene part of Palestine I’ve seen. Maybe their house was a little too nice. The husband told us a story of how the wall was intended to be built through their backyard, but a group of neighbors joined forces, got a good lawyer, and got it pushed back a couple hundred feet. In this area the wall now takes the form of an electric fence visible from their porch. Sharifa and I watched the army jeep go by on patrol many a time. Each time she would point and say “the army,” and I would nod my head somberly, and we would lapse back into silence.

This time I’d told them at the beginning that I’m Jewish. Sharifa loves Jews, she told me—she has a Jewish Israeli friend who visits her and calls her on the phone from somewhere distant like Ireland. You will call me every week, she says, and you’ll come back and stay with us. Like my Jewish friend. It was a little odd; I’m not used to be tokenized in this way. In all honesty, what reason does Sharifa have to love Jews? I began to wonder about the rumors I’ve heard.

Sharifa is not elegant or pretty—she is large and has features dull from years of cleaning the house and the boredom that comes from having little bit more than others. We visit her neighbor, an even broader woman with twins and a fancy white marble staircase. Sharifa tells her proudly that she got up early and “finished her work”—the neighbor was not clever enough to do the same. When I comment to the side on the number of couches in the woman’s living room, Sharifa responds “like ours,” daring me to contradict, though in fact her neighbor has far more. I’m starting to judge what only strikes me as a pointless and petty life, but the next neighbor we visit has only plastic chairs in the receiving room. A real smile lights up this neighbor’s face, she removes particles of sand from a pan of lentils while her daughters affix everything they own to my hair. As we trudge back up the hill, Sharifa informs me that she likes the second neighbor better. “They’re a simple family. They’re a little bit poor,” she says, “but to tell you the truth I like her better,” and I start to like Sharifa better too.

She mentions in the same tone as she says everything else that her mother-in-law has cancer. I remember sitting in the same spot the last time I visited, at the table in the kitchen, while Sharifa stood at the sink, and she said she knew nothing when she got married at age sixteen, and her mother in law taught her how to cook and keep house. They were very close, she told me. Now, I don’t know what to say.

Night falls. We’ve discussed many things that are “very pretty.” I’ve attended school with Sharifa’s daughter in the three-room schoolhouse next door. I’ve watched the gym teacher tell all of the students they are dribbling wrong, and proceed to demonstrate the “correct” way that is not discernibly different to the eye. The religion instructor has asked me a question in Arabic about the prophet Jesus; and I have made a fool of myself by not knowing the answer. I’ve impressed the girls with my ability to jump rope.

Now I talk politics with Sharifa’s husband. It is visiting hours but there is no one visiting tonight. “Make me some coffee,” says her husband, in a manner not aggressive way but just ordinarily assuming. “Smoking and coffee is bad for you, especially at night,” Sharifa scolds him, frowning at his cigarette, and refuses to make the coffee. Over the next hour, he requests several more times and she turns him down again. Eventually, he goes to the kitchen and makes himself coffee. In my head, I raise a fist for female empowerment.

This family has been incredibly kind to me. They have adopted me and given me things and monitored my comfort level at every moment. When I make ridiculous language mistakes, they don’t laugh but only correct me gently. I think it is not a lack of humor but a sign of politeness. The first day in the olive harvest I told Sharifa’s daughter that she was a table, tawleh, meaning to point out how tall she was, taweeleh, in being able to reach high branches. I cracked up when I realized what I’d said, but I was the only one laughing. Another time, I was translating in the car for Sharifa’s husband when Jeff brought his two parents to dinner. His mother said “You are blessed to have to have so many lovely children.” Not being familiar with many courteous phrases, the one I came out with was effectively “May you rest in peace.” His face was impassive as he explained my mistake, and I wonder how many others I have made that they’ve let slide.

Does the fact that the wall is only an electric fence by them mean that they are collaborators? Does the fact that the man worked in ’48 for years and speaks perfect Hebrew mean that they are collaborators? Does the fact that they want slightly more decent lives for themselves, or maybe they believe in cooperation rather than violent overthrow, mean that they are collaborators? What perversion in the world makes me question this woman’s adoration of me and her kindness towards me?

In a room full of men in a village near Birzeit that has recently begun demonstrations, I made the mistake of asking “How do they know which houses to knock on when the soldiers come in the middle of the night?” They all laughed at my naiveté and warned me not to ask that question. They meant ‘don’t ask because you don’t want to mess with the collaborators,’ but I take their warning for to mean for myself: ‘Don’t let yourself be subject to the political paranoia that makes you question your friends and trust no one.’ Irregardless of what ‘collaborator’ really means, and regardless of whether they are, I will not allow myself to disrespect this family by doubting their friendship with me.

a peaceful harvest, al-hamdulallah

2007-10-28T16:24:00.000-07:00

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.

It was a motley crew of internationals that day. We were three from ISM, one from the ecumenical accompaniers, and one from an Israeli human rights organization. The Israeli man was old and wrinkled and evoked what the olives we picked would turn into after a few too many weeks in salt water. He was tan and thin despite his age in the athletic way that seemed typical for an Israeli from his generation—the sandal-wearing, open-shirted, mountain-climbing pioneer type. (The word Sabra came to mind, and then I remembered that the notion of the Sabra is itself a cultural appropriation. It is used to refer to native-born Israelis, but the symbol itself, the cactus, represents Palestinian villages. It is a native plant that can be found near old Arab villages even within 1948.)

He was impressed that I came all the way from Chicago for the olive harvest, though I didn’t. “I can’t get my friends to come out here,” he told me. “And they live so close. I have some Israeli friends that agree with me, that agree with what I’m doing. So I tell them ‘come out to the olive harvest with me’ but they didn’t want to wake up early enough.”

I’ll give him a little credit for waking up early, and some for whatever brought him to this human rights organization to begin with, but being around him set me on edge. It may have started when he said to me “Arab societies are so different. The roles of men and women are so different. Arab women are so…submissive. It’s kind of nice though.” He was shocked to learn I’d spent the night at the house of one of the families. Despite his acute observations about the regressive nature of Arab societies, he was not keen enough to realize that taking his shirt off in front of all the women to change clothes was not a good move.

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.

mom- you asked for more on checkpoints

2007-10-23T16:49:00.000-07:00

Checkpoints in my mind’s eye are vignettes. Some are tinted with sadness, some with anger and frustration, and some with the relieved feeling of faith in humanity that small gestures sometimes bring.

I once watched a young blind man go through Qalandia checkpoint towards Ramallah. There were several turnstiles, each in the opposite direction from the last. If there hadn’t been a woman holding his hand it would have been impossible. He wasn’t forced to negotiate the metal detector because we were heading away from Jerusalem. He'd been in Jerusalem—an indication that it is either his home or he had a medical permit. What is his way home like? His cane surely has metal; do they take it away and make him walk through without it, stumbling and bumping into the sides of the purposeful archway? Maybe he’s in Jerusalem to see someone about the blindness. How must it feel to have your disability thrust in your face, to have it be not only the purpose of a day’s travel but to intervene in the very travel itself?
Another time, there was an old woman in a wheelchair. She passed the tests, her identity was deemed acceptable, but still she had to wait for minutes that felt like hours for a soldier to press the small button to open the door to the left of the turnstile through which the wheelchair would not fit.
In the world of universities, every locale and event must be handicapped-accessible or else it will be subjected to the wrath of activists and the righteous-minded. But this is war, and no one is held accountable.

Another image: a little girl with short curly hair who only wants to play while we wait in line. I didn’t know any colloquial at the time; we communicated with gestures and smiles. The metal turnstile to her is just a jungle gym; she climbs on the bars like the side of a swingset. She doesn’t understand why her father takes her backpack from her to put it on the sliding belt and it momentarily clouds her happy face. I hold her hand and she forgets her discontent, and I forget too.

The first time I saw Huwara, I didn’t understand why it has a reputation for being one of the worst checkpoints. I didn’t see soldiers kicking Palestinians with their combat boots; I didn’t see women in labor preparing to give birth on the side of the road. In fact, from afar I thought it preferable to the cold steel international-border-like quality of Qalandia and Gilo. After a few minutes in line, I realized that there was something seriously, awfully wrong. Huwara is dehumanizing in a way that Qalandia and Gilo are not. People become cattle at Huwara; people are herded like sheep and people fight each other like dogs for space in line. Huwara is the bread crumb thrown into a crowd of the starving for the viewer’s entertainment.
I flashed my passport at the soldiers standing behind a small desk that served as their station and walked briskly by. But one of them grabbed me and shoved me forcefully back. What did I do? What were they saying? It was my backpack; I was supposed to open it. I unzipped it, biting back the tears of anger and surprise that threatened to fall.

Qalandia--I thought it was just a Tuesday, but it was a holy day during Ramadan. Masses of people surged up against the police barriers that had been placed hundreds of yards from the entrance. “I’m speaking to you in Arabic, move back,” one soldier was yelling again and again. He obnoxious tone said “I’m even using your own accursed tongue, you degenerates, and you still fail to heed me?” He said it so many times that I’ll never forget the words. They’ll be in my dreams tonight, I thought. “Imshi lawaran, ana bahki arabi ma3kum.” The traffic circle, isolated by the metal gates at its edge, became a stage upon which the soldiers and the police and the border police were performing their cruelties. Across it they would kick and push Palestinians with green ID’s who tried to get in. Some of their victims were angry; some just laughed and rejoined the crowd to try again later.

The first time I saw Container checkpoint, nestled in the stunning desert mountains, a procession of wedding cars came streaming through the other side, horns honking.

But vignettes don’t address the existential problem of checkpoints. Checkpoints are a deliberate exercise of futility. I believe there are days of soldier training devoted to wasting time at checkpoints and creating a sense of total arbitrariness. At Qalandia, they change where the line stands every few minutes, and everyone has to move. They pause for a while for no reason. They turn the turnstile to green; they turn it to red. They ask you for your visa, but they let you through if you don’t have one. They lounge around, eating sandwiches, taking naps in their little booths, sending text messages. At the drive-through checkpoints, profiling is the name of the game. Some cars they wave through, some they stop.
There is no rhyme or reason, evidence enough that checkpoints have little to do with security. A friend once told the epic story of how she smuggled pork chops into Ramallah. They can only be purchased in Jerusalem, but meat is not supposed to be transported from “Israel” to “Palestine”. A soldier stopped her from bringing them home the first time she tried, so she came through again a day later, having hidden the frozen meat under her seat. Pork chops are obviously the least of it--inconsistency is more the problem and oppression the problem the most.

foiled and frustrated

2007-10-22T00:24:00.000-07:00

“I just don’t know how you’re not angry all the time” I said.

“I am angry all the time,” was her response. But she really isn’t angry. She’s actually incredibly sweet and upbeat and charming.

I was so upset that I wanted to break down and cry. I wanted to be anywhere else. I felt so naïve for thinking we could do it at all. I was afraid that she would hold herself responsible that I was upset, or feel that she was keeping me from going to something I wanted to see. But it wasn’t the films I cared about. The Canadian peacemakers’ films became irrelevant. This was a matter of feeling the occupation, of feeling foiled by it.

Of feeling for a few moments of my life the anger and frustration and helplessness that Palestinians put up with daily.

We’d planned to go to Bethlehem to the Alternative Information Center for a movie screening. Shams has a green ID; she is allowed to be in Bethlehem but not Jerusalem. The car our friends were going to drive us in has Israeli plates. Israeli plates can go through Jerusalem, but what I didn’t know before was that they can’t go on Wadi Nar, the alternative route to Bethlehem that avoids Jerusalem. I had assumed Israeli plates would have some kind of Israeli immunity, an ability to go anywhere. But in fact the occupation strives to keep Israelis away from Palestinians—not just vice versa. Creating and enforcing divisions and hatred between people requires active effort from the government. God forbid Israelis see that Palestinians are people, god forbid they know what their government does.

What kind of system prevents two 19 year old girls from going to a screening of documentaries about cooperation and peace because although they are by all legality and technicality allowed in Bethlehem, one is not allowed on the road to get there?

break-fast on the bus

2007-10-08T15:36:00.000-07:00