some Brooklyn folks at the Atlantic Antic street fair
the Brooklyn tornado!
murals near my house
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Pictures from Brooklyn
some Brooklyn folks at the Atlantic Antic street fair
the Brooklyn tornado!
murals near my house
Making Sense of Madness in New York
New York. Sometimes referred to as the ‘center of the universe’. I can almost understand that now, if that means the center point through which all peoples and creeds pass, collide, and become dizzy from the impact of such rampant diversity and disparity. It is so striking to me to suddenly realize that although I’ve traveled all over the world and opened myself up to many new ways of living, this is really the first time that I feel like I am living in such a uniquely diverse space. It’s ironic really because one of my major concerns about doing this program was moving into a house with 18 other young, upper middle class, socially conscious Jews, which seemed to me to be the promotion of an intentional lack of diversity. And in many ways that concern still holds true and it feels strange to live that way in this neighborhood and in this city. But as the program and house community builds upon itself, I am finding ways to value this structure both as a place of comfort in shared experience and as a safe place to experience jarring discomfort when our often more subtle differences become pronounced and at the center of sensitive discussions. But venturing beyond the walls of our home, wondering what from out there will permeate into the familiarity of in here, I find myself confronting real time examples of processes that I’ve mostly only theorized about and dabbled with in my journey towards becoming a self-proclaimed activist. Walking the streets in my neighborhood and riding subways up, down, and across the boroughs of New York City, my senses have become highly attuned to both the sheer volume of people that occupy this city, and the extent to which they are largely people of color. But this is markedly different from my experience living in Ghana, a place where I was also hyper aware of race because I felt my whiteness glowing and attracting eyes wherever I went. Here, however, I feel much less like an out of place rare commodity, and more like a member of an interconnected and representative world that we often don’t like to admit that we might actually inhabit.
So what am I actually talking about? I’m talking about my neighbors being a collection of folks from the African and West-Indian diaspora, the Black American community, young white hipsters, Latinos from all over the Americas, students, families of varying socio-economic statuses, elderly people, professionals, working class citizens, immigrants, new neighbors, long-time tenants, brownstone apartments, gentrified modernized buildings, houses with stoops, large subsidized apartments in disrepair, family-run food and drug stores, Baptist gospel churches, swanky wine and tapas bars, hole-in-the wall Laundromats, parks and playgrounds, bike lanes, trash on street corners, people on street corners, life. All this and many, many more snapshots that I decided not to list are just within the 1 mile radius around my house; my house of white Jews in their early-mid twenties talking about and engaging with urban poverty, trying to make sense of our role in perpetuating/combating it, and in that process also make sense of ourselves and the multiplicity of identities embedded in and occasionally seeping out of our very porous bodies.
I especially experience myself as a porous being because I think that somehow I have been gifted with a completely subconscious vibe that has always drawn strangers to approach me. Of course this “gift” has its downsides, but mostly it makes for great stories and learning moments. Perhaps this elusive vibe is just that outward expression of being porous, open to the whim of the world and inviting it to affect me, teach me, change me. This has played out in my time in NY thus far by strangers engaging me in conversation in those in between times, the pauses between the mad-rush of Manhattan at the end of a work day, the bit of silence amidst the competing noises of the sub-culture on the subway, the eyes turned upward in contrast to the forward-looking sharp linear pathways that New Yorkers tend to carve out despite diagonal urban planning.
On my first weekend in the neighborhood I set out on my own in search of a bike shop where I could buy a helmet and a lock for my new used bike which I bought in order to experience the beauty and chaos of riding across the Brooklyn Bridge to my office on Wall St. The day that I set out on this task was the day of the West-Indian parade, said to be one of the largest parades in the city. The parade itself was about a mile away but the festive sentiment seemed to have overflowed to the stretch of Fulton Street a few blocks from my house. The street was so alive with music and people milling about, chatting with neighbors, popping in and out of small local food joints, many of which offer home-cooked buffets of West-Indian, African, and Halal cuisine. I couldn’t help but smile at this scene. I was in such a good mood that the occasional cat-calls didn’t phase me, and by the time I reached Marcus Garvey boulevard and found the bike shop closed, perhaps indefinitely, I realized that I still had a thirst for exploring. Then I remembered my grandfather’s story about the street he grew up on changing its name from Sumner to Marcus Garvey, an appropriate change reflecting the demographic changes in the neighborhood. I figured I must be somewhere near the building, the site of countless stories of the family deli and my grandfather’s youth, and so I made a quick call to find out the cross street and set out to connect more tangibly to my roots. Walking through the Bed-Stuy area, I found it hard to imagine my grandfather living there, and I wanted to know more about how the area had transitioned to become the largest Black community in NYC and earn its reputation as a rough neighborhood where a woman like me shouldn’t wander. As I approached the intersection, I started to look up at the building that should have been the one I sought. I wasn’t totally sure it was the right one until a man approached me and asked if I was lost. I guess a white woman looking upwards is a confusing sight there. I told him what I was looking for and once he confirmed that there was a church on the ground floor, I knew that that was it because it matched the information my grandfather told me about the story of the building post-deli. The man, whose name I learned was Jerry, then told me that he’d lived in that area his entire life, 40 years. I stood with him a while as he gave me his account of the neighborhood, explaining to me that in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s it used to be a very beaten down and dangerous place to be at any time of day. Crime was rampant and neighborhood preservation was low on the priority list. He told me that in more recent years, however, things have really started to get better because small crime punishment became more severe which, he believes, effectively scared people into submission. Jerry walked and talked with me much of my way home but stopped and turned back several blocks before I reached my house, saying that he didn’t need to know where I lived but was just glad to talk to me. I was so grateful for him helping me connect some dots between my grandfather’s childhood in the neighborhood, the last 60+ years, and my recent arrival on the scene.
Another experience of random connection came to me when I sat on a bench around Penn Station, an area of Manhattan that I find particularly nauseating due to incessant crowds and the fervor of consumers ingesting both products and famed NY sights. To sit still in a place ridden with such sounds and movement is in and of itself a surreal experience. But then to sit, and find myself in conversation with a elderly woman who I assumed to be homeless and/or mentally unstable, just took that NY moment to a whole new level. This woman, Miss Maddy, sat next to me smoking, dripping snot out of her nose, and holding her giant teddy bear dressed in a shirt and a hat. As the wind picked up she instructed me to put on a sweater, and then take some vitamins…with a shot of alcohol on the side. She burst into a hearty laugh as she showed me her own personal stash of cognac, which she proudly bought at a discounted rate from a nearby drug store. Unprovoked, she then proceeded to tell me about various other articles of clothing that she had bought cheaply, both for herself and for the bear, who she spoke of as an animate object. I later learned that he was some sort of genius, already shaving and accepted to medical school abroad as a mere 8th grader! Throughout our talk she made reference to many different jobs that she held including NY police officer, Russian interpreter for the UN, attorney, freight handler at the docks, and more. Although much of what she said I didn’t fully believe, I listened genuinely and hoped that this woman was not alone in the world. So when she asked me to call her land lady/ sponsor in Delaware (where she said she lived) I gladly obliged, happy that I wasn’t the only one cared for her safety. She rambled and joked with me for a while, her stories getting increasingly jumbled and bizarre, and I just listened and thought about New York, the converging point of so much madness of the world.
In my 12th grade English class my teacher wrote this quote by Emily Dickinson on the board: “Much Madness Is Divinest Sense/ To the Discerning Eye”. I don’t remember what it meant to me then but as I recall this quote right now, in the context of my first month in NY, it seems strikingly relevant. In my training at work I’ve been bombarded with information about the interplay between government, banks, investors, property owners, and renters. I’ve also become painfully aware of the role that money and greed play in many social and/or professional interactions between peoples, whether incorporated or individualized. I’ll explain. I now work as a tenant organizer for an organization called the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB). Essentially, my job involves identifying multi-family low income housing buildings across New York City that are at risk of losing their affordability for a number of reasons. We find such buildings by browsing open public records from the city, state and federal housing agencies and picking out buildings that have high code violations or failed inspection scores, usually signs of building neglect and horrible disrepair. In more recent years, UHAB has spent much of its organizing capacity working with rent stabilized apartments that fell victim to the predatory practices in the housing market, characterized by overly high mortgages/purchase prices intended to jump start gentrification by getting long time low-income tenants out of neighborhoods like Harlem and the Bronx in hopes that higher paying tenants could move in and bring profits for landlords and investors who put their money into commercial mortgage backed securities. If you had to read that sentence twice because I used strange terms that a) you didn’t understand and b) you are surprised that I understand, please know that you are not alone in your confusion. This is exactly my point…I did that on purpose to both show the extent to which I feel out of my element surrounded by talk of mortgages and interest rates and overleveraging, and also to show how this complex lingo is employed in tragic greed-ridden processes that deeply affect people whose livelihoods are gambled away by banks and speculative investors who exploit the public’s inability to have a voice at their own dinner table, figuratively and literally. Maybe I’ll write another post soon in which I do my best to relay parts of the mountains of information I’ve learned about the housing scandal across the U.S, but for now I won’t make your heads spin too much and just explain how I fit into this picture. As a tenant organizer, I go into buildings that are in very bad conditions and are also often in foreclosure. In buildings bought by wealthy real estate investment corporations in the last few years, foreclosure is usually a result of the fact that the income from rent couldn’t support the expenses (maintenance and repairs) plus the high mortgage payments, so the owner just stopped putting any money into the building at all and let it fall into shambles, now at the whim of the bank to re-sell to yet another high bidding irresponsible landlord. So I go into these buildings, knock on all the doors to get the tenants’ version of the story and see what the real needs are. Then I organize meetings with the tenants, facilitate the formation of a tenants association, and then ask the tenants simply: “what do you want?” and “how can we work with you so that you can get that?” From there, we empower tenants to develop a strategized campaign to demand and ensure affordability and good livable building conditions, whether that be by holding banks accountable for bad lending, getting responsible non-profits to buy buildings at fair rates, help tenants to “go co-op” and own the building themselves, or anything else the tenants can dream up.
So where is the divine sense amidst the madness? Well I think that that is the question that I will keep asking myself and searching for with discerning eyes as I continue to make observations and analyses about intersections of life in New York. In the past month I’ve felt such vibrant mixtures of bliss, depression, frustration, excitement, confusion, anticipation, and a host of other sensations. And as I work towards channeling these thoughts and emotions into actions that I can be proud of, I hope I’ll start to find “sense” in scenarios that often seems too nonsensical to work with in my constant quest for change-making tools and allies. As New York keeps pulsing, I’ll keep learning. I can hardly wait!
So what am I actually talking about? I’m talking about my neighbors being a collection of folks from the African and West-Indian diaspora, the Black American community, young white hipsters, Latinos from all over the Americas, students, families of varying socio-economic statuses, elderly people, professionals, working class citizens, immigrants, new neighbors, long-time tenants, brownstone apartments, gentrified modernized buildings, houses with stoops, large subsidized apartments in disrepair, family-run food and drug stores, Baptist gospel churches, swanky wine and tapas bars, hole-in-the wall Laundromats, parks and playgrounds, bike lanes, trash on street corners, people on street corners, life. All this and many, many more snapshots that I decided not to list are just within the 1 mile radius around my house; my house of white Jews in their early-mid twenties talking about and engaging with urban poverty, trying to make sense of our role in perpetuating/combating it, and in that process also make sense of ourselves and the multiplicity of identities embedded in and occasionally seeping out of our very porous bodies.
I especially experience myself as a porous being because I think that somehow I have been gifted with a completely subconscious vibe that has always drawn strangers to approach me. Of course this “gift” has its downsides, but mostly it makes for great stories and learning moments. Perhaps this elusive vibe is just that outward expression of being porous, open to the whim of the world and inviting it to affect me, teach me, change me. This has played out in my time in NY thus far by strangers engaging me in conversation in those in between times, the pauses between the mad-rush of Manhattan at the end of a work day, the bit of silence amidst the competing noises of the sub-culture on the subway, the eyes turned upward in contrast to the forward-looking sharp linear pathways that New Yorkers tend to carve out despite diagonal urban planning.
On my first weekend in the neighborhood I set out on my own in search of a bike shop where I could buy a helmet and a lock for my new used bike which I bought in order to experience the beauty and chaos of riding across the Brooklyn Bridge to my office on Wall St. The day that I set out on this task was the day of the West-Indian parade, said to be one of the largest parades in the city. The parade itself was about a mile away but the festive sentiment seemed to have overflowed to the stretch of Fulton Street a few blocks from my house. The street was so alive with music and people milling about, chatting with neighbors, popping in and out of small local food joints, many of which offer home-cooked buffets of West-Indian, African, and Halal cuisine. I couldn’t help but smile at this scene. I was in such a good mood that the occasional cat-calls didn’t phase me, and by the time I reached Marcus Garvey boulevard and found the bike shop closed, perhaps indefinitely, I realized that I still had a thirst for exploring. Then I remembered my grandfather’s story about the street he grew up on changing its name from Sumner to Marcus Garvey, an appropriate change reflecting the demographic changes in the neighborhood. I figured I must be somewhere near the building, the site of countless stories of the family deli and my grandfather’s youth, and so I made a quick call to find out the cross street and set out to connect more tangibly to my roots. Walking through the Bed-Stuy area, I found it hard to imagine my grandfather living there, and I wanted to know more about how the area had transitioned to become the largest Black community in NYC and earn its reputation as a rough neighborhood where a woman like me shouldn’t wander. As I approached the intersection, I started to look up at the building that should have been the one I sought. I wasn’t totally sure it was the right one until a man approached me and asked if I was lost. I guess a white woman looking upwards is a confusing sight there. I told him what I was looking for and once he confirmed that there was a church on the ground floor, I knew that that was it because it matched the information my grandfather told me about the story of the building post-deli. The man, whose name I learned was Jerry, then told me that he’d lived in that area his entire life, 40 years. I stood with him a while as he gave me his account of the neighborhood, explaining to me that in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s it used to be a very beaten down and dangerous place to be at any time of day. Crime was rampant and neighborhood preservation was low on the priority list. He told me that in more recent years, however, things have really started to get better because small crime punishment became more severe which, he believes, effectively scared people into submission. Jerry walked and talked with me much of my way home but stopped and turned back several blocks before I reached my house, saying that he didn’t need to know where I lived but was just glad to talk to me. I was so grateful for him helping me connect some dots between my grandfather’s childhood in the neighborhood, the last 60+ years, and my recent arrival on the scene.
Another experience of random connection came to me when I sat on a bench around Penn Station, an area of Manhattan that I find particularly nauseating due to incessant crowds and the fervor of consumers ingesting both products and famed NY sights. To sit still in a place ridden with such sounds and movement is in and of itself a surreal experience. But then to sit, and find myself in conversation with a elderly woman who I assumed to be homeless and/or mentally unstable, just took that NY moment to a whole new level. This woman, Miss Maddy, sat next to me smoking, dripping snot out of her nose, and holding her giant teddy bear dressed in a shirt and a hat. As the wind picked up she instructed me to put on a sweater, and then take some vitamins…with a shot of alcohol on the side. She burst into a hearty laugh as she showed me her own personal stash of cognac, which she proudly bought at a discounted rate from a nearby drug store. Unprovoked, she then proceeded to tell me about various other articles of clothing that she had bought cheaply, both for herself and for the bear, who she spoke of as an animate object. I later learned that he was some sort of genius, already shaving and accepted to medical school abroad as a mere 8th grader! Throughout our talk she made reference to many different jobs that she held including NY police officer, Russian interpreter for the UN, attorney, freight handler at the docks, and more. Although much of what she said I didn’t fully believe, I listened genuinely and hoped that this woman was not alone in the world. So when she asked me to call her land lady/ sponsor in Delaware (where she said she lived) I gladly obliged, happy that I wasn’t the only one cared for her safety. She rambled and joked with me for a while, her stories getting increasingly jumbled and bizarre, and I just listened and thought about New York, the converging point of so much madness of the world.
In my 12th grade English class my teacher wrote this quote by Emily Dickinson on the board: “Much Madness Is Divinest Sense/ To the Discerning Eye”. I don’t remember what it meant to me then but as I recall this quote right now, in the context of my first month in NY, it seems strikingly relevant. In my training at work I’ve been bombarded with information about the interplay between government, banks, investors, property owners, and renters. I’ve also become painfully aware of the role that money and greed play in many social and/or professional interactions between peoples, whether incorporated or individualized. I’ll explain. I now work as a tenant organizer for an organization called the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB). Essentially, my job involves identifying multi-family low income housing buildings across New York City that are at risk of losing their affordability for a number of reasons. We find such buildings by browsing open public records from the city, state and federal housing agencies and picking out buildings that have high code violations or failed inspection scores, usually signs of building neglect and horrible disrepair. In more recent years, UHAB has spent much of its organizing capacity working with rent stabilized apartments that fell victim to the predatory practices in the housing market, characterized by overly high mortgages/purchase prices intended to jump start gentrification by getting long time low-income tenants out of neighborhoods like Harlem and the Bronx in hopes that higher paying tenants could move in and bring profits for landlords and investors who put their money into commercial mortgage backed securities. If you had to read that sentence twice because I used strange terms that a) you didn’t understand and b) you are surprised that I understand, please know that you are not alone in your confusion. This is exactly my point…I did that on purpose to both show the extent to which I feel out of my element surrounded by talk of mortgages and interest rates and overleveraging, and also to show how this complex lingo is employed in tragic greed-ridden processes that deeply affect people whose livelihoods are gambled away by banks and speculative investors who exploit the public’s inability to have a voice at their own dinner table, figuratively and literally. Maybe I’ll write another post soon in which I do my best to relay parts of the mountains of information I’ve learned about the housing scandal across the U.S, but for now I won’t make your heads spin too much and just explain how I fit into this picture. As a tenant organizer, I go into buildings that are in very bad conditions and are also often in foreclosure. In buildings bought by wealthy real estate investment corporations in the last few years, foreclosure is usually a result of the fact that the income from rent couldn’t support the expenses (maintenance and repairs) plus the high mortgage payments, so the owner just stopped putting any money into the building at all and let it fall into shambles, now at the whim of the bank to re-sell to yet another high bidding irresponsible landlord. So I go into these buildings, knock on all the doors to get the tenants’ version of the story and see what the real needs are. Then I organize meetings with the tenants, facilitate the formation of a tenants association, and then ask the tenants simply: “what do you want?” and “how can we work with you so that you can get that?” From there, we empower tenants to develop a strategized campaign to demand and ensure affordability and good livable building conditions, whether that be by holding banks accountable for bad lending, getting responsible non-profits to buy buildings at fair rates, help tenants to “go co-op” and own the building themselves, or anything else the tenants can dream up.
So where is the divine sense amidst the madness? Well I think that that is the question that I will keep asking myself and searching for with discerning eyes as I continue to make observations and analyses about intersections of life in New York. In the past month I’ve felt such vibrant mixtures of bliss, depression, frustration, excitement, confusion, anticipation, and a host of other sensations. And as I work towards channeling these thoughts and emotions into actions that I can be proud of, I hope I’ll start to find “sense” in scenarios that often seems too nonsensical to work with in my constant quest for change-making tools and allies. As New York keeps pulsing, I’ll keep learning. I can hardly wait!
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Hebron: from all angles
For the past three Saturdays I have attended the new wave of weekly Hebron protests in the Casbah (Old City). The protests are intended to disrupt army-accompanied settler tours that pass through the Casbah each week, and demand the re-opening of Shuhada Street and an end to the occupation of the city. Although for the past two weeks the settlers have changed the time of their tour to avoid encountering our protest, we decided to continue with the protests as planned to assert the Palestinians' right to move freely within their city. So, each week a group of between 50-70 Palestinians, Israelis, and Internationals gather in front of the gate which blocks entrance to Shuhada Street. We stand with signs in Arabic, Hebrew, and English and pass the megaphone around as different people lead the protesters in a series of call and response chants in all three languages. Some activists take the opportunity to give short impassioned speeches, sometimes by Israelis who speak directly to the soldiers and settlers peering down on us from the Beit Romano Yeshiva rooftop, saying that these unjust policies will not be carried out in our name. In contrast to the first week when the protest ended in a series of unwarranted arrests, the protests now conclude now with a march through the Casbah which is met by an onslaught of dirty water thrown down on us from the settlers' homes situated above the Palestinian shops. For the past two weeks there has been no direct confrontation with soldiers or settlers, but we always close with a promise that we will continue to protest every week until racism and separation are abolished in Hebron and all of Palestine.
This past week, just a few days after standing in solidarity with the Palestinians of Hebron, I decided to take a step that I believe very few political activists ever take. I put on a long skirt, tucked my dreadlocks away, and joined the settlers on their tour of the Jewish Community of Hebron. After having been to Hebron many times and heard the story of the Palestinians and the ex-soldiers of "Breaking the Silence" I figured it was time to come face to face with the settlers themselves and hear how they justify their presence in Hebron to the many thousands of Jews that they've taken on tours there. I came with the intention to listen, to observe, and to maybe understand their conviction. So on Wednesday morning I found myself sitting on a bullet proof bus with a group of 40 other American Jews about take a day-trip to Hebron, a city that I was assured by the tour guide is just like any other old city in Israel. Even before the tour had officially started, I already began to feel uncomfortable and almost teary eyed due to the realization that all the other tour participants really had no idea (and really didn't care that they didn't) about the world beyond this Jewish exclusivity. Little did I know that that this initial reaction of discomfort and sadness was to remain with me and only intensify throughout the course of the day.
Our first stop was the matriarch Rachel's tomb which is just outside/technically inside Bethlehem. To reach the tomb we drove through an unbelievably surreal corridor in the concrete wall that circumvents Bethlehem. Since Israelis are not allowed to enter Bethlehem, this access road, entirely surrounded by the wall, has been created for Jews to visit and pray at the tomb. As the tour guide told the story about a time when the grave was closed to Jewish access and how women from Hebron set a precedent by coming anyways and demanding to be let in until the government agreed to re-open the site to Jewish visitors, I realized that all this effort to keep people separate and relegated to only certain areas is futile because people will continue to find ways to be where they believe they ought to be, or at least struggle for that right with all of their being as I've seen with the Palestinians in Hebron. For some reason, being there only made me think more and more about how this land cannot be divided. Of course I don't mean undivided in the way that the settlers refer to Greater Israel, but rather that in that moment it just seemed so apparent to me that drawing up borders and erecting walls cannot actually lead to real justice or peace; they merely restrict essentials freedoms such as access and movement, and furthermore will never suppress the people's desire to return to areas that they have been barred from. Religious Jews will never give up their ancestral connection to and right to access these holy sites, and I don't believe that they should have to, but this privilege must come with the equal recognition of the Palestinian claims to this land and their legitimate right to live here and move about freely.
Loaded with these thoughts I got back on the bus headed to Hebron. I listened as the guide told the familiar story of Hebron that began 3700 years ago when Abraham laid down roots in the city and purchased the Cave of the Patriarchs as a burial site for his wife Sarah, and the forefathers and mothers that followed. Later, King David made Hebron the capital of his kingdom for 7 years before moving it to Jerusalem. The phrase that repeated itself throughout the tour was "this is where it all began", which later fused into the story of Jewish contiguity in Hebron, and finally the conclusion that the Jewish presence in Hebron will be eternal. When we arrived in Hebron we were greeted by our tour guide for the next leg of the journey, Rabbi Simcha Hochbaum, originally from New York but for the past 14 years he has made his home in the Hebron Jewish community. The tour started in Tel Rumeida, a hilltop overlooking the heart of the city of Hebron where a few of my Palestinian friends/colleagues live. The guide explained the way the city had been divided in the "Y Accords" which created H1 (80% of the city under Palestinian Authority control) and H2 (20% of the city under Israeli military control and Palestinian municipal control). He continually referred back to the 80/20 split to emphasize what he believed to be inequality and discrimination against the Jews who are not allowed to walk or drive in the majority of the city. In fact, after reading a pamphlet I picked up later in the tour which purports to give the "real facts…in contrast to the false anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda," I was expected to understand that Jews are only allowed to enter 3% of the municipal area; never mind that that 3% area was once the center of Palestinian social and economic life and the gateway to the rest of the city, and never mind that that statement is actually inaccurate because it is not Jews but Israelis that are prevented from entering H1 (according to the Oslo Agreement) and Israelis are in fact allowed to be anywhere in H2 (the 20% mentioned above). This important distinction between Jews and Israelis was intentionally blurred by the tour guide in order to stress his point that anti-Semitism is what lies at the root of all criticism towards the Hebron Jewish community. When, in reality, the disputes in Hebron are entirely political and not based on religious identity. Israeli soldiers patrol H2 constantly, practicing the official policy of "making their presence felt," and it is certainly felt as they are seen constantly peering down, guns at bay, into Palestinian neighborhoods from rooftops (sometimes Palestinian homes that have been taken over and converted into army posts) and pillboxes throughout the city. Of course, this is all information that I learned on the "Breaking the Silence" tour and was not dealt with in any capacity on the settler tour. The tour guide praised the soldiers for their incredible self-sacrifice, but the impression of the soldiers that I get, from starting directly into their eyes as they push my friends and I during protests and from the many testimonies that I've heard from members of "Breaking the Silence", is one of a group of painfully confused and uncomfortable 18-21 year olds who are stuck in positions of power and aggressiveness that throw their concept of right and wrong into a blender, leaving them hardened and numb.
Back on the tour, I was told that I would experience holy people in Hebron. The 1000 Jews that live there believe themselves to be the ones who have taken on the essential responsibility of carrying the eternal Jewish flame in Hebron in the name of our ancient historical connection to the city. Of course learning about and appreciating this history is important, but Hebron especially is a place that cannot be understood separately from its current political context. Referring to the 80% of Hebron that is under PA control as land that was "given away" and the remaining 20% as land that "unfortunately is shared with 15,000 Palestinians" is simply a discursive tactic to confuse the tour participants and make them forget that Hebron is (and has been) a city of several thousand Palestinians living under military occupation. Throughout the tour, the only time Palestinians are mentioned or even acknowledged as part of the story is when they are referenced as "unfriendly neighbors", murderers/terrorists, or hookah smoking couch potatoes. Furthermore, talking about the restrictions on further building and expansion in the settlement cannot simply be received as a baseless effort to discriminate against Jews, but rather must be situated in the context of the larger West Bank settlement issue, namely that the settlements are illegal under international law, some (especially Hebron) are notorious for violence and extremism, and they are a growing thorn in any attempt towards a peace agreement.
Perhaps the most interesting and telling part of the tour for me was when we went into the settlements themselves, which basically consist of just a few blocks of buildings that families have made into living spaces, synagogues, and a museum documenting the presence of the Jews in Hebron. In all my previous tours in Hebron I had never had the opportunity to actually go into their community so I was quite excited to step just a few more meters from where I had always stood, on the Shuhada "ghost street" and see how Hebron looks from this vantage point. On my other visits I was not allowed into the settlements because the large police escort that is mandated to accompany Breaking the Silence tours (supposedly to protect us from settler harassment and prevent friction) had placed strict restrictions on where we can go and when. But this time, with not a single police officer in sight, I found myself on the other side of barriers that I previously had only peeked into through cracks in walls and metal gates. The museum, located on the ground floor of the former Beit Hadassah hospital, was quite impressive and most importantly, effective in conveying the message that Jewish groups respond to best: the message of ultimate victimhood. As I looked at the pictures on the wall depicting the infamous massacre of Jews in Hebron in 1929, I felt a sort of déjà vu sensation and realized that the story being told was the nearly the same story that I had heard countless times growing up and visiting holocaust museums. It was the fear-mongering story of anti-Semitism, complete with the moral imperative "never again." And in that moment, instead of being able to let myself grieve for all the bloodshed in Hebron, I found myself shaken by the realization that this story is entirely believable for a Jewish American audience and, had I not been exposed to other credible accounts of Hebron, I too could come away from this tour thinking that the settlers really are the ones in need of my sympathy. But then I remember the accounts of settler abuse and complete disrespect for Palestinian human and civil rights and I start to feel ill. I understand that this mentality does not exist in a vacuum, but rather is steeped in real and troubling consequences that play out on the ground, such as the closure of roads and shops, the disproportionate army presence, the lawlessness of the settlers, and the will of the Israeli government to continue supporting the settlers perhaps for fear of being perceived as part of the cycle of Jewish persecution. I think about the Jewish residents of Hebron pre-1929 who once lived relatively peacefully alongside their Palestinian neighbors, unlike the settlers of today who make every effort to create a situation in which Palestinians essentially cease to exist. I happen to know that some of the survivors of the 1929 massacre or descendents of the former Hebron Jewish community have actually disassociated themselves with the Hebron settlers and do not support their efforts to reclaim the city on their behalf. Yet this Jewish lineage continues to justify the settlers' presence and forceful methods of establishing themselves in the city.
The tour continued with a visit to the guide's home, the old Sephardic temple, and a final stop at the Tomb of the Patriarchs where we were given time for prayer. After spending the day in what often felt like an alternate universe I didn't feel quite able to ascribe the proper holiness to the site and submit myself to any prayers aside from my deep yearning for universal empathy and for at least some of their tour participants to feel confused enough to then seek more information, step outside of their frame of reference, and think beyond the simplistic rhetoric of pamphlets espousing hatred and resentment. I went on this tour out of genuine curiosity and a desire to understand a people that are often (in my circles) written off as crazy and irrational. But after participating on the tour, it wasn't so much what they said that troubled me, but rather they way that the story fits into a worldview based in fear that is held by so many Jews and that has only resulted in generations of bitterness and divisiveness. I want to believe that Hebron can again live up to its name (meaning friendship), but this tour gave me no such illusion.
This past week, just a few days after standing in solidarity with the Palestinians of Hebron, I decided to take a step that I believe very few political activists ever take. I put on a long skirt, tucked my dreadlocks away, and joined the settlers on their tour of the Jewish Community of Hebron. After having been to Hebron many times and heard the story of the Palestinians and the ex-soldiers of "Breaking the Silence" I figured it was time to come face to face with the settlers themselves and hear how they justify their presence in Hebron to the many thousands of Jews that they've taken on tours there. I came with the intention to listen, to observe, and to maybe understand their conviction. So on Wednesday morning I found myself sitting on a bullet proof bus with a group of 40 other American Jews about take a day-trip to Hebron, a city that I was assured by the tour guide is just like any other old city in Israel. Even before the tour had officially started, I already began to feel uncomfortable and almost teary eyed due to the realization that all the other tour participants really had no idea (and really didn't care that they didn't) about the world beyond this Jewish exclusivity. Little did I know that that this initial reaction of discomfort and sadness was to remain with me and only intensify throughout the course of the day.
Our first stop was the matriarch Rachel's tomb which is just outside/technically inside Bethlehem. To reach the tomb we drove through an unbelievably surreal corridor in the concrete wall that circumvents Bethlehem. Since Israelis are not allowed to enter Bethlehem, this access road, entirely surrounded by the wall, has been created for Jews to visit and pray at the tomb. As the tour guide told the story about a time when the grave was closed to Jewish access and how women from Hebron set a precedent by coming anyways and demanding to be let in until the government agreed to re-open the site to Jewish visitors, I realized that all this effort to keep people separate and relegated to only certain areas is futile because people will continue to find ways to be where they believe they ought to be, or at least struggle for that right with all of their being as I've seen with the Palestinians in Hebron. For some reason, being there only made me think more and more about how this land cannot be divided. Of course I don't mean undivided in the way that the settlers refer to Greater Israel, but rather that in that moment it just seemed so apparent to me that drawing up borders and erecting walls cannot actually lead to real justice or peace; they merely restrict essentials freedoms such as access and movement, and furthermore will never suppress the people's desire to return to areas that they have been barred from. Religious Jews will never give up their ancestral connection to and right to access these holy sites, and I don't believe that they should have to, but this privilege must come with the equal recognition of the Palestinian claims to this land and their legitimate right to live here and move about freely.
Loaded with these thoughts I got back on the bus headed to Hebron. I listened as the guide told the familiar story of Hebron that began 3700 years ago when Abraham laid down roots in the city and purchased the Cave of the Patriarchs as a burial site for his wife Sarah, and the forefathers and mothers that followed. Later, King David made Hebron the capital of his kingdom for 7 years before moving it to Jerusalem. The phrase that repeated itself throughout the tour was "this is where it all began", which later fused into the story of Jewish contiguity in Hebron, and finally the conclusion that the Jewish presence in Hebron will be eternal. When we arrived in Hebron we were greeted by our tour guide for the next leg of the journey, Rabbi Simcha Hochbaum, originally from New York but for the past 14 years he has made his home in the Hebron Jewish community. The tour started in Tel Rumeida, a hilltop overlooking the heart of the city of Hebron where a few of my Palestinian friends/colleagues live. The guide explained the way the city had been divided in the "Y Accords" which created H1 (80% of the city under Palestinian Authority control) and H2 (20% of the city under Israeli military control and Palestinian municipal control). He continually referred back to the 80/20 split to emphasize what he believed to be inequality and discrimination against the Jews who are not allowed to walk or drive in the majority of the city. In fact, after reading a pamphlet I picked up later in the tour which purports to give the "real facts…in contrast to the false anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda," I was expected to understand that Jews are only allowed to enter 3% of the municipal area; never mind that that 3% area was once the center of Palestinian social and economic life and the gateway to the rest of the city, and never mind that that statement is actually inaccurate because it is not Jews but Israelis that are prevented from entering H1 (according to the Oslo Agreement) and Israelis are in fact allowed to be anywhere in H2 (the 20% mentioned above). This important distinction between Jews and Israelis was intentionally blurred by the tour guide in order to stress his point that anti-Semitism is what lies at the root of all criticism towards the Hebron Jewish community. When, in reality, the disputes in Hebron are entirely political and not based on religious identity. Israeli soldiers patrol H2 constantly, practicing the official policy of "making their presence felt," and it is certainly felt as they are seen constantly peering down, guns at bay, into Palestinian neighborhoods from rooftops (sometimes Palestinian homes that have been taken over and converted into army posts) and pillboxes throughout the city. Of course, this is all information that I learned on the "Breaking the Silence" tour and was not dealt with in any capacity on the settler tour. The tour guide praised the soldiers for their incredible self-sacrifice, but the impression of the soldiers that I get, from starting directly into their eyes as they push my friends and I during protests and from the many testimonies that I've heard from members of "Breaking the Silence", is one of a group of painfully confused and uncomfortable 18-21 year olds who are stuck in positions of power and aggressiveness that throw their concept of right and wrong into a blender, leaving them hardened and numb.
Back on the tour, I was told that I would experience holy people in Hebron. The 1000 Jews that live there believe themselves to be the ones who have taken on the essential responsibility of carrying the eternal Jewish flame in Hebron in the name of our ancient historical connection to the city. Of course learning about and appreciating this history is important, but Hebron especially is a place that cannot be understood separately from its current political context. Referring to the 80% of Hebron that is under PA control as land that was "given away" and the remaining 20% as land that "unfortunately is shared with 15,000 Palestinians" is simply a discursive tactic to confuse the tour participants and make them forget that Hebron is (and has been) a city of several thousand Palestinians living under military occupation. Throughout the tour, the only time Palestinians are mentioned or even acknowledged as part of the story is when they are referenced as "unfriendly neighbors", murderers/terrorists, or hookah smoking couch potatoes. Furthermore, talking about the restrictions on further building and expansion in the settlement cannot simply be received as a baseless effort to discriminate against Jews, but rather must be situated in the context of the larger West Bank settlement issue, namely that the settlements are illegal under international law, some (especially Hebron) are notorious for violence and extremism, and they are a growing thorn in any attempt towards a peace agreement.
Perhaps the most interesting and telling part of the tour for me was when we went into the settlements themselves, which basically consist of just a few blocks of buildings that families have made into living spaces, synagogues, and a museum documenting the presence of the Jews in Hebron. In all my previous tours in Hebron I had never had the opportunity to actually go into their community so I was quite excited to step just a few more meters from where I had always stood, on the Shuhada "ghost street" and see how Hebron looks from this vantage point. On my other visits I was not allowed into the settlements because the large police escort that is mandated to accompany Breaking the Silence tours (supposedly to protect us from settler harassment and prevent friction) had placed strict restrictions on where we can go and when. But this time, with not a single police officer in sight, I found myself on the other side of barriers that I previously had only peeked into through cracks in walls and metal gates. The museum, located on the ground floor of the former Beit Hadassah hospital, was quite impressive and most importantly, effective in conveying the message that Jewish groups respond to best: the message of ultimate victimhood. As I looked at the pictures on the wall depicting the infamous massacre of Jews in Hebron in 1929, I felt a sort of déjà vu sensation and realized that the story being told was the nearly the same story that I had heard countless times growing up and visiting holocaust museums. It was the fear-mongering story of anti-Semitism, complete with the moral imperative "never again." And in that moment, instead of being able to let myself grieve for all the bloodshed in Hebron, I found myself shaken by the realization that this story is entirely believable for a Jewish American audience and, had I not been exposed to other credible accounts of Hebron, I too could come away from this tour thinking that the settlers really are the ones in need of my sympathy. But then I remember the accounts of settler abuse and complete disrespect for Palestinian human and civil rights and I start to feel ill. I understand that this mentality does not exist in a vacuum, but rather is steeped in real and troubling consequences that play out on the ground, such as the closure of roads and shops, the disproportionate army presence, the lawlessness of the settlers, and the will of the Israeli government to continue supporting the settlers perhaps for fear of being perceived as part of the cycle of Jewish persecution. I think about the Jewish residents of Hebron pre-1929 who once lived relatively peacefully alongside their Palestinian neighbors, unlike the settlers of today who make every effort to create a situation in which Palestinians essentially cease to exist. I happen to know that some of the survivors of the 1929 massacre or descendents of the former Hebron Jewish community have actually disassociated themselves with the Hebron settlers and do not support their efforts to reclaim the city on their behalf. Yet this Jewish lineage continues to justify the settlers' presence and forceful methods of establishing themselves in the city.
The tour continued with a visit to the guide's home, the old Sephardic temple, and a final stop at the Tomb of the Patriarchs where we were given time for prayer. After spending the day in what often felt like an alternate universe I didn't feel quite able to ascribe the proper holiness to the site and submit myself to any prayers aside from my deep yearning for universal empathy and for at least some of their tour participants to feel confused enough to then seek more information, step outside of their frame of reference, and think beyond the simplistic rhetoric of pamphlets espousing hatred and resentment. I went on this tour out of genuine curiosity and a desire to understand a people that are often (in my circles) written off as crazy and irrational. But after participating on the tour, it wasn't so much what they said that troubled me, but rather they way that the story fits into a worldview based in fear that is held by so many Jews and that has only resulted in generations of bitterness and divisiveness. I want to believe that Hebron can again live up to its name (meaning friendship), but this tour gave me no such illusion.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Crossing Borders
Sometimes I feel like I am in a twilight zone. At this moment I can’t tell if that feeling is based on the context of my life in Israel-Palestine or if it is due to the fact that I am currently sitting with my headphones in my ears listening to insanely intense spoken word/hip hop with heavy drum, bass, electric guitar and piano accompaniment while sitting in a sort of vintage motif coffee shop in Jerusalem, where I am looking at (but not hearing) 2 women engaged in lively conversation, an old woman and her Filipina caretaker reading, a security guard in a neon vest, servers in blacks shirts and jeans attending to people, and other curious sights that are harder to describe briefly. I am usually not the type of person to use headphones to cut myself off from the noise of my surroundings. But in the past few days I have found myself resorting to the comfort of the noise inside my head more often, sometimes through music transmitted through my headphones and into my heartbeat and other times by simply remaining silent and paying attention to the parade of thoughts that present themselves to my consciousness.
About a week and a half ago I decided to give myself a little vacation. With little to no advance planning and a borrowed “Rough Guides” book in hand, my friend Lior and I caught a bus headed to Eilat to cross the to the southern border between Israel and Jordan. Despite having lived on a kibbutz nearly walking distance from this border for several months when I was 18 years old, and technically being able to claim that I have visited the Middle East many times throughout my life, this was my first time venturing into the “Arab World”. My friend and I excitedly walked across the border, started trying to convert dollars to dinars in our head (which we later realized we had been doing incorrectly for half the trip), and reviewing the few Arabic words we had learned in our first 2 Arabic classes. We arrived at our cheap hotel room in Aqaba, with a balcony that opened onto a beautiful view of the Red Sea, the rooftops of the city and the market/shops below, and the hotel skyline of the Israeli resort city of Eilat just a bit further down the beach. We set out to explore the city on foot, hoping to take a dip in the water and maybe even catch a glimpse of some coral reefs. Instead we ended up with our new Jordanian escort/temporary friend who discouraged us from wandering a bit further to the cleaner beaches and instead took us to the public beach in the center of town and watched as I awkwardly stripped down to my bathing suit, surrounded by fully covered Muslim women and gawking men, and waded in the water polluted by gasoline from motor boats offering glass-bottom boat tours. I chose to keep my shirt on and barely went in the water past my waist, and thus began the on-going thought process that stayed with me throughout the trip: how much am I supposed to adhere to the custom of modesty in my own style of dress and thus do my best not to offend people while I’m here, and/or how much am I excused as a tourist and held to an entirely different set of standards? And how do I make sense of that exceptional status?
In short, Aqaba wasn’t the most thrilling part of the trip. Although we did enjoy seeing lots of people out and about in the streets in the evening and staring wide eyed at the enormous Jordanian flag lit up in a plaza and flapping proudly in the wind, we didn’t really enjoy the lack of sleep due incessant mosquito biting and inexplicable shouting and ruckus outside our window and in the room next door until about 5 in the morning. From Aqaba we took a bus to Wadi Musa, the town outside the ancient city of Petra. Petra is a well-known tourist hot spot, like most of mind-boggling world wonders in our current era of hyper globalization. But despite feeling overwhelmed by the sight of thousands of tourists in large groups from all over the world crowded into the narrow gorge that serves as the only entrance to the city, Petra was totally worth it. It is really is a sight that pictures just don’t do justice to. The blend of so many striking colors swirled into the rocks and the intricate facades carved onto them thousands of years ago often forced me to stop in my tracks and just let the magnificence penetrate me. We spent the first afternoon in Petra walking the more standard tourist path to all the easily accessible sights and then the second day straining our calf and thigh muscles to reach each and every corner of the city, from the high place of sacrifice on a steep mountaintop to a giant façade of a monastery with a view that has been dubbed “the end of the world”. By the end of the day we even joked about feeling a bit of the exhaustion that the ancient Israelites must have felt in their supposed 40 years of wandering in the desert. But I doubt they took half as many breaks for Bedouin tea as we did. All that hiking and admiring really launched me into a period of quiet contemplation and doing the kind of internal listening that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. And by the time we made it to our next stop on the vacation, Wadi Rum, I was fully immersed in my own meditations, which not surprisingly came very naturally when I found myself surrounded by an expansive desert that seemed to continue forever into the abyss. Off-roading for 3 hours over red sand dunes in the back of a 4x4 jeep, not a building or sign of “civilization” in sight, I let myself drift away. I’m not even sure what I was drifting from or to, but I know that I suddenly felt unburdened by the whole assortment of anxieties that usually take up space in my life in Jerusalem. Instead, I was taking time to appreciate and behold. After the drive we were brought to our campsite, also far off the paved road, and I had some time to read and nap and go deeper into my silence. As the sun was setting we took advantage of our location and did some impromptu boulder/rock climbing to get a glimpse of the sun before it dropped off over the horizon. Back at the campsite, as soon as the sky turned dark, we found ourselves in the middle of a party for a group of Jordanian elected officials. Typical Arabic music was blaring from a sound system that seemed to have materialized out of nowhere and the men were joining hands to dance the debke. It looked like so much fun and I was itching to join in, but then my stream of questions about modesty returned to me and as I looked across the way from where I was sitting and saw Jordanian woman covered head to toe and Japanese women with exposed hair and shoulders, I remained seated, somewhere in between the two extremes. I was resigned not to dance with the men, almost paying reverence to the local women with whom I tried to identify. But then I saw the men make their way towards the Japanese women and start pulling them onto the dance floor, clearly acknowledging the fact that there are two types of women in this scene, and apparently they are not at all related. The tourist women are free to be touched, admired, and involved in a way that the Jordanian women would never be. I struggled with thoughts about that double standard even as I eventually let the music and my love for dancing overtake me. I held the men’s sweaty hands and then even launched into a belly dancing solo that convinced the men that I must have some Arab roots. That identification, and my concession that actually my half of my family is Iraqi, provided an interesting twist to my confusion about the place of women in this society. In one way the men were acting upon an understanding of implied difference between myself and the Arab women, and in another way they were trying to find points of commonality and include me as some sort of partial member of their community. As an aside, it might have also been the first time in my life that I chose to identify as Arab, which then caused me think a lot about why it is so important for Jews from Arab countries/ Mizarachi Jews (as they are usually called) to create this sharp distinction between themselves and Arabs when in reality, just as their places of origin overlap, so do their cultures. At least I can say that about the dancing…because that I learned from my dad.
Our last night in Jordan, swept up in unexpected festivities, officially came to a close with a late night journey into the desert with a Bedouin cowboy tour guide who was with us at the campsite. He drove us in his land cruiser with the headlights off over a huge sand dune and then he let me take over in the driver’s seat as he called directions out into the darkness. We parked the car and retrieved mattresses from an empty campsite. We lay there for a while and did some of the most magnificent star gazing I’ve ever experienced. Constellations, planets, shooting stars, the works. The next day he gave us a ride back to the border and as we showed the border guards our passports to re-enter Israel I received offers of herds of camels if I agreed to stay in Jordan longer. I considered it for a quick moment and then laughed and continued walking into Israel. It was quite a whirlwind adventure and I’ve only explained little snippets here, but suffice it to say that my experience in Jordan was really unforgettable.
Here are a few pictures to whet your appetite and if you want to hear what I was listening to when I started this post several hours ago, check it out:
http://soundcloud.com/zeraviv/the-ultimate-saul-williams-mixtape
About a week and a half ago I decided to give myself a little vacation. With little to no advance planning and a borrowed “Rough Guides” book in hand, my friend Lior and I caught a bus headed to Eilat to cross the to the southern border between Israel and Jordan. Despite having lived on a kibbutz nearly walking distance from this border for several months when I was 18 years old, and technically being able to claim that I have visited the Middle East many times throughout my life, this was my first time venturing into the “Arab World”. My friend and I excitedly walked across the border, started trying to convert dollars to dinars in our head (which we later realized we had been doing incorrectly for half the trip), and reviewing the few Arabic words we had learned in our first 2 Arabic classes. We arrived at our cheap hotel room in Aqaba, with a balcony that opened onto a beautiful view of the Red Sea, the rooftops of the city and the market/shops below, and the hotel skyline of the Israeli resort city of Eilat just a bit further down the beach. We set out to explore the city on foot, hoping to take a dip in the water and maybe even catch a glimpse of some coral reefs. Instead we ended up with our new Jordanian escort/temporary friend who discouraged us from wandering a bit further to the cleaner beaches and instead took us to the public beach in the center of town and watched as I awkwardly stripped down to my bathing suit, surrounded by fully covered Muslim women and gawking men, and waded in the water polluted by gasoline from motor boats offering glass-bottom boat tours. I chose to keep my shirt on and barely went in the water past my waist, and thus began the on-going thought process that stayed with me throughout the trip: how much am I supposed to adhere to the custom of modesty in my own style of dress and thus do my best not to offend people while I’m here, and/or how much am I excused as a tourist and held to an entirely different set of standards? And how do I make sense of that exceptional status?
In short, Aqaba wasn’t the most thrilling part of the trip. Although we did enjoy seeing lots of people out and about in the streets in the evening and staring wide eyed at the enormous Jordanian flag lit up in a plaza and flapping proudly in the wind, we didn’t really enjoy the lack of sleep due incessant mosquito biting and inexplicable shouting and ruckus outside our window and in the room next door until about 5 in the morning. From Aqaba we took a bus to Wadi Musa, the town outside the ancient city of Petra. Petra is a well-known tourist hot spot, like most of mind-boggling world wonders in our current era of hyper globalization. But despite feeling overwhelmed by the sight of thousands of tourists in large groups from all over the world crowded into the narrow gorge that serves as the only entrance to the city, Petra was totally worth it. It is really is a sight that pictures just don’t do justice to. The blend of so many striking colors swirled into the rocks and the intricate facades carved onto them thousands of years ago often forced me to stop in my tracks and just let the magnificence penetrate me. We spent the first afternoon in Petra walking the more standard tourist path to all the easily accessible sights and then the second day straining our calf and thigh muscles to reach each and every corner of the city, from the high place of sacrifice on a steep mountaintop to a giant façade of a monastery with a view that has been dubbed “the end of the world”. By the end of the day we even joked about feeling a bit of the exhaustion that the ancient Israelites must have felt in their supposed 40 years of wandering in the desert. But I doubt they took half as many breaks for Bedouin tea as we did. All that hiking and admiring really launched me into a period of quiet contemplation and doing the kind of internal listening that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. And by the time we made it to our next stop on the vacation, Wadi Rum, I was fully immersed in my own meditations, which not surprisingly came very naturally when I found myself surrounded by an expansive desert that seemed to continue forever into the abyss. Off-roading for 3 hours over red sand dunes in the back of a 4x4 jeep, not a building or sign of “civilization” in sight, I let myself drift away. I’m not even sure what I was drifting from or to, but I know that I suddenly felt unburdened by the whole assortment of anxieties that usually take up space in my life in Jerusalem. Instead, I was taking time to appreciate and behold. After the drive we were brought to our campsite, also far off the paved road, and I had some time to read and nap and go deeper into my silence. As the sun was setting we took advantage of our location and did some impromptu boulder/rock climbing to get a glimpse of the sun before it dropped off over the horizon. Back at the campsite, as soon as the sky turned dark, we found ourselves in the middle of a party for a group of Jordanian elected officials. Typical Arabic music was blaring from a sound system that seemed to have materialized out of nowhere and the men were joining hands to dance the debke. It looked like so much fun and I was itching to join in, but then my stream of questions about modesty returned to me and as I looked across the way from where I was sitting and saw Jordanian woman covered head to toe and Japanese women with exposed hair and shoulders, I remained seated, somewhere in between the two extremes. I was resigned not to dance with the men, almost paying reverence to the local women with whom I tried to identify. But then I saw the men make their way towards the Japanese women and start pulling them onto the dance floor, clearly acknowledging the fact that there are two types of women in this scene, and apparently they are not at all related. The tourist women are free to be touched, admired, and involved in a way that the Jordanian women would never be. I struggled with thoughts about that double standard even as I eventually let the music and my love for dancing overtake me. I held the men’s sweaty hands and then even launched into a belly dancing solo that convinced the men that I must have some Arab roots. That identification, and my concession that actually my half of my family is Iraqi, provided an interesting twist to my confusion about the place of women in this society. In one way the men were acting upon an understanding of implied difference between myself and the Arab women, and in another way they were trying to find points of commonality and include me as some sort of partial member of their community. As an aside, it might have also been the first time in my life that I chose to identify as Arab, which then caused me think a lot about why it is so important for Jews from Arab countries/ Mizarachi Jews (as they are usually called) to create this sharp distinction between themselves and Arabs when in reality, just as their places of origin overlap, so do their cultures. At least I can say that about the dancing…because that I learned from my dad.
Our last night in Jordan, swept up in unexpected festivities, officially came to a close with a late night journey into the desert with a Bedouin cowboy tour guide who was with us at the campsite. He drove us in his land cruiser with the headlights off over a huge sand dune and then he let me take over in the driver’s seat as he called directions out into the darkness. We parked the car and retrieved mattresses from an empty campsite. We lay there for a while and did some of the most magnificent star gazing I’ve ever experienced. Constellations, planets, shooting stars, the works. The next day he gave us a ride back to the border and as we showed the border guards our passports to re-enter Israel I received offers of herds of camels if I agreed to stay in Jordan longer. I considered it for a quick moment and then laughed and continued walking into Israel. It was quite a whirlwind adventure and I’ve only explained little snippets here, but suffice it to say that my experience in Jordan was really unforgettable.
Here are a few pictures to whet your appetite and if you want to hear what I was listening to when I started this post several hours ago, check it out:
http://soundcloud.com/zeraviv/the-ultimate-saul-williams-mixtape
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Change on the Horizon?
I haven't felt as inspired to write lately. Not because there aren't interesting thing to write about and not because my mind has stopped churning, but just because sometimes I am just in the mood to let experience sit, as they are, in their moment, without a thorough re-evaluation and reflection process afterwards. But now I am sitting in the office alone, dark clouds and thunder outside my window, and it seems, if only for a moment, that the heat wave might be ending as the rain ushers in a new season in Jerusalem. But then as I continue glancing outside I see the sun refuse to shy away and fight its way through the clouds, clearing away the few drops that fell and creating a strong odor of wet asphalt that reaches me even from 4 stories above street level. Perhaps this is some sort of metaphor for my experiences here. Dark clouds signal changes on the horizon, unclear whether or not they are welcome changes. Then the sun peeking provides a glimmer or hope, but hope that is always kept in check by the accompanying odor which reminds us where we are and where we have yet to go. So now, in the midst of this fleeting scene, tainted by the noise of sirens and construction below, I feel like I have some time to write about a few happenings from the past few weeks.
My life and work here seem to be constantly fluctuating between high-intensity stimulation and excessively slow periods of solitude and inactivity. This past weekend qualifies as the first category, thanks in part to the visit of a very close friend from Berkeley who brings light with her wherever she goes. It started with a protest in Hebron that I had a bit of a role in organizing with a few very prominent activists here. The process of organizing such activities has certainly been a challenge as I find myself sitting in on meeting, trying my best to stay alert, involved, and hopefully helpful, despite not understanding all the Hebrew, especially when it is all mixed together with a bunch of code words and references to places and laws and past events and people that I am not familiar with. I recognize that I am undergoing a learning process through immersion, but I can't help but feel unsettled and confused as I straddle the line between taking on responsibilities and taking on the role of an observer. Basically, my contributions thus far have consisted of making weekly visits to Hebron to coordinate plans with our Palestinian partners in the city, being designated as the contact person for people who want to sign up to participate in the protest, and video taping everything once the protest is already underway. Admittedly, I don't do much talking in any of these capacities because like I said, I haven't got Hebron and the role of all the different players there all mapped out in my head just yet and I don't know where I can insert myself in a more substantial way. It will take me some time to understand which areas are considered more high-risk for protests, which areas are accessible, and which types of actions are likely to make the most impact. The protest this past Friday drew a crowd of around 70 people (a mixture of Israelis, Internationals, and Palestinians) to a piece of land that belongs to a Palestinian family yet is being used by settlers as a parking lot and a make-shift synagogue (essentially a tent with a Jewish star on it). There the protesters built a Palestinian outpost to show how quickly such a structure would be destroyed in contrast to the Jewish outpost which remains untouched. The police and army urged us to leave because they had declared the area a closed military zone. This resulted in the arrest of a number of people who refused the order to leave and then stunt grenades for the rest who didn't back away quite far enough. In some ways these protests seem like mere theatrics or a game of cat and mouse between the authorities and the activists. The parts are well rehearsed and everyone generally knows the sequence of events: march, chant, confront, crowd dispersal, go home (with different variations on those basic parameters). When I'm there I feel a rush of adrenaline but rarely do I feel like I'm actually making a dent in the system or convincing anyone to correct injustices. So why do it? Why do I willingly enter a scene where I know there is the danger of tear gas or a tarnished name or sometimes even a blow from an angry settler? Well this is a question that I am still attempting to find good answers to but for now I feel like my rationale lies in my commitment to building relationships based on solidarity, challenging unjust practices by shedding light on (or creating noise around) the critical issues that otherwise slip by unnoticed, and being part of a movement that doesn't wait on broken promises, but rather mobilizes the people in nonviolent struggle to demand the recognition that they are denied. Also, these protests represent a community of people in Israel-Palestine that are kept hidden by mainstream media and I think it is important to know that they exist, they are fighting, and they are not "terrorists" trying to dismantle the country from the inside.
My weekend continued with a beautiful Shabbat dinner at the home of a very warm and welcoming family in Jerusalem. It's so rejuvenating for me to find such accepting people in a place where I have to always think twice before sharing myself fully, simply to avoid conversations that make me feel uncomfortable or ostracized. I had one such conversation with a stranger at a party this week and it left me feeling incredibly deflated and hopeless. The simple act of explaining my work here launched him into an upsetting rant full of offensive claims and impenetrable denial. I don't aim to interact with people as if we are facing off on a battlefield, and in fact I refuse to. Actually, even imagining such a situation seems strange because such an approach does not align with my personality at all. I am not a person to yell in your face and tell you you're wrong. I am one the one who quietly listens and tries to find points of connection and inclusion. So when I do decide to speak and give voice to the flurry of thoughts that spend most of their time tucked safely away behind my closed lips within my inner soul, I am so grateful for those who show me the compassion and patience to I need to feel confident, safe, and supported. That is the type of community I left behind in Berkeley and which I hope to be able to create anew this year.
The weekend came to a close with a day by the Dead Sea. I went to enjoy the marvel of this natural phenomenon and also participate in an event attempting to draw attention to the fact that the Dead Sea is in a major crisis as a result of climate change. It is drying up at an alarming rate and contributing to the formation of huge, hazardous sinkholes along its shores. I'm not going to attempt to explain the process by which this happens because it's too technical and geological for my brain to fully grasp, so if you are curious you can look it up (and I fully encourage you to do so).
The event had three groups, Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians, making human chains to spell out "350" (as in parts per million), which is the safe upper limit of CO2 that should be in our atmosphere, instead of the 390+ that we are at right now. Similar actions took place all around the world, and although I found it a bit ironic that aerial photographs were taken (as if planes don't emit tons of CO2) the intention behind such a global campaign is important because it helps people feel more empowered to make change instead of feeling like the task is too daunting and beyond our control.
In more personal news, I'm slowly starting to make more friends and find more creative ways to spend my free time here. I am taking a breakdancing class twice a week, where I attempt to spin on my back and my head do fancy footwork with a group a kids. I am starting an Arabic class today just to learn a few basics so I don't feel completely at a loss for words when I am interacting with Palestinians. And I'm always searching for more ways to convert those more dull and lonely moments here, into opportunities for adventure and learning through critical engagement.
My life and work here seem to be constantly fluctuating between high-intensity stimulation and excessively slow periods of solitude and inactivity. This past weekend qualifies as the first category, thanks in part to the visit of a very close friend from Berkeley who brings light with her wherever she goes. It started with a protest in Hebron that I had a bit of a role in organizing with a few very prominent activists here. The process of organizing such activities has certainly been a challenge as I find myself sitting in on meeting, trying my best to stay alert, involved, and hopefully helpful, despite not understanding all the Hebrew, especially when it is all mixed together with a bunch of code words and references to places and laws and past events and people that I am not familiar with. I recognize that I am undergoing a learning process through immersion, but I can't help but feel unsettled and confused as I straddle the line between taking on responsibilities and taking on the role of an observer. Basically, my contributions thus far have consisted of making weekly visits to Hebron to coordinate plans with our Palestinian partners in the city, being designated as the contact person for people who want to sign up to participate in the protest, and video taping everything once the protest is already underway. Admittedly, I don't do much talking in any of these capacities because like I said, I haven't got Hebron and the role of all the different players there all mapped out in my head just yet and I don't know where I can insert myself in a more substantial way. It will take me some time to understand which areas are considered more high-risk for protests, which areas are accessible, and which types of actions are likely to make the most impact. The protest this past Friday drew a crowd of around 70 people (a mixture of Israelis, Internationals, and Palestinians) to a piece of land that belongs to a Palestinian family yet is being used by settlers as a parking lot and a make-shift synagogue (essentially a tent with a Jewish star on it). There the protesters built a Palestinian outpost to show how quickly such a structure would be destroyed in contrast to the Jewish outpost which remains untouched. The police and army urged us to leave because they had declared the area a closed military zone. This resulted in the arrest of a number of people who refused the order to leave and then stunt grenades for the rest who didn't back away quite far enough. In some ways these protests seem like mere theatrics or a game of cat and mouse between the authorities and the activists. The parts are well rehearsed and everyone generally knows the sequence of events: march, chant, confront, crowd dispersal, go home (with different variations on those basic parameters). When I'm there I feel a rush of adrenaline but rarely do I feel like I'm actually making a dent in the system or convincing anyone to correct injustices. So why do it? Why do I willingly enter a scene where I know there is the danger of tear gas or a tarnished name or sometimes even a blow from an angry settler? Well this is a question that I am still attempting to find good answers to but for now I feel like my rationale lies in my commitment to building relationships based on solidarity, challenging unjust practices by shedding light on (or creating noise around) the critical issues that otherwise slip by unnoticed, and being part of a movement that doesn't wait on broken promises, but rather mobilizes the people in nonviolent struggle to demand the recognition that they are denied. Also, these protests represent a community of people in Israel-Palestine that are kept hidden by mainstream media and I think it is important to know that they exist, they are fighting, and they are not "terrorists" trying to dismantle the country from the inside.
My weekend continued with a beautiful Shabbat dinner at the home of a very warm and welcoming family in Jerusalem. It's so rejuvenating for me to find such accepting people in a place where I have to always think twice before sharing myself fully, simply to avoid conversations that make me feel uncomfortable or ostracized. I had one such conversation with a stranger at a party this week and it left me feeling incredibly deflated and hopeless. The simple act of explaining my work here launched him into an upsetting rant full of offensive claims and impenetrable denial. I don't aim to interact with people as if we are facing off on a battlefield, and in fact I refuse to. Actually, even imagining such a situation seems strange because such an approach does not align with my personality at all. I am not a person to yell in your face and tell you you're wrong. I am one the one who quietly listens and tries to find points of connection and inclusion. So when I do decide to speak and give voice to the flurry of thoughts that spend most of their time tucked safely away behind my closed lips within my inner soul, I am so grateful for those who show me the compassion and patience to I need to feel confident, safe, and supported. That is the type of community I left behind in Berkeley and which I hope to be able to create anew this year.
The weekend came to a close with a day by the Dead Sea. I went to enjoy the marvel of this natural phenomenon and also participate in an event attempting to draw attention to the fact that the Dead Sea is in a major crisis as a result of climate change. It is drying up at an alarming rate and contributing to the formation of huge, hazardous sinkholes along its shores. I'm not going to attempt to explain the process by which this happens because it's too technical and geological for my brain to fully grasp, so if you are curious you can look it up (and I fully encourage you to do so).
The event had three groups, Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians, making human chains to spell out "350" (as in parts per million), which is the safe upper limit of CO2 that should be in our atmosphere, instead of the 390+ that we are at right now. Similar actions took place all around the world, and although I found it a bit ironic that aerial photographs were taken (as if planes don't emit tons of CO2) the intention behind such a global campaign is important because it helps people feel more empowered to make change instead of feeling like the task is too daunting and beyond our control.
In more personal news, I'm slowly starting to make more friends and find more creative ways to spend my free time here. I am taking a breakdancing class twice a week, where I attempt to spin on my back and my head do fancy footwork with a group a kids. I am starting an Arabic class today just to learn a few basics so I don't feel completely at a loss for words when I am interacting with Palestinians. And I'm always searching for more ways to convert those more dull and lonely moments here, into opportunities for adventure and learning through critical engagement.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Strangers at Home
For the past few weeks a major component of my job at Breaking the Silence has been coordinating the open tours to Hebron and the South Hebron Hills. This requires that I set the dates and location for the tours, decide which language (Hebrew or English) they will be in, and then send email blasts and facebook messages to the people that we are trying to reach to sign up for the tours. Our primary target audience is the Israeli public so I’ve been focusing on the Hebrew tours most. Then after I’ve spread the word, I obsessively check our email account tours2hebron@gmail.com, respond to inquiries that come in, and make lists of the people signing up. It’s pretty mindless work a lot of the time, except for the fact that it’s great practice for my Hebrew writing/typing ability. But when I actually do go on the tours myself, which I do every once in a while to make sure everyone gets on the bus alright and to continue my own education about the region, then I get to see the fruits of my labor (so to speak) and I realize why these tours are so important. This past Monday I joined one of the Hebrew speaking tours to the villages and settlements in the South Hebron Hills. This was my second time on this specific tour, and it was even with the same tour guide, so I expected to have a similar experience. However, the fundamental difference between the tours was in the make-up of the groups and especially the reactions that I observed within the second group, which was comprised of 16 Israelis while the first was a group of about 7 internationals. (Just a quick aside about numbers…there are over 50 Israelis signed up for our next tour which takes place today! Seeds are being planted.) So as I was saying, what I realized on this tour was the extent to which Israelis are unaware of the reality on the ground in the West Bank (in this case South Hebron), which is just about 45 minutes away from Jerusalem and actually quite close to many other Israeli cities; remember, it’s a tiny country. Plus, it’s a breeze for Israelis to pass through the checkpoints, the same checkpoints that Palestinians can sometimes wait at for hours. In many ways the tours are very informative and Ilan, the tour guide, is fully equipped with facts about policies and practices carried out by the army as well as his own personal stories of his time serving as a soldier there during the 2nd Intifada. But, as Ilan emphasizes in the beginning, the tour is not meant to be a lecture and it’s a given that people won’t always believe everything they hear from the guide, but maybe they will believe their own eyes when they see the physical markers of separation and inequality. All Israelis hear stories or read the news about settlements and the friction with surrounding Palestinian villages. But do they imagine that some of these famed settlements are just a few caravans on a hilltop who gain land titles and access to water and electricity by abusing their privilege as Israeli citizens which guarantees them protection by the army? The process by which such illegal outposts become legal is pretty unbelievable. Basically a few settlers come and set up their caravans anywhere they choose within Area C of the West Bank. Area C refers to the majority of the land in the West Bank that is mostly rural and totally controlled by Israel. It stands in contrast to Area A which is comprised of the major cities and is controlled by Palestinians, and Area B which is a combination of the two. A description of the complications surrounding the different areas deserves a much more lengthy discussion but that is not my main intention right now. I mention it just for a bit of context and to explain the different sets of laws that serve the different populations in the West Bank. So since the settlers are Israeli citizens settling within Israeli territory (officially) they are held accountable under Israeli civil law which is (supposed to be) enforced by the police. Palestinians under occupation, however, are subject to martial law which of course is much more severe and is enforced by the soldiers. The soldiers have no power to evict the settlers even though they know their actions are illegal, and the police are local police, meaning they are settlers themselves, and thus have no intention of evicting the settlers either. But because they are citizens the army is obligated to protect them, so soldiers come in, set up generators for themselves, declare the area around the new settlement a closed military zone, and help the settlers begin a process of expropriation. Once the land is declared a closed military zone no one is allowed to go there, unless they want to get arrested, thus ensuring that Palestinians cannot access their agricultural and grazing land in that area. As more caravans are added the restricted area expands its reach, and if it can be proven that the land has not been worked in 5 years then the land becomes state owned and available for cheap lease, which the settlers take advantage of in order to legalize their land grab.
The Palestinian village of Susiya in the South Hebron Hills.
An elderly Palestinian man talking to us outside his home
Palestinian village of Susiya. If you look closely you can see the Jewish settlement of Susiya (yes, same name) in the background. All the land in between the settlement and the village has been declared a closed military zone where Palestinians cannot enter.
The illegal outpost/settlement of Avigail. It is on it's way to becoming legal. They are hooked up to water and electricity through the army generators. The nearby village of Susiya has none of these amenities. An organization called Ta'ayush has started to build solar panels and wind turbines in Susiya but it's still very limited
Another image that doesn’t exactly match up with what Israelis believe they know about the West Bank is the image of the Palestinian village of Susiya. If it weren’t for the people who live there as a cohesive community and hold onto the memories of each eviction they’ve undergone, one could easily dismiss the cluster of ripped tents off the side of road as just a few “homeless” people and we would not understand that it is in fact a village with a history that begs to be heard. On the tour we sat in one of these tents, drank delicious tea, and spoke with members of the village who pointed to holes in the tent caused by Molotov cocktails and holes in the ground that serve the purpose of collecting the little rain water that falls in the winter, that is if the holes are not raided by the army and filled in with trash. And then people on the tour wonder why they don’t just leave, move to the cities, pull themselves up by their sandal straps. But when the only other option is to move to the unbelievably crowded refugee camp of Yatta (seen just over the horizon), staying and fighting for rights to their land, however difficult it might be, seems like the only way to proceed. And besides, what right do we have telling them to pick up and leave just to cooperate with the shameful Israeli plan to concentrate them as much as possible in the cities (a type of ghettoization)? Can all these practices really be explained away as simply security measures? Does the official Israeli government rhetoric, that I heard the Israelis on the tour cling to in an attempt to make sense of a senseless reality laid out before them, really help us understand the facts on the ground in the South Hebron Hills, or do they simply keep us from actually opening our eyes and confronting the injustices that exist in this “homeland” that we thought we knew but now seems a bit foreign and unsettling?
However, this feeling of being a stranger within our own country isn’t something that is exclusive to visits to the West Bank, where actually it is expected because “technically” that area is not even part of the country. In fact, that feeling of being an outsider is something I have experienced numerous times within Israel proper, but never to the extent that I did this week. A few days ago I took a bus that I had never been on before which passed through an area that I had never intended to pass through, but I was in no rush and I knew the end destination was Jerusalem, my home, so I paid the bus driver and sat in the front of an empty bus and started to read a book. The bus driver commented that I was crazy for trying to go to Jerusalem dressed as I was (shoulders exposed) but I told him I live there and I dress like this all the time. I responded with a sort of “thank you, but I can handle myself” type of attitude. Nonetheless, I put a sweater on after a few minutes, but only because the air conditioning was on high and not because I felt compromised. Eventually, as the bus began to fill up with haredis (men in black hats, women in long skirts, and tons of screaming children with side curls) I realized that the bus was driving through Bnei Brak, which is one of the most orthodox religious neighborhoods in the country. I continued to mind my own business, reading, until I heard someone talking to me. It was a religious man asking me to move to the back of the bus. I was so taken aback by his request that I could not find the courage to form the words I wanted to say, which would have been something like “but I was sitting here first and I’m not bothering anyone”. Instead I just looked toward the back of the bus, noticed that most women were sitting there and that I was now the only secular person on the crowded bus, picked up my belongings and took my new seat in the back. The tears that then filled my eyes and streamed down my cheeks surprised me because after all, he had asked relatively politely, I hadn’t been physically hurt, and truthfully I don’t mind where I sit on the bus. But regardless, there was something so painful in that interaction and as I sat there I crying I thought about the overwhelmingly frustrating sense of entitlement that allows people to dictate who belongs in the front and who in the back, who in positions of power and who as subordinates, who as an valuable members of society and who as burdens or nuisances. I felt outcast and unable to assert my voice that only cries out for equality. I feel this alienation as well when Israeli family, friends and strangers, tell me that I am working against the country, being one sided, and forgetting the Jewish history of persecution and victimhood. I know where I come from, I love and deeply respect my heritage, and I am trying to achieve my highest ideals which do not dictate that some can benefit at the expense of many. So why is my voice considered extreme and thus not worthy of real reflection that could lead to actual change here, change that I believe is beneficial to everyone, and not just “one side”? So if you think you disagree with me, I just ask that you hear me, and I will continue to struggle for the creation of spaces of mutual respect where everyone has the ability to safely and comfortably express all aspects of their identity.
A Palestinian resident of Susiya showing us a destroyed water hole.
The Palestinian village of Susiya in the South Hebron Hills.
An elderly Palestinian man talking to us outside his home
Palestinian village of Susiya. If you look closely you can see the Jewish settlement of Susiya (yes, same name) in the background. All the land in between the settlement and the village has been declared a closed military zone where Palestinians cannot enter.
The illegal outpost/settlement of Avigail. It is on it's way to becoming legal. They are hooked up to water and electricity through the army generators. The nearby village of Susiya has none of these amenities. An organization called Ta'ayush has started to build solar panels and wind turbines in Susiya but it's still very limited
Monday, September 28, 2009
Pictures of East Jerusalem
A concert in the old city- Tower of David Museum; Tribute to Joe Amar- legendary Mizrachi singer from the 60s and 70s
Shuafat Refugee Camp- lookout from the Jewish neighborhood of Pisgat Zeev (beyond the Green Line)
The wall around Abu Dis, in East Jerusalem
View of Bethlehem- from Gilo. The wall/fence goes around Rachel's tomb in Bethlehem, allowing access to religious Jews, but cutting Palestinians off from their fields on the other side
View of security tower overlooking Beit Jala from the Jewish neighborhood of Gilo (beyond the Green Line)
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