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

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.

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 2^nd 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.

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

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)

Thoughts for the holiday

Tonight begins the fast of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for Jews. It is meant to be a day of very deep self-reflection, repentance, and forgiveness. One might think that living in the (supposed) holiest city in the world would mean that I am surrounded by devout Jews. But actually it’s just the opposite, and I seem to be the only person I know fasting and interested in attending prayer services. Last week I spent Rosh HaShanah (Jewish New Year) in the Tel Aviv/Petach Tikva area, bouncing back and forth between family and friends, and again no one around cared too much about actually observing the holiday. Of course, as an officially Jewish state, most businesses and transportation services shut down on these days. But that doesn’t stop most Israelis from maneuvering their way around these ‘inconveniences ‘and taking shared taxis, crowding into the few open coffee shops, going to the beach, and using the holiday as an excuse to sleep and eat a lot. Seeing this overwhelming secular side of the Israeli public always makes me wonder why people are so insistent on maintaining the Jewish character of the State and why the Orthodox Rabbinate is given so much power to dictate policy here. Why is it that my friends in the fellowship must bring proof that they are Jewish to the Ministry of Interiors in order to obtain a volunteer visa for the year? Why is it that this proof must come in the form of a letter from a Rabbi who must meet strict Orthodox standards which frown upon converts and children of mixed marriages and anyone who belongs to any other Jewish denomination? How can such a secular Israeli public allow the government to support, both financially and politically, religious fanatics creating settlements in the Palestinian territories? But, if we are going to talk about settlements, then we shouldn’t forget that not all settlements are made up of extreme right-wing religious people. A few days ago I went on a tour of East Jerusalem and was exposed first hand to the reality of settlements right in my back yard (almost literally). Jerusalem is full of totally “normal” and undisputed neighborhoods that were built over the 1967 Green Line, which historically marks the boundary between the West Bank and Israel proper but is now is becoming increasingly irrelevant since Jews are usually given the green light to build wherever they want, regardless of which side of the line they fall on. Even if Israel did truly want to assist in the building of a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, the status of Jerusalem will remain a very complicated problem because it is impossible to divide it neatly into distinctly Arab and Jewish sections. The de-facto policy regarding Jerusalem today is to continue settlement expansion into East Jerusalem, build the wall to strategically include more land, and use a whole series of tactics to force the Palestinian Jerusalemites to surrender to the pressure and leave what’s left of their homes (after they’ve been denied building permits and then demolished). The tour also highlighted the incredibly unequal distribution of municipality funds and the ironic fact that Palestinian Jerusalem residents are always first to pay their city taxes to prove that they are entitled to the benefits of residency and that they do in fact belong to this city. Yet, despite their insistence on paying, they still do not have a reliable waste collection service or enough schools for their kids to attend, and the only nice roads and sidewalks seen in the Arab areas are paved only to serve the new settlements that are constantly being constructed there. The tour ended with a view of the Shoafat Refugee Camp, which is technically within the municipal borders of the city of Jerusalem, but has been cut off from the city by the wall that was built around its perimeter. On the tour, I bumped into a girl I vaguely remembered from the Young Judea Year Course program I did 5 years ago. As we looked out onto the views of a side of Jerusalem that we’d never seen, we realized that it was merely a coincidence that all the tours of Jerusalem that we did on Year Course did not include any of these areas or any of the narratives which do not fit nicely into the image of Jerusalem as the city of gold and the eternal united capital of the Jewish State. If I didn’t have such a poor memory I could recount to you all the complicated details of the status of East Jerusalem and its residents (not citizens, mind you), as it was explained to me on the tour, but perhaps it’s enough to just get people to ask more questions and encourage you to do some of your own research and a bit of soul-searching too. It is, in fact, Yom Kippur.

I started this blog post before Yom Kippur actually began. Now I am finishing it on the day of Yom Kippur, mid-fast, and in between prayer services. So I want to add onto, and maybe partially contradict, my previous depiction of the secularization of Jewish holidays in Israel. Last night I had my final meal before the fast at the home of the woman who was the coordinator for my fellowship (before she took another job and passed her responsibilities to someone else). She graciously welcomed me into her home, as I know most families here would do for a lone Jew in Jerusalem. I was excited to spend the holiday here in Jerusalem because I’d heard that its truly a unique experience to see the streets completely open to pedestrians and bicyclists both going to and from temple, but also people just out walking the streets for the sake of being part of a community. The tradition, I discovered, is to walk up and down Emek Refaim Street in the old German colony, stopping and chatting frequently as you pass people you know. There isn’t a car in sight, kids are playing with friends and riding bikes, people are walking their dogs, and there is a very calming aura about the whole scene. I went to services at a reform synagogue in the area, taking comfort in the melodies that were familiar to me, and feeling a bit foreign with the ones that weren’t. But overall, I was happy to be able to find a space for my hybrid secular/religious self-expression, and to continue processing everything that I see and do here. How do I make sense of taking this heavy, but completely necessary, tour during the day and then driving into the Negev for a reggae festival at night? How do I shut off my consciousness to the fact that this festival seemed to me to represent pure self-indulgence and indolence, and even a romanticization of the Bedouin population who live in the area and spent the weekend making us pita with labne and zatar and sweeping up the remains? How do I then return to a Jerusalem simultaneously enveloped in prayer and chanting of racist slogans outside my window? Yes, apparently, there was a gang of kids on my street last night who tried to beat up some Palestinian kids while yelling death to the Arabs. That, amidst the serenity of the holiday that I described before…

I spend a lot of time here in quiet contemplation. Sometimes it’s because I don’t know what to say or can’t find the words, but sometimes I think it is also because I am constantly in awe and bewilderment at the web of contradictions that Israelis have become tangled in, in pursuit of their liberation and self-determination. Thanks for reading and supporting me throughout.

Separation Anxiety

Now a word, or a paragraph, about living in Jerusalem. Most young and hip people who share my political perspectives and secular progressive lifestyle congregate in Tel Aviv, the lively and constantly developing city on the shore. Jerusalem, on the other hand, is characterized by tons of religious people in modest dress and black suits, rowdy Americans on long-term programs, old stone buildings, magestic hilltop views, and the site of incredible tension between Jews and Palestinians who “share”, albeit unequally, this sacred and dysfunctional city. And perhaps it is only appropriate that all these divisions are clearly delineated and made apparent, of course by the giant concrete wall that cuts through those views I mentioned above, but also by the different buses that serve Jews and Arabs and the striking contrast between the increasingly upscale Jewish quarter of the old city and the increasingly neglected and impoverished Arab quarter, not to mention the Palestinian neighborhoods that are literally crumbling and covered in waste while new subsidized settlements are being constructed in their wake.

An anecdote: Just the other day I was walking around the Arab Shuk (open-air marketplace) in the old city, getting lost in the maze as I always do, but this time I was there just before sunset during Ramadan. Everyone (except for me apparently) had formed a mass herd and was scrambling to get to the mosque for prayers and for the breaking of the daily fast. At first I was walking in the opposite direction of the crowd, but to avoid being trampled I had to turn around the allow myself to be carried by the wave. I was with a friend of mine from Year Course (the program I did in Israel 5 years ago). She commented about how she had never seen anything like this in Israel before and had never been that far deep into the Shuk. She even felt like she had crossed into a different country. Actually, before 1967 we would very well have been in a different country. So it’s ironic because there is an invested interest in maintaining that separation and the feeling that this place and these people are foreign, but while also insisting that they remain within Israeli domain and control. But that’s how Jerusalem is; you weave in and out of mostly invisible borders (apart from the wall) and don’t pay attention to how bizarre it is that within one minute of finding my way outside of the Arab Shuk filled with cheap and only practical clothing, supplies, and food, I entered into the newest marvel of Jewish Jerusalem, the very high-end and perfectly sterile shopping boulevard where GAP just introduced its first Israeli branch. I was blown away by the fact that these realities exist right on top of each other yet cannot be in communication with each other. Just another example of the overwhelming privilege of Jews in this country; we don’t have to know what goes on the “other side”, or sometimes in Jerusalem it can be just the next street over. So for me, living in Jerusalem is about forcing myself to see what is right in front me and think about the significance of it all.

While Tel Aviv is a marvel in and of itself, it is also referred to as “the bubble” because it’s so easy to stay in North Tel Aviv and not see the harsh racial and class-based divisions that residents of South Tel Aviv are all too aware of. Jerusalem has a few ritzy shopping zones like the one I mentioned before, but Tel Aviv is overflowing with fashion boutiques and cute cafes that are lit up at night, beautiful young people on bikes and mopeds, and lest we forget, the Mediterranean Sea. I’ll be real with you, it’s fun! But during my orientation for the fellowship we were taken on a tour of Neve Sha’anan, the neighborhood where the largest Central Bus Station in the world was built despite the pleas of the residents to consider the amount of air and noise pollution that would accompany the monstrosity. The tour was lead by the director of a Mizrachi feminist organization called Achoti (My Sister). (Mizrachi refers to Jews originally from the Middle East, i.e their descendants are not from Europe). She gave us a paper with testimonies of women who had been trafficked into Israel from Russia and Moldova and were now sex slaves locked up in apartments in this neighborhood that is now known mostly for the high concentration of foreign workers and refugees who find themselves on the fringe of Israeli society because they are unable to receive the benefits of citizenship, i.e Jewishness. On the tour, we walked to each of the apartments/rooms where the women were held and we read their painful stories of abuse while we stood, literally, at the scene of the crimes. Many of the places we went to have since been shut down, but trafficking of women in Israel is still an issue that is largely ignored, and even facilitated by the police who often make deals with the pimps. South Tel Aviv does not shine like North Tel Aviv and it is not by accident that this area receives significantly less money from the municipality and is the area where all the shameful and racist practices of the city are carried out. So what do I learn from this tour? Did it pop the Tel Aviv bubble? I think that mostly it just helps me connect the dots between the divisions I see in Jerusalem and those that I’m now getting to know in Tel Aviv as well. I look at who is let into the dream world and who is systematically shut out and the parallels speak for themselves really.



These are the other NIF/Shatil Social Justice fellows standing in front of an apartment where 5 sex slaves were burned alive naked and clinging to each other because they were locked inside with no escape.


Here you can see the incredibly close proximity of the Central Bus Station to apartments in Neve Sha'anan. Thousands of buses pass through here everyday, honking and contributing to unbelievable air pollution which contributes to high cancer rates in the area.


Residents of Neve Sha'anan


"Prostitution Row" (unofficial title). All those yellow doors are rooms where trafficked women live and do sex work.

Out of work and on the streets of Neve Sha'anan

Transitions

I arrived here one month ago full of anxiousness and excitement for my first big non-student adventure. I came here to work and to be some sort of professional someone. But since the word professional is a bit off-putting to me, I’ll define my purpose as such: to be part of a movement, to meet inspiring people, to challenge myself and my society to grow; and in the process of doing all these vague and wonderful things, I hope to develop some concrete skills that I hope will only enhance my ability to contribute to the development of a more just world. But in order to really discover my place here and make the best use of my fellowship, I have to be able to find balance and comfort as I make these transitions, of which there are many. The first major transition that I came up against was the transition from communal living within a supportive framework to apartment life, which I’ve now understood to be the “do it yourself” kind of life. For better or for worse (I lean towards the better side), I have been spoiled by my long tenure in my beloved Berkeley co-op. I never had to purchase furniture and worry about how to deliver it and carry it up 4 flights of stairs. Here, my first week was spent sitting on the floor of my completely barren room, pouring over second-hand websites trying to find the cheapest bed and closet and hoping that some knight in shining armor would appear with a truck and a helping hand. In the end, it worked out a bit like that, but much less glamorous and much more frustrating. In the co-op I never even had to go grocery shopping and the kitchen was always well-stocked with yummy shared food and supplies. Now, I push a grocery cart down the street for a couple blocks and pray every night that I’ll come home to find my roommates cooking (because then they offer me some dinner). Otherwise, the food is primarily individual which means that I’ll have lots of tummy aches from the random snacks that I consume as substitutes for quality meals. (I see all the mothers and foodies reading this now and having a panic attack, but don’t worry, I’m exaggerating for the sake of poetic license). Also, in the co-op there were always people around the house, which resulted in constant stimulation. Now I live with just 2 other women my age and aside from the noise of the busy street below our balcony and outside our windows, the place is mostly still and empty. They are really kind and wonderful roommates, but they also work and study a lot and have their own social life that exists mostly outside of the apartment. So allow me to paint a mental picture for you. I live on the main road in the Talpiyot neighborhood of Jerusalem. Essentially that means that I live in the wholesale furniture district on the Eastern edge of the city. I have my own room with white walls, and for anyone who knows me even a little, you should know that I need color in my room, and in my life for that matter. My roommate Noa studies philosophy at the Hebrew University and loves musicals, improv, and cooking. My other roommate Avigail listens to good folksy music, likes postcards with pictures of the U.S civil rights and hippie movement, and invites me to reggae festivals on the beach and in the desert. Basically, it’s a pretty good situation, and all the low points are just part of the adjustment process. I have to remind myself sometimes that I just moved to the other side of the world and it’s not supposed to be easy and familiar. But once works starts to pick up and I get a few more fun activities into my weekly routine, I might even be too busy to write this blog, so I guess I’m grateful that I have a lot of down time by myself to process this first month more completely.

The other big transition and source of stress is related to language and communicability. While I do speak and understand Hebrew quite well, better than your average American Jew I guess, the incredibly high standards that I set for myself seem to be hurting me rather than helping. I’m constantly stuck deciding whether or not it is more important for me to resort to English and understand everything and express myself clearly, or if I should fully immerse myself in Hebrew and run the risk of missing words along the way and adopting a much more reserved and quiet personality. Ideally, I would like to change those options so that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing and so that I can find the courage to ask questions, explain to people that I am learning, and use Hebrew as much as possible. Currently, my style has been to whip out my Israeli accent and pretend that I’m always in the know, OR (with my roommates and some people at work) get lazy and seek comfort in the fact that they speak English fluently. For now, I’ll work on taking my own advice to always seek balance. Moment of pride: I have been reading and responding to emails in Hebrew at work lately and although I’m super slow, it’s good practice and I haven’t yet had someone write back and say that I didn’t make any sense.

Homelessness in a tunnel walkway in Jerusalem. The posters on the wall are related to the coming of the Messiah. I took this picture because it's not your typical postcard image of Israel and presents a good example of the disconnect between reality and ideology.

As I Am

This blog is just a space for me to document my musings and give people a chance to get inside my head and inhabit my world with me. I never imagined that I would create a blog. But as I continue to wander, observe, and learn more about my surroundings and my place without and without it, the reality of structures, systems, contradictions, contrasts, privilege and power compels me to write and reflect in a more public forum with space for rambling and questioning together with my community. Everyone is familiar with my emails from abroad, but I have decided to take the blog route this time because there is simply too much to be said and too much to digest in an email format. So this blog will not be organized thematically or organized at all really. It's just a collection of my thoughts and experiences and we can make the connections together along the way.

Where to begin is always the question…

I guess I’ll start with the base line description of what I’m doing, where, why, and how and then fill in all the details as each piece of the story unravels and begs for more questions and deeper explanation. I am in Israel-Palestine. I recognize that for some people reading even that simple sentence raises questions, concerns and a whole slew of politicized reactions. But it is important for me to begin here with the debate over names of places and events because it highlights a theme that is impossible to ignore here, namely different narratives and perceptions of reality. Although I have been to Israel many times before, this time I have come with the intention to see the many faces of Israel-Palestine and try to understand what this place represents for the different communities of people who live here and/or claim some type of connection to it. This discontinuity between “realities” is what has been most difficult for me to make sense of and accept willingly. In my previous trips to Israel I reveled in its great beauty and the aliveness that I felt walking the streets. Now, holding those memories as one version of Israel, I am turning more corners and crossing both official and unofficial borders to discover the Israel that lurks beneath the shadows, shadows cast (for example) by the massive Tel Aviv Central Bus Station over the impoverished and neglected neighborhood of Neve Sha’anan, or by the settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank that swallow up Palestinian lands and attempt to wipe away any evidence that Palestinians ever existed there. (I’ll explain these examples in much more depth later…just bear with me and my scattered thoughts…_)

So, you ask, what I am I doing here exactly?

I am able to be here and fulfill my desire to learn about and contribute to Israel-Palestine more completely through the generosity and the trust bestowed upon me by the New Israel Fund/Shatil Social Justice Fellowship. As a recipient of this fellowship, I have been granted the unique opportunity to work with an Israeli NGO of my choosing and commit myself to 10 months of activism for social change. So I have chosen to work for an organization called Breaking the Silence (Shovrim Shtika). They are an organization made up primarily of veteran Israeli soldiers who work to collect testimonies of soldiers who have served in the West Bank and Gaza from the 2^nd Intifada until the present day. Then they compile these testimonies into books, sometimes organizing the testimonies according to a specific subject matter such as Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in January 2009, or the soon to be released book of women’s testimonies. The testimonies really shed light on a lot of problematic behavior/activity in the army and document every-day abuses of power that effectively strip Palestinians of any dignity and ability to lead any sort of “normal” life. Since I arrived in Israel nearly a month ago, I have been reading tons of these testimonies and watching DVDs of testimonies as well, and while sometimes I think that I might be getting numb to the stories about raids and house evictions, looting and humiliation, restriction of movement, and excessive use of force/violence, I also force myself to let it penetrate and think about how we have come to place where our “security” depends on the oppression of others and how it is that so few people here know about this and how even fewer care to find out. And as an aside, I don’t even like how I phrased that sentence because thinking of Palestinians as “others” just reinforces the constructed divide between people whose lives are so intimately connected. But I will leave the sentence as a testament to how much I am wrapped up in the discourse of “us” vs “them”.

If anyone is curious about references that I make to testimonies then I encourage you to read the testimonies yourself in PDF form on the shovrimshtika.org website. Another major component of Shovrim Shtika are the tours to Hebron and the South Hebron Hills. These tours are given by former soldiers who served in those areas, and thus have very personal knowledge about the incredibly complicated and troublesome relationship between the Israeli settlers, the Palestinians, the army, the police, and the different sets of laws (or sometimes lack thereof) that govern the area. Since I’m trying to make this just an introductory post I’ll leave it at that for now and then explain my experience on both of those tours in another post that I promise to write very soon. As an accompaniment to both the testimony books and the tours, Breaking the Silence also give lectures and organizes educational events for a variety of audiences, and of course is always hoping to reach more audiences with their message, which is essentially that we must raise our level of awareness about what life under occupation actually looks like and how the our actions bear serious moral consequences that must be acknowledged publicly and honestly. But, seeing how Breaking the Silence has been under serious attack within Israel lately, it seems as though people prefer not to know and wipe their hands clean. It’s easier that way of course because we aren’t the ones paying the price. I have a nice apartment in Jerusalem and I don’t fear that I will be forced out at any moment and I don’t worry about where my water will come from. As a Jewish Israeli American citizen, I am living the good life, able to be both within and without this conflict.