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.