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.