Help me win a photo contest and send an activist to Palestine

I’ve entered this photo into Operation Groundswell‘s 2012 photo contest. First prize is 1500$ towards one of the trips. If I win, I won’t use the prize money myself, but rather I will donate it to someone else in Toronto doing Palestinian activism, who is interested in going on the OG middle east trip. So, if you use facebook, please like my photo, and also like the album in which it is in so that your like will count as a vote!

Adjusting to Toronto, Reflecting on Palestine

After being back two days, it still feels strange to be in Toronto. The weather is so un-desert like, and the streets are completely green. Even with the recent disaster in which CCRI destroyed a significant portion of our garden, our yard is infinitely more green than Ramallah or Kalandia camp. But where the real culture shock comes from is the different priorities here. For instance, over breakfast today my housemates and I found ourselves discussing how we can better utilize our waste – food waste, but also human waste, with the goal being reducing our ecological footprint as close to zero as is possible. In contrast, the garbage solution in Kalandia is someone periodically sets the dumpsters on fire. And whereas we discuss the purchase of rainwater barrels to irrigate our garden, in Kalandia water is stored in barrels because the camp is only supplied with water one day per week – and without water storage houses simply would have no running water on the other days. In other words, while here we discuss water and waste to reduce our eco-guilt, in Kalandia these issues are dealt with out of necessity, and with much less grandiose intentions. This contrast shows how being environmentally conscious is itself a privilege, and relies on a degree of relative stability which much of the world’s population do not enjoy.

Toronto is not a conflict zone. This does not mean there is no conflict or oppression in Toronto; as I return there is a manhunt on where the police are trying to locate an alleged 20,000 “illegal” migrants in the GTA. But conflict does not dominate society here – there are no prolific armed groups, there is no fear of an uprising that would drastically change the political situation.

In some ways, Palestine is a more honest place than Toronto. Oppression is less well concealed, perhaps simply because the situation is more extreme. But also because of the strength of resistance there, specifically the strength of communities which refuse to simply disappear into the rest of the Arab-world. There is nothing Zionists would like more than for Palestinians to disappear, and become Lebanese, Egyptian, Syrian, or Jordanian. But they refuse, and you can see evidence of this refusal in the force of arms levelled against them, and also in the apartheid system which denies most of them entry to the holy city.

In the end, Palestine has forced me to re-consider the national question – the question of whether identification with a nation is always statist, imperialist, oppressive. The answer I think is – not always. There are some nationalisms which are – probably not essentially, but because of their historical situation – anti-colonialist. Even with all the problems with the PA, the collusion between the PA army and the IDF, and the immense inequality and corruption in the Palestinian territories – I still don’t feel the same way about officers or soldiers there than I feel in any other place. This is because the Palestinian territories is not a state, and the soldiers and officers are essentially the same people who fight in the resistance when Israel pursues armed incursions into PA territory. For now, the “state of Palestine” seems something like an anti-state, although there are certainly forces which desire it to turn into something like a normal statist entity.

Back in Toronto, life is good – no occupation, proper water and sewage, recycling services, and many trees. But on the other hand, comparatively little strength in community – the police or army can route around wherever they please in Toronto while searching for undocumented workers, with no fear of being attacked by local militias, and no fear of kids pelting them with stones. People are linked together through work,  social media, and through activist organizations – but they live far from the people they know, and they don’t necessarily know their neighbors or have a good idea of what is happening on their street. As Hamza says, everything good brings something bad with it – and I can see this when contrasting the political and social situations between the Annex (my neighborhood in Toronto), and the neighborhoods I frequented in the West Bank and inside the Zionist entity.

Toad Lane Return

Somehow I made it through Israeli security without being interrogated. It was pretty funny when they had my bag open, and 30 keffiyehs sprawled across the table – they asked: “you have a lot of scarves?”. They also found my book on refuse-nicks, and one on Israeli settler violence.

Arriving back in Toronto is a relief, but it feels strange to be back at Toad Lane without actually having a room to live in. Tonight there is a house meeting, and I’ll find out if I can couch surf here for a few weeks.

Toronto smells wonderful – summer green everywhere, people hanging out on porches, lots of activism. Everything is so different from West Bank. I feel I’ve changed a lot since I left this place at the end of April – I’m quieter, less cognitive, less interested in debating with people to show them that they are wrong. For instance, I’m not interested anymore in the debate over “Israeli Apartheid”. This is a debate over semantics that serves (and has the goal of) concealing the real situation in Palestine – something I’m not interested in being a part of. Of course the Zionist entity is apartheid – more than this, it’s a national socialist state where most property is owned in common and redistributed back to the Jewish nation. Also, it isn’t really a state because it doesn’t have borders, but is constantly expanding by expropriating more and more indigenous land. And it’s fundamentally a national-colonist state, because it holds that any jew, anywhere in the world, has a greater right to live in a village in the state of Israel than a person who was depopulated from that village as a child. But these are just facts – I’m not interested in debating them.

If you want to ask me about my experience in Palestine, go ahead. And if you want to explain to me how your experience was different – that’s fine, do so respectfully. But don’t bicker with me, or expect me to indulge you in one of the popular contemporary debates.

I need now to learn how to live in Toronto again. I need to get a phone, buy groceries, plan my schoolwork over the next few months, meet with professors, and plan my return to the West Bank. Luckily, the weather is wonderful.

From the departure cafe level at Ben Gurion Airport

I’ve spent my seven weeks in occupied Palestine, and now it’s time go home to my everyday reality in Toronto, Canada. Leaving feels strange, feels like I’m waking up   – “back to reality”. But that’s wrong, what I’ve seen here is reality – and in the West Bank I think a few degrees more real than in the indefinitely self-reflexive and over-represented “West”. But to me, a liberal subject raised under the thick veil of publicities and public relations, the dusty real of the West Bank still remains a little beyond me, a little bit a dream. A dream which is not simply pleasant; the West Bank is not a good dream, but a daily nightmare or at best Kafka-esq absurdist routine of apartheid laws, corrupted police and local administration, and a political situation made too complicated by a situation which might be objectively without a reasonable direction in which people can aim. But there are good people in this situation, and I am now lucky enough to call some of them my friends. What astounds me most about these good people is their willingness to look at the situation with all eyes open and be prepared to commit all of themselves to finding the right decision, and also to acting on it.

ITT update

Apologies for the sparse, or should I say non-existent updates during the last week. ITT, or independent travel time is the time after an OG trip when people split up, get lost, spend more than they expected on hostels or find amazing homestay situations. My ITT has been a mix of a rocky start in Tel Aviv, followed by great times with friends and meaningful exploration of the West Bank, staying in Qalandia and Ramallah.

I made it to Jenine, where we met with Canaan and the Palestinian Fair Trade Association, who together help organize Palestinian farmers in the cooperative production, sale and distribution of high quality organic, fair trade olive oil. In Toronto you can purchase this olive oil at Beit Zatoun.

In Hebron I met Waqf officers outside the Abraham mosque, who explained the tense relation between the Islamic security and the IDF, and the history of the partition of the mosque after the Goldstein massacre in 1994, when a jewish extremist opened fire on worshippers and killed 28 inside the mosque, 70 outside, and injured 700 more. We got a tour by some kids of the occupation of Hebron, showing the different areas and the ways the settlers attack Palestinians in an effort to get them to leave. One of the kids had two baby brothers killed in an attack in which settlers with the protection /cooperation of the IDF threw a molotov cocktail into a room in his house, setting the confined space ablaze.

I have other stories, but time is short. I will write later.

 

 

Tel Aviv Military Museums

Today in Tel Aviv I visited the museum of the Eztel, also known as the Irgun, as well as the IDF museum. The artifacts don’t interest me much – I don’t like weapons of war, and I don’t find the particularity of “this gun as opposed to that gun” to be significant compared to the motivations behind armed conflict. Unfortunately, the IDF museum was mostly artifacts – in quantities and sizes that are designed to impress. Rows and Rows of captured tanks, as well as Israeli tanks, and artillery pieces everywhere.

The most interesting thing about the IDF museum was the presence of Palestinian scarves on many of the mannequins. At first I thought it was a prank, but then I saw them on mannequins in several different areas of the museum, and noticed that they were old, faded, dusty – not a recent prank anyway. I wonder if no one who works there has noticed in months, even years, that they have been placed there?

The Etzel museum was much more interesting. It tells the story of the emergence of zionist paramilitary groups in the twenties, and their eventual split into three separate movements. The Etzel, also known as the Irgun, was an extremist off-shoot of the original Haganah, caused by an unwillingness of the Haganah to engage in pre-emptive attacks against Arabs. The Irgun, however, stopped the arm campaign against the British during the war, and even fought alongside them. The group which became the Lehi refused this temporary peace with the British, and insisted on maintaing the armed campaign against British presence in Palestine. After the military defeat of the Nazis the three factions joined together to form the Hebrew Resistance Movement, but tensions between them remained. These tensions culminated in the sinking of a Etzel arms ship off the coast of Tel Aviv by IDF (Hagannah) artillery. It is significant that this infighting did not break into a fully civil war.

The crest of the Etzel depicts the original borders of the British mandate of Palestine, along with a hand grasping a gun. The significance of those borders, which include the area known today as Jordan, is that these were the borders of mandatory Palestine when Britain issued the first white paper calling for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and these were the borders when the league of nations approved the mandate and zionist goal set out in the white paper. Irgun faithful rejected the legitimacy of the partition of Palestine into Palestine and trans-Jordan, maintaing the Jewish claim to the “East Bank”.

All over Israel, you can find the crest of the Irgun. From the war memorials I’ve seen, I’d say they are more prominently commemorated than the pre-state Hagannah, although this might be simply because their crest is more recognizable. I’m not sure how related commemoration of the Irgun is to faith in the original basis of the Irgun – a Jewish state according to the League of Nations mandate, and therefore to include Jordan. I feel this might be part of Israel’s repeated attempts to legitimize to its own people its claim to territory far greater than its 1948 borders, and therefore to experience the giving back of territory gained in war as “painful sacrifices”.

The Etzel, and the pre-state Hagannah, were paramilitary forces who’s victories were gained largely through the use of terrorism, and other military tactics outlaws by the Geneva convention. But there is nothing in either of these museums which expresses regret at the tactics used, acknowledges responsibility for civilian deaths, or even expresses regret. The narrative is bullet proof: anything in support of the cause of zionism is greatly commendable, and anything that stands in its way is evil and inhumane for all the normal reasons, in addition to the evil of anti-zionism. The fact Israeli state narratives still look this way, even after zionism is secure and strong in the region, suggests to me that Israel is in a state of structural dishonesty as regards its paramilitary past (to say nothing of its occupation in the present). What has not happened is the moment of victor’s reconciliation, as reached by Gutsy Spence when he expressed “full and complete regret” for the innocent civilians killed over the years by the UVF. I believe that it is essential at the end of a conflict for both sides to recognize the way their own partisan narrative has corrupted their ethical sensibilities, and attempt to redress these hypocrisies. Because I’m a Hegelian, I think the agressor/victor has to do it first. Maybe the problem with Israel is as simple as this – it’s never grown up to its own place as “the winner”.

Narratives in Israel/Palestine: Simplified

People will tell you that this is a place of thousands of different narratives, and that you couldn’t imagine putting it all together in one lifetime. In a sense, that’s true. But in another important sense I think all the perspectives fit into a few important categories.

In essence, there are two kinds of narratives about what has happened/is happening here. The two kinds are: serious and unserious. Serious narratives get the facts right, and don’t concoct complex lies to cover up the evidence inconvenient for their values. Of serious narratives, there are really only two: Zionist and anti-Zionist. The serious zionist narrative does not lie about the history, does not challenge the new historians uncovering of the facts of the Nakba, and does not pretend that the ongoing oppression of the Palestinians is not racist or not oppressive. The serious zionist narrative uses the same facts as the anti-zionist narrative, but justifies the historical violence and ongoing oppression of the Palestinians in the name of the idea of a Jewish state. Once the Jewish State is truly proclaimed as the highest value, there is no need to lie about the facts to justify it. On the other hand, the serious anti-zionist narrative cites the same history, and interprets with anti-colonial values. It does not pretend that all Palestinians are nice people, or that anti-semitism does not exist. This does not mean all anti-zionist narratives recommend the same solution or the same course of action, nor does it mean all zionist narratives envision the same settlement. However, since they are not willing to lie about the reality and the history, all serious people have potential common ground in the content of the world.

There are of course hundreds and hundreds of un-serious narratives. If you are willing to fudge the facts to justify your position, there is no limit to the number of combinations of values and stories you can come up with.

Thoughts by a Tel Aviv Tourist

The independent travel time portion of this trip was supposed to start yesterday, but for lots of reasons almost everyone stayed at the apartment an extra day – so really, today is the first day of ITT. I tried to stay with some people we met while volunteering, but it didn’t work out so I’m at a hostel. I don’t feel fantastic about contributing the extra funds to the Israeli tourist economy, but I suppose it is good to have the experience of an average traveller in “Israel”.

I’m not crazy about travelling individually; I get lonely and bored. But our hostel is near the beach, so I found a funky mexican bar on the water and chilled for a few hours reading the book on religion and violence which Jordan (an IDF soldier) lent me. Trying to get into contact with people is frustrating without a cell phone, so I eventually gave up and found some pizza and a beer (you can drink beer on the street in Israel – have I mentioned this?) and watched the sunset.

I eventually met up with Sadiah who is staying about a 40 minute walk from my hostel. We decided to meet halfway, in Rabin Square. This was a bad idea – the square was packed with people, and it took me ages to find her. Thankfully things were made easier by the fact she was the only muslim woman in the entire crowd. We talked about politics and religion, but especially we talked about how to talk to people you disagree with. I made improving my skill at “talking with zionists” a personal goal on this trip, and I think I’ve made real progress. Unfortunately, you can only improve your own ability to talk to people you disagree with respectfully – the problem of people you disagree with being disrespectful towards you is out of one’s control.

The amount of racism in this country continues to astound me. Whether its people yelling from passing cars, people staring from cafes, or people taking photographs from their cars, Sadiah is singled out, gazed at, confronted, and verbally denounced for being muslim. I find this much more depressing than racism in Canada, however, because it is not an exception. It is instead a perspective that has the force of the state (both ideologically and in terms of administration and policy) behind it. Jews are the “in group”, and everyone not-jewish is treated well only if it suits the state’s needs. This place is a zionist place, which menas it exists primarily for Jews and Jewish migrants, and only secondarily for anyone else, including those who happen to be from here. This is explicitly manifested in a plack outside the Etzel museam, which speaks of the “Liberation of Jaffa” in 1948 – one must simply ask: liberated from who?

Everywhere you go in this country, you see commemorative plaques to zionist paramilitary groups and their actions in the war of independence – but it’s as if everyone’s skull is too thick to see any commonalities between zionist terrorist organizations and palestinian terrorist organizations. The same kind of logic that justifies the armed conquest of Palestine by Jews can justify the armed conquest of Israel by Palestinians, and if you travel through Palestinian territories you see commemorations of martyrs, and of armed groups and their actions.

I wish that both sides – but especially the zionists – would recognize that it is incoherent to pursue a nationalist agenda of armed conquest of a land because the principles that justify it can always be used to justify another conquest.

Is Israel an Apartheid State?

The Crime of Apartheid:

(h)     “The crime of apartheid” means inhumane acts of a character similar to those referred to in paragraph 1, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime;

Paragraph 1

(a)     Murder;

(b)     Extermination;

(c)     Enslavement;

(d)     Deportation or forcible transfer of population;

(e)     Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law;

(f)     Torture;

(g)     Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity;

(h)     Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender as defined in paragraph 3, or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law, in connection with any act referred to in this paragraph or any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court;

(i)     Enforced disappearance of persons;

(j)     The crime of apartheid;

(k)     Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.

The Silwan/City of David Conflict: Archeology, Tourism, Paramilitaries

We visited the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan the day after the Ir Amim tour, but I haven’t gotten around to writing about it until now.

Silwan is an Arab neighborhood built during the period of Jordanian control of East Jerusalem. It is directly South of the old city – looking north you can see the Southern wall of the temple mount and the dome of the Al-Aqsa mosque. Like other Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem it is dirty, smelly, without proper sewage or water services, and full of unmaintained roads. However, unlike some other Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, it has another side to it – another name, and another feeling. This is because Silwan is purportedly built on the ancient site of the City of David – the oldest settlement in Jerusalem, originally built by Canaanites. As such, Silwan has two names – Silwan, and City of David. The two names refer to the same area – when you are in Silwan, you are in the City of David and vice versa. Settlers in the neighborhood (of which there is a significant and armed presence, I’ll talk about this later) call their neighborhood City of David, whereas Palestinians call it Silwan. However, the built reality is such that it is often quite clear whether you are in “Silwan” or “City of David”, despite them being the same place. This is because the City of David is a Jewish site, and is therefore clean, well marked, not smelly, and full of historical markers and interpretive signs. When you take the archeological tour of “City of David”, you walk halfway across Silwan, but don’t feel you are in Silwan, because you don’t feel you are in an Arab neighborhood. As soon as you leave the archeological site area, however, you are immediately thrust into the feeling of the Arab village of Silwan.