Co-operatives and Liberation, not necessarily in that order
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 […]
Read More ITT updateToday 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 […]
Read More Tel Aviv Military MuseumsPeople 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 […]
Read More Narratives in Israel/Palestine: SimplifiedThe 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 […]
Read More Thoughts by a Tel Aviv TouristThe 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 […]
Read More Is Israel an Apartheid State?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 […]
Read More The Silwan/City of David Conflict: Archeology, Tourism, ParamilitariesToday is the last day of the group travel portion of the OG Middle East 2011 trip. From now on we split up and travel on our own for a week, after which we’ll get back together for one night for “disorientation”. I’ve been meaning for a while to write something about the group portion […]
Read More OG and the Avoidance of the PoliticalWith the recent theft, I am camera-less. Not only was my nikon D50 stolen, all my nikon batteries were stolen so my other nikon, a D70 I brought as backup, is also out of commission. And my canon A510 pocket camera which I had lent to another trip participant was also stolen, because his bag was […]
Read More Camera OpinionsThese last three days have been a whirlwind. We’ve slept at the mediterranean, on the beach of the sea of galilee, and at a spring far above the sea of galilee. We’ve had our cars broken into and valuables stolen, sang songs in the backlot of an Israeli police station, and paid no money for accommodation but […]
Read More Theft, Sea of Galilee and Golan HeightsYesterday we were lucky to meet with representatives of the Ethiopian National Project (ENP), an the Israeli NGO which assists the Ethiopian-Israeli community within Israel. The story of Ethiopian jews in Israel is a compelling one. According to ENP, in 1991 the political situation in Ethiopea was deteriorating and Israel was afraid for the safety of jews there as rebel […]
Read More Israel’s “Ethiopian National Project” and the multiple faces of discrimination in the Zionist Entity
Only a Northern Song 