1,001 stories of displacement

Gate Of The Sun by Elias Khoury
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Umm Hassan is dead."
These are Dr. Khaleel Ayyoub's first words to his only patient, the legendary hero of a dozen failed wars for Palestinian liberation, in Galilee Hospital in Shatila. But this isn't a real hospital (scarcely any supplies or professional staff), Khaleel is not a real doctor (though he had some rudimentary medical training in China), and Yunis, or Abu Salim, is not a real hero (though famous as a "lone wolf" fighter who rose in the ranks of Fatah) — and is now probably brain dead. But Umm Hassan, "Mother of Hassan", the licensed midwife who "knew everything," had told Khaleel he had to talk to the unconscious hero to keep his spirit alive. So Khaleel — 40-ish, with no family and only tumultuous memories of his own — talks to his patient for seven months, inventing Yunis's responses and spinning a thousand and one stories of Yunis' and Palestine's history, from the 1936 Arab revolt on to nearly today. The real beginning was the 1948 war when villagers saw their villages erased and were thrown together as refugees and at least partly, tentatively, re-imagined themselves as "Palestinians," a new-found, widely embracing identity for people who didn't know one another nor even speak the same dialects. Everything since then has been confusion, shifting alliances, dreaming and longing for a past that cannot be recovered and probably never really existed as they remember it. And innumerable wars, against the Israelis, against other Arabs, and even (or especially) against other Palestinians. And alliances, often surprising — with Jews, on some occasions, with Christians sometimes, and foreigners.

These tales — reworked as fiction by Khoury from his own experiences and his hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of interviews as a journalist in Lebanon —are sometimes stunningly sad, even when funny, as the characters contradict one another or even themselves in their uncertain memories, vain boasts and magical thinking. One especially memorable tale recalled by Khaleel is Umm Hassan's very daring return, across Israeli shoot-to-kill defense lines, to what had been her village of El Kweikat, now mostly razed to create a modern Israeli settlement of brick houses. Her old house is one of the few remaining from the old days, and after long hesitation, she tentatively knocks on the door. The woman who opens is about Umm Hassan's age. She surprises Umm Hassan by answering her Hebrew greeting in Arabic with a Syrian accent. Ella Dweik, the current inhabitant, has guessed that this "is" (not "was") Umm Hassan's house, and tells her she had been expecting her, and invites her to sit and have some coffee. She is another victim of uprooting, a Lebanese Jewess who, when she learns that Umm Hassan has come from Beirut, almost screams with envy — she wants nothing more than to return to that city and abandon this desolate patch her husband (an Iraqi Jew) has brought her to in Israel, while Umm Hassan doesn't even know the Beirut that Ella longs for (because poverty and hostility have kept her in Shatila) and could hardly adjust to such a hectic, urban environment, but yearns for her beloved El Kweikat.

And many, many other stories, of women who have lost their children, young men who try to adapt as Arabs in Israel, betrayals and ingratitudes, and sometimes just the surprising courage of those who insist on living and protecting what they can of their families. In the end, after 7 months of Khaleel's one-side conversations with the inert hero, he slips out of the "hospital" to fetch photographs from Yunis's apartment, thinking they may help restore him to consciousness — photos of Yunis's long-suffering wife Naheeleh, of his children and many grandchildren, half a dozen of them also named Yunis. He is stopped on a deserted street of Shatila by a woman in black with a black scarf, like the spirit woman who had so frightened Yunis on one of his earlier adventures; she asks him for the house of Elias El Roumi — but Khaleel tells her there is no Elias (a Christian name) in all of Muslim Shatila; she asks for a hotel to spend the night, but there is no hotel in Shatila, either, but she accepts his offer to spend the night in Khaleel's house — a magical encounter where he is fed and touched by the womanhood he has been longing for, but when he awakens in the morning, there is no trace of her. This is the last of the many tales, the character's visit by the unseen Elias El Roumi, Elias Khoury, the author who has from the beginning been hovering around these stories and is occasionally glimpsed, once as the old man El Khouri of the House of Ice, and in other guises. A delightful, marvelous, terribly sad invitation to reflect on and review this whole terrible saga of two peoples, Jews and Palestinians, each unwilling or unable to hear the other's story.

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For a much more comprehensive review of this book and of its context in the life and work of Elias Khoury, see this excellent report by Jeremy Harding:

Jeremy Harding goes to Beirut to meet the novelist Elias Khoury: ‘Before everything else, a writer of stories’ � LRB 16 November 2006

Shattering a 'national mythology' Israel News - Haaretz Israeli News source

Shattering a 'national mythology' Israel News - Haaretz Israeli News source

The Middle East Times - International

My thanks to friend César Chelala for this article on the so-called "Peace Process":
The Middle East Times - International

I think he's right in his analysis, and I've sent him this comment about the overabundant press attention to the issue:

We are now almost overwhelmed with messages about this conflict, a lot of heat and too little light. Things are changing there — Netanyahu's base is eroding, his new alliances forcing him to break with the older ones, and any such shift creates little openings which a smart opposition could exploit. But of course the opposition is too busy fighting among themselves, Hamas against Fatah, each against its own internal Palestinian critics, Israeli peaceniks like Amos Oz unwilling to join forces with Israeli Arab parties, all of which leaves an agile opportunist like Netanyahu free to cobble together whatever kind of coalition can keep him in office. And meanwhile, the settlements keep encroaching on Palestinian land, making a peaceful settlement ever more difficult.

On Questioning the Jewish State - NYTimes.com

A pretty convincing argument, it seems to me. The whole idea that Jews are a distinct "people", implying some genetic particularity or some other quality that makes them unassimilable to other nations, was an argument of racists, as Levine reminds us.  
On Questioning the Jewish State - NYTimes.com

Holy Lands

I promised some weeks ago to describe our trip. Here at last is a full, detailed narrative, not by me but by Susana Torre, who has been my traveling companion on this and many other adventures through the years. Susana drafted this as a letter to friends, and she has graciously permitted me to post this somewhat edited version for the general public.
 
1/2013 - SUSANA AND GEOFF’S TRIP TO JORDAN, ISRAEL, AND THE WEST BANK

         We were drawn to these lands for may reasons — including history, topography and current events and we also wanted to know how the regional conflict is experienced on a day-to-day basis. The research we did before traveling made me realize that the conflict was already embedded in the two checkpoints of the partition plan of 1947, which had created geographically fragmented states. It is a conflict that continues to be driven by extreme ideological positions and contradictory factors, such as very real security issues for Israel vs. the Israeli settlements encroaching on Palestinian territories, heavily subsidized and protected by the Israeli army. And Israel’s relations with its immediate neighbors, historically and currently, are also essential to the regional story, so we took advantage of this trip to also visit Jordan.

JORDAN

I did not want the experience of crossing the Israel/Jordan checkpoint at the Allenby/King Hussein Bridge to contaminate the beginning of our trip. The reported minimum of three hours it takes to clear security in a militarized and chaotic environment (after a 3-4 hour taxi drive from Tel Aviv) was more than I wanted to endure after our 5-hour flight from Madrid. So we killed some time at the airport and took the direct 50-minute flight to Amman’s Queen Alia airport. But we skipped Amman, choosing instead to sleep in Madaba, where we could start our journey with a view of the 6th century mosaic map on the floor of St. George’s church. The work of unknown Greek Orthodox monks, it is the oldest known geographical depiction of biblical territories, from Lebanon to the Nile delta and from the Mediterranean to the Arabic desert. The central and best-preserved part of the mosaic is “HAGIA POLIS IERUSALEM” — “Holy City Jerusalem” — whose Damascus Gate was the point used to measure distances to all cities in the map. Outside, the hustle of the dusty provincial town center was amplified by the visual clutter of campaign posters strung across commercial streets for candidates to the Parliament’s 140 seats (only 10% of which are reserved for women).

Having little confidence in public transportation, which was scarce and, we were told, unreliable, we hired a taxi to take us to Petra via the King’s Highway. This ancient road, now paved but still meandering, winds through the desert and up to the ridge of the eroded red landscape of Wadi Mujib, as magnificent as the Grand Canyon, before reaching Kerac. This is one of the most impressive of a series of crusaders’ castles whose ruins crown the mountains throughout the region, ghostly reminders of the constancy of wars. When we arrived in Petra in mid-afternoon the sunlight was quickly fading, coloring the hills a dull, dusty red.

Petra: Treasury. 3 Jan. 2013

We spent all of the following day in the vast archaeological site of the ancient Nabatean city which Pliny the Elder described as a center for caravan trade. We walked through the narrow, mile-long siq, whose stone walls sometimes resemble fabric pushed and pulled by wind and water. Then the stone becomes, suddenly, architecture, in the culminating view of the Treasury, the most elaborate and well preserved of the façades hewn into the sandstone cliffs that surround the site at one end of Wadi Musa (Moses’ Valley). Their doorways sometimes (but not always) lead to shallow caves. The dominant use of these carved facades was funerary, so one has to imagine a vast gathering of tents or mud buildings --long disappeared-- enclosed by tombs. It is understandable why Sextus Florentinus, Roman governor of Arabia, wanted to be buried here in AD 129, where he could remain surrounded by all that beauty long after the living had departed.

On the steep climb to the High Place of Sacrifice (460 feet above the ground!) we encountered little souvenir tables staffed by Bedouin women and children, who clamber up the cliff every day. On the way down, Hanan besieged me in perfect, nuanced English learned as a child from the tourists, to please be her first client that day, so I obliged with the purchase of a small forged-iron horse and a donkey made in her village with the same tools and formal ideas as in ancient figurines. Later, we would have to hire the actual beasts to see the rest of the site when our legs could no longer support us. We were grateful for the paucity of tourists in winter, because the silence and immensity of the desert were exquisite and not to be disturbed, an experience that was even more heightened in Wadi Rum the following day.

Wadi Rum, 4 Jan. 2013

In Wadi Rum, we were Mohammed Hammad’s only customers for the daylong tour with overnight at one of the many tent camps in the desert. Mohammed’s cousin Musa -- the only Bedouin nurse in the village’s infirmary on his day off-- was our guide in his dilapidated jeep. Later, Musa would instruct us in the simple certainties of the Bedouin way of life – “man is man, and woman is woman”. And you become a man when your father leaves you alone as a child in the desert for a few days to fend for yourself.

YALLAH! “Let’s go!” he would happily scream while dropping sideways without holding the wheel to emphasize that there were no roads or traffic rules to guide our itinerary. Yet, the visitor’s experience is structured by highlights – such as a huge tree growing in the sand, a hidden spring, an exceedingly strange rock formation, or glyphs encoding information for ancient caravans -- each with a name, sometimes inspired by T. E. Lawrence’s writings or David Lean’s movie about him. While Geoff climbed the “Red Sand Dune”, I sat down and watched the red sand paint the side of a rock cliff. This slow and almost imperceptible activity so utterly transformed the cliff that I renounced all climbing opportunities for the rewards of contemplation.

Wadi Rum is the kind of place that could be called sublime, where awe, fear and an irresistible surrender of reason to sight, touch and smell, combine to stir up something deep inside. When we returned to Rum Village at sundown we learned that all the houses were inside sub-tribal family compounds, marked by waist- or shoulder-high mud walls. The exception was Mohammed Hammad’s house, ornate and decorated like no other and in its own plot, a rebellious sign of individualistic modernity, where our host is never long separated from his computer and Wi-Fi connection. Regrettably, we didn’t spend that night alone in the desert because we had to leave before dawn to catch our plane back to Israel. On this return trip we took the aptly named Desert Highway, straighter and faster than the King’s Highway, making part of the trip through a red sand storm.

JERUSALEM AND TEL AVIV

We arrived in Ben Gurion Airport in the morning on Shabbat, when public transportation closes down. But we did find a sherut (shared cab) to take us to Jerusalem. It was raining lightly, an anticipation of the impending storm that would leave that city and all major highways leading to it paralyzed two days after our arrival. We stayed in a grand old guesthouse in the old city’s Armenian quarter, near the Jaffa Gate and the turbaned stele marking the tombs of Suleyman’s architects, whom he had executed because they had left the grave of King David (a prophet of Islam) outside the city walls. The old city is a labyrinth of streets with entrances to courtyards surrounded by dwellings, with the exception of the colonnaded Roman Cardo and the Jewish quarter. All synagogues and one third of the quarter were destroyed when Jordan occupied the city after the 1948 war. It was rebuilt, when Israel took control of the city after the Six-Day War (1967), to include the big plaza in front of the Western Wall and to create public open spaces and modern apartment buildings clad with the same stone as the old.

Ethiopian Monastery, Roof of The Holy Sepulcher Church   

Old Jerusalem impressed us as a kind of hospice, where each group of inmates, wearing exaggerated identity markers, is locked inside its own religious and existential truth. You see them all over, at all times of day and night, alone or in groups: Armenian monks in pointy headgear mimicking the shape of Mount Ararat; Haredi men dressed up for the Shabbat in huge flattened fur hats; Catholics in tunics dragging full size crosses along the souvenir market that now occupies the Via Dolorosa; Greek Orthodox priests in tall cylindrical hats and chest-size silver crosses. You don’t see the Ethiopian monks on the streets, as they seem to spend most of their time inside the diminutive mud huts of their monastery built on the public access roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Inside the church, a variegated mob engaged in various rituals. Many believers seemed to be in a kind of orgasmic ecstasy, prostrated over a stone the length of a human body, frantically rubbing on it the plastic bags containing their purchases. It is said to be the stone where Mary washed Jesus’ body after it was taken down from the cross.

Armenian monk

How do they know? Saint Helena, mother of the Byzantine emperor Constantine, was largely responsible for establishing the now accepted map of Christianity’s sacred places when she traveled to Palestine at her son’s behest to recover relics. She relied on oral traditions almost 300 years after the facts, and on her suspicion that pagan temples had been erected over places revered by Jesus’ followers to erase the memory thus located. I left convinced that Old Jerusalem should belong to no country. A place so fiercely disputed for centuries should be strictly administered by a neutral international agency, not subject to the pressures of power politics (as if this was actually possible).

Outside the old city there is a modern Jerusalem, where a park-like precinct including the Knesset, the Supreme Court and various administrative buildings, stake Israel’s claim to Jerusalem as the state’s capital. At the Israel Museum, also within the precinct, we ran through the fierce rain to enter the subterranean gallery housing the Dead Sea scrolls found in Qumran, considered the work of the ascetic Truth searchers known as the Essenes (2^nd C BC to 1^st C AD), a model for current-day haredim. I very much wanted to see Yad Vashem, the matrix of all modern memorials to crimes against Humanity, but we encountered its forbidding gate locked up due of the snow storm, the worst in two decades.

In Tel Aviv we felt relieved to find another side of Israeli society --the democratic, argumentative, self-doubting, sophisticated, ethnically mixed, outward-looking one. The people we encountered eschewed certainty, believed in dialogue and toleration, and were generally critical of their government’s policies regarding the occupied territories. Tel Aviv is a dynamic and ambitious city where the “garden city” urban fabric of the central district, proposed by Patrick Geddes in the late 1920’s became populated by the largest concentration of Bauhaus-inspired buildings anywhere in the world. Not all are well designed, and many are in disrepair, but they reminded us, along with the kibbutz movement, of the optimistic, modern Nation-building during the State of Israel’s first decades. Within and outside this core, huge new residential and hotel towers, many on the waterfront, are drastically changing the scale of the city, threatening to replace much of the old neighborhoods, like Neve Tzdek, or block public access to the boardwalk.

THE WEST BANK

Before we left home, I had found a small Israeli tour-operator eager to show life on the West Bank, and we signed on for two day trips — in the company of Yamen, a lively and humorous Palestinian guide with Canadian citizenship.

“Palestinian authority territory area A ahead. Entry to Israeli citizens is forbidden. Dangerous to your lives and is against the Israeli Law.” So read the sign at the crossing point. A law openly broken by many. The taxi with Israeli plates that had picked us up at the Jerusalem YMCA left us at the bridge with the huge warning signs. From that point onwards Yamen would take us to Jericho, Qumran, the Jordan River and the Dead Sea the first day, and to Camp Aida, Bethlehem and Ramallah the second. On our way to the 5^th and 6^th century cliff-hanging Greek Orthodox monasteries (St. George, Mar Saba) we heard the long litany of big and small ways in which the Israeli government make the lives of Palestinians miserable and anxiety-ridden. Restriction of movement between cities; access forbidden to Jerusalem; being forced to fly from Jordan to go abroad (even if you are a Canadian, like Yamen’s wife, but married to a Palestinian); being forced to close down shops that face the separation wall; confiscation of land or forbidding their use for cultivation if it adjoins a Jewish settlement; unreliable water supply; searches at checkpoints, and so on. Yamen was proud of having been Banksy’s contact for the implementation of the Flower Thrower and the girl registering the Israeli soldier, his well-known murals on the separation wall. The wall has become, on the Palestinian side, a gallery to display the work of the world’s best-known street artists as well as those of amateur graffitists. Another Berlin Wall waiting to fall.

We found submerged in the Jordan River four of the many Russian tourists we had encountered, covered only with wet T-shirts acquired at the shop near the place where Jesus had been allegedly baptized. The young Jordanian and Israeli soldiers guarding their respective banks could not take their eyes off the spectacular blonde and the only man, who was using his iPad inside the river to document his own baptism.

There seems to be a construction boom going on in Ramallah, perhaps in anticipation of the city becoming the capital of some future state. We stayed to have dinner with one of Geoff’s former academic colleagues, an Israeli Palestinian (raised as a Catholic) married to an American. He is an anthropologist, as critical of Al Fatah and Hamas as he is of Israel, convinced that those two competing Palestinian authorities are both in corrupt complicity with the State of Israel to administer the colonies and manage the conflict.

The snowfall had also paralyzed traffic in Ramallah. In the morning, young men were staging a battle with snowballs around the new fountain surrounded by giant lions (made in China) that marks the town center. Finally a friendly young man found us a taxi that took us to the Kalandia checkpoint, where we arrived just in time to switch to an Israeli sherut to take us back to Jerusalem. Israeli soldiers checked our I.D. inside the bus, saving us the unpleasantness of crossing the oppressive, jail-like long corridors on foot.

Banksy: Flower Thrower, on the security wall, Bethlehem

Geoff and I differ on when the conflict is likely to be resolved. I feel it could take another generation or two, when the Israeli and Palestinian children that are now being educated together will grow up and challenge the incrusted enmity, set aside the mutual grievances, have the courage to demolish or turn over some settlements, and tear the wall down. Geoff believes that it could happen sooner — the politicians bent on keeping the conflict going are widely discredited among their own constituents on both sides, and the tremors of resistance (more visible in Israel, with its greater freedom of expression, but present in subtler form in Palestinian territory) could become an upheaval.  
 Either way, it would also help to recognize that the 19^th century notion of nation-state with defensible boundaries would make no sense in the 21^st. And that other ways exist to define place for an “imagined community”, such as “The Arc”, a proposal by Douglas Suisman that uncannily echoes my own thinking on this subject: http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9119/index1.html

Daily lives and cruel choices under occupation

Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women by Jo Glanville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

These twelve stories are diverse in every way but one: they are all by women whose lives have been distorted by the loss of a homeland they can call their own, whether their own remembered loss or that of their elders. Some of the authors are exiles too young to have known Palestine and who write in English, for others expulsion is a compulsive, constant memory, while some endure and write from within the occupied territories and in its language. They are all worth reading, to gain an understanding of the costs of exile and occupation, in Palestine and in other parts of the world. Those experiences present people with cruel choices of collaboration, resignation, or resistance, of saving one's livelihood and family or one's dignity. It is never clear which is the truer choice or the more honorable.

To my mind, the most affecting story is by Lina Badr, a novelist and short-story writer in Arabic, living in Ramallah (and active in cultural affairs of the Palestinian Authority), "Other cities." Jordanian-born Umm Hasan ("mother of Hasan"), mother of six, dreams obsessively of spending a few days away from little Hebron, one of the most intensely occupied and harassed towns controlled by the Israelis, to the relative freedom of Palestinian-administered Ramallah; but she is married to a totally unsupportive cousin (Abu Hasan, "father of Hasan") who has not bothered or not dared to get her the necessary Israeli papers to legalize her status in the occupied territories, and she as the wife is not permitted to apply on her own. Passage from one town to the other, though only a few kilometers apart, requires passing through multiple Israeli checkpoints, which will require credentials, and she cannot imagine leaving her six children behind — for shame and because Abu Hasan certainly wouldn't take care of them; how she manages to achieve her modest goal, and incidentally embarrass an Israeli captain who has held up the travelers out of boredom or spite, not only describes some of the multiple indignities under the occupation but also hints at the moral damage it inflicts on the occupiers.

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Shameful episodes in stunning prose

We bought this book in Tel Aviv last week, just days after viewing the exhibit and film Alone on the Walls about the heroic but ultimately failed struggle of residents of Jerusalem's "Jewish Quarter" against the assault by overwhelming forces of the Arab Legion and other Arab armies. A few dozen young men with small arms and lots of ingenuity, aided by women, children and the elderly, managed to hold off the siege for 150 days, from December 1947 to final surrender in May 1948. It is a powerful, moving story, documented by a photojournalist who, in disguise, accompanied the Jordanian troops and was able to get close to the attackers and, after the defeat, to the defeated.

But the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, like all wars, was morally complicated. This famous book by a prolific and highly respected Israeli novelist probes actions of Israeli forces that cannot inspire pride, and that help explain the deep pain and anger of Palestinians today.

Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Published (in Hebrew) in 1949, just months after the events it describes, this was the first novel to (as the author himself described it years later) "[lay] bare the original sin of the State of Israel": the forcible, violent expulsion, killing, and razing of the homes of Palestinian villagers whose ancestral lands happened to fall on the Israeli side of the 1948 partition — the expulsion that Palestinians remember as the Nakba or "Catastrophe." Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky) was a Sabra, born in Eretz Yisrael (in Rehovot) in 1916, 31 years before there was a state of Israel. He writes with an understanding of his Israeli character's psychology from the inside, which makes his portrait of a young Israeli soldier on a mission of what we would now call "ethnic cleansing" sharply, shudderingly convincing. The IDF detail assigned to erase the village of Khirbet Khizeh in the 1948 war is supposed to believe that they are acting in self-defense, that the villagers are all potential terrorists. But as the day of shooting at and sometimes killing fleeing men, mindlessly slaughtering farm animals, terrorizing women, children and old men too infirm to run, and blowing up houses continues, with no sign of an enemy weapon or hostile reaction anywhere, the soldier wonders what in his God's name he and his fellows are doing if not recreating the Jews' own history of exile.

"All at once everything seemed to mean something different, more precisely exile. This was exile. This was what exile was like. This was what exile looked like . . ."

But the young soldier does not bring himself to resist an order, and he does not dare to appear soft or Arab-loving to his comrades, so ever more reluctantly he continues with his squad until the village and its lives are totally destroyed. But his shame continues to haunt him. The book was a best-seller in Israel when re-issued in 1964 and was for a time required reading in high schools. Its merit is not merely its denunciation of "the original sin" but also its exquisite description of landscape, people, sensations and the doubts of the young soldier. It reads brilliantly in this translation by Nicholas de Lange; it must be wonderful in Hebrew.

For another review, thoughtful and seemingly well-informed, see Jacqueline Rose's "rereading" from the Guardian.

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In the holy lands

Armored dove on the separation wall — a Banksy production

Susana and I returned home to Spain on Sunday, after our two-week exploration of Israel, the West Bank, and a little bit of Jordan. I'll be telling you more about our experiences over the next few days; it was too much for a single brief note on a blog, and too much to assimilate so quickly.

We met with Bedouins in Jordan, Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories of the West Bank, and with Israeli Jews, including some dear friends from the past and a few newer friends on both sides of the ugly separation wall. Meanwhile, here is a story we've been following and which illustrates the gross failure of the Netanyahu policies.

Israel removes Palestinian protest camp outside Jerusalem - Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper

More on this in the next few days, and on our conversations with Jews and Arabs, and on the books we have been reading — David Grossman, Amos Oz, Agnon, Yizhar, a collection of stories by Palestinian women, and even T. E. Lawrence.  Shalom and Salaam alaikum.

Travels with Kindle

We've begun the year AD 2013 in the birthplace of the great myths of the West, the monotheism of the Jews and its offshoots in Christianity and Islam. This is also (according to Mayan astronomers) the beginning of the first Baktun of what must be the Fifth Creation (the Fourth Creation, as we all know, ended last December, but without dramatic consequences), an excellent time for new ventures.

Last week we were in Jordan: Madaba, Petra, and Wadi Rum. Then on Shabat we arrived in Jerusalem, where I am writing this from, of all places in this city of so many faiths, the Lutheran Guest House, quite comfortable and perfectly located in the Armenian Quarter of the old city, with a view of the Dome of the Rock Yesterday we took a tour with a Palestinian guide (not permitted to enter Jerusalem) to Jericho, Qumran and the edge of the Dead Sea, with stops at Greek monasteries precariously perched in the mountains, the spot on the Jordan River where Jesus is said to have been baptized, and got views of the Cave of Temptation (from below -- we didn't climb) and too many monstrous Jewish settlements that have taken Palestinian land and water. As we were the only tourists (our guide sometimes has as many as ten), the guide brought along his family, so we had plenty of opportunity to learn from them of life for the Palestinians in a fragmented territory with many restrictions and checkpoints. I'll be telling you more of this later; today I can't delay, because we have much more to see.

And, oh, my title: "Travels with Kindle". Inspired, of course, by Kapuscinski's "Travels with Herodotus" (you can read my review in the archives of this blog or on Goodreads). While in Jordan, I logged on and downloaded T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Wadi Rum is one of the places he stopped on his adventures, and was also the setting for a major part of the movie Lawrence of Arabia), and here I've been reading short stories by Palestinian women to help me understand the life and history here. More later.

How Israel was created, and what to do now

Recommended: The Real Story of How Israel Was Created by Alison Weir

It's important to understand this history, so obscured by political rhetoric and mythmakers. But, however flawed the creation, the state exists and is home to nearly 8 million people, of whom nearly 6 million (according to the Israeli census) are "Jewish" — by religion? by tradition? by ancestry? By any or all these criteria, apparently (which inflates the numbers). The occupied Palestinian territories have about 3.5 million people, including Muslims, Christians and atheists, not counting the many Jews (by any of the usual criteria) who have settled there illegally.

To my mind, the only acceptable way to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to dissolve the partition, that is, re-unite it all as a single state, with the same guaranteed rights for everybody regardless of family mythology, competitive tales of suffering, or whatever religion people profess or abjure. In other words, make it a normal modern state. Jews have as much right to live there as anybody, and no more right than anybody. It would cease to be a "Jewish" state and be simply a state with (probably for a long time) a "Jewish" majority. Until such a solution, the situation there will remain unstable and a continuing provocation to regional violence because the present condition is simply unacceptable to the non-Jews.

So how will the impasse between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis be broken? Not if it is left to those two parties, already locked in self-nourishing cycles of hate and fear. If a solution is not imposed by pressure from other states (extremely unlikely, given current US politics and the uselessness of Tony Blair), it must come from a wider change of the global context. The most important change will be if the peoples of Egypt and other Muslim-majority countries can achieve and consolidate their own democracies and themselves become normal modern states, with rights for all creeds. Such a revolution would immediately deflate Jewish Israeli paranoid chauvinism and leave people like Netanyahu and Lieberman without a constituency to play to. It would also force serious realignment and rethinking of Hamas and the PLO, and the Arabs and Jews of Israel-Palestine would again be able to talk to each and work things out, as they were beginning to do back in the early 1990s, before Rabin was assassinated (1995).

So, for the sake of Israelis, Palestinians and all the rest of us, we are obliged to do whatever we can to encourage democratization of Arab and other Muslim countries.

Happy birthday, USA!

On the Fourth of July, the family packs for the beach and fun in the sun, and the kids get to stay up late to watch the humongous fireworks! That was then — these days we live on the beach, but in a different country. Lots of sun, lots of good things to eat (but rarely wieners), and fireworks mainly when there's a big sports victory — not tonight.

A foreigner who wants to understand the USA will have to spend a lot of time observing and talking to people in many different parts of it — as did de Tocqueville; the country is even more complex than when he visited it, so vast and so varied, and contains such multitudes of people from the most diverse parts of the globe, that almost anything anybody says about it is true about some part, somewhere, some of the time. The image of the USA is generally good today in Spain, but even our Spanish friends who know something about the country are perplexed by its contradictions.

And no American can really understand our country without knowing other cultures and countries, how the USA is like and how it is different from other places. Check out this article in last Sunday's El País on Americans in Spain and Spaniards living in America, by Spanish novelist (and New York City resident) Antonio Muñoz Molina: Desde este lado, desde el otro lado. (Sorry — I couldn't find an English-language version on the web.)

Anyway, I'm feeling especially patriotic whenever I see some action by my fellow citizens that I can be proud of. And here's one that fill me with patriotic pride: US Boat to Gaza (YouTube video). It reminds me that one our our chief national values is, and always has been, solidarity with the oppressed of other lands — even when our compatriots have been involved in the oppression. We are a land of contradictions, and one of the greatest things our country does is protect the right of all of us to protest against all the terrible things our country (or its government) does. In fact, the USA practically invented that right — it's in the Declaration of Independence that we are celebrating today:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends ["Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…

So happy birthday, USA! With all our contradictions, may we forever keep up our struggles for justice, life, liberty and the free pursuit of all the different ways we understand happiness.

House Hunting in the West Bank | The American Prospect

Thanks to Tobin Harshaw in the NYT Opinionator for pointing us to this "well-reported article": House Hunting in the West Bank | The American Prospect

Anti-Semitism, left and right

Here's a good, sober analysis of an explosive subject: Anti-Semitism in Venezuela, A Taboo Subject for the Left? by Nikolas Kozloff. Those of us who are enraged by Israeli aggression in Gaza, the encroachment of settlements and carving up of Palestinian territories in the West Bank and other abuses have to be wary of alliances with racist kooks who blame Jews for everything. As though military aggression and territorial expansion were especially Jewish traits (hardly the image of Jews back when Marx wrote his famous essay, see below).

The president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain, Jacobo Israel, made the point in a recent interview that Israel is held to much higher standards than aggressors in, for example, Sudan, who have caused ten times as many victims as the Israelis in Gaza. True, but the reason may have less to do with contempt for (or is it fear of?) Jews than with contempt for Africans, from whom we expect no better. For a similar reason, many activists are quicker to excuse Hamas rockets and Muslim suicide bombers than Israeli bombs and bulldozers. In current U.S. and European mythology, Israeli Jews are imagined as a civilizing force upon those more barbarous Semites, the Arabs.

And that is the problem: Anti-Arab anti-Semitism, that is, hostility to the Semitic Arabs, in some diplomatic and business circles is stronger than their anti-Jewish anti-Semitism. The people running the U.S. have tried to use Israel to police the region, and those running Israel have used that support to advance policies that benefit themselves and their friends, but not the region, or the U.S., or even the Israeli population as a whole.

Jews are no better than any other people, and no worse. No more deserving of security in their homes, and no less. We either hold all human beings to the same moral standards, or we don't really have standards. Qassam rockets hitting an Israeli home or school are as horrible as aerial bombardments on apartment buildings and other schools in Gaza or Lebanon. BUT those with greater power -- in this case, those with the bigger army -- have the greater responsibility, because they are better able to take the risks of peace.

Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question (1844)

Devil from codshit.com

Photo: Interior of vandalized synagogue in Caracas last month.

Clip: The animated documentary Waltz With Bashir is Israeli filmaker and Lebanon (1982) war veteran Ari Folman's way of coming to terms with that violence and responsibility.

Jewish Voices of Dissent on Gaza

Excellent article by my friend, the prolific social commentator César Chelala: Jewish Voices of Dissent on Gaza in Middle East Times.

2 crises

No answers today, just a question. Today's El País is dominated by two "stories", as journalists call them, though neither one has a clear narrative yet. One is the massive bombardment and now invasion of Gaza by the Israelis. The other is the gobal financial crisis. My question: How will these two huge events affect each other? Because in our closely interconnected world, the vibrations of any major shock are felt throughout the network.

There are other big "stories", i.e., events waiting for their narrative. The Russian pressure on the Ukrainians and the constricting of gas pipelines to most of Europe, for example. The big offensive by the government of Sri Lanka, etc. And down through other events whose ripples beyond their own regions may be felt less intensely. But for now let's just look at the first two.

Did the financial pinch have anything to do with the Israeli move against Gaza? War has always proven an excellent distraction from other troubles. And with no economic surplus, what else besides war can the candidates for premier offer to their citizens? The far more severe pinch in Gaza may also have a lot to do with the Hamas government's allowing, or encouraging, reckless and senseless missile attacks on Israeli civilians. People in the strip are so frustrated that they have to lash out at somebody, and Hamas must figure, better the Israelis than us.

And how will this huge escalation of violence affect global finance? Is it going to escalate the already widespread hostility toward Jewish financiers (and toward the far more numerous non-Jewish financiers wrongly suspected of being Jewish, just because they are financiers)? Probably it will, I think, and that is likely to be a pretext for more isolationist, nationalist economic policies by, for example, Muslim countries in Asia (Indonesia among them). Will it make a rapprochement of the U.S. and the Arab countries even more difficult, because of the U.S.'s knee-jerk support of Israel? Almost certainly. And is that going to further limit the U.S.'s power to affect markets?

As I said, no answers, just questions. These are some of the things to watch for, I think. In the long run, I don't think this invasion is good for the Jews or for anybody. Though it might be good for the short run aspirations of some Israeli politicians.

Middle East finance headlines (Financial Times)
Rice cancels Mideast trip to help with financial crisis (CNN)
Turning a crisis into an opportunity. By Nehemia Shtrasler (Haaretz)
Finance Minister: No Israel banks will collapse in global crisis (Haaretz)

For a happier new year

Happy new year -- I mean, let's all work to make this year happier than the way it is starting out.

The Israeli bombardment of Gaza is a great crime, partly but only partly provoked by the crimes of Hamas. I can understand the terror and rage of Israelis, who on top of all their other fears now find that places as far from Gaza as Barsheeba can be hit by Hamas rockets, but this latest massive response is no more likely to succeed than any of its predecessors. The continuing asymmetric reciprocity of violence (you kill 4 of my people, I'll kill 400 of yours) has never brought peace but has instead intensified the desire for revenge by Palestinians. And with or without kassam rockets, vengeful people always find some ways -- suicide bombs, runaway bulldozers, etc. -- to wreak their vengeance. Israeli politicians surely know this. So why do they, counter to the advice of their own generals, wage such an offensive at this moment? I think The Independent's Adrian Hamilton has the only plausible answer: Adrian Hamilton: Pure politics is driving this war.

I'm back at my desk (actually a new desk, in a new house) in Spain now and plan to resume more frequent blogging, mostly on events in Spain, which I am following closely. But sometimes more distant events, like Gaza, are so great that they demand comment even from non-experts. I am no expert on Mideast politics, but as a sociologist I do know how to recognize patterns of human conflict. This one won't be easily resolved, because the forces driving the conflict include powerful political pressures in both Hamas (which can't surrender its unyielding hostility to Israel without dissolving into nothing) and the two big right-wing Israeli parties, all of whom need to be seen to be violent. Best bet for the U.S. is to step back; U.S. government interference has always been naive and ended up being used by the hostile parties (mostly by Israel) for their own hostile ends. See How Not to Make Peace in the Middle East by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley in the New York Review of Books -- just out and already outdated by this latest attack, but with good historical analysis of the past failures of U.S. intervention. Also interesting are these Egyptian views of the conflict.

Obama: Is this a real change?

Read Mark Engler (link below) on "The World after Bush" before you listen to Barack Obama on U.S. foreign policy. The best we can say is that Obama wants to get us out of Iraq sooner than McCain (though it's still not clear how). But otherwise he's completely vague (what about relations with Europe? China? Korea? and so on -- has he even thought about them?). And on Hamas and Israel he comes out on the right of Bush, saying not only that he would refuse to negotiate with Hamas, but even criticizing Bush for insisting on holding elections in Gaza, because the wrong guys -- Hamas -- won. What kind of democratic vision is that? As Israeli war veteran and peace activist Uri Avnery never tires of pointing out, it is precisely with your enemy that you need to negotiate, if you want to end a conflict. (Here's Avnery's latest column.) And why not negotiate with Hamas? They won the election in Gaza and are the only ones with potential of controlling the civil population there.

I'm still for Obama for prez, given our options, but we can't let up the pressure for change even if he wins. He's going to need a strong push from the Left in order to stand up straight.

Becoming brutal

And do you think this isn't happening to our boys (and even our girls -- remember Abu Ghraib) in uniform in Iraq? Not to mention the un-uniformed Blackwater guys and their kin. Israel shaken by troops' tales of brutality against Palestinians

What 'Israel's right to exist' means to Palestinians | csmonitor.com

This piece by John Whitbeck may help clear up some rhetorical confusion. What 'Israel's right to exist' means to Palestinians | csmonitor.com

Ethnic cleansing in Israel

Here is a 15-minute talk by Ilan Pappe, an Israeli and professor at Haifa University, delivered at Northeastern University in Boston, November 19, 2006: The Cleansing of Palestinians. Pappe traces the Israeli campaign to expel Palestinians from Palestine to the very origins of the Jewish state. Zionism's two founding impulses were, first, to find a safe haven for the Jews (quite necessary and urgent in an era of pogroms in the late 19th century), and second, to redefine Judaism as a national movement. It is this second impulse that, according to Pappe, is used by the entire Israeli political elite to justify any action -- including individual and mass killing, rape and destruction of property -- in its ethnic-cleansing campaign; Pappe hopes to stir a movement to end this policy.

See also Ilan Pappe: Israeli Jewish myths and the prospect of American war

And on the other side, ILAN PAPPE... Advocate of Israel's Destruction;

and finally, for details on his books, interviews, etc., Welcome to the official website of Ilan Pappé

As you will see, there is intense debate (especially in Israel) over some of his historical interpretations, which I'm not in a position to judge (e.g., were the Camp David accords really designed to establish "two Bantustans"?). What he says in this 15-minute talk seems to me persuasive.