Brendan Alejandro Work

Hello,

If I have neglected to update you on my most important development in the past month, I’ll be quick with it: I was denied entry to Israel twice, lost both of my jobs in the West Bank as a result, and decided to come home. I’m writing this from New York City. My failing to inform people was much a result of the suddenness of the events as of the small shame of having no back-up—to see this as anything but a career setback has been a challenge that I’m now glad to have matched. What happens now deserves some thinking. First, what already happened:

I knew from the beginning, only a little over a year ago, that reporting from Palestine could not be fully aboveboard. Journalism in the occupied territories is seen as analogous to activism and Israel’s treatment of activists is well-documented in arrests, shootings, and deportations. I knew I would be unable to get an Israeli press pass because of the agency I was working for, the Palestine News Network, was based in the West Bank. I would instead have to opt for a tourist visa and never be forthcoming about my work. Those who do openly state their intentions to visit the Palestinian territories are summarily deported. The choice was and still is: lie to get access, or tell the truth and never get a look.

In October 2010, January 2011, March 2011, and September 2011, I lied.

With employment as an English teacher with AMIDEAST, working with students in Hebron, I thought I had the opportunity to get an Israeli work visa and end the tri-monthly routine of erasing my name from the Internet, changing the privacy settings on my Facebook, Twitter, and this blog, and assembling mental lists of the non-blacklisted that I could mention as references during the inevitable border interrogations. This is all a tiring and stupid ritual with which everyone working in Palestine is familiar. Sometimes a tightening of surveillance is rumored: “they’re really going after people this month,” or “I heard they’re not letting anyone through that border,” or so on. If your scrutiny of the regulations—or your scouring of your own records—is painstaking enough, or if you ice interrogations every time, or if you just get lucky over and over, you may end up one of those long-time observers, activists, or journalists who stay in the West Bank on a tourist visa for three, six, even 15 years.

I was not one of those people. Nor was I exceptionally prolific in condemning Israel, I don’t think—my name appeared only twice as Electronic Intifada by-lines, neither of which contained any editorial comments but what I would consider straight reporting with cited sources, and in each I was mentioned as the English editor of PNN. The stories I edited for PNN were not always professionally sound, I’ll be the first to admit that, but neither were they libelous or dangerous to Israel. My work with AMIDEAST was certainly not subversive and my reflections on this blog consisted of photos and political opinions, both protected by international freedom of expression laws. If that sounds presumptuous, as if I’m throwing myself in with the humble guardians of truth, I apologize. I mean only to say that neither the work I did nor the opinions I expressed qualified me for the denial of entry I received.

In any case, I didn’t get work visa authorization from AMIDEAST because the organization so severely doubted that the Israeli Interior Ministry would grant a work visa to someone with a journalist’s CV. Israel does not grant work visas to journalists or lawyers. With no teaching certification to speak of—not a problem when I was hired, mind you—I was left with the only option: continue the tourist visa fiasco.

I entered Jordan on December 6, stayed in Amman for four days, and tried to re-enter the West Bank through the King Hussein/Allenby Bridge crossing on the 10th. I was shuffled over to the security line after giving my stock answers and then put in front of a shorter woman, who made a point of looking me directly in the eye when she told me, “We know everything. If you don’t tell me everything about what you’ve been doing, you’re not going to get into Israel.” I produced the slip of paper from the director of AMIDEAST stating that I was employed in Jerusalem—itself a lie, as teaching in Hebron would be against the rules—and she promptly used it against me, saying I could not be a “real tourist” if I was working. I asked what a “real tourist” did. She answered only that she did not think I was doing it. This is probably not it:

I was sent back to Amman.

Back when I had been assured I would be able to receive a work visa from AMIDEAST, I cleared my family to visit me for Christmas. After spending last year without them, the prospect of being together in Palestine became something I started to look forward anxiously, with more and more hope each day for a holiday both gentle and—as apolitically as I can put it—productive. I wanted perspective and warmth, daylight, and I needed to be able to talk. When AMIDEAST informed me that my work visa appointment had been scrapped, I tried not to see that all unraveling. After I was denied on the 6th, I kept my head up and said even the Israelis could not possibly be so cold-hearted as to deny a family entering for Christmas in the Holy Land. On December 16, we tried again, this time at the Sheikh Hussein crossing.

The interrogation was along the same lines, my excuses were eviscerated, my bag searched—books in Arabic were certainly not a smart idea—and eventually I was told I was not being let into Israel for the same reason I was denied at King Hussein. I asked what that reason was. Two officers told me they did not have to give me it, then that I should know it, then at last that I simply was not a tourist. I asked them what proof I needed to give them that I was—being, after all, with my family—and they refused to call any of the numbers I produced. It was fruitless from there. My parents and my sister were allowed in but refused to go without me, and then one of the women wished us a merry Christmas before sending us back to Amman.

I’m tired of telling the story, so the rest of Christmas 2011 will be told in pictures:

We could not stay for long in Amman, a sprawl of little inspiration that deserves far more pity and creative urban planning than actual description, so we headed south for the Dana Nature Reserve, a dry valley renowned for a bunch of wildlife we didn’t see. Dad tried anyway:

Then, for Christmas, the natural Plan B to the place where Jesus was born was the place where John the Baptist was relieved of his head, in Madaba, Jordan. It was a service mostly undeserving of comment, except for the plastic baby that got hauled around the church after communion.

We spent Christmas Day at the Dead Sea, where somehow a lot of rain turned into a nice sunset and we took advantage for photos…

…and all the while I was subjected to the unremitting blasts of nostalgia produced by staring across the water at Palestine.

Finally, Alex and I toured Jordan’s A-list tourist attractions, Petra and Wadi Rum...

in which I mostly took the opportunity to photograph Alex in strange places:

Immediately after being denied entry, I very seriously considered continuing my work in the Gaza Strip or going to Cairo to try something new. At this point it would be impossible from a professional and emotional standpoint not to stay engaged with Palestinian issues, a realization confirmed when my family reported back from the West Bank—I insisted they go in for a few days without me—to pass on the love and indignation of my friends. I miss it as a home. I did not say goodbye to anyone out of stubborn conviction that I would be back and now I’m hurt to tell them—or to choose not to tell them, as I did with Ahed Wahdan’s family—that I may not ever see them again. But logistically it wouldn’t make sense to stay, with no job and no place to live, and personally, I want to go home. Despite its taking place in a sort of boring exile, in a hotel, Christmas gave me love and company. I did not lack for either in Palestine, but there I found them in support of my work. What I want to do is seek them out for their own sake, and in Montana there is home and family—to say nothing of a girl—and I can’t in good conscience say I don’t wish for that as feverishly as I still wish for the opportunity to witness reality and practice good journalism.

So now I have two red DENIED stamps in my passport courtesy of Israel, my face in the al-Quds newspaper…

…and a spinning compass. The end of the most globally consequential year I’ve lived through is 90 minutes away. My flight back to Montana is in five days. I’m going to focus my Arabic studies more academically to avoid the creep of the backwater and save money to be back on the other side of the Atlantic in the fall. Until then, I want to wish everyone reading this comfort and light in the inevitable tumult of 2012. Whether everything happens for a reason or not I wouldn’t know, but my denial of entry may be the taste of chaos that precedes taking the next step. I really do not know.

Best,

Brendan

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Killers and Soldiers

Thursday, December 8, 2011 11:48:27 PM

[This post concerns this story.]

Hello everyone,

Whenever I talk to friends and family, I sometimes field a familiar question about how safe or dangerous it is to live in Palestine. I’ve given a couple different answers: it depends where you are, it depends who you are, it depends what day of the week it is, and in most cases I feel safer here than I would in New York City. This post is designed to answer the question more fully and maybe enter a deeper discussion about violence, danger, and death. Not the lightest reading I’ve ever offered, I know, but stay with me.

I interviewed a man named Hani Jaber last week. He’s 36 years old, broad-shouldered, talks really fast, laughs about everything, and when I was five years old, he killed a man with a kitchen knife. I don’t know for sure, but I think Hani is the first person I’ve ever had a long conversation with who was directly responsible for another person’s death. I qualify that with “long conversation” because I’ve talked to some Israeli soldiers, but only briefly, and with “directly responsible” because these days everyone is more or less complicit in murder. We’ll talk about that later.

The kitchen knife is important.

Israel fashions itself “a villa in the jungle,” a bastion of Western culture surrounded by uncivilized Arabs: this mindset, which of course is racist at the core, features in everything from Israeli music and television to the country’s often unbelievable political discourse. As far as weapons are concerned, you can see why the villa patricians that Israelis position themselves as would not be interested in anything too bloody, lest they be confused with the surrounding savages. So knives and rocks are out, drones and F-16s are in. But what does a savage and civilized weapon make?

Some of the force of killing is lost to distance, sure. It would be hard to gather non-literary evidence of the effect, but from the introduction of the longbow to gunpowder to remote explosives and planes, I don’t think it’s preposterous to suggest that over generations, people have found it less emotionally taxing to kill each other the further they get from their victims. But Palestinians—or any indigenous people cast as barbarian foils to a “civilized” foe—have ranged weaponry as well. Rocket fire from Gaza, which Israel-sympathizers will gladly inflate to millions of rockets per day if you let them, killed a 56-year-old man in southern Israel in late October. So it has to be something else—the ultimate “civilized” weapon cannot merely be something you use from far away.

My theory starts out nominally optimistic and quickly gets dark. I think that people may be getting gentler and the notion that killing itself is savage has really entered the mainstream. I’m not saying that’s a widely, much less deeply felt consensus, just that its opposite is no longer publicly palatable. Since propaganda became PR, it just hasn’t been a winning platform to talk openly about spilling the blood of the enemy (nobody told Hamas). So if you want to kill, you have to make it look like you’re not. Two methods I can think of.

The first means, language, is the elder of the two. Prehistoric thinkers figured out as long as you are not killing a person but an animal, barbarian, infidel, or otherwise already-hellbound malefactor, there isn’t any use getting upset about it, though I guess it’s best to dispatch said creature at an arm’s length so as not to be infected. This later morphed into heroes like St. George, who is often depicted lancing a dragon (representing paganism) writhing beneath his horse—two whole points of contact away from evil, his stallion and his spear—instead of biting its head off or something. Anyway, St. George, who appears over a lot of Bethlehemites doorways…

…is so symbolic of Christendom’s cultured ways of killing that his red-and-white cross was borne on ships and shields during the Crusades and later served as the flag of Great Britain, the country over which he is still patron saint. St. George, by way of coincidence, is buried in Israel. In the years interceding since his death in the fourth century, I shudder to think how many real, breathing and bipedal humans have lain in the place of the dragon—pagans, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, atheists, Protestants and Catholics alike, etc. All you had to do was eliminate their human essence, and today Israel does this like the best of them—the magic word, as you may have guessed, is “terrorist.”

The second means is drone warfare, which was pioneered by the Israeli military in the 1970s. The logic here, as far as I can see it, is twofold: first, the killer is airborne and non-human and therefore expendable and not accountable for mistakes, which is like taking St. George’s horse and cubing its value as an experiential blindfold. Second, it makes people feel a new kind of powerless. There’s a very good Washington Post article about the psychological conditions of being under attack by drones. As long as you cannot strike back or even hide—two things Gazans have tried in vain to do, over and over—you might as well be at war with God.

This, I hope, should not come across as a stretch. The divine bolt is such a cliché, but it’s God’s MO. So far as we know from the Abrahamic faiths, God has never come down and beaten anyone to death. He certainly ordered many unpaid hits, insta-calcified Lot’s wife, engulfed cities in fire and drowned the entire world at least once, but he has never done anything like Hani Jaber. So when Israel deploys drones, it isn’t just to protect the lives of its pilots, it’s to project an idea that the Palestinians in their sights are akin to game animals and Israel the gamekeeper, or to continue the religious metaphor, that Palestinians are otherwise unsanctified mortals and Israel is acting within the grace of God. Once again, this is not fringe rambling by any means, and a brief survey of religious Zionist discourse about war will tell you that.

Hani Jaber, therefore, is operating on the complete other end of the spectrum. Knifing someone to death, or mob-lynching someone, or killing someone with a rock—these things are considered more base than missiles by virtue of their closeness to “raw” human emotion, because when you’re really furious, your hands don’t instinctually make the shape of a stealth bomber control stick, they make fists. But if you consider knives, fists, etc. more “barbaric” than drones, you may be perpetuating the idea that instinctual violence is more wrong than premeditated violence. Rage is one of the seven deadly sins, right? Where, then, is genuinely cold blood?

From what I know, Hani Jaber was acting on impulses of rage when he killed 22-year-old Erez Shmuel, who was allegedly beating Hani’s 9-year-old sister at the time. At least in my mind, that doesn’t make him less of a murderer. But I, like many others, have to learn to judge less direct acts of murder with the same severity. Israeli air force commanders are responsible for more than a thousand deaths in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead three years ago. Palestinians are killers, too. Harry Truman carried out mass murder on an unprecedented scale, George W. Bush is responsible for between 100,000 and a million dead Iraqis, and President Obama’s expanded drone warfare program in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen makes him a bigger killer than we liberals would all like to think. As D.C. journalist Charles Davis writes, “While Obama might seem like a nice, smart guy who tucks his kids in and gives them a kiss on the forehead good night, remember that because of his decisions there are Pakistani and Afghan fathers who will never get to do the same.”

The point will probably deserve repeating until eternity—that human goodness is not a function of power, popular or otherwise—but maybe the moral sense can be a reflex that responds to rote repetition as well as a perceptive sense like vision. I don’t know if I even agree with that now, having just written it. Nonviolence is not a guarantee, violence is both sanctioned by international law and somewhat hard to define, and ultimately it gets into either politics or tactics and this blog isn’t about either. I am only making the point that having voted for Obama and with no plans to do so again, I think others should investigate how and why people are considered killers and act in good faith afterwards.

Because I’m an American citizen—and privileged and white to boot—I never grew up with a clear picture of what we do abroad and I’m still more or less on the manicured side of the barbed wire when it comes to a lot of issues. Divorcing the idea of humanitarian military intervention is still something I’m not prepared to do. But these days, when it comes to elevating the value of military operations over murder with kitchen utensils, I am losing patience with the “support our troops” crowd. I think individuals deserve respect and support, not organizations—not the army, not the police, not the government—and if individuals are engaged directly or indirectly in human rights denial, they ought to be judged.

That’ll do it for me, before I veer completely off-topic. For the record, I don’t feel unsafe among Palestinians. When I was talking to Aryeh King for the story, the settler who set up the volunteer surveillance program in Jerusalem, he warned me personally that if I was in the same room as one of the freed Palestinian prisoners, my life would be in danger. Well, I sat down with Hani Jaber for the better part of two hours, and the most he did was try to kill me with caffeine. Similarly, a reactionary comment in a Swarthmore Daily Gazette article about me alleged that I’m liable to be raped and killed if I go to Egypt, which would seriously surprise my Egyptian friends. I feel unsafe, I should say, in a barrage of tear gas canisters aimed at head-level, which is certainly not limited to Israel, but which only Israel has done to me. Danger shadows power, which good journalism is supposed to afflict. But the front line is not the only place to do that, and that’s why I’m not going to be there forever—the words we use are important, and if through mere conversation we can remove whatever legitimacy was ever conferred on “civilized killing,” then that would be a step, I think, toward peace.

Best,

Brendan

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The Continuing Story of Ahed Wahdan

Friday, November 11, 2011 2:39:10 PM

[This post refers to this story I wrote for Electronic Intifada.]

One and a half months ago I wrote about a protest at the Qalandia military checkpoint, where I watched then-14-year-old Ahed Wahdan lose his right eye to an Israeli high-speed tear gas canister. After he was rushed away in the ambulance, I asked all the kids if they had heard of him. Maybe, they said, but he wasn’t from Qalandia. For three weeks after the fact, Ahed more or less disappeared from the media—I Googled his name in English and Arabic, in all the spellings I could imagine, finding out alternatively that he was 13, 14, 15, and 16 years old, but nothing about where he lived or the state of his health. In mid-October he cropped up in a TIME article saying he would give his “whole body for Palestine.” A taxi driver in Ramallah told me he had heard about him and thought he was from Jalazon refugee camp.

Ahed, now 15, was not in any of those places. His village of Surda is north of Ramallah a bit, on a pretty hillside facing northwest. When I came last week, he was sitting with his friend Nimr outside his house, under a fig tree, instantly recognizable for his gauze eye patch. I introduced myself, but it wasn’t until we were having coffee in the sitting room that he recognized me. I don’t remember his reaction exactly. It was a sort of a conspiratorial smile saying, "That was really crazy what happened, huh?"

The personal miscellany unfit for the EI article is here: Ahed wears Nike basketball shoes, though he prefers soccer, and his jeans are slung low. He has a jacket with a Canadian flag pin, but I doubt for any reason. He still hustles out of the room when guests appear to have finished their tea and comes back with a new tray. He’s an FC Barcelona fan and he looks like he could be 18. More generally, he’s quiet.

Getting Ahed to tell me about his life before and after his maiming was difficult. He said he used to go into Ramallah with his friends, hang out, play some video games, and come back to Surda at night. He went to school, preferred the humanities. Worked at the carpenter shop. Couldn’t work there anymore. What else had changed?

“It’s more difficult.”

What’s more difficult?

“Everything.”

Interviewing Palestinians in Arabic is usually a race for me to catch up to the last sentence, focus the discussion on a specific subject, and get something other than a cookie-cutter quote about the resistance. In this sense I was more comfortable talking to Ahed’s father, a mile-a-minute blabberer calling himself Abu Hazm.

Abu Hazm was effusive with me from the start, kissing me twice on each cheek, once on the forehead for good measure, clasping my hands and forearms. He called me a “true Muslim” for “rescuing my son,” even after I politely explained I was Christian and hadn’t really done that much. Abu Hazm was soon joined by a family uncle and between the two of them, it was nearly impossible to wrest the conversation away from abstract geopolitics and the grace of Islam, the true religion. We went in familiar circles about Israel, the American military and media, and Muammar Qaddafi. At one point he looked to surprise me with the popular myth that Jews evacuated the Twin Towers before the morning of 9/11. Ahed sat in his chair, sometimes talking quietly with his friend Nimr, sometimes checking his phone.

There were poignant moments, made more so for their rarity, of course. When Ahed said he had heard about a blind carpenter in Nablus who worked with “the power of the heart,” he lit up a little bit and gestured like a blind man feeling around for something. He said there was a guy in Essawiya who had had a glass eye for three years and was married and with kids, so I asked him, “And you?” He laughed and said he just wanted the glass eye.

A telling moment came when Ahed showed me the Youtube slideshow (I can’t find it yet, but if you look at the “Qalandia” blog post and click on the photo links, most of the pictures are there). I’m not sure how it came about, but I didn’t ask to see it. It was completely voluntary. It was so important, indeed, that after the laptop we were watching it on ran out of battery, Ahed brought up the same video on his phone and started it from the beginning for me. When up came one picture in particular (note: very graphic), I turned to Ahed to see his reaction. He actually laughed a little bit, I imagine in the way you laugh when you don’t know what else to do. It was then that he told me he watches the video every night.

Perhaps it was a confession he didn’t realize meant as much to me as it did to him. To me, it stuck out of Ahed’s laconic front—if you’ll permit the simile—like a fresh wound. That’s the shape of the heart of the story to me. I do hope Ahed meets the blind carpenter from Nablus, wins compensation against the odds and lives a beautiful life like Emily Henochowicz and I’m going to work within reasonable professional bounds to see that happen. But now, with prospects so dark, all I can think of is Ahed watching that video on his phone, alone, before going to sleep. Does that count as childhood?

I may have written about this before, but this is the best example in the flesh. If Israel-Palestine ever comes to a just end, it will be borne in by Ahed’s generation. Survivors of physical and psychological torture, Palestinians and Jews alike, even if fed exclusivist and nationalist propaganda from infancy, can still be peacemakers—Ahed’s father, if you look at those quotes from the EI story, is a good example. But it’s an extraordinary burden. We, as Americans paying taxes that arm Israel’s racist, right-wing government, are adding to it. In fact, the high-velocity canister that destroyed a 14-year-old’s right eye and cracked part of his skull may have been American-made.

A number of obvious conclusions come to mind here: Don’t normalize Israel, don’t buy from Israel, don’t visit Israel. March on Washington and demand the elimination of all military aid to the only nuclear-armed colony in the Middle East. Tell the truth about Birthright. I wish so hard those sentences did not sound like stale political talking points, because I believe they make up the only way more children won’t be maimed. But in the absence of any new solutions, there are only new victims. If you strip away the issues that everyone doesn’t want to hear about—American aid to Israel, Israeli dehumanization of Palestinians, Palestinian violent versus nonviolent resistance, politics generally—there’s only Ahed.

He doesn’t talk a lot. I can’t impute feelings and statements to him that he didn’t feel or state, because he was hurt and hiding it and I didn’t know how (or whether at all) to get in. But at this point, I think his stoic face says enough.

Sincerely,

Brendan

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A Short Ethical Preoccupation

Monday, October 17, 2011 6:47:19 AM

[NOTE: This blog is by me and about me. That is the goal, at least. I adjust my lens closer because I’m afraid of being accused of the hilarious presumptuousness involved in talking about cultures, nations, civilizations, and other Large People Clusters. I still believe it’s never, ever going to be more sensible to talk about a generation, for instance, than it is to talk about an individual. But there are times, like now, when I feel ready to reach a former using a latter.]

I wrote in April that I felt morally “rooted” on account of my first six months in Palestine. I knew at the time it was a colorful word choice, but it took me until now to realize I had just lied in the absolute: every day here is a small moral earthquake, and me with lots of rooting left to do. A question mark is aptly shaped for that kind of work and you can bet I’ve used it a lot—who has rights, who is right, and what makes right? Does the cumulative “right” I’m doing, if I’m doing any at all, outweigh the wrong? Or merely outshine? Is it possible to be good and happy? What about good and angry? But at some point I was bound to put down my shovel and see what I’d dug.

In Palestine, the one-staters (one state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, equal rights for all) and the two-staters (one state for Jews, one state for Palestinians, your rights depend on who you are) are comparable as people who prioritize long-term goals and people who prioritize short-term goals, respectively. Dangerous ideologues versus selfish collaborators, universalists versus family men, liberals versus conservatives—as long as we’ve abandoned the individual frame, let’s go ahead and say, absurdly, that these are the two principle types of humans in history. When I talk to two-staters, they cite their livelihoods. When I talk to one-staters, they cite their dignity. It’s been said enough times that it’s impossible to live without both, and I should say also that both groups reliably point to their (large) families and say their choice of path is for their well-being. One-staters say their children must know about the Nakba and fight it, must remember and redeem the Palestine that was. Two-staters say their children must move on and be happy, must heal and build whatever Palestine is left.

I am, with qualifications, a one-stater. Here are the two chief qualifications: my life and future are hardly ever in the kind of danger that would make me scream for compromise (my money is in an American bank account, my passport is American, my soul, so to speak, is in America), so I can afford to be radical. I also understand the insurmountable logistical and political obstacles involved in the creation of one state. Since I don’t think it’ll happen, I believe in the one-state solution inasmuch as I believe in capital-lettered concepts like Truth or God or whatever. But it’s a relevant delusion. Westerners get them all the time.

About a month ago, a bunch of Americans dusted off their relevant delusions (called, with a hint of cheese, dreams) and started making a ruckus on Wall Street. The corporate media did their dutiful best to ignore and then laugh them out (phases one and two of Gandhi’s ignored-ridiculed-beaten-victorious paradigm), saying that the protests lacked catchphrase clarity. Now that they’ve been given an inch of legitimacy in the mainstream, the Occupy protests have been termed to be about “economic inequality.” To use the now bumper-sticker-ready model, 99% of the nation is beholden to the greed of 1%, who has control over resources, policies, and actual lives far out of all proportion.

Yes, the economic complaints have been most widely reported and it is the biggest attractive force the protests have: in terms of distribution of resources, it’s just about impossible not to find the stats to prove America is all out of whack, and the obviousness unites. CEOs make 475 times the pay of an average worker. Corporate profits are more than 12% of the entire GDP. The top 1% controls 42% of the nation’s financial wealth. We are the 93rd least income equal country in the world, behind Russia, China, India, and Iran. But at the helm of wasted American capitalism are people, and everyone knows people are unstable and afraid and tend to hate other people. The people we’ve got steering America happen not only to be extremely rich and unwilling to share, but are happy to use war to attain and secure wealth. Economic inequality begets global imperial violence, everything is linked, and the sun rises in the east. I’ll be signing books afterwards.

The only thing I want to add is that American foreign policy—the $700 billion Pentagon budget, the third of a million American troops in 1,000 abroad bases, the drone strikes we don’t even know are happening right now, and of course the cloying obeisance to Israel—is an expression of even greater inequality than in the realm of the economy. At least in the market, Americans have the ostensible luxury of asking can we please, please, please end the Bush tax cuts. We don’t get to decide, however, whether or not to send $8.5 million (or about $35 from your pocket, reader) in military aid every day to a heavily armed settler colony—it just happens. Yet when a war president and several powerful lobbies (arms manufacturing, oil, and Israel) act in the name of 300 million people, we don’t usually think of it as a representative or non-representative act. It just gets catalogued in the long history of dirty things Americans do abroad, while life at home is peachy. Some ugly souls even dare to say American life’s general peachiness must depend on torturing the rest of the world, and that’s called recruitment.

It would be only too easy at this point to get lost in the stories and statistics of American iniquity. This abyss gets deeper every day, as Obama presides over the largest Pentagon budget in history, orders secret committees to authorize airstrikes on American citizens, and now advances the most absolutely ridiculous cock-and-bull garbage about Iranian assassins from Mexico in order to placate Israel hawks in Congress and shore up his “defense credentials.” I’m not voting for Obama again, and if you have treasure the upkeep of your conscience neither will you. But if you thought to bring up the unthinkable alternatives to him, or even if you didn’t, read on.

Occupy Wall Street is in its moment now, but it will soon be in the worst kind of danger from co-optation. By the time of writing, October 16, both parties had begun composing sweet odes to populism, with even Mitt Romney claiming he identified with the 99%. Soon it will be courting season and Obama’s legendary network of ground teams will be encouraging a nation in revolt to shrug its shoulders and say, “Well, it could be a lot worse.” I don’t need to tell you that’s true. But it has to get better. I’m counting on the Occupiers to stay close to the root of the protests, demand outright contrition from the Democrats on Wall Street and Obama, and remain steadfast through whatever happens next November, just as Egyptian protesters have stayed in Tahrir Square long beyond Mubarak’s flight. Of course right behavior and accountability are historically absent from politics, but I want to think that they’re closer than ever before. The binding will be violently resisted, but all that’s needed to pull them together is optimism to believe it’s inevitable, cynicism to say those in power won’t do it, and clarity in the moment to harmonize the two at the right times and places.

Over here on the morality treadmill of Palestine, the perpetual motion of conflict probably strengthens character, but it weakens words. There’s enough scholarship about how poorly speech reflects pain to make that point abstractly, but I myself have floundered in the deep end a couple times, like when I stood and yelled “FUCK THIS FUCKING WALL” or punched a couch after reading this or started crying a few days after the Qalandia incident. And I haven’t really seen anything. It’s enough to lose faith in words altogether, and after words ideas, and after ideas I put on a black turtleneck and sulk for years.

Since living with righteous anger is liable to make me an intolerable dick, I have to recognize compromises here and there as acceptable. I do spend money in the Israeli economy when I travel in to report or see friends in Jerusalem. Similarly, as regards American capitalism, I’m not totally against it; I would like to make enough money one day to fund a pretty nice car. But once you envision perfection in either case, it shouldn’t be dismissed lightly—if, as part of an Occupation or against an occupation, a small dilution of demands is allowed, it runs the risk of being repeated. Even 80% success, over four consecutive compromises, is 40% of the original total. Ask Palestinians: if their grandparents had accepted the unjust and UN-charter-breaking partition in 1947, they would’ve been sovereigns over 55% of historic Palestine. Twenty years later, they had 22%. Today, since Area C can be effectively excluded from Palestinian control, that number is 13%. Sure, there are reasons for all of the historic concessions, first among them being the absurd imbalance of power between Zionists and Palestinians since 1900, but the idea is that if we don’t watch it, what we believe in may end up having an awfully fast half-life.

So, it sounds uncouth to say, but I think the only conscientious attitude at this point is perfectionism—a one-state solution with equal representation for everyone, if we’re talking about Israel-Palestine, and the complete erasure of the securities trade and a halving of defense spending, if we’re talking about the US. Is it wise? I realize ideological staredowns are a big faux pas for us liberals, with whom there is always room for another narrative. But I, and I assume many people capital-O Occupying around the world, will be willing to break with that wisdom in return (eventually) for economic fairness and an end to American imperialism and its dependents. If we were talking in personal terms, asking someone to live a life of conscience might be high-minded, but it wouldn’t be strange: Christianity asks two billion people to do it every day when they wake up, and Islam a further billion and a half, and so on. Why is it strange to ask for upright policymaking?

If, as it appears now, the Occupy movement ends up a kingmaker in 2012, it is incumbent on those who believe in it to refuse the role and crown nobody, asking instead that a democratic system respect the rights of all it serves and touches—meaning not just unpaid American postal workers and debt-bearing postgrads like me, but Afghani and Yemeni civilians whose real lives get passed off as collateral damage literally every day. That would be the closest equivalent to a one-state solution here, which is up to Jewish and Palestinian activists, thinkers and citizens to create. Both models reject existing philosophies of inequality—in America’s case, that certain multibillionaires and banks are more important “wealth-makers” than 150 million workers and therefore deserve a freehold on the nation, and in Israel-Palestine’s case, that Jews deserve a special ethnocratic state all their own at the cost of Palestinian rights and lives. It’s not that late capitalism and Zionism are no longer compatible with universal democracy, it’s that they never were.

It looks like my drivel has run out and I haven’t said much. This isn’t a manifesto. I just feel compelled to speak to something bigger than myself—a generation, as I said in the beginning—in hopes that others are feeling morally stirred as well and do not want to see good principles either hijacked by the “family values” people or ignored altogether by our wormy president. Social liberalism deserves its warriors, and I think one day historians will recognize they started to show up around now. I’m just asking them not to give up.

Best,

Brendan

1 comment

Qalandia

Thursday, September 22, 2011 7:03:50 AM

Hello friends,

Today I went to the Qalandia checkpoint, the largest and the most recognizable in the West Bank, the one that separates Ramallah and Jerusalem. I arrived just around 10:30 in the morning from a reporting trip to Nablus (which in light of today’s events does not yet deserve mention) and I left at 4:30. The six in-between hours did not comprise a “demonstration” or a “protest” by the standards I’ve known so far in Palestine, and it wasn’t a proper “battle” either. It was really just a mess.

Qalandia is one of the geographic focal points of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thousands of people pass through it every day (Ramallah and Jerusalem are two of the biggest cities in Palestine) using a system of security cameras, iron bars, locks and turnstiles. The whole complex is watched over by a large tower, which bears the burns of hundreds of Molotov cocktails and is manned every day by Israeli soldiers. Flanking Qalandia checkpoint is the Israeli wall, not as high as it is in Bethlehem, maybe 20 feet. Right down the street is Qalandia refugee camp, the source of the hundreds of eager under-25 males whose accuracy with stones and general persistence have won the camp and the checkpoint plenty of resistance cachet.

Israeli Special Forces were already at the checkpoint when I arrived. I’m not sure if it was closed at that point, but it must have been closed later. Stone-throwing commenced at 11, followed by the unveiling of the Israelis’ special new weapon “The Scream,” which is basically a loud beeping noise at a high frequency designed to disperse protestors non-violently and when that didn’t work, the soldiers took to the usual methods: high-velocity tear gas canisters, sound bombs, rubber-coated steel bullets, and live ammunition. At 11:30, I was holed up with some Palestinians in a closed storefront about 25 meters from the Israeli position next to the tower. My surroundings kinda looked like this…

…and the Israelis kinda looked like this:

The kids would throw a rock or a bottle and disappear behind the corner, then the soldiers would shoot tear gas back and depending on where the wind was blowing, the actors would shuffle accordingly. I’m pretty sure that’s been the Israel-Palestine battle plan for as long as anyone can remember. At one point, all the kids left except one. (EDIT: I later found out his name, Ahed Wahdan) He motioned to me not to take a picture of him (also standard protocol ever since the Israeli army started raiding camps armed with printed digital pictures) and I obliged as he got ready to throw a glass Coke bottle.

Then there was a bang, the bottle smashed, he clutched his face and dropped. I was about six feet away from him and I went over and shouted “Injured” or something, I don’t remember. I knew it was his eye. After the bullet, the Israelis shot a tear gas canister into the corner of the storefront. It landed within a few feet of us. (EDIT: Later figured out Ahed was shot with the tear gas canister, then it dropped to the ground and gas started coming out of it.) I started trying to pick the kid up, but between huge gulps of tear gas, I didn’t really get anywhere. There was not a lot of blood at this point, just a spurt or two, but I can’t remember. When you get tear gassed, experience sort of fragments between what you see for a half-second and what you see five seconds later when you dare open your eyes again, so for most of the next minute, I visually remember almost nothing. Somebody with a gas mask, another photojournalist, picked up the kid’s legs and I got his shoulders and we hoisted him toward wherever the ambulance was supposed to be. I was having a hard time lifting him and everyone was taking pictures. I found a couple of these later through Twitter and Facebook. Here is one:

I’m sorry if you’re squeamish. This happened. (EDIT: There is a larger and much more graphic photo album available here)

I couldn’t carry him any longer (and I still can’t figure out why). He got up under his own power and said, “Hospital,” and then a bunch of other people bundled him into the back of the ambulance. I didn’t get any pictures of the whole thing, which must have lasted under two minutes in total. Ahed Wahdan was 15 years old and a Reuters photographer confirmed for me later that he lost his eye.

A couple things stand out to me now:

1. Nobody helped me pick the kid up for something like ten seconds. There are three pictures (one is in this NYT slideshow) which show me trying to pick him up. Whoever had time for pictures is a brave and diligent soul I’m sure, but guilty of the most commonly cited sin of photojournalism. Nothing could have saved the eye—it more or less exploded on impact, I guess—and that’s not my problem. But when a 15-year-old is in shocking pain in front of you and you consider the frame, your priorities are wrong. Then again, probably they, like me, were confused (the NYT caption says I’m “tending” to him) and didn’t know what to do.

2. I’m not a law student but since “who was at fault” is constantly being brought up, this was pretty clear-cut. Any Israeli soldiers on the Palestinian side of the Green Line (and definitely on the Palestinian side of the wall, itself an illegal annexation of Palestinian land) are part of a military occupation. People under military occupation have a right to violent resistance according to the Geneva Conventions (specifically the 1977 “Protocol Additional”). I would say that means our bottle-throwing youth was within his rights. Even if you are a Zionist and point out that right is restricted to the political (and hilarious) designation of “alien occupation,” the Israeli army still has codes of conduct and open-fire regulations it is bound to obey. Rubber-coated steel bullets like these…

…are not to be shot at the upper body, much less the face. The tear gas canister that landed next to us was of the banned high-velocity variety. (EDIT: the fact that Ahed was actually shot with a high-velocity tear gas canister does not change the illegality of the shooting. Aiming that kind of projectile at someone's face is against the Israeli army's open-fire regulations.) And the decision to add the latter AFTER they had already shot the kid was way out of all principles of proportionality. Later in the demonstration the soldiers used illegal live fire. Luckily, only five others were injured and none of them as seriously as the kid next to me. You can also see clearly in this shot that soldiers were aiming tear gas canisters not in arcs, but directly at the crowd:

All this stuff is much more well-documented by human rights organizations like B'tselem (see this letter).

3. He was 15 years old and he’ll never have his right eye back. I still can’t get over that.

4. I wonder if his parents knew where he was. Most protests take place on Friday, part of the weekend, but Wednesday was an official day off from school in celebration of the UN statehood bid (I almost went this whole blog without mentioning it). It’s easy to shout parental neglect from the safety of an unoccupied Western country, but when soldiers regularly raid Qalandia camp and take sons literally out of their beds, is it still strange that mothers and fathers sanction this sort of danger? Being a West Bank Palestinian is already dangerous.

5. When it came down to the moment, I realized I didn’t know how to say “Everything’s going to be alright” in Palestinian Arabic, or indeed any words of comfort at all. I’ve learned how to prevaricate at length on politics, society, and the Fatah-Hamas split, but for a few awful seconds there, I was just lying in English and saying, “You’re okay.”

In any case, he was not okay and everything was not alright. Throughout the next four hours, I saw an international activist carted away on a stretcher after getting shot in the ear, one Palestinian get shot in the shin and remain standing (and throwing), two Israeli flags burned, one Palestinian flag stolen, three Palestinians arrested, and about twenty tires lit on fire. This was not a normal protest by the standards of what I’m used to, but seeing as nobody was killed, it could have been much worse. I don’t know how much of the credit for that can be given to the embedded media…

…for whose sake many of the most brutal Israeli tactics are momentarily forgotten, and how much of the credit is lost to luck. It took me a long time to simply walk away from the battle and go home to Bethlehem; by the time I left, it had still not ended. It will probably be continued on Friday, no matter what happens at the UN.

I’m sorry for the clunky list format of this post, it’s the only way I could force myself to write about it. I was in a daze for most of this evening. My good friend and roommate Beth insists I have to process what happened, and that makes sense in theory—you don’t just watch a teenage boy get his eye shot out in front of you and then go on as if nothing happened—but I just haven’t started doing that yet. I still have his blood on my shirt. I keep thinking about living with only one eye and what that must do to depth perception and aim. Will he keep throwing stones? I also wonder what he’ll be like in the future, when maybe there is peace in Palestine and he’s 50 and he still doesn’t have a right eye. Before everyone goes blind in Gandhi’s eye-for-an-eye aphorism, there must be a stage at which both parties have only one eye each, right? And nobody has any judgment at all? I wonder if we’re already there.

Brendan

2 comments

Absurdity Surrounds Reality Surrounds Absurdity

Monday, September 19, 2011 7:11:14 AM

Hey all,

In the rising clamor of the Palestinian statehood bid, Abbas and his detractors have agreed on at least one thing: the day after recognition, if/when it comes, independence will not magically appear in Palestinian laps. Israel’s cynical “facts on the ground” policy (euphemistic mega-stretch for illegal walls and settlements) has virtually ensured that whatever state emerges will be geographically non-contiguous, economically unviable and impossible to govern. The day-after maneuvering is still unclear, in part because of the unpredictability of the far-right Netanyahu government, the further-right US Congress, and the number of pursestrings they control between them, but that would be nothing new to the Middle East. Opacity is a wonderful means for the unelected to stay in power, plus we’ll all know what’s up in a week or two, and I want to stay in the present.

The current realities of Israeli occupation are perpetually in danger of “normalization,” which is a properly boring word to describe how something once infuriating becomes boring. As an outsider with family and friends “on the outside” of the conflict, I have some use in recognizing and publicizing how abnormal Israel is. It is literally speaking the least I can do. But as long as we’re still in the age of irony, it will always be the popular reaction to sniff at injustice than to stare it indignantly down—I hope I’m not being obtuse in saying normalization is not a strange process at all, but a normal one. It certainly has its up-sides. Journalism generally and an understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict specifically would just not be possible were it not for the clearheaded cynics who normalize what they see. But there are experiences in which absurdity overwhelms.

Two West Bank locations stand out for this: the old city of Hebron, 45 minutes to the south, and the village of al-Walajeh, twenty minutes to the west. I’ve written about both places before, but like I said, it doesn’t get any less weird on second notice. I am compelled to bring them up again.

This is Apartheid Street in Hebron, formerly known as al-Shuhada Street (subtle name change effected by the Hebron city government). It’s the main entrance to the illegal Jewish settlement inside Hebron, where 600 settlers live cordoned off from 200,000 Palestinians, guarded by an enormous force of Israeli soldiers who escort them wherever they like in large, armored troop transports. I wrote about it last year. It has achieved infamy among occupation-tourists as a place of stark clarity, the place you have to see if you really want to know what the occupation is like.

On Apartheid Street, Palestinians are not allowed to drive cars or walk without a special permit. All of the Palestinian shops are closed and many have Stars of David spray painted on them. Those Palestinians whose houses line the street but do not have permission to walk around have their balconies caged like this:

This is the view from inside:

If Palestinians choose to open their doors, they get a nice visit from the army.

The commander speaks very good Arabic (it is an irony bordering, appropriately, on the absurd that he speaks better than I do) when he tells this woman to close her door and stay inside her house. Then he and his troops rumble down the quiet street.

The inverse of Apartheid Street is al-Walajeh, a Palestinian village one day to be completely surrounded by the Israeli wall. About 2,000 people live in al-Walajeh, many of them hearing intermittently about the latest Israeli High Court ruling deeming where the wall can and can’t be built—the truth is that the Israeli army is functionally deaf to the court and has opted to encircle the village, appropriating the highest land for settlements…

…and using the rest for to build the wall. When the wall is complete, al-Walajeh residents will have to enter and leave the village each day through one gate to get access to health, education, and employment. The settlers living on the other side of get subsidized housing and well-maintained access roads and of course, the fourth most powerful army in the world for when they want to take a stroll.

Protesters seen here…

…have about as much luck as the woman in Hebron had leaving her house. It doesn’t get anywhere:

So there’s the lay of the land: illegal settlements surround the Palestinians of al-Walajeh and the illegal settlement of Hebron is surrounded by Palestinians. Both cases mock the basic geographic understanding of a state, but it is within precisely these constraints that Palestinians are asking for one. Is it smart?

A friend of mine contends that the bid will snap American diplomats out of their complacence, and on other days I would agree. Where indignation lacks, everything seems normal. The only people walking down Apartheid Street who are visibly unhappy are the internationals, many of whom wear fair-trade woven pantaloons, thereby canceling themselves out of all relevance. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ban Ki-Moon, Catherine Ashton, Tony Blair—to my knowledge these people have never been to Apartheid Street or al-Walajeh. And so, by virtue of the Israeli government’s international legitimacy, both are allowed to exist. Perhaps if the Palestinian government were to achieve parity through the UN, it could call attention to the absurdity.

But I am not hopeful. I remember how slowly and uncomfortably the Obama administration reacted to Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Syria. I know the vise grip the Israel lobby has on Congress (and so does bellweather Thomas Friedman) and I wish I could forget how face-palmingly, alarmingly shortsighted Americans get around election time. Everybody is going to be playing Israel’s best friend for political points and nobody will bother to ask questions of Netanyahu. The only real pressure on him will come from his right—the settlers who this week announced they will march on Palestinian cities, armed with live ammunition, to “make it clear to the Arabs who the home owners are.”

There are a lot of Palestinian flags flying from the roofs, distributed by the UN statehood bid campaign people and eagerly placed by the shabaab…

..and I can’t help but wonder what happens to them after the US vetoes, for the 43rd time, a resolution (ostensibly) against Israel that the rest of the world supports. Tonight the most level-headed Palestinian I know—Ayed, flawless-English-speaking landlord, father of four, aspiring burrito shop owner, master’s degree holder in philosophy—said the sense of frustration and inevitability around the camp reminded him of the beginning of the Second Intifada. In the hour it took to write this, I counted nine fighter jets flying over Bethlehem. I don’t know where it goes from here.

Best,

Brendan

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A Word on the Palestinian Statehood Bid

Monday, September 12, 2011 7:52:07 AM

Hello,

If you don’t have much patience for the intricacies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this one is going to bore you. I’ll try to be short about it.

Palestine is, by some standards of international law, already a state: it has a functioning central (albeit unelected and illegitimate) government, it’s a member in regional organizations like the Arab League, and it has the capacity to enter into relations with other states. It is not a UN member state, but an "observer entity," one rank under the "permanent observer state" status of the Vatican. It doesn’t show up on any maps made in the US, except sometimes as “Occupied Palestinian Territories,” demarcated by dashed lines along the 1967 borders. And since Palestine is occupied, it lacks one basic mark of statehood, sovereignty: it cannot control its airspace or borders (meaning the West Bank and Gaza Strip are subject to nightly raids by the Israeli military or worse), it cannot issue visas, and it cannot take action to defend itself either legally or militarily. Perhaps that explains, but probably too succinctly, why the Palestinian statehood initiative is all the rage right now.

The bid is not a surprise to anyone. Palestinian PM Salaam Fayyad said in 2009 that his state-institution-building plan would be complete by September 2011 and President Obama explicitly stated his desire to see a Palestinian state emerge by the same month. To go further back to a more important date, UN Resolution 181 (the Partition Plan from 1947) calls for the creation of two states, one Jewish and one Palestinian. Israel declared independence on May 15, 1948. Palestine never did, for reasons either too obvious or too complex (depending on who’s reading this) to explain. The statehood bid is designed to create a Palestinian state on the borders of June 4, 1967—that means the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—with East Jerusalem as its capital.

As it stands now, about 130 of 193 UN member states (including India and China and 13 others of the world’s 20 most populous countries) have confirmed they will vote for Palestinian statehood, with more expected to join the camp. The US has said it will veto the statehood bid in the Security Council in order to defend Israel. Other no votes likely include Germany, Italy, Canada, and the Marshall Islands. But it gets a lot more complicated than that.

Talking about Palestine in reference only to the 1967 territories is pretty silly, not least because the West Bank and Gaza comprise only 22% of what was once “historic Palestine” (that means current-day Israel). Talking about Palestinians is equally silly, because 70% of the people are refugees—they live in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank, Gaza, Kuwait, Chile, Argentina, etc. At 5 million people, they are the largest refugee community in the world. My landlord is a refugee, my falafel guy is a refugee, everyone’s a refugee. I hope that’s not a song lyric. This is one of the nicer places where the refugees (and I) live:

Since the only representation of all these displaced people—all of whom rightfully claim their UN-sanctioned right of return to their homes, which are now mostly bulldozed lots in Israel—rests with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), it is that organization that most accountably makes decisions (or should) on behalf of “Palestine.” There is major concern among Palestinians that the PLO will be replaced by a “State of Palestine” at the UN, to the disenfranchisement of five million people. Those who subscribe to this idea have justifiably little faith that those in the Palestinian leadership (Mahmoud Abbas and his ilk) will carry on the fight for refugee rights once a Palestinian state has been established. They remember finding out, thanks to the Palestine Papers, how few refugees Abbas actually wanted to resettle in their former homes when he was negotiating final status issues with the Israelis back in 2008. It was something like three percent. Cynics of the statehood bid see Abbas as something of a traitor to the Palestinian cause who will throw the refugees under the bus (to be fair, they’re pretty well-acquainted with the underside of the bus) as soon as a state is declared. They want to know exactly what is contained in the application for statehood, and to his discredit Abbas is not forthcoming. They fear, in the words of one very well-spoken Palestinian named Akram, that this is the worst mistake the Palestinian leadership has made since the 1994 Oslo Accords, which split up the West Bank and turned the PA into a subcontractor for Israel.

Here is Mustafa Barghouthi, one of the least-reviled (but still somewhat reviled) politicians of Palestine, seated on the far right explaining why he’s for the statehood bid:

If the statehood bid is a long-term strategy, it’s miserable for the above reason. But if it’s step one of a clever maneuver to isolate Israel, delegitimize the occupation, end settlement and enforce the right of return, then it’s brilliant—and as an outsider and optimist, I have to think that’s what Abbas is doing. It’s working on the first count, at least: Israeli leaders have done nothing to avert what Defense Minister Ehud Barak tastelessly called, two days after the Japanese tsunami, a diplomatic tsunami. The state seems to have no plan but to rely on the US veto in the Security Council, issue militant pronouncements about September, and flail for the best. Israelis rightly fear that Palestinian membership in the UN will lead to its signature on the Rome Statute, which in turn leads to the possibility of prosecution of numerous Israeli war crimes at the International Criminal Court. Netanyahu, Barak, and (former Israeli PM Ehud) Olmert are rumored to be named the defendants in prospective ICC cases.

The statehood bid is not just a good tactic because it raises the prospect of ICC prosecution for such things as Operation Cast Lead, the 2008-09 Gaza massacre in which 1,400 Palestinians were killed in less than a month. It also sets the 1967 borders as the legitimate borders of Palestine—which, in case you forgot, Israel forgot. There are currently about half a million illegal Jewish settlers inside the 1967 borders (aka the Green Line), all of whom would be occupying another UN member state after the vote. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, settling civilian populations in occupied territory is a war crime. There’s no doubt Palestinian representatives at the UN would pursue the case.

All of this makes it much harder to Israel to continue the occupation—any half-sane politician would recognize the wisdom of swimming with the tsunami instead of sitting arms akimbo in a bunker. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is not that politician. With September approaching, he authorized the distribution of tear gas, stun grenades, and attack dogs to the settlers in the West Bank, the same rabid ideologues who regularly vandalize Palestinian mosques (even IDF bases) and believe feverishly that the entirety of Israel is for Jews only, God said so. His intransigence about apologizing to Turkey for last year’s brutal raid on the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara was compounded by his refusal to apologize to Egypt for the August cross-border raid that killed five Egyptian soldiers. If I was an Israeli, I would not feel safe with the unapologetic Netanyhau at the helm. At least one Israeli columnist rightly compared him to a drunk driver.

It’s clear to me, after only five days back, that this is not exactly the same Bethlehem I left. There aren’t major shifts visible yet—traffic flows freely, nobody’s cut off the water yet, the checkpoints are still functioning at full speed. I think the Israeli watchtower outside my window has its light on more often. I chatted with two shopkeepers, both of whom are pessimistic about September’s blow to Bethlehem’s crucial tourist industry. One of them mentioned war, the other one said probably not, just a lockdown of the West Bank. Other Palestinians speak much more vaguely about “troubles” or “difficulties” ahead, and I doubt they know much more specifics than I. Probably the most worrying comment I heard was during a statehood discussion at the Alternative Information Center, from some obnoxious wannabe Maoist (opposed to the statehood bid), who said the popular struggle could not discount the gun among its options. He was pretty widely glared at.

I’m out here working for whoever will take me (volunteering for PNN, minus the old boss), ostensibly stringing for the Christian Science Monitor but with no stories to speak of yet. My finances are unpredictable, to write a hilarious euphemism. I have a couple new friends and a couple old friends, but sociality takes a big backseat to what I want to call my serious mindset—specifically the infuriatingly thick moral-political lens that renders it impossible to make a cheese sandwich here and not consider the consequences. The roof is still a quiet place to relax, the hummus is still murderously good, and people still walk around in Jerusalem with huge loaded guns.

The wall has some new decoration:

I’m glad to be back, but more than that I’m ready to get to work. I’d like to update this blog more regularly as this second tour of Palestine goes on and I hope you keep up with me. Thank you for reading.

Best,

Brendan

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Sphinx-based Goofing, Plus I Continue My Backgammon Losing Streak

Tuesday, September 6, 2011 7:17:05 PM

Hello,

I've been to Cairo before, but it wasn't like this. Looking back on five years ago reveals: it was winter, it was pre-revolution, I didn't speak Arabic, I was with my family, and we got scammed very easily. But thought it was a world away in most respects, Cairo was recognizable for what I would call its essence: the hazy, crazy, congested sprawl. It is not Athens, it is not "the West," and it is not easy.

Thankfully we had help. Our CouchSurfing host was a true cosmopolitan, a Copt and French teacher named Nagui whose name is traditionally preceded by "monsieur," even in conversation with his Arab friends. He's in the middle of this terrible picture...

...with another surfer on the left, Alejandro of Chile. Not pictured are his charismatic cats or his coterie of Frenchies, who he manages to keep around him all times of the year. Nagui was the perfect antidote to hectic Cairo--assiduously calm despite the traffic, funny and full of advice. Casey and I bantered with him on everything we could think of, and I tried in vain to revive the morsels of French I had picked up from travelers along the way.

Nagui's flat in Heliopolis was our staging point for two old tourist stand-bys and one new one: the Pyramids, Islamic Cairo, and Tahrir Square, respectively. Here's our report.

The Pyramids are just as scammy as ever, perhaps more because of the revolution's effect on Egypt's typically strong tourism sector. Casey and I avoided some (see above, the camel is named Charlie Brown) and fell for others...

...like this guy, who claimed hilariously to work for the government, usually took 200 Egyptian pounds ($35) for his services, but would be happy if we were happy. He led us around some less-touristed tombs...

...explained that he would be fired if anyone found out, and then threw himself on the ground and complained of sun sickness when he found out we wouldn't go above 80 pounds ($13), in itself a righteously good haul for his old ass. It turned out that speaking Arabic did not help us, but instead led us into a lot of "special price" situations. This kid, seen here drawing the layout of the pyramids on the ground...

...was so impressed with Arabic and my work in Palestine that he told us about a secret pyramid interior, which nobody knows about, but he would let us into for free. We obliged the dude at the entrance...

...with 10 pounds baksheesh (tip) and took a break from the baking sun inside a pyramid. There's a lot of awesome speculation that aliens built the things, but Casey and I refrained from discussing it with the stone-faced pyramid guy. He waited for us to quit muttering about how cool it was and led us out, reminding us to watch our heads over and over...

...and back we went into the waiting arms of our youthful would-be guide. It turns out that Muhammad, as he was named, was also a keen photographer specializing in the type of cheesy scenes we had to that point avoided. Would you a picture with you hand on top of the pyramid? Jumping over the pyramid? Picking up the pyramid? No, no, no! Welllll...probably in a silly mood from the 100-degree heat, we finally assented, resulting in these gems:

I have now officially relinquished my pretentious traveler-not-tourist badge.

Islamic Cairo, as it did five years ago, represented a more intricate wonder of the world to me. The scope of history contained within it, the detail of its many doors and minarets, and the extraordinary and un-Cairene peace to be found in some of the mosques was all there from the first moment Casey went exploring.

In a twist, we met a guy named Ahmed who didn't want to sell us a damn thing. He led us on an alley-wise tour of the old city, chatting American geography and whatever else came to mind, then depositing us on the roof of the al-Mu'ayid Mosque, which we had all to ourselves and our cameras:

Looking out over the vast, serene interior of the place afforded us an opportunity to do exactly what Egyptians seem to think Americans are always doing, and spy on them...

...but let that be considered just a token instance for all the times they were wrong thereafter. It was a great experience, and we thanked Ahmed. But he didn't want money and wasted no time leading us through the dirty cobblestone streets past Naguib Mahfouz's favorite cafe to our next stop:

A game of backgammon with the locals. There's very little backstory here: I'm really bad at this game. I have played and lost backgammon three times, all against old Palestinian dudes, and each time I have left resolved to maybe learn the rules a little better. I didn't. Do not let my calculated ruminating deceive you here...

...the guy on the right stomped me from the start. I don't know how to keep score, but I think it may have been 18 to 2. Just when I needed sixes I rolled ones, prompting Ahmed to chortle and deem the effort a faashil, which translates directly to what you think: fail. I thanked my oppressor and we got on our way.

I would like to think opinion is split among wannabe Conscious Travel Afficionados like me about whether to support or deride "cultural shows." Probably most people are like me and avoid them with a sneer until they get invited to one for free. Everything is good when it's free. But this...

...was great. Sufi Muslims (the initiates are known as dervishes) dance and sing and recite the names of God to attain individual communion with him, and most of all they spin (or whirl, hence the "whirling dervish"). Most of the time they do it in private, some of the time they do it for an audience of white people. It is a form of prayer, which was to be kept in mind when some Sufis started posing conspicuously for pictures while spinning, but it's nothing if not celebratory. Apparently the Sufi orders in Turkey, Iran, and Syria only wear white to keep the ceremony solemn. Not so in Egypt:

The last important sight of Cairo, Tahrir Square, was blocked off by a continuous police cordon and tanks. We could not walk through it, but going around set off memories of al-Jazeera screens in my head from January and February. Slogging through Cairo's legendarily bad traffic, I chatted up plenty of taxi drivers who were proud to say where they were during the revolution: Tahrir Square, of course, and here's this bruise and this rock to prove it. It's a shame we couldn't bask more fully in its recent glory, but news reports of Hosni Mubarak's trial kept our two feet planted in the present (in a place where that isn't always easy). And that's the best I can say of the Egypt "situation" generally, too: it's in flux, with an election in October and a dictator on trial, and the variety of outlooks matches that of the possibilities. Nagui is convinced that Egypt needed the revolution but that it will be screwed by the well-organized Muslim Brotherhood for "ten to fifteen years" before a secular state emerges. A taxi driver of the more devout persuasion told me Mubarak is in hell already. Nothing is totally clear.

I am now writing from Eilat in Israel. After a six-hour journey through the Sinai and a nap's worth of sleepy half-glances at the forbidding desert, I crossed the border with only a few hiccups (or rather gulps, which I kept doing in classically nervous fashion when the specially designated Israeli Siren Force of Hot Border Ladies looked me straight in the eye and asked me what I was doing in the country), and I'll be back in Bethlehem tomorrow afternoon. From here on out, vacation time is over and work begins. It has been a beautiful three weeks in the Balkans, which Casey and I have enjoyed at times far too much. Our wallets are thinner than we'd like, but our perspectives broader. Now I think I'll grab a bite to eat and get some sleep, but please keep reading as I enter what promises to be a thrilling Palestinian fall.

Salamaat,

Brendan

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On the Sublime Poetry of Greek Food, and Some Other Stuff

Friday, September 2, 2011 11:11:56 PM

Hello there,

I'm going to do something unprecedented in the history of this blog and dedicate an entry to someone. Our host in Athens, a 60-year-old retired Greek journalist named Konstantinos Pappas Papanikolaou (aka Kostas), deserves more than this and our small gift from Montana, but the nature of frugal travel means that the highest honors we can bestow are intangible and online. All the same, we want to thank Kostas for three terrific days in and around Athens and say, in the hopes he one days reads this, that he's still welcome to come to Montana. Here we are:

Before landing in the apartment of our gracious CouchSurfing host (that is where we found Kostas, lucky us), we entered Greece through the Albanian border in the north on the morning of the 28th. Our primary destination was Meteora, the site of six cliff-hanging monasteries, with the secondary goal being a bureau de change that would take Casey's 30,000 Albanian leke ($300) and turn it into useful euros. That dilemma would not be resolved until Athens. But in Meteora we managed ourselves nicely:

As you can see, the landscape did its best to awe, even engendering some hands-up-and-out worship from time to time. We nattered on about the origins of religion and Casey obliged for this shot:

Inside the monasteries was no less jaw-dropping, but more on account of its comparative lack of serenity. You can't really see it in this shot...

...but the walls were painted top to bottom with graphic scenes of early Christian martyrdom. The names of the martyrs in question were less memorable than the methods, so forgive me if I forgot exactly who got his head nailed through the middle, who was broken over a wheel and dragged over knives, who got de-limbed by a hammer and ax, and who was drowned with an anchor around her neck. Early Christians had it rough and now modern Christians get to check it out. Great.

We did not prepare terribly well for our stay in Meteora and ended up sleeping on the ground in a campsite for the hilarious price of nine euros (should've just slept in a monastery for free). It was cold and stupid and cold, though not nearly my worst night on earth (see blog from Nepal, a long time ago), and we were happy to get a move on. At this point we scarcely realized, however, the treat we were in for in Athens.

This is our view from Kostas' place in Gazi, a suburb of Athens about ten minutes from the Acropolis (top left). And by "Kostas' place," I mean the apartment he lent us for free for three days, from which he gladly shuttled us in his Jaguar S-type to some of the best restaurants in the city for scrumptious excursions into plates and plates of stuffed tomatoes, wine-boiled pork, and homemade cherry yogurt. More on that in a second.

On our first morning we skipped off to perform our obligatory staring rituals at the centerpiece of Western civilization...

...but I was not knocked over. It was crowded and hot, but it's the Parthenon, so whatever. More likely I was reminded of the obvious irony that an enormous temple was standing in at the supposed birthplace of democracy. The citizens' assembly building (forgot the Greek name), where most of the only-Greek, only-male, only-rich experiments in democracy took place was way down the hill where nobody went. I've seen stupidly huge temples before and I don't see how Athena can't be freely substituted for Ra, Vishnu, or the Judeo-Islamo-Christian honcho, the only result being a slight increase or decrease in tourist flow. But I took a couple pictures...

...and quit bitching. Then, in an attempt at contextualization, I sat down in the shade of the Parthenon, pulled out my new Kindle and started reading Aristotle's Ethics, but succeeded only in looking like a douche. Moving on...

...at the Museum of Greek Musical Instruments, we listened to old recordings of bouzouki players...

...and out in the protest-free streets (even anarchists get a summer break), we saw some great art. The next day, Kostas bought us tickets to a concert put on by big-time Greek guitarist and folk singer Sokratos Malamas, who lasted--to our fatigue--at least four hours and fifty songs. Greeks go hard...

...but we got some time to sleep in the Jaguar on today's daytrip to Delphi:

In desperate need of a question for the oracle, I forewent the deep stuff about professional success, my love life, and Western civilization and instead asked if I was going to have a good lunch. This is the best way to avoid oracular enigma. Because in Greece, food is life and when Kostas is paying, life is good.

I don't have pictures of the food and I don't have a reliable way of making food pictures not look stupid. What I do have is a plate of tender beef smothered in eggplant right next to me, and a fertile vocabulary. With no tastebud memory to speak of, I can't in good faith put my last few meals above the near-spiritual dinner I had in Istanbul last summer (see the blog from then, duh). But both the Turkish and Greek cuisines put me on new planes, where writing free verse and kissing chefs seemed not only sensible, but pitifully underappreciative. The bite of local fried cheese and wild boar sausage I had today could have made me settle in Greece and enter into a contract of long-term indentured servitude to Kostas on the condition that he pay for just one bite a day. The sip of homegrown red wine I took afterwards made me seriously consider naming a child Dionysos. I also did a lot of unbound groaning, sighing, and doing that thing where you kiss your forefinger and thumb with a flourish.

The red wine takes me to now, sitting and sipping in my underwear on Kostas' back porch. The Acropolis is still lit up and at 2 a.m., the clubs are just getting started. For my last view of "Western culture," (we fly to Cairo tomorrow and then I'm back in Palestine), I suppose I couldn't have picked better. The problem is Lil' Jon and the Parthenon don't mix at all and I still don't have a clear idea, even in its cradle, of where the West is. Our time in Greece has been wonderful for its museum content, no doubt, and its wealth of transhistorical visions ("This is what Pericles SAW!" I must have once exclaimed); the stories I became familiar with as a myth and history geek came to life and their power flooded me. What I did not see, and still doubt, is the thickness of the root that supposedly connects the pederastic Sacred Band of Thebes with the nebulae of ideas, places, and people known today as "the West."

The generosity and eccentricity of our host Kostas (he never drinks water, only Coke Zero) was never in doubt, thank goodness. Again we want to thank him for his hospitality. For the rest of you louts, keep up with us and I'll put up another blog from Cairo.

Eat well,

Brendan

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Albania, Through a Haze

Wednesday, August 31, 2011 6:59:10 PM

Hello,

The last blog left off beneath a clocktower in Kotor, Montenegro, where Casey and I were spending too much money. It turns out that in the denouement of the Yugoslav civil war, the countries on the coast picked up the pieces with considerably more ease than the inland nations--whereas a little over a decade ago Montenegrins were shelling Croatians with mortar fire, now they're both cashing in with the "charge people their firstborns to sit on a beach" model, while Bosnia remains dirt cheap and dirty. We played Montenegro's game for two lazy days, dallying once to hike into the mountainside fortifications surrounding Kotor:

But when we noodled off to another stretch of coastline reputed to feature one of Montenegro's most beautiful towns, Sveti Stefan, we found out that developers had considered it simply too nice to remain a functioning urban setting and had instead turned it into a hotel. That's some crap. You have to pay $65 to sit here:

And that's in the eighth poorest country in Europe. Thankfully I remember to temper my hot indignation for sitting fees with bouts of free rock-jumping, which was available a short walk away. I dove into the Adriatic after saying hi and can I swim to these fishermen:

But it was time to go. The word on Montenegro is that it believes it has at last joined the ranks of the overpriced ham sandwich purveyors in Europe, meaning I can't/won't visit again until I'm stably employed and wifed. We hailed a cab to Albania.

By way of comparison, Albania is the third poorest country in Europe, one spot below Bosnia and five below Montenegro. But as recent history goes, neither of those Slavic states can match Albania on its record of being downtrodden: being poor is one thing, being isolated is another. Albania, for forty years, was both, and the stain of dictator Enver Hoxha's policy of closed door communism is still not washing away. The country we found (for only three days, an admittedly inadequate sample) was ramshackle, potholed, trashed, and on account of decades of unregulated air pollution...

...very, very hazy.

The haze pervaded our three days in Albania and did not clear. It may be compared with our experience with the Albanian language, which shares almost nothing with any Slavic, Latin, Greek, or Semitic language--like Basque, it hangs off an obscure branch of the language tree, tempting linguaphiles. We struggled mightily with Albanian, in ways that made our preparation for Serbo-Croat seem intense. There are no cognates, no familiar constructions, and in Albania, not a lot of English speakers. Lost as we could be in a postcommunist cement purgatory, we got up to the following adventures:

We dicked around on leftover communist-era machinery in a castle (that shirt says "PAPER'D UP" with a $100 bill, the latest of my developing-world tee-shirt conquests)...

...and tagged an Omnivores sticker on a nine-foot statue of George W. Bush (two clarifications here: Albanians love Dubya for no clear reason other than their fierce pro-Americanism combined with his unprecedented presidential visit to Albania in 2007, and the Omnivores are a terrific Missoula hip-hop crew)...

...and wandered around in awe of Albania's 15th-century resistance hero Skanderbeg, who is much, much larger than life, appearing in the capitol's main square, the national currency, and all over his own ultra-patriotic museum. We also got our hands on a rusted and downed American jet on display in the slate-roofed mountain town of Gjirokaster, near where the pilot had to eject sometime in the '60s (Enver Hoxha spun it wildly, winning Cold War concessions for his tiny, bunker-ridden country):

It was a curious transit through Albania. But from our experience, the country was too hard to pierce, being simultaneously under reconstruction...

...and obscured by a hot, gray haze. It was only at the end of our Albanian sojourn that we figured out
the native method of clarification: a shot of raki in place of breakfast, which in Casey's words, flicked the uvula and then burned all the way down. I'm currently in Greece, where thankfully the various Bacchan delights have erased its taste, but I think Albania will linger on with me as a place to be found again, in another season.

Be well,

Brendan

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