Work Abroad

[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

[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

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

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

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