Author: admin

Imagining Israel’s future

by adminin Israel, Writing

6336532Souciant, May 18, 2011

In May of 2011, the Palestinians made a brave attempt to start the Third Intifada.

On the northern borders, the grandsons and granddaughters of those who had been dispossessed during the nakba attempted to exercise their United Nations-acknowledged right of return. These were the grandsons of those who had been driven from their homes, which were later declared “abandoned” by a law created by the new “Jewish and democratic” state. The grandsons of those who were locked out of the land in which they were born; the grandsons of those were then declared “infiltrators” when they tried to return.

Israeli soldiers, ignoring their own protocol, did not shoot to disable. They shot to kill. Some of these grandsons died on the Lebanese border. Others were slain near the line that separates Syria from the Israeli Occupied Golan Heights, which Israeli annexed unilaterally in 1981, a move that was deemed illegal by the United Nations.

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“Israel’s 9/11 coming in September”

by adminin Politics, Writing

dsc05528Maan News Agency, May 15, 2011

As though Israeli leaders aren’t doing enough to scare their citizens about Palestinian reunification and statehood, another “warning” has recently popped up on the streets of Tel Aviv. The walls, rather.

It’s right-wing graffiti — a blue Star of David with the date “9/0/11” below. The meaning is clear. Israel’s 9/11, Israel’s catastrophe, is coming in September.

When I saw it, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was part of a governmental campaign. After all, this is the message Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been peddling to anyone who will listen.

According to Netanyahu, Palestinian reunification– which is a critical step toward a viable Palestinian state– is a “mortal blow to peace.” But the so-called peace process has been dead for some time. And the Palestine Papers were a post-mortem that confirmed what settlement building had suggested — Israel is more interested in land than it is peace.

Netanyahu remarks that Hamas “has not given up the ghost of getting rid of us.” But, in reality, Hamas has said that it would accept a Palestinian state within 1967 borders.

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Palestinian identity under attack in Israel

by adminin Writing

dsc01008Maan News Agency, April 29, 2011

Earlier in April, the Israeli Ministry of Education decided to add a question about the Holocaust to the matriculation exam of Arab students.

Because the state has banned any study of the Nakba– going so far as to strike the word from the textbooks– the move has drawn sharp criticism in Israel’s Palestinian community.

The Abraham Fund — a joint Jewish-Arab organization that advocates for equality within in Israel — remarked that, “It is important that Arab students learn about the Holocaust and understand the history and pain of the Jewish people… At the same time, it is important that Jewish students learn about the history of the Palestinian minority in Israel, especially those aspects tied to the state of Israel and her existence.”

Sawsan Zaher is a Palestinian who was born and raised in Israel. An attorney at Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, Zaher recalls that she did not learn about the Nakba until she studied it on her own, in her early twenties.

“I finished high school without being able to study Palestinian history–about what was here before 1948, about the nakba.”

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Bin Laden’s death should not be celebrated

by adminin Writing

flag-half-staffMondoweiss, May 2, 2011
The Huffington Post, May 3, 2011

Osama Bin Laden is dead. And Americans are celebrating.

Last night, the crowds cheered and sang before the White House and in Manhattan. And, today, the jingoistic, congratulatory op-eds hit the papers.

It’s been particularly troubling to me, an American-Israeli, to watch these events unfold from Tel Aviv. I’ve heard too many Israelis justify the occupation of Palestinian territory with statements like, “They’re animals, they celebrate when we’re killed.” I’ve heard the same rhetoric come from American mouths, “The Muslim world cheered after the 9/11 attacks.”

Americans–many of whom consider their so-called War on Terror morally righteous–must ask themselves if the images of their celebrations really look so different than those that they condemn.

We must remember that a tremendous majority of the Arab and Muslim world did not revel in the horror of 9/11. The attacks were largely denounced–from Ramallah to Pakistan and almost everywhere in between.

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Bride of the Sea

by adminin Israel, Writing

dsc03604Souciant, April 6, 2011

Sometimes I’m not sure what to call her. Is it Yafo? Or Jaffa? Then there is the old Arabic nickname, Urs al-Bahr, Bride of the Sea. Each word has its history.

And each has its fate.

If things had gone according to plan—the UN’s 1947 Partition Plan that is—Jaffa would have been part of a Palestinian state. But there was a war here, and there was a nakba, and the Bride of the Sea ended up inside of Israel, alone. In 1950, the municipality of Tel Aviv annexed her and (as husbands sometimes do) gave Jaffa a new name, a Hebraicized one: Yafo.

I took these photos while I was working on a story about gentrification in Yafo/Jaffa. It was a rainy day and I was, characteristically, unprepared for the weather. My lens kept getting wet. While I found this mildly irritating at the time, when I got home I was pleased with the aesthetic result—I felt like I was looking at this once hopeful Bride of the Sea through thick eyelashes, heavy with tears.

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A new nakba?

by adminin Israel, Writing

dsc03419Counterpunch, April 22, 2011

Several weeks ago, Israeli authorities arrested M, a pregnant woman, along with her three-year-old, Israeli-born son. The young family—sans the father, who had been deported several months before—was briefly detained then expelled from the country.

But don’t break out those Palestinian flags just yet. This was a family of migrant workers.

The father is Thai; the mother, Filipina. They both arrived in Israel, legally, on state-issued work visas. Here, they met and fell in love. And that’s how they became “illegal.”

The father lost his visa because of an Israeli policy that forbids romantic relationships between migrant workers (read: non-Jews). The mother lost her legal status due to the governmental policy that forces women to choose between their visa and their baby. M made the choice most women would—after she gave birth, she refused to send her infant to live with extended family in a faraway land. So she became “illegal”, along with her child.

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Israeli town rallies against African refugees

by adminin Writing

dsc03914Al Jazeera English, April 13, 2011

James Anei was a 16-year-old boy when he witnessed a massacre, carried out by militias loyal to the government in Khartoum. Terrified, he fled his village in South Sudan.

“You see someone dying in front of you and you know this guy and you know his parents and so you run… because you fear that you will be killed, too,” Anei says.

“I find myself in another place,” he adds, explaining that he was so frightened that he didn’t know he’d been running until he stopped.

Once he realized he’d escaped, Anei headed north. That year, 1999, he arrived in Khartoum. There, he managed to scrape together a living and go to school. Not knowing whether or not his parents survived the massacre, Anei remembers crying sometimes when he saw his classmates with their mothers and fathers.

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Israel’s uneven justice

by adminin Writing

dsc09574Maan News Agency, April 13, 2011

Last week, Israeli immigration police arrested and deported a three-year-old boy, born and raised in Israel.

The toddler was detained and expelled to the Philippines along with his mother, M, who is pregnant. The children’s father is a migrant worker from Thailand who was deported several months ago. Distance and poverty makes it unlikely that the family, torn apart by the state of Israel, will be reunited.

This is just one heartrending story that has surfaced as Israeli government steps up its current efforts to ensure a “Jewish and democratic” state—by deporting non-Jewish, Israeli-born children of migrant workers, along with their parents.

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Boycotting Israel… from within

by adminin Writing

dsc03633Al Jazeera English, March 26, 2011

It was Egypt that got me thinking about the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement in a serious way. I was already conducting a quiet targeted boycott of settlement goods—silently reading labels at the grocery store to make sure I wasn’t buying anything that came from over the Green Line. I’d been doing this for a long time.

But, at some point, I realized that my private targeted boycott was a bit naïve. And I understood that it wasn’t enough. It’s not just the settlements and the occupation, two sides of the same coin, which pose a serious obstacle to peace and infringe on the Palestinians’ human rights. It’s everything that supports them—the government and its institutions. It’s the bubble that many Israelis live in, the illusion of normality. It’s the Israeli feeling that the status quo is sustainable.

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A state of narcissism

by adminin Israel, Writing

tel-aviv-banksySouciant, March 17, 2011

It was cold outside and pouring rain. The cafe was packed, upstairs and down. “It’s really a commune here, huh?” the woman next to me said as I sat down. I smiled, nodded, and asked if it would annoy her if I plugged my laptop in. The wire would run right behind her, grazing her back. “No problem,” she said.

I listened in to her conversation with her friend, a blonde woman digging into a big bowl of organic fruit, yogurt, and granola. (It was one of those cool, lefty, organic coffee places). They were talking about an opening at an art gallery I have been to on many occasions; they discussed some grant in New York that one of the women was thinking about applying to. I could tell these women were cultured, educated, well-traveled. They were the type of girls I would sit in a café with. And it’s likely that we have mutual friends already.

On my other side was a large group of Russian tourists who looked to be in their late ens and early twenties.

When the blonde woman next to me opened the window behind her, eyebrows went up all around us. Russian, Israeli—it didn’t matter—we reached a quiet consensus that the window should stay closed.

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