Tag: The Caravan: A journal of politics and culture

Strained Silence

by adminin Israel, Writing

The Caravan: A journal of politics and culture, December 1, 2012

As is the case at most falafel stands across the country, the radio station of choice at my neighbourhood falafel stand is the Israeli Defense Forces’ Galgalatz. The station, I thought yesterday afternoon as I waited for lunch, is inescapable. It blasts from my neighbours’ stereo on Friday mornings; it drifts from the windows of passing cars. From clothing stores to coffee houses, it’s “Gal-Gal-Gal-Galgalatz”, as the jingle goes, “because of the music”.

The station plays a mix of Israeli and international pop (excluding that from the Arab world, of course). But the feeling of normality is broken by the top-of-the-hour-every-hour news bulletins that follow an alarming series of beeps, reminiscent of those that signal an emergency broadcast, lest listeners forget we are surrounded by “enemies” and that we are in a state of war. This radio station is run by the IDF, after all.

In recent days, there has been another reminder that Galgalatz is government-owned and soldier-manned—the station has refused to play a new song by famed Israeli musician Yizhar Ashdot. Titled ‘Inian Shel Hergel (A Matter of Habit)’, the song is highly critical of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and describes, in explicit detail, soldiers’ abuse of Palestinians. As military service is mandatory and nearly every Israeli has a relative, friend, neighbour or acquaintance in uniform, the army is something of a holy cow. No matter what one thinks or feels about the occupation, you don’t criticise ‘our’ soldiers.

While Galgalatz has taken flak for its decision, others support the station’s choice. “I don’t think [Ashdot] should even be called a singer,” a commentator on the radio remarked yesterday as I waited for my falafel.

Maybe it’s just a song; and maybe it’s unrealistic to expect a station manned by soldiers to play something critical of soldiers. But the controversy over Ashdot’s song is symptomatic of a larger crisis in Israeli media, which has suffered in recent years as the government has, in numerous instances, clamped down heavily on freedom of speech.

For instance, during Operation Cast Lead, the December 2008-January 2009 war between Israel and Hamas, both local and international media were banned from entering the Gaza Strip to cover the conflict. Even after the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the ban, the press was still not allowed to enter—suggesting that the army and the state hold little regard for the judiciary.

In July 2011—just days before Israeli protesters pitched tents in Tel Aviv to protest the ever-rising cost of living—the Knesset, the Israeli legislative body, passed the Boycott Law. The legislation penalises public calls to boycott individuals and institutions that represent the state of Israel, as well as Israeli goods, including those produced in the West Bank settlements—though many argue that the settlements themselves are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Those who break the Boycott Law are subject to stiff fines. The legislation drew widespread criticism from both the right and the left as an unconscionable curb on free speech—and, by extension, democracy—in Israel; this is particularly significant since Israel has long-promoted itself as an oasis of democracy in the Middle East.

The legislation has had a chilling effect on Israel’s media, which finds itself unable to print opinion editorials that support boycotts. According to some observers, the July 2012 conviction of journalist Uri Blau has further frightened reporters and editors into silence. A reporter for the prestigious, left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, Blau received classified military files from a former soldier Anat Kamm. After he used the leaked information for several articles that were critical of the Israeli military, Kamm was arrested and eventually sentenced to four-and-a-half years in jail; this, despite the fact that the articles had passed through and been approved by Israel’s military censor. Blau’s own conviction in the case resulted in four months’ community service. According to Haaretz, Jack Hen, one of Blau’s attorneys called the prosecution “precedent-setting… The public’s right to know and freedom of the press were seriously damaged by the decision to put a journalist on trial.”

Other factors, too, have long undermined the country’s freedom of press—such as the military censor, which has the power to pull any story it deems a threat to national security. Also of concern is the influence of oligarchs in leading publications, such as Israel HaYom (Israel Today), owned by Sheldon Adelson, an American billionaire and staunch supporter of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The paper, which openly promotes Netanyahu’s Likud party, is distributed for free throughout the country, reportedly at a loss for Adelson.

Ben-Dror Yemini, who is a columnist for Maariv, the country’s third most widely read paper, has calledIsrael HaYom a “danger to democracy”. But the editorial voice of the relatively independent Maarivitself has been susceptible to pressures. Speaking of 2011’s tent protests, which were anti-capitalist in nature, Maariv reporter Haggai Matar said that there was “less coverage or negative coverage in the privately owned papers. In the case of Maariv, support would risk the other parts of the company.”

Publications also worry about losing readers if they are too critical of the establishment. “The attempt to be accepted by the mainstream and not scare readers or viewers away and not to be branded as the ‘leftist media’ has an effect, especially on coverage of the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict,” said Matar.

This kind of self-censorship in the Hebrew media starts with reporters, who are sometimes fresh out of the army themselves, and reluctant to criticise the military. It occurs at the level of language, with outlets repeating the government’s words rather than using neutral terms; one example is the Israeli media’s tendency to call African refugees “infiltrators”—a loaded term favoured by right-wing politicians. Human rights organisations say that using the word “infiltrators” is akin to incitement.

Censorship also occurs at the editorial level. In 2009, a reporter for Yedioth Ahronoth—Israel’s second-most popular daily—wrote a lengthy exposé about Israeli military officers intentionally breaking the rules of engagement during Operation Cast Lead. Editors killed the story. Eventually it was published inThe Independent, a British newspaper, instead.

Haaretz is one of the few publications whose writers are consistently critical of government policies, the army, the occupation, as well as the oligarchs who have increasing economic control. In the words of Uri Tuval, an editor at Haaretz and a member of the newspaper’s union: “[Haaretz] is the only independent newspaper in the country without political or capitalist interests. We have absolute freedom.”

But Haaretz represents only a sliver of the Israeli market, pulling in between five to 10 percent of the country’s readers. And like many media outlets in Israel and around the world, Haaretz is struggling to convince subscribers to pay for news they can find for free on the Internet. In an attempt to tighten its fiscal belt, the newspaper has laid off dozens of workers; more pinks slips are soon to come. Both former and current employees report that the newspaper’s wages have been stagnant for years while rents and expenses throughout the country continue to spiral upward. Tuval and other Haaretzemployees have protested the paper’s downsizing—a recent, day-long strike brought the paper to a temporary halt.

Some observers say that market pressures—both to adopt a more conservative stance, as well as to compete with free online sources of information—could force Haaretz to close. “The fall [of Haaretz] is predicted because some people won’t subscribe to the printed paper,” Tuval said. But in his view, the paper will survive this challenge. “We’re not a big paper. We were never a big paper,” he said. Haaretz’s small size, in Tuval’s view, will allow it to survive through these turbulent times in the Israeli media, without compromising on its liberal editorial vision.

A measured spring in Jordan

by adminin Middle East, Writing

The Caravan, May 1, 2012

Friday noon prayers find the faithful spilling out of al-Husseini Mosque in downtown Amman. They crowd the street and sidewalks, bowing between vendors. Four men kneel alongside a folding table loaded down with silver faucets, showerheads and handles. Others prostrate themselves next to a display of cheap plastic shoes. Those who can’t afford prayer rugs kneel on crushed cardboard boxes.

Some men don’t even have cardboard: They bow and put their heads on the asphalt.

As prayers end, the people rise—and the protest begins. Members of the Jabhat al-’Amal al-Islami (Islamic Action Front—IAF—a powerful political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Jordan’s biggest opposition party, which Parliament is now seeking to ban) organise the demonstrators in neat lines which, slowly, make their way down the street. The crowd, which numbers about 1,000, comprises mostly men. A small group of women brings up the rear of the procession.

Mufida Shakra, a mother of five, is among them. Shakra studied law and sharī’ah (Islamic law) in Kuwait and “Alhamdulillah,” she says, “I work as a teacher [of] sharī’ah.”

Shakra’s thanking God that she has a job. While 92 percent of Jordanians are literate, and many attend university, the official unemployment rate hovers at 13 percent. Unofficial estimates put joblessness at a staggering 30 percent.

In much of the Arab world, men are expected to provide for their family, and do not marry until they are financially stable. But, because Shakra has an income, she was able to help her unemployed 26-year-old son start a family.

“I gave him the money to marry,” she says, touching her hand to her chest. “He’s a graphic designer [with a university degree]—and he doesn’t have work. No job. He’s sitting at home. It’s a very bad situation here, really.”

Even if he had found a job, it probably wouldn’t have been of much help. Wages in Jordan are low compared to the cost of living, and Jordanians are finding it increasingly difficult to buy basics, including food.

The country’s distribution of wealth is just one of the protesters’ troubles. Demonstrators are also calling for greater government transparency, elections and an end to the corruption that they blame for their economic woes.

While concern about corruption isn’t new, what is new is that Jordanians are not limiting their criticism to government officials. They’ve taken the unprecedented step of critiquing the monarchy itself, a move equated with sedition and punishable by jail time.

In a February 2011 open letter to the ostensibly reformist King Abdullah II, Jordanians accused Queen Rania Al Abdullah of “stealing money from the Treasury”. It also called on the king to return the properties that have been given to the queen’s family. “The land belongs to the Jordanian people,” the authors wrote.

The letter reveals anxieties not just over the distribution of wealth but over who gets to control Jordan itself. Its signatories were 36 East Bankers from prominent Bedouin tribes; it took aim at Queen Rania, who is of Palestinian descent.

Perhaps because Jordan is a young state, still forging its national identity, sharp lines divide who’s in and who’s out. Those who were here before or during Jordan’s establishment in 1946 as a sovereign state are considered native ‘East Bankers’ with far more entitlements that those who came later—the outsiders. And they include the Palestinian refugees who arrived in the wake of Israel’s creation in 1948 and during other crises in the Middle East. Today, Palestinians constitute a majority of Jordan’s population. East Bankers fear that reform will mean increased Palestinian involvement in Jordanian political life. They also worry that the Palestinians will turn Jordan into their national homeland.

The thrust of the letter to the king was that Palestinian Jordaninans, his wife included, don’t care about the state or about public interests, a common sentiment among East Bankers.

Shakra and her husband are children of Palestinian refugees who were driven from their homes when the state of Israel was created. Even though she speaks to me in English, Shakra calls her parents’ hometown, Jerusalem, by its Arabic name, Al-Quds.

Her fingers trace the edge of her white hijab, tucking in stray hairs as she says, “I am from Al-Quds. I don’t want any country but [Palestine].”

And she wants the Jews out of Palestine, she adds. In the meantime, however, “Jordan is important to me.”

Despite her many grievances, Shakra is quick to add that she feels the king has done a lot for the people—she just wants him to do more.

Her comment points to one of the crucial differences between the protests in Jordan—which began in January of 2011—and those that brought down the regimes in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. In Jordan, people simply want reform—they do not want to topple the king.

This Friday’s protest reflects that. Chants—led by three men standing on the back of a pickup truck draped with the Jordanian flag—do not include calls to overthrow the monarchy. They run the gamut from a demand for a Jordan free of corruption to a free Palestine to “the Jews are pigs” to solidarity with the Syrian people.

The scattershot of slogans points to another reason why Jordan’s revolution is yet to take off. The energy that could be harnessed into a broad-based, popular movement is largely being channelled in multiple directions towards specific demands. In December, a small group of women protested the Citizenship Law, which does not allow Jordanian women married to foreigners to pass their Jordanian citizenship on to their children. In February this year, 20,000 teachers rallied in Amman to protest stagnant wages. The next day, hundreds of Jordanians demonstrated against changes made to the Social Security Law.

While Islamists led the recent protests, their participation in demonstrations has been inconsistent. They were in. Then they were out, and the unions and leftist organisations were running the show. Now, the Muslim Brotherhood’s IAF is back in. But for how long? And to what end? No one seems to know.

There’s another reason that Jordan is yet to see its spring: people here fear a revolution. Throughout all strata of Jordanian society, there is a consensus that widespread unrest would only exacerbate Jordan’s divisions, throwing a match on the proverbial tinderbox.

It’s not just the Palestinians who are causing apprehension. The number of Syrian refugees is growing daily. And many also find the East Bankers’ tribal Bedouin affiliations worrisome. A revolution could turn into a messy power struggle like that being played out next door, in Iraq.

Faced with unrest, the Jordanian government has played on the country’s fault lines to keep the small protests from snowballing into a bigger movement. So for now, Jordanians are making only modest demands. But, according to Hamed El Eid, a 47-year-old engineer and a member of the IAF, the people are getting impatient.

“Several months ago, the government promised us that it will make a big improvement,” he says. Improvement, however, has been “very, very slow”.

El Eid wears glasses, a crisp blue dress shirt and a navy windbreaker. His gray beard is neat and close-clipped. As we walk down the street, El Eid explains that while the Muslim Brotherhood has bounced in and out of the protests, he, personally, has stayed with them from the start.

“And I will continue,” he adds. “I will not stop until [the government has] satisfied all our requirements.”

He ticks the demands off on his fingers: “A parliament that will be elected in a transparent way without any corruption; we want to take out the corrupted people and put them in prisons because they have stolen from the country.”

Because a majority of the IAF’s supporters are Jordanian Palestinians, I ask El Eid about his national origin. He seems slightly offended. He straightens his glasses and answers, “Regardless of whether [our] grandfathers are from Palestine or Jordan, we are all Jordanian citizens. [The family’s roots are] meaningless when we are working on this issue [of reform]. We want to improve Jordan.”

Just as Palestine is not just for Palestinians, El Eid explains, “All Arab people are requesting [the liberation of] Palestine,” and Jordan is not just for East Bankers.

When asked if Amman will become Cairo, El Eid, like others, says he doubts it. The economy is a little bit better in Jordan than in Egypt, the situation a little less desperate. “Here, our requirements are for improvement; [in Egypt] their requirements are for change.”

By the time we reach the end of the street, the 1,000-strong crowd has thinned. Most of the demonstrators have dropped out of the lines and have taken refuge from the midday sun under the awnings that hang over the sidewalks. “Look,” one protester says, pointing at a group of men who have stopped to buy some sweets, “they’re getting a snack.”

Losing faith

by adminin Writing

The Caravan, February 1, 2012

When I put my silver digital recorder on the table, Kidane Isaac, an Eritrean refugee, eyes it and shifts in his chair. He angles his broken straw fedora downwards, tipping the rim lower, as though to cover his face.

The hat, which has a black band and a hole in the top—bits of straw unravelling, sticking this way and that—doesn’t suit the red, white and blue windbreaker Isaac wears. It’s also a poor choice for the weather. It’s a wintry day in Israel and the stylish summer hat is ineffective against the cold.

Not to mention that the fedora seems out of place here, at a coffee kiosk in South Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station. The surrounding neighbourhoods, the poorest in the city, are home to a large population of foreign workers and African refugees as well as a handful of Palestinian collaborators. While some migrant labourers make enough to send remittances home to their families, most African refugees are barely hanging on to the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder. Some have fallen off completely—homeless, they live in the parks near the Central Bus Station.

When he opens up to me later—sliding his fedora back on his head, leaning forward, putting his elbows on the table—I’ll learn that Isaac, 25, isn’t homeless. But he is unemployed. Too proud to use the word, he says, “I’m taking a break.”

Jobs are scarce for Israel’s roughly 35,000 African refugees. The state does not provide work visas for them so they are forced to enter the black market, where they face exploitation. Because of increasing racism, refugees sometimes have a hard time finding work. Even if they can scrape together the money to rent an apartment, some Jewish landlords refuse to rent to foreigners.

Nor does Israel process their requests for asylum—a “policy of non-policy” that has been sharply criticised by human rights organisations, including Amnesty International. But, because Israel does not deport Sudanese and Eritreans to their home countries—as it does undocumented migrant workers—it tacitly admits that they are refugees.

Isaac left Eritrea five years ago, he explains, because his mandatory military service consisted of construction work, a situation he likens to “forced labour”.

“They don’t pay you, you don’t get to see your family,” Isaac, one of nine children, says. “I felt like I wasn’t a citizen in my own country, you know what I mean?”

According to the United States Department of State, military duty in Eritrea is “effectively open-ended” and human rights violations run the gamut from abuse and torture of prisoners and army defectors to “arbitrary arrest and detention” to “unlawful killings by security forces”. Civil rights are severely restricted, as is freedom of movement.

So in 2007, Isaac left. He fled to Sudan, where he lived in a refugee camp close to the Eritrean border. Because the security cooperation between the two countries made Isaac feel unsafe, he moved on to Libya where he spent more than three years “living in the hands of the smugglers”.

While he tried several times to cross the Mediterranean and reach Italy, Isaac recalls, he was passed from smuggler to smuggler. It’s the typical experience of African refugees in Libya, he explains, nonchalantly. “Or you might get put in jail and then you pay a lot [to get out]. There’s a lot of bribery and corruption in Libya.”

In 2010, he abandoned any hope of reaching Europe and, because he understood Israel to be the “only democracy in the Middle East”, he set his sights on Tel Aviv.

He adds, however, that when he left Eritrea, he had “no intention or inclination to go to Israel. At all, at all”.

He’d heard about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “all the problems and the Israeli Army. After what I’ve been through in Eritrea,” he says, throwing up his hands, “Khallas,” Arabic for enough.

“I wanted a place I could go and live peacefully,” he adds. “That’s why I preferred to spend all those years in Libya, trying to reach Europe.”

Isaac says he has been shocked by the conditions African refugees face here. “It doesn’t have any proper policy for us. [Refugees] are not allowed to do anything. I would say it would be better for [us] in prison.”

Jail, he explains, would be more honest than the current situation, which he calls a “trick”.

“Because then [the Israeli government] can say, ‘Oh, you’re free and you’re working and you’re living and, okay, we have African migrant workers here.’”

I think of the detention facility the state is building in the south of Israel to house African refugees caught entering the country. I consider the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were dispossessed when Israel landed upon them. I think of the Israeli blockade of Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Checkpoints. Home demolitions. Political prisoners.

I think of what the Jews have themselves suffered and the biblical command to care for the strangers among us.

“Do you believe in God?” I ask Isaac.

Isaac angles his hat, which I have come to see as a small act of rebellion to circumstance. “Yes, I do,” he answers.

“Even after all this?”

“Religion, I don’t believe in religion. It’s just a drop, some sort of organisation … But I believe in some superpower or whatever.”

Since the state of Israel was established in 1948, it has granted recognised status to fewer than 200 refugees.

Instead of reviewing the cases of African asylum seekers, the Israeli government calls them a faceless mass, “infiltrators”. It’s a word preferred by politicians, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also claims that Africans are a “threat” to the “character of the country”, our “Jewish and democratic” state.

On 9 January, just a week after I interviewed Isaac, the Israeli Knesset passed a parliamentary bill that modifies the 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law. Initially created to keep Palestinians from returning to their homes in Israel after the 1948 war, the updated legislation will subject African refugees and their children to three years in jail, without trial. Those from “enemy countries”, including the Darfur region of Sudan, could be imprisoned indefinitely.

But, even before this legislative change, Africans caught entering Israel via its porous southern border with Egypt already faced jail time. Sunday Dieng, a 26-year-old refugee from what is now South Sudan, was held in an Israeli prison for 14 months in 2006 and 2007.

When I ask about the conditions and whether or not he received adequate food, Dieng looks down at the coffee I’ve bought him and gives a polite smile. The gesture matches his slightly formal dress. He wears a starched shirt with a stiff collar. His brown sweater is zipped up. A tiny Mercedes pendant hangs from the tab.

“Yeah, food was no problem,” he says, still looking at his cup. “But, you know, to live in jail for one year and two months for no reason, even though you have food and everything—it’s terrible. It’s very difficult.”

He looks up at me and flashes his teeth to make me, or himself, feel better, perhaps.

“It causes damage to the [mind], because you know you didn’t do anything wrong, you didn’t do any crime.” Dieng, who was not charged with a crime, was held without trial.

He forces another smile before he goes back to the beginning, to 1993.

Dieng was 12 when his village was bombed and soldiers from northern Sudan killed his parents, before his eyes. He and his eldest brother fled, eventually making their way to Ethiopia. But Dieng had his heart set on studying. The refugee camps lacked “proper facilities”, he says, so he went on to Egypt alone.

Because he didn’t feel safe there, he eventually continued on to Israel, making his way through the Sinai on foot until he reached the border.

Speaking of Israel’s unwillingness to process requests for asylum and the refugees’ inability to support themselves financially, Dieng remarks, “How can you let someone into your house if you don’t want to give him food, if you don’t want to give him a place to sleep? This is like killing him in a political way.”

With contributions from Yohannes Lemma Bayu, founder and director of the African Refugee Development Center. 

Photo: Mya Guarnieri. Refugees march in Tel Aviv in December of 2010. The sign reads: “We asked for shelter, we received jail.”

Labour Pains

by adminin Lead Story, Writing

The Caravan: A journal of politics and culture, November 1, 2011

Sitting outside of the small pharmacy she and her husband own in Palawan—the Philippines’ western-most province, a far-flung island known as the last frontier—Diana recounts how she let her application for American citizenship lapse.

“We never responded to the [US] embassy,” she says. “So then they sent us a letter: ‘It seems you are not interested in pursuing your application, so we are canceling [it].’”

Diana, 31, shrugs and takes another bite of fried banana, a popular Filipino street food. A motorized tricycle coughs by, its driver looking for a customer. A few stray dogs, whip-skinny, drift past. I watch them make their way down the road, which is dotted with palm trees, nipa huts, and the occasional cement building. It’s typhoon season and heavy grey clouds arrange themselves on the horizon.

Continue reading “Labour Pains”