Saturday, October 29, 2005

"Becoming Uncomfortable"


Sur Bahur*


Swollen bags, punctured bed foam,
mangled wires, blank bottles
The van gasps like a horse with broken pipes
Heaving us over hills
Along creeks of trash
There’s no-where left to put it these days
A guy with gelled hair sips a coke through a straw
The stoop of MacChicken is crowded
A tiny boy drops his notebook from a pile
heading for stairs
I knock and point through tinted glass
At the laminated cartoon faces
at blocky smiles
accidentally abandoned
He stares and goes.


* Sur Bahur is an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem

__________________________________
Hadera

The boy wanted to be confetti
and firework buried in sky
Spraying scalding oil, violet streaks of cabbage
Tomato pulp and cellophane seeds
in a cocktail of invisible enzymes

Now the men scramble for pieces of flesh
as if it were Bar Mitzvah candy

Headlines remember
those bound
by the covenants of their fathers
________________________________________________________________
"What the hell is going on in Jerusalem?"

Friday morning I joined the organization Ir-Amim (City of Nations) on a study tour of Jerusalem's tense and tangled borders. We drove along the municipal boundary of the city, observing the places where the "Jerusalem Envelope" portion of the Separation Barrier intersects with, swells beyond or contracts inside this political line. Ir-Amim was founded two years ago by some of the leading Israeli players in civil rights and legal advocacy. The organization operates with the understanding of the symbolic and political weight of Jerusalem in any future Israeli-Palestinian settlement. Ir-Amim seeks to expose and confront the realities on the ground in the shared city. They advocate for the cessation of settlement expansion in the city and work with political associations in Arab East Jerusalem to build infrastructure. They analyze each section of the barrier based on the criterion of security, human rights and long-term political implications.

As the bus first departed for the parts of the city Israelis rarely venture into, Amos told us that the tour would not provide answers and would most likely leave us more confused. The Jerusalem of ancient myth was the navel of the world, the source of creation, of law and order, of gurgling chaos. The city is at once fractured, with half of it hidden from view of most Jews, and economically, culturally and topographically impossible to sort. Ir-Amim works to problematize the Jewish mantra of an “Undivided Jerusalem.” They use the analogy of a divorce to describe their political work in pursuit of parity and pragmatics in a two state solution.

When the state of Israel gained control of Jerusalem in 1967, it also annexed 70,000 Palestinian people. Since that point, the government has strived to maximize its stake in land and increase the Jewish population. Today, Arabs comprise one third of the city’s population. In an earlier blog entry, I wrote a bit about the legal status Arabs of East Jerusalem. To reiterate, these non-Jewish Jerusalemites are known as permanent residents. They pay taxes to the Israeli government and are entitled to social services. They can vote in local elections, but not in national elections. Neither citizens of the P.A. or Israel, they are virtually nobody’s constituents. As I witnessed on the tour, there is a huge disparity in financial resources allotted to the Jewish and non-Jewish neighborhoods of the Israeli capital. Shredded tires, cardboard boxes and plastic bags line the roads of East Jerusalem, which are in dire need of paving.

When we boarded the mini bus for our tour, Amos Gil, the executive director of Ir-Amim handed each participant a map - a blur of green and blue and red lines, light-blue and yellow blotches depicting the Green Line (the pre-1967 borders), the Municipal Boundary, the Route of the Barrier, Israeli and Palestinian built-up areas as well as planned settlements.

We climbed out of the van at different vantage points where we looked at the impact of the security fence on people’s access to their communities, to employment healthcare and education. We also discussed the efficacy of the wall in preventing terror attacks and international reactions to different sections of the route.

A hole was left in the fence near Bethlehem so that Jews might have access to Rachel’s Tomb. In 2004, a man crossed through this gap to carry out the bombing of the # 19 bus in Jerusalem. Also vital to note is that no terror attacks have been carried out by residents of Israel/East Jerusalem.

Some interesting legal muddles have surfaced in village of Beit Sahur, which is just south of Jerusalem and adjacent to Bethlehem. The route of the fence annexed the tip of this village into the city of Jerusalem. Under this context, the Israeli government arrested people who had lived in this area all their lives for being in Jerusalem “illegally,” without Israeli resident status. Human Rights organizations are battling the Israeli government in court over a clause known as the Absentee Property Law. According to this doctrine, if land-owners are no where to be found, the government reserves the right to confiscate their land. Near Beit Sahur, the fence has blocked people from accessing their farms and olive groves.

In the North of Jerusalem, within the municipal boundary, there is a village called Kafr Aq’b. Its residents have always been Jerusalemites. The separation fence cuts the village off from the city, leaving the land linked, instead, to the area of Ramallah though the residents identify Jerusalem as their center of life. Everyday, 6,000 students must cross through checkpoints within Jerusalem to get to school. When the separation barrier is completed along its proposed route, like the residents of Kafr Aq’b, 55,000 of the 230,000 Arab Jerusalemites will be on the wrong side of the fence.

In some places the barrier is built of gray, concrete panels that jut out in a spine along the sandy hills. In other places, the barrier is a shorter span of barbed wire and chain links, fifty to seventy meters wide, with a road in the middle for military use. We saw the most famous chunk of the barrier, which runs along the hem of Abu Dis. Its image was slapped on front pages around the world when Israel began construction of the wall in 2004, creating an international public relations disaster. I remember seeing it in South Africa under the headline, “Apartheid Wall.” The monotone cement is covered in spray paint:

“From Warsaw Ghetto to Abu Dis Ghetto.”
“No for Another Wailing Wall.”
“Love Everybody. Hate Apartheid.”
“Seattle is with Palestine.”

It is the last Friday of Ramadan. Police jeeps and Israeli soldiers patrol a slot in the barrier as lines of people wait to get through to Jerusalem. Only the ones with blue identity cards can pass.

I like Ir-Amim’s rational approach, its focus on pragmatics, on people’s day-to-day realities amidst a conflict held hostage by zealotry. At this juncture, I think it is crucial for the Israeli government to provide infrastructure and adequate civil services to its East Jerusalem residents. Because of their lack of political clout, international pressure is a must. One of my goals in this blogging endeavor is to try and present the complexities of the situation in this country, frequently glossed over by the media and omitted from Hebrew School curricula. Please write me with comments and questions. I have volumes of my own. Brown President Ruth Simmons said that the only way we learn is by becoming uncomfortable. I’m learning like crazy.

Thursday, October 27, 2005

MONTH IN REVIEW

SINLESS BIRTHDAY

When I told people my birthday fell on Yom Kippur this year, they responded with speechlessness and sympathy. No frosted cupcakes or frothy beers for you this year. Just judgement, fasting and flagellating. It turned out to be one of my favorite days in Israel. On a day where we are obsess over transformation, hopeful and fearful, the entire city transforms. Normally, the roads near my apartment are busy with cars and trucks and busses spitting fumes. Most people wait for the electronic man to blink green before even thinking about crossing the street as the drivers are a bit agressive in this country. Jaywalking here could be a sport in the X-Games. Elisheva, my supervisor from Shatil gave the social justice fellows photocopies from a book about cultural exchanges between Americans and Israelis. One page contained a diagram of an Israeli parking lot and an American one. In the rendering of the Israeli lot, cars were parked in all different directions, on top of sidewalks and blocking each other in. What a country. Anyway, on Yom Kippur, no one drives. Instead, the streets are full of kids full of glee pedaling bicycles and circling on scooters. My favorite vehicle I spotted was a tricycle on a stick. Parents pushed kids along the paved surfaces of the busy Emek Refaim and General Pierre Koenig Streets. Couples in white flowy clothing walked with dogs. A group of teenage girls sat gossiping in the middle of the street. The city stopped to breathe. It was a refreshing day. After the sun slipped down and the gates swung shut, I celebrated being 22 with a delicious meal at the Jakar household and a gathering at a bar/movie theatre with new and old friends.

The country has been swept off its feet the past month, spinning from one chag (holiday) to the next. Wooden, leafy booths have descended on every kosher restaurant in the city, on balconies and in backyards. Many pilgrims have flocked to the city for the festival of Sukkoth. Some have even tried to lay the cornerstone for the Third Temple. A few nights ago, I dined with fellow Ramahnicks in the sukkah of the Seyah Family, who spent their first summer in Lake Como, PA this year with their three ridiculously adorable sons. Sheryl Seyah happens to be in the catering business. We reminisced about Ramah while nibbling on baked brie, roasted artichoke and goat cheese dip and plum torte. I am thankful for the Ramah connection - I have bumped into shlichim (Israelis who worked at camp) in coffee shops in my neighborhood, at bus stops in Ashkelon. I spent Rosh Hashannah with the Jakar and Brown families, who I grew up with at camp and the holidays felt like home.

GRAIL FOR SALE

I spent the beginning of sukkoth wandering in the desert, land reputed to be the grazing and stomping ground of the Israelites en route to the Promised Land. I took a four day trip to Jordan's Hashemite Kingdom with Hannah, her friend Ben from Morocco (from Philly) who is getting his Masters in Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University and Moshe, a frisbee playing geology buff studying at Ben Gurion University. Hannah is an Arabic wiz, which was not only vital in terms of getting around, but made the trip much more fun as she received multiple marriage proposals by men floored by her linguistic talents.

We crossed the border at the lip of the Red Sea, walking from Eilat to Aqabba. We hopped in the car with a "Turist Driver" we met a few steps into Jordan, who set us up with his friend Zeidan, who runs a Bedouin Meditation Camp in the patch of desert known as Wadi Rum. Zeidan drove off the road into a small village to fetch Mahmoud, who would be our guide for our day and a half of trekking in the desert. Zeidan and Mahmoud squeezed into the driver's seat together, speeding down strrips of road to Wadi Rum. I am mildly obsessed with the desert. Ever since I spent Passover in Namibia in 2004, I can't get enough of the red sand, dimpled dunes and towering ridges.

We arrived at the Bedouin Village inside the gate to the Wadi Rum nature reserve. Zedian offered us "shia," tea in his pink concrete home. We sat on cushions on the floor with floral patterns. On the wall, a picture was proudly displayed of Zeidan shaking hands with the King, the Crown Prince Abdullah. Many of the residents of the village had four-wheel drive vehicles parked in front of their homes, as guiding tourists through the desert is the main source of income for the village. We climbed into the back of a truck with a canvas roof and gripped the metal sides tightly as Mahmoud took off, spraying sand. There were footprints and hoof marks and jeep tracks in the grainy expanse. We stopped to see some Nabataean writings, to hop over boulders and to scale a shiny pumpkin colored dune. We arrived at the Meditation Camp for sunset. Mahmoud prepared more shia for us. He dug a pit of sand in which to roast shiny onions and potatoes, chicken (which I abstained from) and a stew of scarlet tomatoes, eggplant and cauliflower. The next morning we hiked back to the village. Upon arriving inside the border, the call to prayer blared from a speaker at the mosque. Each phrase stretched out in all directions, ricocheting off the massive faces of rock sourrounding the village.

We made our way to Wadi Musa (The Valley of Moses). As the story goes, somewhere around here, Moses struck the rock to get water for the parched Israelites and was consequently denied entry to the Promised Land. Wadi Musa is also the hub for tourist accomodations for people on their way to the lost city of Petra. We checked into a colorful hostel called the Valentine Inn, with tinsel decorations and posters imploring, "Smile!" The hotel boasted a 3JD (Jordanian Dinar) dinner buffet with over 20 salads and a "movie by consensus" every evening, which incidentally, always turns out to be Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. At the entrance to Petra itself, you can visit the Indiana Jones Snack Shop, its marquis decorated with sketches of Harrison Ford and Sean Connery. The Treasury at Petra is probably most famous for its role as the Temple in the film. Tourists like us flooded the dusty roads of Petra the next morning to gawk at the architectural wonders, columns carved from stone with rust, golden and violet swirls. Apparently Brown professor, Martha Joukowsky, was in charge of excavations at Petra. One of the many vendors selling drinks and jewelry inside Petra told us that there was a Brown University flag at the monastery. We ascended a trail that coiled around cliffs in search of this Holy Grail. We found only a lone donkey, grazing in front of the stone structure.

Our final destination on our Jordan jaunt was Amman, "a modern Arab city." We arrived in the afternoon. Moshe's father's colleague's brother Mohammed met up with us at our hostel in Amman the evening we arrived to give us a special tour of the city. He pointed out the Roman Ampitheatre, the monstrous U.S. Embassy, the largest in the Middle East and then led us on a pilgrimage to the Mecca Mall. During Ramadan, the city comes to life after sundown. The mall was packed with people. Children concentrated on cups of gelato. Men in Kafiyas wandered into the Timberland store. I saw a poster for the Chappelle Show DVD. A blend of tradition and change. There were women in hijabs (head scarves) and women with hair loose on their backs. In other parts of the city, it is rare to see women in cafes or restaurants at all. I was most struck by the Starbucks booth in the middle of the mall, with special marketing for the Ramadan season. "Share this special time. Gather. Enjoy," was scripted over an image of a the new Creme Brule Latte, its whipped cream dome huddling between silhouttes of mosques. Capitalism is indeed the universal language.

RAIN DANCING

The month of holidays drew to a close Tuesday evening, with the holidays of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, squeezed into one day in Israel and spread over two days in the Diasporic world. We prayed for rain and danced with Torahs as we finished the cycle and rolled the scroll back to the beginning. I really love the prayer for rain. It courses through the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and Aaron mentioning the role of water in their lives and asking for water in ours "for a blessing, not a curse," and "for life and not death." (I'll be on the lookout a version that includes the matriarchs). This prayer spoke loudly to me after months of twirling tentacles of hurricanes tearing up homes in New Orleans, Mississippi, Texas, Mexico and Florida. Also, while guarantees of sunny days don't make me sad, I know the desert is thirsty. For the last round of holidays, I was content to celebrate our dynamic entanglements with nature and text in Jerusalem.

JOB DESCRIPTIONS

Prior to my tiyul (trip) in Jordan, I was a non-profit tourist for 6 weeks in Israel. There are so many issues in this nation(s)-state the size of Jersey, I'm dizzy often. "Seven Year Old Blames Sharon." Sometimes I think I am reading the Onion. A seven year old girl who was evacuated from Gaza has stopped eating as a form of protest against the Prime Minister. This makes national headlines?

At first I thought I wanted to work directly on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - but the types of projects I have the opportunity to do with other organizations seem more interesting and challenging. I will be working with two different organizations. One is called "Kol HaIsha," which literally translates as "The Woman's Voice." The name plays on the Rabbinic prohibition of women's voices in spaces where men are praying. It's a multicultural feminist organization in downtown Jerusalem that provides crisis counseling, small business training for women from all ethnic/religious/socio-economic backgrounds and sexual orientations. The organization does public advocacy work for women's rights, economic justice and ending violence against women. It is home to the Antea gallery, a women's artspace, which explores controversial issues and recognizes the voices of new artists. I think I will be doing public relations work, grant-writing and programming for the gallery. But I'll keep you posted.

The second organization is called Yedid, which means friend. Yedid runs 18 citizen's rights centers around the country, in communities where many people are economically and socially marginalized. Yedid's goal is to help people help themselves, to become engaged in social issues and to break the cycle of poverty. People can come into Yedid for information and referrals regarding rights in terms of housing, employment, healthcare etc. The centers only have one permanent staff member each, the director. Otherwise, they are staffed entirely by volunteers. I'll be interning at the center in Ashkelon two days a week. Ashkelon is south of Jerusalem, on the coast and the city population is 40% immigrants, mostly from the Former Soviet Union and Ethiopia. I will be coordinating an afterschool program in Ashkelon. I will also be working on a community organizing initiative there with a guy from L.A. who has extensive background in labor organizing. I look forward to learning from him and from listening to the stories of people from all different backgrounds who are living Ashkelon.

WISCONSIN CHEESE

The Wisconsin Plan is a hot item on the agendas of many non-profit organizations in Israel concerned with economic justice. Israel recently imported America's Welfare to Work Program, along with private companies to implement it in 4 cities including Ashkelon, Jerusalem, Nazareth and Hadera (the site of yesterday's suicide bombing). These are among cities with the highest rates of poverty in a country where one third of children live below the poverty line. The program here is called Me Ha-Lev, which translates as "From the Heart." The way it works is that participants must report to the Wisconsin Center in their city for 30-40 hours a week in order to receive welfare benefits for their families. At the center, people wait to receive referrals and training and if they are unable to find employment, they are placed in mandatory community service positions. The Workers Advice Center in Israel identifies some of the major flaws of the Wisconsin Plan in Israel on its website. Along with the privatization of social services comes business incentives for the companies in charge often at the expense of the workers. The companies who run the Wisconsin centers increase their profits by cutting welfare costs. One of the major ways to scale back government welfare expenses is to deny benefits to people who fail to meet the program's requirements. Two thirds of Wisconsin plan participants are over the age of forty, making it more difficult for them to find work. Others are disabled or sick, single parents or Arab women, for some of whom working outside of the home is contrary to cultural values. In addition, the plan includes no vehicles for the creation of employment opportunities in non-professional sectors in Israel. It also has the potential of generating further unemployment by providing free, volunteer labor to charity organizations. I expect to learn more about the plan, especially the impact it is making on individuals and communities in Ashkelon. I just wanted to fill you in on a major economic justice issue in the country.

Monday, October 03, 2005

Ikea is the New Jerusalem



“Pikak” is the word for traffic jam in Hebrew. As you approach the exit for Netanya, intervals between cars and horn blasts shrink. The pikak lasts until you reach the blue corrugated walls of the Ikea warehouse that calls to travelers, to home-owners and permanent residents. Once inside, you can pace and pause and examine tableaus of possibilities for living rooms and kitchens, bathrooms and children’s bedrooms. The colorful products, shelving units, area rugs and stainless steel kitchen tools are imported mostly from Europe. Bins of plastic extension cords in electric orange and ice trays with star shaped molds. Votive candles, plasma television screens, swiveling desk chairs, framed mirrors. Ikea- The store for all things homey in the homeland.

I have a map of Jerusalem. It’s a 26 page atlas that outlines the neighborhoods, the streets, the museums and the post offices. On some pages, the details fade as your eyes move toward the right side. The area of the city known as East Jerusalem isn’t included in this record of my home city for the year.

Residents in mostly Arab East Jerusalem have the choice whether or not to pursue Israeli citizenship. If they are not citizens, they are permanent residents, though they may have been here before Israel was a state. According to the law, the Israeli government claims the right to demolish homes erected without permits. However, it has become increasingly difficult for residents of East Jerusalem to acquire building permits. Home demolitions have become more and more common in the past few years.

While the separation barrier has thwarted some terror attacks, especially in the area of Jerusalem, it has severed communities and cut people off from needed economic and cultural resources. Meanwhile, policies on the table propose a swelling of the borders of Jewish Jerusalem with a new settlement area known as E1 to boast thousands of homes and even hotels. Annexing this area between Jerusalem and Maalei Adumim (a West Bank settlement) can only further hinder the chance for relationship repair between Israelis and Palestinians.

I think what is most disturbing to me is that I would never know about any of this unless I wanted to hear about it. Who is at home in this city? What does it mean to be at home? What does it have to do with Ikea? In South Africa, I remember a piece of art called “Home Sweet Home,” which was made up of pillows embroidered, “Keep out,” and a welcome mat woven from barbed wire. Basically, it tore open the contradiction of a home that must be secured like a fortress. A militarized compound will never feel like home. Welcome to the Homeland.

But as Gili, the director of one of the organizations I visited remarked, “I can’t afford not to be an optimist.” So I am still running around meeting with different organizations trying to figure out what social justice means and how I want to be a part of it. For a long time, I have connected it to being heard. In South Africa, I studied language policy because I wanted to know what language had to do with access to resources and how marginalized languages could be considered resources. I wanted to know how people could make their voices heard.

Over Rosh Hashanah, we read the story of the akeda, Tomorrow, we will read about Avraham binding his son Isaac to a sacrificial altar. Knife in his hand, we read, a messenger of G-d instructs him not to follow through with the slaughter. He sacrifices a ram instead and learns he will be blessed. At this point, Avraham names the site where all of this transpired. We read: “Avraham called the name of that place: YHWH Sees. As the saying is today: On YHWH’s mountain (it) is seen.” (Genesis 22:14)

In my last blog entry, I wrote about people trembling when they saw Jerusalem, her towers and citadels rising in the distance. Perhaps, they had the experience of being seen. Among Jerusalem’s mythic identities, it has been called the site of Gan Eden. From an underbelly of chaos, the world’s structures swirled into being. Here, Adam and Eve first imagined themselves “seen.” Perhaps, holiness has to do with being seen.

Here in the cosmic navel of the world, people are struggling to be seen and to be heard, too often silencing and erasing the voices and visions of others. In a book about the genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath, Phillip Gourevitch writes, “Power largely consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality.” Narratives are everything here. By adopting them, people possess the power to invalidate others.

One of the places where I hope to intern is called the Museum on the Seam. Its façade is scarred with bullet holes from the two decades it served as a military outpost (1948-1967). The museum touches West Jerusalem and East Jerusalem, the ultra-orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim and more secular neighborhoods, the Old City and the newer parts. The museum uses “the language of art” to promote dialogue and understanding across borders. A block away from the museum, I saw Hebrew letters spray-painted on a wall in blue calling for “Death to the Arabs!” Both times I visited the museum, groups of soldiers sat discussing the Israeli Declaration of Independence, the promise of equality and the reality on the ground. No weapons are allowed in the museum. When I climbed the winding staircase up to the roof I saw that the soldiers had abandoned their guns in a pile, high up in this in-between place.

Last night, the grocery store near my neighborhood was packed. Women in scarves and wigs and hijabs filled carts with liters of pepsi and tubs of humus and loaves of honey cake, stocking up for Rosh Hashanah and Ramadan. A baby gummed at a roll, perched in a shopping cart. A bottle of wine slid off a shelf and shattered. A worker quickly mopped it up, then loaded more liter juice bottles on to the rapidly emptying shelves. For Jews and Arabs, now is the time for family and faith and new beginnings.

For this New Year, I wish for all of us the courage to break down the boundaries in our lives to seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard.