Dark Thoughts

June 5th, 2008

Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, staying in the home of a Palestinian family

It's one-something in the morning and some combination of mosquitos, the small glass of turkish coffee I drank before bed and the food baby sitting in my stomach is preventing my return to sleep. The toilet doesn't flush here, so I'm trying my best to keep all contents inside my body for now. Since the water flow into the area is controlled by the Israeli government, the only water they have comes from a tank that sits on top of the house.

Today I hit a point where I felt the situation here was so completely huge and hopeless, but then I realized that if something as concrete and institutionalized as slavery in the United States can be abolished, maybe there is hope yet (not to say that we are completely free of slavery). Everyone always gets so offended when you compare the situation in the Middle East to any other global tragedy, but the truth is that unless we can familiarize and place this situation in a context that people will and can understand, nobody will care. Unfortunately, that's the the way this world works. Unless you can show people that a situation directly includes or influences them, they're indifferent. And then you have the few who don't bother to determine their relation to the situation, but who have the privilege to get involved and "save the masses" through a facade of solidarity and a mountain of false generosity completely free of investment in the core truth. Today made me wonder if I'm not just that- if I'm just like the very people I condemn and detest. I will gladly parade a kefiyah on my neck and a "Free Palestine" shirt on my back, simultaneously rockin' a hamsa or a Jewish star, feeling superior because I'm a cool Jew. I'm a Jew who knows wassup. Down for the struggle because I was born into a city of struggle, but also down by choice because of a mobility afforded to me for my lightness and Whiteness. Like the title of William Pietz's article, this is a Fetishization of Civilization that I am projecting. That I can afford to be in this blood-splashed land as an observer and a learner speaks to my power. I can go home to my cushy California life, blow some trees, play in the dirt with little kids, drive the streets of Oakland, windows down and radio up, and pretend to forget. I have the choice to remove myself from this situation and return to my world of love, smiles, paychecks and fresh fruit. But people here can not escape. And when I say that, I don't mean an inescapable reality like America, where racism is instiutionalized and social mobility is restricted by taboos and artificially created hierarchies. If you have a West Bank id, you literally cannot go to Jerusalem. EVER. If you have a Palestinian passport, to travel even to other parts of Palestine requires up to seven checkpoints and more hours of your life than you can afford to spend on travel.

In the film we watched at Ibdaa Cultural Center in Bethlehem's Dheisheh refugee camp, "Frontiers of Dreams and Fears," Mona explores an aspect of the word "travel" that had never occurred to me. After her best friend flees to London without saying goodbye, this 14-year-old young woman mourns the loss and condemns the word. "I hate the word travel." As a refugee, travelling symbolizes the lack of a home. The need to travel is consuming and abolishes any desire to travel for pleasure. Mobility has never stared me down so hard before. I flash an American passport at a checkpoint and am ushered past tens of Palestinians who have been waiting in line for hours. I so appreciate that today my mobility was put in check because I was beginning to feel comfortable in this skin of privilege.

When we entered the H2 area of Hebron/Khalil today, a Palestinian area and city being "resettled" and dismantled by Jewish settlers, our tour guide was stopped by IDF police and threatened with arrest if he did not leave the area. He left, went beyond the checkpoint to wait for us, and we continued up the hill. We reached a second checkpoint, and I became mesmerized by the Ethiopian soldier lounging inside a camouflaged booth, gun cradled in his arms. My mind raced back to what Rotem told us the first day of this trip: the dirty, angry jobs are given to Arab Israelis and Ethiopian Israelis because it prevents the European Israelis from immediate harm and because of the tension, resentment, and hatred it breeds between Palestinians and Arabs & Ethiopians. Anger bubbled inside me, but not anger at the Ethiopian man or his comrade, each man barely older than I. I am angry at the ability of a higher power to instigate and perpetuate this. This brand of oppression is so much more tangible than any I've been privileged enough to analyze. Triple-layered gates and gun-bearing parades of Israeli soldiers pepper the streets of Hebron, squeezing my heart. I care so much, but is it enough? My caring matters to me, but this people need more than American empathy. And who I am I to empathize with this struggle? Our tour guide joked today that he was grateful we spent a day in the streets of terrorists, that we risked our lives despite the warnings of friends against an area where we'd surely be bombed or kidnapped. The funny thing is I heard those cautions and concerns from even the most conscious of friends. A demonization of people scares me so because people are people are people. The more time I spent here the more frighteningly this situation reminds me of the Native Americans... virtually exterminated civilizations. I cannot stomach the thought of extermination here. It is too world-shattering.

But then again... I can go home. So world-shattering constitutes tears and a feined sense of personal victimization because I remotely know these people. The hardest part of all of this for me to swallow is the knowledge that I will go home. And I am scared because I cannot answer myself when I ask how home can become a birthing ground for application rather than fetishization. Truth comes with a price... will it cost me my comfort? I know that I can go home... but will I?