how to make real peace with fake partners....

where to begin and how to keep this short and sweet? i've just returned from a whirlwind ten day tour of israel/palestine with the simulation crew: natasha, shane, adriana, simone, manu and sometimes ahmad. we spent many hours contemplating the failure (or was it a success?) of camp david (two, that is). tamara won't be happy to hear that even the armenians are taking some heat for it, according to our sweet driver abu issa. we met with many important and self-important people and weren't really sure why they so willingly gave their time to us. who are we, we wondered? the new frontier of track four negotiators? are they really reading our plan? do we have anything worthy to say? how to explain my fight with anushay over the right of return and my schizophrenic identity as an unconvincing real israeli-american girl and a dashingly convincing, if not a bit crazy, fake palestinian man?

we went over many speed bumps a little too quickly for comfort. we ventured into freshly expanding settlements and an illegally constructed outpost. we saw several portions of the wall/barrier/fence and several machine guns, the likes of which i had to fakely request in the safe confines of the classroom just months ago. the call to prayer awoke us in the old city in jerusalem and in ramallah. some of us got lost in jaffa and group therapy became necessary in herzeliya. we watched a propaganda movie in the golan complete with water, wind, and smell effects that rendered shane veritably giddy. we ate well and slept very little. we made friends and hopefully pissed off just the right people. we met camels and cats, human rights organizations and civil society people, soldiers and waiters and soldier-waiters full of wisdom. we came close to the solutions, i'm sure of it.

for more details, write to me. for pictures, and there are some really good ones, see the link to my flickr site below.

shakespearean drama, part two

Ali and I, as we are generally prone to delusion, sometimes concoct ridiculous fantasies about things like what our wedding would be like in a parallel universe where such a thing wouldn’t kill my grandmother. Since we never have any time together and his work consumes his life, these fantasies often involve sinister things (mainly that he invents) like being imprisoned together or kidnapping each other. The other day we came up with a great plan that I would stage his kidnapping explaining to my grandmother that I’d kidnapped a Palestinian and that she, being an Arabic-speaker, would have to negotiate with Haniyeh himself to do an exchange for Gilad Shalit. We even said we’d put one of Ali’s friends up to playing the role of Haniyeh and while Savta was busy on the phone we could lock ourselves up in my child-sized room and forget about the world around us. I marveled at our demented form of genius while he whispered all kinds of un-kosher sweet-nothings in my ear. In the meantime, back to work and the unwelcome and bitter realities of separation…

from an email to najib

To those who are curious to know, Ali and I had a very nice reunion recently during which he told me all kinds of lovely things a girl wants to hear. We drank wine in the garden and marveled at being together in Jerusalem after dreaming about it so many times from hotel rooms in New York. He then disappeared in the past week and I’m not sure what’s up. Last night the documentary that he’s in aired on al-Arabiyya and then he appeared in a roundtable discussion afterwards… as if he weren’t already in high demand and risking his life. He literally will be Palestine’s MLK Jr. and his attempts to convince me to be Coretta Scott King have thus far not been successful. I’m so torn…of course I want him to free Palestine and I’m so proud of him and think he’s amazing, but sometimes a girl just wants someone who can come home after work like a normal person or sleep in sometimes on the weekends.

In the meantime, it’s pretty funny (in a tragic-comic kind of way) because of course I can’t tell anyone about him and I so my grandmothers are constantly trying to set me up with nice Jewish boys. I went out with someone last night who at some point in the evening started saying nasty things about Arabs. Ugh…if only he knew, I kept thinking to myself. It’s hard to hear this crap all the time and I constantly struggle with how to respond. He also asked me if I felt like in coming to Israel, I’d come “home” because I’m Jewish and these are my people and this is my land. I almost barfed my gin and tonic into his lap. I told him sometimes I think it’s nice that on Fridays you can say Shabbat Shalom to people with the same certainty that people in the states go around at Christmas saying Merry Christmas, but that I feel alienated because I don’t share the same political views as most of the country. I weakly left it at that, but yesterday when my grandmother asked me why the Palestinians want to live in “our home” I scandalized her when I answered that it was their home too.

The other day I went to this meeting in the territories with my great aunt (she volunteers with Machsom Watch, the group of older women who monitor the checkpoints for human rights violations) and we passed this super Orthodox couple on the side of the apartheid highway and she looked at them and said to me, when I see people like that I understand anti-Semitism. It was so powerful to hear her say that, to articulate these thoughts I’d been having, and which would be considered so sacrilegious, and here is this 80 year old woman whose father was one of the founding members of the Jewish paramilitary organization saying it aloud. As difficult as it is here, sometimes in the most difficult moments I am reminded of why I came - because I'm ashamed of what is taking place in the name of "my people" and "our security." Because it saddens me that a people faced with so much intolerance can turn around and let fall from their mouths the same kind of disgusting absurdities and generalizations which have so long been directed at them.

I guess I didn’t anticipate it would be easy, but perhaps I underestimated how hard it would be. When I meet people who’ve been working on this conflict for 20, 30 years, I am so amazed by and feel so much respect for them. People like Ali who work tirelessly, fearlessly. People who stand apart from the crowd and are full of courage. I want to know their secrets, like how people ask for the secrets of long-married couples. I want to ask, how do you willingly hold on so long when everything in the world is stacked against you, when the temptations of ignorance are so strong?