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?