Anecdotes from the misery index

There is no better or more eloquent way to say it. The situation is ugly from every
angle you look at it and each time you think it can’t get worse, it goes and does.

People have asked me if I’m ok. For now things are relatively safe and quiet in Tel Aviv, and I am suddenly grateful for Tel Aviv apathy. It keeps me sane I think to feel some sense of people going about their normal business. Is that crazy? I suppose that in times of madness it can be reassuring that human beings carry on and sometimes even coldly so.

But the stories coming in from Gaza are harrowing and we are no longer joking at work about needing therapy for secondary trauma. Each day someone loses it – either with sadness or with anger or a troubling combination of both. The moments that keep us together happen when people in Gaza can still make jokes, or when sudden surprises happen.

Today one of our clients at work made contact with me for the first time since the war started. I was so happy. It only lasted a few minutes but still.

Today a man called to ask if we could help evacuate his family from Gaza to the West Bank, where he was lucky enough to be. He told us his wife and children were in Gaza, and made a special request that we include his cat, Bisu. He said that until November when mail stopped coming in to Gaza, he would send cat food for Bisu via Aramex. He told us she was a part of the family and he didn’t want her to stay behind in Gaza.

In Hebrew, there is a word for hell that sounds like “Gaza”. My mom explained to me that around the time she was a kid, people started substituting “Gaza” for this word hell, when they wanted to tell someone off. It has always been a forgotten place.

Yesterday we were talking to this guy at the electricity company in Gaza. He told us that the IDF had taken over Hamas TV and were trying to send out propaganda. He joked that if they wanted their propaganda to be effective, then they should make sure people have electricity! He laughed, and we laughed.

We told him that we were at this protest the other day and a pro-war demonstrator held up a sign that said "Traitors: Go to Gaza", so my co-worker yelled back at them -I can't go to Gaza, the borders are sealed! The electricity guy laughed and told us we are welcome to come visit anytime they open up.

New Year's Day

It was hard to imagine celebrating New Year's last night. In the days leading up to it, I kept flashing to what the night would be like – walking by bars with people gathering outside to laugh and share cigarettes, standing in the middle of the party surrounded by people chatting and clinking glasses, bits of conversations flying by, at midnight strangers cheering and kissing – it sounded impossible. Last night came quietly and cold. There was suddenly no question whether to go to the party or to stay at home. By eleven-thirty I was already reading a magazine in bed. At midnight church bells started clanging outside. I woke up my love and kissed him, before turning back to my magazine, waiting for sleep. The only image that haunted me once the evening came, was of a family, sleeping together on the living room floor, the windows wide open to prevent them from shattering when the missiles fall, cold and darkness coming in from every direction. If I had any faith left in religion, I imagine this is when I would start praying, but because I don't, I just keep hoping and hoping everything will be ok.

My last memory

Riding on the sherut this morning to Jerusalem, Ali and I began to make up dreams again. It is amazing how easy it is to forget that we’ve had the same dreams and shaken ourselves awake before as well. We are leaning our heads back against the seat. Looking into his greenish gold eyes and again, I forget that I don’t believe in the kind of love that knocks you over, that makes you ridiculous, that makes you think holding hands on a sherut ride is suddenly the most romantic thing you’ve ever done. I’d forgotten to be cynical, I’d left cynicism at home and there I was, loaded down with sappy, syrupy happiness, lost in our ridiculous dreams, dreams that could not be more humdrum if they tried. We’ll get a place together, he says, and make children, and they will have your looks and my craziness. They will be rowdy in the backseat of our car. No they’ll be calm and pensive and full of laughter. We will take a trip, he says, to the mountains, to that hill over there, at least two days. We will make love standing up even, he says, let’s make love here now. I teach him the word for vineyard. I say I’ve always wanted one. He says I’ve always wanted to be a pilot and I say I’ve always wanted to be a journalist, but without the pressure of deadlines. I’ll write my book and we will be millionaires, he says. The day I come back home I will call you and we will take our trip, he says. He promises even. And I forget myself. I forget to not believe him. I am happy. I see it all in front of me. There is nothing more real. When he goes, he has to go, I tell him, keep in touch with me and he smiles. Blows me a kiss. I am ok all day. I come back home. I water the plants and hang the laundry and drink tea on the beach with a friend. I walk and walk and walk and everything is ok. It is only hours later I remember. Hours later I feel myself falling to the floor. He says to me, a dream isn’t something that we have when we’re sleeping, it’s what prevents us from falling asleep in the first place.

Tamara says it’s been too long

If the days blend into one another, it can means two things – either that you’ve settled into a painful routine, or you’ve settled in nicely to a life you never imagined you’d have. The days are sunny and easy, and you find yourself walking and wandering from place to place with songs playing in your head. Waiting for the light to change you start to hum to yourself, out of tune because you can’t quite hit the highest notes.

At these times, life is punctuated by momentous events. Births and deaths and holidays break the patterns you’ve grown comfortable with, just when you begin to notice your own comfort.

Right before the start of Ramadan, my not so new love’s aunt passed away, followed, a day later, by an uncle. The family - spread across cities, territories, countries - came to mourn. A day plus another three days without music, watching them piling in the car in the evenings to sit together in Lod and in Haifa. One aunt came from Jordan, which gave someone the idea to ask me if I could help bring another aunt from Gaza that no one had seen in eight years. At my work, we spent the three days of mourning faxing documents and faxing them again, making emphatic and then angry phone calls to the army, coordinating with men in uniform sitting in air conditioned rooms on either side of the crossing.

Finally when the mourning period was over, the army gave her permission to pass, with her daughter, and stay for three days. Four days of mourning gave way to three days of joy.

The family praised my name and all those at my organization who worked to get her in. For two days I kept my distance, nervous. My love told me how everyone came to see her, so happy after thinking that they would never get a chance to see her again and how she sat and told stories about life before the war, the family being together, being whisked away to Gaza by a new husband at just sixteen years old.

On the third day, she wanted to meet me – her nephew’s Jewish girlfriend. We came to her sister’s house, another aunt, and the family was sitting together, inside and outside, with bowls of fruit and cakes on tabletops everywhere. The aunt from Gaza sat on a chair, her hair covered by a translucent headscarf, her small hands twisted with arthritis placed in her lap. She had the same wide lips as my love and his mother. She took my hands in her hers and pulled me close, kissing the air near my cheeks over and over, saying in Arabic shukran shukran, and something about peace and other things I couldn’t understand.

Months of learning the alphabet could never have prepared me for this moment, where there was so much I wanted to say. She touched the side of her head and said something. I looked around and I couldn’t catch anyone’s attention who could help translate. It was just her and I and the distance between our two nonetheless related languages. I smiled and she smiled, and then we let go of each other’s hands.

As we walked out, another aunt called to me, everyone was quiet. She said, thank you for what you did, thank you for bringing our sister to us.

I answered back awkwardly, if only she could come every time she wanted.

On the ride home I was quiet, but once inside the house, I sobbed into my love’s arms like my life were being pulled from under me. I felt broken into a million pieces.

On my birthday, my love woke at seven and filled the house with balloons.

Today we remember easy days. Come sit with me, he says, and help me plan the garden.

making up for lost time - tel aviv, jaffa, sinai

In my many months of not posting, so much has happened and yet it all happened so quickly that entire entries never seemed to materialize quickly enough to keep up. Sometimes I felt just like posting a photo and maybe one line. This was Purim, who knew it was such a party in the streets? I wanted to make some eloquent commentary about a Reuters photograph that was in the paper here of a little boy in Sderot dressed as a Palestinian militant, complete with a fake Qassam rocket, the same kind that real militants launch at this little boy’s southern Israeli town near Gaza. But nothing eloquent seemed to come, the picture already spoke for itself. A trip to Los Angeles and New York offered perspective and the welcome company of old friends, frutas in Echo Parque, a world of glittery palm trees and then snow and cold and favorite restaurants. Coming back meant more work, and with it the kind of stories that have gradually worn away at the easy optimism I packed with me a year ago. It got warm enough to drink iced coffee again and now it’s hot enough that there is no going back.

But most of all, what’s kept me away from the internet in the evenings and prevented me from even snapshot, half-baked musings is that I met a new love. Class is over but he is still trying to teach me Arabic. When people call from Gaza I can never remember how to say -Call again tomorrow, or -Call back in ten minutes. But I will never forget how to say -The humidity ruins my hair, and at least one useful thing –Mai isn’t here now. With the new love in my life, I am no longer thinking of green lines and red lines, but about how to negotiate the space between us. I am amazed at how I can argue so efficiently in Hebrew even when it displeases me so much that we are fighting. He bought me plastic, magnetic Hebrew letters that he put up on the back of his front door so he could teach me to spell. One day his craziest friend came over and used every single letter to write a long soliloquy I could barely read. Yesterday I came over to the door, looked at all the letters and picked out three to spell “sun” – which, like in English, is composed of just three little letters.

In Sinai I thought about peace. The consensus in the Israeli subconscious seems split in just two when it comes to Sinai (the furthest Israeli citizens can get in Egypt without a visa, and within spitting distance of Israel’s southernmost tip, the Red Sea city of Eilat). Sinai is now thought of either as a hotbed of potential attacks (at any minute, we are always being warned, Israeli packed pool sides and beach front promenades may be targeted) or it is thought of or rather described by a near ecstatic sigh followed by an “ooohhh Sinai” – almost painful-like, it’s that good. I was happy to finally extricate myself from the first category and find myself settled in quite nicely into the second category, filling myself up with sunshine and watermelon and feta cheese. I could have spent many more days contemplating my feet padding around in the Red Sea and doing whatever I wanted whenever I wanted because that’s apparently what Sinai is “all about.” Peace is good, was the simple thought that kept coming to mind, especially when you are the one coming out on top of it.

compassion/fatigue

tamara wants me to say what i think of the situation, as we say in hebrew, the "matsav". everyone knows what you're talking about when you say that... they wouldn't mistake it for the situation you found yourself in when your last boyfriend broke your heart or the situation you had on your hands when he found out you'd been cheating.

it is one thing and one thing only -- the conflict. i am not sure why i don't post more often... if it's fatigue, or running out of things to say, or being too self-conscious about who might stumble across my amateur musings. future bosses? old lovers? smart friends? or maybe because i always want to write about my interactions with people and i feel it's not right to expose them.

the matsav, as they say, is not good. but has it ever been good? i found myself giving a presentation last week in front of a group of visiting parliamentarians from a european country. i began, the situation in gaza has not been good for some time but new and startling precedents are constantly being set. they looked at me as i spoke... and i wondered what good it was doing. here we were before them, a panel of concerned citizens, dreadful stories under our arms, personal calamities, and they, calmly drinking water and juice, eager to catch the next flight home. afterwards we snapped photos together and wished each other well.

and i went out into the afternoon air, frazzled, still gaining hold of myself after being so nervous to present before them, and before my peers. i berated myself for not telling more stories, for not hitting my points home, for not making sure these six pleasant men from europe would lay sleepless that night on their flight home for thinking about our matsav, about gaza and the people there dragged down further than ever on purpose by weary leaders with too much to prove. they would sleep well, those men, because i'd let the people of gaza down. i took one step after the other and finally shook myself out from under that ridiculous burden. i reasoned with myself, they'd been hearing it for all of the days of their visit and nothing would unseat them. as we are all so fatigued and we've heard it all before.

later that evening, i left my house to meet my great aunt at a play put on by a mixed arab and jewish troupe. i walked past an appliance store and all the tvs were set to the same newscast, showing last week's shooting incident in jerusalem. religious men and boys gathered in a street, their bewildered faces streaked by red siren lights. it took a second for me to read the caption below and afraid to be overcome with panic, as i am prone, i kept walking and tried to put it out of my mind. a few blocks later i called my uncle in jerusalem and was happy to hear he was safe at home with his family. i thought of jesse and i walking in paris and seeing the second airplane hitting the second tower on the television screens of an appliance store. as i kept walking, all the corner stores and cafes had their tvs set to the news, radio newscasts blared from stores without tvs. people had already begun to gather around, making exasperated commentary -you see what happens? and -peace, they muttered to each other. the tvs said who to care for, they said these are ours and those were theirs. they said our calamity exceeds theirs, our fight is moral and just. it is as simple as black and white.

i thought of all the eyes on all our dead here, the endless commentary and the endless taking "sides" as if there really are just two simple sides and two simples perspectives. i thought of how the calamity always seems to be getting bigger and how the only ones who act are those who rise up to create another.

l.a./new york

i suppose it's a little bit misleading to post an entry about los angeles and new york when i call this thing "tania in the holy land" but i think it's fitting nonetheless, and especially since i am writing this from my bedroom in tel aviv with all the glory of holy-land-tinged hindsight.

for the first time in over eight months, i made the dizzyingly long trip back to the states, via two planes, and after nearly 24 hours, landing in los angeles.

upon returning from paris, los angeles seemed spacious and empty, from buenos aires, safe and new, from tel aviv, l.a. is orderly. people wait their turn in line, horns rarely honk, cars stay in their lanes. i managed to discover new places - like a pirate themed bar in koreatown and my dad's straight-up hike which takes you to a breath-taking (and catching) 360 degree of the city - and also to visit my favorite spots and with my favorite people. nothing beats frutas with salt, chile, and lime on the shores of the lake in echo park or the margaritas at el carmen.

new york was cold and hectic. i visited with friends and criss-crossed bridges over from new jersey, to manhattan, to brooklyn and back again. i told the same stories about my work and life in tel aviv substituting new anecdotes and jokes where appropriate.

at various moments, i thought how nice it would be to come back to the states. i fell in love with my friends all over again and with sunshine in l.a. and snow in new york. i thought about how i could lose myself in the comforts of "home" and so much laughter. on the plane ride to new york from los angeles, i dreamt i was at another l.a. party, going from room to room where friends drank cocktails and exchanged easy conversation. but telling the story of my life in israel, over and over, and no matter how many times i could still get fired up about what i had to say, i realized it was no use giving up now.

perhaps eight months ago i thought i might have the answers to middle east peace. i thought with enough time here, they might be revealed and lift us all up out of the catch 22s and downward spirals we find ourselves in...now, i don't know much of anything anymore. i don't have answers, but i do still have a lot of questions and i'm not ready to go just yet.

today

holiday of holidays

the weekend before last my mama and i went to haifa to see family. i am proud to report that i dragged the whole family to the "holiday of holidays" downtown which is a not entirely un-hokey celebration of the convergence in december of three important holidays in the muslim, jewish, and christian traditions. or maybe it's more apt to just say - it's the only place in the world where palestinian-israeli christians and muslims, israeli jews, and santa all get together to eat kebab and wander the streets. the only place where, on saturdays in december at least, people aren't eying each other suspiciously and santa is yelling at the cops in arabic and hebrew to let through his procession of drum playing scouts and baton twirling beauties.

in the evening i went with my cousin and his friend to dalyat al carmel, a druze village close to haifa which cascades down the hillsides in small points of light. we bought trinkets and i watched the sunset color the hills in amazing shades of purple and orange. my cousin made fun of me for taking so many pictures like a tourist. his friend said to me, mock impatiently, tania - where do you live? i answered, tel aviv. ok then, he said, you're not a tourist, stop taking so many pictures.

but these and so many things are still new to me - eruptions of conflict, brief semblances of peace and co-existence, sunsets, christmas lights in storefronts and bilingual hebrew-arabic speaking santas. looking at the sunset, i thought to myself, i was born on this mountain and if i had opened my eyes the first thing i would have seen was the sea below, spreading out dizzyingly as it does from so many places in haifa. so what does it mean to belong somewhere, for somewhere to belong to you, to long for a home in a place you have never seen or not long at all for the first home you knew? i am looking, my eyes wide open. the immensity of the sea from that high above is completely quiet.

crossing jordan

last weekend i met behrangy and his friend in jordan. we wandered the new, dusty streets of amman's upscale shopping area, all but closed down on an early friday afternoon. we ate with ex-pats in a big fancy restaurant. a sign on the wall said king hussein had once eaten there, as well as chris rock. we accidentally hit up a bar full of what one might call high class hookers, dancing for men and ordering them expensive booze. i was silently horrified, behrang's friend nodded approvingly. we ate syrian and israeli chocolate in our hotel room, while watching bbc world news and egyptian soap operas.

petra was full of tourists and people selling donkey rides and cheap jewelry. the ruins of its ancient city towered in shades of pink and orange over brits and americans in red and black checkered keffiyehs. i took pictures to show to friends back home - i imagined a new line called keffiyeh casual or keffiyeh contemporary. behrang and i snuck away to the fanciest hotel in town and ordered cocktails and mezze while his friend investigated the possibility of bunking with bedouins in the caves.

the next day i rode in a shared taxi the three hours to amman, just me and about 20 curious jordanian men. no one spoke to me at first, but then at the rest stop they all gathered around and tested their best english - shooting questions like the israeli border police at allenby bridge. i lied like a champ, pretending to be on god knows what kind of break from university in america...luckily it seemed that no one was keeping track of american holidays. i wanted to tell them i was israeli to see what they'd say but i decided it wouldn't be worth it, even if only one of the 20 wasn't so into the idea.

back on the bus, the guy next to me gestured towards another who had been talking to me, and said to me very seriously, 'beware of the boy.' my heart raced a bit and i asked why, looking over at the 'boy' with green blue eyes, his hair shiny with gel, his racing red jacket too big over his narrow shoulders and his freshly shined black leather shoes, crossing one over the other. he stared back at me, right into me, like fresh off the pages of a nudey magazine, maybe just pushing 22 and already bracing for a hard life of heart breaking. the man next to me leaned in close, his breath pushing at my hair, moist and warm, 'because you're very beautiful.' my heart slowed back to normal and i leaned back in my chair, bracing for the ride into amman.

slouching towards annapolis

it seems that i should weigh in on annapolis since i consider myself to be some kind of envoy of peace to the region (albeit in my own quiet, private sort of way).

what has not already been said about annapolis, about oslo, about israelis and palestinians in general?

well, maybe one thing, everyone needs to be a simulator. in my not so humble opinion, i believe there is a very profound need for people on the ground, just as much as the leaders and the scholars, to reach outside of themselves and see the perspectives of those on the "other side", look at the red lines that come up against their own red lines and the real limitations which for too many years have prevented a solution to this conflict. knowing someone's position is different from having to defend it as your own. you don't just learn the things they might say in a kind of mechanical way, you begin to react from a deeper place inside yourself.

nothing in the world will or should force either side to let go of its narrative of exile, loss, and suffering, but every day the situation becomes more complicated and the likelihood that this will all end with a handshake on the white house lawn more remote. israelis will have to realize and accept why their presence isn't loved in this corner of the world, and palestinians will have to accept that they aren't going to love everyone living on this land, because short of mass atrocity, this is all we have left.

there were two minor earthquakes in the region recently and it got me thinking - what would happen here if a catastrophe completely outside of the realm of the conflict struck? what kind of chaos would it bring, or unexpected cooperation maybe? or what if we all just fell into the sea, together, damned as we seem to be to suffer alongside one another these parallel narratives of exile and loss. what would the world look like without us? which conflict would rush in and take our place?

i was working out at the gym when they showed olmert and abu mazen getting off their respective planes near annapolis on the news. suddenly i couldn't wipe the smile off of my face. i felt filled with happiness, inexplicably. i know we are doomed to failure, in that cynical "realistic" place inside of me, but i couldn't help it, i felt drunk with hope in that moment...drunk with what if...?

everyone weighing in can only talk about the failure, this and that aspect of failure, the concessions, the injustice, the mistrust and fear...but i am here to talk about hope. on the brink of failure let there be one naive moment where we delude ourselves that all will be ok. let us believe that there are solutions and better days and then perhaps when we are really ready to look, we will know better how to find them.

gaza city/tel aviv

our field worker from gaza calls the office daily, many times a day. "shalom, gisha" i answered yesterday and she replied, "shalom gisha" as if gisha were my name. and then we had a little laugh. some days she says shalom tania, and i reply, ahlan ayda. how are you? i ask, and she replies forlornly, still alive. it catches me off guard every time, still, almost every day. oh, i say, stupidly. or, when are you coming to see us again? even more stupidly.

life in tel aviv trudges on, alongside calamity, alongside the bright sea we share in this region begrudgingly. politics seem to have gone out of fashion. a story in the paper today warned ominously about gaza's sewage spilling into the sea if fuel is not available to pump it properly. once in the sea, it wouldn't be constrained by checkpoints or security barriers. it made me think of how i am still making up for lost summers, going to the beach on saturdays and laying for hours at a time, doing not much of anything.

i moved into a new place, with two sweet girls and a dog i've grown fond of named eva. she looks at me with big sad lonely eyes when i come home and it's hard to be mad at her for chewing up the newspaper or spilling her food in the kitchen. my room has a small balcony, which faces northeast, with a view of rooftops and their solar panels and a few ugly high rise buildings and a small, old cemetery. the room itself is yellow yellow, with linoleum floors made to look like granite (so classic here) and it smells a bit like wood because of the cheap balsa wood bed frame i bought for my new, a-bit-too-hard-mattress.

this is where i live and i don't wake up anymore wondering where i am though in my waking hours i sometimes wonder what keeps me here. well, that's not true, i know it's my job that keeps me here though that doesn't prevent me from having exasperated moments, as we all do every where.

i went to this really lame wedding last night and was missing america. i just felt so alienated and different. i was thinking about how for the longest time i wanted to get married, barefoot with flowers in my hair, at the boonville hotel in northern california and suddenly there i was, at this fancy banquet hall with pyrotechnics and blaring techno music and all these israelis line-dancing. and then my great aunt turned to me and said, hopefully next time it will be you. and then the rabbi talked about how it's important that jerusalem never be divided (making not so subtle reference to the negotiations) and i started fantasizing about scandalizing this whole country by marrying ali, barefoot with flowers in my hair, on the greenline somewhere, with israelis and palestinians dancing the hora and dabke together.... and then despite it all, i had to smile to myself.

The right of return (to Britain)

From Haaretz

By Tamara Traubmann

Thousands of people and one very active Internet site have been busy these days with Khaled Al-Mudallal's right to return - that is, his right to return to the University of Bradford in England. Mudallal, 22, was supposed to be devoting his entire attention right now to his last year of studies for a bachelor's degree in business administration. But instead, he is stuck in Rafah and cannot see how he will be able to leave the Gaza Strip and finish his studies.

He is not the only person in such a predicament. More than 6,000 people have requested to leave Gaza - one-10th of them students who are studying abroad and have already missed the start of the academic year. But Israel is not allowing them to travel to Egypt and continue onward to their respective places of study from there.

Mudallal was born in the Rafah refugee camp. He has six other siblings. He went to Bradford six years ago, following in his father's footsteps, who completed his doctorate in history there. "I understood that England was a wonderful place to be, an interesting place where I could develop," he says, explaining his decision to remain abroad even after his father returned to Gaza. "Until then, I had lived in Palestine. It was entirely new for me to live in an area that was not occupied, in a wide open place."

Last June, he came to visit his family in Rafah. He planned to marry his fiancee, Duah, and take her with him on a honeymoon to London. But the timing of the visit turned out to be problematic: In June Hamas took control of Gaza and, in response, Israel tightened its sanctions against the Strip. The Rafah border crossing is closed most of the time and the passage of Gaza's residents into Egypt has virtually come to a standstill. Although Israel has in fact created a system of transportation for the Palestinians, by means of buses that take them from the Erez checkpoint to the border crossing with Egypt at Nitzana, it is not operational at present.

Jeopardizing degrees

According to a report published last week by Gisha: Legal Center for Freedom of Movement (www.gisha.org), there are currently some 6,400 people waiting to leave the Gaza Strip. About 670 of them are students who want to go study in Europe, the United States, various Middle Eastern countries and elsewhere. The delay of their departure could mean they would lose an entire academic year and perhaps even their place at the university, and it jeopardizes the grants and the visas they have received.

Gisha has petitioned the High Court of Justice on Mudallal's behalf, demanding that Israel allow him and his wife to leave the Gaza Strip. At the beginning of this month, the High Court rejected the demand. In its response to the court, the state claimed that the system of transportation to Nitzana - which came to a complete standstill in September - would be resumed that very day, and the judges stated that Mudallal would have to wait his turn.

This could turn into a prolonged delay. Since June, a mere 480 people have left the Gaza Strip using the Israeli transportation system. According to Gisha's report, even if the system were to resume operations immediately, Mudallal - who was assigned number 4,845 - would leave Gaza in another 502 days - almost a year and a half from now.

But the transportation has not yet resumed. According to the spokesman for the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, Shlomo Dror: "There is an intention" of resuming the system in the near future via the Kerem Shalom crossing point. Dror explains that its operation was stopped for security reasons.

"The decision was made by Southern Command, on the grounds that there was heavy firing of mortar bombs and that the Israel Defense Forces was unable to devote additional manpower for the purpose of taking Palestinians out," Dror told Haaretz. "The Palestinians complain to us that they can't leave to go and study. The complaint should be addressed to Hamas - I would very much like Khaled to go study. If Khaled has complaints, he should go to Hamas and say: 'Sorry, you are responsible for my life in Gaza, you have taken control of Gaza. Stop shooting mortar bombs on the crossing points so they will let us out.'"

Last Monday, Gisha once again petitioned the High Court on behalf of students from Gaza, calling for "the policy of collective punishment" that prevents them from going to study abroad to be rejected.

"Rather than fulfilling its obligation to find the resources necessary to open the borders and let the students out, the army has chosen to keep the borders shut," Gisha's director general, Sari Bashi, said. "The Erez checkpoint is open and people are able to cross over there to Israel. It is the army that has decided that students will not leave. Since September's cabinet decision calling for steps to punish the residents of the Gaza Strip, the shuttle service has been canceled and the army has locked up students and thousands of others inside Gaza. International law forbids the deliberate harming of residents of Sderot, and it also forbids deliberately harming one and a half million civilians in Gaza in reprisal."

Hampering education

Gaza's youngsters are limited in their ability to get an academic education. There are only three universities in the Gaza Strip. The departments for bachelor studies do not include subjects vital to Gaza's future well-being, including for example occupational therapy, speech therapy and physiotherapy. The number of possibilities for a master's degree is extremely limited. As for studies in the West Bank, where most Palestinian universities are located, even before Hamas took control of the Strip, Israel did not allow the passage of Gaza's residents to study in the West Bank, and does not allow foreign lecturers and experts to enter the Strip.

The Gisha report claims that "travel restrictions have prevented and continue to prevent university faculty from Gaza from pursuing advanced studies and attending conferences and seminars around the world. The opportunities to conduct joint research and to cooperate with colleagues at other academic institutions worldwide are extremely limited - hampering the development of the educational system in general."

Meanwhile, Mudallal is teaching courses on administration on a voluntary basis at the Islamic University in Gaza. He has already missed more than a month of studies and is afraid that soon he will lose his temporary employment at a computer store in Bradford. Meanwhile, his debts are piling up because before leaving for Gaza, he rented an apartment and bought a car for which he is paying.

Dozens of students have demonstrated on his behalf in England. The National Union of Students there has set up a campaign under the slogan "Let Khaled study," and has organized an Internet site ( www.letkhaledstudy.co.uk). More than 2,000 people have signed a petition calling on the Israeli government to "remove the restrictions on freedom of movement, which it has imposed on Khaled and other students in Gaza."

The student union's Ruqayyah Collector, one of the campaign's leaders, referred to the academic boycott against Israel, which the lecturers' union decided to cancel when the campaign on Khaled's behalf was just starting. "People talk about academic freedom but this is an equal right of all, of the Palestinians as well. Academic freedom can't just relate to one group," she says.

Mudallal is encouraged by the campaign on his behalf. He is still dreaming of finishing his degree, so he can return to Gaza and help rehabilitate its collapsing economy. He invested a great effort to be able to study at Bradford. "Until the age of 16, I didn't speak English at all. I did my best after a day of study at high school. I spent many long hours studying English. But I understood that it would be very good for me to study there, for my future, so I had to study hard."

He adds: "I am a refugee. We are from a village close to Ashdod. But I'm not fighting to go back to that village, but rather to go get an education. That's all I want."

lotem

this is my newest cousin, lotem, which means "rockrose" and her older sister adva ("ripple") who wants to be a baby again too. i had never heard of a lotem but apparently it grows wild here and has beautifully crumpled petals that look like a pink crepe dress that someone didn't have time to iron before they went to the party. let's hope she grows up wild too.

looking for home

today was an interesting day. this morning i went to jerusalem to visit my uncle and his family. i got hit on on the bus by a settler. i wanted to say something dramatic, like, i don't go out for coffee with settlers but i didn't. i've been to his particular settlement. our simulation group went there because it's built in this dramatic way, completely enclosed by palestinian villages. i tried to be sarcastic, asking him what it was like waking up to a view of a palestinian refugee camp but apparently my sarcasm didn't translate because he just said casually, oh, i live on the other side of the neighborhood.

when i got back to tel aviv, i went to go see an apartment. this photo is of the living room, but it was decidedly less tidy than that. the housemates had a bunch of annoying friends over, one especially who after i said i worked in a human rights organization kept making annoying comments. like he wrote my name down on some list and then joked that he'd write in the margins, tania, likes palestinians.

some days this place is so ridiculous.

game of the ball used with the foot

i didn't take very many photos during behrang's visit, but here are some from a soccer game we went to between tel aviv hapoel and some team calling itself "orange hell" or officially i think it was bnei yehuda. when is someone gonna tell these people around the world that the names they use in english don't sound very tough at all? there's a band here called "infected mushroom." that's not tough! it's just nasty sounding!

the game was good fun, nevertheless. quite different than soccer games i'd seen in the u.s., france, and argentina... well, they didn't play so well and second, the fans were really rowdy and mean, but with their own team! i hate to re-enforce stereotypes, but i'm going to anyway. it was like a bunch of jewish mothers yelling out directions or better yet, recommendations on plays that should have been made. like, hey you retard, you shouldn't have let the ball get away! or, you son of bitch, didn't you see number 22 coming up behind you? maybe it happens everywhere, what do i know, but that loud?

new beginnings, again

I started working this week at Gisha, the legal center for freedom of movement. I feel very lucky to have found a job that is so relevant and important and so related to what I’m interested in and what I came here to learn about. The organization mainly provides legal assistance and does advocacy on movement issues related to Gaza and Gaza ID card holders in the West Bank. I’m replacing an exceedingly sweet girl while she goes on maternity leave so most likely the job will just be temporary, maybe four months, but already in just a few days I feel like I’ve learned more than at all my other jobs combined. Ok, so I haven’t worked that much, but still.

At work, I think often of this little boy I met in Ramallah who arrived from Gaza just weeks ago with his mother. I asked him how old he was and he shyly held up 4 fingers but then later on the dance floor he was the life of the party, dancing coyly with one hand on the back of his head and the other at his waist.

I also found a temporary place to live right on the park Ha-Yarkon, near all kinds of lovely shops, cafes, and bars. I went on a walk this evening to the port. Gila, my closest pal here, is taking me out for my birthday on Friday (ahem!) and Behrangy arrives on Tuesday.

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?