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?

tel aviv

i've been spending more time in tel aviv lately visiting with friends and family. yesterday i spent the afternoon with my father's aunt, my great aunt, who is nearly 80 and volunteers with machsom watch, the group of women who monitor the checkpoints. she calls the women in her organization "fighterits" adding the hebrew feminine suffix "it" to the english word fighter. i told her about the right winger and she said she'd have much less patience for someone like him. she told me stories about trying to learn arabic and how touched she was to realize that hebrew and arabic are so similar. she proudly told me she drives her own car into the territories, unafraid and determined. she read me stories by a women named edna from the organization, stopping at the end with tears in her eyes. she told me about organizing a family passover ceder in an arab village and how proud she was that her granddaughter's rightish wing boyfriend came despite his apprehension.

funny enough, some young man from port said in egypt called her randomly on skype several months ago probably thinking she was a young woman. she innocently answered and has since been talking with him several times a week, mostly about day to day things. he called while i was there and was interested to talk to me about my peacemaking ambitions. he talked to me about the situation of gazans stranded in egypt and the nature of his work as some kind of textile importer. we made outlandish, tentative plans to all take a trip to dahab in the sinai. in the meantime, she said she'd take me to a meeting with several important organizations next week. even though i'm only related to her by a long fizzled out marriage, i felt happy and proud to have such a compassionate, lefty woman consider me family and friend.

i've also been spending more time with my clone, gila, who is also american, also looking for peace work, went to school at nyu and knows my cousin benny. last night we went to a very difficult play called "hebron" about the terrible situation there, the antithesis of muslim-jewish coexistence. well, to be fair, i pretty much dragged her there. afterwards ali and other people gave a talk, moderated by an exceedingly annoying woman. it was my first time seeing him since i've been here and of course, once he was on the stage and speaking so honestly and eloquently about the need for co-existence and mutual understanding i forgot all about the million reasons i have to hold on to my own anger towards him. he makes it so hard to hold grudges!

the biggest cross in the world

a few weeks ago, the right winger and i went to eat hummus in nazareth. he showed me around a bit and gleefully told me that the christians of nazareth are hoping to construct the world's largest cross at the tip top of the city, upsetting nazareth's majority muslim community. a few days later the story appeared in the press and i found the image accompanying the articles to be absurd and sort of hilarious. though i've never been one to knock extravagant religious imagery, the fighting and tensions that ensue over things like this are much less appealing. i thought i'd share.

right and left behind....

I finally got my first real chewing out since being here. As some of you may know, I'd been seeing someone in Haifa who, to put it lightly, didn't share my views on a whole host of things - from peacemaking to hiking and everything in between. It was nothing short of miraculous one day when we discovered we both liked the same song on the radio. I should have started running the day he told me he didn't like cheese and I should have run even faster when he told me I have no reason to be here and that my views are a threat in and of themselves to the country. But no, being the optimist-bordering-on-gatekeeper-of-la-la-land that I am, I thought I might be able to pull this one over to the other side. He was a bit of a project, and a hard one at that, who also happened to enjoy taking me out and translating for me and teaching me about relevant spots around town. In the beginning we talked about politics, always heatedly, and sometimes even had make-up make-out sessions that were like mini-peace agreements in themselves. I was making concessions but also felt like I was making progress.

Yesterday, all that work came down on my head in several of the ugliest phrases I've personally heard uttered anywhere in my direction. Following a semi-controversial interview I went on last week at a leftist organization, homeboy decided I was beyond hope, beyond the illuminating reach of his right-wing claws and thus worthy of being chewed out and verbally spit on. He said it was a shame I wasn't born earlier because I could have made a nice career as a Nazi collaborator and that people like me, i.e. enemies of the state, deserve to be hanged in the public square. He quickly retracted the latter part once I pointed out how fundamentalist he sounded but the damage had already been done. Anyway, I will spare you further details, but suffice to say after almost an hour of his abuse and my earnest attempts to diplomatically sock it back to him, I finally gave up. We both promised to think about what the other had to say and then hung up.

For about five minutes I felt like the world was crashing down around me and that I should probably just fly back to New York, where I can at least defend myself to the best of my ability in all the glory of my native tongue. But then it dawned on me, the real difference between him and I. While he is a certified misanthrope, believing that most people are animals and worthy of his scorn, I, maybe because I'm an optimist, maybe because I'm nice, like to think that most people in the world want the same things I do. It seems to me that most of us enjoy the view of the sea, we want to sit for long periods of time enjoying the company of our friends and family, we want good food to eat, better lives for our children, and above all to feel safe and secure where ever we go. And for that reason, I refuse to give up. I refuse to accept his black and white version of things, his us and them and good versus bad. Let him live in his cheeseless world, full of hatred and anger. I would have liked to pull him out and I would have liked to understand his perspective but a girl can only take so much abuse.

yesterday's hopes

i've been going running on the beach in the evenings, in my never-ending quest for a bikini bod. yesterday there were all these jellyfish washed up on the shore that i had to dodge. the sun dropped down behind the clouds and this salty, humid breeze started blowing off the water and i felt like the luckiest person, joblessness and all aside. it has been great to spend time with my family, even my grandmothers who are slowly driving me crazy with their insistence on my finding a man and getting married already. every day they say to me, so-and-so has a nice grandson, it couldn't hurt to give it a try, let me give him your number. and i say, no, no grandma, it's ok.
and though i'm not involved at all in what is going on here politically, i like to think my presence alone is inspiring some sense in high places. finally there is some talk of renewing efforts to make peace. my grandmother likes to say, "tout change et rien ne change," everything changes and nothing changes, but my stubbornly optimistic self holds out hope something simply has to change.