The presentation began with the Palestinian Nakba of 1947-1949 and how it affected Lydd/Lod specifically. The speaker showed how 95% of the city’s Palestinian residents were expelled, while those who managed to return were housed in new neighborhoods with Hebrew names. She showed how the city went from being an important regional and commercial center, a beautiful city with a 6,000 year old history, into a neglected backwater in Israel’s “periphery,” a city “being erased before one’s eyes. She showed how 95% of the city was physically erased after the war, demonstrating that the Nakba is not just about the expulsion of people but the erasure of their homes and the physical landscape in which they lived. The plight of Dahamash, she argued, is simply a continuation of the policies of completely Judaizing Israel’s “mixed cities.” She cited recent quotations from top Israeli officials openly stressing the need to force Palestinians to emigrate out of the country. She suggested that the Judaization of street names and names of neighborhoods is part and parcel of this process, and she quoted senior officials who are “seriously considering” changing Ramle’s name to a Jewish name.

In years following the 1948 war, the responsibility for Judaizing Lydd/Lod was transferred from the military (who destroyed thousands of houses in the city in 1954) to the district planning commissions and the Lydd/Lod municipality. Since construction permits are nearly impossible for Palestinians to receive (even if their land is privately owned) it is estimated that the majority of Palestinian houses in the “mixed” cities are illegally built. She stressed that residents are forced into this situation by the municipality, who give them no choice but to build illegally or leave their city. Thus, entire neighborhoods in Lydd/Lod have been built without permits. Their inhabitants are heavily fined, they don’t receive even the most basic services from the municipality. This situation creates an economic incentive for the municipality to force Palestinians to build illegally since they receive tax and fine revenue but are not required to provide basic services. There are 500 active demolition orders in the city, and residents live in constant fear of demolition. The speaker noted that although the municipality frequently suggests that there is no money to provide services such as garbage collection and school buses, it costs far more to demolish one house than to provide services to an entire neighborhood like Dahamash. This shows quite clearly what the municipality’s priorities are.

The speaker discussed the relationship between Jews and Palestinians in the city over time. Following the 1948 war, Palestinian and Middle Eastern (Mizrahi) Jewish residents lived as neighbors in the Old City area in peace, but in ensuing years the Jewish and Palestinian neighborhoods were forcefully separated and separate neighborhoods were established for each. She stressed that impoverished Jewish residents suffer from the same policies of intentional neglect and gentrification that Palestinians suffer from, with any who succeed in attaining any economic security opting to leave the city instead of trying the dying city. All the residents desire, she stressed, is to live in dignity as equal residents in the city of Lydd/Lod, side by side with Jews.

Unfortunately, the municipality and the state of Israel’s policy of ghettoizing the Palestinian population and Judaizing Lydd/Lod and other “mixed” cities creates tremendous tension between the Jewish and Palestinian residents. To give us a sense of the state-sponsored ethnic conflict in the city, she discussed the fact that during election periods, mayoral candidates use pictures of demolished houses to demonstrate to their right-wing Jewish constituents that they will control the Palestinian population with a heavy hand. She quoted the current mayor of Lydd/Lod in an interview with the local newspaper, responding to a question about Palestinian community organizations’ request that streets in which Palestinians live be given Arab names. He demonstrated a deep race-based hostility to Palestinians that she said was the norm rather than the exception in mayors of “mixed” cities. For example, he said that “the first Arab to talk about national issues, I will shoot him, because whenever I shot Arabs in the past, I was the one left alive. They should go to hell.” The speaker showed us horrifying pictures of Israeli youths recruited by the municipality as volunteers to assist in the process of “preparing” a Palestinian home for demolition. She said that it was “much worse than the demolition itself” to see young Jews educated to demolish Palestinian houses. She mentioned the post-disengagement phenomenon of the religious Zionist movement seeing the “mixed” cities as a target for settlement and Judaization, sending Jewish “pioneers” to try to Judaize Palestinian neighborhoods. She differentiates between Jews who want to live in Lydd/Lod as a city, and Jews who want to Judaize Lydd/Lod, to dominate its Palestinian residents, and eventually to replace them with the aid of the municipality.

At this point, she discussed the specific case of Dahamash. This is a village located between Ramle and Lydd/Lod and is home to 500 Palestinians. Exceptionally, they are the recognized owners of the land, which is has not been the case in post-Nakba Lydd/Lod. They had to go to court to receive even the most basic services, such as garbage collection.. Unfortunately, their land has been zoned as “agricultural land” and all structures on it have been declared “illegal.” Thirteen demolition orders on houses in the neighborhood are imminent, while nearby, a construction project initiated by the aforementioned mayor of Lydd/Lod is taking place despite the fact that that land as also previously zoned as agricultural land. The race-based discrimination is apparent. For Palestinian residents who’ve lived on their land for decades and even longer, it is impossible to rezonetheir privately owned land for construction. For housing projects and construction for Jews, however, it is possible and frequently done. She stressed that the recent demolition orders are part of a plan approved in 2000, and that a plan called “Lod 2020” approved by the municipality threatens to bring the Judaization of Lydd/Lod and the condition of its Palestinian residents to new levels of hardship. These are not isolated cases, but well-thought-out plans approved before-hand which the residents of Dahamash see as the continuation of the Nakba of 1948.

On recommendation from members of the district planning council, the residents spent thousands of dollars developing an entire city plan for their neighborhood, in a bid to legalize the existing buildings. A few days ago, the well-thought out, professional, and expensive plan was rejected outright. In this, the residents of Dahamash join the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, who have submitted hundreds of plans, financed entirely from their own pockets, to the planning committees, all of whom have been rejected. Now the demolition orders have again become imminent, and are scheduled to be approved on July 14^th. On July 13^th, the Sheikh Jarrah solidarity activists will join with the residents of Dahamash and activists across the country to protest the impending race-based house demolitions.

During the teach-in, it was clear to those assembled that this event was not a simple educational opportunity, but also a political statement. Shortly after the presentation began, a police officer cruised by and pulled aside a Palestinian activist. Later, a dozen or so settlers stood beside the stolen Al Ghawi house and watched the presentation. Some clapped when the speaker showed pictures of destroyed Palestinian houses. They were obviously angry at our presence in what they consider to be their neighborhood Discussing the Nakba with the newly-made refugees of Sheikh Jarrah, amidst the glowering stares of orthodox settler youths, brought home to me how immediate and urgent the struggle against Judaization is, and how the struggle is entirely about the simple right of people to be present, when powerful institutions and racist movements just want them to disappear.

As I was riding my bike back across the unmarked border, the Green Line, to Jewish Jerusalem, I had to go through Me’a She’arim. One of the settlers from the neighborhood was there, and he recognized me. He started shouting “Traitor! Traitor! He helps Arabs! Traitor!” I saw the other ultra-orthodox people starting to look up, and I felt fear. I pedaled faster, appreciating a new knowledge of what a society headed for fascism feels like. I remembered that same settler confronting one of the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah: “You are an Arab. You. Are an Arab. You are an Arab.” He responded: “Yes! I am a Palestinian, Muslim Arab” and the settler responded: “People should be ashamed when you call them Arabs.”

The shame of his shamelessness, and of the shamelessness of the state and non-state proponents of Judaiziation, turns my stomach anew every time.

Finkelstein’s doctoral thesis debunked a very influential forgery called “From Time Immemorial,” which fabricated data to show there were hardly any Palestinians in Palestine during the nineteenth century. Whatever your stance on the issue is, fabrications like that can be dangerously misleading, and Finkelstein exposed how the data was twisted, footnote after footnote. He wrote excellent rebuttals of some of Benny Morris’ more reactionary claims, showing how they were undermined by Morris’ own historical research. He has taken brave stances against many forms of injustice, and paid a high price.

(I want to note in parenthesis that while he does frequently mention that both his parents were Holocaust survivors, and does accept the validity of conventional histories of this event, there are some extremely irresponsible passages in his book on the “Holocaust Industry” which undermine survivors’ testimonies. But that deserves a separate discussion).

Recently Finkelstein has taken what many see as a disappointing stance regarding the right of return: citing his own experience after he was prevented from teaching in his academic institution, he advises Palestinians to “move on” and make more realistic demands:

“People get offended when I make the analogy – I’m going to make it tonight – I wish people would understand the point I’m making. I knew I had a right to return to DePaul. I knew I had that right, and I knew if I went to court for ten years, I would win. But then I have to make a judgment: Do I want to draw this out for ten years, or am I going to go for a settlement that’s going to give me less than my right to return, but it will give me something? And then I made my choice. I think it’s basically the same for the Palestinians. Do they have a legal right? Yes. But is it worth fighting this out through eternity, or do you cut your losses and move on?”

Feminism is the radical idea that women are people too. The right of return is the radical idea that if you’re born in a place, you get to live there – even if you’re an Arab! – and that you and your children are therefore not immigrants, but natives. Why would someone like Finkelstein be confusing people like that? Expecting people to give up their connection to their places of origin is no more “pragmatic” than telling women to settle for an inferior status in society.

Regardless of his personal quirks, what I think is going on here is something I’ve noticed among many Jews in the pro-Palestine movement, including myself. Even if we declare ourselves to be progressive, we still carry a lot of fear. There are ‘traditional’ Jewish fears of being a persecuted minority. There is the unavoidable nightmare of a new Holocaust, which we constantly project onto Arabs and Muslims. There are periods in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where we or our relatives experienced physical threat, such as the suicide bombings of the second Intifada. And of course there are the never-ending manipulated fears that Israeli leaders drum up to gain more votes, or more support for their latest expansionist policy.

What I’ve noticed is that a way a lot of us deal with these fears is by giving Palestinians advice: if only they play nice, sound less angry, tone down their demands, and generally be reasonable, we and people we know will be calm enough to accept them. Now, clearly our Palestinian allies can sometimes be wrong, and we do get to disagree with them if we are to be a real part of this movement. But I think the ubiquity of this tendency to advise goes beyond that. Finkelstein should have known better than to tell Palestinians to compromise on this very personal right: I think the real reason was his fear.

The right of return, if implemented fully, will involve a huge upheaval. It is understandable that people would be afraid to take such a step. As allies, it is our responsibility to work through these fears and not allow them to prevent Palestinians from living in their own home. Anyone born in Jerusalem has the right to live there, whatever religion or ethnicity they belong to – this much should be obvious. Anyone whose family has lived in Yaffa/Jaffa for centuries belongs there, not in exile. Israel should be welcoming back its Palestinian inhabitants, instead of constantly devising tricks to keep them out.

None of this has to come at the expense of the true legitimate rights of Israelis like me. As Edward Said explained, in a very inspiring essay:

“What we never concentrated on enough was the fact that to counteract Zionist exclusivism, we would have to provide a solution to the conflict that, in Mandela’s […] phrase, would assert our common humanity as Jews and Arabs. Most of us still cannot accept the idea that Israeli Jews are here to stay, that they will not go away, any more than Palestinians will go away. This is understandably very hard for Palestinians to accept, since they are still in the process of losing their land and being persecuted on a daily basis. But, with our irresponsible and unreflective suggestion in what we have said that they will be forced to leave (like the Crusades), we did not focus enough on ending the military occupation as a moral imperative or on providing a form for their security and self-determinism that did not abrogate ours. This, and not the preposterous hope that a volatile American president would give us a state, ought to have been the basis of a mass campaign everywhere. Two people in one land. Or, equality for all. Or, one person one vote. Or, a common humanity asserted in a binational state.”

This may not happen anytime soon. But if you are interested in being a good ally to Palestinians right now, it helps to think about this, because your fears can get in the way of providing good support, or of simply getting close to people. In the end, this isn’t only about politics – it’s about friendship: I think of the right of return as having my best Palestinian friends as neighbors in Israel too, for them to be around me whenever I miss them.

Dedicated to my comrades in Students for Justice in Palestine

I should have taken your email! People were all around us at the rally, shouting and singing, I really wanted to talk to someone but I didn’t notice how well you were listening, how you had patience to talk to me and read the flyer I was distributing. You had a red beard and skullcap, and a blue shirt with “Israeli Peace” on it. I wore the black shirt of Students for Justice in Palestine.

You read my flyer and asked me, “where it says in 1967 Israel occupied more territories populated by Palestinians, what do you mean by ‘more’? Are you saying Israel of 1948 was also conquered”?

I know what you are really asking: do “we people” recognize “your” right to exist, or… you know, want to throw you into the sea?

Dude, I’m an Israeli Jew, just like you! I don’t want to throw any Israelis into the sea, honestly. I’m a horrible swimmer and I have asthma, so although the sea in Tel Aviv is warmer than around here, I’d rather just look at the waves, maybe dip in my toes once in a while. Besides, the sea gets polluted: throwing people in could be dangerous!

But because I am Israeli, I know where you’re coming from. This question is one of our formulas, isn’t it? The ones we use when people tell us they were displaced in 1948, and we get really scared. You know them all by heart, don’t you? “These things happen in wars”; “If they had won they would have done the same”; “If they hadn’t rejected the partition plan in 1947, it wouldn’t have happened”; “the Arab states should have done more for them”, etc., etc.

I’ve tried not using those formulas and just listening to Palestinians telling me the place they are from, the place they can’t return to. I’ve tried looking at them straight in the eye when they say it, without responding. I feel so nervous it makes me sick in the stomach. I cringe. I feel like I’m going to explode.

Because when I look them in the eye, it stops being “us and “them”. For one moment, I wonder what if I was “them”. In Lydda, Yitzhak Rabin drove them out, firing shots above their heads; he tells the story in his memoirs. In Al-Majdal, which is Ashkelon today, they were loaded onto trucks after the fighting ended, and dumped on the other side of the border. In Jaffa they really were driven into the sea, under bombardment. Children were lost in the waves as their families fled to Gaza in fishing boats (did you know that? It was we who threw them into the sea, not the other way round!).  And then we took all of their property and they stayed refugees, for sixty years. For sixty years!

Now they are here, and here are their children, looking at me, straight in the eye. Do you see why we are so scared?

But they are just looking at me, actually they are smiling. You may not believe me, but I get regularly hugged by Palestinians. Not everyone hates us, Aryeh (I think you said that was your name?). I have Palestinian friends: they cook for me; they laugh at my jokes; we gossip; they burn discs for me; we get all mushy and cheesy with each other.

Yeah, don’t tell me: maybe my friends are nice, but how can I generalize? What about all the suicide bombers, all those photos of little babies dressed with weapons, don’t “they” teach their children to hate us? And then I could quote you some surveys about attitudes to Israel and willingness to compromise, and there we go, straight back to cliché-land.

Let’s go another way, and look at that fear again. A lot of it has got to do with this Right of Return thing. What do you imagine when you think of it? For a long time I was too scared to even try to picture it, but when I did, the first image that came up was from the Westerns I watched as a kid: the Indians swarming down the hills, shrieking, shooting arrows or whatever weapon people use nowadays: The attack of the barbarians.

But maybe imagine something different: a plane landing in Ben-Gurion airport with some “new immigrants” from the refugee camps in Lebanon. This really pompous politician is out to greet them, smiling from ear to ear. The first refugee comes down the steps and shakes people’s hands. The politician uses some fancy clichés, welcoming them to their homeland. These cute kids, third graders, are standing in line, with huge bouquets of flowers, too big for them to hold, pointing at the refugees who just got off the plane, looking a bit dazed by the strong sunlight and the humidity. And then some representative from the Ministry of the Interior goes up and gets their details. She’ll be calling them tomorrow about arrangements, where to go to from the hostel, when they can learn Hebrew, she’ll give them the contact information of the organizations that have volunteered to help them. And welcome back home, by the way.

There, isn’t that a nicer image than the previous one? But you think I’m totally crazy, don’t you? Don’t I realize the implications? What about the demographic balance? What about the Jewish nature of the state? What about all we have built over the last sixty years? Don’t Jews need a safe haven? And our right for self-determination?

So the options you are giving me, Aryeh, are these: we could get to keep our right for self-determination, our safe haven, my favorite bookshop-cafe in Rabin square in Tel Aviv, the songs my mother likes to hear on the radio on the holidays, our wonderful Hebrew slang, our “dugri” directness and our weather (well, maybe not our weather, at least not in August). But then I need to look my Palestinian friends in the eye and tell them: no matter how much you miss your homeland, you are never going back. Not you, not your parents, not your children, not your grandchildren, nor your grandchildren’s grandchildren. We got to miss the Holy Land for two thousand years, but you’re not Jewish, so you will never ever be allowed to return.

Or, we could completely destroy Israel, raze everything to the ground. Bring bulldozers, knock down all the beautiful buildings of Tel Aviv University, the mounds of grass, the corner outside the Arts building where students and teachers smoke weed together, the little frame-shaped sculpture that overlooks the sea, the café outside the university with the hot Moroccan shakshuka, we can knock down all of these and turn the university back into Sheikh Muwwanis, and let the refugees live in the village that was there before.

And you’re saying these are the only two possibilities. Seriously? Is that the best we Jews can come up with? We, the People of the Book? With Einstein and all our Nobel prize winners? With our Ladino love songs and marvelous Yiddish curses? With all of our films, winning prizes at every festival? Our thousands of years of poetry, from the Song of Songs to Amichai and Yonah Volach? The agricultural innovations we export to the whole world? Are you seriously suggesting that these two miserable options are the best we can think of? Why, I find that almost offensive. Aren’t we a little bit smarter than that?

Do I have a solution? I do have some ideas, but what I really want is to get people talking. I want to hear Palestinians telling us what they miss most, where they would like to live, what they would want it to be like. And we could tell them what is important to us, what we have learned over the last sixty years. It’s like two flatmates about to move in together – where shall we put the couch? What time do you get up in the morning? Oh no! Do you snore? Don’t waste all of that hot water in the shower! Those are the conversations we need to be having.

Now you really think I’m nuts, don’t you? We could be talking millions of people here, it’s a huge upheaval, where will we put them all?

The short answer is – we’ve done it before. Every time a wave of Jewish immigrants came to Israel, people said it would never work, there would be no room, everyone will starve. But we managed, somehow. This is no different. In fact, we’re stronger and more experienced now.

And the longer answer is that the reason this seems unimaginable is simply because of our fear. That fear has deep roots: Jews and Israelis have definitely been attacked and hurt, time and time again. It’s through this fear that we tend to think we are dealing with some kind of virus that must be kept in isolation. But Palestinians are human beings, and they deserve to be treated that way. We really could try and do that for a change, instead of forcing them to the other side of the border, setting up walls and checkpoints and prisons, and pretending any of that is a solution.

To truly overcome fear, reading this letter won’t be enough. What you need to do is to hang out with some of my Palestinian friends, see them celebrating Hanukka and Passover with us, stuff grapeleaves with them, all of that mushiness I was referring to earlier. You have no idea how much fun it is: let me know when you’re coming. Trust me, you’ll enjoy it! Just give it a try.

Slums on the Bagmati river

For example, when Nepal is introduced as a “poor” country,  what is being referred to is the present. On the one hand, they are talking about the government’s tiny budget, endlessly supplemented by program-specific grants from non-governmental organizations, foreign governments and different branches of the international government like the World Bank. More than 80% of the health, education and probably other budgets comes from these non-governmental governments, systems that are largely dysfunctional and unaccountable (while the Nepali Royal Army is an image of efficiency and uncommon job security). The idea is that the government is weak and poor, so the nongovernments have to help the government. The assumption is that if the government “worked,” then everything in Nepal would be fixed, that essentially the problem with Nepal is poor governance.

On the other hand, they are talking about the poverty of the people. Although the vast majority of people in Nepal live in rural villages, when foreigners talk about poverty they are mostly talking about what they see in Kathmandu, the extremes symbolic of the rule. People collecting garbage to recycle, fishing through trash to find fruits to sell. Child porters carrying 170kg at a time, many under 12 years old (10% of the GDP or more is from child labor). Slum dwellers living on the banks of the garbage-choked Bagmati river, where no one else wants to live because of the monsoon floods. And of course, the infamous street children, who live their lives in the streets getting high on glue. Yesterday, one of the kids pointed to a stray dog and said cheerfully in Nepali “Just like me.”

Probably like many third-world cities, Kathmandu assaults the average middle-class first worlder with both presence and absence. The presence of piles of burning garbage and throngs of people. The absence of recognizable signs of authority, from street signs and street lights to animal control, from paved roads to city planning. On the other hand, the absence of central authority only makes it all the more amazing at how good people can be at managing with each other. Although most of Kathmandu’s residents have no access to any discussion on governance, Kathmandu (miraculously) works, day after day, probably with less theft and violent crimes than most of America’s heavily-policed cities. Despite the poverty and inequality, Kathmandu’s residents offer each other admirable amounts of their already limited space. One of the TBT workers said that his greatest culture shock upon returning to Israel is all about buses. In Nepal 30 people or more cram into a microbus and still manage patient smiles, even when sitting on top of each other. On the other hand in Israel, despite the large, roomy, air-conditioned bus traveling on the fully paved road, the people are far more impatient to say the least.

The poverty in Kathmandu is undeniable, sometimes described as “crushing.” But when we say these people are ‘impoverished,’ that implies causes, agents, reasons. If they are impoverished, who or what is doing the impoverishing? And if they are crushed, who is doing the crushing? (And no, it can’t just be a ‘lack of awareness’). Unfortunately, the questions implied by the word ‘impoverishment’ remain largely inert in the absence of history.

My first exposure to history in Nepal is Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy by Manjushree Thapa, a problematic and conflicted book by one of Nepal’s elite liberal humanists trying to understand her country. What I understood from the book and from the smattering of historical content in the program is that Nepal’s “history” is actually two histories. First there is the widely known ‘political history’ of Nepal, frustrating as it is irrelevant. Beginning with the ‘unification’ of the country by a particular royal dynasty 250 years ago, this history is an endless series of soap-opera successions, betrayals, and power struggles with local and international powers backing opponents and making deals to top the intrigue. Most of Nepal’s people are not mentioned, the assumption being that they are somehow implied in the endless royal drama. In 1950 the royal dictatorship was briefly replaced by their elite challengers/inheritors, political parties, who rode on popular desire for some alternative. They behaved in much the same way as different lineages of royal inheritors had, except with more instability, with ten governments taking power in as many years. The second half of the 20^th century is a struggle for power between different segments of the royal family and the political parties, culminating in a second 1950’s style popular movement followed by the reinstitution of parliamentary democracy in 1990. Then, out of nowhere, the People’s War from 1996 to 2006, a ten year insurgency led by the Maoist communists of Nepal. Violence, refugees, natural disasters, broken treaties, a strange massacre in the royal family, and the negotiated settlement with the Maoists come in a rapid and incoherent succession, a feeling of watching a massive spectacle that one has no active part or understanding in. Thapa communicates this brilliantly in her book.

On the other hand, very much in the background and totally separate from this traditional telling of Nepali history, is the (depoliticized) economic history. Development projects exploding with the reinstitution of the royal dictatorship in 1960, and roughly since then a growing corpus of increasing statistics in a myriad of areas such as literacy, poverty, nutrition rates, number of schools, number of people. The arc of progress made of tiny numbers stretching out like  rainbow while the politicians bicker.

If accepted, this history would lead one to forsake politics for the sake of the pure, light-bringing progress of economic development. While the politicians quibble, the apolitical non-governments have been the only ones to do Nepal any good. Give us economics, save us from politics. Although this history is unintelligible and explains nothing, it is its very unintelligibility that achieves its political ends: to make people stay as far away from politics, to make it reasonable to think that economic development can be apolitical, to dismiss history as hornet’s nest of cynical power-politics that no person should even try to know or understand.

But under scrutiny, this history raises questions. For example, the People’s War turns out not to have been launched by the Maoists. It began with government attacks on villages where the movement later to be known as the Maoists was operating. Apparently, they were trying to organize people separately from the political system, something that threatened the sovereignty of the government was considered a threat existential enough to warrant massacring some unarmed civilians (this pattern would be repeated). The resulting insurgency fought the government to a standstill and even today controls large swaths of Nepal’s countryside.

Now, I’m not saying that the Maoists were perfect or selfless or even good, but rather that no insurgency can survive for one year, much less ten, much less fight the government to a standstill without massive popular support whose origins cannot be dismissed. Apparently they redistributed land in some places, forced banks to return confiscated land deeds, made landlords forgive massive debts, etc. On the other hand, Manjushree Thapa, the author of “Forget Kathmandu,” probably echoes widespread assumptions among Kathmandu’s urban intelligentsia about the Maoists: that the Maoist insurgency is a mindless pastime of impressionable villagers trying to vent their frustration at their own backwardness, or that most of their rural supporters are being coerced or threatened. These liberal elites explain that the insurgency is just an extreme symptom of a lack of development and/or “true” democracy. The march of development must be restored. The cynical, political past must be left behind in favor of it.

But there are more troubling facts. Leaders from a new ‘Janjati’ (ethnic/indigenous) party came to visit TBT, and they talked about all kinds of crazy things like the imposition of the caste system through a ‘Hindu state,’ how this imposition was used to dispossess people of their lands, how as recently as sixty years ago many people lost their land because elites had registered it in their own names. And of course, the sharecropper system that is one of the universal constants in Nepali rural life: most villagers must work the lands of rich, upper-caste, absentee landlords and pay half of their harvest as rent. Many if not most have lived on land that is not legally theirs for hundreds of years. Although the leaders who told us this were themselves elites with long histories in politics, quite possibly instrumentalizing their ethnic background for political support (but why is that only a problem when members of indigenous or marginalized ethnic groups do it?), this history was something different than the banal power contests that passed for history until then.

Yes, it turns out that not all is quiet and pastoral in the average Nepali village. In the two villages that I visited as part of the orientation, TBT workers explained that most farmers did not own enough land to feed themselves, with the best land usually owned by a minority of wealthy (sometimes absentee) landlords. The unequal land situation forces poor/impoverished farmers to relentlessly plow both their lands and the lands they sharecrop, leading to soil degradation and decreasing yields. The choice between rural hunger and backbreaking labor on the one hand, and urban poverty on the other is steadily sharpening. Like so many third world cities, Kathmandu actually a refugee camp for the rural poor, whose minimal services are mostly funded and partially administered by nongovernmental organizations and foreign grants to prevent the situation from becoming too bad to be suffered quietly. Through first-hand experience, Tevel Be’Tzedek workers have learned that virtually all of Kathmandu’s poverty is village poverty transported, that the urban poor are largely first generation rural refugees exchanging rural debt slavery for urban wage slavery.

Virtually everyone with a grassroots experience of social problems in Nepal knows that the problem is in the villages, that the problem disproportionately affects lower-caste/ethnic groups, and that the problem is land. Much fewer people have an idea of how this situation came about, how 80% of rural people came to own only 20% of the arable land.

But precisely at this point, the conversation ends. This is the end of the road for NGOs, because the history of land ownership is Nepal is a political history, and the question of land distribution is a political question. The separation of Nepal’s political history and its economic future must remain sacred and respected. After all, politics/history is impossible to understand and frustrating, it is best avoided. For all intents and purposes, then, the question of the historical origins of the very crushing poverty that NGOs seek to address is avoided.

This is a testament to how coincidental history is to the work of most development NGOs, a testament also to the limits of what “impoverishment” can mean in these circles. Obviously, the answer to the question of “how things came to be this way” would force nongovernmental organizations to deal with what is politically wrong in Nepal, to trace economics and politics back to the point where they become inseparable, then to trace it back to the present and stitch economics and politics back up again. It would force NGOs to grapple not only with the “impoverished,” but also with the political, economic and social actors, processes and systems that have and continue to impoverish them.

Perhaps the negative practical consequences of such a move are so great that they make it impossible to think it about openly. Wealthy land owners are after all actively running both Nepal’s government and many of its non-governments. But there is also a sense that TBT as a foreign organization has no legitimacy to look at the issue historically and politically. In Tevel B’Tzedek a series of largely informal understandings have arisen out of the direct experience of two years of trial and error. One is the sense that the mission is to learn about and empower the people we work with to think about the problems themselves, because they have legitimacy we do not to resist their enslavement. Although TBT volunteer activities have been formally confined to educational work related to health, nutrition, and agricultural improvement, there is a sense that there is a broader direction to the work that will somehow lead to greater autonomy and independent action, mainly exemplified by women’s groups and theater groups that aim to develop autonomous thought and expression in groups.

Needless to say, I believe that TBT needs to have a broader vision for their work that is firmly grounded in an explicit historical analysis. I believe this vision should include the creation of eventual creation of autonomous community organizations and networks with independent agendas that TBT can support and be a part of rather than proscribe. But I also believe that TBT’s unique model of direct and open-ended engagement of volunteer groups with village and urban Nepali communities and the willingness to follow and build on the conclusions of each group allowed TBT to reach deeper understandings of the issues than many (large, hierarchical) NGOs who have been in Nepal for years or even decades. Although I call for more historical analysis and reflection on the origins of present problems, I think that TBT is some proof of how loose, nonhierarchical structures and grassroots engagement more naturally lead to political directions. If nongovernments adopt more decentralized, democratic structures, it might only be a matter of time before they can no longer see themselves only as unpaid government assistants and start seeing themselves as allies of Nepali activists working for their liberation.

Yesterday, Students for Justice in Palestine held its first event of the year at UC Berkeley. The Multicultural Center at the MLK student building was packed – I had to sit on the floor between the aisles for most of the evening. Our speakers, Israeli refusers Maya Wind and Netta Mishly, gave a highly eloquent presentation not only about their movement, the Shministim (twelfth-graders refusing to serve in the army), but on basic facts of the occupation that necessitate this refusal. I could hear many productive and stimulating conversations going on around me all throughout the evening, involving not just hardcore I/P activists but many who came from a different perspective. The discussions continued into the night, as several of us went out to a local café and to a party, in true SJP style.

Maya and Netta insisted on a very openly structured Q&A session, well beyond the comfort level of the rest of us. Although the talk focused on the occupation, the inevitable one-state/two state question came up: did the two speakers want to dismantle Israel, as the evening’s sponsors want to do? Maya (I think) answered that as an Israeli, she cannot support dismantling Israel (for me, this is the common error of confusing the country with the regime – many Iranians or Chinese support dismantling their regimes without destroying their countries). Netta, on the other hand, said she is not afraid to live in one secular state. Representatives from SJP and from Jewish Voice for Peace insisted that neither organization had a position on one-state/two states.

For most Zionists, this seems like sacrilege: how can one not have a position on this most fundamental question, the right of Jews for self-determination? Can this stem from anything other than an anti-Jewish sentiment? How can one continue a conversation with anyone who doesn’t believe in this obvious right? I thought I would use this opportunity to articulate some of my own thoughts on the subject. I don’t claim to represent anyone but myself, a non-Zionist Israeli, active for almost three years in SJP.

A lot of people simply make Zionism a private case of nationalism, and then continue to debate whether nationalism itself is a good idea. I think this is unnecessary, because Zionism is an unusual and a-typical kind of nationalism. When the French, or even the Palestinians, began talking of themselves as a nation, this meant a transition from local or religious identities into a more comprehensive one (in the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, respectively). This was also the case for another form of Jewish nationalism, the East European Bund. Zionism is nationalism with a significant twist: it was all about creating a national home for Jews in a country where Jews were, originally, a small minority. Some the original Zionists fantasized about how excited the local natives would be about this project, promising to bring them progress and prosperity. But if they failed to do so, there were other options too: as Nur Masalha has documented, from the beginning, the option of transfer was on the table for those whose response to becoming a minority in their own country was less than enthusiastic.

Throughout its history, most Zionist practices created a basic asymmetry between the growing structures of the homeland for the Jewish people, and the bystanders, who were barred from participating. This is very clear, for example from the text of the Balfour Declaration: Jews deserve a national home and representative national bodies, while non-Jews (the vast majority of Palestine’s population at the time) have some religious rights, but nothing comparable. Wherever Israel would be established, wherever its borders would have been, this would have been the case: anyone belonging to the indigenous Palestinian population would have to have lived as a non-Jew in a Jewish state, an inevitable second-class citizen.

Or, of course, they could have moved elsewhere. It is incredible for me to witness how common this answer is, how deeply inculcated this Israeli attitude is: why can’t those pesky Palestinians just move already, if their nationality is so important to them? You hear this across the board, from extreme right-wingers to self-declared leftists.

I think this widespread expectation that Palestinians will just get up and leave comes from several sources: one piece is Zionist education, that skips directly from biblical times to the nineteenth century, teaching us almost nothing of what happened in between – including the roots of modern-day Palestinians in their land, going back many centuries. With the last two thousand years (since the destruction of the Second Temple) mostly erased from view, Palestinians can appear as temporary guests who just arrived yesterday and will be gone tomorrow. Where are the museums of Yaffa’s or Ramlah’s history? Why did my Tel-Aviv school take me to see archeological remains from the Philistine period, near Tel Aviv University, but not the last standing houses of Sheikh Muwwanis, the Palestinian village that existed on that very spot until 1948?

Another piece is the historical Jewish experience. Most Jews are from all over, not living in one country for too long, often as a result of persecution. On my mothers’ side, my family is from Britain, Turkey, Egypt, Italy and Spain, going back to the great expulsion of 1492. On my father’s side we’re from Syria, but also from Russia, six generations back. The idea of migrating from country to country comes so naturally to us that we have trouble understanding the depth of Palestinian connections to particular places, particular villages and towns where their families had lived for centuries. Different villages have typical accents, sometimes typical clothes or unique shrines. The same plots of land were passed on from generation to generation. Famous families were linked to specific cities. To expect someone to give up all of that and move elsewhere is crushingly cruel.

Continuing the Zionist project in the present means more than preserving Jewish identity. I have never heard any Palestinians object to playing Jewish songs on the radio for the holidays, or to teaching Hebrew in schools. The issue of providing a safe haven for persecuted Jews is complicated, but solvable (I would start from distinguishing true refugees who want to come to Israel from those who were pushed into doing so by the government. At every historical junction, most preferred to go to the US or other western countries, and it often took a lot of pressure from the Zionist leadership to direct them to Israel, where they would help solve the “demographic problem”. For instance, I remember how Israel pressured the U.S. in the nineties not to accept too many Jews from the former Soviet Union).

Zionism today, as the state is practicing it, means taking concrete steps to ensure Israeli Jews have the upper hand. It means constant surveillance of Israel’s Arab population, security service involvement in the appointment of teachers, confiscating land from Arabs for Jewish-only communities, preventing urbanization of Palestinian citizens because they are easier to control in villages. It means constant talk of the “demographic threat” as equivalent to the “security threat”: a tiny, smiling, laughing child is the same as a dangerous explosive – a dire threat to our lives and security. What does this racism do to us? How do we let our thinking be twisted in such a way, beyond the most basic human feelings and values?

It means projects like Birthright, that welcome American Jews to Israel, even if their families haven’t been there for at least two thousand years (if ever), but tell Palestinians who were actually born there that they cannot come – simply because they are Arabs. You could say Palestinians as a people are homeless, so that celebrating our privileges in this way is like eating a lavish meal in front of a homeless person.

So these are some of the reasons why I don’t think continuing with a Jewish state in the present is a good idea. Why, if so, doesn’t SJP endorse an alternative, such as a one-state solution? Our mission statement, written by Borderline Crimes’ very own Yaman Salahi, puts it best: “It is not within our rights to decide ourselves what that solution is, only to amplify those voices working against injustice”. I think that what is important here is that we resist the temptation to engage in pseudo-politics. Too many times people feel they are taking a serious stance by playing “if I were Prime Minister…”, but this is really nothing more than a parlor game, and a pretty clichéd one at that. We need to think in terms of effective actions we can take as the citizens that we are, not as high-up politicians. No one is waiting with baited breath to hear what a bunch of students at UC Berkeley think the whole regime should be like, but we do have other, more realistic options. One of them is what Maya, one of the refusers, called “economic activism” – putting pressure on specific companies (of whatever nationality) that profit from the occupation. SJP tries to think creatively about what we can do from our current position, with our current resources. This is one of the reasons we don’t have an official position about one-state/two states, and why we don’t devote our energies to advocating an overall solution.

But nevertheless, on a personal level, I have found it very beneficial to talk, or even just to imagine a one-state solution and what it would look like. Not because it could happen tomorrow, but because this is the equivalent of committing yourself to a long-term partnership: as an Israeli, I am always going to live with Palestinians, in a relationship that I will endeavor to make equal. With all Palestinians, regardless of how the state categorizes them at the moment – citizens of Israel, residents of the West Bank and Gaza, and the external refugees. I have my right of self determination and they have theirs, and neither trumps the other. It is my duty to distinguish my legitimate rights from illegitimate privileges, and to earn others’ respect for my rights by seriously committing myself to protect theirs.

I don’t have a blueprint for this state: it requires a long, ongoing conversation. In order to take part in this conversation, I had to go against my fears, every step of the way: my fear of the “terrorist language” Arabic; my fear of going to the occupied territories and getting shot or kidnapped (aren’t Palestinians inherently violent?); my fear of phrases like “the right of return”, which turned out not to be a codeword for “throw the Jews into the sea”, as I had heard so many times; my fear of finding out exactly what happened in 1948, including in my hometown Tel Aviv, including at the sites of my parents’ house and my university. And I learned not to use these fears as an excuse to legitimate my privileges.

Because I’m not doing my Palestinian allies any favors. My activism isn’t a form of pity or of guilt. It’s because I know my liberation is completely bound up with theirs. I can only work out of my racism, the racism and fears I internalized so deeply for so many years, with their help. And thanks to them, it truly is liberating. Every step of the way.

Shana Tova.

But none of that changes the fact that I frequently find myself sitting in front of a very nice man or woman talking about how the army changed their life, what a positive experience it was in retrospect. They speak fondly of  how hard/boring/demanding it was (in a way I might remember freshman year). The occupation? Palestinians being arrested without charges? Settlers being protected as they steal land, destroy property and beat people up? Exceptions, exceptions, not as bad as you see it here on TV. So funny that both anti-occupation activists and Israeli soldiers see American TVs as the place where everyone gets confused.

But of course, they are not equal sides fighting over the same reality from the same position of power. Millions of Palestinians are not lying about their oppression, and Israelis in general (and Israeli soldiers in particular), are systematically separated from that reality until they go to police it. I also know about Breaking the Silence and the amazing testimonies that they get. They speak of an entire shadow reality that is not discussed or recognized by most Israelis. I understand the conventional arguments about propaganda, about outright intentional lies by powerful people to hide the injustices that are being perpetrated. I don’t mean to imply that this is not part of the problem, but I want to think in this post about how it is not the entire or only problem. Rather than exposing and denouncing lies, I want to ask in this post about how the system creates and maintains the disjunctures in information and experience between soldiers and anti-occupation activists.

For example, something that could fall under this line of inquiry is the fact that because Israeli soldiers only go to Palestinian towns and villages armed and in uniform, Palestinians always correctly see them as representatives of the Jewish state (from which they are automatically excluded) restricting their freedoms and assisting in the dispossession of their land. Consequently, all former Israeli soldiers report a glowering, hostile attitude from Palestinians and unproblematically assume that this attitude would continue if they were not in uniform, if they were not armed, etc, with disastrous, highly racialized consequences (knifings, stabbings, lynchings). Perhaps because of this experience, of seeing people afraid of you and angry at you (without seeing what they see and why), Israelis are mortally afraid  of Palestinians. The overwhelming number of routine contacts between Israeli and Palestinian activists in the anti-occupation movement is dismissed as merely a massive exception to what they perceive to be an unbridgeable, violent border between the two national identities.

But maybe that’s not the case at all. It’s just an idea, something to look into.

Another idea I was thinking about is the division of labor in the IDF and how that serves to cut up and divide soldiers’ experience of the entire situation so that it will be more directly explainable. For example, for anyone familiar with the army it is well known that Israeli-Jewish women have a profoundly different service than Israeli-Jewish men. It seems that their service comprises teaching classes about weapons use, in the process of which they create really strong support systems for each other within the army. The men go off and guard the Kav (the ever-moving border, literally ‘the line’). It might be that for them, army service has little to anything to do with coming into contact with the people under occupation. And how could the male soldiers explain it to them without raining down on their parade? Isn’t it safer just to ignore what you think is happening and play along? As an Israeli male soldiers coming to spend a weekend at home, would you really want to waste your sparse vacation days trying to convince the women soldiers that there is something very wrong about what they’re doing?

Ok, all this is just prep for this last example, from which the post takes its title. MaGav, Mishmar HaGvul, the Border Guard or Border Patrol. Every unit in the IDF has its internal reputation that is the intersection of several categories: dedicated or lazy, smart or dumb, rich or poor, country or city, elite or run of the mill or worse. In some ways, the units act like Israel’s colleges, or more correctly Israel’s fraternities, with flags, slogans, shirts (a few of which became infamous), and reputations. One of the major differences is that a central authority decides what the role of each of these fraternities/units is going to be in the maintenance of…security, of course. What else?

Well, what’s the role of MaGav? If you’ve ever seen a film about Bil’in or a film of any other nonviolent protest area, you’ve seen them. They are the unit of the army in charge of policing Israel’s innumerable borders. In East Jerusalem, in the illegally annexed land next to the wall, and who knows what other places. Soldiers from this unit have been caught with YouTube videos showing humiliations of Palestinians passing through their areas. It is generally agreed that they do a lot of the dirty, day to day work of the occupation while other units are mostly all about one-night only raids, and guarding bases and outposts in rotations. Speaking of which, apparently MaGavniks don’t switch from place to place: they stay put in one place for their entire three years, getting extremely “bored,” which is why they begin doing “stupid shit.” Without exception, all the commentary I’ve heard from soldiers about MaGav has been negative. They are the outcasts of the army, the dumb ones, the violent idiots who make the rest of them look bad. If American TV is the number #1 cause of the bad image they get (unjustifiably in their eyes) MaGav is the second. They can’t speak lowly enough of them.

All of this became infinitely more interesting to me when I discovered that these unit categorizations occurred parallel with the recognized (yet unexplained) ethnic configurations of each unit. It seems that some of the units are more Ashkenazi (white Israeli-Jewish, descended from European Jews) while others, like MaGav, are known to be brown units. In a video of a recent protest in Bidu and Beit Surik, the well-known anti-occupation activist Ezra Nawi, who is himself Mizrahi (a Jew from Arab countries, literally ‘Easterner’), comments in a mixture of sadness and humor about the ethnic background of the Israeli soldiers who came to protect the annexation of the nearby Palestinian village’s land for Jewish uses. In minute 4:05, he says :

“Our Druze brothers came to make order here! And the Ethiopians should also say a kind word! And also our brothers the Frenks, who are the basis for the MaGav.”

Frenks is a slang word I don’t know. But the Druze and the Ethiopians are two groups of people who serve in the army but are also of a disempowered and racialized socio-economic class.Then he turns to the soldiers themselves and says:

“I want Ashkenazis in MaGav! Why aren’t there Ashkenazis in MaGav? ”

Nawi was recently arrested for trying to prevent a home from being demolished with the usual canard about “assaulting a soldier.” (more info).Nawi writes about the intersections between his Mizrahi identity and his relationship to the racism of the occupation apparatus. He expressed similar concerns about MaGav’s makeup in his article in the nation. In it he writes:

:…as a Mizrahi Jew (descended from Jewish communities in the Arab and Muslim world), a gay man and a plumber, I do not belong to the elite of Israeli society and do not fit the stereotype of the Israeli peacenik–namely, an intellectual Jew of Ashkenazi decent. Actually, the police officers who constantly arrest me and I are part of the same social strata. I was programmed like them, have a similar accent, know their jargon and our historical background is comparable. And yet, in their eyes I am on and for the other side, the Palestinian side.

This simple fact seems to disturb them so much that they have to vilify me; that is the only way their worldview will continue making sense. I threaten them precisely because I undermine the categories and stereotypes through which they understand the world.”

Here we have a surreal situation. Why would the most disempowered, racialized, socio-economically depressed communities be most represented in the army unit that, at least for activists and protesters, comprises the very face of the apartheid regime in the territories? Why would Ashkenazi (white), socio-economically elevated soldiers be effectively rerouted to other work?

I believe that I can speak with more confidence on the possible consequences of this practice rather than its actual causes. In practice, the groups most disenfranchised by the current system have their standing in society predicated and conditioned on the oppression and dispossession of people they would otherwise be more identified with, the Palestinians. The people with most sociologicaly incentives to cross the border between soldiers and Palestinian are literally placed in charge of it: Israel’s borderline populations are placed in charge of the border themselves, they are given the opportunity to hold themselves above one of the only populations below them on the totem poll, earning their membership in Israeli society with every border defended, regardless of the rationale. Each of these communities, the Druze, the Mizrahim, the Ethiopians, has and continues to have serious problems with the state and complementary histories of activism. Ethiopians are excluded from Jewish schools and work, and protested/rioted when their blood was rejected for far it was contaminated with AIDS. Mizrahi activists posed a powerful challenge to the state a generation ago with the Israeli Black Panthers. Druze activists are starting to claim a Palestinian identity. Unregulated, who knows what they could do?

But we have forgotten Ashkenazis, who are also being managed (this time with privilege). Most of the soldiers I’ve talked to are Ashkenazis, which is how my thinking about this post started in the first place. What does it mean for more white Israeli soldiers to get a pass on confronting protesters? For one, secular white Israelis usually have more power in society, so there is some incentive to keep their actions targeted and framed, rather than ongoing and contradictory. More powerful people might go out and get really militant if they were forced to do what MaGav does. They might even refuse in greater numbers, putting even more tension on the consensus. Further, most of the anti-occupation protesters from the Israeli side are Ashkenazis themselves; no one wants someone’s family member, classmate, or future roommate to be protesting against them, do they? Has that ever happened? Why or why not? And most importantly, what might the soldiers decide to do in those situations?

I may be totally wrong. I anticipate that some people will tell me I am, and I welcome these challenges. I’m sure that many high class Ashkenazis do the routine grind of the occupation and then keep it to themselves, or somehow justify it, or get their experience of things regulated a different way, or go to Breaking the Silence. And of course, I haven’t talked at all about upbringing in Israel, how the occupation is framed there, how the army frames actions etc. etc. There are no small number of causes for soldiers to not see the injustice of the Palestinian’s situation, and no small number of causes for them to say nothing about it even if they do see it.

But the situation I’ve outlined is in any way true, then it presents an interesting conundrum for the anti-occupation movement. Here I am, white Israeli, yelling at brown people to stop oppressing other brown people while at the same time, white soldiers and perhaps even Israeli society in general participate in the shaming of MaGav, the idiots, the incompetents, the violent, the cruel, all words that all over the world comprise different words for denoting one thing: “brown.” But what can we do with the actual cruelty?! MaGav enforces cruel laws, arbitrary policies, racist settler agendas, etc. etc.

If it’s true, we should start thinking about it. How can this awareness be built into practice? How can we talk to soldiers from disadvantaged backgrounds about the unjust position they have been placed in? How can we hold ourselves apart from and denounce discourses that assist in the racialization of MaGav, and the consequent white-washing of the occupation? How can we draw a connection between Israeli people of color (Israeli-identified Druze and Bedouin, Ethiopians, and Mizrahim) and the machinery of ethnic segregation in Israel/Palestine? Or is all that just condescension?

One more piece. The Movement for Dignified Living is a grassroots movement in Be’er Sheva that resists bank-initiated housing evictions resulting from predatory lending. They practice nonviolent direct action to radically challenge the power dynamics between their largely Mizrahi constituents and the banking system. One of the most amazing successes of this movement and its founder, Haim Bar-Yaakov, (who, by the way, reminds me a lot of Ezra Nawi– Mizrahi, middle-aged, amazing activist), is the ability to directly engage police officers who are of the same disadvantaged background and cause them to rethink the rationalizations they are given for evicting people (they are lazy, they are thieves, they need to be dealt with). The police actually inform the movement of evictions before they take place so that they have an excuse to stop!

The MDL (Movement for Dignified Living) is involved in a series of transitions. Their result will determine its future. But their experience suggests to me that confrontations with MaGav could be irrevocably changed if represented in the activism were people from the soldiers’ own neighborhoods, classes, or even families. In other words, the success of the movement in my mind depends to a greater degree than ever imagined on its racial diversity. If the movement is white, even radically deconstructing white privilege, it will be easier for soldiers from disempowered communities, like in MaGav, to dismiss them. The more diverse the movement, the more the contradictions of the system will be revealed, the more difficult it will be for MaGavniks to enforce the ethnic borders that are their charge.

The dominant political dogma in America holds that the ballot box is the most effective means of reform or change, thus the first task at hand is to pay close attention to the underlying logic of this means of political participation. Voting is discursively conceived of as a way to make our voices heard. Voter registration campaigns emphasize this point in trying to convince us that we can effect change this way, but one wonders how “change” can possibly be non-partisan, unspecific, apolitical, and not bound to any particular program or agenda, as these registration campaigns often manifest themselves. Under this model of voting, political engagement is basically reduced to polling. If voting is merely a way of making one’s voice heard, it’s not quite clear why it’s a better alternative than writing a letter to the editor. Moreover, incumbency re-election in Congress is often well over 90%, so the idea that voting in and of itself leads to tangible changes is not convincing at face value, and indeed it renders citizen control over government a mere illusion.[1] Furthermore, even if it can be said that this pattern of re-election is not problematic, one can criticize the very structure of the voting system and the way that districts are often drawn in order to give one party a non-competitive monopoly on seats in Congress.[2] Gerrymandering brings into question whether those who win elections really do so on the merits or as a result of careful engineering.

Though I believe electoral reform is necessary, that is not my purpose in writing this. My critique is intended to apply even in the case of a more democratic voting system. What is left unanswered by the dogma of voting is the following question, especially relevant today: what can we do when voting doesn’t lead to the kinds of changes we need? Is it really the case that all we can do is sit back and watch, cursing the politicians involved, while merely continuing with business as usual, hoping for a miracle?

It is precisely this condition of powerlessness and desperation that helps us to see what is at stake when we pretend that voting is the only, or best, means of political participation. Voting fails to address the relationship of power between constituents and elected representatives, and in fact only re-affirms it, even imparts upon it a sense of legitimacy. Media coverage gives the impression that all there is to political tension in this country is the predictable duel between Republicans and Democrats–it never has enough depth to conceive of political tensions in a different, more important, and more relevant way: as between the governing class (which encapsulates both the Republican and Democratic party machines, as well as other loci of political power) and the people left out of that class. The difference can be understood in the disproportionate influence some people or entities have on government, the disproportionate amount of power they hold. As much as politicians feign service to the people, other controlling interests guide their legislative and executive actions. [3]

Our sense of empowerment is abated by a media that is basically a spokesperson for the governing class. We can observe this in mainstream media coverage of health care reform, which is covered as if it were a horse race and the only question for us as viewers is who will win. The media treats us as observers of politics rather than participants in it. We see and hear little about what regular people who are not a part of the elite governing class actually want to see in healthcare reform, and when we do, we only get their views in terms decided upon by the political elite. “Do you agree with so-and-so’s plan?” The biggest sham of recent weeks is the broadcast media’s fixation on the townhalls, as if the healthcare debate were really taking place there rather than in private meetings between career lobbyists, insurance executives, and government officials. [4][5][6]

The worst part, though, is that allegedly grassroots and progressive organizations encourage us into only passive participation in the debate. At best, MoveOn.org and other “Political Action Committees” tell us to e-mail our senators and congresspeople, and perhaps to write our newspapers or donate to campaigns. It is all about “keeping the discussion alive” and supporting elements of the political elite. But there is a great danger attached to confusing the presentation of our opinions with political action. Politics is not about opinions–that is a matter of philosophy; of arguing for the best policy, or advocating particular reforms over others. Those are important discussions that must take place in open, candid, and innovative ways. But though they might generate political momentum, they do not accomplish it in and of themselves. A discussion does not automatically transform into a politically effective agency. Other forms of empowerment are necessary. If 66.8 million Americans who had voted for President Obama last November had gone on strike instead, healthcare reform may have happened months ago, and the government’s response to what is now perhaps sensationally called the “Global Financial Meltdown” might have been qualitatively different. These tactics have to do with real politics, with challenging and re-shaping the way power is allocated in our society.

These two threads regarding the kind of political participation encouraged by the media and our institutions intersect at an important point. Politics is not so much about what is possible as it is about our ability and freedom to decide what is possible–it’s not about possibilities, but about the possibility of possibilities. When a poll or a ballot gives us a certain number of pre-packaged options, it is removing us from the preceding process of deciding for ourselves our own possibilities. The elements of society that decide what is possible–rather than the ones who decide between pre-screened possibilities–are the ones that are actually empowered and capable of playing a role in shaping their fate. When our disillusionment or dissatisfaction is met with the suggestion that we merely register to vote, we are similarly disempowered and disenfranchised, and we are discouraged from strikes or other actions that may actually prevent or threaten to prevent the persistence of the status quo in a tangible, economic, and physical way. We cede our power to the political class instead of participating in the political process ourselves in a meaningful way.

It is necessary for us to rediscover these avenues, which are often met by criticism from the media and the governing class. These tactics re-arrange the political process so that rather than taking place only amongst members of the political elite, like representatives and lobbyists, it takes place instead between the people and the elites, bringing the interests of the people (and not members of the political elite) to the fore. And while some might suggest weak protests outside congressional offices, results might only be seen if we generalize these protests so that they take place outside our own offices, in the streets, the workplace, the university–in every facet of our lives. By leveraging our power to disturb the reign of the political class, we can forge political capacities that we lacked before, effecting change–without a ballot box, and without an election. When we stop contemplating “change we can believe in” and instead start to change what we can believe in, when change is not merely an object, a noun to which we can only devote our emotional faith, when change becomes a verb, something that we do, we might actually start to see a change in the distribution of power in our society.

Resources
[1] Re-election Rates Over the Years, OpenSecrets : http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php
[2] If the idea that all votes are equal is a fundamental aspect of democracy, the opening line of this game gives the lie to our system: “As a mapmaker, I can have more of an impact on an election than a campaign.” http://www.redistrictinggame.com/
[3] Lobbying Spending Database, OpenSecrets http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s
[4] Dem, GOP centrists meet in secret http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/dem-gop-centrists-meet-in-secret-2009-06-16.html
[5] Is Obama a back-room blue dog? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/is-obama-a-back-room-blue_b_259780.html
[6] Why aren’t progressive groups protesting Obama’s back-room deal with Big Pharma? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/why-arent-progressive-gro_b_253279.html

Protest in Ma'asara July 17, 2009 (MUSA AL-SHAER/AFP/Getty Images)

We hear too little about non-violent Palestinian resistance to the occupation. Today I was in the village of Ma’asara, south of Bethlehem, and this is what happened.

A friend from Berkeley arrived in Israel yesterday, and asked if I wanted to hang out. I was looking for someone to come with me to this protest, which I’d heared about through emails I receive from Ta’ayush – one of the most effective anti-occupation movements in the Israel left. The ride was organized simply and effectively: one activist receives phone calls and coordinates the rides, others volunteer their cars, meeting times are set outside houses in south Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and elsewhere. Within 40 minutes we pass the checkpoint easily with our yellow-plated Israeli car and enter the territories.

Most Israelis are too scared to go to protests in the territories.  This is one of the ways the occupation sustains itself: by isolating the Palestinian protestors from possible allies and witnesses. The media told us they will not report our rally unless some violence occurred: someone needs to pay with their blood so that people around the world know that in Ma’asara (and neighboring villages like Umm Salamuna) Palestinians have been coming out regularly every week for several years to protest the confiscation of their lands, the imprisonment of their children, and to say they deserve freedom like any other people. No one was hurt today (or in most of the previous rallies here), so you’ll only hear about this through blogs like ours.

(When I table for SJP on Sproul Plaza (in Berkeley), someone will inevitably come up and tell me, angrily or patronizingly, that “we people” (Palestinians like me?) need to try non-violence for a change. Husam has brilliant spontaneous reactions, like opening his cellphone and pretending to call all his “close friends” from Gaza who are currently working on the next suicide bomb (because we are obviously all coordinated). I’m a bit slower, so this is my belated reaction).

Yes, it is more dangerous than yelling at the TV or attending polite protests in the heart of Tel Aviv, where few Palestinians from the territories will hear us. But that is precisely the point: meeting people is more effective than a thousand speeches and slogans. You learn all the details firsthand, and you not only argue for an alternative – you are actually creating it, demonstrating how easy it is for Israelis and Palestinians to work together.

You learn, as my friend Haggai Mattar told me, that there is not a single Palestinian movement that hasn’t hosted Israelis for regular non-violent protests, including villages who support Hamas and Islamic Jihad. My inner Zionist was sounding alarm bells when he said this: how can Israelis cooperate with these people, if their movements committed such violence against Israelis? Then I reminded myself that in Tel Aviv there is no violence against Palestinians mainly because there are hardly any Palestinians left: we ethnically cleansed the villages of Sheikh Muwwanis, Summayl (al-Mas’udiyya), Jammasin el-Gharbi, Salama, Abu Kbir, the Fishermen’s village and Irshid, not to mention tens of thousands of Jaffa’s residents, some of whom drowned in the sea as they were escaping. http://www.palestineremembered.com/JaffaTownsSnapshot.html And after that, we used more violence to keep most of them in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, more violence to take their water and land, more violence to prevent them from competing with Israeli industries so that they stayed poor, more violence to enable Israeli real estate moguls to profit from the confiscation of their land (as Gadi Algazi explains in his brilliant essay on Bil’in – http://www.taayush.org/new/fence/matrix-bilin-en.html), more and more and more violence. Ignorance cannot be an excuse for self-righteousness, because self-righteousness is incredibly dangerous http://borderlinecrimes.com/2009/07/10/on-self-righteousness/. My hands are bloody too, and non-violent cooperation with any Palestinians who are willing to work with us is the best alternative.

I learned about the quiet ways the army tries to suppress any form of resistance, including purely political non-violent protests: shootings and beatings, administrative detentions without a trial that can last years, and heavy fines that equal tens of thousands of dollars. And here they were, the people who suffer all this, much more patient than me in the presence of the soldiers who inevitably turn up to the rallies, blocking the proud slogans and the uplifting spirit with their barbed wires and commands. They endure all of this every week and come out again and again, waving huge Palestinian flags, chanting against the wall, speaking loudly about how they deserve freedom just like anyone else, bringing their little children with them so that the soldiers can see they are human beings just like them.

Ma’asara is not adjacent to the separation wall: the villages that are have lost much of their land, and have become dependent on employment in the nearby settlements. As a result they receive explicit threats that if they protest, they will lose their jobs. Ma’asarans are demonstrating out of solidarity with those who cannot.

It is impossible for me to convey how many times I was told how much the villagers yearn for peace, how glad they were to see Israelis and internationals come to support them, how they saw this cooperation as the opposite of their strangulation by settlements, surrounding them from all sides on their confiscated land, how our support was clearly contributing to their morale and ability to sustain this protest week after week, in spite of everything. Thankfully, both the army and the protestors in Ma’asara largely refrain from violence during the rallies, and there is actually an opportunity for us to speak to them, to attempt the impossible and try to convey our message. Palestinian women and men spoke fervently about their confiscated land and their desire for freedom, chanted “yes we can” and “down with the wall”, and promised that all the violence in the world would not deter them. Some French internationals sang songs from the French Revolution and waved their flag. And at some point one villager came up to me and asked me if I could speak in Hebrew to the soldiers!

I looked round to see if he was really speaking to me, and when I realized he was, I managed to walk closer to them and address them, on the other side of the barbed wire they placed in front of us. I was too scared to look them directly in the eye, but I did manage to convey some of my thoughts, and quite incredibly, they didn’t shout back or disturb or address me: they actually listened.

I told them they have no reason to fear us: the Palestinians, Israelis, and Internationals here aren’t a threat to the security of the state. We aren’t violent and we’re not anti-Semites, and we don’t hate them, or the settlers, or anyone else. We are all here together, because we think what they are defending isn’t just: people just want to live their lives and to keep their livelihood, and the wall is deeply harming their ability to make a living. There are capitalists profiting from the settlements that the wall has enabled – their interests are neither ours nor the soldiers’. There is no reason for them to defend them. One day, I said, after you’ll end your service, you’ll be sitting in India or somewhere else and wondering why you did all this. Why not make a difference now? Why not cross the barbed wire and join us? It’s more fun on our side.

Being an effective activist is a bit like learning to play a musical instrument. Your only real choice is to practice again and again, until you succeed.  The soldiers didn’t cross over. But I’ll be back next week to try again.

New York Daily News photograph by Joseph Ambrosini of Stonewall uprising taken on Sunday, June 29, 1969 via OutHistory.org

Recently dozens of LGBT pride parades were planned in cities around the world to mark the annual pride week. For many people with commitments to LGBT liberation, this time is set aside in reflection on the struggle for the rights of LGBT people, their history and contributions, and on the need to reveal and oppose the separation and oppression of people with non-normative gender identities or sexual orientations. This year this spreading and increasingly accepted annual celebration has received extra attention in that it marks forty years since the “Stonewall Riots,” the unofficial ‘beginning’ of the contemporary LGBT rights movement in Euro-American world.

The fortieth anniversary celebrations have brought rare attention to an event that has historically been underrepresented and systematically forgotten in our society. In the week beforehand, the New York Times ran editorials and articles discussing the significance of the riots, while various LGBT activists were interviewed on the subject in the corporate media. President Obama himself commemorated the riots with an East Room reception. While many if not most other instances of insurrection, popular resistance, and grassroots activism go unmentioned except by radical intellectuals and historians, the pivotal Stonewall riots seem to have achieved a measure of attention that other uprisings have not, perhaps a testament to the rising acceptability of the LGBT issue as one of fundamental human rights and equal protection under the law.

I wholeheartedly celebrate the all too recent induction of this important event into the public consciousness. It’s not every day that an uprising that was not only spontaneous but also comprised physical force is honorably mentioned, much less honorably mentioned. However, I also believe that it is our responsibility to commemorate the memory of Stonewall not only through highlighting injustices that are uniquely (or exclusively) committed against people for their sexual orientation or gender identity but to draw connections between supposedly separate ‘issues,’ especially connections that cross the border between the acceptably and unacceptably rebellious.  We have the responsibility to examine historical continuities and similarities that extend to the present day and could prefigure unique ways to build solidarity, rather than section off ‘LGBT history’ from other histories of oppression and resistance.

For example, I was fascinated by a first-hand account published in the New York Times entitled “The Real Mob at Stonewall.” The article was written by a US army officer named Lucian Truscott who was one of the only reporters on hand to write on the riots. He mentions, for example, that the raid on Stonewall was not technically against gay people for being gay. Rather, the stated reason was based on the seemingly uncontroversial and much more palatable basis of ‘law enforcement.’ According to the police, the Stonewall (and many bars like it) had been raided for “…selling liquor without a license, which it was….”Truscott explains the process:

“It worked like this: citing disorderly behavior laws, the State Liquor Authority ruled that bars catering to openly homosexual patrons were not entitled to liquor licenses. Gay bars were thus made effectively illegal, which left them to the mob, which happily ran clubs without liquor licenses and paid the police to look the other way. Several more years would pass before the first clubs with openly gay owners would be licensed…and the mob lost its stranglehold, an early legacy of Stonewall.”

In this way, the systematic separation and oppression, the state-sanctioned culling of gay life from the face of cities across the United States, was both carried out through and obscured by the enforcement of liquor laws. Who knows, maybe many police officers themselves thought that that’s the only thing that they were doing as well, just keeping people safe from illegal alcohol rather than criminalizing LGBT community spaces. You’d need to dig just a little bit deeper to discover that gay people could not own bars and get liquor licenses in the first place, but unfortunately for most people that bit of depth accomplished its task.

This situation was immediately familiar to me as someone at least peripherally aware of the ‘law’ practiced in Palestine/Israel in general and the occupied territories in particular. After all, anyone familiar with house demolition practices under the occupation knows that demolitions are always explained as the simple application of laws applied equally to people regardless of their national identity. Palestinians simply build too many houses illegally, and that is why, we are told, there are tens of thousands of houses slated for demolition. But dig just a bit deeper, and you find that while Jewish West Bank settlers’ “natural growth” is staunchly defended by the Israeli government, you find that Palestinians are systematically denied construction permits on both sides of the green line, that no new housing or school infrastructure for Palestinians has been built in places like Jerusalem in forty two years, and that private Palestinian land is being confiscated for Jewish housing expansion. Akiva Eldar, an Israeli journalist and an expert on the settlements, published a straightforward piece on this phenomenon entitled “What about the Arabs’ natural growth?”

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1092430.html

I have also found these publications helpful from Ir Amim (“City of Nations” in Hebrew), an information-producing Israeli NGO working for equality in Jerusalem.

http://www.ir-amim.org.il/eng/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/PlanningCrisisEng.pdf

http://www.ir-amim.org.il/Eng/?CategoryID=254

In this way, in both Stonewall era New York and present day Palestine/Israel, the essential injustice of each situation lies beneath a legalistic sheen, a stinking carcass sprayed with cheap perfume. This oppression, obstructed to outsiders by appeals to ‘the rule of law,’ is also something that both the patrons of Stonewall and the Palestinians of Israel/Palestine have learned and known about every day of their lives in one way or another. It seems to me that as spontaneous as the Stonewall rebellion was at the time, it was also based on deeply and widely shared experiences of oppression, a knowledge that every patron of the Stonewall possessed. And in a sense the Stonewall riots were not only a reaction to long-standing oppression of gay people in New York, but it also denied the police and the public at large the veneer of legality that justified the criminalization of gay life. After Stonewall, the police could still raid gay bars, but not with the notion that they were doing anything other than arresting people for who they were.

The connections between LGBT rights and Palestinian rights are not just comparative. They have been made flesh through activism and solidarity practiced by many activists. “Aswaat” (Voices) is an organization of Palestinian lesbian women who organize against the ‘circles of oppression’ they live as Palestinian and LGBT women. Al Qaws (the Rainbow) is the first Palestinian LGBT organization for all groups in the Palestinian population, based in Jerusalem but with related affinity groups in cities in the on both side of the green line. And of course, Ezra Nawi is a shining individual example of connecting his experiences as a working class gay man, a Mizrahi Jew, and an anti-occupation activist. His activism, like so many others’, was made famous by his recent arrest for “assaulting a policeman.” Writing on the situation in the Nation, Nawi writes of how the occupation apparatus uses his gay identity to undermine his work:

“Over the past eight years, I have seen with my own two eyes hundreds of abuses…and exposed them to the public–therefore I am considered a provocateur. I can only say that I am proud to be a provoker.

Because I am a provoker, the police together with their allies have threatened me, beaten me and arrested me on numerous occasions. And when I continued to “provoke” them, they did not hesitate to out me as a gay man; indeed, they spread rumors among the Palestinians with whom I work that I have AIDS.”

Nawi connects his own experiences of dehumanization to the dehumanization of the Palestinians he works with. Even though he is Jewish, the law enforcement and court systems and their participants see him as an Arab:

It is important to keep in mind, however, that the evil I confront every day in the West Bank could not have been carried out without the Israeli court system. Judge Eilata Ziskind not only mistakenly found me guilty but she instructed the court to invite a translator for the sentencing, as if I do not speak Hebrew; in her mind I, a Mizrahi Jew, am a Palestinian Arab–and Arabs are, almost by definition, guilty.

One the one hand, the oppression scantily clothed in the letter of the law, and on the other the utter dehumanization that Palestinians and to a lesser extent their allies face regularly, are both echoes of past and present experiences of the gay community in the United States. In my view, the lesson from Stonewall is to tear apart the tissue paper rules and legalistic justifications that paper over dehumanization and oppression, to require the apparatus to do its work in the light of day, and to resist in a manner that shatters the images that oppression engenders of the oppressed. When the gays were being arrested, they “…struck vampy poses, smiling and waving to the crowd. This was not the way gays were supposed to behave when they were arrested, and the officers started shoving them with their nightsticks.” What started the riots, then, was the fact that people not acting the way they were supposed to.

Every Saturday evening Teddy had a rite: he dressed up in the uniform of his favorite soccer team, including the shoes, and watched their weekly match. There was a proper way of doing this – for instance, I couldn’t disturb him, since I could cause “Nakhs”, or bad luck. For about two hours I could hear him from my room, yelling (”you idiot, make a pass!”, “kick it already!”, “no, no, not that way!”). Unfortunately, the players on the screen never seemed to listen, and they mostly lost. I think on some level he realized he was having very little effect on them by screaming at the TV, but every match it was the same.

Teddy’s soccer spectator attitude reminds me of the way most of us experience politics. “Why don’t those politicians do something already about all these problems?;” “Why aren’t the feminists/animal rights activists/vegans worrying about other issues?;” “Why are these people so violent? don’t they realize non-violence would work better?”… we complain to the nearest person, or the newspaper or the TV set, but unfortunately “those people” never seem to get it, no matter how loud we yell.

Over the years, I’ve come to recognize that there is another way of doing things, which can ultimately be more satisfying and fulfilling. It’s about taking baby steps outside of our comfort zone. People around me do small and large things to actually get involved in the issues they are passionate about. They’ve given up on waiting for someone else to fix things. There aren’t enough responsible adults around – it turns out we need to take responsibility ourselves.

Taking responsibility doesn’t have to mean pledging to do everything to save the world right now – it can just mean taking one small step you’ve never done before, which could potentially be effective: one small thing that will make you feel you actually are getting involved, that you’ve gone beyond bitching or being cynical.

Here’s one small idea: Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization I have huge respect for, sends one email a week about an issue you can influence (check out http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/ ).

Last week they wrote about Ezra Nawi, an Israeli human rights activist who tried to prevent the army from demolishing the shacks of some pretty poor Palestinians in the South Hebron hills, a discreet form of ethnic cleansing off land adjacent to a settlement. Publicizing this is important – it educates people about the issue and it could contribute to releasing him or shortening his jail time. All it takes is one email, and they give you the address – http://freeEzra.org

Here is his article in The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090713/nawi

I’m sure others could comment and provide links to more organizations. For instance, Amnesty International publishes regular calls for action about a whole range of issues. This one is to call on the Israeli  government to cooperate fully with the Gaza fact-finding mission:

http://www.amnesty.org/en/appeals-for-action/israel-must-co-operate-fully-with-independent-gaza-fact-finding-mission

Writing an email a week for a progressive cause is one example of how we can integrate political activism into our everyday lives. Note to self: keep asking – where is my comfort zone? what are my next steps for going beyond it?