Queue-jumping

The other day I had to be in an unfamiliar place in Jerusalem for nine o’clock. To allow for my tendency to get lost even in my own neighbourhood, I was up at five and out of the door by six.

My careful plans didn’t work out. As I reached Bab Zqaq, a crowded bus swung across the junction and onto the road for Jerusalem. I had missed it by about two minutes. I gnashed a tooth or two. The timetable is erratic, especially in the early mornings, and I had no idea when the next bus would arrive or when it would depart, especially as the driver waits for it to fill before he goes anywhere. My only option now was to shlep over to the big checkpoint, cross it on foot, and catch one of the more regular buses from the other side. (Yes, it can take a great deal of time and precision-planning to get to a city that’s five miles down the road.)

To enter the checkpoint, you pass through these caged chutes, which are sometimes so tightly packed with people that it’s barely possible to move. I hate waiting in that crush. It’s hot, there is always the irritation of cigarette smoke, it’s noisy, it’s claustrophobic, and you have no idea when you’re going to get out, because it all depends on the mood of the guard. As a non-Palestinian, I have the option of bypassing the cages and walking straight into the terminal on the specially marked ‘Tourist/Humanitarian Lane’ (no bars on this one). It’s not an option I’m prepared to take. Privileging people on the basis of the colour of their skin (or their ID card, or their passport cover) is a tad outdated now, or it should be.

I entered the machsom with about twenty-five Palestinians. The guard at the first turnstile didn’t bother to check our documents. He looked half-asleep. As I headed towards the main checkpoint building, the tarmac already warm beneath my feet, I could hear shouts and screams floating out into the newly minted morning. Arabic? Hebrew? Over the loudspeakers it’s hard to tell what language they are using until you get close. The guards often manage to make both languages sound quite unlike the ones I hear spoken around me, and it’s not just the loudspeakers that achieve that affect. Stop, shoes off, shut up, wait, go, go back, stop old woman, stop boy. In a blog post about her decision to sail to Gaza, the author and Civil Rights activist Alice Walker described the memories that witnessing the Israeli border police in action brought back for her: “In the Southern United States when I was a child, they would have said: Boy, or Girl, I want to talk to you…”

In the search area there was a lot of yelling from men with guns and a lot of people hurrying to get through, and I put my head down and hurried with them, knowing that I had no reason to be jittery – these men can’t really do much to me. A Palestinian who relies on his work in Jerusalem to feed his family and who must arrive on time if he doesn’t want to be sacked has far more to worry about. And at the final documentation check, where the Palestinians have their hands scanned and their permits inspected and where I just flash my passport, a long queue. A guard in a booth was checking the papers; another one was superintending the line, his weapon tapping against the metal of the turnstile whenever he moved slightly. I put my headphones in and prepared to wait, irritated by the way that the woman behind me kept nudging my back. Now if there is one thing I hate, it’s being nudged when in queues. It’s a British thing. I turned round to give her the famous frosty stare, and she nodded towards the guard with the gun. I looked at him and he gestured to me to come to the front of the queue.

Privileging people on the basis of the colour of their skin (or their ID card, or their passport cover) is a tad outdated now, or it should be.

I went over. (After all, I reasoned, I’m running late. I have to be in Jerusalem for nine, if I make a fuss they’ll probably just take it out on the people queuing with me, what can I do about that, I will make a different choice a different time, but today I have to be on time…) The guards were friendly to me. They smiled. They tried to make pleasant chitchat: “Good morning. Where are you from?” Somehow I think I was the only person in that line to receive a good morning that day. I wanted to ask them why. Why do you yell at that man for not moving fast enough for you, but you smile at me? Why don’t you wave him to the front of the line when it’s obvious he’s old? You’re not soldiers, you’re civilians, so why did you even accept a job here? You chose it. Why? And the questions to myself: why didn’t you stay where you were? Why did you just do what they told you? You chose it. Why?

Anne Braden

Lyrics to ‘Anne Braden’

from the color of the faces in sunday’s songs
to the hatred they raised all the youngsters on
once upon a time in this country long ago
she knew there was something wrong
because the song said yellow, red, black, and white
everyone precious in the path of christ
but what about the daughter of the woman cleaning their house
wasn’t she a child they were singing about
and if Jesus loves us black or white skin
why didn’t her white mother invite them in?
when did it become a room for no blacks to step in?
how did she already know not to ask the question

left lasting impressions
adolescence’s comforts gone
she never thought things would ever change
but she always knew there was something wrong

she always knew there was something wrong

Why I will no longer argue with child abusers and their apologists

In England I used to work with young people who had often suffered terrible abuse – physical, psychological, and sexual. When I mentioned that work to new acquaintances, the reaction was usually one of uneasy sympathy. “That’s so awful. I don’t know how anybody can treat children like that, I really don’t.”

Talking about Palestinian children who have been abused in custody, with the abuse even including outright torture, I encounter another response. “So what were the kids doing? The army wouldn’t arrest them with no reason.”

Dr Seuss poster.

I’ve had it up to here with the excuse-making and the equivocations and the rationalisations for inflicting deliberate harm on those who are most vulnerable in any society. I am sick of people’s sheer pig-headed selfish insistence on prioritising the protection of a country’s reputation over the protection of these children. And when I say sick, I mean sick – nauseous, down, and above all just plain tired.

So I have come to a decision. From now on I will have nothing to say to the apologists. Not online, and not in real life. (Not in a box. Not with a fox. Not in a house. Not with a mouse…) I used to believe that there was something to be gained from debating the issue with them. Now I have come to realise that it’s pointless. To begin with, it’s not an ‘issue’. Children beaten up in jail and threatened with rape are not ‘issues’. Children torn from their beds in the middle of the night and taken away without charge, without a parent, without even a lawyer are not ‘issues’. They’re not up for debate in the same way that logical positivism is. A person who grasps this does not need convincing that what happens to kids in military custody is very wrong. A person who does not grasp it will never be convinced. To them the kids only exist in the abstract. They’re not real. They don’t matter. And if you point this out to the apologists, they’re quite shocked, because OF COURSE they oppose child abuse – REAL child abuse. But this isn’t real, not really, and if it is, it’s an isolated incident. Not enough to matter. Of course, in deploying these arguments – common to abuse apologists in all contexts – they become complicit in the abuse itself, as one of its most hurtful consequences (in many cases even its purpose) is to teach victims that they do not matter. I remember one young disabled woman from New Zealand, a victim of serious physical and psychological violence, telling me, “Sometimes I hold myself and keep telling myself, ‘I am real, I am real’.” Speaking at a conference I attended, an Irish woman who was repeatedly raped and exploited through prostitution said that as she sat on the pavement she used to wonder if any of the people passing by really saw her. Abuse apologists do not see. They’re the same all over the world.

I have a choice: to argue ad infinitum with these people, becoming increasingly tired and sad in the process and achieving nothing, or to turn instead to the kids and their families. The time I spend giving my fiftieth detailed explanation of how military law affects children could be better spent in writing a comforting bedtime story for a child who doesn’t sleep well any more. Instead of spending hours enumerating the reasons why he can’t sleep for the sake of people who just brush them off like so much dandruff, I could write a book for people who actually want to know, or I could learn more up-to-date practical techniques for the management of sleep disturbances in trauma, or I could just make the poor kid a hot chocolate and sit with him through the night. All of this would be a far more worthwhile use of time. It might not bring about an end to army child abuse, but it would at least demonstrate to these children that they matter.

The ruins after the rain

I’m in England at the moment. Yesterday I had a beautiful day in Coventry with my friend Sam. I never thought I would write ‘beautiful’ and ‘Coventry’ in the same sentence, but that was before I saw the cathedral, where Sam is volunteering.

Coventry is known as Britain’s Dresden. The cathedral was all but destroyed by bombing during the Second World War (despite the best efforts of the provost, who valiantly stood on the rooftop one night and tried to toss stray bombs onto the street with a pitchfork before they could explode). Only the outer walls and the spire remain. Peering into the cathedral on the morning after the bombs hit, one of the staff noticed that a pair of scorched beams had fallen in the shape of a cross.

The cross in the ruins.

When the war ended, it was decided that the ruins should remain as they were. Wandering through them, I was surprised by their peace. Normally in a place that bears obvious scars of violence I feel more grief than anything, but this place was marked with something more than that. I think it is because of all the love and care that people from Coventry (and much further afield) have put into making it a place for reconciliation. A statue was sent from Dresden, and it now stands near the entrance to the ruin, named simply ‘Survivors’. It is a quiet reminder that the prayer inscribed behind the charred cross – Jesus’ words as he died, ‘Father, forgive’ – was not just for the bomber pilots who discharged their cargo on Coventry but also for pilots who flew in the opposite direction. Nearby is a plaque in honour of people who died on the Home Front, confronting bombs with pitchforks, and one final statue – a couple embracing.

Our tour guide (a volunteer from Germany, whom Sam had roped into the expedition on the grounds that she knows more about the cathedral’s history than he does) explained that the statue’s creator was inspired by a woman who refused to believe that her husband (reported missing, believed dead) really was dead. She set off round Europe on foot to look for him. I don’t know if she ever found him, but the sculptor tried to imagine what their reunion might have looked like and cast it bronze.  Originally titled ‘Reunion’, it was renamed ‘Reconciliation’ when it was donated to the Peace Studies department at Bradford University. Fifty years after the war’s end, several casts were made of the statue. One came to Coventry. Another went to Northern Ireland. A third stands in a park in Hiroshima.

Lifelines

Lifelines is a network of penfriends who support prisoners on America’s Death Row. Last night I happened to see a note from them in the back of one of the magazines I read occasionally. They have a long list of prisoners waiting to receive penfriends and they need more people to join.

I’ve been aware of Lifelines ever since a very memorable religion and ethics class on capital punishment that my class was given when I was fourteen years old. The teacher showed us some material from them, and she also read aloud to us from Sister Helen Prejean’s remarkable book Dead Man Walking. The book chronicles Sr Helen’s time as a chaplain on Death Row and her fight to establish robust and total Catholic opposition to the death penalty. I couldn’t join Lifelines as a penfriend back then, as they only accept people who are over eighteen, but I ‘adopted’ a prisoner to pray for. This was the first political activism I ever did, pretty much.

Sr Helen has written that she was drawn towards this work by recognition of the link between the death penalty and poverty. “It didn’t take long to see that for poor people, especially poor black people, there was a greased track to prison and death row.” Her involvement was cemented by one more thing: “I began to understand that some life is valued and some life is not.” After being present at dozens of executions, she also saw that this disregard for life and dignity extends far beyond the person being killed: “When you witness an execution and watch the toll this process also takes on some of those who are charged with the actual execution—the 12 guards on the strap-down team and the warden—you recognize that part of the moral dilemma of the death penalty is also: who deserves to kill this man?”

All injustice seems to come down to the same idea, whether implied or explicit: some lives don’t matter enough. This is why I’m writing about Death Row on a blog about life in occupied Bethlehem. Perhaps some people reading may want to respond to Lifelines’s request and become a penfriend. Information and FAQ are on the website.

Shades of Hebron

“How is it that they show up whenever you’re here?” I asked Nadav in considerable irritation.

I had opened the front door to find that a blue metal barrier and two occupation soldiers had sprung up like mushrooms overnight. (Sadly not the edible kind.) They were blocking the mouth of our street. The wall surrounds us and the only way to get into Bethlehem lay past them. And I was going to have to walk past them with an illegal Israeli, which is not the ideal accessory to have about your person when confronted with an unexpected military roadblock.

For the honour of the nation: silencing victims of domestic violence

Impelled by the murders of women in their hometown of Lyd, the Palestinian hip-hop group DAM has got together with Amal Murkus and Jackie Salloum to release a rap against honour killings. Sung in Arabic, as with most of DAM’s music, it has generated a critique by two academics living in the USA, written in a particularly obscure kind of academickese (the better to give the impression that they’re making a sophisticated point when really they’re not). Stripped of its frills, the main complaint of Lila Abu Lughod and Maya Mikdashi is this: DAM rapped about the murders of Palestinian women by Palestinian men without also mentioning Israel’s military occupation and systematic discrimination against Palestinians as a whole. And this makes Palestinians look bad.