What ‘retards’ have taught me about peace work (and people)

“Are you mentally handicapped?”

“He’s too low IQ to give a proper response.”

“I’m sure you’re retarded.”

The use of cognitive disability as an insult has always bothered me. It’s demeaning and hurtful to people who have such disabilities, and it shows a lack of understanding of how these conditions actually affect a person. When these insults are flung about in a discussion on the conflict in Palestine and Israel, my usual distaste is tinged with a sense of something very like irony as well.

Before I started work in Bethlehem, I had a job in a residential college for young adults with learning disabilities. Most of the students were eighteen or nineteen when they came to us, although the college could accept any student between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. It was a marvellous place, set in one of the wildest and most beautiful counties of England, with a river flowing beneath it and a ruined castle in the grounds. Also dotted about were several little cottages (once the houses of farmhands) where the students lived together in groups of half a dozen.

Back to school?

In England, the past week has been a flurry of washing and ironing and stationery-buying as my nieces and nephews got ready to go back to school. My eldest nephew is just entering Year 8, his second year of high school, after spending the summer helping out at a welding firm. When I heard what he had been up to with his holiday, I had to bite back the cry of concern. It barely seems like five minutes since this baby was snuggled up on my lap, his head covered in fine wispy hair, smelling sweetly of talcum powder and dribbling as I showed him photos of tropical fish in a book that we had bought at Seaworld. Now he is very nearly a teenager and being allowed to do work experience in a place with lots of sharp edges. I did begin to say, “It barely seems like five minutes since…” but I shut myself up hastily. I hated hearing that sort of thing when I was twelve.

In Israel and Palestine, children are also returning to school. In Nabi Samuel, a little village on the outskirts of Jerusalem, the primary-aged children will be squeezing themselves into their one-room building, where three classes are taught simultaneously. (There are blackboards hanging on three walls; the children sit back to back, jostling for space on the bench, focusing on their own board and somehow managing to block out what the other two teachers are saying.) Bolted to the side of the school is a tin-roofed privy of the kind that you can still see in the gardens of some English houses. It may not be there for long. That toilet is repeatedly demolished by the Israeli military. Now you know why the villagers don’t dare to risk expanding their school. If they did, the whole thing would be brought down.

Time to face the music

A child in the Gaza Strip plays the cello in a music school for under-12s. Photograph by Jehan al-Farra.

During BBC Proms last night, the BBC was compelled to pull the performance of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra off the air. Peace and justice activists entered the Royal Albert Hall and staged a performance of their own, beginning with a modern choral rendition of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ (“Israel, end your occupation / There’s no peace on stolen land…”) followed by a more experimental form of music, slogan-shouting. The BBC decided that chants of ‘The IPO – are instrumental – in an illegal occupation’ didn’t add to the listening experience, so it had protesters expelled from the Royal Albert Hall and ‘regretfully’ stopped the radio broadcast of the IPO’s performance. Today it’s become one of the most talked-about aspects of the Proms.

A few weeks ago, I joined other supporters of justice for Palestine in asking the BBC to revoke their invitation to the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra. In my own letter, I wrote, “This orchestra routinely entertains troops in the Occupied Territories, adding a sham veneer of culture to occupation’s misery. Music should be for everyone. Until such time as Palestinians can enjoy concerts too (which means they have to be able to move about freely, for a start), don’t promote the IPO.”

The response we got was that the invitation was ‘purely about music’; there was no political element to it of any kind. Today, I have seen many people making that argument, describing music as ‘apolitical’. Others ask what on earth the Israeli Philharmonic has to do with Israeli government policy. Some take it a step further and declare that music brings  people of all races together, meaning that a boycott of an orchestral performance is a counterproductive step.

No.

I came online to the horrible news that there have been attacks along Israel’s southern border. Details are sketchy at the moment. At first I read that five Israeli soldiers had died as they travelled on an Egged bus, then I read that they were critically injured, then I read that they were dead, then injured, and so on. At first there were reports of three gunmen firing on the bus from the Egyptian side of the border. Then came reports of explosions in Beersheva. And then came a hailstorm of responses on Twitter, mostly from Israeli and international supporters of the Palestinian cause.

They were targeting armed soldiers, so it’s not terrorism.

Getting on a bus with civilians when you’re in military uniform is like using the civilians as human shields.

Israel does far worse…

This is resistance.

I know that Israel does worse. I know that hardly a day goes by without F16s and drones being heard in the Gazan sky. In Bethlehem my throat used to go tight whenever I heard fighters screaming southward overhead, because I guessed where they were going. I know that only a fraction of what happens to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is widely reported; I’ve seen the crimes, and I’ve heard the silence afterward. I know that there is a terrible double standard in the portrayal of attacks on Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military and attacks on Israeli civilians by Palestinian militants. Operation Cast Lead made that clear enough.

But why is the cheapness at which Palestinian life is held by the Israeli military a reason to hold Israeli civilian life equally cheap? Resistance is worth nothing when you become the mirror image of your oppressor. Integrity is one of the few things that can’t be robbed from you at the point of a gun, and in responding to the death of a human being with, “But they do worse,” you relinquish that integrity and damage yourself more than you know.

To begin with, it’s not about ‘them’. It’s about an individual who has been killed or hurt. One person. I can’t look at any Israeli (civilian or soldier) and see them as just a representative of their state. I refuse. After talking to many IDF soldiers, I know that army life itself is often painfully effective in reducing people to mere symbols. As one soldier said to me and Rousol in Hebron, “I’ve got my political views, but as soon as I put on this uniform, I have to forget about them.” Another of them, who couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, responded to our question on how she felt about life in Hebron with, “What I feel doesn’t matter.” Her voice was so low and thin and sad. And a third soldier: “My opinion doesn’t count.”

I am not joining in with that. No matter what they do, no matter whether they choose it happily or they’re forced into it against their will, I refuse to see them as occupation’s symbols. I can’t be anything but unhappy when they die or get hurt. Oppression hurts the oppressors too. And  a supporter of the Palestinian resistance, I resist oppression wherever I find it.

Through the influence of my Palestinian colleagues, who are among the most loving and courageous people I’ve ever had the privilege to meet, I stopped caring whether a person is civilian or combatant long ago. Firstly, even the worst criminal has the capability to change and become good. Often the most peaceful and loving people are those who fought against their hatred and their anger – and won. Secondly, no matter who we are or what we do in life, we all bleed the same.

So I am not going to enter into any debates over whether this was justified. Whether it was terrorism or armed conflict. (‘Killing’ covers both of them nicely.) I don’t want to hear that Israel commits worse atrocities – I know it does, and I don’t want any part in anything that resembles those atrocities, even if it’s pale in comparison. If it’s wrong when they do it, it’s wrong when anybody does it. Instead of debating, I am going to spend my time praying: for the dead (the deaths of those five people were confirmed as I wrote this), for the wounded, for their families, and for the unfortunate souls in Gaza who are going to be pounded with a bloody vengeance tonight, because Ehud Barak has announced that Gaza is responsible and Gaza will pay.

I know what that means, and I know why my friends in Gaza are frightened today. Something tells me they won’t be sleeping so well tonight.

I have a feeling that the grieving relatives of the dead five people will have a bad night too, albeit for different reasons. Let’s pray for them all.

Blackout

Jehan is a twenty-year-old woman from the Gaza Strip who writes a beautiful and illuminating blog under the wryly humorous name of Palinoia. I also follow her on Twitter. She’s usually quite active at this time of night – as is the rest of the Gazan Twitter crowd. When they all sign in en masse in the space of ten seconds, I know that there is a bombing raid going on and they’ve given up on sleep. Together, they provide 140 character windows into Gazan life – their hopes, their frustrations, what they’ve had for breakfast, and what it feels like to have F16 fighter aircraft acting as pre-dawn alarm clocks. Oh, and the most effective music for blocking out the sound of said aircraft (Metallica, apparently).

But tonight they are silent. Initial reports are that the Israeli military has cut off all telecommunications, using bulldozers. The land cables have been severed. The mobile mast has been damaged. Naturally, people beyond Gaza have started to get worried. As one Gazan Palestinian living in my own city of Manchester put it, “They could be doing anything to them and we wouldn’t know.”

The Israeli authorities have said nothing about the communications blackout so far. It’s easy to predict what the justification for imposing even further isolation on 1.7 million besieged people will be: “Security. Counter-terrorism operations.” They say that so often that they have started to sound like parrots with severe vocal tics. For a counter-terrorism operation, it is certainly fostering enough terror of its own.

I’ve never met Nader or Jehan or Sameeha or Mona or any of the others, and thanks to the siege, I’m not likely to see them any time soon. But through their writing and our cosy bombing-time chats, I’ve come to feel close to them. I want Nader to achieve his dream of studying in the UK. I wish I could smuggle a concert grand through some Egyptian tunnel and into Jehan’s house, so that she can make the music she loves. I wish she and Sameeha could have something resembling a normal gossip between two young women who are friends, and not the usual, “There is a helicopter over my house! Have you got one too or is it just drones where you are?” I’d like the world to know of Mona’s kindness and good practical sense, her commitment to justice and her work as a doctor, so that they have another image of Gaza to set alongside the gallery of masked men with rocket-launchers that the Israeli authorities present to the public.

I’m not going to get my wishes, at least not tonight. There is no wishing well deep enough to accommodate them. So instead of wishing for things that can’t happen, I am penning this short reminder: there are 1.7  million human beings trapped in the Gaza Strip tonight. They are being prevented from speaking for themselves. I am not trying to speak in their place – no one can do that. I am simply giving voice to my own concern, because this ominous silence feels horribly like a foretaste of what it might be like never to speak to them again. I’m simultaneously thinking of Operation Cast Lead and trying not to think of it.

Graffiti on the separation wall near Ramallah.

It’s only possible for Israel to continue in its policies towards Gaza because there aren’t enough people in the world who are acquainted with this feeling. Even in the West Bank, we joke that Gazan Palestinians are aliens; Israel has been very successful at cutting them off from the world. The Internet is their way of fighting back against the dehumanisation and the isolation. Reading what they write and chatting to them online is how you can help break the siege without leaving your own living room. Let’s value their voices and make them heard.

“My opinion doesn’t matter”: conversations with soldiers

We reached the Ibrahimi Mosque at about ten o’clock, when the heat was just starting to creep up in the cramped alleyways and shaded market of Old Hebron.

It was Rousol’s first visit to Hebron since her arrival in the West Bank – where technically she wasn’t supposed to be, as the airport security officials had compelled her to sign a form stating that she would go nowhere except Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Eilat. She received this treatment because she is Arab. It also happens to known activists: until recently there was an American Jewish girl volunteering illegally in Beit Sahour who had been made to sign a similar declaration.

Rousol arrived as a tourist with no plans to do voluntary work of any sort. Her airport experience altered that. She decided to help out with ‘Bienvenue en Palestine’, a project designed to highlight the difficulties that travellers face in reaching the Palestinian territories if they’re open about where they’re going. I am quite grateful to the Israeli border police for their draconian and discriminator procedures, because without them Rousol might never have been galvanised into visiting Bethlehem, and I never would have met her. And I would have no story to tell you now.

Tales of the unexpected

I am working on a book. Last Monday, as part of my research, I spent three hours with a man who lived through the Nakba. Although he is in his mid-eighties now, Abu Salim’s mind is as clear and sharp as the rays of sunlight that lanced through the blinds into the room where we sat. He told some fascinating stories. I hardly asked any questions: he poured out information with a born storyteller’s instinct for humour and anecdote.

Some of the things he told me were startling, especially what he had to say about his village’s relationship with a Jewish kibbutz that was established near them in 1940, eight years before Israel’s creation. Secondly, most of the Nakba stories I have heard are from people who were driven out of their homes – into the refugee camps of Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank; or further afield in the Diaspora. Abu Salim is the first person I have met who remained. He lives only a fifteen-minute drive from his former village of al-Bassa. This gave his story a different twist, and introduced me to aspects of dispossession that I had not encountered before.

‘Freedom for Palestine’ enters the charts at number 43

The single ‘Freedom for Palestine’, produced by OneWorld and sung by an eclectic group of international musicians, has entered the UK chart at number 43. If sales nudge it higher, it will be played during the Top 40 countdown on radio stations across Britain. That will put the BBC in a tricky pickle, as back in May they bleeped out the word ‘Palestine’ from the hip-hop song ‘Fire in the Booth’, so that Mic Righteous actually sang, “Free P*******e.” The corporation justified this creative remixing with, “All BBC programmes have a responsibility to be impartial when dealing with controversial subjects…and an edit was made in this instance to ensure that impartiality was not compromised.”

That would be the same impartiality that led the BBC to decide against broadcasting the humanitarian appeal put out by the Disasters Emergency Committee in the wake of Operation Cast Lead. The BBC did not want to be seen to be getting involved in a politically charged war. (Personally I wasn’t aware that there was any other kind of war, but there you go.)

Anyway, buy the single. Make them play the song. In addition to instilling me with a warm sense of smugness, it will raise the public profile of Palestine at a time when house demolitions and land confiscations are on the rise, child arrest gets more and more common, Gaza’s crisis goes on, and increasingly racist and disturbing laws are passed by the Israeli Knesset.

We are the people
This is our time
Unite together
For justice in Palestine.

Questions from a young Palestinian

I have just stumbled across a blog written by a very sharp and articulate sixteen-year-old Palestinian living in East Jerusalem. As an East Jerusalemite, Jalal is a citizen of nobody’s country. The Palestinians of East Jerusalem are classed as ‘permanent residents of the State of Israel’, a dubious category that deprives them of all the basic civil rights that come with full citizenship – including the right to vote. It’s a suffocating existence.

Last month, not long after we commemorated the Nakba, Jalal posed some questions to his readers:

I respect every Israeli who is ready to have me or any Arab alike, to be his neighbor in an apartment in Tel-Aviv. I am ready to respect every Israeli who feels we are all equal and we all deserve the same equal rights of living. 1948 Arabs today are living in ghettos around Haifa, Yaffa, Jerusalem and others due to the extremely racist apartheid Israeli laws and regulations which consider Arabs as inferiors in the state of Israel. This is not acceptable.

I am extremely inspired by the South African experience which succeeded using non-violence, to gain equal rights for all citizens whatever their race or ethnicity was. As their Apartheid system has fallen,  the Israeli Apartheid System can and will fall, hopefully democracy will prevail, the people will speak, and their voice will be heard.

We are not different, no one deserves to be treated different than any other person because of his religion or ethnic origin. We are all Semites after all; we can and should live together, not separated by walls or borders.

I ask you, how do you define “Coexistence”? Do you accept me as your neighbor? Are we different?

I hope he gets some good answers as he grows older.

Here is his blog, Palestinian Field Negro.

Israelis in Palestine: Part 1

The other day I realized I have never actually been to the West Bank in my entire life. However, I doubt I would be welcome with open arms. There are many enraged Palestinians. Not that I blame them…

For the past two years or so I have been a regular reader at Richard Silverstein’s blog, Tikun Olam. These remarks were made by an Israeli reader, Shai, several months ago. It wasn’t the first time he had expressed curiosity about visiting Palestinian areas and worry about what the Palestinian reaction would be. It is rare for Israelis to travel here, so I was glad that he was even open to the possibility, but with each successive mention my exasperation grew. “This place is no bigger than a postcard; he could be in a Palestinian town by lunchtime if he wanted. Why doesn’t he stop dithering about and go?”

Eventually I could tolerate it no more. The likelihood of Shai actually visiting the West Bank and getting to know the people he wrote about seemed as remote as the arrival of world peace and the abduction by aliens of the Netanyahu administration, but I invited him anyway, feeling that as a peace worker I ought to at least make an effort. I was in for a surprise. He arranged to visit with his sister, Sara, and her French boyfriend, Gregoire, who were also curious about Palestinian daily life.