West Bank Adjacent

Hatred or apathy, what is worse?

2006-08-05T10:33:00.000-07:00

This morning I woke up to photographs of dead Syrian Kurdish bodies in South Lebanon and leveled bridges and highways in the Maronite mountain villages. Now the Christians are being attacked! Yesterday there was an image of a bloody floor in an Israeli apartment. A real Crusade is on our hands.

The Lebanese faces in the photographs show people taken totally by surprise, people who have lost families and are empty with shock, people who want revenge. The photographs of Israeli faces show fear and a desire for revenge.

Condaleeza Rice tries to calm fears of a US invasion in Cuba.

The world has gone mad and outside my door the hum of the 5 freeway continues on unabated. It is just another Saturday morning in Southern California, and the truth is, why shouldn't it be? the 5 freeway has not been taken out by missiles that we paid for and launched by our client state somewhere close by.

When does the moment come when people call something by its name? How many days of counting airstrikes and dead bodies until a massacre becomes officially a massacre? How soon after the event does this happen? How many UN officials, elected politicians, and journalists do there need to be present in order to call something wrong? When will the time come when the rising tide of Islamic anger has crested and Muslims say, 'we just won't take this shit anymore?' And then what happens? What will be the response and against whom?

Will there be some pathetic attempt to lob a half-hearted missile from Iran -- where? At Israel? Jews and hollywood studio-types will get together and scream anti-semitism even though we exist over here safe from the bombs that we pay for. What will be the event here that will shake people out of some moment of complacency for long enough to make them realize that we are connected to all this?

Thou shall not kill

2006-08-02T01:07:00.000-07:00

Today I thought about the 10 commandments. I wonder what happened to that simple and brilliant idea of not killing? Why is that so hard to do? The world would be a better place if we could all agree to not kill. Maybe we all need a quick review course on the 10 commandments during the 48 hour non-cease fire?

I thought about our President and how he killed more people through the death penalty in Texas than any other governor. It was on his resume (along with alot more people dead in Iraq and Afganistan and in New York) and we still elected and reelected him.

A friend told me that Thomas Friedman said on 'Meet the Press', "Arabs and Israelis HATE more than they love their children." I thought about this crass statement and for a moment I was deluded into agreeing with him. Then I thought, a better way to describe hate and love in the Middle East might be (acknowledging that I am making a gross and very suspect generalization) - Arabs and Israelis hate as much as they love their children. Imagine how much love you have for a child and then imagine that amount of love turned into hate. That is a poisonous amount of hate! Perhaps all of this hate comes out of the horror of seeing your children die in front of you and not having the wisdom or strength to rise above the desire for revenge. I imagine it would take a strong person, an Olympian, to be able to resist a desire to strike back once their child or loved one has died. To not seek revenge, in fact, might be the greatest act of love. Very few people are capable of doing this, I think.

Then I thought a conversation I had with a friend, Dima, on my balcony in Damascus. She was speaking about the massacre in Hama in 1982. That little event where Hafez al Asssad's brother Rifa'at killed 30,000 people several days, some of whom were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and then leveled the whole neighborhood and paved it over. (It is good to remember that it is not just the Israelis who are capable of carrying out the scorched earth policy.) Dima said to me, "There is no other way to deal with people like that. You just need to kill them." Amazingly, her attitude didn't surprise me. Maybe what was surprising was that I wasn't shocked. After almost a year in Damascus, I had become used to strident and often violent responses to violence.

It is a huge dilemma for those who try to live according to the 10 commandments. What do you do when someone is willing to use violence and killing? Do you respond in kind? Do you accept to die in order to claim some moral high ground and say, "I don't believe in killing even if you do and you are willing to kill me?" I am convinced that violence should only be used as a last resort and only after all other diplomatic means have been exhausted. The memory of senseless violence that leads to the death of innocent people is a pain that is too great to recover from. This violence leads to more disease and sickness and death. I am sure.

I had a conversation with Dr. Roumani today. He said, "The Middle East is sick with cancer and there is no chemo to cure it."

Dead bodies

2006-07-28T10:33:00.000-07:00

I want to refuse. I want to refuse to take a side. I can’t refuse to take a side. I am already on the side. I am very far to the side. Perhaps I am too far. Which side are you on right wing Zionist? Which side are you on evangelical Christian? I’ll choose the other side. I’m firmly on the other side. Here on the other side fighting the greatest military power are other maniacs. Well, at least I’m with the underdog. It’s always feels more higher and mightier and more RIGHT to be with the underdog. I don’t like this underdog though. I don’t want to be standing here with this underdog. I won’t choose this side.

Where is the middle ground? There is no middle ground anymore. Well, maybe here in the safety of the USA where there are no bombs falling and people walk around everyday and are able to live their life and drive by people sleeping in the streets and drive by the near dead crack addicts or no that’s a dead crack addict and drive by the drive by victims in their wheelchairs if you bother to travel to that side of town. That side of town is not so far from my side of town, but I don’t walk down those streets that are just a street away from my street because I won’t be welcome there. I stay on my street where people are friendly and I know we won’t shoot each other. At least I don’t have to dodge bullets on my street.

Well that’s not true. There was a night not too long ago when I woke up to gunfire. I looked out the window and saw no one. It was 4 in the morning and I called the police and reported a sound. They asked, were there any bodies that I could see? No, I don’t see bodies. I can’t see here. Nothing is clear to me here at all. I know there are dead bodies out there somewhere but I don’t see them. I went on to the man on the phone; there are a lot of dead bodies everywhere but I can’t see them. Can you show them to me? Maybe if I saw them every single day then I could understand better what it means to pay taxes and vote and be responsible for sending weapons and missiles somewhere else very far away from my street and my home an my car and my family. I want to understand what that means. I want to understand more about the dead bodies that I am connected to. Can you show them to me? The line went dead.

Starry night

2006-07-21T22:27:00.000-07:00

I am sitting in Los Angeles looking at images of the destruction of South Beirut and listening to Starry night, music produced and recorded by Mazen Kerbaj in the midst of the Israeli seige. The sounds of his trumpet mix with Marcel Khalife's oud music, which is also playing in my studio. It is unbelievable and awe-inspiring how completely connected and disconnected we can be in the same moment. I can view images of destruction on bbc.com, I can hear the actual sounds of bombs being dropped in Beirut from this distant location and life goes on in the rest of the world. Condoleeza Rice debates whether it is the right time to visit the war-torn region. She and the rest of the Bush administration contemplate from a distance when the right moment might be to pressure for a 'cease fire'. In the midst of it all, people's homes and a life are being destroyed. The proximity and distance that occur in the same moment is hard to compute.

Each loud bomb that i hear through my computer is equivalent to some family's life and home being destroyed. For what? Who is benefitting from this madness.

Last year in Beirut I had a conversation with a Lebanese journalist who predicted that peace with Israel was not far off. I imagined a Levantine Middle East where it was possible to cross the border between Lebanon and Israel in a direct path. I imagined something of the economic prosperity that might come to this region as a result of that peace. I felt something of the excitement that she felt in imagining this peace.

The other day I had a conversation with a Syrian friend about her feelings about what is happening in Lebanon. Unlike many Syrians, she opposes Nasrallah and his belligerent stance towards Israel. She said, "It is a crazy situation. It is up to Nasrallah to decide our fate." She said this with a tone of irony and disgust. How can one man act this way and have such a devastating effect on so many people's lives? However - there is a flip side to this -- how is it that Israel is given the go-ahead to act as they do and affect so many MORE people's lives?
Why is it that in this age of easily accessible information such as sheer numbers of dead bodies accompanied by images and sounds of destruction we can't see that the balance of power is totally off kilter?

Isolationism and alienation

2006-07-20T13:47:00.000-07:00

My friend Esther has advised me that it is better blogging protocol to write shorter and more often. I will take her advice.

Today, riding my bike through Los Angeles, on the way to my 'day in the office', I had a thought about isolationist tendencies in the United States. I was thinking about this as a result of a brief interlude of viewing FOX TV last night where I witnessed Mara Liasson talking about how in the South of Lebanon, there is no distinction between the 'guerrilla forces' and the people. She said, "regular people are storing weapons in their houses!" Essentially, she was saying - they are all terrorists in the South. I thought -- WOW, I actually listen to Mara Liasson on NPR every once in a while and think that she is relatively intelligent. And here she is mouthing off on FOX news and she knows very little about what she is saying. I am constantly reminded of how we Americans are very cut off from what life is like for people living outside of our nation-state but forced to live with the very real effects of our foreign policy.

I recalled that during FDR's time, the US was isolationist but we had a government that was actually TAKING CARE OF PEOPLE! It was actually, maybe, being isolationist for a good reason! Money was actually being spent here on citizens who live here. Imagine that. Now - it seems that the US is still isolationist in mentality but not in action. Lead by our current diplomatically-challenged President, we are waging war and supporting proxy wars all over the place and what money is actually being spent here?!

Standing on the sidelines

2006-07-19T15:21:00.000-07:00

I'm hopping on the blog bandwagon. In the last week I've just been burning up with conflicting thoughts over the explosions in the Middle East. This blog is a place to reflect on how I can reconcile with some central questions: What does it mean to be a citizen of a country that is sponsoring and participating in killing? What does it mean to be an American Jew and forever linked to a state in the Middle East that I do not actively choose to be affiliated with? OK - maybe overwrought, but I've been thinking about it alot over the last year and a half.

It’s déjà vu all over again. How many times have we experienced this before in the last 15 years since we all hopped on the information super highway? The bombs start dropping from warplanes in the Middle East – in a more rapid succession than usual - and the in-box is flooded with email reports from the ground with evidence and testimony of how life proceeds during wartime.

I sit in my studio and read it all obsessively. I want to be connected somehow to this violence as if understanding it through electronic mail will bring me closer, give support to people there, make me an ally somehow, distance me from the fact that I am a US taxpayer and a Jew and feel some maybe-not-totally-irrational connection and responsibility for all this. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this, am I? After all, this is some supposed democracy that we live in where we can speak and write and talk openly about what we like and don’t like and maybe it might result in making some tiny bit of difference.

I’m sorting through all the conversations that I have had in the last week since the latest flood of missiles and missives began their exchange from Israel and Lebanon. Since I spent the better part of the last year living in Damascus, Syria I have a different understanding of what it is like to live on the other side of US and Israeli aggression. There are complicated and multi-triangulations of power in all of this. It is not just about Arabs vs. Israelis. It is also about Syria vs. Lebanon vs. Israel, Iran and Syria vs. Israel, the US and Israel vs. Iran, Syria and Iran vs. Saudi, Jordan and Egypt, and Shia vs. Sunnis and Christians. Unfortunately though, all of these complicated triangulations melt away in the face of the massive Israeli war machine. This is something that Americans and especially the Bush administration do not understand. As soon as the Israeli bombs start dropping, all of the Arab world, no matter their ethnic background or tribal affiliation unites against Israel and, in turn, against the US. After all – who funds the Jewish war machine to the tune of 3 billion dollars a year if not us—the US? Can’t there be a better way to deal with these problems than violence if what the US is after is developing the region so there is some support for the US and our need for oil? Where is all of this heading if not to Armageddon?

There are several comments that stick in my head:

A Jewish colleague and good friend of mine, Evan K., said, “Well, it’s absolutely clear that Israel did the right thing in response to the Hezbollah kidnapping of 2 Israeli soldiers by bombing Southern Lebanon and the runways at the brand new Rafik al-Hariri Airport in Beirut.”

A Syrian-born doctor whom I know, Dr. R., said the following (a paraphrase) “I don’t know about Hassan Nasrallah, I don’t know enough about him to say whether I support him or not, but I am happy to see that someone is striking back at Israel. No, he won’t ‘win’ in the end because ultimately the IDF is much more powerful, but it is good to see that someone is finally standing up to Israel and saying – NO we won’t and can’t take this anymore.”

Dr. R. is the father of a good friend of mine. He has been in the US for 31 years. He has no love for the state of Syria and in fact, even though his daughter is there, he refuses to go back. But he does miss something about the warmth, humor and general hospitality that is ever-present in Syria. He doesn’t understand why Israelis and/or American Jews don’t make an effort to sit down and negotiate with their Arab neighbors. Why do they always strike out in violence?

Similarly, Evan K. is not a neo-con, despite his harsh-sounding assessment of the situation. I would call him a moderate-to-sometimes-progressive leaning Jew who supports environmental causes in Israel and is a devoted visitor to the Jewish nation-state in the Middle East. I would venture to say that he would be supportive of the idea of ‘dialogue’ and general support of humanity (maybe mostly Jewish humanity) in the face of violence.

Is there something in these two conversations that might sum up our predicament? What is going on here? Two reasonable people – not fundamentalists, not neo-cons—are advocating violence. How are moderate people being pushed into what are essentially extremist positions? How can we resist this? I refuse to go down this path of saying that the only way to deal with the situation is to bring out the bombs even if I have heard my Syrian friends say – the only way to deal with extremist violence is to respond in kind.

This situation was in the making – what we are seeing now is the endgame of 1559 and the laying of the foundation for the next set of objectives. To review: The first part of UNSCR directive 1559 was to remove Syrian troops from Lebanon, the second part was to disarm Hezbollah. The first part was accomplished mostly due to diplomatic pressure from the US and France and from a now-mostly-forgotten-and-all-too-brief episode in recent Lebanese history called the Cedar Revolution. It was that tiny revolution that led the way for the Bush Administration to trumpet widely and proudly that democracy was flourishing in the Middle East. Perhaps it might have been that small revolution that led people in Palestine to vote and democratically elect the Hamas party to lead them. (Hmm, that was not part of the Bush democracy agenda!) And also, it might be what leads others in Lebanon to say that they support Nasrallah because he stands for what they believe: standing up to Israel!

Several people have emailed me to ask: What is up with these people in Lebanon who don’t disavow the violence that Hezbollah and Nasrallah are perpetrating? Aren’t these people crazy extremists?

My answer to that is: when faced with the reality of the Israeli war machine and living with it daily at your doorstep pushes many moderate and even progressive people into extreme positions. It becomes difficult to speak critically about Hezbollah when they are saying something and doing something that many people feel powerless to do. We need to remember here, sitting from our comfortable distance, that we are also inhabiting an extreme place of disconnection from the policies that we, in some perverse and twisted way, voted for.

Many people are asking – what can we do? When people who I know to be reasonable and smart people advocate violence I wonder - Is the only course of action the violent one? When is violence the only appropriate response? What does this mean for us who are not directly involved? Is it possible to sit actively, rather than passively, on the sidelines?