A New Old Year in Palestine

It is 1:30am in Ramallah, Palestine. Our New Year's eve consisted of a a few nice nibbles at a friend's house, watching BBC and Al Jazeera for the latest updates on Gaza and then a midnight vigil for the victims of Israel's bloodiest attack and murder in Gaza since 1967. Happy New Year.

As the news will tell you, Israel commenced an aerial attack on Gaza Saturday morning and continues until now, New Year's eve. The death toll is two shy of 400 (although that was an hour ago, who knows how many more as the attacks continue into the night) and the injured hover at 2000. The main hospital in Gaza is not only overflowing and unable to take care of all the wounded but has entered a crisis with no medicine to care for them. They had been short on supplies since Israel tightened the noose around Gaza and cut off electricity, humanitarian aid, food, fuel, etc in November. So you can imagine where the situation is at this point. Can we even begin to imagine?

Olmert said today: "there is no need for a 'humanitarian ceasefire' as there is no humanitarian crisis". How many lies can fall from this man's lips and that of the rest of the government?! I have been reading Israeli denial, evasion, justification and the like for the past four days-it is enough to make anyone sick. The racism is so extreme that Palestinians are not human to Israelis anymore. Just today I heard a Birthright leader say when asked how many Gazans had been killed: "I don't care about Arab lives". This is a man who is taking kids on their first tour of Israel and it is pretty clear that indeed his sentiments are not his alone. Palestinians are not human beings to many Israelis, they don't see them (nor do the planes dropping bombs, they don't see 'people' they see 'targets'). Much of the Israeli papers are full of words like: "300 terrorists were preparing to graduate from an academy in Gaza today, terrorists who were planning on killing Jews" (1) These were in fact newly trained policemen, graduating from their academy when Israel dropped the bomb on them. Same for a family that was loading a truck with gas cannisters and scrap metal: according to the IDF (2), "eight members of a Hamas cell were killed in this aerial attack, we considered them a legitimate target" (3) According to Israeli Human Rights Group, B'tselem, who had an investigator in the area (not several thousand meters in the sky like the fighter jets), there were remains of gas cannisters only, not 'rockets' and the man who owned the van said he lost his son and seven family members while delivering gas and collecting scrap metal from the bombed-out buildings. I am sure there are hundreds more stories like these, but almost none are published. The dead become 'terrorists', 'Hamas' or 'collateral damage' effctively erasing any of their faces, names and lives altogether.

Ha'aretz, once thought of as Israel's 'left, intellectual paper' consistently has the number of wounded Israelis on their cover daily: "two dead and four wounded"—if you didn't know already. I'm not saying their deaths don't count but is it not unbelievable that over 400 people have been massacred and 2000 more injured and they don't show up on the front page?! I have also checked out the Globe and Mail, the New York Times and even the Guardian and their insistence on 'balanced reporting' is not in fact balanced but actually about making sure they don't piss off the Israelis, thus covering as much of the Israeli 'story' as the Palestinian...did anyone else notice this IS NOT A BALANCED SITUATION?!

Just a few facts that most of the papers are neglecting to mention in their scramble to be 'balanced': 1. Israel attacked Gaza and its citizens. Bombing the most densely populated place on earth does not leave much room for 'not aiming at civilian targets'...the whole place is mixed with civilians. And people are not 'collateral damage' as Tzipi Livni mentioned in a move to make people understand that 'this is what happens in war as undesirable as it is'; 2. Israel claims (as does most of the press in parrot-like fashion), that the reason they attacked was to stop the rocket fire from Gaza (which have not killed until this week). Let's be very clear: the rockets were in response to the Siege on Gaza which began in November after an Israeli attack inside the strip undermining the truce established in June. Although both sides violated the truce before, this was on a much larger scale(4); 3. The siege has effectively caused the collapse of infrastructure and has resulted in a humanitarian crisis. 4. While Israel insists there is no 'humanitarian crisis', the UN, the World Bank, Oxfam the Red Cross and Red Crescent, have been declaring otherwise for months.

Between the starving of a people, the cutting off of all supplies, medical and otherwise, the consistent breaking of the truce, I would argue that balance should not be what a journalist strives for in reporting but rather context and fact to better explain the current situation.

There are protests going on across Israel that of course most will never hear about as the police have taken to brutally breaking them up and thus presenting a homogeneous image to the world. Israeli demonstrations have effectively been dismissed in the papers as "Violent Arab Demonstrations" while Abbas' Fatah Army is 'controlling' demonstrations here in Ramallah (they say they are protecting Palestinians from being killed by Israelis) But in the meantime, showing one's outrage for the killing of hundreds of people has been completely clamped-down on for fear of undermining what Abbas/Fatah and the Israel effectively want: Election Wins all around.

And so we sacrifice women, children and families so that Israeli leaders can deliver their election speeches and Abbas can take back Gaza despite losing DEMOCRATIC elections over a year ago. It was only a matter of time and here we are. The only democracy in the Middle East? I guess it depends how you understand that word. Happy 2009.



(1)Hamodia daily paper January 1st, 2009
(2)Israel Defense Forces
(3)Brigadier General Miri Regev, IDF spokesperson
(4)On November 5th, the Israeli government sealed all the ways into and out of Gaza. Food, medicine, fuel, parts for water and sanitation systems, fertilizer, plastic sheeting, phones, paper, glue, shoes and even teacups are no longer getting through in sufficient quantities or at all.

Glory, Glory

So Xmas is upon us in the (un) holy land. Tamira and I will go to Bethlehem to see what its all about. Bethlehem is 15 kms from Ramallah, that's about 15 minutes by car under normal circumstances...but as we know, it is anything but that: We are counting on about two hours (with holiday traffic at the checkpoints of course—ok, maybe three). We've been studying our route and hopefully by xmas eve we'll know what we are doing. We thought donkeys might be most appropriate in speed and symbol.

I promised I wasn't going to glorify Palestine or its people in the opening of my blog and so far I have kept true to my word. But I have to say, people here are making this very difficult for me! There isn't a day that goes by where Tamira and I don't walk out of a shop, a meeting, an interaction and not shake our heads saying 'it can't be so, people just cannot be THIS nice!' The other day we went to buy a printer. The shop's VISA machine wasn't working and we didn't have cash. They said: "Just take it home and come by and pay us tomorrow, don't worry." Hello? Did you hear that?! 'Please take our merchandise oh person we have never met before and come pay us some other time'. I think that might have happened to my grandmother in 1910. This happens to us daily. So there it is, a broken promise, glory, glory. Crazy.

Other than that we have been working on a small film about Mahmoud Darwish, the late great poet laureate of Palestine. Darwish is most often described as 'the people's poet' and yet his poetry of the last many years is so very dense, so very difficult. I think it doesn't actually really speak to 'the people' any longer but his legacy does. I would argue too that as soon as you are appointed 'the people's' anything, you really can no longer belong to the people as you have become but a symbol and symbols are the exact opposite of the people—they are singular and external—no doubt one of the reasons Darwish resisted this title for so long. But it is through his words, his work, his poems and given time to actually sift through that I believe is the way back to the so-called people. It is in trying to find the rhythm of Darwish that we hope to work through the rhythm of the life lived here. I am attempting to follow the directive of my friend Fady: to shed my skin and still be in it so I may get closer to understanding.

Glory, Glory be.