(click on the image for a larger version)
Comic by Ethan Heitner for Adalah-NY.
http://freemohammadothman.wordpress.com/
Last fall, I was lucky enough to participate in several of Mohammad’s tours of the Israeli-built separation wall and the Palestinian olive harvest. His commitment to the Stop the Wall campaign is truly inspiring; Mohammad is a full-time activist and educator.
“So senior year, huh? Where do you think you’ll end up when you’re done?”
This was the first sign of interest that my landlord had displayed in my personal life since I moved into one of his dingy apartments a few months ago. I decided to engage in his invitation to bring our relationship past the late rent check that I was handing him that morning. Maybe we would become friends and I could convince him to fix our toilet.
“Well, I’m considering moving back to the Middle East actually,” I responded. “I spent some time in Israel and Palestine last year and would like to go back and work.”
“Man, I was just down in Arkansas, passing through on my truck route, and I walk in this gas station and the guy there has this fuckin’… what is it? That Palestinian thing. Fuckin’ Hezbollah TV or something turned on.”
“Wait, Hezbollah has a TV station?”
“I dunno, it was something like that. He said he was from Yemen.”
“Could it have been Al Jazeera?”
“Probably. Anyways, so I asked this guy where the hell Yemen was and he pulled out a map and — get this — he couldn’t fuckin’ show me where it was. Didn’t know how to find it.”
“Really?” I asked in a bit of disbelief.
“Ya, I mean the guy was sitting behind the counter eating his fried chicken. Totally American. You couldn’t really tell he was Arab at all.”
“Interesting.”
“I guess that’s really our biggest weapon,” he chuckled, “stick a KFC in the middle of China and we wouldn’t even have to go to war.”
Cellcom, an Israeli telecommunications company, recently launched the following ad campaign:
Sadly, I was never fortunate enough to see one of these touching matches during my time in the West Bank. It gives me hope to think that despite the fact that Palestinians are locked in what is effectively an open-air prison, they still have a sense of lighthearted playfulness.
The only thing that I’ve ever had thrown in my direction from the IDF was a canister of tear gas when the checkpoint into Jerusalem became too crowded.
Stung the eyes, made it hard to breathe. Foul play, guys. That’s what we call bad sportsmanship.
making it
ignore all possible concepts and possibilities
ignore Beethoven, the spider, the damnation of Faust
just make it, babe, make it:
a house, a car, a belly full of beans
pay your taxes
fuck
and if you can’t fuck
copulate.
make money but don’t work too
hard – make somebody else pay to
make it – and
don’t smoke too much but drink enough to
relax, and
stay off the streets
wipe your ass real good
use a lot of toilet paper
it’s bad manners to let people know you shit or
could smell like it
if you weren’t
careful.
- Charles Bukowski, 1972
Lights up.
A woman stands alone on the stage, her arms extended out in a typical ballet posture, her hair tightly wrapped in a high bun. The music begins with a deep pensive note, and then lingers for a short while as her motionless body paints the atmosphere. Keep reading →
KIFL HARIS, WEST BANK - A construction worker overlooks an Israeli highway being built to connect the settlement of Ariel, which is located beyond the internationally-recognized “Green Line” that separates Israel from the Palestinian Territories, to Tel Aviv. (November 16th, 2008)
Israeli military checkpoint outside the Palestinian village of Birzeit.
Inspired by Christoph Bangert’s work for the New York Times, I’ve decided to start posting more pictures of my experience in Palestine on this blog. It’s been hard to start the process of sorting through the hundreds of photos that I collected last fall, but what better incentive is there than procrastination from the pile of papers I have to write?
This is a picture of one of the checkpoints situated near the village of Birzeit in the West Bank. We would have to drive through it (and countless others) every time we traveled to the northern parts of the territory.
Sorry for the lack of posts in the past few months. Surprisingly enough, Poughkeepsie, New York is less of a blogworthy place than Ramallah, Palestine (at least in my humble opinion). For those faithful few who still visit this page, here’s an essay that I recently wrote for a Hebrew literature course that I’m taking this semester called “Voices from Modern Israel.”
UPDATE: This essay was published on the website of the Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture (an independent publication based in East Jerusalem that I interned with last year) in April 2009.
Performing Israeli Militarism:
Ritual, Repetition, and Masculinity in the Works of Oz and Naharin
Yonathan Lifshitz, the central character in Amos Oz’s Hebrew classic A Perfect Peace, is an unmistakable representation of a crucial segment of modern Israel. He is a “sabra” (or prickly pear) in the most exterior sense of the classic metaphor: rugged, tough, and seemingly hostile. With his thick outer skin, Yoni is not the type of fictional construct that one could easily call a “buddy.” This complex protagonist is Oz’s unsubtle illustration of the archetypal young, native-born Israeli kibbutznik. He is disillusioned with the grand projects of his founding fathers, tired of the expectations that his society places upon him, weary of the burden of the hopes and aspirations of the wider Jewish Diaspora for a concrete homeland in which to cement themselves and each other. Keep reading →
A few weeks ago I attended a protest in my hometown of Victoria, British Columbia against the recent Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip. Walking towards the gathering wearing the keffiyeh that I bought in the Old City of Jerusalem, I was immediately thrown into a crowd of passionate activists from both sides of the political divide holding boards and banners, arguing with one another about motives, necessity, and justifications for the bombardment of schools and houses in the densely-packed Palestinian territory. Israeli and Palestinian flags were held high along the road, as if each was trying to cancel the other out by their unwavering presence.
One woman who was carrying a massive banner supporting Israel seemed to notice the peculiar scarf around my neck. She paused for a while, and then moved her head upwards to catch a glimpse of my face. After staring curiously for a few seconds, she walked over to my side of the invisible divide and we started speaking.
“You’re Daniel Ming, right? I recognized you from that article in the newspaper the other day.”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“So you studied in a Palestinian university last semester? In Ramallah?”
“Yes, I was at Birzeit University in the West Bank.”
“Well, I just thought I should come here and talk with you so that you can know the other side as well.” Keep reading →
Does anyone else still have that uneasy feeling in the pit of their stomach every time they think about the recent slaughter of over one thousand and three hundred Palestinians? Do you still have that burning in your chest? That aching coldness in your fingers?
Are you numb? Are you depressed? Do you watch as the country celebrates such a proudly historic moment in American history with the bitter realization that somewhere else in the world, whether it be familiar or exotic to you, a father is burying his two year old daughter? She was the same age as my baby sister.
Please, share your feelings with me. I don’t know what I’ll do without being able to talk to people openly and honestly about all of this.
This is to you, whom I’ve devoted every ounce of my critical thinking abilities and leisure reading towards for the past five months. I’ve only gotten to really “know” you recently, and it has been a hectic and tiring ride. You’re demanding, you know? The moment I met you on that warm summer morning in an Amman conference room, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
I have some news that may seem disappointing. For the next few months I shall resume my over-privileged New York liberal-arts-college-life. I will sit in wood-paneled classrooms and listen to ramblings on postcolonial theory. I will spend my afternoons in a ventilated dance studio trying to get back into shape rather than hunched over my trusty laptop in a smoky café. I will do something that defies my previous expectations of myself, with the hopes of refining my ideas of what it really means to “take care” — which, ironically enough, was often the last note in emails from friends, family and faculty while I studied in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
But I promise not to abandon, and never to forget. Please see this as a temporary pause of my physical presence in the midst of your chaos, rather than as an act of running away. I won’t do you any good if I don’t feel completely ready to pay you a second visit, which will come soon — maybe this summer? You only deserve the best of me.
And, to be honest I-P.C., you too have some shit to sort out while I’m gone.
I’ll keep writing and see you soon,
Daniel
