(click on the image for a larger version)

Comic by Ethan Heitner for Adalah-NY.

http://freemohammadothman.wordpress.com/

The Nation

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.

]]> http://danielming.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/free-mohammad-othman/feed/ 0 danming mohammadothman1 mohammadothman2 http://danielming.wordpress.com/2009/09/18/the-war-on-terror/ http://danielming.wordpress.com/2009/09/18/the-war-on-terror/#comments Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:31:31 +0000 Dan http://danielming.wordpress.com/?p=360 ]]>

“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. After a brief moment of self-examination, four other women join her on the stage and assume painstakingly specific positions – high, low, wrapped, spread. A crisp and feminine bodiless voice enters the scene and says “ignore,” while the dancers simultaneously assume new positions, without any suggestion of parallel form. They wait for a brief second, giving enough time for the audience to realize the shift, but not quite enough to understand its significance.

The voice continues: “ignore all.” This time they add another position, and keep building the phrase (and unwrapping the poem) each time the voice beckons them forward.

“ignore all possible”
“ignore all possible concepts”
“ignore all possible concepts and possibilities”
“ignore all possible concepts and possibilities…. ignore Beethoven”

On certain lines, such as “the damnation of Faust,” they all assume the same position: legs bent forward in a deep lunge, faces cast downward, arms stretched upwards with fingers clenched in a clawing position – as if they’re holding up the weight of the world on the back of their necks. One reviewer spoke of how this image has become burned into his mind, a moment that will remain as “iconic and lasting as marble.”

The dance is part of a piece entitled George and Zalman by contemporary Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, and was recently featured in “Deca Dance,” a evening-length collection of his work which I have already seen twice and will probably see several more times in the coming months. In my readings of Naharin’s work, his voice tells a story of modern Israeli life in all its complexity: simultaneous joy and sorrow, lightness and darkness, a determined focus on self and a tangled fear of the “other.” The synthesis of his movement language with Bukowski’s haunting and cynical poem conjures a message of forewarning and somber reflection. What are the “possible concepts and possibilities” that are being (and have been) ignored? And the “shit” that one would not want to smell of? For a nation that has been embroiled in war since its very inception, these simple words, if considered in the context of Israeli society, speak volumes through the art of suggestion.

As I revisit the poem, the words “ignore Beethoven” evoke the sounds of the composer’s famously ominous and foreboding melodies. It’s almost as if Bukowski and Naharin are setting Beethoven’s score as a soundtrack for the mundane tasks that characterize everyday life: paying taxes, copulating, making money, and sitting down with and stiff drink at the end of the day (not too strong — just enough to relax). They all sound like simple, uncomplicated matters, but if we listen closely, we can hear the subtle darkness that lies beneath. How many nameless bodies lie buried underneath the contentious landscape of modern Israel? Beethoven, the spider, and Faust all serve as evocative symbols of the cataclysm that becomes obscured by the monotony of domestic life.

And how have native writers dealt with this inner struggle?

* * *

In the darkness

If they show me a stone and I say stone they say stone.
If they show me a tree and I say tree they say tree.
But if they show me blood and I say blood they say paint.
If they show me blood and I say blood they say paint.

-       Amir Gilboa

I came across this poem while flipping through the assigned texts for Voices from Modern Israel, a Hebrew literature course I’m taking this semester. Its simplicity and clarity instantly struck me, and I found clear parallels and interesting contrasts between it and the Bukowski text. Gilboa seems to be alluding to what is either a grand deception or an epic delusion — perhaps both? The speaker is desperate in his sense of anger and disbelief at the collective’s inability and unwillingness to see blood for what it truly is. The reader is still left uncertain as to whether “they” use the term “paint” for propaganda (which in this case bears unsettling similarities to the word “terrorist”) or for self-comfort, to allow themselves to sleep at night without being woken up by the screeching cries and moans of their victims.

In abstracting his words of reckoning, Gilboa encourages us to consider this process in a more universal sense. Names like Beethoven and Faust contain very specific and culturally Euro-centric meanings. As evocative as they are, these terms have their limitations. Perhaps he is suggesting that the story of paint has been adopted in times and places outside of the wretched struggles of Israel and Palestine. This poem could be relevant in any place where an individual voice has stood up against a violently ignorant master-narrative or communal forgetting. The speaker shows us the absurdity of the constructed “war story,” in which we find ways to alter brutal truths and forget the devastation which our armies have proven themselves capable of inflicting at the simple push of a button.

Perhaps the collective rushes to term blood as paint because it’s simply seen as not belonging in the same space as the stone and the tree. After all, who wants to talk about the apocalypse in Hiroshima at a dinner party? The maimed children in My Lai over brunch? The shelled elementary school in Gaza at a coffee date? Even if we are somehow implicated in the violence at hand, it doesn’t belong to certain conversations. Leave politics to the politicians, some people just want to pay their taxes and forget about the bitter deafness in which Beethoven spent his final years.

I take back part of my earlier contention, the message of these two poems extends far beyond the microcosm of Israel, and there are potentially bodies everywhere. But as we attempt to establish normalcy in our everyday lives, certain things have been ignored, painted-over, and repressed from conscious memory.

I’m brought back to the dance that started this process of examination. In the last few moments of the piece, the poem restarts and the dancers execute the movements that accompany each word for the first three lines. When they reach the instruction “just make it, babe, make it,” they freeze on those last two words, heads held high and toes pointed forward. The lights suddenly fade to black, and the audience is left with the visual resonance of the five female bodies floating in the darkness, while Bukowski’s words still linger in the blank space of an empty stage.

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. For the majority of the novel, we are shown a man who has almost literally lost the force of life in him, trapped in the daily motions of his isolated Kibbutz and the constricting rituals of Israeli society.

            There is a point, however, in which this young kibbutznik reveals another side of himself. When Yoni finally gets up one morning and decides to leave his homestead, we are shown a much darker, handsome, promiscuous and aggressive man emerging from the repressed, lifeless cynic to whom the reader becomes accustomed. As he walks away from the place that he has long called home, Yoni assumes a long-forgotten identity. He becomes the confident soldier that we see glimpses of in his past; re-embodying the young man who was once decorated with medals for saving his friend during a bloody war and celebrated in a magazine article that he oddly (and at times loathingly) cherishes.

            As observers who are occasionally granted access to his inner struggles, we get the sense that Yoni’s experience in the military was deeply disturbing and has left a lasting mental and emotional scar burned into his psyche. He recalls the events for which he was so triumphantly celebrated with an almost obscenely comical tone. These various recollections scattered throughout the novel brought to mind a quotation from Tim O’Brien’s pseudo-memoir of his experience as an American soldier in the Vietnam War. On the subject of “war stories,” O’Brien claims that “you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth…” Obscenity, or at least a suspension of previously held moralities, seems to mark Yoni’s brief return to the military culture of modern Israel.

            The image of Yoni standing by the roadside with his rife casually hung across his body reminds me of the countless off-duty soldiers that I would curiously and cautiously observe while traveling throughout Israel. They stood, or more often slouched, in their faded green uniforms with a youthful indifference, unaware of the disturbing symbolism that they carried so unwittingly around (and in) their adolescent bodies. These teenagers and young adults, many of them the same age as me, represented an almost universal Israeli experience of the “sabra’s” formative years as a soldier. Young men and women, temporarily enclosed within the confines of their nation’s demands, attempt to find a sense of carefree adolescence while enduring several years of mandatory military service. Such service has almost become a ritual, a rite of passage in Israeli society that cannot be easily avoided without social consequences.

            The implications of this process reach far beyond the simplest political idea of militarism, which is the belief that a people should maintain a strong military capability and be prepared to use it against aggressors. Mandatory military service in the Israeli context forces us to consider militarism in a wider, more societal sense; in this country, it is hard to discern where civilian culture ends and where military culture begins. The reach of this concept involves militarism of the heart and mind, of desire, of the body and soul. Yoni’s entire manner of speaking changes; he becomes cavalier, arrogant and sexually provocative. On a desert army base, he is finally able to find a sexual partner who matches him in temperament, expectations and intensity. Here we can find Oz’s social commentary on the nature of military culture in the Israeli experience. Within this contained setting, a social space emerges in which one can find an accepted outlet for their most destructive self. The forces in this space become aggravated by the particular age group that is processed through compulsory service; the soldiers in question are youth in their ripest, most muscular form, ready to explore the world and themselves.

            While reading the passage of Yoni’s departure from the Kibbutz and sojourn to an army base in the Negev desert, my mind jumped once again across the ocean and back to Tel Aviv, where I had the opportunity to see the Batsheva Dance Company (an Israeli modern dance ensemble) perform a few months ago. I was reminded of a particular moment in a piece called “Deca Dance,” choreographed by the prolific Ohad Naharin — who is also quite the “sabra” himself, interestingly enough. In this section, five or six men wearing grey boxer briefs and undershirts stood at the front of the stage in a tight row. With their confident demeanor, tanned skin, toned bodies, and buzzed haircuts, they projected an undeniably masculine sense of confidence to the hypnotized audience. They quickly assumed the idealized image of young Israeli soldiers: uniform, disciplined and sharp, combined with a peculiar quality of brazen, yet casual, poise.

            The meaning that I discerned from their appearance became clearer when the men started executing Naharin’s trademark choreography. When the music started, they went through a repetitive series of movements in complete unison, ranging from strong self-affirming poses to slightly sexualized positions. The expressions on their faces were tough, their eyes staring out at the audience in a way that was sometimes confused and more often challenging – as if they were daring us to question the ceremony of their performance. The soundtrack accompanying their dance was a minimalist combination of sounds that could more accurately be described as “counter-music”; it consisted of an incessant ticking noise, making the movements seem all the more urgent and necessary.

            One reviewer of the dance aptly claimed that called Naharin’s use of repetition was fascinating and celebrated his “hypnotic incremental building up phrases of movement and words so that things change and intensify and become imprinted on one’s consciousness.” Indeed, the use of repetition did evoke the sense that these actions were some type of ritual for the men, a series of events that have been “imprinted” into their lives. In this way, Naharin expressed himself not only as a choreographer in the dance world, but also as an important voice of contemporary Israel. From the many stagings of his work that I have witnessed, I find my experience as an audience member to be much richer if I consider Batsheva as a distinctly Israeli company, and not simply as another random addition to the increasingly globalized modern dance scene. By applying a national lens to such an abstract art form, I am able to discern some sort of message in the forms and movements.

            In comparing Narharin’s choreography to Oz’s writings, these parallel themes of militaristic masculinity and repetitive rituals emerge with a transfixing clarity, although I must acknowledge that my readings of both works have been heavily colored by my own experiences and associations. It is entirely possible that these common threads have nothing to do with the actual intentions of the choreographer and writer, and everything to do with my own intellectual and emotional entanglement in the perplexing space of Israel and Palestine. Either way, I believe that the subject of Israeli militarism is made much more intricate and multifaceted when approached through creative reflection. In dance and in literature, this crucial aspect of such an internationally emphasized historical “conflict” is finally endowed with a human voice.

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.”

Apparently for her, my sympathies and loyalties in the situation needed no identification. Unaware of the fact that I have close family friends who live on a Kibbutz near the Israel-Gaza border in the Negev desert– within range of the rockets that were being constantly fired at the time of the protest– my newfound discussion partner went on to tell me about her life growing up in a small Israeli town near the Lebanon border. She explained the constant anguish of fearing rocket attacks, the devastation of having a friend killed during the first Lebanon War, the impossibility of finding normalcy in a life that is at times so uncertain.

I listened to her; trying to comprehend the ways in which her lived experiences have led her to this moment. She proudly waved a flag in support of a military that is currently responsible for over a thousand of Palestinian casualties; mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, all obliterated in the name of “fighting terrorism.” And moreover, she wasn’t simply forgiving the Israeli Defense Forces for their actions; she was defending the very right of Israel to commit these atrocities. Some of the signs in the counter protest read: “What would you do if rockets were falling on your house?”

Is “bomb a UN school” the logical answer? If so-called terrorists hide behind civilian targets, must the civilians first be destroyed in the name of purging evil? How could this woman lament the deaths of Israeli citizens and not give a thought to the lives of the Palestinians which Israel constantly oppresses?

In trying to make sense of the chilling answers to these troubling questions, I came across a psychological theory called cognitive dissonance. When our minds hold two conflicting ideas, attitudes, beliefs or opinions, we are left in a state of tension. One way in which our brains attempt to resolve this mental discomfort is through seeking out justifications in order to privilege a certain opinion over a long-held belief. In this case, the two inconsistent cognitions are 1) that massacres on innocent civilians are morally reprehensible and 2) that the attacks on, and continued collective punishment of, 1.5 million Gazans is an appropriate response to threats towards the state of Israel. Despite the fact that there were one hundred Palestinian deaths for every Israeli citizen killed in the recent war, the word “massacre” is never invoked by the supporters of the invasion. The consistency of these two ideas is therefore unchallenged, and the painful tension is effectively avoided.

The justifications that have been championed by the pro-Israel camp center around the need to protect against incidents of terrorism, and under this banner of national security they have come to defend the unimaginable horrors of an indiscriminate war. This month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution “recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza” by 390 votes to five. The specific methods of an appropriate defense were never mentioned, and there was nothing in the resolution that expressed criticism of Israel’s tactics. We are watching the official American sanctioning of a distant slaughter, which may not seem new to students of history, but is still shocking to a student returning from the Palestinian territories.

I was talking to a Vassar professor the other day about the catastrophe in Gaza and my subsequent decision to return to Poughkeepsie, rather than Jerusalem, for the semester. In defense of Israel’s actions, she invoked the famous words of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir: “We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.” As I walked away from that encounter, the words rattled in my skull. Justification can be a monster of a thing. 

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