The Israeli Fatalism

Yesterday, I got to catch up with a friend I hadn't spoken with in months, and as I was regaling her with tales about life in Jerusalem, she asked a very interesting question that I think I've danced around in previous posts but haven't ever directly addressed before.

I described to her daily scenes that are almost mediocre in a typical Israeli's life, such as the stopping of traffic for the blowing up of suspicious packages, people toting guns up and down the streets as if it were the most normal thing, and soldiers patrolling the Old city streets.

She then asked me that with all the conflict surrounding Jerusalem, if there is a sense of fatalism that permeates the attitudes of the residents here.

This idea of fatalism is very interesting in the context of Israel. The philosophy of fatalism to me implies an almost defeatist attitude because it is being resigned to fate. I understand how any non-Israeli would think this way about Israel. The omnipresence of metal detectors, checkpoints and security guards are frequent reminders of the potential for dangerous situations to arise at any moment. And the media is a constant barrage of images around the conflict.

Like my tour guide in the Golan said: life is hard in Israel because the people here are perpetually reminded that they have to fight to exist on this land, but that's just the way it is. Life moves on.

I would say that Israelis accept that they must fight to survive, but I do not believe that they are resigned to this fact. Rather, it is a sense of incredible nationalism and pride instilled since birth and reinforced with three years in the military that drives this unquestionable sacrifice for their country. Death is but a small part of life, and they will fight to live even if it means they might die.

It seems that while Israel is fated to fight many more battles before attaining the chimera of peace, Israelis are hardly succumbing to others to predetermine its fate.

Most Israelis I've talked to are jaded by the idea of compromise and peace any time soon. In fact, Arab-Israelis and Palestinians are also disenchanted by the prospects of peace within their own government as well as in Israel. Like I've said before, it has become a zero-sum game. Terrorists and extremists on both sides continuously doom any hopes for peace.

Israelis seem to think it is fate that Israel will always be antagonized by the surrounding Arab and/or Muslim countries, but they will not surrender without a tough fight. And as history has proven, they sure can hold their own for such a tiny country.

Rationality and Morality

So, it's still high holidays season here in Israel.
Luckily, I've been keeping myself busy somehow.

Today is Simhat Torah, and it will be the last random weekday that the buses don't run and stores are closed until I'm guessing Chanukah. And apparently, Chanukah isn't a big deal in Israel relative to Chanukah celebrations in the states.

Yesterday night, to celebrate Shemini Atzeret, which is usually celebrated by a big family dinner (or as my non-religious Israeli Jewish friend likes to describe it: "same shit, different day"), my friends cooked a nice dinner and we topped it off with wine and a long argument about Israeli politics.

I got a nice long history lesson of Israel including all the wars from an Israeli friend, and although I argued that history is always written/re-written by the victors, he insisted that this history was pure fact.

We argued about Israeli independence, al-Nakba, education systems, check-points, etc. It was a good argument, and it's for moments like those that I wanted to come to Israel.

A really good point one of my friends made was that all the security measures and checkpoints are necessary because if they didn't exist, people could not live for fear of bombs every day. I guess that's the idea. Biseder.

But when I told her that walking through checkpoints as a non-Jew or a non-Israeli and being stopped randomly on the street to prove your identity (and your right to freedom to walk around where you please) is humiliating and done in ways that are most often very disrespectful, she agreed.

And she put it this way: The security measures including all the checkpoints, random stops, rude questions, disrespectful treatment is rational though it may be immoral. It's understandable if not justifiable.

Does the Israeli government have the responsibility to be rational or moral? Shouldn't it be both? But can any government be both especially in such conflicts? And even when they're not in conflict, all countries try to promote their own self-interest, and usually rationality wins over morality.

Maybe rationality and morality aren't mutually exclusive. One can make a rational decision that is also moral. Or one can make a rational decision that will ultimately benefit the common good even if at the individual level, the intention was selfish.

I'm sorry if this post confuses you. I'm a little lost myself.

Shuafat Refugee Camp

Yesterday I visited Shuafat Refugee Camp, which is just right next to the Student Village, where most of the guys of G-Town live. I'm not sure what I expected a refugee camp to look like, but I was both surprised and not surprised by what I saw.

First, we drove through the area of Shuafat, which is on the way to Ramallah, and then coasted past the checkpoint into the refugee camp. I find it interesting that there's no problem and no wait to get into the camp. It doesn't matter what you carry in there or who you have in the car with you. The Israeli guards really don't care. If you are under the Palestinian Authority, meaning you don't carry a blue identity card with you proving you are an Israeli citizen or a permanent resident of Israel, you can go in to the camp, but you can't leave. It makes me wonder how one got out in the first place.

Anyway, as soon as we drove into the camp, a little kid started banging the car with his fist as we tried to maneuver through the most narrow streets. There were three women in the car who were clearly foreigners. At first we thought maybe he was hitting the car because a woman was driving, but no, there are many women drivers in the camp. Then we were told he hit the car because he is "of the camp". I can't remember exactly what the term is, but basically, children "of the camp" are portrayed to be violent and impulsive. Probably, he was just trying to make a point that we didn't belong in the camp.

If there is a tension between Palestinians of the camp and Palestinians in the West Bank and Arab-Israelis and Palestinians as permanent residents of Israel, of course it makes sense that there would be some animosity towards anybody more different.

The camp itself was marked by a certain gloom. The streets were more like alleys, and they were dim and narrow. There was trash everywhere. There was colorful graffitti everywhere from Ramadan, from little children just drawing all over the walls, from G-Town and their supporters, from people who had returned from the Hajj, etc. The buildings from the outside looked dirty and run-down. The whole place seemed cramped and overcrowded.

However, when we went into two of the houses of two members in G-Town, the houses were large family complexes. They were beautiful inside with spacious courtyard areas, and multiple apartments. One of the members even had a tropical parrot gracing the foyer and what one might even consider a "boom boom room" for the band.

Another house had a balcony covered with grape vines overlooking the camp, and from the top, the camp seemed like any other city. It reminded me a lot of the Islamic tradition of private vs. public space where the outside of buildings and homes most often deceive the viewer to its true hidden treasures inside.

I was not surprised to see how dirty and cramped the camp seemed. But, maybe this is ignorant of me, but I was surprised to see how nice individual houses were inside the camp. Of course, just like Ramallah, the five-star prison, there is always a nagging feeling due to the lack of complete freedom because of the knowledge of the checkpoints just a few hundred meters away.

Unfortunately, we didn't get to visit the separation wall because for some reason, the band members didn't feel like walking around the camp. I did manage to get a few photos, but I felt like it wasn't really welcome by the residents of the camp.

Also, while I was bedridden during Yom Kippur, I was unaware of the riots that occurred in Acre just to the north. Apparently, after the riots broke out, East Jerusalem was on high alert, and there were some incidents of young Palestinian/Arab-Israeli children around the French Hill area who threw rocks at some of the dorms in the Student Village.

Everyday, I feel like I'm starting to really understand the seriousness of the conflict as it has become my reality. But at the same time, I can't really say that living in Israel is dangerous. Maybe volatile is a better word to describe the situation?

Like I wrote in a previous post, there is no intermixing in Jerusalem. The Jews and the Muslims around here seem to just ignore that the other exists or that the other is just like them.

There is no overt hostility, but there is no acknowledgement.

It is a tense peace based on a twisted sense of denial for self-preservation which to me just fosters a growing latent danger.

On our way out of the camp, we were stopped at the checkpoint. This checkpoint was different than the Ramallah checkpoint because instead of standing behind a bulletproof glass window, the soldiers are right in your face and so are their guns. I'm not sure which is worse. I guess it would depend on what kind of day you and the guard are each having.

The soldier asked to see our passports, and asked us why [the hell] were we in the refugee camp. We answered that we had friends in the camp. Yes, she heard us right. We have friends in the refugee camp, and no, not everyone whether he/she is Israeli or not is afraid to visit a refugee camp.



Check out this article that was in the New York Times. It talks about the Heartbeat of Jerusalem concert I went to and has a quote from one of the members of G-Town-Muhammad.

Being "the other" and understanding the other "other"

edit: My computer froze last night (per usual) as I was writing this post:

What a strange day.

I'm so tired right now, but if I don't write this out tonight, I'll regret it come tomorrow morning.

So much has happened since the last time I've written...where do I even begin to begin?

For starters, I've just posted an article from Reuters about tonight's "attack" in Jerusalem-I'm trying to figure out why they've put quotes around the word, and I guess it's because no terrorist group was behind the act, and no civilians or victims were killed (yet). Only one casualty, and it was the driver of the vehicle.

The police claim it was indeed an act of terrorism, and I believe this is because terrorism is defined as an act of desperation to incite fear amongst civilians. I was driving back from an Ulpan graduation party at my teacher's house, and we were downtown right next to the Old City when this happened. All of a sudden we heard police and ambulance sirens closing in on the city, and we saw people running towards the scene. There were several different accounts of what had just happened; when we asked the people on the street, they said there were gunshots, while the radio announcer said it was another tractor/bulldozer incident by the Damascus Gate.

I was taken aback by how casually Israelis seemed to react to this incident. One Israeli I met simply said, "Welcome to Israel" and when I asked my Israeli friend if he'd heard what happened, he just sighed and said that things like this were a fact of life in Israel. And that was it. The "attack" hasn't been mentioned again since.

Last night, I went to a concert put on by an MTV-Fulbright scholar who brought together Palestinian and Israeli musicians along with a Palestinian and Israeli youth music group Heart of Jerusalem to perform at the Jerusalem YMCA. The first artists were from the group White Flag; the group is made up of 3 Palestinians from Gaza and 3 Israelis. Because sometimes (like last night) half the group from Gaza can't get through the checkpoints on time or ever, the group's self-proclaimed motto is, "the show must go on". They sang in both Hebrew and Arabic.

The hip-hop group G-Town that my internship researcher is focusing on also performed last night. They were good live, although I think they felt a little awkward at first because the crowd was quiet and seated-really not your typical hip-hop concert with a loud, excited crowd, arm waving, and head bobbing.

The crowd was mixed with mostly older parents there to watch their children perform in the youth group, younger Israeli groupie types of the band, the Sulhita project, and the G-Town posse dressed in western hip-hop gear with printed NY and LA wide-brimmed hats, baggy jeans, stylish Kanye hoodies and kicks.

After the concert, the other intern, the researcher and I went to go meet the members of G-Town, and I felt like such a groupie waiting for the group after the show! We hung out and talked with two of the members of G-Town in a nearby playground until late into the night.

It was a really interesting experience to hear first-hand a Palestinian's experience in Jerusalem. The members of the group live in the Shuafat Refugee Camp, which is actually just north of French Hill.

One of the members told us that he is studying film and television in a school in a nearby settlement. I asked him if that meant that most of his classmates were Israeli Jews, and he immediately responded that he didn't have a problem with Israelis or Jews, but he definitely affirmed that he did not like Israeli settlers. He told us how in class the Israelis never spoke with the Palestinians even though the classes are very small. He said that he doesn't even get acknowledged so much with a greeting or a smile.

I found out that there are separate schools for Jewish students and Palestinians students although there are a few schools like Hand-in-Hand that have both Israeli and Palestinian students and teach in both Hebrew and Arabic. Unfortunately, from the get-go, there is no intermixing. The children are segregated by the education system, and it seems that the approach to a peaceful coexistence is set up to fail.

Even in local Jerusalem parks, both Israeli Jews and Palestinian parents bring their children to play although the parents never talk to each other and the kids don't play with each other; they just share the same space.

This is when I realized that most of the people here cohabitate without coexisting.
There is only a feeble coexistence because in each own struggle to affirm the right to live, each must ignore "the other"'s right to live. The system is understood by many as a zero-sum game, and unfortunately someone has to lose.

We talked about the checkpoints and how tedious and humiliating they can be. Then he told us a story from his childhood when he was stuck with his family in the car at a checkpoint for several hours. When they finally got through, someone shot at the car, and the car with his whole family flipped over. They were all in the hospital for days. He doesn't know why the soldiers shot at his car. The bizarre thing is, he told us that until the age of fifteen, he had never met an Israeli who was not an IDF soldier with a gun. For most of his childhood, he confessed that he was afraid of Israelis, and this fear generates resentment, and that leads to hate.

It's interesting that from both sides, there are mutual constructs of "the other" that start from childhood. While Israeli Jewish children, especially those who grew up during the second intifada, imagine Palestinians as terrorists, Palestinian children imagine Israelis as intimidating soldiers with guns.

Both imagine the other as a violent oppressor.

Then, in another interesting turn of events, I went to the settlement of Efrat tonight to my Ulpan teacher's house with the rest of my Ulpan class to celebrate the end of summer Ulpan. I was in the Muslim quarter all afternoon buying Turkish delight and trying Knafeh while trying to find a way into al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock (unsuccessful).

I ended up walking to the central bus station with two friends, when I was stopped by a plainclothes policeman just between the Damascus gate and the Jaffa gate. He only stopped me. He aggressively told me to show him my passport. I was skeptical at first as to his identity as a policeman, but a nearby police vehicle with another policeman nodding along convinced me.

Obviously I don't carry such an important document with me everywhere, so I told him that I didn't have my passport in English. He started getting angry and told me that I was a tourist so therefore I must have a passport. I was flustered and so angry, but I managed to tell him in Hebrew that I was a student at the Hebrew University. As soon as he heard the Hebrew, he broke out into a smile and let me go as my friends watched. I was so humiliated again that I was the only one stopped because I was clearly not Jewish. I was so angry by his blatant discrimination. It made me so upset, and I couldn't understand how Palestinians could deal with this treatment on a daily basis. I thought, fuck this place. I would never send my children here.

The bus ride to Efrat was interesting. I saw the separation barrier up close, and the bus was built like a tank with small bulletproof windows to shield against snipers. I also noticed that the walls were not continuous, and a friend explained that this was so that if a driver is shot at while on the highway, he/she could stop behind the walled sections as protection from the sniper. What a life, huh?

Then, on the way back from dinner, the "attack" happened. And it made me re-evaluate my reaction earlier about discrimination. While nothing justifies rude treatment, I realize that here, discrimination equals survival. It certainly doesn't justify discrimination, but it is understandable.

How can they distinguish between the terrorist and the non-terrorist?

They have to do these random checks as humiliating and rude as they may seem to the person being checked. The checkpoints too are horrible, but an Israeli friend of mine who worked at a checkpoint in Gaza told me how they found bombs daily. How could they not have these tedious checkpoints when innocent people's lives were at stake?

I talked to my roommate after I got home, and I was pretty shaken up. I could still hear and see the sirens for a while outside my window. She told me that she had no sympathy for terrorists. She said that attacks on civilians were not justified by anything. If it were up to those individuals, they probably would change the system if they could.













I agree that most people would not condone maltreatment of others without just cause; however, the problem is, is defending against terrorism by a few radical individuals just cause for humiliation and discrimination against the whole group of people?

View from the top

If you know me well enough, you knew from my last post that I was going to be back at the Muslim quarter of the Old City the very next day. This time though, a friend and I walked to it from the dorms. It was a pretty long walk, but Jerusalem is cooling down a bit, and so even though the sun was still beating down ferociously from above, there was also an occasional cool breeze to mollify the heat.

I bought myself one of the three things I vowed to buy in the Middle East. I bought a 20 shekel Azan alarm clock!!

When I was in Morocco, I loved waking up, yes even at five in the morning, to the muezzin's call to prayer resonating from all corners of the city. After going back to the states, I realized that hearing the call to prayer was something that I really loved and really missed. I read somewhere later on that in all the brick-a-brack type stores in any Middle Eastern souk, one can find alarm clocks that wake you up with the call to prayer-I knew I would have to get AT LEAST one. I'll probably end up buying up a collection before I return home.

And there, in the souk of the Old City, I found several! There were Azan clocks that rang five times a day, and multi-colored Azan clocks, small ones, big ones, and all wonderful. I bought one that only rings once since I figure I won't be home enough to enjoy the other four.

(You can see my new Azan clock as the crowning photo of this blog. By the way, do you like the new layout?)

After some intense roaming around, gobbling down sticky honeyed Arabic desserts, drinking pomegranate juice, and haggling for random unnecessary purchases, we took a breather by the entrance to Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. We weren't allowed in because it's disrespectful to enter after a certain time especially during Ramadan, so we watched as huge crowds filed in. I have yet to visit the mosque and the dome, but I'd never found the entrance before-I'll get to them some day.


































Also, today as I was taking my jog, I realized why I put myself through this painful run almost every day. To be honest, I really dislike running-I would much rather be taking a nap. But as I gazed out at the view overlooking Jerusalem, I realized this view reminded me everyday how lucky I am to be here. As much as I complain about things around here, I would not rather be anywhere else right now in my life.

And I'm sorry to be cliche, but it also made me realize just how unique Jerusalem is. On the one hand, it is unfortunate that Jerusalem is still a divided city; half the city is festooned in colorful blinking Ramadan lights and is less "modern", and the other half is dominated by architectural giants and a lighted menorah. There are some Jewish Israelis who have never ventured into the Muslim quarter of the Old City or even to East Jerusalem, I'm sure it's the same vice versa, although more Palestinians/ Arab Israelis probably go to West Jerusalem for jobs than Israeli Jews go to East Jerusalem.

The longer I'm here, the more I feel the subtle and sometimes not so subtle tensions between Jews and Muslims. This city is full of unspoken rules and muffled discrimination. I'm starting to understand that both sides have valid points, both sides are marred by fundamentalism, both sides are misunderstood, both sides are just trying to exist, and ultimately, both sides are fighting for peace.

On the other hand, above the clamor of the city and the politics and the religion, the view from the top shows a tentative coexistence if only because of proximity of sacred sites, but it is a coexistence nonetheless.


(picture from www. jerusalemshots.com)