Tuesday, January 31, 2012

[ePalestine] After a lifetime abroad, Fida Jiryis explores returning to the state of Israel

One of the few who have realized the right of return! May there be many more soon!


Homeland is home,
Sam



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Saturday, January 28, 2012

[ePalestine] Jadaliyya: In Colonial Shoes: Notes on the Material Afterlife in Post-Oslo Palestine

Jadaliyya 

In Colonial Shoes: Notes on the Material Afterlife in Post- Oslo Palestine 

by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins 


Solid (un-wasted) Writing,
Sam



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Tuesday, January 24, 2012

[ePalestine] Bitterlemons: The writing has always been on the wall (by Sam Bahour)

TO READ ONLINE: http://bit.ly/x6VNcN

Bitterlemons.org

A PALESTINIAN VIEW 

The writing has always been on the wall 

Sam Bahour 

The human body is an amazing creation. It's not only the most complex system known to mankind, but it embodies within it signals that tell its owner that something has gone wrong. A similar signaling system exists in political bodies. Those tasked with reading the signals--be they individuals, physicians or politicians--can choose to consciously ignore the warning signs. The Middle East peace process between Palestinians and Israelis has been emitting SOS signals for decades, but only recently are those signals being received and analyzed for what they are transmitting- -a clear and irreversible message that the entire paradigm of "two states for two peoples" has collapsed. 

Like doctors who peddle medications instead of practicing medicine, many politicians are under the influence of their narrow political interests and prefer not to call situations by their name. After so many years of failure--political, legal, diplomatic and economic--those who are paid to diagnose and treat reality are being replaced with voices from all corners of the world, voices convincingly making the case that the entire premise undertaken by the Palestine Liberation Organization, starting as far back as 1974, is no longer feasible.  

Some will say that the PLO was tricked by the West into a path that was never intended to succeed. Others may claim that the PLO had no option but to acquiesce to the pressures placed upon it to enter, more recently, the Oslo peace process, in hopes that the West (mainly the US) would then pull its weight in bringing Israel in line with international law and UN resolutions. Regardless of the analysis of the past, very few people on the ground who are intimately involved in the attempt to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli "conflict" would venture to spend any additional political credit on the notion that two independent states, Israel and Palestine, remain a way out of this man-made tragedy.  

The measures were many, each of them a warning signal that sounded over and over again, but largely fell on deaf ears. The ignoring of a refugee population. A prolonged military occupation, unaccountable to the Fourth Geneva Convention. The launching of the illegal Israeli settlement project. The continued use of military force against Palestinians wherever they reside: Jordan, Lebanon, inside Israel, or the occupied territory. Assassinations and mass murder of Palestinians, from Lebanon to Tunis to every Palestinian city, in broad daylight for all to see. Seven hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians arrested and detained, many without charge and many tortured. A lopsided peace agreement (Oslo) that merely institutionalized the reality of military occupation. The election of Israeli prime ministers who, one after another, represented political programs that explicitly forbade the emergence of another state between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River. The list goes on and on. Each one of these signals emitted a deafening sound that was heard by all, and ignored by all who could change the course of events.  

One of Israel's founding ministers of education and culture, Professor Ben-Zion Dinur, said it most sharply, according to the book "History of the Haganah": "In our country there is room only for the Jews. We shall say to the Arabs: Get out! If they don't agree, if they resist, we shall drive them out by force." With this theme as its explicit backdrop, it is no wonder that newly-established Israel had little chance of being a normal state among the community of nations. These words rang out long before the creation of the PLO and long before the unacceptable phenomenon of suicide bombings entered the scene.  

Israel was founded on the infamous fallacy that it was built on a "land with no people, for a people with no land." Instead of acknowledging that this fallacy is a form of outright racism, Israel is legislating it into its laws. Since its inception, Israel has arrogantly refused to address the most crucial prerequisite of its establishment as a conventional state: accepting the Palestinians, those people that just happened to be living in that "empty" land that Israel was created on.  

After over six decades of conflict and dispossession of the Palestinians, and after two decades of Palestinian political recognition of Israel on part of their lands, the Israeli people choose to sustain the conflict. They are bent not only on keeping their boot of occupation on the necks of Palestinians living under it, but on embarking on an accelerated path to disenfranchise, yet again, Palestinians who remained in Israel and assumed Israeli citizenship.  

Today, Israel seems determined, more than ever, to forcefully prove the original premise of its statehood--an Israel with moveable borders and a Jewish-only population. Twelve Israeli prime ministers before Binyamin Netanyahu, six of them after the signing of Oslo, have failed at this nonsensical endeavor. He, too, will fail. If Israel cannot produce a leader to move the country from being a pariah to being a member of the Middle East, only Israel's Jewish population will be to blame.  

This should not come as a surprise for Israelis who have studied their own history. Israel's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, understood it well when he said, "Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we came here and stole their country. Why should they accept that?" The fact of the matter is: Palestinians even accepted "that" and are still being rejected and punished.  

It is clear that Israel has no plans to reach any form of lasting peace with Palestinians or concede to a two-state solution. Its spread of illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory has created new facts on the ground that make it impossible to form a contiguous Palestinian state, even on the 22 percent of historic Palestine that Palestinians have been reduced to and agreed upon.  

In light of this continuing Israeli policy of outright aggression and negation of Palestinian rights, Israelis should prepare themselves for the next generation of Palestinians, a much more savvy generation interlinked with a global world and a region that values rights over an artificial border. Soon, if the current trajectory continues, Palestinians will tell Israelis: "You win! You get it all--the West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza, the Jordan Valley, the settlements, all the water, and guess what? You get us too! Now, where do we sign up for our health care cards?" -Published 23/1/2012 © bitterlemons.org 

Sam Bahour is a Ramallah-based management consultant.




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Monday, January 23, 2012

[ePalestine] A Testing Ground (by Little Girl Behind a Big Wall BLOG)

TO READ ONLINE: bit.ly/zKrNBy

Little Girl Behind a Big Wall

A Testing Ground 

Posted on January 2, 2012

I grumble as I wait in the line of cars at the checkpoint. At least, there are only a few cars in front of me and the soldiers are moving quickly. As I approach the checkpoint, I roll down my window and flash my passport. 

In Hebrew, I am told to go straight and up the hill- not the usual left to exit the checkpoint. It is amazing what can all be communicated with a single point of a finger and a grunt. It seems that the mere presence of an M16 can help in understanding foreign languages. 

As I drive to the designated area, there are soldiers pointing myself and 5 other cars (all Palestinian) towards selected parking spots. Every spot has an apparatus next to it, which looks like a giant IV that you would find in a hospital. I am told to get out of my vehicle with all my windows shut, except the driver window, which should be 5 cm open. 

I get out of my vehicle and stand next to the Palestinians who have also had to abandon their cars. Soldiers wander around the cars, one with a stopwatch. It is obviously a drill of some kind. With complete disregard for our schedules or impending meetings, the soldiers are taking the opportunity to practice and test Practice on a population without any kind of consent, but that does not seem to matter. Consent is never asked or required from a people under occupation. They are the occupied and at the whims of their occupiers. 

From the IV apparatus next to our parked cars, soldiers put a hose into our driver side window. It reminds of movies where the someone tries to commit suicide by filling their car with exhaust. Some of the people ask the soldiers what they are doing. Their response is, that it is for security and that it is fine. There is no comment as to what or why they are  spraying some sort of chemical into our vehicles. 

After 10 minutes the soldier with the stopwatch stops his clock. The hoses are removed from our cars and we are allowed to continue onwards to Jerusalem. We are permitted to go on with our day. We are permitted to go on living. 

Yet the smell from the gas still lingering in my car is assaulting. Even though it is cold outside, I drive with my windows down. Unfortunately nothing will stop my impending headache. For the next four days, whenever I drive my car I have a headache. Yet, my whining and complaints are futile. 

An occupied population is a crucial experimental ground for the occupier. Israel views the Palestinian people as a dispensable people- a testing ground for ‘security’ apparatuses and weapons that are later exported globally. Tear gas technology, stink spray, rubber bullets, and gassing cars are all tested here before they are exported. If too many Palestinians end up dying from the gas, or there is an international outcry, it won’t be exported, if it found ‘effective’ it will be sold worldwide and used by governments on their own people, such as at G20 protests. 

While, western governments buy these security apparatuses and support a government that does testing on human beings we are not surprised when cancer becomes more prominent to people under occupation. We are not surprised when children in Gaza are increasingly born with birth defects. In the mean time, my head hurts from the smell gas but I am already half an hour late for my meeting, so there is              
no time to complain.



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Tuesday, January 17, 2012

[ePalestine] Fighting a Forbidden Battle: How I Stopped Covering Up for a Hidden Wrong

Superb, but he will still need to learn the difference between his, yet great, religion and how it was hijacked by Zionism. 

---

Dietrich College News 
January 2012 
2012 Martin Luther King, Jr. Writing Awards 
Prose: High School 
First Place (Tie) 

Fighting a Forbidden Battle: How I Stopped Covering Up for a Hidden Wrong

By Jesse Lieberfeld 11th grade, Winchester Thurston  

I once belonged to a wonderful religion. I belonged to a religion that allows those of us who believe in it to feel that we are the greatest people in the world—and feel sorry for ourselves at the same time. Once, I thought that I truly belonged in this world of security, self-pity, self-proclaimed intelligence, and perfect moral aesthetic. I thought myself to be somewhat privileged early on. It was soon revealed to me, however, that my fellow believers and I were not part of anything so flattering. 

Although I was fortunate enough to have parents who did not try to force me into any one set of beliefs, being Jewish was in no way possible to escape growing up. It was constantly reinforced at every holiday, every service, and every encounter with the rest of my relatives. I was forever reminded how intelligent my family was, how important it was to remember where we had come from, and to be proud of all the suffering our people had overcome in order to finally achieve their dream in the perfect society of Israel. 

This last mandatory belief was one which I never fully understood, but I always kept the doubts I had about Israel’s spotless reputation to the back of my mind. “Our people” were fighting a war, one I did not fully comprehend, but I naturally assumed that it must be justified. We would never be so amoral as to fight an unjust war. Yet as I came to learn more about our so-called “conflict” with the Palestinians, I grew more concerned. I routinely heard about unexplained mass killings, attacks on medical bases, and other alarmingly violent actions for which I could see no possible reason. “Genocide” almost seemed the more appropriate term, yet no one I knew would have ever dreamed of portraying the war in that manner; they always described the situation in shockingly neutral terms. Whenever I brought up the subject, I was always given the answer that there were faults on both sides, that no one was really to blame, or simply that it was a “difficult situation.” It was not until eighth grade that I fully understood what I was on the side of. One afternoon, after a fresh round of killings was announced on our bus ride home, I asked two of my friends who actively supported Israel what they thought. “We need to defend our race,” they told me. “It’s our right.” 

“We need to defend our race.” 

Where had I heard that before? Wasn’t it the same excuse our own country had used to justify its abuses of African-Americans sixty years ago? In that moment, I realized how similar the two struggles were—like the white radicals of that era, we controlled the lives of another people whom we abused daily, and no one could speak out against us. It was too politically incorrect to do so. We had suffered too much, endured too many hardships, and overcome too many losses to be criticized. I realized then that I was in no way part of a “conflict”—the term “Israeli/Palestinian Conflict” was no more accurate than calling the Civil Rights Movement the “Caucasian/ African-American Conflict.” In both cases, the expression was a blatant euphemism: it gave the impression that this was a dispute among equals and that both held an equal share of the blame. However, in both, there was clearly an oppressor and an oppressed, and I felt horrified at the realization that I was by nature on the side of the oppressors. I was grouped with the racial supremacists. I was part of a group that killed while praising its own intelligence and reason. I was part of a delusion. 

I thought of the leader of the other oppressed side of years ago, Martin Luther King. He too had been part of a struggle that had been hidden and glossed over for the convenience of those against whom he fought. What would his reaction have been? As it turned out, it was precisely the same as mine. As he wrote in his letter from Birmingham Jail, he believed the greatest enemy of his cause to be “Not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who...lives by a mythical concept of time.... Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” When I first read those words, I felt as if I were staring at myself in a mirror. All my life I had been conditioned to simply treat the so-called conflict with the same apathy which King had so forcefully condemned. I, too, held the role of an accepting moderate. I, too, “lived by a mythical concept of time,” shrouded in my own surreal world and the set of beliefs that had been assigned to me. I had never before felt so trapped. 

I decided to make one last appeal to my religion. If it could not answer my misgivings, no one could. The next time I attended a service, there was an open question-and- answer session about any point of our religion. I wanted to place my dilemma in as clear and simple terms as I knew how. I thought out my exact question over the course of the seventeen-minute cello solo that was routinely played during service. Previously, I had always accepted this solo as just another part of the program, yet now it seemed to capture the whole essence of our religion: intelligent and well- crafted on paper, yet completely oblivious to the outside world (the soloist did not have the faintest idea of how masterfully he was putting us all to sleep). When I was finally given the chance to ask a question, I asked, “I want to support Israel. But how can I when it lets its army commit so many killings?” I was met with a few angry glares from some of the older men, but the rabbi answered me. “It is a terrible thing, isn’t it?” he said. “But there’s nothing we can do. It’s just a fact of life.” I knew, of course, that the war was no simple matter and that we did not by any means commit murder for its own sake, but to portray our thousands of killings as a “fact of life” was simply too much for me to accept. I thanked him and walked out shortly afterward. I never went back. I thought about what I could do. If nothing else, I could at least try to free myself from the burden of being saddled with a belief I could not hold with a clear conscience. I could not live the rest of my life as one of the pathetic moderates whom King had rightfully portrayed as the worst part of the problem. I did not intend to go on being one of the Self-Chosen People, identifying myself as part of a group to which I did not belong. 

It was different not being the ideal nice Jewish boy. The difference was subtle, yet by no means unaffecting. Whenever it came to the attention of any of our more religious family friends that I did not share their beliefs, I was met with either a disapproving stare and a quick change of the subject or an alarmed cry of, “What? Doesn’t Israel matter to you?” Relatives talked down to me more afterward, but eventually I stopped noticing the way adults around me perceived me. It was worth it to no longer feel as though I were just another apathetic part of the machine. 

I can obviously never know what it must have been like to be an African-American in the 1950s. I do feel, however, as though I know exactly what it must have been like to be white during that time, to live under an aura of moral invincibility, to hold unchallengeable beliefs, and to contrive illusions of superiority to avoid having to face simple everyday truths. That illusion was nice while it lasted, but I decided to pass it up. I have never been happier. 




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Saturday, January 14, 2012

[ePalestine] The Independent: EU on verge of abandoning hope for a viable Palestinian state

NOTE: I've had the opportunity to privately read this report, it's shocking and long overdue.

The Independent 

EU on verge of abandoning hope for a viable Palestinian state  

Israel's foreign ministry denied that Israeli settlers were taking water resources from the West Bank 

Donald Macintyre Thursday, 12 January 2012 

The Palestinian presence in the largest part of the occupied West Bank – has been, "continuously undermined" by Israel in ways that are "closing the window" on a two-state solution, according to an internal EU report seen by The Independent

The report, approved by top Brussels officials, argues that EU support, including for a wide range of building projects, is now needed to protect the rights of "ever more isolated" Palestinians in "Area C", a sector that includes all 124 Jewish settlements – illegal in international law – and which is under direct Israeli control. It comprises 62 per cent of the West Bank, including the "most fertile and resource rich land". 

With the number of Jewish settlers now at more than double the shrinking Palestinian population in the largely rural area, the report warns bluntly that, "if current trends are not stopped and reversed, the establishment of a viable Palestinian state within pre-1967 borders seem more remote than ever". 

The 16-page document is the EU's starkest critique yet of how a combination of house and farm building demolitions; a prohibitive planning regime; relentless settlement expansion; the military's separation barrier; obstacles to free movement; and denial of access to vital natural resources, including land and water, is eroding Palestinian tenure of the large tract of the West Bank on which hopes of a contiguous Palestinian state depend. 

International brokers are trying to persuade both sides to reach a peaceful settlement through talks, which had stalled over the building of Israeli settlements and the Palestinians' recent declaration of statehood at the UN. 

The report points out how dramatically the settler population – now at 310,000 – of Area C has increased at the expense of Palestinian numbers – estimated at around 150,000. In 1967, there were between 200,000 and 320,000 Palestinians in just the agriculture-rich Jordan Valley part of the zone. 

Area C is one of three zones allocated by the 1993 Oslo agreement. Area A includes major Palestinian cities, and is under the control of the Palestinian Authority. Area B is under shared Israeli-Palestinian control. 

Although Area C is the least populous, the report says "the window for a two-state solution is rapidly closing with the continued expansion of Israeli settlements and access restrictions for Palestinians in Area C [which] compromises crucial natural resources and land for the future demographic and economic growth of a viable Palestinian state". 

It says the EU needs "at a political" level to persuade Israel to redesignate Area C, but in the meantime it should "support Palestinian presence in, and development of the area". The report says the destruction of homes, public buildings and workplaces result in "forced transfer of the native population" and that construction is effectively prohibited in 70 per cent of the land – and then in zones largely allocated to settlements of the Israeli military. 

In practice, it says Palestinian construction is permitted in just 1 per cent of Area C, "most of which is already built up". The EU report's short- and medium-term recommendations include calling on Israel to halt demolitions of houses and structures built without permits – of which there have been 4,800 since 2000. But there is also a call for the EU to support a building programme that includes schools, clinics, water and other infrastructure projects. 

The EU should also be more vocal in raising objections to "involuntary population movements, displacements, evictions and internal migration". 

The report says Area C – along with East Jerusalem – has not benefited from the gradual reversal of the West Bank economic collapse since the beginning of the intifada in 2000 which saw growth of 9 per cent in 2010. It also claims Palestinian economic activity is mainly "low intensity" agriculture in contrast to specialised, export-directed farming by Jewish settlers in the Jordan Valley "which uses most of the water resources in the area", and that it is of "great concern" that cisterns and rainwater structures have been destroyed by the Israeli authorities since January 2010 – a claim which Israel's foreign ministry denied. 




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Friday, January 06, 2012

[ePalestine] Siegman: The Mideast Peace Process in 2011: Hopes and Disillusionment

The National Interest 
January 6, 2012 

The Mideast Peace Process in 2011: Hopes and Disillusionment 

By Henry Siegman 

This past December, four European countries—the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Portugal, all members of the UN Security Council—harshly faulted Israel for its violation of international law and the rights of the Palestinian people by continuing the expansion of illegal settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Israel’s intemperate response to that criticism exposed for all to see the moral and political obtuseness of its settlement policy, telling these European countries to mind their own business instead of interfering in Israel’s “internal” affairs. 

The Israeli notion that the Occupied Territories beyond the 1967 border are “internal,” allowing Israeli governments to do with them as they please without regard for the rights of the Palestinian people or for international law, has not just “complicated” the peace process, as the United States and other governments have often put it. It has turned the peace process into a farce, for it exposes the strategic choice of Israel’s current and previous governments of territory over peace, and leaves no doubt that the goal of Israel’s settlement project is the prevention of Palestinian statehood. 

Mostly ignored or forgotten is the fact that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ran on a Likud party platform that explicitly opposed Palestinian statehood; later, after he made his speech claiming to have been converted to acceptance of a two-state solution, key members of his government established the “Entire Land of Israel” parliamentary caucus whose official goal is the prevention of a Palestinian state anywhere in the West Bank. It is the largest of the Knesset’s many caucuses. There is no record of Netanyahu ever having criticized this caucus or having ordered members of his government to leave it. 

Even as Netanyahu proclaims how desperately he wishes to renew peace talks with President Mahmoud Abbas, his government distributed hateful and defamatory accusations against Abbas, describing him as a “radical” who glorifies and perpetuates violence and terrorism—this of the man who not only publicly opposed the violence of the second intifada but whose collaboration with Israeli security forces put an end to violence and terrorism in the West Bank. A “circular note” issued to foreign governments by Israel’s Foreign Ministry in October 2011 reaches the “inescapable” conclusion that “no agreement will ever be possible [with the Palestinians] as long as Mahmoud Abbas leads the Palestinian Authority.” 

In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September, President Obama asserted that Palestinians can achieve statehood only through direct negotiations with Israel, effectively subjecting the Palestinian right to national self-determination to Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman’s veto. If Netanyahu and his government choose to present Abbas terms for an agreement that no Palestinian leader could conceivably accept—which, by insisting on Israel’s annexation of all of Arab East Jerusalem is exactly what they have done—they will be able to keep the West Bank and its population under permanent subjugation. 

Before demanding that Palestinians return to bilateral talks with Israel, and certainly before punishing Palestinians for refusing to do so, President Obama had an obligation to answer a simple question: What would he have done if Palestinians acceded to his demand and resumed bilateral talks, but continued to encounter Netanyahu’s refusal to negotiate territorial issues from the 1967 border, or to limit changes in that border to territorial swaps? Would he then have allowed the Security Council to address Israel’s rejection without resorting to a veto? His September speech left little doubt about the answer to that question. 

So as 2011 ended, the Middle East peace process became history. Despite the U.S. administration’s rhetorical objections to Israel’s settlements and its equally rhetorical support of Palestinian statehood, Obama’s rejection of international intervention and his insistence that a Palestinian state can come about only as the result of a bilateral Israeli-Palestinian agreement sent a clear message to Netanyahu’s government. For all practical purposes, a Palestinian state is no longer on America’s political horizon. 

But for this very reason, 2011 was the year in which the international community, including America’s most important European allies, realized the groundlessness of their long-standing belief that the United States is uniquely positioned to leverage its unprecedented support for Israel into pressure to accept a just and balanced peace accord. The international community now sees that the United States is uniquely preventing an agreement, repeatedly using its Security Council vote, or the threat of a veto, to shield Israel from international pressure that might have changed its cost-benefit calculations. 

It is this new awareness of an intolerable American bias that provoked four European members of the Security Council to drop the pretense that their governments believe Netanyahu is committed to a two-state solution. Following a closed meeting of the Security Council at which its members received a briefing on Israel’s newly announced construction plans, which would effectively exclude a Palestinian state from any part of East Jerusalem, and therefore rule out a two-state solution, these key European governments described Israel’s continued territorial confiscations as sending “a devastating message” about Israel’s intentions. One senior European official who did not wish to be identified [3]said [3], “We don’t know where this government is leading Israel to, or what its position is regarding the peace process.” That is diplomatic-speak for “We know where this government is leading Israel and what its position regarding the peace process is, and it can no longer count on our complicity.” India, Brazil and South Africa also condemned Israel’s behavior, as did Russia’s UN envoy. 

As long as the peace process was based on the illusion that Israel was always ready to return the Occupied Territories in exchange for Palestinian and Arab recognition, and that America would use its leverage to bring Israel into line if it failed to do so, there was no chance that the peace process could lead to a two-state solution. Now that Netanyahu and Obama have put an end to these two illusions, international sanctions fairly applied to both parties for illegal and predatory behavior are no longer inconceivable. If such intervention were now pursued by an international community no longer willing to accept an American Middle East peace policy that is hostage to its Israel lobby, a Palestinian state living in peace alongside an Israel reconciled to its internationally recognized borders may yet be achievable. 

Henry Siegman, president of the U.S./Middle East Project, is a non-resident research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. 



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Tuesday, January 03, 2012

[ePalestine] TWIP: Reality versus Image A Return to Galilee (By Fida Jiryis) - A MUST READ

Dear friends,

Happy New Year to you all.

My friend Walid Abu Rass, Finance and Administration Manager at the Health Work Committees (HWC) is still in an Israeli prison, being held without charge for 6-months. We anxiously await his appeal date in hopes that all the lobbying may get him home to his wife and two daughters sooner.

Also, we continue to raise funds for the Palestinian Circus School. Thanks a million to those who have already given and for those who would like to visit: http://www.indiegogo.com/Palestine-Circus-School . No gift is too small.

I can't think of a more appropiate topic to start off the 2012 posts than Palestinians inside Israel. The below article is from a writer colleague of mine, Fida Jiryis. She really touches on a deep topic in a way that deserves serious attention. She is one of 50 Palestinians who have been allowed to implement the "right of return" ...A MUST READ. Fida is currently writing a book on this topic and really welcomes any comments on this article. You may reach her at: fida_jiryis@hotmail.com . 

---

TO READ ONLINE: http://bit.ly/uKckmS

This Week in Palestine, Issue No. 165, January 2012 

Reality versus Image A Return to Galilee 
By Fida Jiryis 

As a Palestinian who was born and grew up in the diaspora, I always had a powerful notion of Palestine in my mind and emotions, yet it had no physical association. It was difficult to imagine a place I’d never seen but only heard of. The Oslo Accords in 1993 changed all that. A year later, I visited Palestine for the first time and, in June 1995, relocated with my family to my parents’ native village of Fassouta, in Galilee. 

We were the exception and not the rule: out of the entire Oslo process, fewer than fifty people were allowed to return to inside Israel, and they were all Palestinians who had been issued Israeli IDs when the state was formed, and subsequently left the country to join the resistance movement abroad. When they returned after the Oslo Accords, very few of their families came with them, so my case of coming to Israel for the first time in my early twenties was unique. 

Few words can express the magnitude of emotions of someone who grew up a Palestinian then found herself, overnight, an “Israeli citizen” who had to learn Hebrew, find a job, and integrate into Israeli society. To call this social schizophrenia would be an understatement. 

I floundered in this new, alien, hostile environment, wondering where I was, wondering, even more, how I could survive. To be face to face with those who had taken our country, to have to learn their language, to have to seek work in their institutions - and to have to do all this while somehow pretending that everything was fine and that I was just going through the process of a normal relocation - was too much. Again, Palestine had only been a fleeting concept to me before. I knew it was under occupation; I knew my village had become a part of “Israel,” but what that meant in concrete terms was, at best, cloudy and elusive until I experienced it. 

A close friend of mine felt the same when she returned with her family to Ramallah and shortly after, went to visit Jaffa, her father’s hometown. My friend was ecstatic: after a childhood and adolescence spent in one refugee domicile after another, she was finally making the return home. Her visit to Jaffa, though, hit her like a bullet in the stomach. With her own eyes, she was witnessing the foreign occupation of her city, her father’s birthright and her emotional anchor for so many years - the peg upon which she, like so many millions of other Palestinians, had hung her dreams and identity to maintain her sense of belonging and homeland when the rest of the world was just one large diaspora. 

It is heart-breaking to dream of a place for so long and then to find a reality that is so different, so wretchedly painful, that one almost wishes it had stayed as a dream. 

I fell back on my own culture, attempting to find belonging and security there and escape the daily aggression of Israeli society. It seemed not only natural to do that, but the physical location of my village, tucked away in the Galilean mountains, was a likely cocoon, a respite where I could go and forget about the outside world for a while. 

But the initial euphoria at meeting so many relatives and loving members of my extended family gave way to reality, as I tried to learn the ropes of my new society and find belonging and acceptance there. I had come from mellow, easy-going Cyprus, which had provided a safe, relaxed haven for my family after our difficult ordeals in Beirut in the early 1980s. We lived in Cyprus from 1983 till 1995, and I went to Britain for three of those years to study for my first degree. 

When the dust settled and we began living in Fassouta, I experienced a culture shock so profound that I could never get past it. To begin with, for Palestinians brought up in non-Arab countries, the return to live in Palestinian society is fraught with frustration. My brother and I were not used to the confines, behavioural norms, and restrictions of a traditional Arab society. It took months of initial, painful integration, followed by years of an on-going search for understanding, for us to attempt to integrate. 

The integration was never complete. To outsiders, to our family and other villagers, we seemed to roll along just fine; we settled in, found work, behaved more or less according to custom, and showed a willingness and desire to fit in. One of my cousins sourly remarked, a year after my arrival in the village, that she was surprised at how short a time it took for me to acclimatise. While I was basking in my newly found sense of community and belonging, she was expressing the frustrations and despair with our society that are so prevalent among the young population. 

Then the deeper problems emerged. I could find very few people to talk to who could relate to my world, and vice versa. Their world was alien to me; I had no concept of their context of growing up and living in Israel, and they, equally, could not begin to imagine what my life had been like before. Often, I would be in social situations and feel people’s looks of burning curiosity, hear them asking each other who I was, then nodding and dissecting me with their eyes. I had barely come out of my teen years and was still an awkward, shy girl in her early twenties, so these social situations were difficult and embarrassing. Notwithstanding, I did my best to fit in: I attended weddings and got a young cousin to teach me dabke; I showed up frequently at houses of uncles and aunts, who were thrilled to have me visit; and I quickly created a large social circle. 

But something was deeply wrong, and it took a long time before I could find my feet and figure it out: aside from our surface culture, another subculture existed, one which made me profoundly uncomfortable. We were all part of “Israel.” We consumed Israeli products; my cousins were all educated in the Israeli system; we depended on the state for employment, health care, social benefits; Hebrew was everywhere, including, to my horror, in our own dialect at times. Our identity was a warped mutation between Arab and Israeli, and we, collectively, seemed to be a hybrid that was neither - a minority struggling to survive in a hostile environment, yet intrinsically holding on to its own fabric, all the while becoming more and more ostracised. 

Sixty years of occupation had not stopped timeless traditions: strongly interdependent parent- child relationships; olive picking and numerous harvests of carob, thyme, mloukhiyyeh; traditional kubbeh, made with raw meat paste, with Arak on the side; the wedding season in the summer; people’s close-knit social relationships, and a thousand other norms and practices that had been there for centuries before this conflict brought yet another alien people to our land. 

But venture outside the village, and people were hit by the daily struggle for survival in an entire system designed to marginalise them, at best, to ethnically cleanse them, at worst. I heard countless ordeals of trying to be accepted to university, trying to find work, battling with the health system, constant discrimination. My experience of studying Hebrew and working in Israeli companies was a bitter one of alienation and depression. 

There was no escape. Buried so deep in my culture, I tried to reconcile my feelings of frustration at its constraints and shortcomings, with those of resentment against the larger, hostile state, and the yet deep feeling of attachment and wonder I felt at being in Palestine - this feeling that ultimately kept me here or brought me back no matter how many times I left and how far I went. 

No image could have prepared me for this reality, one that is so multi-layered and complex that I am writing a book about it, due to come out in a year. The euphoric, idealistic image of Palestine sustained by so many Palestinians in the diaspora is entirely fictional; ours is a country riddled with difficulty, one that needs hard work and perseverance to forge our path. Yet our sense of belonging and homeland here, impossible to feel anywhere else, makes the effort the most worthwhile, true undertaking we can embark on. 

- Fida Jiryis is a writer, editor, and author of Hayatuna Elsagheera (Our Small Life), 2011, a collection of Arabic short stories depicting village life in Galilee. She can be reached at fida_jiryis@hotmail.com.



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