haifa, part 1

I have a few half-completed posts from my trip to Palestine with IFPB that I'm trying to turn into completed posts.  Here's the first one.

The day after I was interrogated at the Allenby Bridge, I got up at the crack of dawn to go to Haifa.  It was the end of a three-week trip and I was pretty exhausted.  But we hadn't been anywhere in the north of Israel, my friend M wanted to go with me, and more than anything I wanted to talk to M about what had happened at the bridge, because she's Palestinian and has been interrogated many times by Israeli border officials.  So I dragged my luggage up the Old City steps and onto a bus.

She asked me how I was, meaning were there any lingering effects from my border adventure the previous day.  I told her I was fine.  Of course I was.  They'd let me in, right?  They hadn't hurt me or anything, and I had never been worried that they would.  I knew it wasn't that kind of situation.  The worst they were going to do was try to scare me.  And in the grand scheme of Israeli repression, what was a little psychological roughing-up, really?  It was nothing, I said.

Really, I wanted desperately to talk about it, to pour out the whole story, every detail.  I wanted someone to commiserate, to tell me I'd made the right choices, to say, "those bastards," with the shake of the head and the wry half-smile that says, "I've been there."  But she said we should be careful what we talked about on the bus, so I held in the story and we talked about other things.

I spent most of the day in a haze of cognitive dissonance, wandering through the stunning ordinariness of Haifa.  I got out most of the salient details over coffee in a shopping area that felt oppressively normal.  I kept thinking about that quote from Joe Sacco's Palestine:

"Make no mistake, everywhere you go, not just in Marvel Comics, there's parallel universes.  Here?  On the surface streets: traffic, couples in love, falafel-to-go, tourists in jogging suits licking stamps for postcards...And over the wall behind closed doors, other things--people strapped to chairs, sleep deprivation, the smell of piss...other things happening for reasons of national security."

Okay, yeah, my experience wasn't nearly that dramatic.  But still.  I'd spent a few hours in that other world--or at least in the first circle of it--and today the ordinariness of the normal world that covered it up seemed unbearably criminal and sick.

Throughout the day, little things kept setting me on edge.  The soldiers that seemed to be on every bus.  A woman's voice with a particular accent.  The bag search at the bus stop, which two days ago would have been a minor annoyance, but today felt invasive and icky.

By lunchtime there was a cold twisty knot of anxiety in my stomach, almost enough to keep me from eating.  This wasn't a final-exam or a night-before-the-big-pitchfest nervousness, but something deeply wired into my body's emergency response system, an elemental fear.  It wasn't the kind you could channel into a burst of adrenaline and focus, but the kind that paralyzed, the kind that made you want to curl up in a ball and hide somewhere.  I realized the source of this fear was the thought of going through another Israeli-controlled border terminal (Ben Gurion Airport) in less than 24 hours.  I had to do it because I had to get on the plane to go home, but I really, deeply did not want to.

I realized maybe I was not as fine as I'd said I was.

Then I started to get angry.  I was angry at them for having so much control over me, and angry at myself for letting them.  It felt like something that had been done against my will, this installation of fear.  No matter how many times I told myself I wasn't afraid of them, that they didn't intimidate me, that my non-Palestinian identity kept me safe from actual physical harm, it didn't matter.  My emergency responses were doing something else.

I was ashamed, too, at the thought that I'd let them get to me.  I felt I wasn't living up to the Palestinian standard of toughness.  Because what they did to me was so minor, really.  Barely a blip on the radar compared to the repression they dish out against Palestinians.  But it had still left a mark.

I also felt a kind of backhanded awe for the enormity of the oppressive power Palestinians have to face every day.  And I realized why everyone always says they're fine.  Because there's always someone who has a worse story.  Because everyone feels a responsibility to be tough for everyone else, to shrug it off with a defiant grin and a flash of bravado.  Because you don't want to admit how much of a hold they have on you, because if you admit it you might never get out.

I admitted to M that I was feeling really nervous about the airport.  "It's helpful to prepare for the worst," she said.  This didn't seem like very comforting advice at the time, but it actually turned out to be quite useful.  After preparing myself for a strip search and more questioning, the quick bag check and pat down with clothes on, and the fact that the airport security people were merely bored and not hostile, felt like a gift.  But that made me a little angry too.  Because being only mildly harassed by airport security shouldn't feel like a fucking gift.

movie review: budrus

Sometimes I forget that the Palestine I know and love is so very different from the view of Palestine and Palestinians that gets presented in the mainstream media and is absorbed more or less uncontested by most Americans.  Anyone who wants to see my Palestine--the real Palestine--should watch Budrus.

Budrus is a good documentary by any standard, but as an education tool it is simply superb.  It shoots down so many myths about Palestine and Palestinians all at once--that Palestinians are unreasoning violent terrorists; that Israel is just defending itself; that there is too much ingrained hatred for Palestinians and Israelis to ever live and work together; that Palestinian women and girls are meek and submissive and play no role in the struggle.  All these stereotypes and more are soundly demolished in the film's slight one hour and eighteen minute running time.

When the residents of the West Bank town after which the film is named learn that Israel's apartheid wall will slice through their town's land, cutting through the cemetery and separating villagers from most of their agricultural land, they decide to resist, using classic tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience.  The Israeli army, predictably, responds with disproportionate, punitive violence.  The struggle unites local activists from Fatah and Hamas, men and women, young and old, Palestinians, internationals and Israelis.  Lead organizer Ayed Morrar's teenage daughter Iltezam is a force unto herself.

The scenes of Palestinian and Israeli activists defending each other against the army are some of the most inspiring moments in the film.  You can see two groups of people learning to trust and care about each other like family.  "They don't all hate us," realizes Iltezam Morrar, speaking about her new Israeli friends, which is striking because it's usually framed the other way around.  You can see the change in the Israeli activists too, how someone from an oppressor settler-colonial society can be transformed by switching sides and throwing their lot in with the oppressed.  In those moments, you can see how the whole apartheid system could collapse.

For those already familiar with the history of unarmed resistance in Palestine, Budrus won't present tons of new information.  Visitors to the Occupied Palestinian Territories now have the choice of attending one of a dozen or so protests of the type seen in Budrus on any given Friday.  What the film does do is tell the story of nonviolent resistance in one West Bank village incredibly well.  The filmmakers were there at the right time, and in the right places, and they reveal the transformation of the village through struggle in such an uncomplicated, straightforward way that the film's power doesn't really hit you until some time after you've left the theater.

Budrus is currently playing in film festivals and limited release around the world.  Look for a screening near you here.

writing is a job

If I haven't been writing here so much in the past month, it is only because I am busy writing other things.  I'm working on two feature scripts in collaboration with other people, plus some of my own stuff, plus organizing a move back to NYC for next month (yay!).

I do have several unfinished posts from my trip to Palestine that I want to get up in the next few weeks, and as November 19 approaches you know you can expect some posts of the wizard inclination.  But if I am not writing here so regularly, fear not.  I'll be back soon.