i love you, new york

Photo credit: AP

Thousands in New York rallied in defense of the proposed Park51 community center, for religious freedom and against Islamophobia. NY1 is reporting five thousand. Estimates from friends who were there ranged between 3,000 and 7,000, versus about 750-1,000 assorted bigots on the other side. The rally on our side sounded beautiful.

Dear New York. You may smell bad and be prohibitively expensive, but you come through when it counts.

a 9/11 post

In the seven years I lived in New York after September 11, 2001, I kind of got over 9/11 tributes. Many a September 11th passed without my feeling a particular need to memorialize, and I think plenty of New Yorkers felt the same. Not those who lost loved ones or suffered trauma, but the vast majority of us who were just there in the city on that surreal day of blue skies and ash-white smoke. We were around for the main event. Calling it up year after year seemed unnecessary.

But this seems to be the year that some people want to remember 9/11, and for very particular reasons. People who insist on a particular meaning for that event, slave graves and other inconvenient truths aside. And while I completely agree with the sentiment of this post--about the imperial arrogance of demanding that our tragedy be remembered above and to the exclusion of all others--I do remember. There are things from that day and the days that followed that I can recall with a visceral, snapshot clarity that hasn't faded after nine years and maybe never will.

On September 11, 2001, I was a 19-year-old sophomore at Columbia University. I was six miles away from the World Trade Center that morning, at the other end of Manhattan, but that was close enough. These are some of the things I will never forget:

Checking in with friends to make sure they are still alive.

Standing on the roof of my friend's building, watching the F-16s fly over Manhattan, with a Lebanese friend who casually remarks, "Huh. That's the first time I've seen those when they weren't going to bomb somewhere."

Eating a late dinner at JJ's Place a few days later, listening to some bigot-on-the-street scream hatred on CNN, and suddenly being engulfed in a physical, palpable wave of fear. Not fear of more terrorist attacks but fear of my own government, and what it might try to get away with under the shadow of racist hysteria.

The missing posters. The faces that stared up at you from subway stops and telephone poles, framed with the desperate pleading of loved ones, and the twisted connection they invoked to that other 9/11--also a clear blue Tuesday morning--a parallel so surreal it could only have happened in real life. The way people say missing when they can't yet bear to say dead.

That demonstration, that incredible night march through the streets of Manhattan ten days after 9/11, when we expected a hundred people and five thousand showed up. Chanting "No war, no attacks, bombs won't bring our loved ones back" as if the raw power of our grief could actually make those in power listen. Marching against war before we even knew where the war was going to be. The two-hundred-person antiwar organizing meeting held on the lawn outside Columbia's student center, when it seemed, for a historical split-second, that something other than slaughter might have been possible.

The moment at the end of that same night march, in Union Square, when the wind shifted, bringing with it the acrid smell of the still-burning rubble less than a mile away. "I left Sarajevo to get away from that smell," a woman standing near me said. At that moment we were just scared civilians in another bombed-out city.

And, most of all, the thing I thought about as we went out to get food after a long day of news-watching and check-ins to assure ourselves and others that yes, everyone we knew was still alive: Imagine living every day like this.

I know the terror and grief New Yorkers experienced for one day is minuscule compared to what our government has visited on other countries and on the people who were here before us. I am humble about our place in the world historic scale of destruction. But I think it is important not to forget those feelings, to hold on to them and to see in them the reflection of other bombed cities and shell-shocked survivors. I think they are useful when remembering whom to sympathize with and whom to fear, when remembering who is the us and who is the them.

Whenever someone shouts "Remember 9/11!" to justify war or Islamophobia or attacks on immigrants, I want to ask, "Do you?" Were you there? Because if you weren't, shut the hell up. And if you were, if you really remember the fear and vulnerability and pain that engulfed the city, how dare you wish that upon anybody else?

mockingjay review, WITH SPOILERS. and block quotes.

WARNING: This review contains SPOILERS. Big ones! If you've already read Mockingjay or you are some kind of weirdo who doesn't mind spoilers, read on. If you haven't read the Hunger Games series, you probably shouldn't read this either, because most of it will not make sense and I'll only ruin the last book for you.

Sometimes you want to like a book so much, it takes you a while to admit that it did not, in fact, meet all your expectations. Such was the case with Mockingjay, the final book in Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy.

Suzanne Collins could have knocked it out of the park with Mockingjay. All the ingredients were there. Collins had set so many wonderful, complex and exciting dynamics in motion by the end of Catching Fire. Sadly, so many things just didn't pay off in the way I hoped they would.

Remember this, from Katniss and Peeta's Victory Tour in Catching Fire?

You can feel something in the air, the rolling boil of a pot about to run over. Not everywhere. Some crowds have the weary-cattle feel that I know District 12 usually projects at the victors' ceremonies. But in others--particularly 8, 4, and 3--there is genuine elation in the faces of the people at the sight of us, and under the elation, fury. When they chant my name, it is more a cry for vengeance than a cheer. When the Peacekeepers move in to quiet an unruly crowd, it presses back instead of retreating.

Perhaps my favorite thing about Catching Fire was the way Collins captured the feeling of a revolution starting. People beginning to shake off the fear that used to paralyze them, suddenly having the courage to challenge power that seemed invincible only yesterday, solidarity and defiance blooming out of alienation and despair seemingly overnight. This was reflected in the Games of the second book--from the tributes holding hands in the beginning, all the way through to the epic win of an ending, when Katniss turns her arrow not against a fellow victim of the Capitol's game, but against the game itself. At the end of Catching Fire, the stage was all set for Panem's mass popular revolution to begin in earnest.

So I was disoriented and distressed to find this popular element almost entirely missing from Mockingjay. It's like Collins forgot about all the social power she set into motion in the second book and somehow decided the only way to overthrow the Capitol was with a conventional military force. Enter District 13.

I hated District 13. I was suspicious of them the moment I learned they really did have nuclear weapons, because I didn't believe that Collins would ever make people who rely on nuclear terror the good guys. And they aren't, really.

Bringing District 13 into the mix destroys one of the best things about the series, which is the asymmetry of the conflict--the will and solidarity and creativity and ingenuity of ordinary people against the massive military power of the Capitol. Watching teenagers pwn the Capitol with improvised weapons was one of the things that made the books great. It doesn't work the same way when you start relying on a conventional military power.

I know we aren't supposed to like District 13--or, I should say, the leadership of District 13 (its people are strangely undifferentiated and passive.) But the problem is that while Collins doesn't encourage us to like Coin and her army, she can't quite dispense with them either. She relies on them to win the war. It's like she can't quite trust the popular revolution she set in motion in Catching Fire to actually take power.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the biggest missed opportunity of the whole book: the attack on the mountain-encased military base called the Nut in District 2. There's something that feels so wrong about districts fighting districts, and to her credit, Collins lets her characters think so too. The sudden flashback to the mine accident that killed Katniss's father is a total surprise, a scene I never expected to see, but it's brilliant. When Katniss looks at the people she's supposed to be fighting, she sees not enemies, but her own family. Instead of feeling victorious, she feels manipulated and sick. And to top it off, her scripted, stage-managed television appearance (in a series that's so much about the power of media) is interrupted by the real-life, bloody consequences of her actions. Katniss seems to realize that they're going about this all wrong, that she's just back in the Games again, fighting the wrong enemy. And she gives one of her best speeches of the entire series:

"Who is the enemy?" whispers Haymitch. [Nice callback to the end of Catching Fire, SC.]

"These people"--I indicate the wounded bodies on the square--"are not your enemy!" I whip back around to the train station. "The rebels are not your enemy! We all have one enemy, and it's the Capitol! This is our chance to put an end to their power, but we need every district person to do it!"

YEEAAAHHHH! I'm thinking at this point. This is what we've been waiting for! Katniss is going to unite the districts--not as a figurehead, but as an actual military leader. The final battle against the Capitol is ON! I'm ready for someone to start singing the Marseillaise.

But instead, Katniss gets shot.

I kept waiting for confirmation that it was one of Coin's people who shot her. This would have made perfect sense, because Coin obviously sees Katniss as a threat, unscripted Katniss as a bigger threat, and Katniss with the power of the districts behind her as the biggest threat of all. But there is never any textual evidence to support this theory, so as far as we know, Katniss was shot by someone random who clearly wasn't listening very closely to what she was saying. I think this says a lot about how Collins feels about human nature.

In hindsight, I think this is where the book started to derail. This should have been the moment Katniss took the offensive and started calling the shots herself, making all her friends and allies choose sides and setting her up for an inevitable conflict with Coin. I thought maybe Coin was going to threaten to nuke the Capitol, and Katniss and friends would end up racing against time to stop the war before that happened. (That would have been cool, wouldn't it?) Instead, Katniss gets taken out of the action at a crucial moment with an injury.

This exact same thing will happen again, later, only the second time it will be infinitely more frustrating. It's like Collins is afraid to let Katniss take control of the story. The same way she doesn't quite trust or understand how to let the revolution she created take power, she can't quite trust her main character to move from figurehead to general, from reacting to driving the action herself.

In retrospect, this is a problem that plagues the entire series. My one discomfort with Catching Fire was that for the whole book, Katniss was a pawn in a game she didn't understand. It made her look stupid. I just assumed the third book would be when she finally came into her own. I was concerned when she wasn't part of the mission to rescue Peeta, but I was temporarily mollified by the twist of Peeta being insane, which was a cruelty that seemed genuinely worthy of the Capitol's sick imagination. But the place where Katniss's lack of agency drove me to distraction was in the final assault on the Capitol.

I guess this is the place to just come out and say it: I flat-out hated Prim's death. I will accept the death of almost any fictional character--provided it's earned. It was not. It was cheap and useless and didn't serve any dramatic purpose. The possibility of Prim being on the front line was never even planted as something we were supposed to be worried about. Then there is the fact that Katniss's trek through the Capitol had already been bloody enough. It had claimed the lives of quite a few characters we'd come to care about. Gale had just been captured and Katniss had failed in her one final promise to kill him in order to spare him a miserable slow death by torture. The stakes were already high enough without throwing Prim in there out of nowhere.

Killing Prim does something else. It short-circuits the entire trilogy. This whole story was set in motion because Katniss wanted to save Prim. While Katniss certainly couldn't have known how things would turn out, having her die anyway sends an awfully fatalistic message, doesn't it? Whether Collins intended it or not, it kind of makes you question whether everything Katniss did was worth it.

I don't think I would ever have been fully comfortable with Prim's death, but I might have accepted it if it had propelled Katniss directly into the president's mansion, into the final conflict with Snow and/or Coin. But that doesn't happen.

No matter what you think about Prim's death, the fact that the Capitol fell while Katniss was in the hospital is just wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. It's such a fatal dramatic error that I actually had to read that chapter twice to realize that's what happened. The whole trilogy had been preparing us for a showdown between Katniss and Snow. It's Katniss's one consistent goal throughout the book: I kill Snow. As Katniss approaches Snow's mansion, her mission couldn't be clearer: Kill Snow. End the war. And she fails.

I would have accepted a last-minute twist in the confrontation with Snow. (Like, maybe, Coin already being there, negotiating a surrender with him while their respective armies slaughter each other outside? And Katniss deciding to kill Coin instead, because she realizes Snow's power is already broken. That would have been cool, right?) But taking Katniss out of the action at this point with a near-fatal injury--one inflicted by people supposedly on her own side--made me want to throw the book against the wall.

Katniss's last mission was plagued with so much danger and bad luck and impossible odds, so many characters who risked or lost their lives to see her succeed, that having her fail at the last minute felt like a horrible sick joke. It made Katniss look criminally stupid and the whole ending section in the Capitol feel cheap.

So why did Collins do it? Either it was bad writing, or there was a purpose. Let us assume for a moment that it was not bad writing and that Collins was trying to say something.

Because Prim was killed by the rebels (or at least by a splinter cell acting on Coin's orders) the only message that I can possibly extract from this horrible dramatic choice is a kind "pox on both your houses" condemnation. The Capitol is awful, but the rebels are just as bad. Or, if they didn't start out as bad, they've become the very thing they're trying to destroy by engaging in war.

There are many scenarios under which I wouldn't have any problem with an antiwar message like this. Collins's other series, the Underland Chronicles, has a powerful antiwar message much along the same lines. And there it works beautifully, because the Underland Chronicles are all about the moral problems of conventional war. The different species in the Underland fight each other over land and resources and all kind of stupid shit, with conventional armies of approximately equal power. Their wars are useless and destructive. In this context, an antiwar message is not only radical and humanist, but logically the only dramatically satisfying conclusion to the series.

But the war in Mockingjay isn't a conventional war. It's a revolution. And the problem with tacking on an antiwar message at the eleventh hour is that you've just spent the better part of three books convincing us that Panem needs a revolution and the Capitol deserves to be overthrown. "A pox on both your houses" doesn't exactly fit with "We all have one enemy, and it's the Capitol!" In this context, an antiwar message becomes reactionary, because what's the alternative? The status quo? Not to resist at all? That would make a very boring book, wouldn't it?

Nevadeline, perhaps the only person who shares my obsession with the political book review with equal passion, suggested that maybe Collins is trying to show what happens when a genuine popular revolution gets taken over by people who are fighting the old order because they want to be the new ruling class--people who don't really plan on being less oppressive than the old ruling class. I wish I thought Collins was this politically sophisticated, but I don't think she is. I think if that was what she was going for, we would have seen some conflict between Coin and the folks who organized the uprisings in Catching Fire, instead of all those folks just kind of mysteriously disappearing in Mockingjay. I also think it's hard to reconcile that analysis with this quote, near the end of Mockingjay:

They can fatten me up. They can give me a full body polish, dress me up, and make me beautiful again. They can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them. I no longer feel any allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despise being one myself.... Snow thought the Hunger Games were an effective means of control. Coin thought the parachutes would expedite the war. But in the end, who does it benefit? No one. The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen.

Yes, no one. Except the people who never have to send another child to the Hunger Games. Who maybe don't have to live the rest of their lives behind electric fences and under Peacekeepers' guns. Who don't have to watch all the fruits of their labor be loaded on trains to the Capitol while their families starve. Who maybe, just maybe, have a chance at a more equal society. They benefit.

People may fight conventional wars for the interests of those in power, but we fight revolutions for ourselves. Collins seems to have lost track of this distinction somewhere along the line. Revolutions--even revolutionary wars--are waged for liberation. There is no guarantee the new order will be better than the old, but if people are willing to risk their lives, it's because the old order has become intolerable, and because something has given them hope that a better world is possible. You can argue about what methods and targets are moral or justified. You can question whether the leadership of District 13 is really on the same side as the ordinary people of Panem. You can debate whether war is actually necessary when the districts produce everything and the Capitol produces nothing. (I wish someone had! That's what general strikes are for.) But you cannot read these books and come out thinking that it is not justified to resist the Capitol.

What Mockingjay was missing most was a sense of hope. One of the reasons that Harry Potter feels like a realistic resistance story even though there are wizards and house-elfs and magic is that JK Rowling gets the emotional landscape right. Resistance has highs and lows. So there's grief and rage and terror and guilt and self-doubt and despair, but there's also love and camaraderie and purpose and liberation and empowerment and joy, and, sometimes, victory. And they're all mixed together and unpredictable, which is what makes resistance stories great fun to read and write.

The best moments from the first two books were the highs: the moments of defiance or humanity or triumph in the face of oppression--the little moments of victory for ordinary people against the Capitol. These little sparks could have grown into something much bigger, into a blaze that devoured the whole rotten system. But only if you believe these moments weren't just "symbolic resistance," but were the actions of people actually capable of remaking the world in their own interest. Only if you really believe ordinary people working together are capable of defeating even the most ruthless oppressor.

resistance as survival

On the very last day of my trip with Interfaith Peace-Builders, we met with Omar Barghouti, one of the founding members of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and a leading advocate of BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) as a nonviolent form of resistance against Israeli colonialism and apartheid.

I knew we were in for a treat because I've heard Omar speak before and he is teh awesome. Calm, logical, humane, amazingly articulate, often funny, angry but never hateful, he's just one of those people who manages to say ten inspiring things every time he opens his mouth.

We talked a lot about BDS and Omar said a lot of smart things, but there was one thing he said that really stuck with me. "If you're not resisting this system, it can kill you." He talked about his firm belief that resistance is liberating and empowering and sometimes the only means of maintaining your humanity under oppression.

This stuck with me because it fit with something I started thinking about in Gaza, where so many people had endured things that would seem to be unendurable. While I was there, something clicked in my head, about how sometimes resistance isn't so much a conscious choice but an instinctive survival mechanism. How sometimes it's the only way to hold on to your sanity in the face of so much pain. The only way to feel like you have some agency when your oppressor controls everything in your life down to when the lights go on and off.

Systems of oppression are not stable. They are governed by their own internal dynamics, which force both sides into confrontation whether they're prepared for it or not. Oppressors, unchecked, grow into bottomless pits of power-hungriness. No concession, no degree of passivity and submission and boot-licking is ever enough for them. If you give them an inch, they'll take everything you've got. At the same time, very few human beings can stand to be ground down indefinitely. Eventually one of two things will happen. Either they'll push you so hard against the wall that you have no choice but to fight back--resistance or death--or some particular injustice will just be too much to bear, snapping some deeply-buried tripwire of defiance that makes you explode in a spontaneous, instinctive act of rebellion.

Of course, in a system of oppression any resistance will be punished, and often punished with disproportionate and spectacular cruelty. It seems paradoxical that the thing that can free you will also make you suffer. But you must remember that something else happens when you fight back. All of a sudden you remember that you are a human being, with agency and choices and control over your actions. You stop being paralyzed by fear and remember that they don't control everything you do. When you're busy being compliant and obedient, all you feel is their power over you. But when you resist you start to feel your own.

bil'in friday

Video coming soon. Stupid non-Mac-compatible camera.

The first day after the delegation is officially over is a Friday, and a few of us who are still around go out to the protest in Bil'in. The residents of Bil'in hold a weekly nonviolent demonstration to protest the confiscation of the village's agricultural land by the Apartheid Wall. While Bil'in is far from the only village that holds these nonviolent protests, they've been at it for over five years and have become one of the more famous.

We manage to find a cab driver with a big enough vehicle to fit all of us, but then realize he doesn't really know how to get there. This is not helped by the fact that many Palestinian towns and villages are not marked on Israeli road signs. Thank God someone has one of those handy maps we got from UN OCHA showing every road and movement obstruction in the West Bank! We arrive in plenty of time to meet the demonstration at the assembly point across from the Bil'in Popular Committee headquarters.

There are not too many internationals in the crowd today, but there is a good crew of Israelis. Israeli activists--mostly young anarchists, with a few old lefties mixed in--participate in this and many other of the Friday demonstrations every week. Of course the vast majority of the crowd is Palestinians, from Bil'in and other places in the West Bank. We see some folks we recognize from Nablus.

The march out of the village is spirited despite the ungodly heat. The aim of every week's demonstration is to march through the gate in the wall and onto Bil'in's village land. I don't know when they last made it through. The gate is at the end of a narrow path on top of a steep, rocky hill, giving the Israeli army the high ground, the most favorable position, and us the least.

Sometimes the soldiers hang back a little but this time they're ready to meet us, lined up in two rows in front of the gate, in full riot gear with tear gas launchers at the ready. It's hot and they want to get this over with quickly.

Because none of us have taken the nonviolent resistance training workshop offered by the Bil'in Popular Committee, we're advised to stay at the back of the demonstration. There's a bit of a stand-off, that tense pre-melee dance that goes on whenever the unarmed side is daring the armed side to attack. Some kids skitter up the scrubbly embankment near Bassem's grave and pick up rocks. Demonstration organizers are up at the front in a second, trying to convince the kids to put down the rocks. Many people consider rock-throwing, a tradition from the First Intifada, to be within the spectrum of nonviolent resistance when the other side has live ammunition, but they're still trying to stop them, determined the soldiers should not have any excuse even though they don't need one.

Meanwhile the front of the demonstration has pushed right up against the riot shields of the first line of soldiers. Many times there are internationals at the front of the demonstration but this week it's all Palestinians, which means the response is expected to be quick and harsh. After five years of confronting soldiers, these people aren't scared of shit. They're primed, on their toes, donning bandannas, keffiyahs and gas masks, waiting for the skirmish to begin. Some of the shebab are laughing at us, hanging out in the back, sending us friendly challenges to come up to the front with them. Other people are looking out for us, giving us advice as we're obviously newbies. Someone passes out cut onions, to counter tear gas inhalation. "Remember to look up," a young guy reminds us, gesturing at the sky. Tear gas canisters fly hundreds of meters, get scalding hot, and contain an explosive charge to disperse the gas. Even if you're not directly targeted you can be injured if one hits you or lands close by.

People have lots of tips, but there's only one instruction you really need to remember. "When they fire the tear gas, run."

And all of a sudden, they do. I have enough time to hear the person next to me say "Run," then all hell breaks loose. I can hear the sharp cracks of tear gas canisters going off somewhere behind me; I shoot a glance back toward the gate and see the area where the kids were gathering rocks is already thick with those sinister white trails of descending gas.

It turns out run means RUN and soon the majority of the crowd is sprinting up the path back toward the village. You have to be quick because sometimes the soldiers are right behind you. Young men from the front of the demonstration have already made it all the way to the back, some carrying their coughing, choking friends between them. How the hell did they run so fast? I guess if you do this every week for five years you get in pretty good shape. I am not in pretty good shape and it's taking all my concentration to keep moving without tripping, colliding with someone or passing out. It's so hot it's like running through soup. I'm secretly glad we stayed in the back because I don't think I could physically have run the distance from the front to safety. I can't imagine having the wherewithal to be directing the action or helping someone to safety right now; it's all I can do to take care of myself.

Another round of loud cracks--five, six, ten at a time. I look away from the path just long enough to see a bright white cloud of tear gas blooming on the ground just feet behind me. We must be several hundred meters away from the soldiers at this point. The wind is not in our favor, blowing all the gas back toward the village. I get one good waft of it--hot, acrid, stinging, burning the skin, eyes and throat. It seems harsher than the tear gas I've encountered at protests in the Americas. Maybe I've never been this close to it or maybe the Israelis have their own extra-evil mix. I remember to breathe through my keffiyah but one whiff is enough to give me a pack-a-day-smoker's rasp the rest of the way back to the village.

Some weeks there's more back-and-forth between the soldiers and the protesters, but this Friday when the intense heat makes fainting and respiratory problems more likely, the majority of protesters head back to the village after one round of confrontation. A few hard-core shebab stick it out by the gate, slinging rocks at the soldiers in the thick of the tear gas. No one's going to stop them once the gas starts flying.

Afterward we're all invited to Iyad Burnat's house for tea and recuperation. He looks gently amused by our sweat-soaked dishevelment. "That was mild!" he says with a grin. Sometimes the soldiers chase people all the way back into the village and fire tear gas into the houses. "My daughter knew the smell of tear gas when she was one month old," he says. He shows us a spent canister of the kind the army was firing today. This kind can travel 500 meters.

Iyad has that quintessential Palestinian mix of warmth, humor, stubbornness and dignity, always with a little bit of sadness underneath. Bassem's martyr poster hangs on the living room wall, along with a picture of a relative who's served eight years of a nine-year sentence in Israeli prison. Iyad discusses a new flanking maneuver they've been trying out to get around the soldiers and up to the gate. He talks about it like a military operation, which I guess it sort of is, except only one side is armed.

Iyad's wife brings out Bil'in handicrafts for sale and serves up cup after cup of sweet Palestinian mint tea. Meanwhile their kids pile into the living room, eager to entertain us. The girl can sing and one of the boys dances, a bundle of spastic energy. Iyad seems like he'd be a great dad, someone who'd raise his kids to be kind and always hold their heads up. I think about the fearful thoughts he must have sometimes, about how his kids will be made to pay for his being a leader of the resistance. At the same time it's so obvious that this is what he's fighting for. This is the only reason people who live here need to go out and face the soldiers week after week. And after I've caught my breath and drunk some tea, I'm ready to go back and do it again too.

new look + new title

Blogger has made some new template designs that are very clean and easy to read, so I'm trying one out for a slightly more professional look.

I also decided I needed a new title for this blog, since I am no longer on the left coast and don't plan to return any time soon. I got a few suggestions (I thought my sister's idea of "Laura Left the Left Coast" was pretty funny) but in the end I decided simple was best. I think the new title also reflects the blog's evolution from its initial hey-I'm-moving-across-the-country roots to something that is mostly political in nature.

I haven't decided yet if I'm getting a new URL, because I hate it when someone does that and you have to change all your bookmarks. I'll keep you posted.

what happens at the allenby bridge...if you're palestinian

Having dinner last night with some friends who'd read my blog, I joked that I'd met the Israeli Dolores Umbridge at the Allenby Bridge. "Yeah, I was waiting for her to make me write stuff in my own blood," I said. "If I were Palestinian, she would have."

Then, today, I remembered the story of young Gazan journalist Mohammed Omer. And suddenly it didn't seem like so much of a joke.