obama pwned on palestine: a play-by-play

Annoying thing about town hall meetings with the president: sometimes someone asks a real question. In this case, that someone was University of South Florida student activist Laila Abdelaziz, who had the great honor of delivering Obama one of the more embarrassing moments of his presidency.

You know (I sigh with a bit of nostalgia), there was a time when a presidential fumble like this wouldn't have even registered. But now that Americans have become used to a commander in chief who can, you know, conjugate verbs and stuff, it's almost painful to watch Obama tie himself in knots trying to defend US support for Israel. Nevertheless, he manages! And it ends up going something like this:

[rush transcript]

0:00: Young woman of color who says she campaigned for me? This can't possibly go wrong!
0:05: Human rights, sweet, I got this.
0:12: Oh crap.
0:27: $!#@%&, I didn't practice this one.
0:30: Stall by talking about "the Middle East in general." Cause they're all really the same over there, right?
0:35: Stall some more by talking about that dude's beads. Wow, I got 20 seconds out of that?! Win!
0:55: "The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries." Oh jeez, I sound like Bush. Well, at least I've made the point that any conflict in the Middle East is the result of age-old intractable religious strife, not colonialism or imperialism. Man, that part of the world's just fucked up.
1:17: ISRAEL IS ONE OF OUR STRONGEST ALLIES. I know that one! Whew, back on track.
1:27: Israel is a democracy!!!!!!!!!!!!
1:30: Israelis are like us, unlike those crazy Arabs surrounding them.
1:52: Did I mention they're surrounded by crazy Arabs?
2:03: The Palestinians deserve our attention, not because they're, you know, people, but because they're DANGEROUS to the US and to Israel, ONE OF OUR STRONGEST ALLIES.
2:23: Oh and btw Palestinians are uneducated.
2:29: Shit is really complicated over there, so don't expect anything to improve any time soon, and HEAVEN FORBID don't try to understand it yourself. But both sides are equally at fault. And by that I mean mostly the Palestinians.
2:42: [lay out peace plan that Israel has ensured will never come to pass]
3:00: Both sides must compromise. Palestinians: you first.
3:10: Palestinians must stop resisting occupation and ethnic cleansing. Israel must "acknowledge their grievances" (no actual action required).
3:50: [required to say something nice about Netanyahu here under terms of Netanyahu-Obama "I totally pwned you on that settlement thing" agreement]
4:03: Abbas, our unelected puppet in the West Bank, has to deal with Hamas, the people the Palestinians actually elected to lead them, and it's causing some kinks in the pipeline of the Palestinians completely negotiating away the last shreds of their dignity.
4:30: In conclusion, ISRAEL IS ONE OF OUR STRONGEST ALLIES. Next question, please.

book review: safe area gorazde by joe sacco

I don't think there is anyone else in the world who does quite what Joe Sacco does. Part graphic novelist, part investigative journalist, Sacco has traveled to some of the world's most broken and abandoned places and produced extraordinary volumes of war reportage in comic book form. Ari Folman, director of Waltz with Bashir, has listed Sacco as a major influence. As for his own influences, Sacco puts George Orwell at the top of the list, and it's not hard to see why. Homage to Catalonia, Orwell's incomparable book of participant journalism about the Spanish Civil War, is perhaps one of the few precedents for Sacco's work.

His two books from the Occupied Territories, Palestine and the newly released, devastating Footnotes in Gaza, are brilliant--rare, astute and compassionate looks at the tragic and absurd reality of daily life under Israeli occupation. So I feel almost sheepish admitting that Safe Area Gorazde, Sacco's comic about the Balkan War, has become my favorite of his full-length works.

Sacco took four trips to Gorazde, a majority Muslim town in eastern Bosnia, in the waning days of the Balkan War. Gorazde was an enclave: a UN-designated "safe area," although the epic irony of that phrase was not lost on anyone who visited there. Surrounded by hostile Serb forces for the better part of four years, Gorazde teetered more than once on the brink of the ethnic cleansing and genocide that eventually swamped all the other "safe areas" around it, including Srebrenica, where an estimated 8,000 people were slaughtered in the largest mass killing in Europe since WWII. And yet, miraculously, Gorazde survived--although the reasons had far more to do with luck than with any actual effort on the part of the so-called peacekeeping forces.

I'm not exactly sure what I find so compelling about Safe Area Gorazde. Perhaps it is Gorazde itself: the scrappy little industrial town on the Drina River whose name few western journalists could pronounce (go-RAJH-duh). Besieged, shell-scarred and starving, its population swollen with desperate refugees from areas already overrun by the Serb army (a constant reminder of the fate than many believed awaited Gorazde itself) and yet still, somehow, grimly and humbly clinging to life. This is certainly what drew Joe Sacco there and what kept him coming back. In fact, he dedicates his book to the town, "where I spent some of my happiest moments." After reading the book, one understands that this is not sarcasm.

Safe Area Gorazde also has the benefit of coming as close as any of Sacco's books do to having a single protagonist, although he emerges quietly. If there's a hero in Safe Area Gorazde, it's Edin, Sacco's tireless guide and translator. Grad student, conscripted math teacher and occasional soldier, Edin is as unassuming, war-weary and battered as his home town, and, it turns out, just as much a survivor.

We don't realize quite how much of the story we've been seeing through Edin's eyes until nearly the end of the book, when, suddenly, we find ourselves following him almost uninterrupted through twenty-six harrowing pages of the 1994 Serb offensive that nearly overran Gorazde. Turns out Edin participated (while nursing a head wound, no less) in the grim guerrilla defense of the city organized by a handful of soldiers and local residents. The front line, as it were, ran practically through his front yard. He sometimes fought alongside family members and neighbors; other times with strangers, refugees retreating from towns that had already fallen.

While we've known all along that Edin is a soldier, that he's been going back and forth to the front for most of the war, we're not quite prepared for the image of this seemingly mild-mannered school teacher crouching in bombed-out houses with his father and brother under withering tank and artillery fire, sniping at invading soldiers with a Kalashnikov while blood seeps through the bandages on his forehead. This guy--an engineering grad student who lives with his parents and complains about his students' poor test scores--doesn't seem like a likely resistance fighter. He could be anybody. He could be one of us. And yet Edin is revealed to be a reasonably competent strategist of urban guerrilla warfare and becomes sort of a leader, in his characteristically modest way, trying to keep the line organized and talking people out of retreating when he can. It is, after all, his home he's fighting for.

The pages describing the '94 offensive, circumscribed by a claustrophobic black border from beginning to end, are some of the most vivid and striking in the book. Sacco employs every trick of framing and perspective in his arsenal, often drawing Edin and his comrades from an over-the-shoulder angle, as if we're crouching there right along with them, in that gutted house, against that wall, flat on the ground behind that pile of bricks that seems ludicrously insufficient cover from an advancing tank.

(I couldn't help thinking, as I read these pages, if that tank had been an IDF tank and that guy with the Kalashnikov had been a Hamas fighter and that town had been Gaza and not Gorazde, how the perception might have changed. Would he have become a cowardly terrorist deliberately hiding himself among civilians, instead of just a guy defending his neighborhood against vastly better armed invaders?)

Edin's is a true story, of course; all he did was live through it. Sacco's genius is to present it to us with no preparation (even though the entire comic is told in flashback), letting it unfold matter-of-factly and without warning, as it did for the participants. We understand the terror on the faces of the men hiding in rubble, because we've heard the same horror stories of mass murder, mutilation and rape that they have, and because we've come to know Gorazde a bit, and we don't want to see it destroyed.

While the villains of Safe Area Gorazde are clearly the Serb nationalists--and not without reason--there are some other forces for whom Sacco reserves a hefty dose of bile. One is the "international community," particularly NATO and the US, who callously muttered about "neutrality" when besieged people needed food and civilians needed protection from genocide, then intervened only when there was something to be gained in the post-Cold War pissing contest.

During the '94 offensive, Edin remembers NATO planes constantly flying over Gorazde, taking surveillance pictures as he and his neighbors fought for their lives on the ground. How hard would it have been for the biggest, most advanced military in the world to take out the murderous artillery batteries in the hills above Gorazde? Certainly not very hard--half the world had seen the United States' precision-guided bomb porn broadcast on CNN during the Gulf War. But somehow, in those rare cases when bombing something could actually save lives (see: Auschwitz railroad tracks) the world's biggest military has a tendency to be mysteriously unavailable.

The other targets of Sacco's contempt are the "hack pack," the swarm of mainstream media journalists who breeze into Gorazde in the morning with the UN aid convoys to snap up a few sound bites and thirty-second clips, then pile back on the convoy trucks to be back in Sarajevo in time for dinner, and deadline. Sacco sees the type of oversimplified, context-free, ahistorical journalism that's become the norm in the rapid-fire twenty-four-hour news cycle, in which conflicts are neatly packaged to be consumed like the latest fashion trend, as exactly what he's rebelling against. He counters it with two weapons: a keen respect for history (he goes back to WWII to untangle the roots of this conflict) and a genuine sense of compassion for the people and places that become the subjects of his books. With these tools, he seeks to answer the most important question in the journalist's litany, the one most frequently ignored by sound-bite journalism: Why?

Joe Sacco has a great gift for revealing the sparks of kindness, humor, courage and solidarity that dwell in dark places, for finding the humanity amongst inhumanity that makes war-torn places simultaneously the best and worst places on Earth. Perhaps the best praise I can give his book is that after reading it, I kind of wanted to visit Gorazde. And when I found this photograph of the town from 2006, patched up and with all its lights back on, I recognized it instantly, and I smiled.

floodgates

It has been raining quite heavily here in LA, which it usually does around this time of year, but not usually with quite this intensity or duration. Despite the fact that it does rain really hard at least a couple of times every fall/winter, Los Angeles's desert-city infrastructure is woefully unprepared. After just a day of rain, the storm drain on the street behind my building, which I cross on my way to school, had completely backed up under a clot of pine needles and dead leaves, flooding the street with up to a foot of water.

Israel, it seems, has the same problem. But what an elegant solution they have found! When a dam in southern Israel came dangerously close to overflowing due to heavy rains, the Israelis simply opened the floodgates, sending a wave of water up to five meters deep pouring without warning across the central Gaza Strip into the Mediterranean Sea. People who live along the coast (and fishermen who depend on the sea for their livelihood) woke up to find the waves brown with silt. And hundreds of families in Johr al Dik and Nuseirat, already some of the poorest areas in Gaza, had to flee and watch helplessly as homes, possession and agricultural lands were swamped by rising floodwaters. Because clearly what Gaza needs is more homeless, dispossessed and economically ruined people.

The low-lying central part of Gaza used to be the main area of agricultural production, and the land that was flooded was once planted with fruit and olive trees, which, like all trees, would have slowed the flood waters and prevented soil erosion. But most of this agricultural land has been destroyed by Israel--trees uprooted, irrigation systems torn up by passing tanks, and farmers shot at when they try to replant.

The current debate in Gaza is whether the flood was a calculated move to further punish the population--reminding them, on the anniversary of the end of Operation Cast Lead, that they still live and die at the whim of the Israelis--or just a case of callous disregard for Palestinian life and property. Personally, my money's on the latter, but the former would certainly not surprise me.

Certainly the flood was intentional, in the sense that Israeli civil engineers must have known that when they opened the floodgates, the water would flow downhill into the Mediterranean, and that in between the dam and the Mediterranean was the Gaza Strip. I don't know which disturbs me more: the idea of someone consciously planning new and innovative ways to punish the Gazans, or the idea that any people who happened to live in the path of the water, because they are Palestinian, were seen as nothing more than so much dead leaves clogging Israel's storm drain.

gazans donate to haiti relief

Ma'an News reports: Gazans Raise Money for Haiti

Of course they do.

Because despite 60+ years of dispossession and 40+ years of occupation--or perhaps because of it--Palestinians remain some of the most generous people on the planet.

Because who knows rubble, destruction, despair, the stench of death, the pain of sudden loss, and the terror of being without food, shelter, clean water and medical care during an emergency better than them?

The idea of Gazans lining up to donate blankets and milk, in the middle of Gaza's cold, rainy winter, when many are still homeless from the war the year before, is inspiring and humbling. But as usual, there's a cruel twist, courtesy of the siege:

"The Red Cross director was only able to accept financial donations as transferring goods out of the Strip is near impossible."

resistance lessons

"The first thing you have to understand is how power works."

We are sitting on a sidewalk in Cairo outside the US embassy--seven women, surrounded by a tight ring of riot cops and closely watched by the ever-present mukhabarat, the Egyptian secret police. (Someone called them "refrigerators in suits," because that's how they're built, and that's how I'll think of them forevermore.)

We're in the middle of a week in which we 1,300 internationals, most of whom come from western "democracies," got a very mild taste of what it's like to organize in a police state--a real, permanent, and very well-developed one, not the collapsible police state that the US government like to trot out during big demonstrations.

We are sitting down because a few minutes ago, the refrigerators in suits started violently shoving us toward the entrance to the embassy grounds, where another group of about 30 people are also penned in by riot police. We decided we weren't going, so we linked arms and sat down, blocking the entrance. It was a brilliant use of nonviolent civil disobedience tactics, de-escalating the situation immediately, and now we are sitting in a circle, getting an impromptu lesson on resistance from Lisa Fithian, who's been at this game longer than I've been alive.

"The people who have power over us get to keep it because we let them--because we're afraid of what they'll do to us if we don't cooperate," Lisa says. "We start to get power back when we refuse to cooperate with them."

Three hours later, I know she is right. The sit-in has dispersed with no arrests and no serious injuries. And what's more, I feel great. Fantastic, actually. Best I've felt since landing in Egypt. The bitter disappointment at not getting into Gaza and the worry about what the Egyptian government might do to us are gone as if they never existed. And I'm not alone. Shae and Dara, my two travel companions, feel it too. Even Lisa is grinning. Everyone realizes now: this is what we have come here to do. We challenged the police, we refused to be intimidated, and we won.

What's more, we gained valuable intelligence about how these particular police behave. They're physically intimidating, and there are a lot of them, but they are not ready--yet--to beat us or arrest us. That means we have space to keep pushing and escalating our tactics.

From that moment on, I am fearless. Walking through downtown later that day, I realize I have learned how to cross the street. It may seem silly, but crossing the street is the biggest challenge many tourists face in Cairo. There are no traffic rules, and where there are crosswalks and signs cars generally ignore them. You have to learn to just step out into the street without fear, trusting that that cars will stop. And I am doing it like a native.

The sit-in has transformed everyone who participated in it, and our confidence is contagious. At the nonviolence training the next day, our affinity group, which contains three people who were in the sit-in and two people who were not, is one of the few that decides we are willing to risk arrest in the model scenario we are working with. When asked to arrange ourselves in the room based on the level of risk we are willing to assume at the protest the next day, we are right in the front. We're not trying to show off. We're just not afraid.

When Lisa asks for female volunteers to be at the front of the demonstration on the 31st, Shae, Dara and I all volunteer without hesitation. I'm ready to be on the front lines. I decide fearlessness is the most valuable thing I have to offer at the moment, especially since some people are clearly freaked out by Mick's pre-protest speech when he tells people in his thick Scottish accent that they should be prepared to be beaten and arrested. I personally don't think we're going to be arrested, although I'm willing to be if it comes to that, and I decide I'm not afraid of a little police brutality.

I've already written about the spectacular beginning of the demonstration here, so I won't repeat myself. But when we sit down in the street in Tahrir Square, I can tell there's going to be violence. I can feel it coming. The uniformed riot cops are reluctant to touch us, but the secret police, they've had it. They're used to being feared. They are not used to people defying them, and it annoys the hell out of them. They've decided now is the time to reassert their power-over, and they're going to make sure we get the message.

Soon there is grabbing, dragging, kicking, punching, hair-pulling, and it gets pretty hectic. I do my best to stay in the street as long as possible. Finally four guys pick me up and carry me out of the street. For some reason I find this kind of funny. It's just absurd, the fact that four refrigerators in suits are exerting themselves over a 5' 1" woman. I almost start laughing.

Turns out one of them grabbed me hard enough to leave a bruise on my arm a week later. What's that about? They could have gotten me out of the street without the bruise. But they want to remind you of their capacity for violence.

One of the goals of nonviolence training, Starhawk tells us, is to help people realize that they have power, and the ability to exert some control over a situation, even when all the force is on the other side. If people realize that they are in control of their actions, they can avoid panic and remain empowered even in situations where violence is being used against them. (Personally, I believe this is true even in situations of extreme violence, like torture, although it is certainly much harder to remember this when the violence is that intense.)

I'd love to say I was scared and faced off with the cops anyway, but I can't claim any such bravery. In truth I wasn't scared at all, because I felt in control of my actions the whole time, and I never felt the consequences got beyond what I had prepared myself to accept. Behold, nonviolence training works!

Without fear in the mix, something interesting happens. You kind of see through the game. The whole thing becomes transparent and almost comical, because the cops are so aggressive, and they clearly think they're intimidating you. And the fact that you're not scared of them becomes kind of like a private joke or a secret weapon--aha, I know you're trying to frighten me by using violence, but it's not working, which means I win. I WIN. Joke's on you, asshole. You may have the monopoly of force, but it turns out it ain't worth shit.

The point of relating all this is not to make myself look badass. It's to make a point about resistance.

Toward the end of last semester, working on the rewrite of Gaza Sunrise, I started getting really frustrated, because I couldn't seem to effectively communicate why people would engage in resistance when the price of doing so was very high. Now I understand the piece of information I was missing. It's not just that there isn't any other way to win, because power concedes nothing without a demand, etc., etc. It's that sometimes resistance is the only way to claim any power in an oppressive situation.

It should be stated that the situation we were in in Cairo was a very, VERY low-stakes environment compared to what Palestinians face and what Egyptian citizens face from their own government when they protest. At the end of the day, it can be a fun war story and not a genuinely terrifying experience for us because, as internationals, the consequences for us are still relatively mild. There is a scale of political repression, and--let's be honest--we are still operating at the low end here. None of us were going to be imprisoned, tortured or killed for our actions. Obviously, as you go up the scale of increasing consequences, it becomes a lot harder to get to that state of fearlessness. At some level it may become impossible, and that's when real courage--of the scared-shitless-but-doing-it-anyway variety--is required. But I think the same fundamental dynamics of power and resistance apply.

There is something amazing, deeply subversive and delightful about realizing you have power in a situation where the other side would like you to believe you have none. I'm starting to understand that that is true even in the most extreme conditions of repression. As Lisa said while we sat on the sidewalk outside the US embassy: "If you know what the consequences are and you're willing to accept them, there is nothing anyone can do to stop you."

haiti/palestine

Leave it to Mondoweiss to have the best thing to say about Haiti, and so simply and succinctly, too.

On October 17, 1989, an earthquake registering 7.1 on the Richter scale hit the San Francisco Bay area. 62 people died. The earthquake that hit Port-au-Prince, Haiti, yesterday was the same intensity, 7.1. But the death toll is already estimated in the thousands [at least].

And as a bonus, it led me to this interview with Haitian photojournalist Daniel Morel, who has great things to say about so many things I'm interested in.

some good news: mohammad othman and jamal juma' are free!

There has not been a lot of good news on the Palestine front as of late.

After Viva Palestina 3 successfully defied an epic obstacle course of bureaucratic intransigence, broken promises, and serious police violence to reach Gaza, Egypt deported convoy leader George Galloway and announced that all further aid convoys would be banned from its territory.

So far, all of the Gaza Freedom March participants who have tried to reach Gaza independently have been turned back...except perhaps for one Indian man who had a letter of support from his embassy, something no American or Canadian can expect to get.

And, inconceivably cruel as it may seem, terrifying rumors of another war on Gaza continue to circulate.

So it is with great joy that I report a victory for our movement: Mohammad Othman and Jamal Juma', two prominent nonviolent activists with the Stop the Wall coalition in the West Bank, have both been released from Israeli prison.

Mohammad was arrested on September 22 and Jamal on December 16. Both were held without charges or trial, solely because of their participation in nonviolent resistance activities.

Another prominent nonviolent West Bank activist, Abdallah Abu Rahmah, is still imprisoned...along with up to 11,000 other Palestinians who are not famous, many of whom have never been charged with any crime. And the coordinated crackdown on the nonviolent resistance movement continues--one of the latest victims is Czech citizen Eva Novakova, the ISM media coordinator in the West Bank, who was arrested "Palestinian style" in a 3am night raid on her home in Ramallah and deported to Prague.

But there is no mistake that the release of these two activists is a victory extracted by the significant international solidarity campaigns that have been built around their cases. "The massive support and actions of international civil society clearly made my imprisonment too uncomfortable for the Israeli authorities," said Jamal Juma' upon his release. "This international solidarity has given our popular struggle against the Wall further strength. We are deeply thankful for all the efforts."