world's war-makers, poor-makers prepare to tempt fate, may 2012

Today Obama announced that NATO and the G8--quite literally, the organizational representations of the world's imperialist powers and economic elite--will be meeting back-to-back in May 2012, in Chicago.

Whoever planned this is a fucking idiot.  Or possibly just very, very arrogant.

The G8 developed a pattern over the years of meeting in increasingly isolated locations--like an island off the coast of Georgia--to avoid protests by thousands of people angered by the economic policies of austerity and neoliberalism enforced by the west's most powerful governments. 

Now, in an about-face that I'm sure was partially engineered by Obama as a centerpiece of his 2012 presidential campaign, they're meeting in the US's second-largest city.  A city with a large, multi-racial, well-organized left, easily accessible from many points in North America, with a decent public transit system to ferry around lots and lots and lots of protesters.  A city that has been a historic center of protest since the fight for the eight-hour work day (remember when we had those?)  A city where police brutality is kind of an issue, and people might not react well to their streets being taken over by the phalanxes of riot police it will take to defend these rich, murdering asshats.  A city where there might just be a few people who are angry about slashing social services to the bone while pouring money into endless war.

In short: It. Is. So. ON.

how the us boat to gaza became the unofficial flagship of freedom flotilla 2

The passengers on Freedom Flotilla 2 are currently assembling in Athens, parachuting into a country on the brink of mass revolt.  (Perhaps more on that in a future post, but for now check out someone who knows a great deal more about Europe than me.)

As anyone who has been following developments with the Flotilla knows, all forces even remotely associated with it have been under intense pressure from Israel (and presumably the US, behind the scenes.)  One result of this pressure is that the Mavi Marmara, the ship owned by the Turkish charity IHH on which nine activists were murdered by Israeli commandos last summer, will not be sailing in the Flotilla as expected (although my understanding is that IHH is still participating as an organization, contrary to what some reports have said.)

This is a blow on a symbolic level, obviously, but also in terms of pure logistics.  The withdrawal of the Mavi Marmara has cut the numbers of the Flotilla in half.  But something interesting has also happened.  With the highly charged symbolism of the Mavi Marmara out of the picture, the star of the Flotilla (at least in the US media) has sort of become the US Boat to Gaza.  This is something I'm sure no one expected when fundraising began for the US Boat over a year ago.

As Joseph Dana points out, the US boat is now the largest in the Flotilla.  It will carry 36 activists, 4 crew members, and 10 journalists, including reporters, photographers and/or camera crews from the New York Times, CNN, and CBS News.  Also among the press corps are two of Israel/Palestine's finest independent journalists: Mya Guarnieri, writing for Ma'an, and Dana himself, who will be covering the Flotilla for The Nation.

Wait, wait.  Let me repeat that list again.  The New York Times, CNN, and CBS News.  Are on the Flotilla.

Remember last year, when there was a virtual media blackout on the first Freedom Flotilla, right up until the moment people got murdered?  This time around, there's been a sea change (sorry, had to do it) in media coverage that is nothing short of surreal.  Major US media outlets have run significant and not-appallingly-bad stories about the Flotilla, well in advance of its departure, including at least two in the Paper of Record, which is hardly known for its favorable coverage of Palestine.  The US media is beginning to see the Flotilla itself, and not just the Israeli reaction to it, as a major news story that can't be ignored.

Of course, that does not guarantee at all that what happens will be reported fairly or make it past unfriendly editorial filters.  But it does change the dynamics of the situation in significant ways.  When the first Flotilla was attacked, grassroots journalists had to fight tooth and nail to wrest control of the media narrative away from the Israelis.  It's just not going to be that easy this time around.  Even if US mainstream media journalists are not particularly sympathetic to the Palestinians, they are used to being treated with respect and decency, particularly by governments and militaries that, y'know, we pay for.  I have a feeling they may be in for a very rude awakening, and that can only have a positive impact on their coverage.

I do think Israel will intercept this Flotilla.  I don't think they'll repeat the wholesale killing spree they unleashed on the Mavi Marmara, although they have already threatened other forms of violence against the unarmed passengers of the boats.  But it's going to be really hard for them to spin whatever they do as a justified response to crazy violent Islamist terrorists when the most high-profile passengers on the Flotilla are citizens of a nation that is one of their only remaining allies.

back to palestine, july 8-16

I'm doing this.  It's a week of international solidarity actions in Palestine, which will bring together hundreds of internationals to work with 15 Palestinian civil resistance organizations across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

It also includes this--a mass fly-in to Ben Gurion Airport on July 8.  Hundreds of internationals will arrive on the same day, and, if all goes according to plan, hundreds of people will refuse to lie to Israeli security about the fact that we are here to visit Palestinians and participate in nonviolent solidarity actions.

"You're crazy," you might say.  "They're just going to deport you all, and you will have spent all that time and money for nothing."

It is true that they may deport us.  The Israeli authorities will do what they will do and we cannot control their behavior.  But if that happens, I don't believe it will be for nothing.

I heard about the fly-in action months ago.  Like many people, I thought it was a great idea, but I was afraid of getting deported, and downright terrified of losing my ability to enter Palestine in the future, especially at such a critical time.

But then came Nakba Day, Naksa Day, and the announcement that seven of my friends will be on the US Boat to Gaza, which is due to sail very shortly before the July week of action.  The action started to seem more and more like an important challenge to Israeli apartheid, and I began to feel more and more like I was the exact right kind of person to do it.

I've been to Palestine twice on "witnessing" delegations.  I've seen what things are like on the ground.  I'm done with traveling there simply to witness.  On the last trip I was questioned extensively by Israeli security, and I have been writing and speaking openly and publicly about Palestine since then, using my full name and with a very visible online and real-world presence.  This leads me to believe that I would probably be questioned no matter what I did and how carefully I tried to hide the next time I tried to enter Palestine, and that trying to pass myself off as a "tourist" in the future might in fact only piss off Israeli security and give them an excuse to deport me anyway, for lying to them.

For what it's worth, I have absolutely no problem with activists going on the DL, not telling the whole truth, or otherwise obfuscating in order to get into Palestine and do work that undermines the rotten apartheid system.  That is the standard M.O., and I think people should continue to go for it.  But I'm excited by the possibility of trying a different route this time.

Something interesting happened once I signed up for this venture.  I completely lost my fear of Ben Gurion Airport, which has to be one of my least favorite places on Earth.  Israeli-controlled borders are miserable places.  They're factories of humiliation, intimidation, dehumanization, and forced submission to vile degrees of racial profiling, political policing, and generally unchecked dominance behavior by cocky soldiers and cold-eyed secret police.  Usually, internationals and Palestinians accept submitting to this system as a necessary evil, the unwritten price of an entry visa into Palestine.

But there is something so wonderful about the prospect of being able to defy that system, of being given permission to defy it as part of a nonviolent civil disobedience action.  It releases every natural rebellious instinct, the very impulses that draw people to Palestine in the first place, and channels them into mass action.  The prospect of getting deported alone is lame, pointless and depressing.  The prospect of getting deported along with hundreds and hundreds of people who are challenging Israel's racist, repressive entry policies sounds like it just might be worth it.

The brilliance of this action is that it takes an experience that is often isolated and isolating--interacting with the fearsome Israeli security apparatus--and turns it into a collective, mass solidarity action.  The whole system of interrogation, detention, prison and deportation is designed to isolate you as much as possible, to create the impression that you are completely alone against this overwhelmingly powerful repressive machinery.  Mass civil disobedience completely undercuts and inverts this power dynamic, which is one of the reasons Israel finds acts of unarmed civil resistance so threatening.

It's not that any of us want to get deported.  We don't.  We want permission to enter Palestine and travel freely to visit our Palestinian friends, as is our universal human right.  But we have no illusions about the system that stands in our way.

I love Palestine.  I love the people I've met there, Palestinians and Israelis, who are fighting for Palestinian national liberation and a country where everyone can live in peace with justice and equal rights.  To be invited--welcomed--into such a heroic struggle is an honor beyond words.  It physically hurts to think about the prospect that I might not be able to go back there for years.

But really, what justification do I have to hold so tightly to my ability to enter Palestine when that right is denied to so many actual Palestinians?  When Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have to brave Israeli snipers just to catch a glimpse of their homeland?  When it was recently revealed that 140,000 Palestinians from the West Bank lost their ability to return home, simply because they had the temerity to live, work, or study abroad?

Israel is being challenged on every border.  If Palestinian refugees can brave minefields and live ammunition, and the folks aboard Freedom Flotilla 2 can face Israeli gunboats and navy commandos, we can stand up to the Ben Gurion security apparatus.  Yalla, let's go to Palestine.

what is the point of political film?

"Movies have an accessory and not a decisive usefulness in the various events and elements that contribute to the transformation of society.  It is naive to believe that you can start a revolution with a movie and even more naive to theorize about doing so.  Political films are useful, on the one hand, if they contain a correct analysis of reality, and, on the other, if they are made in such a way to have that analysis reach the largest possible audience."  
                                      --Franco Solinas, screenwriter of The Battle of Algiers

Those of us who are concerned with political storytelling often hear that the goal of a political film is to convince--to sway people who are on the fence on a particular issue.  We are frequently cautioned against "preaching to the choir."  The unspoken corollary is that if you are speaking to the "middle," you must moderate your message.  You must not be too strident, too angry, too militant.  You must not be too "one-sided" by showing oppressors as they really are (particularly if that depiction challenges the dominant narrative).  You must not demand the audience sympathize with characters who may make them uncomfortable (like, for example, the pair of would-be suicide bombers in Paradise Now), or have demands and goals that seem unreasonable.

Personally, I do not think being "moderate" or "toning it down" is the best way to convince someone; I think telling the truth and being unapologetic is.  But more importantly, I do not think convincing the fence-sitters is the best, most powerful use to which political films can be put.

I think of the great political films I love--The Battle of Algiers, Milk, Salt of This Sea, Bloody Sunday, The Time That Remains, to name just a few.  Did any one of these films really convince someone to change their mind, to support gay rights or Palestinian liberation or resistance to oppression?  Probably not.  Bigots and defenders of colonialism were not the target audience for those films.  They weren't made for homophobes and Zionists and racists.  They were made for us, or as Harvey Milk said, for the us-es.  They are our stories reflected back to us.

In a film, the protagonist is the person with agency--it is her action toward a goal in the face of obstacles that drives the plot.  "A movie is about someone who wants something and is struggling to get it," was the mantra drilled into us in film school.  The protagonist is the person from whose perspective we see the world and with whom we identify and empathize.  So choosing your protagonist is often the most political choice you make when writing a film, because you are effectively choosing who to give agency to, and who is worthy of empathy. 

Marxism begins from the point of view that ordinary people make history.  We are the protagonists of the story of the world.  On the most basic level, one of the purposes of political art is to allow oppressed and marginalized people to see themselves represented as the subjects of the story--the subjects of history--not its objects; as beings with agency and the ability to control their own destiny, even if it is only their destiny within a movie. 

This is not in itself enough to defeat oppression.  Oppression is defeated through struggle; through protests, strikes, mass movements and revolutions.  But it is powerful, and liberating, to see the truth of your experience reflected on film, and to watch other people who don't share that experience sympathize with it and root for someone like you.  It's a reminder that our tales are worthy of being told; that we are worthy of being the hero of the story; that there are others like us; that we are not alone.  To remind ourselves that our stories have power is to remind ourselves that we have power.

For the member of an oppressed group, it is a moment of saying, "That is me.  That is my reality and my struggle being represented on screen as something worthy of empathy."  For the ally in solidarity it is saying: "That could be me.  That person is just like me, just as human as me.  My life could be theirs if not for circumstance.  I understand what they are fighting for, and if I was in their position, I'd be fighting too."

This is why political films must always be true--not necessarily true in a factual sense, but in the sense of accurately representing things like oppression, resistance and power.  For the filmmaker this means really understanding your subject matter: researching it if it is not your own life experience, and being able to fully and unhesitatingly identify with the wants and needs of your characters.  It also means being honest and unflinching about the world you are portraying, even when that may confuse the expectations of people for whom it is not their lived reality.

The best way to have political films reach the largest possible audience is to make them good, and that means making them truthful.  Studios are not going to help you there.  The layers and layers of assumptions behind Hollywood studios' self-fulfilling prophecies about who the American movie-going audience is and what they want to see deserve fuller consideration in another post.  Suffice to say that most Hollywood films are like fast food in a poor neighborhood.  Of course people will swallow crap if it's the only thing around.  It doesn't mean they don't hunger for something better.

The audience for a political film is not the kind that's built through studio marketing divisions and subway ads and building-sized billboards on Sunset Boulevard, even if studios ever had an interest in doing that.  It's going to be built like a movement, from the grassroots--by the people it sets on fire because it touches something deep inside them, because it reflects things they know to be true but have maybe never seen on screen.  These people become the film's champions.  They rave to all their friends about it, blog about it, tweet about it, organize screenings of it because it speaks to them and moves them and they have never seen anything like it.  When you see a film that speaks the truth, the effect is electric.

There is a moment I love in the beginning of Salt of This Sea, when Soraya, the main character, arrives at Ben Gurion Airport.  Unsurprisingly, she is searched by a couple of humorless Israeli security agents.  They even search her voluminous curly hair.  Both times I saw this film in the theater, people laughed at that scene.  In that laughter is a moment of release from alienation.  It's the laughter of relief, of realizing, "Oh, there's someone else out there who gets it."  Other times, the exact same feeling can make you cry.  There are several scenes in Milk that have that effect on me every time.

People make films for all kinds of reasons, but for me, it's always in pursuit of that moment--to feel it myself and to be able to bring it to others.  I haven't set out to try to tell the stories of oppressed, exploited and marginalized people out of some abstract sense of political mission.  I write those kind of stories because they're the ones I identify with.  I don't think there's anything special about me.  If I can identify with them, then other people can too.  That means there is an audience for those kind of films--a powerful, passionate audience if you know how to connect with it.  After all, we the us-es are the majority.

nakba day

I bet you thought this blog was dead.  It is not.  I've just been writing other things, like this and this and a spec pilot for German TV (long story) which have kept me really busy.  But now I'm back!  And today is Nakba Day in Palestine.

Why is this Nakba Day unlike any other Nakba Day?  Because the Arab Spring has begun.  There are always protests in Palestine around May 15, when the state of Israel marks its independence and Palestinians commemorate the expulsion and dispossession of some 750,000 indigenous people to create that state.  It's a day to remind their colonial masters that Palestinians still exist, they have not forgotten, and they will return.

But this year, in the spirit of revolutionary direct action that is sweeping the Middle East, some Palestinians and their supporters decided to take that message literally and marched on the borders of Israel/Palestine from all directions, demanding to return, now, as is their right.

In Gaza, protesters marched to the Erez crossing with Israel.  The response: sniper shots, an Apache helicopter, and tank shells.  2 dead, 80 wounded.  Ken O'Keefe filmed it:



In Lebanon, somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 Palestinian refugees and their supporters marched to the border.  Israeli soldiers hid in the trees and cold-bloodedly opened fire on unarmed protesters as they approached the border of their own country.  10 dead, 112 wounded.  My friend Alex saw the whole thing.

Jordan and Egypt obliged by cracking down on the protests on Israel's behalf before they even reached the border...although a few Egyptians managed to slip through the dragnet and reach the Rafah crossing, still not open despite promises from the new Egyptian government.

Meanwhile, East Jerusalem is a tinderbox after a 17-year-old boy was shot and killed at a demonstration on Friday.  There was a day-long protest near Kalandia checkpoint that looked like a scene from the First Intifada.  And Palestinian flags flew in Tel Aviv, for the first time since 1948:



But perhaps the most amazing scene happened at the "border" of the Golan Heights, Syrian territory occupied by Israel in 1967 and then illegally annexed in 1981.  Hundreds, maybe thousands, of Palestinian and Syrian protesters walked through a mine field and poured over the border fence into the village of Majdal Shams.  The video has to be seen to be believed.  I'm pretty sure this is what Netanyahu's nightmares look like.  Oh yeah, the Israeli army opened fire there too, killing 8 people.

what's missing from miral

Is it possible that an American-born Jew could make a good movie about Palestine?  Theoretically, sure.  Unfortunately, Julian Schnabel's Miral is not that film.

Let us leave aside for a moment the numerous artistic problems of the film--the Interchangeable Brown Person Casting of Indian-Portuguese Freida Pinto in the title role; the atrocious script; the mediocre directing of even veteran actors; the numerous fudges of geography (I really do not think there is a checkpoint anywhere between Haifa and Jerusalem); and the many painful incidents of characters pausing to explain things for the benefit of the audience that would be perfectly obvious to any Palestinian as part of their lived experience (my favorite: one Arabic-speaking character explaining to another Arabic-speaking character what intifada means...and getting the translation wrong.)  All these shortcomings are present, but Miral's deepest flaws are political.

The main story of the film takes place primarily in occupied East Jerusalem in the years between 1967 and the First Intifada.  Yet through the magic of Hollywood, we're presented with an occupied Jerusalem in which the occupation is almost completely invisible in people's daily lives.  In this fantasy Jerusalem, no hostile soldiers roam the streets of the Old City, outlandishly large guns slung over their shoulders, alternating between flirting with tourists and harassing the locals for sport.  No crowds of women linger outside police stations waiting for news of arrested husbands, sons and brothers.  No squat green police cars prowl the streets at night declaring curfew.  Miral and her religious father cheerfully plant flowers in the garden at the Haram al-Sharif without ever having to pass through a phalanx of riot cops to get there.

There is Israeli violence, yes: a home demolition in a refugee camp, a demonstration met with live ammunition, and a chilling sequence in which Miral is arrested, humiliated and beaten unconscious in an Israeli police station, which feels so vividly authentic because it is a true story from author Rula Jebreal's youth.  In these scenes the reality of occupied Palestine is momentarily visible through the Hollywood trappings.  But the Israeli violence is always a reaction to Palestinian resistance--with the unspoken implication being that if Palestinians would stop resisting, everything would be fine.

But that is not the reality in Palestine at all.  What Miral misses entirely is that Palestinian resistance is itself a reaction to the lived reality of Israeli colonization and ethnic cleansing.  It's the daily, lifelong parade of insults, humiliations, difficulties, pain and suffering imposed by the occupation that fuels Palestinian resistance again and again.  Palestinians don't have to do anything special to invite repression from the Israeli state.  They just have to exist.  Without showing the daily grind of misery and oppression that Palestinians face, Palestinian resistance becomes completely unmotivated, or motivated by abstract hatred of "the Jews"--which is exactly how Americans like their violence from Arabs.

Also missing from Miral is the mass popular character of the First Intifada, which was primarily a movement of strikes, boycotts and unarmed street protests--not unlike those sweeping the Middle East today.  It was a mass movement which touched all of Palestinian society.  Yet Miral manages to separate its main characters' daily lives from revolt, struggle and politics--something absolutely unheard of in Palestine.  Resistance is portrayed as a marginal, exotic, minority activity, alien and separate from ordinary people's lives.

The two characters who are unambiguously positive forces in Miral's life--her adoptive father (Alexander Siddig) and teacher Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass)--are openly hostile to resistance.  Not only is this politically reactionary; it's completely unbelievable.  If there is one defining characteristic of life in Palestine, it's the way in which politics forces its way into every aspect of people's lives, making the most ordinary tasks into de facto acts of resistance.  It's highly implausible that someone like Hind Husseini, who flies a Palestinian flag in her window (and somehow manages to get away with it in the pre-Oslo days when such an act was an arrestable offense) would berate her young students for attending demonstrations at a time when the whole of Palestinian society was in revolt.

While Miral herself frequently gives militant speeches, her forays into resistance seem naive and ineffectual and universally end in disaster.  A fellow student is killed at a demonstration and the anger is directed not at the soldier who saw fit to shoot an unarmed teenage girl, but at Miral herself for being so stupid as to drag her friend along to a protest.  Her fling with a vaguely-defined "PLO activist" results in arrest, torture, and alienation from her father.  Throughout it all, everyone's goals and politics are vague and muddy, and Miral comes off looking stupid and manipulated.  Even her wish for "one country where we can live together with equal rights" is dismissed as the silly dream of an idealistic child, as the film becomes an unabashed Oslo Accords love-fest in its closing moments.

We get a glimpse of Schnabel's politics earlier in the film, in a long, overly expositional rant against settlers as the driving force behind the occupation.  By placing the blame on settlers, Schnabel lets the rest of Israeli society off the hook for the original act of colonization.  This goes hand-in-hand with his strident defense of the two-state "solution," despite what seems to me to be overwhelming evidence that it is both impossible and unjust.  The blame-the-settlers-for-hijacking-our-country-which-is-otherwise-perfectly-fine logic is essentially the J Street position, and Miral is J Street politics in a movie.  A component of this politics is the idea that the majority of Palestinians just want to live their lives but are being held hostage by a stubborn minority who insist on resisting and fucking everything up for everyone else who just wants to live in peace.  Completely missing, of course, is the idea that Israeli occupation, colonization and apartheid is itself the thing that is holding back genuine peace with justice.

The final element missing from Miral is more subjective and ephemeral.  Through a maudlin, directionless script and the overuse of tragic music, Schnabel manages to suck all the emotional intensity out of one of the most intense places on earth.  Schnabel's Palestine is a dreary tragedy, completely devoid of the warmth, wicked humor, communal strength and indomitable spirit that most visitors fall in love with when they travel there.  Completely lost is the idea that resistance (in whatever form one chooses) can be a source not just of suffering but of empowerment and joy, and that despite a seemingly endless supply of pain, Palestine is a place worth loving and fighting for.

the cruelty is in the details

In his report to the United Nations, Judge Richard Goldstone described the actions of the Israeli state as "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population."  He was writing, of course, about Operation Cast Lead, the 22-day Israeli assault that pulverized the Gaza Strip in the winter of 2008-2009.  But I've often thought about how perfectly those words describe so many things that Israel does.

The Israeli repressive machinery has had a long time to develop--over sixty years--and consequently it is very finely tuned.  There are many states that treat the populations under their control with just as much violence as Israel does, but few that do it with such precise, intentional, and coldly calculated sadism.

The latest example comes to me thanks to the excellent reporting of Joseph Dana, writing on the left-wing Israeli blog +972 Magazine.  Dana travels frequently throughout the West Bank to document Palestinians' nonviolent struggles and their repression.  Lately the village of Nabi Saleh has been the site of the following scene:

Heavily armed Israeli soldiers enter the village at two or three in the morning.  They surround the houses and wake everyone up.  What are they doing in the village at three in the morning?  They are photographing children--all the male children of the village.  They have a list.  Why are they doing this?  So that when they arrest the boys, they'll know who's who.  Why is the Israeli army arresting teen and pre-teen boys?  So they can torture them into implicating their parents and their parents' friends, who are organizing nonviolent resistance in the village.

But they don't just go about their torture of children willy-nilly.  No.  They pre-screen.  Children arrested the first time are given a brief "interview" and released after an hour or two.  Based on these interviews, the Shabak (secret police) decide which of the children are weakest and most likely to "confess" that certain adults are the leaders of the village popular committees that organize the demonstrations.  These kids are then arrested again and tortured.  One of the unlucky boys in Nabi Saleh was Islam Tamimi, age 14.  Apparently whatever he said after a terrifying late-night arrest, hours of questioning, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and exposure to nighttime cold was not good enough, because his 11-year-old brother was arrested the next day.

I have heard many stories of Palestinian children being arrested in the West Bank.  But for some reason no one ever really explained the full horror of it.  It's something about the two-step process that gets me.  This isn't random harassment or reactionary violence.  It's targeted, deliberate, premeditated.  Someone planned it.  They sat down and thought: What is the most efficient way to traumatize children?  How can I do this in a way that will inflict the most fear, pain and suffering on the greatest number of people?  The boy, subjected to an adult-sized dose of repression.  His parents and siblings, who often don't know where he's been taken but certainly know what is happening to him.  The village activists, painfully aware that this is retaliation for their organizing.  The whole village, subjected to collective punishment for its resistance.

The final cruelty is that the confessions that these children almost always sign after hours or days of suffering and terror are completely superfluous.  Israel doesn't need an excuse to arrest anyone in the West Bank.  They charged Bil'in activist Abdallah Abu Rahmah with weapons possession for having a peace sign made of spent tear gas canisters in his yard.  He is still in prison.  And it's not as if the popular committees and their leaders are underground or secret.  They have websites and Facebook pages.  They host internationals and Israelis in their homes every Friday.  Everyone in the village knows who they are.

So, you might ask, what is the point?  To deliberately scar the next generation, by giving young boys the experience of being broken under torture before they reach puberty?  To make children feel the overwhelming power of the Israeli state from a young age?  To teach them, at 10 or 12 or 14, what it feels like to be made to denounce someone you know and trust and care about, to watch them be dragged off to prison, possibly for years, because of a piece of paper you signed despite the fact it was most likely written in a language you cannot read?

One of the hardest things to explain to people who are not familiar with the Occupied Territories is the sheer number of things Israeli soldiers and police do just because they can, for no reason other than to prove their power over the civilian Palestinian population.  Sometimes the dominance is banal--a long line or a petty humiliation at a checkpoint.  Sometimes it's a surgical strike: resist and we will take your children away in the night and hurt them.  While the Arab world burns with revolution, the machinery of Israeli colonialism grinds on, cold, implacable, and thoroughly planned.

This is why certain famous people glibly condemning the "nihilism on both sides of the conflict" sends me into apoplectic fits on the internet.  Because anyone who actually bothers to look can quite easily see a different reality in Palestine: on one side, a vicious colonial state armed to the teeth by the US, and on the other, a 14-year-old boy, waking up at two in the morning to find soldiers around his bed.  That people continue to resist under such conditions, with whatever means are available to them, is not nihilism.  It's a demonstration of unbelievable courage.