Nairobbery

I thought i left unscathed.

Arrived in Dar Es Salaam, pulled out a 100 dollar bill to pay for a ticket to Zanzibar. It was fake. So were all 6 of them. NEVER leave your cash in a safe-deposit box of the hotel, even if it's the presbyterian hostel, is the moral of this story.

?!

I am away from the world for two days and it falls to pieces. Paige has just sent about 6 e-mails, apparently Beirut is up in arms and streets are closed and flights are canceled but actually not really. Hezbollah is protesting but the Christians are actually the ones fighting. What's going on? I thought Another World Was Possible (Vomit, vomit, vomit. I will post about the WSF later).

Anyway i just wanted to link to Paige's blog if you want regular dispatches of the insanity that is going on. (www.xanga.com/lostinthelevant). So keep your fingers crossed for this woman, who is now perhaps arriving in Nairobi on Friday. We're still on for the night-train to Mombasa if she makes it.

Oh. Good news: Gul is sitting next to me and has already gotten a glimpse of the madness that is my life here. It's nice to have someone to vent to, even if they're jet-lagged and falling asleep.

And they were THREE

Gul has just booked a ticket to Nairobi from ... where the hell are you? Delhi? Bombay? She will be joining this party (of the century, for sure) - gettin' rowdy, the halal way.

Here's to this wave of wreckless genius. I love you girls.

In other (now almost irrelevant) news, the social forum is in full swing and completely disorganized. Mostly I sit on the curb with a beer watching the masses walk by - Masai tribal community organizers next to a contingent of Indian "untouchables" and of course Italian anarchists, whose presence at these things can always be counted on.

I've made friends with the group from Western Sahara, because I mistook their tent for the Palestinian one - flags are almost identical. They were very nice, and i have an open invitation to visit their occupied territory.

Today I saw an elephant in a bus parking lot, a Pelican landed on my matatu, and I met an Israeli that supported the boycott of Israeli goods.

More, later.

Going East!

Off to the World Social Forum in Kenya (Nairobi) tomorrow. Hat tip to Margo who has managed to find me a room *and* a ride from the airport. Shukran!

There's more. Paige has managed to work miracles once again and find some kind of ticket to Nairobi via Doha. So we will be meeting in Nairobi on the 24th and commencing a 3 week backpacking trip to... well, we're not sure yet but probably Mombasa, Zanzibar, Dar Es Salaam (Tanzania) - in other words, the East African coast. And if we still have time, money and energy left, we'll head back west. All this will be overland, meaning exruciatingly long and uncomfortable bus trips - but well worth it.

So here's my Ode to Paige for working miracles and helping me put off my life for another month.

Paige, relish this moment - we'll probably be at each other's throats in two weeks, tops ;-)

New Haven, CT:

Myrtle Beach:

Somewhere between the US and Canada:

Taybeh, Palestine

J'eetah, Lebanon (because sometimes, i'm on the right)

Next stop, East Africa!

Words never shocked, pictures no longer do; now we use videos - soon we'll have to be physically dragged to a place to make it matter

This probably no longer qualifies as a travel blog. But anyway, i'm still sitting on my ass at the office doing a lot of nothing, so i have plenty of time to still have half my mind in Palestine.

Many of you were probably on my list a few months ago when I was working with B’tselem and forwarded a video clip of a settler in Hebron harassing and shouting obscenities at Raja' Abu Eisha, a 17 year old Palestinian, who was standing outside her home. B'tselem had given the Abu Eisha's a video camera so that they can document the regular (daily) harassment at the hands of the settlers [the “cage” you see was the Abu Eisha’s attempt at protecting themselves from settler intrusions, stones and garbage].

They finally managed to get Israeli TV to air it about a week ago, and it’s caused a minor scandal and has been all over the news since (Look! Even the Jerusalem Post wrote something, leaving their wording outrageously ambiguous.... a "feud"??)

I just got an e-mail from my colleague who was responsible for the whole thing and he told me that he just came back from the Abu Eisheh’s in Hebron, he had to wait in line behind CNN, BBC and ABC crews before he could check in on them.

While on the one hand it’s great that the ugly face of settlements and occupation is being revealed and some probes are being launched - on the other hand, this whole business makes me furious.

The attention, of course, is short lived. This stuff has been going on for years and organizations like B’tselem and other internationals that are posted on Tel Rumeida have been releasing reports every week about settler abuse and beatings, cases far worse than this one. Furthermore, it is not “random” or sporadic, nor is it an unusual bunch of fanatics. It is part of a policy of evacuating the old city of Hebron through the combined effort of the settlers and the IDF who are sent there to protect them and who – as the video shows – stand idly by and watch. Economic strangulation and personal harassment, and the mere proximity to approximately 500 armed extremists who believe they are doing God’s work when they beat 10 year old boys up or force rocks into their mouths, has resulted in a successful campaign of ethnic cleansing of the old city of Hebron as thousands of Palestinians have left the area listing settler harassment as their primary cause.

And so it makes me mad that this is what it took for anyone to pay attention to this issue -The fact that Raja’ happened to catch this on video, and that it’s particularly shocking because of it’s sexy factor - the settler woman is telling Raja’ to “go back in her cage” and calling her a “whore”, taking on strange voices as she repeats the word over and over like some crazed fanatic.

When I was in Palestine working on the video archive I was filing dozens of these clips a day and would witness this stuff regularly in Hebron. Contacting the media was hopeless, Hebron was “old news”.

This basically confirms that I should sell out to Hollywood, or work for an ad-agency.

Sunday morning whining

Sorry for the lack of updates, been getting your e-mails. A lot has been happening!

Good news first: I bought a ticket, i'm off to Nairobi, Kenya for the World Social Forum and other good stuff on the 19th! I'll be gone for a week - I have high hopes, but I'm still not sure I have a place to stay. There are about 150,000 delegates from all around the world coming for the WSF, and they're all going to need beds. The good thing about activists is that they're hospitable, right?

This couldn't have come at a better time - i desperately need to get out of Kigali, and I also desperately need a plan. If anyone can come up with something resembling a "plan", please drop it in the comment box to this post. I'll take just about anything right now.

In a nutshell, here's what's up: I'm leaving my NGO. I can't state all my reasons here - this being a googleable site and all - but suffice it to say that i'm not enjoying my time/ work there.
I don't have a backup plan as of yet, i'm not even that enthusiastic about going solo on my research project and am generally sick of Kigali, if you called me I'd tell you why. Oh, the politics of it all!

And as usual, Paige has just planted a dangerous seed: she doesn't start work until end of February. She will hop on a plane and meet me somewhere in East Africa where we will backpack around Uganda/ Tanzania/ Kenya and wherever else the wind takes us. Or we could just do Yemen for 10 days. Could any offer be more tempting? No. Could I justify using Yale's money on this? ...

I can no longer give you a lift

Have you heard about this???

It's now forbidden to transport Palestinians in an Israeli or foreign car.

Being a Jerusalemite, I drive an Israeli car. This means that I can no longer have 90% of my friends in my car when i get home. Mom, no more giving a lift to your colleagues or your friends. And the rest of you - you know who you are - will no longer be able to spend most of your quality time with your significant others in some dark corner of the streets of Ramallah to get away from the parents - because now an even bigger brother is watching!

But don't worry, soon they'll legislate about sharing a house or maybe a bed with Palestinians to make sure they get everyone.

Scary.

Please disappear - or at least relocate to Burundi, Jordan, or just hide behind that wall?

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on some of the early or alternative proposals for post-genocide reconstruction/ reconciliation in Rwanda. I’ve come across some creative stuff, but this one in particular floored me.

Chaim Kaufman, an Associate Professor at Lehigh University, feels that rather than attempting to resolve ethnic tensions in Rwanda (which many have argued to be largely economically driven) we should just separate the ethnic groups, creating a Tutsi state somewhere in Burundi, where there are Tutsis anyway (Some of you already picking up on the parallels?)

In his own words: “Solutions that aim at restoring multi-ethnic civil politics —such as power-sharing, state re-building, or identity reconstruction—cannot work because they do nothing to dampen the security dilemma, and because ethnic fears and hatreds hardened by war are extremely resistant to change.”

Kaufmann proposes that “stable resolutions of ethnic civil wars are possible, but only when the opposing groups are demographically separated into defensible enclaves.” (Drum roll – here it comes) He proposes that Rwandan Tutsis should, together with Burundian Tutsis “be encouraged to relocate to a smaller, defensible, ethnically Tutsi state.”

Why don’t we just go ahead and give autonomy to the several thousand ethnic groups in Africa and call it a day? I can't believe that people are still trying to solve problems started by this narrow perception of the nation-state by using that very same construct.

But more importantly – who, you might ask, does he think should do all this “encouraging”? One might assume the International community, or maybe the African Union. Others might argue that this “encouragement” has already been undertaken numerous times through various incidents of ethnic cleansing culminating in the 1994 genocide - this is when tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to neighboring Uganda and Burundi.

Kaufman is (perhaps not as intentionally or maliciously) doing with his pen what others have attempted to accomplish with the machete (or the merkava). That the Ivory Tower is held to such low standard of responsibility towards the potential implications of their theories is frustrating, especially when they freely use vague, painful euphemisms like “encouraging to relocate.” What happens when Tutsis refuse, which I can guarantee they would? Maybe we could use “mild to moderate physical pressure,” another one of my favorites?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for academic freedom. I just think that some people are more concerned about contributing to some sexy debate in an esoteric political science journal than they are with the real questions at hand. This debate in particular is not as harmless as one may think, as it is reminiscent of another one that has gained mainstream support elsewhere in the world, as “Transfer” (of the Palestinian population to some other Arab country) is debated on Israeli radio stations and public television, using much of the same arguments.

Perhaps the real “fuck you” to proposals such as this one has been given by the Tutsis themselves when they opted to return en masse at the first chance they got (right after the genocide, in 1994), despite being mostly well-adjusted and affluent in the neighboring countries.

Are YOU saved?

And here I thought I was running away from the Holy Land.

This morning, I got a call from Pastor David. I met Pastor David in a store in Uganda - It's fairly normal to give your contact info out to everyone you meet here. People seem to have a habit of collecting phone numbers as they go about their daily routines. By my first week here my phone book was filled with names I couldn't even associate with a face/place, eventually I found a mini-solution, and now I have entries like "Immaculee fr/ Pharmacy" "Innocent waiter" or, my favorite, "Faith fr/ Zion".

But back to Pastor David. Upon finding out I was Palestinian, he asked if I was Muslim (Again, I thought I left these questions behind).
- uh, not really anything. My family's Christian.
- Are you saved?
- Um...

I had to ask friends about this - "Saved" seems to signify Born Again, or some other form of fanatic churchgoer. It is used in sentences such as "He pretended to be Saved so he could get free music lessons" (judgmental) or "I used to be Muslim, but I'm Saved" (beaming, proud). Or, in it's most frequently encountered form: "Are you Saved?"

Until now, I still can't get used to saying "No" without feeling like i need to be hanging my head in shame, or pleading for help.

Annette's grandfather, who has rarely left the village, was Saved. He sat me down and forced his grandaughter to translate a good half hour of zealous preaching. He told me he used to be a sinner (and proceeded to list his sins, one by one - the most entertaining part). I tried to politely end this session with a "don't worry, I promise I don't sin!"

But I only got a disgusted, patronizing "but of COURSE you do!"

This was one among many encounters with various forms of reversed missionary activity. People stop me all the time and tell me about how they're saved, how often they go to church, and how great God is. Pastor David called me this morning (from Uganda!) to make sure I found the Church he told me about, and to give me the contact info of his pastor friends.

So I've narrowed the possible reasons for this down to three options:

1) They think I'm white and have some sort of remnant of colonial inferiority complex and feel the need to prove their status as Good Christians, ad nauseum.

2) The tables have turned and Africa, (which has the fastest growing Christian population in the world and among the most frequently attended churches) now feels the need to spread the Good Word to anyone who will listen.

3) I look like I'm Living In Sin.



No need to cast your votes.

I promise i'll only do this once

But you must have a look at this excellent article by Gadi Al-Ghazi that makes the connections between Israel's steady fortification of the occupation, classic colonialism, capitalism and zionist ideology, while also throwing into the mix some frightening information about how gender dynamics in Israel's divided society are played out.

Really, really well done.