There's a point in here somewhere, I just wish I knew what it was...

When I was little, I used to scream and scream whenever I had my hair brushed, as if it were the worst pain in the world. My Mum, whilst not unsympathetic, sought to give me a sense of perspective, and pointed out that there was suffering in the world that I could not begin to imagine. She was encouraging me to focus on the genuine suffering of others rather than creating my own mini-dramas. Obviously, she had a point (now when I brush my own hair, it is mildly painful at first while it's still tangly, but I don't tend to kick up quite such a fuss!) and I've tried to make that point central to the way I live my life, but I maintain to this day that, if the worst thing I could imagine was having my hair brushed, then that was a form of genuine suffering.

In the context of my previous comments about the situation in Palestine not being the worst one in the world, this makes me seem rather hypocritical, especially given that having their hair brushed is probably the least of many Palestinian children's worries. But the question remains, if each instance of suffering is to be recognised as in some sense valid, then how can we treat all of the really awful instances with enough urgency? During Operation Cast Lead, a friend of mine posted a list of other conflicts that were going on or escalating at the same time, exploring the question of why everyone (the media and the British left, among others) was so obsessed with Palestine, and the death count was certainly among the lowest. Inside Israel, it's been mentioned to me as a problem that most of the news coverage is of things relating to Israel, with limited wider perspective. It certainly makes sense for Palestine to be a priority issue for me, given that Israel acts in relation to it in my name and, apart from anything, my family will be affected when Netanyahu and Lieberman scupper all chances of genuine peace talks, Fatah decides to talk to Hamas instead, and an intifada begins, maybe even me as well if it happens soon enough.

That's putting it very crudely. During the intifida, the death count was much higher amongst Palestinians than Israelis, the Israeli roads are more dangerous than anything the Palestinians can hope to do to us, etc. etc., but the point still stands that when Israeli politicians are messing around with your safety and that of your loved ones, it becomes a pretty immediate problem, quite aside from moral objections you might have to their behaviour.

Maybe I've started on a tangent. Read on, dear reader, and perhaps it will make sense, although this being me there's a good chance it won't, but hopefully you'll read on anyway. It's been ages (sorry about that), so there's a lot to catch up on. I'll organise it into catagories for ease of reading:

1. Family stuff, Hebrew etc
2. The African Refugee Development Centre
3. The Israel Palestine Centre for Research and Information's 'Yes We Can! Creating Community – Realizing Peace: Creating a Community of Peace Builders' weekend conference
4. The Breaking the Silence Tour of the South Hebron Hills

Part 1

So, the big news is that my Dad's girlfriend's daughter (try describing that relationship in Hebrew - ha bat shel ha bat zoog shel ha abba sheli) has HAD A BABY. He's very very very sweet, although I've only seen him once, but tomorrow we are having a brit milah, involving celebrating his circumcision (this struck me as slightly odd, but then so is eating dead turkeys because the messiah was born, so it's not like anything makes sense when I live in a historically Christian country... at any rate, lentil loaf is better, and clearly far more fitting to the occasion!) So that's very exciting. We kind of saw it coming, 'cause she'd been pretty heavily pregnant ever since I got here, but still, new person in the world (or rather, in the world around me involving people I'm close to, 'cause obviously getting excited every time any new person comes into the world would be quite an undertaking)!

My explorations of Israel itself have thus far taken me to Haifa for the day, which was very nice, vaguely similar to Tel Aviv but different as well, and through Hayakon Park on bikes with Dad and his girlfriend. Apparently hiring the bikes was quite dear, but it was bloody good fun, I'd recommend it. Other than that, I'd like to go back to the Dead Sea and Galilee, but having already been to both more than once, that just leaves going back to Haifa to see the famous gardens there, and then any cultural experiences I have the opportunity to have. Any other suggestions would be great!

Hebrew is coming along decently enough, still not overly useful for day-to-day conversation which gets frustrating, but getting there if people are patient with me. It was a little embarassing: Dad's girlfriend's other daughter, the one who hasn't just had a baby, came over from New York with her two adorable kids, and asked me one morning if I'd been kept awake by the children. I gathered that she was asking something to do with sleep, so responded with 'yes, thank you', assuming it was whether I'd slept well. That was a little embarassing. Pretty much the last thing she said to me upon parting was 'maybe next time you'll have more Hebrew'... But, on the plus side, I ended up helping to TEACH Hebrew yesterday, and I can definitely get by on the streets more now. Unlike most people, I can speak more than I can understand, which is somewhat frustrating, but hey ho. I've got the opportunity to do an hour's Arabic a week as well, which might be a very bad idea, but is too tempting an offer to resist, so I'll let you know how that goes...

Part 2

I was looking for relevant work experience for my application to train as a social worker, and my sister's housemate works at the African Refugee Development Centre in Tel Aviv, so he very kindly put me in touch with them and I'm now helping asylum seekers with their applications for asylum and researching sex and gender based violence in Eritrean culture. On a personal level, I've met some great people, it's daunting but hugely satisfying work, and it makes good use of not needing a proper income for the time being, assuaging my guilt.

It's more on a political level that it's been interesting though. For the monthly staff development evening, we saw the film 'Refugees' by Shai Carmeli Pollak and had a question and answer session with him. Now, in Israel, the line that gets parroted all around the world with regards to immigration rings a little hollow. Because denying the right of return to one set of people, and making it incredibly difficult/impossible for another group to gain asylum, whilst at the same time actively encouraging another group to move here, rather undermines the point that we're a small country that can't accomodate more people. As with most countries, it becomes more obviously a case of being a small country that priviliges a particular group for its room. The question of what happens to all these refugees from Africa can't be resolved, as far as I can see, independently of the entire question of the future demography of Israel-Palestine. It simply can't be a single issue. But then, Israel is more blatent in its double standard, but it's not as if most other places have open borders. Hell, even opening your borders to a specific group counts in a sense as a relative achievement. I'm not quite sure what to do with this new addition to my overall picture of Israel-Palestine, but I have to say that my self-definition as a zionist is being stretched here. But then, I can't help but think that my reactions are more as someone who's rather distressed by the whole fact of borders and people fleeing for their lives and then being treated like criminals, than as an anti-zionist perse. We'll come onto this, but the thing that really makes my blood boil is diaspora Jews who haven't fled persecution but just thought it was a good idea settling, not in Israel, but in Palestine, where they proceed to make life hell for Palestinians. Again, I don't really know what my point is, I'd be interested to read others' thoughts. Maybe just 'fuck, everything is fucked up' (please do excuse my language, but it seems called for here).

Part 3

So, you've heard of 'hugs and houmous' right? Where Israelis and Palestinians get together, hug, eat humous, and that's somehow meant to be relevant to peacebuilding? Well, I found myself at such a gathering, which is not to devalue it: getting Gazans, West Bankers and Israelis all in a room together is no easy feat, either psychologically or practically, and it is important. The trouble with it was that it was heavily dominated by the Jewish participants; the one time actual concrete political issues were touched on, I managed to get myself labelled 'the girl from the far left' (following on from the point by an Israeli that some Palestinians objected to settlers attending, where he seemed to be implying that having someone there from the 'far left' is as uncomfortable for Israelis as having settlers there would be for Palestinians) simply by mentioning that Israel has been an expansionist state from the start and is still colonising what's left of Palestine (mentioning, I tells ya); and peace very much seemed to be an ethereal idea rather than a concrete reality that we were working towards by anything other than the fact of our having put aside our prejudices to all come together. So I've volunteered to help organise the next one, which should be happening in February, with a view to trying to bring in a bit less of the fun, depoliticised bonding activities and a bit more confronting of the issues and concrete action planning. Maybe that's arrogant, but helping to organise things is something I like to think I do reasonably well, and having a vision of how something could be is always an incentive to get involved in making it happen, right? I will listen respectfully to any objections raised to my ideas, and it might turn out that for some reason I haven't thought of it is better to do it the more relaxed, less tackling of the issues way. Friends from the far left do seem to agree with me, though, so maybe it's true that I am from the far left. It's slightly worrying that using words like 'expansionist' and 'colonising' in relation to Israel is what identified me as such in a group of peacebuilders, though!

Part 4

So, my friend David has been working on a project in a village in the South Hebron Hills building a community centre there and ensuring a constant presence of Israelis and internationals in order to try to curb the worst excesses of the horrendousness of the behaviour of the settlers towards their Palestinian neighbours. He wanted me to get involved, so he suggested that I go on the Breaking the Silence Tour there yesterday, so I'd get an introduction to the region, which I did. Breaking the Silence are a group of ex-soldiers who feel that Israeli society, and internationals, need to know about what they did, and were encouraged to do, in the army. I was incredibly impressed by and grateful to our tour guide, who was sharing his experiences of doing things like blindfolding and tying up Palestinians and leaving them at the side of the road for driving on a road that was closed to them, which can't have been easy. I would strongly recommend the Breaking the Silence tours to anyone and everyone who's in the vicinity of Jerusalem, which is where the tour starts from.

Now, the most illuminating point that our tourguide made is that there was limited military presence in the South Hebron Hills following on from Israel's initial occupation of the West Bank. It was only once settlements started being built that the army became necessary. This is an important point, because the line is that the army is in the West Bank, controlling the Palestinians, for Israel's security. Settlers might be Israeli citizens, but they're not living in Israel. So the logical conclusion is that the only function of the occupation, rather than being for Israel's security, is to facilitate settlement. What baffles me about this is that people in Israel accept it with so little outcry. Settlers are heavily subsidised by the government. It's soldiers from Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem who are taken at eighteen and put in a position where they do things that at least some of them feel the need to break the silence about. Not to defend Israel, but to facilitate the destruction of Palestine. No one likes the settlers. But people seem to largely accept them as a legimitate part of Israel.

Let's look a little more closely at the way the settlers behave. Our tour ended in the village of Sussia, which is where David's project is. The villagers of Sussia are living in tents, because every time they've tried to build on land that they hold the deeds to, it's been destroyed by the army. Within view of their village of tents where water is scarce and there's no electricity, is the settlement of Sussia, which looks like something out of 'The Truman Show'. And it's worth noting that, while the Palestinian villagers are fighting for their right to the only home they have, the people in the settlements will have come from Europe and America, with nothing but ideology stopping them from returning there, or at least living within Israel itself. This links back to the issue of who Israel provides refuge for and who we try to keep out.

Is this the kind of anti-Israel propaganda that is supposed to have poisoned my mind? An ex-soldier who only realised after he'd served the full cynicism of what he had been utilised to do?

Now, to end up back where we started with the question of whose suffering deserves whose attention, I think what has made the situation here such a rallying point for people around the world is that it's being done by supposedly civilised, Western forces. Israel couldn't subsidise the settlers and militarise the Occupied Territories without the support, financial, practical and diplomatic of America and, to a lesser extent, Britain. The settlers don't just appear by magic: they come from Europe and America. I'm going to end with a quote from a friend of David's that I met yesterday. I'm sorry if this post doesn't really seem to know quite what it's getting at: I've fallen back on collating descriptions of my experiences and perceptions, because I'm having so much trouble making sense of them. If any of you can, dear readers, then please do comment!

'It's not about peace, it's about doing what's right. If Israel withdraws to at least the 1967 borders, that won't be a present we give to the Palestinians if they are nice to us, because we shouldn't be there in the first place.'