back to minnesota

Minnesota, the land of lakes, meat and potatoes, long vowel sounds and polite drivers. :) i'm back.

back with a smile on my face, but with mixed feelings as always. Today I drove into Buffalo for the first time in a year.... and oh Buffalo, you look the same as ever. Beautiful, quiet, somewhat empty. There's so much space in this part of the world. Spacious parking lots, big buildings and stores, big houses, big lawns. Everything just seems big.

and it's great to see my family again. I love coming home to the comfort of dinner around the table, calm conversation, and jokes about the upcoming family reunion.

I also miss who I left behind. I miss Kufr Qara - for its beauty and quiet. Sometimes I still have fond memories of Cairo as well ;) - for its chaos and life. But I miss the people I've left.... some of the best people I've ever known. And some who changed my life. All of you, I hope to see again, maybe sooner than later. :)

I love life, I just wish it was less complicated sometimes. So.... I write this happy to be back in Buffalo, happy to see my family - and remembering to love both those here, and those who I had to say goodbye to.

Encountering Ignorance

Today I was stopped while walking home in Kafar Qara by Israeli police. A van full of officers, I think six in all, pulled over and stopped me, asking for my passport. When they found I didn't speak Hebrew, out crawled an officer who cheerfully jumped out on the curb and pronounced he was American, too. As they all looked on, he asked me for my ID, examined my Minnesota driver's license, and started to ask me questions. Why am I around these Arabs? Why would I want to live in a place like this? Don't I want to live somewhere nice instead of here? Did someone make you come here - are you sure you're okay? Aren't you afraid to live around Arabs? A series of insulting questions. Ending with almost flirtatious last words and a provocative smile on his face: "we were surprised to see someone like you in a place like this."

And with that, they drove away. As I continued my walk home, I was surprised to feel heat rising in my face and the sting of tears in my eyes. And I find myself wondering why these incidents pinch me with a sharp pain, and leave me feeling so alone.

I guess my humiliation, or despair, is both personal and political. Politically, encountering the attitudes of ignorant assholes always leaves me angry and depressed. I see how their attitudes make the racism and oppression of Arabs possible in this country, and how it fuels the policies of the Israeli government. It also fills me with indignation and makes me feel protective of my Arab friends, my family here in Kafar Qara.... knowing that the humiliations and discrimination that they face is far worse than anything I've ever experienced.

Personally, nothing makes me feel more alone than these encounters. When I meet a fellow American, the first in weeks, and a van full of other supposed 'white' Israelis with European heritage, with whom I'm supposed to share a common culture. And yet with a few questions they deride my decisions, my life. They insult my choices with smiles on their faces, and share knowing grins as they insult all the friends that I have here. They assume that because I'm a white American, I'm in on the joke. I 'get' it - and I'll understand their insulting manners and their stupid humor. It makes me ashamed of my country sometimes. And I wish I could apologize, or change, all the pain that American policies and ignorance have brought to the Middle East.

When I am back in America, it's not as though all Americans are the same. But I encounter different levels of the same ignorance and stupidity, and I'm exhausted by the feeling of displacement that it brings me. I am not Arab, I am American. But I find myself choosing sides, and feeling alienated from the culture that I was born into. And as I am forced to think about returning to the States in a couple months, I am already tired thinking of all the stupid questions and attitudes that I will encounter.

I like to hope that my country is changing - I have to believe that with new leadership, and better education, people will finally be able to recognize injustice in Palestine and other places in the world. And I have to figure out how I can take part in this change; I guess that's the other lesson of the day, to take these emotions and fuel them into action. And not let the bastards get you down.

Treason of the Hawks - by Stephen Walt

I wanted to spread this great blog post by Stephen Walt, a Harvard professor.

The treason of the hawks
Tue, 04/28/2009 - 11:47am
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/node/17280

In Every War Must End, his classic study of war termination, Fred Iklé coined the term "treason of the hawks" to describe those tragic situations where hardliners stubbornly refuse to make peace and thereby lead their countries to disaster. Iklé, who served as Ronald Reagan’s under secretary of defense and is certainly no dove, recognized that obstinate opposition to making peace is as dangerous to a nation's future as naïve pacifism and potentially as damaging as deliberately selling out to the enemy.

After pointing out that "treason" is a word that carries especially harsh moral connotations, Iklé noted:

[T]he English language is without a word of equally strong opprobrium to designate acts that can lead to the destruction of one’s government and one’s country, not by giving aid and comfort to the enemy, but by making enemies, not by fighting too little, but by fighting too much and too long. 'Adventurism' -- much too weak a word -- is perhaps the best term to describe this 'treason of the hawks.' ... Treason can help our enemies destroy our country by making them stronger; adventurism can destroy our country by making our enemies more numerous."
I was reminded of Iklé’s insights when I read about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ideas for resuming the peace process with the Palestinians. Netanyahu clearly wants to avoid an open rift with the Obama administration, which has forcefully reiterated its commitment to negotiating a two-state solution. To do that, he has to pay lip service to the peace process. But because Netanyahu has long opposed the creation of a viable Palestinian state and instead wants to extend Israel's control of the West Bank, he has to lay out a set of demands that will endlessly delay the process and make it hard for Obama to put meaningful pressure on him.

According to Ha'aretz, Netanyahu will insist that the Palestinians go beyond their prior recognition of Israel's right to exist (as expressed in the 1993 Oslo Accord) and explicitly recognize Israel as a "Jewish state." Furthermore, he wants the United States to agree that a future Palestinian state be barred from possessing its own army and forbidden from making alliances with other countries, while Israel is permitted to monitor its borders, its airspace, and its use of the electromagnetic spectrum, presumably in perpetuity. In the meantime, the expansion of Israeli settlements will surely continue, and in ways that will soon preclude any possibility of a territorially contiguous state on the West Bank. Lastly, Netanyahu wants to link progress toward a two-state solution with an end to Iran's nuclear program. As I've noted before, this condition would allow Tehran -- purposely or inadvertently -- to derail a two-state solution by stonewalling on the nuclear issue. Ironically, this outcome might suit Iran and Netanyahu alike: Israel could keep expanding settlements and the Islamic Republic could continue to play the Palestine card against its Arab rivals.

My question is this: What is Netanyahu thinking? Doesn't he realize that time has nearly run out for the two-state solution, and that failure to achieve it is by far the most serious threat facing Israel? The prime minister and his allies keep harping about an "existential" threat from Iran, but this bogeyman is mostly nonsense. Iran has zero -- repeat, zero -- nuclear weapons today, and even if it were to acquire a few at some point in the future, it could not use them against nuclear-armed Israel without committing national suicide. Let me say that again: national suicide.

And could someone please explain to Netanyahu that a group of devout Muslim clerics aren't likely to fire warheads at a land that contains the third holiest site in Islam? Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said some remarkably foolish things about the Holocaust and repeatedly questioned Israel's legitimacy (as in his oft-mistranslated statement about Israel "vanishing from the page of time"), but he's never threatened to murder millions of Israelis (and Palestinians) with nuclear weapons. Just last weekend, he even told ABC's George Stephanopolous that if the Palestinians reached an agreement with Israel, then Iran would support it. Moreover, as Roger Cohen has noted, there is no evidence that Ahmadinejad has any particular animus toward Iran's own Jewish community. Despite his many offensive statements, in short, Ahmadinejad is not Adolf Hitler and we are not living in the 1930s.

The real threat to Israel's future is the occupation, and the conflict with the Palestinians that it perpetuates. To see that, all you have to do is look at current demographic trends and poll results and then ponder the consequences for Israel. There are presently about 5.6 million Jews in "Greater Israel," (i.e., the 1967 borders plus the West Bank) and about 5.2 million Arabs (of whom nearly 1.5 million are citizens of Israel). Palestinian birth rates are substantially higher, however, which means they will be a majority of the population in "Greater Israel" in the not-too-distant future. To put it bluntly, it is Palestinian wombs and not Iranian bombs that pose the real threat.

Netanyahu ought to be equally concerned by signs that the Zionist ideal is losing its hold within Israel itself. There are reportedly between 700,000 and one million Israeli citizens now living abroad, and emigration has outpaced immigration since 2007. According to Ian Lustick and John Mueller, only 69 percent of Israeli Jews say they want to remain in the country, and a 2007 poll reported that about one-quarter of Israelis are considering leaving, including almost half of all young people. As Lustick and Mueller note, hyping the threat from Iran may be making this problem worse, especially among the most highly educated (and thus most mobile) Israelis. Israeli society is also becoming more polarized -- which is one reason Netanyahu had such trouble forming a governing coalition -- with the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox at odds with secular Israelis, to include the more recent immigrants that form the core of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's support.

So what are Israel's options? One alternative would be to make the West Bank and Gaza part of Israel, but allow the Palestinians who live there to have full political rights, thereby creating a binational liberal democracy. This idea has been promoted by a handful of Israeli Jews and a growing number of Palestinians, but the objections to it are compelling. It would mean abandoning the Zionist vision of a Jewish state, which makes it anathema to almost all Israeli Jews, who want to live in a Jewish state. The practical obstacles to this outcome are equally daunting, and binational states do not have an encouraging track record. If the choice were between this option and a genuine two-state solution, there can be little doubt about which Netanyahu would prefer.

A second option would be for Israel to retain the West Bank and expel the Palestinians by force, there preserving its Jewish character through an overt act of ethnic cleansing. A few Israeli extremists have proposed something akin to this, but to expel millions of Palestinians in this fashion would be a crime against humanity. The Palestinians would surely resist being driven from their homes, and such a heinous act would take place in full view of a horrified world and damage Israel's reputation far more than the recent carnage in Gaza did. No true friend of Israel could support such a course of action, and one hopes that Netanyahu has the good sense to recognize that it would be a tragic mistake to go down this road.

The only other option to a genuine two-state solution is some form of apartheid, in which the Palestinians are granted limited autonomy in some disconnected and economically crippled enclaves whose borders, airspace, and aquifers are controlled by Israel. The Palestinians' fate, in other words, would remain in Israel's hands, even if some modest efforts were made to improve their living conditions. This outcome seems to be what Netanyahu has in mind, but it is not a viable long-term solution either. The Palestinians are not going to accept being permanent vassals -- especially once they are a majority in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean -- and they will continue to demand either a viable state of their own or full political rights within Israel. Over time, this option is going to be an increasingly difficult sell around the world, and especially in the West.

That is why former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Ha'aretz in 2008, "if the day comes when the two-state solution collapses," Israel will face "a South-African style struggle for voting rights." Once that happened, he warned, "the state of Israel is finished." Despite his long career as a Likud Party stalwart, Olmert finally recognized that if the two-state solution becomes impossible, Israel will be stuck defending a political order that is anathema to prevailing Western and American values. Although lots of other democracies have behaved abominably towards minorities in the past, such behavior is not legitimate in the 21st century. Americans favor self-determination and our own political traditions emphasize liberal values and the virtues of a melting-pot society. Even a lobbying group as powerful as AIPAC will find it hard to defend Israeli apartheid.

A two-state solution is not an ideal outcome; it is merely the best available alternative. If Netanyahu wants to safeguard Israel's future, therefore, he would not spend his time inventing new conditions and doing his best to make the peace process a charade. Instead, he would get on the phone to the White House and urge them to get moving as soon as possible to establish a viable Palestinian state, and he'd ask Obama to commit the resources necessary to make it work. He'd also be on the phone to Abraham Foxman of the ADL, Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents, David Harris of the American Jewish Committee, and Howard Kohr of AIPAC, urging them to pressure the White House and especially Congress to broker a two-state solution before it's too late. While he's at it, he'd denounce false friends like the Reverend John Hagee of Christians United for Israel and he'd invite Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street to come to Jerusalem and help him map out a strategy to turn the Titanic around before it hits the approaching iceberg.

There would still be lots of hard bargaining to do, of course, and Netanyahu would have to make sure that a final-status agreement protected Israel's legitimate security concerns. But by acting in this way, Netanyahu would be helping preserve Israel's future instead of putting it in jeopardy.

If Netanayahu can't figure this out, then Barack Obama and George Mitchell are going to have to sit him down and explain the situation to him. And if they do, one can only hope that Israel's supporters here in the United States abandon their usual modus operandi and back Obama and Mitchell up. If they don't, they may someday have to explain to their grandchildren why they watched Israel drive itself off a cliff and did nothing to stop it.

village life

Lately, I've been thinking about what my life here in Kfar Qara is - what fills my days and what I've learned by being here. I love it here, and sometimes it's hard to put my finger on why. Life is slow and contented for the most part, moving hazily through days of good food and people that I love spending time with. But there must be something significant that makes me so happy here.

One is that I don't talk about politics. This may be surprising (I know I wasn't expecting it). In a part of the world with so much political chaos, and especially in Israel/Palestine with an ongoing conflict, I expected to be talking about politics a lot with people here. But after 4 months here, I realized that I rarely do. Around the Israeli elections in March, there was some political talk. But for the most part, my friends here don't talk about it because the situation is what it is and, I quote, "there's nothing left to talk about." I guess it gets pointless and tiring talking about your political reality. It's not the same for us, sitting in our American homes discussing Middle East politics as an abstract concept. Here, it's real, and it's just too depressing to bother talking about. Better to live life. Not that it doesn't come up, and I'm sure there are many political conversations that I'm not privy to.

The point I'm making is a personal one - my life here doesn't consist of discussing politics from an ‘insider’ perspective. Rather, I’ve learned that life isn’t all politics, and as much as you can talk and talk about the situation here, the people who live here are the powerless ones. And I’ve learned to stop talking about the political situation, and just be content to be here.

The other thing about life in Kfar Qara is that I’ve re-connected with the quiet life. It’s been a long time since I lived in a small town. There’s something lovely about it. I have time and space for walks, I don’t hear the honking of traffic in the morning, and the only option for things to do on weekends is visit someone’s house.

Which means I spend a lot of time with people. The environment is totally different than living in Cairo. In Cairo, my friends are mostly people like me, young, single, working. Whether Egyptian or foreign, most of us worked and went out in the evenings – doing the typical city things. Here, I’ve been forced to adapt my lifestyle to the one that works here – a lifestyle dictated by family. Though I’m still on the outside a bit, because I live with a family I spend nearly all my non-working time with them. I do laundry and wash dishes. I sit and talk with Afnan over tea. And, I talk and play with Zeina and Fofo, or go outside and walk with them as they bike in the valley. We visit Afnan’s parents, siblings, aunts and uncles. I drive to pick up the girls from school or to the store to buy flour to bake a cake.

What choices we make in life! And what stages we go through. As I live this quiet life, I can’t help contrasting it to my life in Cairo, or what my life will be next year in NYC. It’s been great to have this time, and I think I’ve learned to appreciate the slower, quieter side of life, family, and being content. Politics and having intellectual discussions have their place, and I’m sure I’ll be having plenty of those conversations next year. But, I may also look back wistfully on this time in Kfar Qara.

on the occasion of the Nakba

today marks the Nakba, or Catastrophe: the day when Palestinians' hopes of returning to their homes after fleeing violence were dashed when Israel was declared a Jewish state.

it is also Independence Day for Israel, a day of celebration.

living here, in Kfar Qara inside the state of Israel, presents an odd juxtaposition.  today is a holiday for Israel, full of parties, BBQs, fireworks, and fun.  for the Arab community, the Nakba is a day like any other, except to remember the tragic fate that overcame them in 1948.

Instead of celebrating today, I'm at work - though only for part of the day - and then I'm staying in Kfar Qara with my new family.  I won't be BBQing today.

I don't have a problem with the State of Israel existing, or with the Jewish people having a homeland.  I have a problem with the way the State was created; the Exclusivity which declared it a Jewish State for Jewish people only in 1948, systematically disinheriting and marginalizing the entire Arab population who were currently living on the land.  Israel could have been an inclusive state, becoming a state where Jews, Muslims, Christians could live together in a pluralistic and democratic state.  Instead, once again the human race (we love to do this) chose to give in to feelings of entitlement and privilege one group over another.

That's what I have a problem with.  Now don't get me wrong, I know we Americans are even worse.  Our country was created on a foundation of massacres and bloody extermination of people groups.  We had our own feeling of entitlement to land and resources, and we still do today, perhaps more than any other country in the world.  We all bear some guilt for this.  I still celebrate the 4th of July, perhaps because I still see America as a country that is progressing and becoming slowly more open and accepting as the years pass by.  

We all choose our battles.  I can't protest everything.  But because of where I am, and the still-recent and all too fresh emotions that are attached to this day, this day is a battle I'm still willing to fight.  So today, the day of the Nakba, I won't be celebrating.

Wow.  I don't know how time passes so fast!  I am a horrible blogger - I mean, it's actually pathetic that I didnt' write anything on here for 4 months.

Well, it's nearly impossible to recap the last few months, but I'll take a stab at the most important parts.  November and December were delightful in Cairo.  I enjoyed great times with friends, and had a relaxed time with work.  I started tutoring my friend's husband in English, which was great and I was able to spend much more time with their family.  I also had a great Christmas with my friends in Cairo, complete with a full Christmas dinner, Christmas songs, and the Nutcracker Ballet at the Cairo Opera House.

In January, I moved to Kfar Qara - a small Arab town in Israel.  I have been in Kfar Qara now for almost a month.  The time is flying, and I am enjoying every minute.  I am living with a great family here, consisting of the dad Mohamed who is a lawyer, the mom Afnan who's a math teacher, and the two girls, Fatima and Zeina (they are 10 and 8 years old.)   They are known as Fofo and Zanzuna around the house. :)

I am working at a research center that is located here in the village.  It is a scientific research center - so they focus on science projects and science education for the Arab towns in the area.  There is a serious lack of good science education and knowledge within the Arab population in Israel, so the scientists at the center are attempting to catalyze some improvement.  I am helping with various things, mostly writing and editing and helping to organize new projects.

Living in a different Arab context - especially among Arabs in Israel - is a very interesting contrast to Egypt.  Here the Arabs live as a minority population in a relatively unstable and hostile political environment.  There are literally Israeli Jewish politicians on the 5 o'clock news talking about how all the Arabs in the country should be kicked out.  Open racism is a reality for them.  Discrimination in work and schools is also widespread - and in general the Arabs here deal with very difficult circumstances.  However, surveys (and my conversations) have also shown that the majority of Arabs here would not leave Israel if given the chance to live in another Arab country.  They realize that there are merits to at least living in a democracy.  I guess it's choosing the better of two evils (Israel or an Arab government).  Sadly, another Arab country is a worse alternative.

It is so much more beautiful and clean here.  I feel like it also affects the population.  The people in Kfar Qara are unfailingly polite and hospitable.  They also seem to respect their environment much more than Egyptians.  In Cairo, I think that the population has been severely psychologically affected by the pollution and filth that surround their lives.  Perhaps it damages self-respect, I  don't really know.  And I'm enjoying a change from the rudeness and harassment that often seems the norm in Cairo.  I miss Cairo, too.  I miss the chaos and the 'life' that infects you there..... the millions of people and the ability to learn something new every day.  Here in Kfar Qara, I'm learning more by absorption, and beauty and time to reflect and meditate.  It's a nice change.

That's all for now.  Hopefully coming soon, I'll be able to write more about what I've been learning here. :)