Hey again!
As always, I'll digest the post at the beginning:
I. Overview
II. Things we did the second day (Old City, become obsessed with hummus)
III. Trouble on the Border (Palestinian Stabs a Haredi man near the end of Shabbas)
IV. Sheikh Jarrah and E. Jerusalem: At War with the Jerusalem Municipality (evictions/discrimination through decreased municipal efforts)
V. Visiting Arik Sharon One Last Time
VI. Little Commune Next to the Knesset (About our house community, our neighborhood, and living in West Jerusalem)
VII. Meet the Crew
I. The Overview
So, to be honest, my first five days here were very fuzzy. Most of my experiences were saturated by an intense bout of jetlag, featuring 3-4 hour nap times twice a day while my body figured out which time was actually night. All of our experiences were bracketed by graduate school and fellowship applications. Life was funny, in that it felt like a dream. Maybe it was.
Who knows.
Anyhow, I'm going to tell it like I felt: blurry, runny, and a little point blank. This post showcases the funny, the intense, and the grateful.
One of these posts will be light, fluffy and dreamy. But this one will be, as my first post insinuates, a little heavy and polemical.
II. Things we did during the second day
*As I said before, this is gonna just weave in and out of what we did, much like how I felt and experienced it*
After my lovely evening with the Israeli customs officials, I arrived at the apartment, ate some delicious rice and veggie sauté, met my fellow program mates and directors, looked out my apartment window to a jaw-dropping view of Gan Sacher, the Knesset, and The Israel Museum, took a shower, found a bed, and slept for the whole 4 hours of jetlagged sleep that I would get.
The next day we went with Itamar around Jerusalem as I had mentioned in the previous post (this was the same "go around" as the g'vul lesson he gave to us). We went through Rehavya, past the SuperSol where David Klapper stole a shopping cart to transport our overabundance of water, up the YMCA tower to see the many different sectors of Jerusalem, snapped some pretty good pics of Gai ben Himon (Valley of the son of Himon) that led down to the City of David and the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, went to the windmill that my mother, my brother, and I went to see when we walked around a bit back in 2001, and made a friend with an elderly Muslim woman who sold us swiss chard and parsley in the Old City.
*Beware: Hasan is about to get really serious*
And then. We ate the best hummus I had ever tasted. Up until that moment, anyway.
It's in the Muslim quarter of the Old City, a place called Abu Shukri on Al Wad Street.
Wow.
Not only was the basic hummus incredible, but then they went and put cooked chickpeas in some, or refried beans in another, or marinated shwarma in others...
My stomach is swooning so hard right now even thinking about it.
It was SO good, we went back a week later and bought two big tubs of their hummus to bring back to our house.
And then... we found out... there were... OTHERS..................
Tip of the iceberg. Since then, our house (See III.) has been on an epic journey to find the best hummus spots in the city. We have charted Ta'ami and Hummus Ben Sirah, a Jennifer Greyber suggestion. Adam Schwartz pitched in with Pinati.
Our mouths are ready for this delicious hunt.
In this epic quest, we have so far found a felafel place in Tel Aviv (as of yesterday) that confirmed for us that any other felafel in a pita claiming to be felafel is lying about its existence, found a joint that provides hummus and felafel for 10 shekhels (2.5 dollars), and go through about 3 tubs of hummus every five days.
We admit. It's becoming a problem. But everyone else is doing it. So we're not going to stop.
After Abu Shukri, we waded through the Damascus Gate and into East Jerusalem. Remember how I said the 'boundary' between East and West was literally, well, nothing?
Well ok, now's the time to start describing East Jerusalem outside the Damascus Gate:
1) An exotic mixture of vendors, from side-of-the-road peddlers to sneaker vendors that charge upwards of $120 for a pair of sneakers.
2) You begin to hear Arabic more than Hebrew, yet the volume remains relatively the same.
3) People in W and E Jerusalem move at the same speed and, when in friend groups, laugh emphatically/walk enthusiastically/and show the genuine love for being in a group.
4) You walk around like you walk around any other portion of the city and no one bothers you. *I do say this from a relatively privileged position: as a person who did and does not wear a yarmulke or any religious garb. I also did not see many others wear a yarmulke or any religious garb. This all depends though. The folks from Rabbis for Human Rights always go into East Jerusalem and they also always wear religious garb and are not touched. I guess this just depends on who you know or how bold you are... I can't really comment past this initial observation yet, though the general perception from conversations I've had with more religious Jews on the W. Jerusalem side is that you definitely should not appear Jewish in E. Jerusalem (i.e. speak Hebrew, wear anything conspicuous)... more to say on this later when I've thought about it more*
5) The coffee is... much better than in West Jerusalem; but that's definitely a subjective opinion.
6) The sidewalks along food shops can get VERY dirty, and smells often vacillate between glorious and horrendous as quickly as Chinatown in NYC or alleyways in India.
7) Otherwise, the sidewalks are very similar to W. Jerusalem.
We walked out of the Damascus Gate, bought a sketchy looking bag of pasta (which, we confirmed later, tasted absolutely horrible), and began to walk back home when...
III. Trouble on the Border
We looked across the street that serves as the border between E/W Jerusalem and saw a couple people crowded around in a circle shouting. There was a Hasidic (ultra-orthodox Jew) sitting on a stone barrier on this corner looking sick from our perspective, and a large number (like 30-40) of other Hasidic folks attending to him. There were also a couple Arab taxi drivers who had been in the area beforehand that were part of the crowd as well. Police showed up on the scene, as did emergency 911 Magen David Adom services 3 minutes later. At the time, all of us assumed that the man had gotten a heat stroke or was not feeling good for one reason or another. As we couldn't get close and couldn't really find out what was going on, we left the scene.
The day following, we found out in Ha'aretz that the Hasidic man had been stabbed by "a Palestinian" (though this is unconfirmed). The police pointed to an Arab, yet the investigation has so far been inconclusive.
Again... #4 above comes from a place of relative privilege that I still have yet to fully understand.
But, I'm not done. It gets more complicated.
IV. Sheikh Jarrah and East Jerusalem: The Neighbors Are Not All Right (House Evictions)
Up the street from where the stabbing took place is the south left sector of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Eastern Jerusalem. On the day following the stabbing, we met with Moriel Rothman who works with Just Vision, a media organization that seeks to increase the power and legitimacy of Israelis and Palestinians against the occupation through nonviolent action.
On an unrelated note, some of you might know Moriel from this. On a related note to my unrelated note, you might not.
At any rate, Moriel had us watch a video about the evictions that are happening in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and then gave us a tour of the neighborhood.
I should note at this point a bit of background about East Jerusalem before I continue with the Sheikh Jarrah experience:
1) It is under the control of the municipality of Jerusalem, i.e. the same one that provides for the amenities in West Jerusalem, which is under Israeli governmental control.
2) East Jerusalem compromises 38% of the Jerusalem municipal population.
3) There have been many municipal "discrepancies" between W and E Jerusalem found by B'tselem, an Israeli organization that does legal/rights based research on the ground. The discrepancies bring up questions about whether the municipality is providing services equally on both sides of the line, and why this is the case.
4) My roommate posted on a facebook listserv called Secret Jerusalem (where you can find out hidden answers to any question you have about Jerusalem life) asking about where to drop compost. A woman, namely the administrator of Secret Jerusalem, remarked to throw it anywhere in East Jerusalem, as they are "still in a third world environmental awareness."
*Either she was being extremely sarcastic, or I don't think she realized that the Jerusalem municipality collects garbage once a month in many areas of East Jerusalem (and, sometimes, every two or three or eight months), whereas it collects garbage 4 times a month punctually in West Jerusalem... My friend Sameh put this discrepancy into words: "I wish to start an environmental initiative in my community to clean it up. But why should I have to provide a service the municipality should provide us with our tax money? Why is my neighborhood (Beit Hanina), an "Area A" neighborhood (one that pays the top tax amount to get all municipal amenities), serviced less than an Area C (ex: Kiryat Hayovel, one that pays the lowest tax to get limited municipal amenities) neighborhood on the Israeli side?"*
But back to Sheikh Jarrah.
We watch the movie called My Neighborhood (you can watch the trailer if you click on the link). It told the story of a family that got evicted by Jewish settler groups. More on that here, if you want a longer read, but I'll condense it into these simple steps:
1) A Settler group buys a permit from a Jewish family who has a deed from their home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood before 1948 and is not planning on returning.
2) The same group brings this permit to the Israeli high court and utilizes the "Law and Administrative Matters Law" (or simply the 1970 law), that says any Israeli with a pre-1948 claim to a Jewish-owned property in East Jerusalem could bring it to the court, have it passed with little resistance, and then receive a permit to evict the current owners.
3) The settler group gets a police ordinance to evict the current tenants from the house in Sheikh Jarrah and then
4) Settlers show up with the Jerusalem Municipal Police and the IDF, all of whom forcibly evict the tenants.
So yes. People are getting forced from their homes because of this ordinance, one of which was this family that the family followed.
What is a little more baffling about this story is that this and many other Palestinian families had been offered this home as compromise for giving up their home in Yaffo after the 1948 war (The Absentee Law of 1950 prohibited any Arab from claiming any pre-1948 claims in Israel for direct compensation in Arab lands--then Jordan--so this family was provided compensation in Sheikh Jarrah).
After a conversation with the daughter of the family, we then walked up the hill where we saw the twenty or so Israeli settlers lounging in five buildings behind it. I began to feel sick and emotional inside at just how real this was. It was at once relentlessly real, twisted, wrong, and unclear and I really couldn't take seeing settlers insistently live right next to people they despised, and vice versa, for the sake of making the land Jewish.
Again, all of this is collected from facts I've researched only thus far and from the limited amount of people that I've talked to on both sides of this issue.
Here's what I do know: the Israeli government consistently states that East Jerusalem citizens are not in the state of Israel, yet they also effectively have control over all of East Jerusalem (It's Area C from the Oslo Accords), and all E. Jerusalem inhabitants have Israeli citizenship cards... so it seems odd that the local government, even if it doesn't claim responsibility for these people, has a responsibility to these people and deliberately do not take it up.
I'd be interested to know if there is some rationale behind these laws in the present other than the fact that the Jerusalem and Israeli legal structures pave a very easy path for forced evictions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem in favor of ultra-religious settlers that wish to push all the Palestinians out and make the West Bank all Jewish land (see trailer). Because, if I see this correctly, the law (and municipality actions) intentionally discriminates against Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Why this happens, by extension, is not for me to say, nor do I know.
At this juncture, there doesn't seem to be a rationale behind these laws that I can find other than the one I've proposed, and it renders my living in West Jerusalem a whole new level of privilege and awareness that I didn't have before. Perhaps someone could provide me an idea or understanding from the other side that I'm simply not seeing with these stories and 'facts' (HINT HINT: COMMENTS).
V. Visiting Arik Sharon One Last Time
On the Saturday after we arrived, Ariel Sharon passed away after having spent the last 8 years of his life in a coma.
Ariel Sharon was a very controversial political leader in Israel. You can register his accomplishments according to whichever side you happen to fall on politically, but here are a couple of them: leader from the right wing since Israel's creation, became a general in the army, when elected to office in '77 he served as the Minister of Defense for a number of years, he later led the 1982 attacks in Lebanon and made some decisions that led to Christian forces massacring thousands of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps near Beirut, was publicly asked to step down because of this action, returned to politics in 2000 after Ehud Barak failed at Camp David, was the man who went to Al-Aqsa mosque with soldiers and body guards by his side (an action that is generally said to have been a major factor in the Second Intifada, which began the next day), continued settlement building in the West Bank yet completely disengaged from Gaza in 2005, and shortly thereafter fell into a coma which he never woke up from.
A complicated man that divided everyone in Israel and beyond through the polemical and often contradictory nature in his actions.
Though, the argument can be made that this is true for any leader on either side of the equation.
A report came over the public news that his coffin would be open to the public (not his body, but his coffin--in Jewish tradition there's no such thing as a wake/publicly seeing the body after the person has died). As we were literally 300 meters from the Knesset and as this was what I perceived to be a historical event in the course of the conflict, myself and two other folks on my program decided to go.
We came to the Knesset entrance and got in line with the 200 or so people that were passing his coffin in a line. Journalists recorded live new segments while others took pictures and spent some time viewing the coffin. Some even prayed. There were four army personnel on either side of the coffin, two of which had their coats off and rocked back and forth "praying" (I put this into quotes because we didn't really know whether this was true). After we progressed with the line, we circled back and walked back to the apartment and started exchanging our reactions to the event.
I stopped directly in front of his coffin for about a minute or so, and I started thinking many things at once.
The first: Visiting Arik in this way was weird. This is a man I had heard about from his controversial actions in the history books and in the news, so it felt like a historical occasion with regards to the conflict at large, yet I didn't have any personal connection to him as I was not an Israeli affected by these actions in one way or another.
The second: z"l (stands for zichrona livracha: May his memory be a blessing)
The third: ... maybe z"l was pushing it.
The fourth: But was it?
The fifth: Man this is complicated.
The sixth: This man was supported through his comatose state by tax money from Israelis for the past 8 years. I wondered how they felt about that.
The seventh: Well, how do other Israelis feel about his death in general? (Dare I quote a woman from a pro-settlement party on the radio: It's sad that he died, but it was also a good thing, because he didn't get to push through with all his plans.... she apologized for this statement the following day)
In the middle of formulating what would become my last reaction, one of the other program mates, David Sklar, muttered behind me, "I wonder if things would have been different had he not gone into a coma."
This thought, the final one in the line of other thoughts, had also just finished crossing my mind.
VI. Our Little Commune Near The Knesset (b'Sha'are Hesed)
I joke not. We are a group of folks living communally in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Sha'are Hesed (literally means the gates of lovingkindness/compassion).
Ok. That's all cool. What are the components of living communally with five people?
Well, here's just a taste:
1) We share a communal budget for food (700 NIS per week, about 200 dollars). Yes people, I'm still eating very well (featuring lots of veggies and beans!).
2) We take responsibility over communal cleanliness (featuring cleaning after meals, and random apartment cleanings)
3) We meet/talk every so often to discuss issues as they come up and come to consensus-based decisions.
4) We, from the outset, came up with needs and wants to living together. This photo represents the consummation of communal norms based on these wants and needs at this point. These are all subject to change as we continue to live together into the future.
5) Above all, we're here for the good of both ourselves and the common communal member.
Sha'are Hesed eh? Ultra-Orthodox community? How's that been?
1) People talk to us often and are genuinely interested in what we're doing... we're unsure how much we should talk about our ideals to make relationships and promote understanding between all the different populations in Jerusalem, but we definitely garner interest despite our program's secular nature.
2) Lots of mothers amble about with carriages and smaller (and always-cute) children.
3) On shabbat there is a police barrier placed on the central road to block traffic.... not that this stopped my program director from driving down it when we were first going to the house after my bout with Israeli customs because he didn't know any other way (slight misunderstanding).
4) An open give and take library devoted to Jewish mysticism, spirituality, and communal topics.
5) IT'S LIKE SEVEN MINUTES FROM THE SHUK (open market). This is extremely convenient for all our food shopping needs.
6) And 5 from Nachlaot, one of the more beautiful, spiritual, and communal neighborhoods. We toured this with a neuroscientist student named Itamar (not the Hebrew Itamar) who showed us a Yeshiva, some community centers, and the awesome feeling of getting lost in the endless wind and whirl of streets (I can't wait to get lost there again soon!)
7) We have an amazing view of the Knesset and the valley leading further into West Jerusalem.
VII: Meet the Crew:
Oh, the program mates. Yes. Here they are, with a brief introduction. From now on, I will be posting more about them in :
+ Mischa Berlin-- Toronto native, graduated from McGill two years back. In order to go on this trip, he left his job as a research assistant at an educational research center that investigates how to create more meaningful learning for students across Canada. He's here to start to put into tangible practice ideals and conversations he has had for a long while now, and is excited to get to know a bit more of the Palestinian side of the narrative on the ground.
+ Vallie Rourke-- New Jersey/New York/Portland/Maine native. She currently goes to the College of the Atlantic in Maine where she studies Human Ecology (the intersection of environmental science, biology, and human society, amongst other things). She's been involved with communal living/Hashomer Hatzair (the group that runs our program) for a long time now, and this program afforded her the opportunity to continue this experience while also looking to pick apart her relationship to this area.
+ David Sklar-- Montreal native. A franco-anglophone, David is a full-time actor (look for him as an extra on the new X-Men movie. Yes, I'm serious) who is fully connected to the theater and acting scene on the ground. He decided to take this time to also come here to think with a more critical lens and start to put in work to make the situation better for all populations here on the ground.
See his blog up on the right hand of the page, or click on his name, to follow his reflections!
+ Faryn Borella-- Vermont native, and just finished her final semester at Occidental College (though not graduated just yet!). After a semester at the Arava Institute (educational facility that brings together Jordanians, Palestinians, and Israelis through researching and studying environmental issues that affect everyone in the area) in the Negev Desert (south of here), she decided she needed to come back to indulge in more direct work between the different populations in the Jerusalem area.
See her blog up on the right hand of the page, or click on her name, to follow her reflections!
+ Me-- North Carolina native. After a couple of trips to the area and studying the history of the conflict, I am curious to see the value of programs that encourage relationship-building on the ground between both sides. I am also intending to study international development programming with a focus in community education in environmental science/oral history/recreational activities to build relationships and bridge gaps between conflicting populations in conflict zones.
Gosh. So much to tell, yet wow! I'm already making these so long!... Stay tuned for the next one!
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