Almost there guys. I'm almost caught up enough to breeze to the present and let you know what I'm up to every couple of days!
So breeze on I will:
I. Old Friends in E. Jerusalem and Labeling
II. Getting Lost Twice but Finding Everything
III. Hebrew University and Hadassah on Mt. Scopus (This one's for the history buffs, and for anyone who went to Hebrew U)
IV. Jerusalem's Complexities Continued: East Jerusalem Tour of Arab Neighborhoods
I. Old Friends in E. Jerusalem and Labeling
One of my goals here is to reconnect with everyone that I can who I know in Israel and Palestine alike.
So, when Sameh Aweadah and Hani Salman agreed to meet with me after my weekend in Ramallah that Saturday night, I was ecstatic. These are two people that I worked with at a peace camp a couple of summers back, and two people that I LOVE with a genuine passion for our short time together there.
Then again, I tend to love a lot of people with a genuine passion when I get to know them.
David and I met Sameh and Hani at a local place in East Jerusalem just North of the Damascus Gate. There we joked about our difficulties speaking Arabic and English respectively, and caught each other up on our current whereabouts.
And, inevitably, every conversation in Jerusalem gets around to a conflict somehow.
The thing I love about Sameh is how honest and strong his opinion is. I know that in any discussion I have with him directly, I will not be able to sway his opinion, but that afterwards he goes home and thinks about what I said and come back either with a change of heart or with a new discussion to spark.
Enter one of these discussions:
"I think you cannot be Muslim or socialist at the same time."
To my American ears, this claim struck a discordant chord. Of course there were socialist undertones in Islam! You could definitely pick and choose from Islam and apply it to your socialist ideology and vice versa.
"What are you talking about Sameh? Of course you can."
"No you can't. If you're a Muslim, you abide by Muslim law which directly contradicts socialist ideologies."
"Maybe," pipes in Hani, "but are you saying you cannot take some elements of Islam and not accept others, and in this you can still be a socialist?"
"Yeah," David and I say.
"I mean you can definitely take the portions of the Qur'an that talk about giving to those who are in need and loving thy neighbor as thyself and apply them to socialist ideology," I continue.
"No you can't."
As I said, a man of his opinion.
"Why do you think that?" David asked.
"Listen, I understand what you are saying, taking small aspects from each or not applying ideology here or there to fit into your own identity. But I don't consider you to be a Muslim by religion if you don't follow the rules and society within Islam. Socialism is a society where everyone is able to take part in the different parts of society. Islam inhibits women from doing this. By definition, a Muslim cannot be a socialist. For example. I am a Muslim because my parents were, and that's it. But I am pretty solely socialist, and my wife does not have to follow the discrepancies in Islam, but more according toward socialist ideals."
"Ah, I see what you mean," Hani answered. "I think I agree with you, though I think you can still identify as a Muslim religiously and take part in particular rights."
We continued to debate on this point for the next 15 minutes, with Hani, myself and David postulating counterpoints to this strong point.
Why do I include this conversation? It's one in a string of many I've had with people here. For people here, religion is something that truly colors identity in a way that Westerners who pick and choose their identities according to an assortment of ideals and practices just do not understand. The fact that I got asked at the border about my Muslim name is somewhat an extension of this, and the confusion about my being Jewish with this name also confirms the confusion that occurs when a "picker and chooser" does not follow what would ordinarily be a straightforward identity path.
I still disagree with Sameh's interpretation of identity, but I respect his opinion. The strength in his assertion is a result of a society here of labeling who you are in relation to them, and the notion of one's identity here as telling to what your actions or beliefs are. Perhaps this is a human thing, to know how one person relates to us, but I'm becoming aware of how quick this process is in Israel, and then how quick a person here in Israel or Palestine chooses to act based on how you answer them or they perceive you to be.
I'll give you a tangible example of the perception: while postering for the Jerusalem Youth Choir (a high school chorus made up of Palestinians and Israelis), I walked into the Dan Panorama, where the security guard started speaking harshly to me in Arabic "lah, lah, lah, shoo inta bidi? (no no no what do you want?)" as if I were not worthy of the Dan Panorama (the irony behind this was that my mother, brother, and I stayed there our first time in Israel--I responded that I was American in fact and spoke Hebrew). I went to the front desk where he spoke to me in English and he set down some posters in the poster section.
I exited and walked up the street, where a woman stopped me and asked me in Hebrew, "S'licha, atah yodeah eifoh hamispar shalosh me'ot v'chamishim barechov hazeh?" (Excuse me, do you know where the number 350 is on this road?)" I answered "Lo, ani lo yodea, slicha ve'mazal tov" (No I don't know sorry. Good luck).
Walking into Primo Kings half a block later, the security guard asked me in Hebrew, "Ma atah oseh?" (what are you doing?) and I responded "Yesh li posterim l'concert b'yom hashishi she'ani rotzeh lateit lachem (I have posters for a concert on Friday that I would like to give to you all). The passing hotel worker made eye contact with me and quipped, "Marhaba, kif ha'alik? Mabsoot?" in Arabic (hey, what's up? You happy?), to which I responded, in my limited Arabic, "Ayweh, mabsoot shukran, oo inta?" (Yes, I'm happy, thank you, and you?) and he responded in turn. The desk worker, who had not heard any of these interactions, asked me after all of this, "Can I help you?"
Needless to say... I am a genuine source of confusion here because of this culture of labeling in combination with this culture of quickness. Most people I've come into contact with are used to making an assumption about one's identity quickly and approaching them in that way; it's a part of the culture here. For my own identity, I do have to do a bit of explaining before they understand why I speak much more Hebrew than Arabic, I am from the US, and I am Jewish.
II. Getting Lost Twice But Finding Much
I love to get lost when I'm in a new place.
But getting lost in Jerusalem is freaking scary, because it can happen so very easily, and there are some vital times you can't find a person who knows where you need to go.
I had taken the Sunday afternoon to go to Teddy Stadium to check out the rock climbing wall there and to the Jerusalem Mall to strike up some old Ramah Seminar memories. At around 3:50 I started to walk back from the mall to my home. This is the route I should have taken.
This is the actual route that I took.
When you look on a map, you think "How could you do that Hasan? How could you mess this up so badly?"
In my mom's case, she'd ask, "Huh, maybe we should start to invest in a different family navigator."
Well, dear readers, this is how: Jerusalem has hills that mask wherever streets are going and causes them to go in completely inane and unpredictable directions, not all streets are marked and I don't have a smart phone.
Thus, I got a nice tour of the Jewish College for Girls and walked straight through the Yeshiva University.
I also took this video to share a nice little viewpoint I found somewhere in all this.
Later in the week I was supposed to take the bus from here to here while postering around town.
Instead, I took the bus from here to here, and walked from here to here.
And, just when I thought I had wasted precious postering time, I found Bob Gutman's home away from home: the Shalom Hartman Institute, whose adjoining schools accepted my posters with open arms!
So the new saying will go now: when lost in Jerusalem trying to do something important, you can find something else important, at the very least.
Or you'll be scared and lost.
III. Hebrew University Campus and Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus
Going back to my first post about the limits in the land, I mentioned briefly Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, and now I want to speak about it more. A lot of people who look at the weird green block in the '67 line around Jerusalem and say "what's that all about?" I had the same question, and over the course of several conversations with people/a small amount of research, I have some very imperfect history in addition to some imperfect observations.
Oh, I mention all this because I went there to poster for this concert and I was really fascinated by what I saw there.
Ok, now for some imperfect history:
The Mt. Scopus area was originally purchased in 1916 from the British owned Gray Hill Estate. The University started from this Estate following its inauguration in 1917. It was an early Zionist vision to establish a Jewish University in the holy city. Designed by Sir Patrick Geddess and Frank Meers, the first three buildings (Wolfson National Library, Mathematics Institute, and the Physics Institute) were erected in 1920.
From the beginning, Hebrew U has brought academics and students from all different backgrounds to its center in the pursuit of higher education. This is and has always been a place where anyone can study, regardless of the headlining name.
I experienced this first hand as I raided the different poster boards in the area. In my time snooping around, I ran into American exchange students joking with Muslim Palestinian women and men at the small coffee shop in the Administration Building/Student Center, watched a Haredi man say excuse me to the group as he hurried to who knows where, and found some Israelis furiously typing on their computers (it was finals week).
Truly a really wonderful place at the outset, but as you know here, what is not said is another degree of the reality (e.g: I didn't see Palestinians and Israelis together on campus, despite they are both a part of the campus life and on campus). I plan to return to when I can to act like a student while I do some covert observing.
As a side note, it's really nice now to be a person that has the 'luxury' to choose when I want to be on an university campus. I live next to the other Hebrew U. Definitely gonna work at their library/run up their stadium stairs just like I did back in UNC (woooo acknowledging and taking advantage of your privilege).
Hadassah has an equally compelling and interesting history. It also has very similar attitude toward diversity/pluralism, and as such, a very similar group of diversity moments. Though created as a Jewish entity in , the fact that its creators are Jewish is its only real tie to the religion. From the Mt. Scopus' campus' inception until 1948 and then again from 1975 until the present (from 1948 to 1967 Jordan declared it a demilitarized enclave and because of political reasons, was rendered unoperable; following '67 when Israel acquired the West Bank from Jordan, it renovated the campus until its eventual re-opening in 1975), the hospital catered to all people of all backgrounds and ages. "Medicine knows no identity," was definitely pertinent to this location.
Fun fact: my great-uncle was there when Hadassah reopened. There's a story somewhere about him cutting a ribbon that opened a building too during the same trip. You go great uncle!
Ok. So why am I mentioning this?
Let's go back to the original question. Look at the little green block here and there. It's square in the middle of East Jerusalem and surrounded by Arab neighborhoods. What is that all about?
So the University and hospital continued to function throughout all of the conflicts in the area. In 1947/48, things got hot and heavy, and both campuses abandoned their actions. After the ceasefire and the eventual negotiation in 1949, Jordan and Israel agreed to allow an access road to the Mount Scopus campus, and Hebrew U continued as it did before the war. Hadassah, as mentioned before, did not return until '67 because it became so inconvenient to continue its operations, and so they moved to this location in Ein Kerem, West Jerusalem.
All right. That's cool. Are you done?
No.
But Hebrew U and Hadassah are in that green block. I get it. Can't we move on?
No. We haven't addressed two things: what is Issawiya doing in there and the relationship between Hebrew U and French Hill.
Issawiya has been there since 1838. It has moved slightly because of development. The neighborhood where Hebrew U bought the land that was on the outskirts of Issawiya, then, and is now directly next to it because of development.
Another notable thing about this area is the French Hill neighborhood. Notice that it seems to connect this green block to West Jerusalem. This was intentional. The Israeli government after '67 decided to utilize the land that they found themselves in control over (annexed, conquered, liberated... whatever your word choice is) in order to start solidifying Israel against future attacks (in addition to other concerns, but this one was at the root). So, the Israeli government decided to reach out to an area they owned during the entire period between '48 and '67 but had difficulty developing to its potential: Mount Scopus. Thus, French Hill was born, and became the first actual township/settlement built and inhabited across the green line.
So, Hebrew U had an indirect hand to the beginning of settlements/townships across the green line so as to provide a safe and secure way for Israelis to access Mount Scopus, an area that was Jewishly owned for the good of the surrounding public. The Mt. Scopus Hadassah area was renovated in the meantime as well because of the results of the '67 war, and became a center for everyone in the Jerusalem area regardless of race.
I haven't touched that though Palestinians on the other side of the wall are welcome to these two places... the nature of checkpoints and the laws in Israel make it very hard to get to these locations. This isn't to say Hebrew U denies Palestinians admission or Hadassah denies Palestinians. I'm talking here about what the wall and the current state of affairs in the West Bank does for people who want to take advantage of these resources, which are, by their charter and creed, open to the public.
That paragraph needs to be longer, cause this is not a simple situation. But in particular contexts, I think I need to say that this moment, to me, emphasizes some of the costs and inevitable contradictions in maintaining the current occupation/state of Israeli military actions in the West Bank,
while at the same time billing oneself as a Jewish state as democratic and seeking to promote the work of organizations that will enact this ideal by serving everyone in the area that it can.
As David Sklar says in his blogpost: How can a country with so many contradictions, so many groups, communities, and people purposely pulling in opposite directions, move forward?
I don't think I have an answer that will address everything. I don't think anyone, truly, does. So the best I can do is give you snippets.
IV. Jerusalem Complexities Continued: East Jerusalem Tour of Arab Neighborhoods
My group and I went on a tour with Ir Amim, an organization whose explicit goal is to educate people on the social and political issues that impact the Jerusalem municipality and thereby the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. This was a bus tour of the different areas, starting from Gilo in the south and going to Shu'afat in the north east. Our route went something like this.
I know. Most of you on first glance see Ir Amim as another leftist group that seeks to push an agenda of peace and reconciliation. While this is true, I found the tour brutally honest about many things that a leftist group would probably not admit or do on a tour. Here are a few:
1) The tour guide was Israeli with an incredible American English accent (or maybe she was American and made Aliyah with her family when she was young... I can't remember). Throughout the process, she emphasized how scary it was to live through the Second Intifada. "While I waited for the bus, I wondered if this one would be my last."
2) She said she feels "relieved that the wall is in place, as it keeps my family safe."
3) Whenever she talked about Israel, she said the words "we."
4) She said that she'd feel uncomfortable if the wall were located on the green line. "It wouldn't be safe enough."
This all said, here is another snippet of this tour. It's eight minutes long and shows a little bit of the complexities with the Arab neighborhoods within Jerusalem.
In addition to this snippet, she talked about the same things I had been talking about in the past: East Jerusalem Arab neighborhoods have significantly less municipal services in their neighborhoods as compared to Israeli Jewish neighborhoods (an urban planner pointed out water barrels on the top of Arab houses in these houses; a person told me these are for when running water does not come, or when there is dirty/unclean water through the pipes). Trash in these neighborhoods are piled high. Comparatively, Israeli neighborhoods have people who pick up this trash as their job (a high number of which are Palestinian Arabs). The same cannot be said for Arab neighborhoods.
These are all realities, but then she said something that, again, a leftist organization would not say: "The authorities in the Jerusalem municipality are aware of this, and over the past four years they have continually said that it's a problem they need to address. This is significant as this problem had never been acknowledged before. This type of thing takes time, of course, and logistics can sometimes be a burden to enacting this image. Ir Amim just wants you to get a sense of the complexity of this issue by letting you see that it still is a problem to be addressed, regardless of what the municipality is saying."
On education: "Arab schools learn under the Jordanian curriculum because the families didn't want their kids learning at an Israeli school." *note: my placement at Yad B'yad is trying to combat this trend!* "This is all well and good, but there is right now a huge classroom and school shortage in E. Jerusalem, and this has been the case over the past 20 years. Right now there are 40 psychologists on call in W. Jerusalem schools vs. 10 psychologists in the overcrowded E. Jerusalem schools. In that time, the municipality has built several parks and neighborhoods for Jewish people to live over the green line."
Again, take into account the paragraph before.
On the separation wall/security fence (cement boundary... whatever you want to call it). The woman talked about how the boundary definitely helped curb the attacks and violence in Israel proper, but that there were other factors to this trend as well: "There was a complete culture shift in Arab resistance from the West Bank when Arafat died in 2004. Arafat was a proponent of armed resistance whereas Abbas, the current prime minister, supported nonviolent resistance. A lot of Israelis will say that they have violent Palestinians already behind bars. But since Abbas has been Prime Minister, he too has jailed countless Palestinians who have committed significant acts of violence (everything from murder to bombs). This has also been a significant factor in why there was a drop in attacks. Sure now people are throwing rocks, but it is not as significant as it was back during the Second Intifada because of Abbas' crackdown on violence from the Palestinians in the West Bank."
Somehow, Israel and the Palestinian Authority are working together in a way that isn't very readily apparent.
On housing demolitions: "Housing demolitions occur from W. Jerusalem to E. Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, it is illegal to develop without the state's permission, as it is all state-owned land, so if there is any illegal building, then it is destroyed. The reason is both environmental and also because the municipality wants to curb population explosions. This is changing: over the last five years the land is becoming more privatized in a specifically Jewish way.
The after-effect of all of this is the following: E. Jerusalem often needs to develop or to build beyond their communities, but Jerusalem puts a cap on anything above a particular *small* percent of the current buildings in E. Jerusalem. E. Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods have populations that are growing much faster than that of W. Jerusalem, and they have less space for the amount of people living there, so you would think that the municipality would proportionally allow this, but they don't. Thus, more demolitions happen on the E. Jerusalem side for this very reason. 70% more actually. Israelis over the green line get permits to build easier because they do not grow or build at as fast a rate, or because the government had a plan for them."
The tour was definitely enlightening as most of these tours have been thus far... but I left wanting to talk with a person in charge of security, or a person on the development board.
A new quest is born, and with it, a new blog post in the future!
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