Why not listen to some music while you read? This entry's offering, "Strange Waters", from Bruce Cockburn's The Charity of Night album. You'll need the free Real Audio player and you can shift-click in Netscape to download the 712K file from here to play from your hard disk if you experience any network congestion. Click on the note to begin.
Commemorating is something that I have got into a fair amount since moving to Palestine in 1994. Pictured (from left to right): Australian-Palestinian Adam Hanieh and myself during the construction of the September 1996 memorial website, in September 1997.
Web publishing here takes a lot out of you, mainly because nothing really exists on the Web in English, or Arabic for that matter. Rightly or wrongly, when embarking on Palestinian memorial projects, it feels as though it's up to you.
Simon Wiesenthal once observed that, "Hope lives when people remember." The converse is also true. Hope dies when people forget, or when they display only apathy, or when they go about the process of rememberance in a way that seems ill thought-out or rinky-dink.
I couldn't write this for a few days for a combination of reasons, all building up from the same sense of hopelessness as the Palestinian Nakba year began to pass by. Anyone who regularly reads A Personal Diary will have noticed that the recent entries have had less than positive things to say about Palestinians here and outside of the country.
It all began with the Who Killed Muhyideen Al-Shareef entry? A week-long holiday had coincided with the aftermath, and I spent most of it reading every English-language report on the event that I could find, and had the rare luxury to actually spend time matching up the various stories, visiting some of those involved, and thinking about everything in some depth. One thing that the diary entry failed to achieve was to emphasise the severity of the point of revelation.
After two weeks of every theory under the sun being proposed by everyone in the country (sometimes with the same person proposing a variety of theories simultaneously) to the point of total confusion, the neat 'announcement' that Addassi had done it and the shabby way in which the set-up was handled was sickening. The thought that the 'Palestinian Revolution' had come to this stage was as depressing as it gets.
Hey, we live here! We know the situation and systems are bad. We live with them! But exactly how bad it is, has been an unfolding daily workshop from the day I set foot in the country.
There was some negative reaction from the university community about the Muhyideen Al-Shareef article, one lecturer claiming that I was "gambling with my blood" by writing it. There are not many non-Palestinian journalists that live in the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Yet, in the end, I would have withered away had I not written it. It feels good to tell your truth.
Following this sad article to have to write was an entry about the pathetic petulance of the 'losing' side during the Birzeit student elections, the mini-Lebanon in the center of Ramallah, and Goodbye Nizar Qabbani. The latter essay, which was sent widely out on the Internet through e-mail, got a lot of reaction. A huge number of Palestinians wrote in from all over the world, uninanimously agreeing that they felt the same way as I did about how things had deteriorated, and a few Jews, who ranged from blaming me for writing the piece to create 'a negative atmosphere', to one correspondent who misunderstood part of the article and charged that I had "incited violence" by writing it.
So this is what an appeal to the Palestinians of the Diaspora to begin dealing with their history with the same seriousness with which Jews have dealt with their own history is considered to be these days: incitement to violence? Is this the ultimate message by demanding financial reparations for six million stateless Palestinians and tens of thousands injured by the soliders of occupation and dispossessed by the policies of occupation? Incitement to violence? Is this the logical conclusion of wanting to see a Palestinian Schindler's List? Incitement to violence? I don't believe people sometimes.
The unbridgable gulf of perspectives, between myself here in the West Bank and one Jew living in America, made me terminate our e-mail correspondence. To him and others like him, I say this: in the end, I am going to talk about what I see before my eyes and how this makes me feel inside. I am not writing A Personal Diary to try to make peace with anyone. I am writing it to report what I observe. It is not me that needs to 'make peace' in this situation. I am writing to offer what was a previously unavailable perspective on life here, that I would have cut off an arm to read when I was stuck outside the country. Go to People-to-People if you want the fluffy bunny reconciliation stuff.
Anyway, all this input overload and the focus of Al-Nakba rememberance events of the Palestinians, on 14 May 1998, conspired to make life here a little depressing. The irony is, that as Jews and Palestinians look back at both their tragedies, one thing they have very much in common is that they are further apart than we know. And, within their respective camps, they are similarly fractured like two tree stumps split by a destructive ball of lightning known as Ideology.
One Orthodox Jew who wrote to me from the US, Craig, imparted a measure of hope to me that there are those out there who at skin-level fit the West Bank vision of Orthodox Jews perfectly, but at heart-level do not sit comfortably in the stereotype at all. I must point out that Craig was also not comfortable with what I had written in the Nizar Qabbani piece, but had the courtesy and temerity to hold on to our six e-mail long discussion until it reached a point where we had got past a lot of the intial assumptions and found a sense of - dare I say it - common ground. Let me share with you an extract from one of his letters:
Shabbos was quite a tumult here. The pictures in the Times, especially the one I posted of the young Palestinian being abused by the Israeli police, led to no small unease among my Orthodox friends. At the conclusion of the meal, when I usually speak for 5-10 minutes on the weekly portion from the Torah, I spoke of the murder of the Arab in Jerusalem. I cannot remember so penetrating a quiet at my table as last night's. Truly, you must know that you are not alone.
The image of a gathering of religious Jews, seated around a table to celebrate Shabbat, stopping to give serious thought to the events that the Palestinians are going through is a very powerful one for me, living here in the West Bank. Reading the media, there is usually no hint of conscience on either side. These words give me hope that the possibility exists that all of this could end one day. Thank you Craig.
These last few years, I have been led through some strange waters indeed. Now, the Nakba awaits...