This found its way into my inbox. I found it a pretty stunning read because it was such a different perspective than I am exposed to through the mainstream press the political press, and even daily kos. It regards someone a few degrees away from me and his impressions of visiting Palestine.
Palestine was good, full of kind people, hospitable to the extreme but the circumstances don't really allow you to enjoy it too much - without feeling like a voyeuristic tourist. Life is so fucking cruel there and every story you hear from the Arabs has the ingredients for making you either enraged or perfectly resigned. The Wall is everywhere encircling all the major Palestinian cities, shutting off communities from each other and rendering any movement of goods and people impossible in most cases.
I went to my colleague's in-laws' house for Sunday dinner. They live in [...] a place that used to be popular with all the tourists coming down from Jerusalem. Now the road is shut off, and a 20 foot wall stands there instead. All traffic now coming into the city has to go through a military check-point, which serves as the only way out of what is effectively a prison. By building the wall the Israelis have moved the border about five kilometres, stealing (normalizing) the land between the current and the former parametre. The Wall stole half his in-laws' land and the rest of the neighbourhood is totally deserted now. These are the "facts on the ground" Bush and Sharon speaks of, the ones the Palestinians have to "respect".
Fucking disgraceful. After the 1967 invasion the Israelis invented a law that said wherever you were then was where your ID card would state you as living. Anyone out of the country, on business or holiday or as a student, lost their citizenship. Families were separated, and my friend who's from Jerusalem got a Jerusalemite ID whereas his wife (from Bethlehem - 10 minutes down the road) got a West Bank ID. Now she's not allowed, despite working for a international human aid agency in Jerusalem, to cross any check points after 7 o clock. And their baby has to be listed with him only. If they ever wanna leave the country she has to go through Jordan, whereas he has to take the Tel Aviv route from Israel. Anyone with a West Bank ID is fucked. At check-points where, say, I could cross just showing my passport from the car, they have to walk through, expecting a demeaning body search. Last week they made her wait for two hours in the freezing cold. The whole system is entirely corrupt and defined mostly by the whims of aggressive security guards. They've applied for her to get a Jerusalem ID. It'll take somewhere between eight years, if she's lucky, and thirteen if she's not. Meanwhile the Israeli settlers keep moving in, stealing more and more land in the process. The settlements are then connected by "Jewish only" roads which split the country into fragmented little segments that have nothing to do with a "state". Gaza is one big prison over on the east. No one's allowed in or out. You're defined by, and get treatment according to, the colour of your identity card and licence place. Israeli and Jerusalem cars travel between the different zones - Palestinians cannot.
A doctor at our hospital was studying in Canada in 67 and lost his citizenship, despite his whole family being there and having lived there for generations. For the last eleven years he's been working with us in Jerusalem on tourist visa's, having to leave for Cyprus every three months to renew it. Recently, out of nowhere, the Israelis said the game was up. If he tried to leave again, he wouldn't be allowed back in. Now he's pretty much imprisoned 30 minutes south of Jerusalem. He can't go to work cause being stopped at a check point would risk losing him his family. Meanwhile the Israeli lawful-right-of-return policy allows any Jew in, say, Russia to come to Israel to live. Fucked up. Half the people with historical links to the land are being screwed in an apartheid regime and no-one's doing fuck all about it.
Even the Christians in Palestine voted Hamas. They were just fed up with nothing changing and hoping for anything. For god's sake, it's the twenty-first century - how can anybody dream of building a wall like that? Strange having just been in Berlin - seeing the remains of the Iron Curtain - and then going to Jerusalem a month after and seemingly no one's learned anything.
My first reaction was that I was really surprised to recognize that I don't see such perspectives even at daily kos. We're used to it not showing up in the mainstream press. But the shame of it is that when the subject is broached in political discussion boards, it just devolves too easily - the pro-palestine side (as voiced by us citizens that aren't palestinian) can too easily devolve into anti-semitist rhetoric, and the pro-israeli side can too easily devolve into claims of anti-semitist rhetoric where none is there. In the above excerpt I see a lot of frustration but nothing that decries jews in general. The frustration seems directed squarely at Israeli policy. The most I see is a general omission of an opposing point of view, but that is what perspective is. Anyway, I do feel like reading this actually did shift my beliefs of what is going on over there, and where the balance of responsibility might lie in laying more groundwork for peace. Arguments about splitting up territory don't even have to be addressed to resolve some of these maddening and numbing bureaucratic games that undoubtedly lead to Palestinians feeling indignant and oppressed.