'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Great experiences; limbo nonetheless

I've been hanging around here in Israel/Palestine for the past few days, for reasons that will become clear to you if you read one third or so of the way down in the present post.

This post is made up of some descriptive fragments that I have written over the past couple of days as one way of dealing with this Kafka-esque limbo situation I've been in. They are not well organized; but that's for later.

Nightfall in West Jerusalem

Monday night I decided to spend a little time in Israel. So I left the charming little hotel I was staying in in occupied East Jerusalem, the Christmas Hotel, and walked around 200 yards westward before dashing across the hectic eight-lane highway built some years ago along this section of the Green Line that divides the occupied and unoccupied halves of this ancient city. Immediately I was plunged into the late-19th-century world of a quarter of extremely religious Jewish Israelis called Mea Shearim.

For a long time, most of the people of Mea Shearim were so fundamental in their religious beliefs that they did not believe any "slvation" of any value could be brought by the establishment at human hands of a Jewish state, and some of them were staunchly anti-Zionist. But that's another story. Today, as the shadows of dusk gathered in the narrow streets, I walked through quickly, not wanting to attract attention to my "immodest" dress of long pants and long-sleeved shirt. Large notices exhorted "Women and girls" not to offend the quarter's residents with any immodest garb. Pants were expressly included in that. I wasn't sure wherther the notice applied to the street I was walking along, or only the smaller side-alleys. But I walked fast, just in case.

Also walking along were several little family groups-- usually, one or more women (wearing long skirts and head coverings), pushing strollers and with a knot of other barely ambulatory young children tagging along behind. Natalism is definitely alive and well in the ultra-orthodox communities! At a boys' school, several earlocked boys of around ten or eleven were playing a rowdy game in the yard. hey didn't seem to have supervision there. I do know though that the issue of provision of after-school servces in the religious school systems in Israel (at a time when the parallel secular systems couldn't afford it) has sometimes been a political hot potato.

It seemed like a friendly, busy neighborhood. There were still some small workshops open, lit up yellow in the darkening gray of the street: a carpenter's place, a couple of places where metalworkers were making what seemed to be large music-stands, perhaps for holding Torahs. There were some small groceries, and a cafe where a tired worker was swabbing down the floor. Most people seemed to be eager to get home.

I walked on past Queen Helena Street (one of my favorites!) to the large, sprawling "Moscobiyya", the compound of three hostels built by members of the Russian nobility in the 19th century to house Russian Orthodox pilgrims visiting the Holy City. Long ago, these hostels were taken over by the Israeli police and various other administrative offices. As I walked around, I peered in and noticed the windows of one of the compounds still have the solid metal coverings--with tiny holes punched for ventilation-- that signal that a political prisoner may well be sitting inside.

I went on over Yaffa Street, now being re-surfaced and restricted to traffic, into the loud, gawdy scene of the Ben Yehuda pedestrian areas. A couple of small groups of soldiers lounged around the entrance-- Ben Yehuda has been the target of a number of Palestinian suicide bombers in the past. I didn't see any ultra-orthodox families out there enjoying the fun, but from Israel's extensive spectrum of different modes of Jewish self-expression there were people from just about every other part of it. Cute boys with bleached-blonde hair poked up into little jelled spikes. A gaggle of girls in drab-colored long skirts (but no head-covering). Families of mildly orthodox people. A small group of off-duty soldiers including an Ethiopian. A couple of "hippy-religious" guys. A young man who wore his yarmulke cheekily far forward on his head edging up against a very saucy little pointed quiff. And on several corners, black-suited emissaries of the Lubavitcher outreach organizations aiming their exhortations to greater religious observance politely at passers-by from behind little portable podiums.

I wandered up and down a bit, enjoying the scene. Went to a Steimatzky's bookstore to buy a couple of maps. Finally went to Cafe Rimon for a bite to eat. A security guard with very dark-skinned African features was checking everyone's bags at the door of the cafe. Inside, the pleasant hostess asked me "Meat or dairy? Smoking or non-smoking?" so she'd know where to seat me. (I should have figured out an answer to that first question before I got this far; and on what turned out to be a good impulse, I chose dairy.)

I sat there reading the incredible book "Driunking the sea at Gaza" written almost ten years ago by the Israeli journalist Amira Hass. She lived in Gaza as the correspondent for "Ha'aretz" for a few years back in the early 1990s, and she's been back there, evidently, numerous times since. I met Amira once, long ago. She is a very serious, insightful person, and a wonderful writer who simply by describing the effects that Israel's domination and control has on the daily life of the Palestinians of the occupied territories illuminates the inuman nature of that control more effectively than most dryly-written human rights reports ever could.

[Later, on the way back to the hotel I took a tour through the echoing, darkened streets of the Old City, but I don't have time to write about that here.]

* * *

My mystery destination revealed

I might as well reveal to all my eager readers there at JWN just where it is I have been heading for the past few days. Or rather, trying to head, since the permit the Israeli forces nowadays require from any foreigner trying to enter the tourism destination in question still has not come through.

The identity of the place in question? Friends, it is Gaza, that small strip of Meditarreanean beachside land that is home to 1.2 million Palestinians and 7,500 Israeli settlers (with the always modest needs of these latter requiring something like 30 percent of the surface area of Gaza to support.)

So they haven't let me in yet. I can't think why. I'm traveling there to do a little consulting for an excellent, US-based aid organization called Anera. The people in Anera's Jerusalem office have been working hard to get the permit approved. They put in the application the required five days in advance... I was all set to get straight in to Gaza Sunday or Monday... But here we are, Tuesday evening, and the approval still hasn't come through.

Tom Neu, the head of the Jerusalem office, says that though the Israelis frequently make it fairly tough for representatives of US-based NGOs to get into or around the occupied Palestinian territories (OPTs), things are far worse for representatives of European or other non-US NGOs... Not to mention, of course, for the Palestinians themselves.

Actually, waiting around like this for the possibly non-existent approval to come through has made me feel just a small taste of what life is like for the Palestinians in the OPTs. A couple of years ago when I was here, someone said that the worst thing about the totally capricious and unpredictable way in which the Israelis' draconian movement controls are applied to the entire indigenous population here is that it makes it impossible for anyone to undertake the very basic human function of planning their use of time in a sensible, predictable, or rational way.

After two days of this waiting around, I can now say I understand just a tiny, tiny bit how soul-destroying the effects of this can be.

Luckily, however, I do have a cellphone, so I'm not tethered to a single land-line as I would have been without one. (Doris Anfous, of Anera, is the wonderful person who has been calling the Israelis every couple of hours to ask about the progress of my application. She has promised to call me the moment she hears a 'Yes.')

So yesterday, as I wrote here already, I went off to see a little portion of the infamous Wall. Today I decided to come over to Ramallah, just ten miles north of Jerusalem, which is the city where Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority were allowed to set up the headquarters of their West Bank operations when they came back to Palestine from decades of forced exile in 1994. (East Jerusalem itself, which is part of the occupied West Bank and was always its capital, would have been the logical choice. But the Israelis were seeking to cut East Jerusalem off from the rest of the occupied West Bank as they continued their massive project to integrate into Greater Israel.)

By chance, Tom Neu was coming here this morning anyway. I hitched a ride over with him. I was all ready to come the "normal" way the Palestinians have to use: one share-taxi from Jerusalem to a spot just between the two cities, in Kalandia, where the Israelis have a big checkpoint; go through that checkpoint and walk the 200 yards across the no-man's-land; get another share-taxi on into Ramallah.

Instead of doing that, as we approached the Kalandia checkpoint we swung off to the right and drove along to a "No Palestinian Vehicles Allowed" special bypass road that streaks northward along the rocky spine of the West Bank, allowing settlers to reach their lovely homes in just minutes.

We turned off the bypass road at Beit El, a point north of Ramallah where the Israelis have a special checkpoint that allows foreign diplomats, some foreign NGO workers, and a handful of Palestinian VIPs a "quicker entry" to Ramallah. We were waved forward through that checkpoint quite quickly. But as Tom drove away from it we saw a harried-looking man in a smart suit walking along by the roadside trying to make a call on his mobile. Tom drew to a halt and offered the man a ride on into Ramallah.

It turned out he was Ambassador Ahmed Soboh, the Deputy Minister of Information in the Palestinian Authority. We took him to his office where he offered us coffee and we swapped a few tales of the woe and frustration caused by these movement controls. He pulled out a veritable fistful of different passes that he had to carry with him all the time. (Made the "passbooks" that the non-White South Africans were forced to carry everywhere back in the bad old days of apartheid look completely simple and straightforward, by comparison.)

"These two are my VIP passes," he said, showing two laminated photo IDs with magnetic strips running down the back. They were in a little plastic pocket, and tucked in behind them was yet another pass. Of course, all three were issued by the Israeli authorities, and much of the writing on them was in Hebrew. (So much for the modest amount "self-rule" the Palestinians thought they won through the Oslo Accords... But even after that, Palestinians of every rank from highest to lowest still had to get "permissions" from the Israelis to travel around inside their own territories... Actually, it makes South Africa's Bantustan policy look positively liberal, by comparison.)

"But even though I have these VIP passes, and they know who I am-- of course they know who I am!-- still, I had to get a completely separate permission this morning to travel from Ramallah to Jerusalem."

He wiped his glistening brow and stuffed his passbooks back into his pocket. He told us his task in Jerusalem had actually been to go to the US consulate there to pick up a visa for an upcomimg visit to the US. "No problem! They gave me my visa staright away."

In fact, it seemed he had finished his business there earlier than expected, and his driver had brought him back to the Beit El checkpoint. But the Israelis wouldn't let his driver cross that checkpoint. "Though I told him we had passed through the checkpoint, going to Jerusalem, just one hour earlier! They are crazy! They don't remember."

* * *

Why they haven't let me into Gaza so far

Today, the Israeli forces launched an operation into the Shuja'iyeh neughborhood of Old Gaza City that resulted in the deaths of 12 Palestinians, including reportedly some children. It is quite possible that this operation has been planned for a while, and that's why they haven't been letting me--and perhaps a number of other foreigners--in.

I read here and here in today's Jerusalem Post that there are significant forces in the Israeli military who are arguing against even any partial Israeli withdrawal from Gaza on the grounds that this will "reward terror" and degrade Israel's general "strategic deterrence." It is quite possible that if indeed a withdrawal of some scope is in the works it would be preceded by some particularly fierce Israeli operations against targets in Gaza as a way of trying to ensure that some general "deterrent lesson" gets delivered before the withdrawal. I need only refer to their practices before some (but not all) of their phased withdrawals from Lebanon over the past 20 years.

(I need to try to get the link to some of these articles in today's Israeli English-language press into this piece somehow.)

* * *

A friend in Ramallah

"Hello, hello, Ghassan?"

"Hello? Yes, this is Ghassan. Who's there?"

"Ghassan, hi! It's Helena. Helena Cobban. How are you? How's the family?"

"Helena! How are you? Where are you-- are you here in Palestine?"

"I'm here in Jerusalem. I'm waiting for a permit to get into Gaza. Ghassan, I was thinking, while I'm still waiting for this, to come over to Ramallah. What d'you think? Is that do-able? Are you around?"

"Sure, yes, Helena, come on over. I'm right here. I'll be going to the university later in the morning. The Israelis opened the road between Ramallah and Bir Zeit, so we're all working normal hours there now. You want to come on over and see some people there?"

"I'd love to, yes. What a great idea."

"So call me again when you get near to the Kalandia checpoint and I'll drive down and pick you up. What time do you think you'll get there?"

"Kalandia? No idea. Maybe an hour or so?"

... Well, in the end I didn't go via Kalandia, but instead drove round through the "gringos' checkpoint" at Beit El, at the north end of Ramallah, and ended up sitting in the office of the Palestinians' Deputy Minister of Information (see above). Ghassan came by and picked me up from there, and drove me up to Bir Zeit University, where he works in the Institute of Law. I had brought my two fairly small bags with me--hope springing eternal within me that the permission for Gaza would come through at any moment!--and I slung them into the trunk of his car.

Along the way, we were able to catch up a little. I last saw Ghassan when I came to Bir Zeit to a conference back in May 2002. Before that, I hadn't seen him for more than 20 years-- back in the days when he, his wife B, his brother T, my then-husband, and I were all friends back in Beirut. Ghassan, B, and T were all able to "return" to the West Bank with the slice of Palestinian nationalist activists who came here in the wake of the Oslo Accords. ("Did it feel like a 'Return' when you came back?" I asked him along the way there. "I mean, I know your family is not originally from here--" "No, it didn't feel like a 'return' at all. My parents were from different parts of northern Palestine, but basically from Haifa. But we came.")

I had an interesting half-day at Bir Zeit. A long talk with a lecturer in the Cultural Studies department, and a short "interview opportunity" with a young student who is part of the Islamic list that swept the recent elections to the student council. The student had just finished doing some exams, so maybe he wasn't delighted to be dragged into the professor's office to meet with this woman who could only speak broken Arabic. (It's been coming back in leaps and bounds, though, I swear. I only need a few more days and it will have reconstituted itself nearly perfectly in my brain.)

He spoke in rapid-fire short bursts, as though plugging in the rote-learned answers to my short series of questions. But with apparently deep conviction, at the same time: as though these learned and relearned phrases truly were the revealked truth whose self-evident truth-value should be evident to anyone. (Professors at Bir Zeit still say today, as they did 15 years ago, that the Islamist students are often among their best students: diligent and serious with their academic work-- unlike many of the secular student activists who seem more easily distractible.)

This piece is not about my talk with the student, however, but about the extraordinary kindness and friendship that Ghassan and the rest of his family showed to me.

By mid-afternoon, it was increasingly clear to me that I would not be getting to Gaza that same day. "Stay with us tonight, then," Ghassan said warmly. "In fact, tonight, T is having a party at his place and many of our old friends will be there."

How could I resist? I sepnt the rest of the afternoon hanging out in Ramallah city-center, a chaotic noisy place full of life and activity. A half-dozen Palestinian soldiers and policemen hung around in the main circle at Al-Manara. I found an internet cafe that would print up the 257-page-long text of the Quaker book I've been collaborating on-- I was planning to take it to the Palestinian Quaker who was part of our group, Jean Zaru, since I knew she often had trouble printing large documents. While the printing proceeded, I caught up on my email and cruised the net as much as I could on their painfully slow connection....

Darkness had fallen and the evening air was getting pretty chilly by the time Ghassan came by to pick me up and take me to the beautiful ground-floor apartment he and B live in. (We are all empty nesters now!) Without batting an eyelid B said, "Helena, how lovely to see you! Of course we would like to have you stay. Everyone knows how tiresome this business of permits is."

In the course of the evening oth Ghassan and T told me about the various reconciliation efforts they've been involved in, with counterparts in Israel. T has worked for quite a while with a looseknit organization called "Silent No More/ One Voice" that has tried to help stimulate the growth of a peace culture among both peoples by engaging individuals in a series of formal enquiries conducted along what sounded to me like slightly complex lines.

Did I mention that both brothers are computer specialists? Well, in T's case, I didn't figure out whether he had actually helped to devise the system SNM/OV had used, whereby a series of questions was put to participating individuals. Each participant would have 100 nominal "points" to allot between the answers.... So, if the "Right of Reurn" is more important than "Jerusalem", I suppose you give it a greater percentage of your hundred marbles...

As I understood it-- which was certainy imperfectly, given that we had been drinking a bit of beer along the way there-- the process was iterative. Once a degree of agreement had been reached around one point, the questioning would move onto another. The questions on which agreement was harder to achieve would be broken down into smaller sub-questions, and so on.

"So tell me again, how is this different from the Geneva Accords or the Nuseibeh-Ayalon process?" I asked him.

"Oh, it's very different, because in those other processes, the designers of the process provided the answers and just ask people to sign on to what they have agreed. But our process is much more one of participating in what the answers--and even the questions-- should be."

I should note that T also gave me some deserved criticism when I reproached him with the fact that not many Palestinians in the occupied territories seemed to be very interested in mass civic actions these days. I think I heard the words "arrogant and pretentious" aimed my way; but it was all between friends. (I think.)

... For his part, Ghassan has worked for a few years now with a group of Palestinian and Israeli academics who meet together every so often to discuss issues of common theoretical and practical concern. The Israeli participants include a number of the "new historians" there, as well as the geographer Oren Yiftachel, and a couple of others. The Palestinians include several luminaries from the Bir Zeit faculty. Ghassan modestly told me that his main role has been to work on the group's website. Check it out!

But one of the most interesting stories Ghassan told me was that on Monday night--the very night before I turned up on his doorstep-- he, B, and a number of their other friends had been to what he thought was the only showing to date in Ramallah of Polanski's movie "The Pianist".

"It was very interesting," he said. "We could learn much more about what the Jews had been through there in Poland. And of course there were so many parallels with our own situation here. When they showed the scenes of the Germans starting to put up the wall around the ghetto, you could hear a lot of gasps of recognition and surprise."

So how was the public reaction to the showing of the movie?

"A handful of people, at the end, started arguing loudly: 'Why are they showing this movie here?' It seems they didn't know beforehand that it was about the Holocaust. But they were only a minority. Most people said nothing, but seemed glad that they had gone to it."

I wish I'd been there. I also wish I could go to a showing of "The Pianist" in Israel and see the reaction to it there., Ghassan, who follows Israeli press and culture fairly closely, said his impression was that many Israelis didn't like the movie because it portrayed the Jews as passive victims. I also wonder whether it might not unnerve them because of the many parallels--in the many scenes of the concentration phase of the Shoah, though not of course [yet] the extermination phase (which is only alluded to and prefigured in the movie, quite richly, but not directly represented)-- between the fate of Europe's Jews under Nazi rule and the fate their own government has been imposing on the Palestinians.

Anyway, one last note about Ghassan. He had toild me once before that he and B had visited Israel's large-scale Holocaust memorial museum at Yad Vashem, not once but twice. He reminded me again that after making that visit, he had written about it in both the English and Arabic editions of a Palestinian publication called the Jerusalem Quarterly File. (Winter 2002 issue, pp.42-45.)

"I am not sure I can come up with original ways of expressing the horror and revulsion at what took place under the Nazis. A Palestinian refugee can particularly imagine the endless dimensions of the suffering of the victims and of the survivors. The survivors, especially, sometimes envy the dead, after dear ones are gone, homes and treasured possessions lost, and communities and relations torn asunder.

"But I cannot help looking with a Palestinian's eyes and heart... The Holocaust to us Palestinians has been used mainly to justify to the world--and to Jews themselves everywhere-- the settler colonization of our country... "

Anyway, read it if you can find it. I'll go looking for a link for it when I can. Found it!!