"Hunger strike a signal to world's oppressed"

{I was fortunate and honored to have interviewed Khader Adnan on Wednesday, April 18th a day after his release from the Israeli Ramleh prison hospital.}

Khader Adnan recounts his 66-day fast in Israeli jail that has made him a symbol of Palestinian resistance.

When Palestinian hunger striker Khader Adnan called his mother at 11:30pm on Tuesday night, she burst into tears. "He told me, 'Mother I am on my way home,'" she said. “For the first time in months my heart was at ease again." For Palestinians, Khader Adnan has become a symbol of resistance and steadfastness, or sumoud, after he waged a 66-day hunger strike against the Israeli prison service. He began his hunger strike immediately after his violent arrest by Israeli soldiers on December 17, 2011. He was detained under what Israel calls "administrative detention", a policy adopted from the era of the British mandate. Under administrative detention, Israel can detain a prisoner for up to six months, renewable indefinitely, without ever charging the prisoner or presenting any evidence against them.


There are currently more than 4,500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, over 300 of those, in administrative detention. Adnan’s hunger strike, which eventually attracted international media attention and solidarity from around the world, inspired other administrative detainees to go on hunger strike. Hana Shalabi went on strike for 43 days before she was released and deported from her village in the West Bank to Gaza. Five others are now in the Ramleh prison hospital, including Bilal Thiab and Thaer Halahleh, who have not eaten for 52 days. After more than two months without food, Adnan’s lawyer brokered a deal in February with Israeli officials that saw him released on April 17. Coincidentally, that is the same day Palestinians commemorate Prisoners Day, which was marked this year by the open-ended hunger strike of 1,600 prisoners. 


Sahar Francis, director of the Ramallah-based rights group Addameer, saw Adnan's hunger strike as a catalyst for this current mass hunger strike movement. "I definitely think the successful hunger strike of Khader Adnan and his release was a main feature in inspiring the 1,600 prisoners to carry out this act now, which is a continuation of what they began in September 2011," he says. "It should be noted that a successful hunger strike depends a lot on internal support, international pressure from the EU and UN, and the policy of the Israeli prison authorities." Khader Adnan, who was was reunited with his family just before midnight on Tuesday, after visiting the families of the prisoners in Arrabeh, seven of whom are serving life sentences, later spoke to Al Jazeera.


Al Jazeera: You've undergone the most difficult experience of your life and have been separated for months from your family. Why did you first stop by the families of other prisoners before seeing your own, and how does it feel to be free again?

Khader Adnan: Every day we live through Prisoners’ Day and its special symbolism. I went to see the families of those imprisoned before seeing my own family as a token of appreciation for their support during my imprisonment and their enduring anguish at having loved ones behind the bars of the Israeli occupation. My freedom is incomplete because of the prisoners who I've left behind. We salute all of the prisoners; Lina Jarbouni [the longest serving female prisoner], Sheikh Ahmad Hajj [the oldest prisoner on hunger strike], Omar Abu Shalalah, Jaafar Ezzedine, Hassan Safadi, and of course Thaer Halaleh and Bilal Thiab. I was received by Bilal Thiab's mother in [the nearby village of] Kufr RaI and relayed to her his message of endurance and commitment to his hunger strike.

After 66 days of refusing food, you spent 53 days recuperating. Did the treatment at the hands of the Israeli officers during your imprisonment improve after you ended your hunger strike?

No, not at all. Up until the last day in the prison hospital they would embark on ways to humiliate me, such as opening the door to stare at me whenever I would use the bathroom or shower. When I was hunger striking, they would purposely eat and drink in front of me. They would insult me, call me a dog. One told me that they still haven't done anything to me yet. Their manners are so unscrupulous. They tried to provoke me by repeating that my wife was unfaithful to me, and that my daughters were not mine. What else could they do? They banned the media from covering my case, proof that they are afraid of the truth. Even after I ended my hunger strike, as I was being transferred from the hospital in Safad to Ramleh, they did so in a way so that no one could see me. They kidnapped me and pushed me through an inner garage. My appeal was held in the hospital cafeteria! Is Israel that afraid of showing its true face to the world?

 How did you manage to find the resilience and strength in continuing your hunger strike, especially after the three times your family visited you?

[Hurried laugh] I don't know how I did it. All strength comes from God, and when I began my hunger strike I knew that it would be until freedom or death … sometimes I am puzzled myself! Israel granted permission for my family to see me not out of the goodness of their own hearts, but because they thought that the sight of my family would be enough to pressure me into eating again. It achieved the opposite effect, and I was further inspired to challenge my jailers. I've spent many sleepless nights from the pain my body was going through. However, my family's happiness, my people's happiness, and the free people's happiness all over the world made me forget that I've ever experienced pain throughout my hunger strike.

Sixteen hundred Palestinian prisoners are on their third day of an open-ended hunger strike in Israeli jails demanding improved living conditions, including the right to family visits and the right to receive family photographs. Will this tactic succeed in translating a popular resistance movement outside of the prison walls amongst Palestinians?

My stance will always be with the prisoners, whether next to them, behind them, or in front of them. From the Gaza Strip to the West Bank to the '48 territories and the exile, every Palestinian is obliged to stand united. We are all the children of the same cause, and one people living under the same occupation. I saw so much support from our family in 1948 Palestine, from the Palestinian doctors and nurses, the Palestinians in Haifa, the school girls from Nazareth who wrote an assignment on me … I will never forget their love. The mass hunger strike is a signal to all oppressed and vulnerable people everywhere, not just Palestinians. It's a message to everyone suffering from injustice, under the boot of oppression. This method will be successful, God willing, and will achieve the rights of the prisoners. I ask God to move the consciences of the free people around the world. I thank them all, especially Ireland, for they have stood by my hunger strike. I ask them to stand in solidarity with all the Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in the past, present and future, with our tortured and oppressed people who live under the injustice of occupation day and night.
 
As the Palestinian prisoner to go on the longest hunger strike and survive, how does it feel becoming a symbol not just for Palestinian steadfastness but for resistance among other oppressed people?

During my days in the [Meir Ziv] hospital in Safad, occupied pre-partition Palestine, I was reminded of the holiness and the glory of this land. Being close to the resisting countries of Lebanon and Syria all gave me further incentive to defy the Israeli prison authorities, which I don't recognise. I have barely presented anything worth of value to the Palestinian cause. I work at a bakery and sell zaatar, and will continue to do so to remind every Palestinian that their roots are deeply entrenched in this land, among the olive trees and the zaatar.

Source: Al Jazeera

Prisoner of the Day: Hazem Elaydi

The Prisoner of the Day Campaign was created as a response to the alarming yet expected media coverage discrepancy regarding the recent prisoner deal arrived at by Hamas and Israel. While the world is holding its breath for that portentous moment when Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit is back in his mother's arms after five years of captivity in the Gaza strip, the 1027 Palestinian prisoners are treated as an empty numerical entity. This campaign will devote each day for a Palestinian prisoner, either included in the deal or not, as a means of awareness and a reminder that Palestinians will always be humans.

Prisoner of the Day: Hazem Elaydi

Hazem Elaydi is from the Maghazi refugee camp in Gaza. He was a young man who loved to read, and would get his hands on every newspaper he could get. In the summers he would help out at his father's store but would end up reading the stacks of newspapers he took with him instead. He was a highly intelligent knowledgeable person with an interest in knowing what was happening in places around the world. Everyone who knew him recognized that he had great potential. He was generally well-liked and respected by people owing to his pious and conservative nature.

Hazem Elyadi as a young man

He was majoring in Chemistry at An-Najah University in the West Bank, but at the onset of the first intifada he happened to be visiting his family back in Gaza when the borders were closed, thus effectively ending his education as it was impossible to get back.

During the first intifada, it was common policy for Israel to send out orders for random young Palestinian men to report to Israeli officials for interrogation. Usually it meant nothing, but when Hazem went it turned out to be more than just a routine interrogation. He was kept in administrative detention for three months as the Israelis attempted to gather charges against him. Two days before he was due to be released, two inmates who were being tortured told similar stories about Hazem. Back then, policy dictated that if two people gave the same testimony, the person it was concerning had to confess. After being beaten and tortured, Hazem confessed to false claims and was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences without the courtesy of being given a fair trial.

Hazem's niece Fidaa got to know her uncle via secret phone calls. Cell phones of course are forbidden in prisons and are smuggled in. After spending the winter in Gaza, Fidaa wrote an eloquent piece highlighting how love of a family member imprisoned cannot be stunted the cold prison walls. She also drew attention to the conditions the prisoners undergo, and the humiliation they must routinely suffer. Since 2007, Hazem hasn't received any family visits as part of the extensive collective punishment on Palestinians in Gaza, who were forbidden from seeing their loved ones behind Israeli bars.

The amazing news is that today, Hazem Elyadi was released as part of the prisoner swap deal between Hamas and Israel. After 21 years in Israeli jails, he is now back in Gaza in his ailing mother's arms. I asked Fidaa how the celebrations were most likely going to pan out. She replied,

"As far as I know, every relative we have--no matter how distantly related-- will gather to welcome him. I'm assuming over 200 people will gather. It'll be chaos! I'm guessing some animals will be slaughtered for the occasion and a huge feast will take place. I'm also guessing that the women have been working for days making sweets to pass around to family, friends, and neighbor. The celebration will begin with his welcome at the Rafah crossing and then an hour's drive to Khatiba Square in Gaza City where thousands will gather and all of the prisoners will be shown a hero's welcome. My relatives will be travelling in busloads to Gaza City to celebrate and welcome the prisoners. The they will go to my uncle's house where our matriarch, my grandmother, lives. They have decorated the house days in advance. The wedding-like festivities will likely begin at sunset and continue throughout the night."

Fidaa is a law student in Texas. She desperately wishes she was there to welcome back her uncle and to witness the happiness etched on her family's faces in Gaza as they receive Hazem. This is where technology is truly a blessed thing.

"I wish with every ounce of my being that I could be there with them. For the first time in weeks, I won't be spending 8 hours in the library after class. I'm going straight home so my mother and I can video chat with out relatives in Maghazi and Deir il-Balah refugee camps. I will speak to my uncle, screen-to-screen, at 4 pm Dallas time, 12 am Gaza time."

Fidaa will also celebrate the release of her uncle in her own way. She made brownies for her 90 person law school class, a great idea as not only do the rest of the students enjoy the brownies but also opens their eyes to the plight of Palestinian prisoners, and what the released prisoners mean for their families away from the corporate mainstream media that paint the prisoner deal from only one side (that of Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit.)

So what's next for Hazem? Well, as he was incarcerated as a young man he never married. Fidaa's aunts already have that covered though, as those living in different countries in the Middle East are making travel plans to Gaza as soon as possible. Fidaa thinks that a wedding is already in the making, with a bride already found!

"Rumor has it that the family has already found him a bride, and they're simply waiting for his approval and within a week there will be an engagement. I will not be surprised if his wedding is in less than a month! I'm hoping they will wait until the end of December so that I have a chance to go to Gaza after finals and make it to the wedding."

It seems like the Elyadi family have a lot to celebrate over the next few months. Hazem's return, Eid with Hazem, Hazem's engagement, Hazem's sahra [nighttime party] before his wedding, and Hazem's wedding.

All the best to Hazem Elyadi, an innocent man who spent twenty one oppressive years in the Israeli occupation's jails.

Prisoner of the Day: Majd Ziada

The Prisoner of the Day Campaign was created as a response to the alarming yet expected media coverage discrepancy regarding the recent prisoner deal arrived at by Hamas and Israel. While the world is holding its breath for that portentous moment when Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit is back in his mother's arms after five years of captivity in the Gaza strip, the 1027 Palestinian prisoners are treated as an empty numerical entity. This campaign will devote each day for a Palestinian prisoner, either included in the deal or not, as a means of awareness and a reminder that Palestinians will always be humans.

Prisoner of the Day: Majd Mahmoud Ahmad Ziada

Majd Ziada was barely out of his teens when he got arrested by the Israeli Occupation Forces. It was at the height of the second intifada in 2002 when the Israeli army during its collective arrest campaign detained Majd on the evening of the Israeli invasion of the twin cities Ramallah and Al-Bireh. He was 19 years old.

Before he got arrested, Majd enjoyed playing basketball at Ramallah's First Club in al-Tira. With the outbreak of the second intifada however, life became more grim. He lost his best friend who was killed by the Israeli soldiers, and Majd himself was once used as a human shield where he was forced to walk in front of the Israeli tanks. Just before he was due to take his final exams of his senior year (tawjehi) the Occupying Army raided his home and dragged him out where he was bundled into a jeep. His family knew nothing about his whereabouts or condition for fifty days after his arrest. They then learned from a newspaper that he had been beaten up in custody.

When he was four years old, Majd witnessed the arrest the of his politically active father, Mahmoud. He told his dad, "Don't worry Baba, I will take care of my mother and baby sister." In the absence of his father, his mother worked to support the young family. It was left up to Majd to look after his baby sister Raya, as he carried her, fed her, put her to sleep. His father was in and out of prison a total of seven times, and was never once convicted of anything. But because of the mangled policies of administrative detention, it was "legal" to arrest him and keep him detained for any period of time without ever knowing the reason why.

In a 2009 interview, Mahmoud Ziada recalls: "The Israeli soldiers searched our home, then they handcuffed me and took me to the military jeep that was standing in front of our house. As I was climbing into the jeep, my five year old son Majd shouted through the window 'Baba Mahmoud, don't lose courage!'"

Majd accompanied his mother to visit his father in prison, and he used to go with her to national meetings. At demonstrations he would shout national slogans and sing national songs.

Majd with his father and sisters making a human tower

Initially, and for absolutely no reason, Majd was sentenced to 15 years in prison. At his appeal, the military court (which tries all Palestinian prisoners) gave him an extra 15 years for a defiant statement he gave:

"I do not believe in this court because it is an unjust one. I am opposed to the occupation and I will remain opposed to the occupation, so go ahead and sentence me. I will join my brothers and sisters in jail and consider it a badge of honor."

Majd suffers from a life threatening condition. He lost his hearing in his right ear due to acute ear inflammation, which could have been prevented had he received adequate medical attention. There is a huge risk that the disease could spread to the rest of his body, rendering it fatal, and so he desperately needs surgery.

His family are granted rare permission to visit him in prison. For the first seven years of his imprisonment only his youngest sister Hurriyah was able to visit him due to her status as a minor. After she turned sixteen, visits became more harder to procure. Afterwards limited permission was given to their mother to visit him once every few months. Last year Majd's father was finally granted permission by the Israeli Prison Service to see his son. The last time Majd saw his family was two months ago, after a five year gap. Hurriyah and her mother were the lucky ones to go, as only two people are allowed on visits.

His sister Hurriyah has this to say: "I haven't been able to hug my brother Majd Ziada for ten years because of the Israeli Occupation. When Majd was imprisoned I was 12, now I am 22."

Majd Mahmoud Ahmad Ziada has been on hunger strike for 21 days.

Elmaz Abinader Interview

Published by the IMEU .

I had glimpsed Elmaz Abinader a couple of times during my visit to the building in Birzeit that the Palestine Writing Workshop and Palfest jointly share. Her dark curly hair moved enthusiastically as she spoke to her students around the makeshift table in the next room, fitting the lively astute character that one gets an impression from her blog posts on the Red Room online community website. Although Elmaz was born into a Lebanese family, she lived in the US her whole life. Most of her work (Children of the Roojme, a Family’s Journey from Lebanon, In the Country of my Dreams) centers on Arabs or Arab-Americans coping and dealing with antagonistic measures present in their daily lives. It was interesting to see where this particular theme fit within her experience of teaching for the first time in the occupied West Bank, and her perspective on the role of creative writing in Palestine.

You’re involved with VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation). Explain a bit about how the event pans out.
It happens every year, on the campus of Berkeley, and always the last week of June/first week of July. I was actually one of the founders. People have to apply for it. The workshops run for about two weeks, and each week is different. We have very famous writers of color teaching, and about five hundred people apply every year. We accept around one hundred and twenty applicants. Some of them stay in residency where we have it, and they work on their writing for the entire week with a master teacher. We do a big reading at the end. Yeah it’s very special.

What are the tips or advice that you found most helpful?
What happens in the standard American society is that people of color become exoticized. Some people look at their themes, their topics and their stories and think “oh how unusual, how different.” So the actual work on their writing never gets done. This kind of perspective gets in the way. So at VONA we say “ok, we’re all writers of color and we all have these special types of stories, now let’s get to working.” So it gives them a better opportunity to get the development in their writing.

Have you ever travelled to a different country to teach a workshop?
I taught at Egypt for one year [as a Fulbright scholar]. I had a wonderful time there. I’ve mostly taken my performances out of the country. People get in touch with me that way and learn about me through their questions. I spend a lot of time talking to journalists, teachers, radio and television people.

Has there been a particular environment that you found difficult to teach in?
There are different ways that environments can be good and different ways that they can be difficult. For instance in Egypt, it was difficult because students were oriented to tests. So the idea of a classroom discussion, the idea of free thinking, was very hard for them to grasp. I would tell them a story about my life and they’d ask if that was going to be on the test. On the other hand, they were so enthusiastic and open. They were also very easy to teach. Everything has a particular kind of challenge and a particular kind of advantage.

Have you ever worked with disadvantaged youth or minorities?
I don’t really work with youth that much. I mostly work with university students, adults about creative writing and the theories of teaching creative writing. I teach people so that they can in turn teach or work. My university is located in a town called Oakland which is a very integrated place, and I have a project there. Many of the people of color there are not serviced well (the public school system is not that great), so my graduate students go out to the different populations in the city and offer them writing workshops.

Where did you hear about the Palestine Writing Wprkshop? Explain how your workshop- the Writer Cultivator training worked.
[Palestinian-American poet] Suheir Hammad connected me with [the founder], and it went from there. [For the training] we had three different parts to it. One part was I approached the students as writers. I did exercises and activities that showed different approaches to pulling their writing out of them, (even though they are all well-known published writers here in Palestine) yet there’s always another way to go about your writing. And then I approached them as teachers, and I asked them how they planned on going to a population of a particular age they’ve never met before and teach them how to do creative writing, and what they can find inside themselves that makes them good teachers. The final part the students went to teach at four different refugee camps – Jalazon, Qalandiya, Qaddoura, and the Am’ari. Then they would come back to report to me and we would analyze the way their classes went, how they can prepare for their next class, what the sequence of classes needs to be, etc. Their students (the refugee girls) are going to have a celebration at Sakakini Cultural Center, a big reading on July 30th. I’m not going to be here!

There’s a lot of talk about creative economy. How sustainable do you think that will be, particularly in its creative writing form here in Palestine?
I think the possibility is huge, but the steps are going to be small. First of all, you have a very strong literary community. There are key literary figures like Walid Abu-Bakr and venues like the Sakakini Center. The key figures are the strong pillars of the literary community here, and they recognize this need, along with the Palestine Writing Workshop’s philosophy and mission, to create this need. I think you’re going to get a lot of writers and you’re going to get a lot of classes, but the transition to getting publishers and editors is going to be the difficult part. You can send foreigners in here to teach, but you have to create your own publishing industry, it has to be interior money. The job will be to make it so spectacular that people can’t ignore it, like the music scene here, and then when people can’t ignore it they’d want a piece of it.

Are you aware of any writing communities here in Ramallah/West Bank?

Other than PWW and Palfest? No, I just met individual writers and they all seemed to know each other. On Wednesdays we have our classes at La Vie. Last week it was over at 4pm, and my students hung around, they didn’t leave. I left, but they went into the garden and started doing writing exercises with each other. It was so nice. They took advantage of the moment of being together –there were six of them here—and when I came back someone told me that the last student just left. People are hungry for that establishment of community. I have that back at home, where I have five people come over, and we sit and write, then break for lunch, then go back to working on our stuff.

Do you think that writing especially in oppressed societies is used as an outlet to escape one’s reality or as a platform to convey to others what they endure on a daily basis?
One of the things that literature can do is all of those things, but it is better, for me at least, if they do it through narrative and poetic forms. For instance, I know more about World War One from good stories I’ve read and films I’ve seen. When you see peoples’ lives inside a political situation and they tell a story, whether it be a love story or a story about their garden, everything has got to do with how often they’re going to see their lover or how much water their garden needs respectively. In this way literature actually corrects history by bringing it to the people level off of the government level. One problem with getting Palestinian literature outside of Palestine is that you need a range of voices, not just one person or a character that people come to rely on as representing the story of Palestine. We need a variety of voices, for them to be complex and complicated and not always about the political situation, but about everything such as whatever people are dreaming about. I learned the most about Palestinian literature by talking to Walid [Abubakr]. He gave me a really good perspective on who the uppercomers are, and the dearth of writers of the last generation.

What has been the most striking aspect of your current crop of students?
They’re very smart. One of the things I always say in my teaching world is as soon as I stop learning from teaching I will stop teaching. These writers are so creative and so smart and even though they needed some guidance on how to teach, as soon as the door was opened they just took off. They’re also so sweet, offering to take me places on my first day here. I feel like I’ve made friends even though I’m a hundred years older than everybody.

How important is the potential in creative writing in society under occupation?
I think it’s where the most potential is. In the mainstream societies they’ve written themselves into a corner. I feel like I’m reading the same crap over and over. One of the things I’ve fantasized about was creative writing teaching articles, and teachers and creative writers throughout the world would show for example how a story from Palestine and a story from Sri Lanka can have a dialogue in a classroom. Because we have online capabilities, we can go global. There’s a kind of democracy to it that the publishing industry never had, which also means that the crazies can get through [laughs].

Your upcoming memoir The Water Cycle deals with the shaky concept of identity and cultural relationships. Did you feel as a child/teenager that you had to compromise a part of you in order to fit in? Or was it mainly confusion?
My whole childhood. My family lived in a town where there were no other people of color. The pressure to be part of the society, to look like part of the society, act like part of the society, to hide things about our home life was enormous. It was that time in American history where people were ‘assimilationists’, and so my name was changed when I went to school to Alma-Ann, I was dyed blond for a wedding, there were all kinds of pressure. But of course the more you push something the more it pushes back. My Arab ties would be stronger if I spoke Arabic, but I believe that I feel as much part of the Arab diasporic literary community as I do in the American literary community.

What has been the best thing you’ve learned from your students so far?
The best thing I’ve learned from my students is that you can write under any conditions. One of my students was teaching at the Sakakini Center. Her family arrives, she picks up her baby, and she continues teaching. There’s a hunger to be heard.
Writers in the US including myself are always saying I don’t have time I don’t have the space I need to be spoiled but people here have to go through checkpoints, and wait for all kinds of crap before they get to sit down and do their writing.

#PalTweetUp

There are Palestinians living in Palestine who are using Twitter not just to tell the world what they had for breakfast, but also for the potential to disseminate information that could as Joseph Dana said, cut through the lies and narrative control of the western media.

Today's meeting was hatched from the brains of two fellow tweeps, who wanted a space where everyone can finally meet face to face, translating a virtual network into a solid one. I was at the beginning a bit skeptical (did we really have to meet? what if we work better alone than together?) but that was my rays of optimism at work as usual.

In the build-up to the meeting, there was a lot of excitement. We were going to Skype with our brethren in Gaza, and since it's been so long since we've last seen a Gazan we were breathless with anticipation. Would they look like us? Have normal human features? Would they be malnourished and exceedingly thin? Would their accents be as bad as the Yankee twang?

An hour before the scheduled time, I reminded my mother where I was going. She looked at me in disbelief, then accused me of not telling her before. We argued for a bit-apparently after I'd graduated I've been going out way too many times-before she finally asked what we were going to do. I casually mentioned Joseph Dana's name and she shook her head, saying "Whenever a foreigner comes to talk you all get excited, that's what's wrong with this activism thing. They laugh at you and you all lap it up. God I can't wait until your dad is finally allowed back in here."

I should've mentioned to her that Joseph is an American-Israeli. I would have loved to hear her thoughts on that. I was also slightly miffed. She calls me a ghooleh then laments my supposed naivete. Just because I'm the whitest thing in Palestine doesn't mean...

Anyway, I was left with one last chore to do before I finally headed out. When I arrived at Bazinga I was struck by the colorful beanbags on the floor, and tried to mentally match up faces with Twitter names. Someone did the right thing and just asked out loud our names. The next 15 minutes or so were spent trying to connect with the aliens in Gaza, and even then the audio-video quality was choppy.

"Hello can you hear us?"

"Yes habibi. Can you see us?"

"Yep, can you see us?"

"No not really..looks like you're all too far away."

They were sitting at a table in Delice cafe. We were spread out across a room, slouched onto beanbags. They looked eerily just like us. In fact, one of them could challenge me for the whitest thing in Palestine title. We didn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

Finally, a stable enough connection was established. We began doing the introduction rounds. Mine was terribly boring, completely forgot to mention I was also from Gaza and had trained an army of cousins there to do my bidding last time I was there. Then that infiltrator Joseph Dana got up to talk about his flotilla experience on the American ship The Audacity of Hope:

• Basically the flotilla was successful on the level that showed how important a role social media can play.
• He was surrounded by old mostly Jewish women on the boat-not to belittle their endeavors or anything but to highlight the hilarity of Israel's hysterical hyperbole of the boat being part of a major security threat to Israel
• A complaint was filed, later known to be from an Israeli legal center in Athens about the boat not being sea-worthy
• His opinion is that they should have sailed within the same hour they got wind of the complaint
• The crew and passengers were sitting in their hotel rooms talking incessantly of when they were going to set sail
• When they finally did, it was a demonstration of "hippie language on steroids" on the deck, a lot of hugging, excess emotion that got annoying for a while

Then the discussion fell about as to how to use Twitter wisely. A lot of strategic thinking needs to go into how to use Twitter because ultimately it's all about getting the best message through to most people. So we must reign in our moral righteousness and reserve using terms like "Apartheid" or "IOF" when talking about Israel as we would be largely written off as jihadists, peace-hating Ayrabs, terrorists, etc. Less is more. If we use simple neutral words to describe Israel in the same sentence that mention house evictions in Sheikh Jarrah or the invisible ethnic cleansing taking place in the Jordan Valley, the discrepancy will be all the more obvious.

Then it was the Gaza tweeps to offer us something. Unfortunately they were too shy to sing GYBO's latest song The Mystery/اللغز but they did propose to lip-sync along while the link played. The organizers of this tweet-up got in touch with Bilal Tamimi, one of the main documenters in the village, and asked him if he could make a compilation video of the protests in Nabi Saleh. As the familiar faces of the villagers flickered across the screen I felt so honored to know them personally, for them to have taken me in so readily, as their own sister and daughter and friend. It was set to the soundtrack of my childhood, يا نبض الضفة which along with the song Onadikom never fails to get me at least a little emotional. The first song has the story of Lina Nabulsi, the 14 year old schoolgirl who was shot back in 1976 as one of its refrain, and my nine year old egotistical self in a weird twisted way believed that song was made in my honor.

The audio-video connection became more shaky, and in the middle of discussing the need for an independent news website (later to be turned romantically into a newspaper) the connection was lost, most likely because the electricity went out in Gaza. I would have loved for those tweeps to have pitched in with their ideas and opinions but plans are already being made for next time to accomplish some proper and much needed interaction and conversations. Here in Ramallah, we are wondering why in Gaza the youth don't criticize Hamas more, either viciously or in matter of fact way.

Anyway, everyone agreed that the idea of a representative media forum is imperative, especially since Palestinian media is rubbish and to put it quite nicely, we have serious reservations about Ma'an News Agency, both English and Arabic. The brainstorming began: correspondences from the West Bank, Gaza, '48 areas, the diaspora ("sorry for the divisions!"), the issue of internet security, the whole not-everyone-who-blogs-can-write-newsworthy-pieces colloquy, the content, the web design, etc.

Overall, it was simply refreshing to be in the presence of honest, smart, intelligent people with no political affiliations whatsoever (except for that infiltrator). It wasn't enough to just talk but also to share suggestions, plan productively, all for the hopes of breaking the stagnated work of Palestinian youths under occupation.

Shakira Ya Hakira

Back when Al-Jazeera dropped the bomb on the Palestine Papers in January, we realized what absolute tools we had for Facebook friends. They had changed their profile pictures to a big red smoking ban ring on Al-Jazeera's logo, and statuses were were of slander toward the channel. The PA organized protests in Ramallah with one huge banner reading "Al-Jazeera = Sahyouniyeh/Zionism". It was pretty hilarious, but nothing compared to the catchy chants started up by the goons: Ya Jazeera Ya Haqira.

Haqir: /hackir/ noun, adjective; singular masculine form. A bastard, a lowlife, a scoundrel. Singular feminine form is haqira.

*The /h/ is the Arabic pharyngeal 'h' sound, not the English fricative. The /i/ is a long 'ee'. We may be showing our major here a bit too much.

Anyway, we've fallen behind on posting BDS successes or their targeted campaigns at the next entertainer to perform in the only democracy in the Middle East. Shakira, she of Columbian and Lebanese descent, ignored all the letters and attempts to educate her fluffy mainstream cougar head about Israeli occupation and Apartheid, and horribly splintered the hearts of millions of Arab men with THIS:

Grosssssss. And Pique, your hotness level definitely plummeted too. Thank goodness for Xavi and Dahhvid Villa.

In her speech, Shakira went on to spout some nonsensical blather about Israel being the mother of all cultures, apparently ignorant of the fact that Israel is only 63 years old.

Award winning actress and writer Najla Said penned a letter to the diva, which sums up everything we're too lazy to properly express:

Dear Shakira,
Since your trip to Israel this week was ostensibly one of “good will” and humanity, and since in your speech to the Israeli Presidential Conference you stated that you are “convinced…that investing in education is the best strategy for peace and global stability,” I am going to give you an education. In humanity and solidarity. 

Let me start by saying that I was a fan of yours before your mainstream American commercial success. I loved your Spanish albums, and I loved you for seeming like a rebellious little punk who dyed her hair funny colors and sang melodiously along to crunchy “rock ‘n’ roll” guitar riffs about how messed up you were over a boy. You reminded me of the Spanish Alanis Morrissette. When you released your first English language album, I was a little sad that the whole world would know about you, but I was also excited for them to, because you loved to talk about being Lebanese. So even though your English lyrics were laughable and you dyed your hair blonde and became a Britney Spears clone like they all do, you were still you, shaking your hips and banging your drums and telling the world that belly dancing was in your blood, because you are Lebanese. And when Wyclef Jean said, “Let me see you move like you come from Colombia,” as you did your famous hip gyrations, a few of us who are also Lebanese cringed, but we got over it because we were proud of you. 

Don’t get me wrong, Shaki, I don’t want you to go back to being your younger self. I am glad that you, like Alanis, grew up and discovered love, peace and happiness, but you might have thought a bit about what it means to be educated before you spoke publicly about how important it is. I don’t expect you to be “political.” I know you are an entertainer and it’s not your job to “be political.” But you made yourself political from day one by showing off your Lebanese-ness. 

Here is the thing about being Lebanese or Arab; you kind of have to love us for who we are and what we feel as much as you love us for our hummus and our belly dancing because for the first time in a long time we are proud of where we are from and are able to speak out about injustices that have been committed against us and our loved ones for decades. And here you are, making us feel shitty and hurt. You weren’t an Orientalist before because you seemed to be one of us, but now, my love, you are. 

The modern state of Israel shares geography, but nothing more, with the “Abrahamic” religions that may have originated there.
As a UN goodwill ambassador, you maybe should have thought about the hundred or so (give or take) UN resolutions that the State of Israel has defied before hugging their President, Shimon Peres. You might have thought of visiting Gaza instead of one of the rare schools in Israel proper, where Israeli and Arab children, who are fortunate enough to be allowed citizenship, learn together. In 2006, you spoke out against the Israeli war on Lebanon, and called for an end to the fighting. In your statement, you said, “We do not need leaders who create dispute, anger and hate, but rather leaders who care about the people and their needs.” Well, your lips lied on that one, honey. Again, I need only to point to your ridiculous love fest with Peres at the Israeli Presidential Conference yesterday to prove my point. People who actually believe in peace and goodwill do not ignore half the people in the equation when they set out to perform acts of peace and good will. They don’t hug former military leaders (even ones who have a Nobel Peace Prize), and they don’t say things like this: 

“I am very happy to be in Israel, because I believe this is the perfect place to talk about how urgent it is to make education a priority. Israel has been a great melting pot of cultures for so many centuries. It will continue to be. In my song ‘Waka Waka,’ I sang how we are all Africa. Today I want to say that as part of western civilization we are all the inheritors of an Abrahamic culture and a soul that has been forged here; therefore, we are all Israel, too.” 

We are not all Israel, Shakira, and that’s the point. The modern State of Israel shares geography, but nothing more, with the “Abrahamic” religions that may have originated there. Some of us are Palestinian and cannot be Israeli. Some of us are from Gaza and cannot even go to Israel. Some of us are Lebanese and have been bombed by Israel. Some of us are Jewish and don’t believe in what Israel says and does. That doesn’t mean it has no right to exist; it does, but so do we. 

And since you spoke of children and education, I’d like to leave you with something that Alice Walker said the other day about her decision to ride on the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza. It sums up everything I am trying to say much more beautifully than I ever could:
“I see children, all children, as humanity’s most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left. One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe. 

As adults, we must affirm, constantly, that the Arab child, the Muslim child, the Palestinian child, the African child, the Jewish child, the Christian child, the American child, the Chinese child, the Israeli child, the Native American child, etc., is equal to all others on the planet. We must do everything in our power to cease the behavior that makes children everywhere feel afraid.” 

Thank you for your time, Miss Mubarak (Hey, come to think of it, are you related to the dude who ran Egypt for a really long time? Because that would explain EVERYTHING!).
Love,
Najla

PS What in the name of flying fudgecrackers is up with her latest music video? We felt like 16 again when we used to get that nascent guilty feeling of watching something that starts with DO NOT WATCH IF NOT 18 OR OVER. Crap, no not porn dammit.

And now we move on to Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine. We're not even going to pretend to know who this is but a quick Wikipedia search tells us that he's an American singer, spoken word artist and leading figure of the Green Party. He's also an anarchist, supports various political causes, and advocates direct cause and pranksterism in the name of said political causes. Great, so where does that fit into his awareness about Israeli occupation and Apartheid? Oh, it doesn't. But the pressure was so great on him and his band. A petition was signed by thousands. His Facebook page turned into a spam-fest of Zionist trolling (and religious warfare by the "proper" Muslims) after activists appealed to him not to play in Tel Aviv citing reasons and resources and overwhelming evidence. He finally pulled out, and wrote the most wet blanket letter we've ever read:

Dear Friends,
Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine are not going through with the July 2 date in Tel Aviv. This does not mean I or anyone else in the band are endorsing or joining lockstep with the boycott of all things Israel.


I am going to Israel and Palestine to check things out myself and may yet conclude that playing for people in the belly of the beast was the right thing to do in the first place.


The toll and stress on the band members and myself has been huge, both logistically and as a matter of conscience. I can't drag anyone any further into rough waters without being better prepared than some of us thought we were. A responsible leader does not go, 'Hey, check out the storm at the top of Mount Everest. Let's go up anyway just in case we don't die.' Some members are angry with me for this decision, let alone how long it took me. I don't blame them.


It would have been so easy to quietly pass on the gig out of fear someone might get upset, and no one would have been the wiser. We could have flown under the radar, left the date off our tour postings and not bothered with a statement, but how honest is that?


Our intention in going was that we thought we could do some good , speaking truth to power, fans and impressionable young minds in a way that most bands don't. What about the people on the same side of the human rights fence we are who now don't get to see us play? Should they be boycotted too? What about the even larger atrocities of the Bush regime and by extension Obama? Should we turn off our mouths of anger and boycott our own country too?


We tried again and came close to landing a Ramallah show, but again, we needed to be better prepared. How fair is it to the organizers to demand a full-on rock show on a few days' notice with a type of music they may not be familiar with? More importantly, how much are we really doing for Palestinian rights if people there don't seem interested in our kind of music at all?


I've been doing this long enough to know better than buy into hardline absolutes such as playing in Israel automatically supports apartheid or Israel's government. That threat is ridiculous. I know far more about this issue than some people think I do, and I am not a poodle for Hasbara, Peace Now, BDS or anyone else.


The first people contacting us went out of their way to be diplomatic and communicate how they felt. Then our Facebook page went from eye-opening and educational to a childish bickerfest between a handful of people, to the point where we had to try something else just to reclaim our own Facebook page.


As the gloves came off, unfortunately so did some of the masks. Calling anyone speaking up for Palestinian rights a 'terrorist' is dumb. So are the blanket condemnations of everyone who happens to be Israeli that seem to be coming from the 'drive all the Jews into the sea' crowd. I also even got an invitation from a self-proclaimed fan to 'come meet the Israeli right' and see the settlements through their eyes, complete with a wine-tasting party. Whew!


Whoever started punksagainstapartheid.com now admits it was aimed solely at one person - me. It is obvious that not everyone signing the petition has any idea who I am, or knows anything about punk, possibly the majority. The last time I looked I could only find three names of people I actually knew. Some made it clear that I will be on their bad list no matter what I do because I dared to even think of playing in Israel.


I can't back anyone whose real goal or fantasy is a country ethnically cleansed of Jews or anyone else. Where people who think for themselves or talk to the wrong person are automatically a sell out. Speaking personally, I currently favor two democratic states in the admittedly naive hope that in our lifetime they can somehow evolve into one. Where race or religion does not matter because people have learned to work with each other.


I think back to last year when JBGSM played in Serbia. The locals we spent time with were not monsters, and filled me in on how they risked their necks for years opposing and demonstrating against Milosevic and were not down with ethnic cleansing at all. But they weren't too happy about being bombed by NATO for over 2 months straight either, and showed the ruined buildings to prove it.


I also heard comments like, 'The Croats killed my grandfather in World War II. I can't forget that...' and 'There's another war coming soon. I can feel it.' The most I could do from the stage is say that I do not know what I would do if the Croats or Serbs killed my grandfather, or a suicide bomber or occupying army killed my child. But I would hope I would be one of those people who could somehow say, 'Can't we have some peace?' The audience seemed to appreciate that.


The next day I laid out my thoughts and emotions to the person giving me a ride in Slovenia. She turned ice cold and said, 'Maybe next time you should play in Bosnia.' Good point. The nightmare continues.


Rise Above,


Jello Biafra

There is so much to criticize here. If he performed in Ramallah that makes it ok for him to play in Tel Aviv?

BEEEEE
DEEEEE
ESSSSS

So the point missed him completely. Of course, he couldn't have followed the meek path of those performers who cancelled their gigs in Israel, citing "professional reasons" or something of the other. Nope, he had to be honest to his fans. It will be interesting to see what his impressions are after checking out 'Palestine/Israel' for himself.

Nora Barrows-Friedman, staff writer and editor for The Electronic Intifada, rolled her eyes at Jello's letter too:

Biafra’s decision to cancel the Tel Aviv gig is the right one, but he still seems under the impression that the boycott is a fringe movement that he has the right to ignore.

In his statement, Biafra also concludes quite naively that if he had also booked a gig in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, it would have put the entire debate to rest — as though playing a show in Tel Aviv and playing a show in Ramallah would have been an equitable move. However he doesn’t understand that playing a show in Tel Aviv in the first place is a direct violation of the Palestinian-led boycott call, no matter wherever else one happens to play. If an artist performs for money in Tel Aviv, he is crossing the boycott line. And Palestinians leading the BDS call will not be placated or amused by a token gig in a ghetto bantustan in the West Bank.

Read the rest of her article here.

And next time, we won't wait a week to finally type this up.

Getting to Know the Birawees

So what do you know about Ramallah's twin city, Al-Bireh? More importantly, what do you know about the Birawiya or as they're known in the Arabgaleez (Arabic + Ingleezi) language, Birawees?

First of all, make sure you refer to Al-Bireh as a city, not as a town or a village despite its colloquial rural patois. Birawees are touchy about that. They've got an immense load of pride which gives off the impression that they're full of themselves, which is absolutely true. And before we go on, we must give off the disclaimer that the rest of this post will be full of stereotypes and generalizations to further enrich that Orientalist mind and make the enlightened liberal one shake its head sanctimoniously.

One thing that is quite obvious from the start is that Birawees are a bunch of stuck-up racists. We're both half-Birawees, and our non-Birawee mother and father have always been referred to as ghareeba/ghareeb i.e. strangers. The offspring are then looked at in a condescending manner. Those poor urchins...suffering from the demise of being a half-blood. Jesus Christ we're reminded of Harry Potter, Mudbloods, Purebloods, and Half-bloods. Every year Muntaza Al-Bireh, a public park with a huge fountain in the middle and a building with wedding halls in it host a dinner for all of the Birawee graduates of high school. We weren't invited. We didn't lose any sleep over it of course. That's just their screwball mentality. The women wail when their daughter gets married to someone outside Al-Bireh, and say "gharrabna bintna!" which means we have foreignified (or alienated, to use proper English) our daughter.

Long ago, the Birawees were known for being rich mother-heifers because they owned so much land. This lead to some back-stabbing, double-dealing, and subterfuge as the males in the family swindled the inheritance papers so that their six sisters (and if the male was a real asshole, his four brothers also) wouldn't get a share. The father would die, thinking that even in death his words will be final, not suspecting the craftiness of his youngest son or his good for nothing firstborn who change the will barely after the earth settled on the father's grave. Of course, this birthed very strained family ties and relationships for the future generations, who know no God when it comes to land and money. Til this day, there are grandchildren who do not know their second or third cousins because their grandfathers were at each other's throats over this issue. Nevertheless, it has not lessened the supercilious attitude. That's because the next generation immigrated to the United States, made their money in grocery stores, liquor stores, gas stations, various 7/11's, etc. So they were still filthy rich. Some dragged their families years later back to Al-Bireh, where their children would moan about how boring the "blad" is and how the Palestinians living here are such boaters. The money earned would be showing its class in monstrous architecture that pass for villas. The men who worked for 35 years behind the cashier would die in the States from diabetes, lung cancer, high blood pressure, kidney failure, osteoporosis, rheumatism all rolled up into one package. The smarter ones sell their stores after 30 years and come back to their hometown to open up a pizzeria or some other quaint project, and spend the rest of their lives holed up in the dirty coffee shops right next to the Omari mosque.

The sons of these old men marry American women, have a kid, and then get a divorce. They go back to Al-Bireh to marry a proper Muslim bint il-balad, then return to the States and have five more kids. The kid from the American woman is discarded somewhere. When the five children reach their teens, the parents move the daughters back to Al-Bireh in order for them to remain chaste virgins and not the hoochie mama sluts who dress in short shorts and tank tops, have boyfriends and go to school with. The sons remain in America, finish high school and start working at the respective grocery store/liquor store/gas station etc. They make a little money, grow even more thick-headed, and believe that they are God's gift to everything. They wear jerseys and jeans that can fit a whale, have about five custom made Nike shoes, and shop at Rocawear. "Education, who needs university when I'm making money already. No Ma, I don't want to get married. I tried banging the local stripper and all I got out of it was two freakin kids." They do end up getting married, well into their thirties, and they will not settle for a bride unless she's a 17 year old virgin that lived all her life in Al-Bireh, and who gets sold off by her father because his future son-in-law has US citizenship which automatically means moolah. Those who immigrated to America and breed generations there come back with the same damn mentality of everything is haram and everything is 3eib.

The daughters who are "lucky" enough to be trusted by their parents not to turn into hoochie mama sluts and so continue living unabated in the US come every summer to Al-Bireh, pretending that they hate the chaotic backward lifestyle but secretly kill themselves over finding a husband. These girls take the Ramallah perverts too seriously, curse the taxi drivers because he can't understand their chopped up Arabic, and think that if they wear a knee length skirt they will be branded as Americanized Britney Sbears and so consider it a sacrifice on their part to dress in longer sleeves and not wear capris. They are also the same ones who dress to the nines at every single wedding in the summer, even the ones that they're not invited to, all in the hopes of finding a suitable husband, one that comes from the same mold as they do. The girls are essentially all clones of each other. Sometimes you see them walking in large packs either late afternoon or at night, their Snooki poofs visible from a mile away, their straightened hair lying dead on their shoulders, dressed in the same skinny jeans (Seven if you please) and that inevitable purse swinging from their arms. These girls have devalued what a Coach bag is. The savvier ones are moving on to Michael Kors and Louis Vuitton, but the Coach bag is a staple of the masses' wardrobe. Despite coming here every summer they still don't have the wits to figure out that speaking English (especially their lightning speed nasalized tone) in public will cause store owners to triple their prices and get chased by a greasy haired bunch.

It's a whole Little America in Al-Bireh during summertime. The streets are suddenly flocked with jersey-wearing Amrikan with their sagging jeans and silver chains bouncing off their chests, and the weddings are full of pencil skirt wearing girls who size each other up based on whose got the biggest flash factor.

Now let's get in the clan divisions. I believe there are five in total: Karakra, Tawil, Hamayel, Quran, and Abed. Even within Al-Bireh the stereotypes attached to each clan are well known and well made fun of.

Karakra: Not much is known about this small clan other than that they are an arrogant bunch. The joke is that they put on airs when they number a total of 14 members as everyone else is in the US or dead.

Tawil: This clan is known for its superior, haughty vainglorious nature. It is so true. They point their chins forward, flare their nostrils, and look down their noses at everything and everyone. They can only have nothing but the best. The best houses, the best cars, the designer clothes, the best looking wives and daughters, etc. They make others want to smack the shit out of them.

Hamayel: In Arabic we say "Hamayel are habayel" i.e. Hamayel are stupid. The mean people go a step further and say "Hamayel are hamayel". The "h" in the first word pronounced like the numeric transliteration of "7", as in Hmar/7mar (donkey.) The second "h" is is regular English sounding H. The second word means degenerates, lowlifes, ruffians, etc. Rumors (and overwhelming evidence) has it that some families are into the drug trade. We are so gonna get quartered for this post.

Quran: This clan is one of the largest. It is huge. They are known for being hilariously cheapskates. Like, really cheap. They give the most extravagant weddings, the only time where they will actually spend money, but they sleep on cardboard because they don't want to invest in mattresses, never mind beds. The girls with braces get married early so that their husbands will pay the orthodontist bills. The women have a whole closet full of gold jewelry but whatever happens they will never ever ever sell their stash, even if their nephew back in Louisiana faces up to 5 years in prison if he's unable to pay the 5000 dollar bail.

Abed: Another large clan. Dar Abed are known for being essentially astoundingly stupid. They're, quite simply, airheads. They love the color red, like their Arabic coffee too sweet, and can't mentally add up beyond the number ten. When it comes to another round of "Whose the Best" they are always at loggerheads with Dar Quran, as Dar Tawil are sooo above those trivial matters, Dar Hamayel are busy getting caught with crack stashed behind the embroidered pillows, and Dar Karakra are too busy weeping over their infinitesimal lot.

The Birawee women are a peculiar bunch. They know exactly who your parents are from the first look, even if you've never ever met each other before. One time I was walking home from somewhere. The sun had just set, my crap music was blaring through my headphones, and the lovely breeze put me in a good mood. A bunch of old women were walking slowly in front of me. I passed by them, made the mistake of mumbling good evening-damn my good upbringing-, and a conversation started.

"Inti bint meen? Whose daughter are you?"

"Uh..my grandma is-" I hate that question. It goes without saying that they automatically assume you're from Al-Bireh. It makes me spill out my whole life story, and my parents' too. It's unheard of that a young woman from Al-Bireh would marry a young man from Gaza (a refugee no less).

"Ahhh, I knew you were Manal's daughter! Look, its the blood my dear. It's in your face."

"I'm..I'm kinda in a rush now.."

"We know your aunts too! Didn't they all get married into Dar Tawil? Of course they did! Good for them."

These women find brides for their sons by flicking through high school yearbooks. They start from the seniors' page, then go down to the sophomores'. Their sons can be the most idiotic shithead in the world, with no degree to his name who lives off his parents' money, but the girl must be an angel. She must be young so she can be raised up by her husband and his family. She must be well brought up. She must be docile, doe-eyed, and pure. She must be tall and slender. She must be white with fair hair and blue eyes. The guy can work in a bar, have a few girlfriends back in America, and maybe a kid or two that no one is supposed to find out about. He can drink, he can be abusive, he can do whatever the hell he wants but the girl must fit the upper criterion. A perfect match.

The white skin..dear oh dear. A bride was found for a cousin. She was perfect, had all of the excellent qualities, was educated, demure, religious, had American citizenship. But she was...samra. Too dark for their taste. And by dark I mean cafe au lait dark. Sorry, fsh naseeb!

Weddings are simply an occasion to show off the most expensive embroidered thobe and the heavy weight of gold around their necks, heads, and wrists. When we were younger, we enjoyed going just for the dabke and dancing. Then we quickly found out that we were simply prey for the old wizened vultures. One time when I was 15, a veiny hand shot out and snaked itself around my waist, pulling me from my friends and the dance floor.

"Inti bint meen habibti?"

That time I had figured out the magic word. I felt so smart. I played on their racism.

I shouted, "My dad's from GAZA!"

The veiny hand shot back. "Gaza?!?" She gave me the most disgusted putrefying look.

I was still young enough to feel insulted so I muttered "bitch", a big word for my innocent soul, and went back out on the dance floor.

Heba's had her own share of matchmakers knocking on her house. She's the baby of the family, with three older sisters who at that time were unmarried. The matchmaker wasn't having any of it, reiterating that 16 was a perfect age. The matchmaker finally left, feeling thoroughly insulted.

It gets worse when they find out you have American citizenship, which they call "ceetizen". They will literally HOUND you. Back when I had a heart I actually burst into tears because this woman and her crone of a friend were so fucking relentless. Never mind I was still in high school and had my own plans for the future. What the hell was I waiting for? He's a really good guy, he has his own grocery store here next to Masjid Ali and wants a ceetizen wife. No, of course he's not gonna dump your ass after he gets ceetizen. And if he does, well that's your fault since during the green card months you ran out of ways to entertain him.

What's your father's name?

Please fuck off.

What's his name? Your family's name? Come on.

Ignoring you right now.

Look, write it down, don't be shy now.

[My eyes blur.]

You-you're her friend right? Write down her father's name.

Despite all of this, despite this mountain load of shit, we are privy enough to know that other cities and villages and towns hold the same stereotypical view. The Birawees are loaded, their mother in laws are complete busybody hyenas, the women are known for their sharp tongue and forceful attitudes (she's a kawiya!) and the men are a spiritless lot behind their walls of cash. This may be true in some cases, God knows everyone knows each other's life stories, but again you must dismiss everything that's been said here as a fat generalization. Wait, why the apologetic tone? It's all true man.

PS It's wildly known among the older folk that Elizabeth Taylor, she of the violet eyes Sophia Loren, is originally from Al-Bireh. Her parents died when she was a toddler and so she was sent to some orphanage school in Bethlehem where she got adopted by an American family. True story.

UPDATE: For those spitting at me because "your families aren't like that at all" I wasn't aware I was writing about them specifically. For those who are digging on my mother (one of your own!) stop it immediately. For those who analyzed that I must be an angry jealous bitch because not one single rich Birawee asked for my hand, how the hell did you know that! Best explanation there is. Shucks.

PalFest This Year

PalFest generally is something we all look forward to, but a number of things made the event when it came to Birzeit University this year anti-climatic. At least for us. First of all, there was barely anything done to herald the coming of PalFest on campus. Last year we were involved within a large group of volunteers who acted as each writer's personal guide/barnacle as we lead them here and there. We spent the week leading up stapling PalFest posters in every building all around campus, breaking nails as we battled with rusty tacks and stiff boards. On the actual day classes were suspended for the students majoring in English as it was mandatory to sign up for and participate in a workshop. This year, not many students were aware of when PalFest was actually going to take place, and when Monday the 18th rolled around everyone went to their classes/loitered in the cafeterias as usual, thus missing out on the plenary held in the Kamal Nassar building. For those who had classes at 11 am, they were surprised to see a foreigner sitting at the teacher's desk. So in a way, students were forced to attend workshops they didn't sign up for because a) they knew nothing about the whole thing, and b) lack of organizational and advertising skills, which is what point (a) is about but we felt we had to compensate for our blunder by sounding insipidly smart.

Initially we had signed up for two separate workshops with Bidisha, because her name is cool and her lack of a surname appeals to us, in a way that Madonna did for damaged hair broken housewives back in the 1930's. Also, in Arabic "bideesh" means "I don't want to", and we are a couple of very easily amused nut cases. Sadly, as it transpired, we didn't actually have a choice in attending the workshop.

Our Shakespeare class was occupied by the kindly Anne Chisholm, a journalist and critic who wrote four biographies about surely fascinating people. The class/workshop was spent by students asking her questions about biography-writing, how does a person feel when they know that someone else is writing a book about their life, and simply, "Is it fun?" Anne enjoys the experience and said that the best part for her was doing all the research prior to the actual writing. Yes, we'd like to research every tidbit of Johnny Depp's life and entitle the book as Johnny Depp, the Freedom Fighter That Never Was. That is such a best-seller title right there. Then we all did a little exercise, where everyone had to pick a person to write about and mention four reasons  for doing so. Heba chose her dad, Linah picked Vittorio Arrigoni.

And that, for us, was that. Compared to what happened last year (appealing to God to stop making Remi Kanazi such a douchebag, which turned out to be everyone's first impression of  him ["Hi, I'm famous, google me and you'll see"] but who is actually such a down to earth humorous guy, to expanding with love in the presence of Adam Foulds and Nathalie Handal's sweet, sweet natures) this year we have no memorable anecdotes. So we enlisted  the help of two fellow students, who shared with us their account of what went down from their perspective.

Fawziah AbuAllan didn't know what to expect in a workshop with John McCarthy:

For the fourth consecutive year, BZU took a day to host the Palestaine Festival for literature. Many poets, authors, and other literary figures from abroad were invited so that they could share with us their experience through the workshops that were held.


I was lucky for having this chance to meet one of the authors in person, John McCarthy, who wrote about his trauma after being captured in Lebanon and held as a hostage for five years in Beirut, a prisoner in Lebanon.
 After John introduced himself, he asked us to write about our own traumas, and how we felt about them. I wrote about my brother's death. I couldn't finish reading it because I couldn't help myself but to cry. It was really emotional for all of us because we shared personal information we didn't know about each other. We had something in common; all of us have this kind of memory which makes us fall apart whenever we remembered or talked about it. After he heard our stories, he was impressed or in his own words, " amazed". I remember him saying, "I'm sorry, I'm just a journalist and you are the real poets!" We were happy to hear this, because his words were just sublime, exactly what we needed to hear whenever we felt tired and frustrated by life under occupation. He gave us the motive to write and to continue writing what we began because Palestinians are the only ones who can write about what is considered as "The Real Story", away from the banal media coverage.
This unforgettable experience will be always in my heart and mind because I took something precious from it: his words, advice, and motivation.

Alice Yousef accomplished one of her dreams by meeting her role model:

Palfest, the Palestine Festival of Literature is one event that I wait for every year as it graces Palestine with its presence in April. I have been passionately waiting for Palfest this year, as I had an amazing experience with Palfest last year. It happened that this year Palfest turned out to be more than rewarding, starting from my experience with two workshops at Birzeit University and ending on the ground at Al-Sakakini Cultural Center. On Monday, Palfest gave amazing workshops for the BZU English majors.. it was very much a gratifying experience as we got to share our writings with famous authors who in turn shared their experience, writings and books with us. This year attending the workshops at university was different, because sadly there was no reading. The workshops however were a natural flow or creativity. Yet with no reading at university I craved for good literature. Having heard of a reading at Al-Sakakini Cultural Center, I decided not to miss it and was glad I didn’t. The reading opened in a small room, crowded with faces, some familiar..others not so much. Hearing the writers and intellectuals speak was an experience by itself, empowering and inspiring for an emerging writer/poet as . It was much later that I could take it all in, as I am still over the clouds for the chance that was handed to me: talking to one of my role-models in writing Alice Walker, who was very down to earth and executes passion for life and writing . Being there at Palfest still leaves a mark on my life, that’s why I’ll still wait for Palfest next year.

TedxRamallah

Inspire and be inspired. That's what it is ultimately about.

A good friend of mine put me in contact with the event's organizer, Ramzi Jaber. We exchanged emails, and he asked if I would like to be on the blogging team, to post on the TedxRamallah website during or after each session. I leaped at the chance-hello, graduating soon, must build up résumé- after informing my teacher to pretty please postpone my exam on Saturday. I admit I might have told her that the whole event rested on my shoulders and that it was imperative for me to go.

Heba was supposed to attend with me but she backed out at the last minute. Instead, it was just me and the mother. We got up at 6am, something we both haven't done in the longest time, and I busied myself with trying to find an economical way to dry my newly washed jeans. The iron wasn't working, neither was the hair straightener, the blow dryer would wake up the whole building...I considered just putting them on wet where they would sap my body heat, but in the end I turned on the soba and steamed them.

Even though the event is called TedxRamallah, it was actually held all the way in Bethlehem because the venue in Ramallah wasn't ready yet. We hurried through downtown and as we came into the parking lot where the buses were scheduled to be, we saw them slowly rumbling down past us. Shoot. Cue Mama griping how it was all my fault being late. Luckily, there was one micro-bus due to arrive shortly, and we climbed in with the other late arrivals gratefully. The hour and a half twisty turning trip began.

What is TED? It stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. The little x means that it is an independently organized TED event. From their website:

TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. Started as a four-day conference in California 25 years ago, TED has grown to support those world-changing ideas with multiple initiatives. The annual TED Conference invites the world’s leading thinkers and doers to speak for 18 minutes. Their talks are then made available, free, at TED.com. TED speakers have included Bill Gates, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sir Richard Branson, Nandan Nilekani,Philippe Starck, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Isabel Allende and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The annual TED Conference takes place in Long Beach, California, with simulcast in Palm Springs; TEDGlobal is held each year in Oxford, UK. TED’s media initiatives include TED.com, where new TEDTalks are posted daily, and the Open Translation Project, which provides subtitles and interactive transcripts as well as the ability for any TEDTalk to be translated by volunteers worldwide.

TED has established the annual TED Prize, where exceptional individuals with a wish to change the world are given the opportunity to put their wishes into action; TEDx, which offers individuals or groups a way to host local, self-organized events around the world, and the TEDFellows program, helping world-changing innovators from around the globe to become part of the TED community and, with its help, amplify the impact of their remarkable projects and activities.

The remarkable speaker line-up include Huwaida Arraf, who co-founded the International Solidarity Campaign, Steve Sosebee, the founder and CEO of the Palestine Children Relief Fund, Raja Shehadeh author of award winning Palestine Walks, Alice Walker the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, Suad Amiry architect and founder of Riwaq as well as the author of hilarious novel Sharon and My Mother in-Law, and many more. Providing the entertainment were Nazareth songbird Rim al Banna, hip hop group DAM, and-be still my fluttering heart- all round philanthropist, spoken word artist, and wager of beauty Mark Gonzales.

We arrived at the Convention Palace, and stood in the huge line to get our badges. After that I went inside with the other bloggers who were already firing up their laptops and ready to go. There wasn't a room or whatever to accommodate us so we had to sit in the last two rows on one side. I peered into my bag and grimaced. I decided to get it over with.

"My laptop is ancient so don't make fun of it. And the battery lasts for half an hour so I need to be near the socket."

To which the rest of the team replied:

"Hey, my battery lasts that long too."

"Yeah mine doesn't last that long either, we'll take it in turns to plug in."

"Or some of us could share a laptop since we all won't be writing at the same time."

Awesome, they weren't those annoying 'look-at-me! Ive-got-a-Mac-and-I-just-like-swiping-my-fingers-here-and-there-and-windows-will-magically-appear' types I half expected them to be. We settled down, and watched hundreds and hundreds of people file past us, going down the stairs and taking their seats.

The event was to be live-streamed to Beirut and Amman, with 17 other cities watching. The hosts Jameel Abu-Warda and Huwaida Arraf kicked things off with Raja Shehadeh being the first speaker. Some speakers couldn't make it to Behtlehem/Palestine in general because of their visas. Wael Attili was one of these victims and he spoke to us via Amman. He's the co-founder of the Kharabeesh network, where story-telling takes place through cartoons. Kharabeesh means "scribbles" in Arabic and Wael shared the story of how one day his little daughter proudly told her class that her dad works for Kharabeesh and went home crying because they all laughed at her.

I'm not going to describe each speaker since there are hundreds of thousands of tweets that already did that, but I'll just pick the stand-out talks I really enjoyed. Huwaida Arraf managed to get all us teary-eyed as she talked about Vittorio Arrigoni, a man she personally knew, and described him as a beautiful soul who was more Palestinian than other Palestinians. It really is depressing to lose such a monumental activist, a man who had a larger than life personality and was simply passionate about Palestine. Activists don't come like that every day.
Fadi Ghandour, the CEO for Aramex and founder of Ruwwad for Development shared his experiences with his attempts to better the community of Jabal al-Nathief located in Amman. There are 75,000 people living there and only 62 trash cans. Jabal al-Nathief (Mountain of Clean) is filthy. That means 1209 people for every one trash can. So the first thing Ruwwad did was to instill more trash cans. However there was a dire lack of facilities and institutions. There wasn't even a police station. And so Ruwwad got to work, opening up a library that kids voluntarily choose to enter, an IT lab that gives free lessons to all, improved classrooms, a project to get children to read for 6 minutes every day-after some UN organization concluded that the average Arab child reads for 6 minutes a year. Handicapped people weren't left out either; they made use of their hands and learned how to make pottery, recently putting on an exhibition for the first time. But it wasn't all easy sail as Fadi faced a lot of prolonged delays and uncooperative behavior from the thousand and one Jordanian ministries who like to hoard money and now and then sprinkle out a few coins to the plebeians.
Mohamed El Dahshan is a writer and economist who blogged up the revolution in Egypt from the very first day. He earnestly relayed to us how the impressive aerial shots of Tahrir Square failed to capture the true essence of the revolution: the up close and central lives of the partaking people. As Mohamed said, "I think we had the funnest revolution ever."
Julia Bacha, the Brazilian filmmaker also made an absorbing speech at which point I was loudly but internally cursing my laptop, myself, and the whole Internet nation since the two pieces I had written so far disappeared into oblivion, which meant I missed much of Julia's talk about how cognitive dissonance brings about change.
Munir Fasheh, a professor at BZU had us all in stitches as he eloquently and entertainingly made his argument. The education system here in Palestine simply stunts the intellectual growth of students, and yet it is so institutionalized that any improving factor from the outside is considered detrimental and unacceptable.
Mark Gonzales equals amazing, end of. Mama enjoyed his performance a lot more than she did for DAM's, whom she called "imsak3een". Well their last song (I'm In Love With a Jew) was pretty terrible.
Khaled Sabawi, the president of MENA Geothermal (green energy) delivered a highly informative presentation. Basically, Palestinians pay the highest prices for energy in the entire region; 97 percent of the energy they consume is exported; in a few years Palestinians will be living through congested smog worse than Mexico's, but fear not! When there's a will there's a way. Enter geothermal energy. The earth consumes 50 percent of the sun's rays, and two meters below ground the temperature year round stays at 17 degrees Celsius. Pipes underground could be used to extract temperature via a cooling process in summer and a heating process in winter. The Israeli Interior minister wrote Khaled, "We could learn a lot from you." So as a result he was barred from entering Palestine three times, an engineer his company had worked on training was arrested and held in solitary confinement for 2 months on no charges, all for the sake of ensuing that the quality of Palestinian life remains miserable and backward.
Alice Walker stood on the stage and told the audience how she ended up speaking to the Israeli soldier who was interrogating her at the Allenby border crossing like she would to her son: "Do you know what you are doing? This [occupation] isn't good for you." The soldier was pulling up everything she had ever said about Israel and said, "Look, it says here you boycott Israel, that you would never come and visit it" to which she smoothly replied, "I'm not visiting Israel, I'm here for Palestine." She asked him if he thought that peace could ever be possible between the Israelis and Palestinians, and he answered honestly, "No. There's too much hatred on both sides."

After the event was over, Mama went up on-stage to talk to some of the speakers while I was wistfully thinking of food and fighting the urge to hoist my jeans up which had magically turned three sizes bigger. She had already talked to Khaled and Sam Bahour, both family friends, as well as Mounir Fasheh. She set her eyes on Alice and managed to get through the hungry fans. She then proceeded to tell Alice her life story, the whole ugly narrative of my family's displacement because we all don't have the correct Israeli issued IDs, how as a result my dad can't come in and is living in a different country. "So hating the Israelis for what they did to me and my family is something I can't help, you know?" Alice had an expression of pain on her face. She put her hand on Mama's shoulder and said, "I know. I know. Believe me I do. I'm from the deep South, where they had all kinds of apartheid laws there, and for a while I hated the whites too. But I got really sick. And I don't want that to happen to you, I don't want you to hate until you get physically sick." Then she was bombarded by the event's volunteer kids and disappeared for a moment. She then called out, "Hold on, I want to hug you. I would really like to give you a hug." And so they embraced. Women. So proud to be one.

We walked out, and brought a couple of books-Vittorio's Stay Human about Operation Cast Lead which he had witnessed from the ground, and Ben White's Israeli Apartheid. I went into a frenzy seeing all the books as usual, but contented myself with the knowledge that Ghada Karmi's books had to be in at least one of the three libraries on campus, unlike Edward Said's The Question of Palestine which they conveniently "lost". I asked Mama what she thought of TedxRamallah.
"It's nice, really enjoyed myself. Most of the speakers had really good speeches. Maybe next year I can be one of them?"

We climbed into one of the coaches, and I popped in my headphones, unbelievably tired. Mama was still enjoying herself as she was conversing with the other people around us. I turned off my iPod and listened to them talk. There's Maysar, sitting two seats down, who is a genius. He showed us all on his phone the gamma robot he had designed and invented, and told us how most of his professors at his university (Al-Quds/Abu Dis) discouraged him and were totally unappreciative of his project, despite him being the smartest sophomore in his department. They didn't like how he had used 'unconventional' methods to build the robot, and how his calculations weren't written down but were done mentally. This brought us back to Mounir Fasheh's speech, and how the method of intellectual stumping was all too glaring. We all encouraged Maysar, telling him to forget his teachers and to continue building/inventing more robots because sooner than later someone will recognize him and he will go on to achieve greater things. If only those idiotic professors of his realized what a truly talented student they have on their hands and to do nurture him instead of shooting him down because he dared to think outside the box. As we rumbled past Qalandia checkpoint, Maysar passed his notebook around and we all wrote supportive messages.

Inspire, and be inspired. Roll on next year!

Vittorio Arrigoni, Rest in Peace

Thanks to Carlos Latuff for this gem.

Words cannot express our rage and horror at this brutal murder of Palestinian Italian activist. Yes, he was a Palestinian, so passionate was he about exposing Israel's occupation and helping the other Palestinians in Gaza.

Rest in Peace Vik. Gazans certainly knew your worth. Unfortunately, so did the "Salafi Israelis".

Refaat Alareer describes how these Salafis are manipulated by Mossad/CIA websites, acting out their orders. This may sound extreme to a person with a sprinkling knowledge of the whole conflict and who will no doubt accuse Alareer of being one of those conspiracy theorists, but that doesn't make it less true.

Mohammed Suliman, who has an excellent blog, writes his thoughts on the debacle.

We can't form our own words, so we're resorting to linking to other expressive posts.

A few days ago we bitterly noticed how Ramallah held a silent protest for Juliano Mer Khamis's murder while there was barely a whisper of anger about the nineteen people killed in Gaza. Salam Fayyad stuck his nose in this matter, publicly condemning Juliano's murder while remaining mum about the killings of civilians in Gaza. The spotlight only shines on internationally known activists whereas Palestinians are lumped together as a numerical monolith.

We realize now that this is a nuanced subject. Juliano and Vittorio are granted media (social or not) coverage and recognition not only because of the work that they did, but because they were representative of the non-representative Palestinians themselves. Their voices were heard. And for that, they had to be silenced.