Summer has come to the Berkshires - a brief, sweet period in this resort area. Winter is cold and clamped down, the town near-empty, people withdraw inside, you get desperate trying to come up with ways to keep the kids occupied. Then, all of a sudden, around June, the weather warms up. The tourists arrive. There is music at Tanglewood, dance at Jacob’s Pillow, all the stores and restaurants open up. Life is great, life is easy. Let’s go to the playground. Let’s take a walk in the woods. We’ll go get ice cream afterwards…
I hope my readers will forgive the paucity of content here. The new site is
functional. I’m working on populating it. We’ll have more feeds, more
links, and a new look when it’s done. Hope it will be worth the wait.
Anyhow, while you’re waiting for this blog to come back, check out Raising Yousuf. I just found it via a link on Rafah Pundits.
Laila is a reporter and a mom. She writes about raising her son in the Gaza strip. Some of the writing is specifically political, but more of it is about her day-to-day life, her family, her travels (getting from place to place is a major task in the occupied territories, and thus also a major topic of conversation). And, as they used to say in the feminist movement, the personal is political.
Interestingly, around the same time, I came across an Israeli weblog called Abbagav (Abba is Hebrew for father). Gavriel writes more about national affairs and the media and less about fathering per se.
Reading the two blogs side by side, you get a good sense of how each side looks to the other. In a word, not good. I won’t offer my usual judgements here. I’ll just comment that this is what happens when you build barriers between people. They seize on the aspects of the Other that are strange, adverse, hostile. They miss the common ground, the things that make them both human.
OK I will judge. I find that Laila makes more of an effort to find the humanity in the Israelis than Gavriel does in the other direction. And I have found that this is a characteristic of people living under oppression. They understand the oppressors. It’s a survival tactic.
This is not to say that understanding brings forgiveness.
Keep working, keep praying.
Hi. This is Gavriel (AbbaGa
Hi. This is Gavriel (AbbaGav). I’d like to thank you for visiting my blog and reminding me that people other than the already-converted-choir read my words. I had actually been thinking recently of trying to get more bloggers to venture out, to read and comment on the blogs from the "other side" (whatever the other side might be, Palestinian-Israeli, or Dem-Rep, etc.). My hope was it would remind us when we cross those invisible lines that we don’t see when we are just in our own private echo chambers.
I read the other blog you recommended, by baby Yousuf’s mother, Laila. It is a good blog. But I am a little puzzled at what particular "effort to find the humanity in the Israelis" you find in her blog. For sure, her blog is warmer and cuddlier, because she has a lot of cute baby pictures and family cuddles. But I read every post in her blog and didn’t see anything particularly humanizing of her view of the Israeli oppressors. Everything about Israel and Israelis related to how they victimize Palestinians, except perhaps one joking aside in which she remarked on Israeli soldiers’ expensive sunglasses.
Not that I’m blaming her for that, because that is what things feel like to her, and it’s her blog.
But I think you misunderstand your own biases when you enter the spaces of these two blogs. You are inclined to see her and her baby as victims, and me and my daughters as her oppressors, and have already made certain decisions about what you think that means. Again, you too are free to do that if your goal is just to more clearly mark in concrete which side you think is good and which side is bad.
I don’t point this out as merely another in my series of snarky "biased media" complaints (I’ve done way too many of those already). Instead, I’d like to understand what you/we really mean by wanting each side to find the other’s humanity.
I don’t understand why you see her as humanizing Israelis when she comments on hearing Israeli Apaches overhead going to kill Palestinian fighters. You can say you feel she is a victim (indirectly) of those helicopters, but that still doesn’t make those points "humanizing". Anymore than my posts about suicide bombers humanize Laila, they just express my feelings.
Instead, I would feel more humanized to hear, preferably from many, many Palestinians and Arabs, how much they disagree with the Arabs I have talked to, that they are not just waiting for the next slice of Iraeli concessions before asking for the slice after that, each slice designed to hasten the time when their fighters can obliterate the state in which I am busy raising my daughters not to hate them. I would like them to help me not feel like a fool for doing so. I would like to know that when "end the occupation" is thrown around, it’s not referring to 1948 as an occupation, and calling in code for the destruction of the Jewish state.
And I’m sure you and she would like to see more posts from me about how thoughtless Israeli policies are denying Palestinian babies their formula or giving them cancer or stuff like that (I made that up, although I’m sure we’re accused of it). I’d rather be posting about what each side can do to alleviate the other’s suffering and anxiety than attempt to cast their every act as coming from the darkest depths of depravity.
I don’t realistically expect Laila to do any more than she does today. I’m not expecting my blogging to change overnight either. Both our sides have a lot of work to do.
For now, I’m sure she will continue blogging what she experiences and feels, without undo regard for what I will think of it. I will probaby do the same. The way the ball rolls from there is that we have to read each other’s blogs, and comment: that we understand their experience, to let them (me) know when their (my) "humor" has crossed a line, and to move forward slowly from there. Sure, some people will never change, but hopefully many can and will. The alternative is to wait for whole generations to die away on both sides, to give way to new generations hurt and desperate enough to consider a new approach. Sadly, that was supposed to be us.
Reading each others’ blogs
That is really a very thoughtful comment, and it definitely makes me reconsider my initial reaction to your site. It’s very admirable that you went over and read Laila’s blog. I guess what caught my eye when I read her posts was an account of a conversation with an Israeli solider at a checkpoint. It’s not so much that she went out of her way to make him sympathetic. More, just that she recounted a conversation between herself and an Israeli. You get a sense of how they both see the situation. They are both human, and this is humanizing.
What I noticed on your site was mostly political commentary - for example, (is it fair to say?) making fun of Arab senstivity to desecration of the Koran, suggesting that is is hypocritical, etc. Documenting anti-Israel and anti-Jewish statements by Arab leaders. Sure, this is part of the Arab political spectrum. The Arab media propagates anti-Israel rhetoric, as the Israeli media sometimes propagates anti-Arab rhetoric. But those things happen in a context. There are also Arab leaders working for peace. Do we dismiss their statements, and believe only the threats? I’ve felt that to call attention exclusively to the negative distorts more than it clarifies.
Having said all that - I will definitely return to your site and read it regularly. Maybe my first impression was wrong. I have my biases, as you point out. A good antidote is to listen to those with other perspectives and opinions. I am delighted to find someone - a dad, like me, no less - from whom I can learn how it looks from the other side.
When I was in the West Bank, I didn’t hear a lot of talk from Palestinians about wanting to destroy Israel. I didn’t (to my knowledge) talk to Hamas leaders. But I talked with cab drivers, shopkeepers, doctors and technicians, kids in internet cafes, women in parks, and anyone else I could start a conversation with in English. I heard some express a longing for the land they used to have; but this was more a sort of nostalgia for something that would never return, than an active desire to recapture the land. Mostly, what they said was, we accept Israel. We don’t like it, but we accept it. And now, we want our state, too. We have rights, we have dreams and aspirations as a people; and we are being kept from realizing them by this endless occupation.
There was also, sadly, a deep cynicism about Israeli and American motives. Very few believed that Israel would ever relinquish the necessary territory for a viable state. They have seen the settlements grow, and grow… and felt their hopes disappear with their land.
The conditions they live under really are terrible. Have you ever travelled around the territories, not on the settler roads, but on the Palestinian roads? Stopping every few miles to walk through a checkpoint? Access to emergency health services is greatly impaired. Imagine if it was (G-d forbid) your own child, waiting in an ambulance for hours, for permission to pass. Access to clean water is also limited, dangerously in some areas. Mothers worry about their kids being rounded up, starved, abused in jails. Some, perhaps, are members of terrorist cells. Many are not. Almost every family has a story to tell about tanks rolling up their street, the whole family dragged out of bed and held in the street at gunpoint. Hardly a kid there has not had some trauma of this sort.
Israelis, on their side, live in constant fear - or at least, in constant danger - of terror attacks: the quiet street that explodes, with no warning, into carnage. And what if that was your child, my child? These are terrible acts, and Israel has every right to demand that they cease. Israelis should be able to live in safety in their own country. I remember standing in Tulkarm, looking over the wall, and thinking of the awful Passover bombing in Netanya. And I thought, for that moment, I was on the wrong side of the wall.
My hosts there, a physician and his wife, do not support such violence. They find it as horrifying as we do. Nonetheless, they are subjected to impossible the day-to-day conditions of the occupation. They try to teach their children not to hate Israelis. And they worry that kids, dealing with their own anger, the powerlessness of their parents, will get mixed up with militant groups - like street gangs.
Can it be true that you have no Arab friends who have told you such stories? None who wish for a future of peaceful co-existence? In my short visit, did not find this sentiment so rare.
Finally - I hope and pray that you do not think I am accusing your daughters. Children are not responsible for the actions of adults around them. When they are of age, they will make their own decisions. From what you say, it sounds like you are raising them to make good ones.
We, parents, humans, can only hope, yes?
More soon, I hope. I’ll look forward to reading your site.
All my best,
Andrew Schamess
on humanizing-laila from gaza
Hi guys-
I had the pleasure of receiving an email from Gavriel. Thanks for taking the effort to do that. I’m happy to see that people are reading my blog-which is not just a private family blog. Andrew put it best when he said the personal is political. Indeed.
Anyhow Gav, I’m not going to waste space or time writing about details on the blog, or of Gav’s reply (some of which I found offensive). You are entitled to your opinion, though I agree with much (most..all?
) of it, and yes, do find a lot of it offensive and lacking in judgement/insight/understanding at times.
And contrary to what you may believe, I think my blog effectively humanizes the situation…it may be the Palestinians situation (most people, including I think you Gaza-no offense-think we are a bunch of rocket-throwing blood-obsessed crazies down here) but I hope I do shed some light, though my limited interaction (here, not abroad) with Israeli soldiers that sometimes they are victims too, of their own government’s policies, of the same political cycle. Andrew caught on to that.
A lot of my dearest friends are Israelis, both abroad and here. However when you live in a place like Gaza, closed off the entire world, where the health situation is ghastly (1 bed for over 400 patients…), where daily travel becomes a chore (to put it mildly), where every, and I mean EVERy, aspect of your life is controlled by people that you can no longer see even (see my article: the invisble occupation), and when you live all of this with a child, its hard to see the humanity in all of that.
That said, I do sympathize/pity the young soldiers who work here. As my Israeli friend Neta says, they go into the army as one person, they come out as completely different people, and I sense that when I talk to some of them on border crossings, some who do sympathize with us and are just serving out their duty, others who are plain mean and have lost all their humanity (see her great article-three horus at Kalandia checkpoint..http://www.countercurrents.org/pa-golan171004.htm…).
Anyhow, if I have a chance to talk to more Israelis here, I gladly will post my conversations. Unfortunately, we are not given that opportunity in Gaza. Keep reading though, I’d to hear from you guys, and others who read my blog, some more. Maybe we can publish them someday? :)
one more blog
By the way I should mention I had another blog that was more political, http://www.gazanrambling.blogspot.com , but that is slowly dying due to my limited amount of time. It has some past posts though if anyone would like to take a look at them. I may eventually combine the two blogs. Suggestions welcome!