Gilad Shalit

One prisoner for one thousand: Gilad Shalit was released today.  He looks like a holocaust victim.  His face is pale and pointy, his eyes are black as soot. His broken, timid smile makes him look like a goblin. How can this woman, this interviewer, ask him questions? This man was maybe raped, certainly beaten and brainwashed. Sitting in Bagel Bite Delicatessen, watching him on screen, I try to keep the salty tear fluid from clouding my eyes. The waiters are smiling and turning up the volume. Their brother is home. Everyone stops what they’re doing to watch. How can I eat knowing this man was in captivity for five years? How can you eat? The possibilities of his experience make me want to vomit. Go ahead, let yourself imagine them. 

Why We Fight: An open letter

Dear Friend,

           

This morning I woke up and had a strange urge to watch my favorite scene from “Dances with Wolves,” which I think you said you’ve seen. It’s the one when Kevin Costner dances alone around the fire with his arms spread out to the night sky. He twirls under the stars to the sounds of American Indian chants and mimes out being a warrior. And it hit me that the fight’s in our blood. We all wait for a battle that we sometimes never get to fight. I’m not talking about the “human need” to go to war with one another, I think that assumption’s bullshit. I’m talking about the burning drive to push against an opposing force, even the desire to die in the process. I think people pervert this desire with their fascination of soldier’s “glory,” cold mechanized killings and domination. I know people demonize their enemies to create a dummy to fight against. But I see now that that phenomenon is just a desperate search for something to fight for. I’ve been waiting, ever since I was a little girl, for that ancient battle I think we all dream of, leading friends and family and rising like shadow-children of the earth.

          I don’t expect a response, I just for whatever reason thought to share this idea with you. I hope you’re doing well,

Catie

Honesty

Middle-Eastern music floats in through my window tonight, watery and hypnotic. Everything is different here in Israel, nothing is the same. I’ve been living in a dream world for way too long, keeping life at an arm’s distance. I know if I don’t turn that world into art there’s really no point. The music grows louder; the voices rise and harmonize in the streets. I regret that people missed my joy, I kept it so well hidden deep in my solar plexus. I would cave in my chest as if to hide my heart and conceal my smile with a smirk. It doesn’t matter now, because I’m in the center of things. With a vision of a shimmering coast, traveling truck-caravans, laughing and music I suddenly remember the person I wanted to be, the life I wanted to live. I remember what it’s like to touch, to smell, to breathe. The music is crashing in now and it forces me out of my apartment. There I see the source of the sound: the messiah-mobile. The black van has green, pink, and blue neon tubes and a net of flashing lights attached to its sides. On top of the roof sits two giant lit-up sculptures of crowns. Music is exploding out of the vehicle and the Orthodox Jews are jumping around with the Torah. A man’s voice cries out to God and I see that we’re all just people here, flesh and blood, dancing together in the streets, waiting for rebirth. 

The Christian Quarter

                As I walk through Jaffa Gate a man selling pita bread calls out to me. I attempt to ignore him, but as he persists I turn my head. He rushes up very close and says, “Hello, don’t be scared. Why are all of you always scared, always white people.” I try to look directly into his eyes that are hidden behind sunglasses and say in an even voice, “I’m not scared. I have some place to go.”

            I hurriedly make my way to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the supposed burial place of Jesus. Entering the church, I’m hit by the scent of beeswax and frankincense. I wait in a line full of Russians with molded high cheek bones, painted eyes, and wet whispers that remind me of when I was a little girl. Only a few people are ushered in by the priest at a time. Inside, the stone tomb is dark and smoky. Dozens of golden lamps with long chains hang from the cave-ceiling. There’s a hobbit-sized arched doorway that leads to a second room. Bending down, I pass through into an amber glow of icons and candles. Tilting my head back, I look up into a cluster of lamps suspended in a dark void that extends into nothing. Suddenly, I feel deep down in the center of the Earth.

            Walking back to Jaffa Gate, an Arab shopkeeper asks me where I got my dress. This time I stop.

             “You’re beautiful and you’re wearing a beautiful dress, let me make you earrings to match.”

 I hesitate as he ducks inside his shop. “I’m not here to spend money.”

            “It is alright,” he waves me in. Small rectangles of woven rugs line the ceiling. All of the walls display strands of turquoise, carnelian, and tiger’s eye. A Muslim alarm clock that plays the call to prayer sits above the doorway. As he fiddles with two lapis beads and a pair of thin metal pliers I ask the man questions about his work.  When he’s finished, I try on one of the earrings.

            “Here, let me,” he picks up the other and before I know it he pushes my hair behind my ear to get the hook through the opening. I don’t know what to do and I know he won’t be able to do it without force. After a second, he gives up. I thank him for the gift. He says it’s good for business, that maybe I’ll come back to buy something and bring a friend. “I’ll make you a necklace next time.” Suddenly, he brushes open my button-down sweater and touches the skin below my neck. “You like them short or long?” I quickly close it and jerk my head back.

            “Yes, cover up if you’re more comfortable.” His brown eyes are wide and I cannot read his expression. I shake his hand and leave. Alone with eyes forward, I walk down the empty cobbled stone street past the leering men.

Nashim

            At 9pm we cross the checkpoint into the West Bank. Three of my friends and I are crunched into my Hebrew teacher’s little car on the way to see Kever Rachel: Rachel’s tomb. The holy site sits in a small bubble of Israeli territory on the other side of the partition wall. An Israeli soldier approaches us with a machine gun slung loosely across his hip and Odelya rolls down the window to speak to him in a fast riff of sing-song Hebrew. He quickly smiles and waves us on without questioning.  “I just kept blessing him so there would be no questions, he’ll think she’s one of those,” Odelya laughs. We drive down the short road guarded by high-wall security fences. This area used to be verdant groves and rolling hills. Now, busses transporting families from Jerusalem weave between police jeeps.

Rachel is a tragic matriarch in the Hebrew Bible who waited seven years to marry her true love Jacob. After seven years, she was then compelled to give him to her older sister. When they finally did marry, Rachel died giving birth to her second child. She bled to death and since it’s unholy to touch a corpse that has lost blood, Jacob was forced to bury her on the side of the road, isolated and far from her family. Rachel represents the person who is on the path, but is not getting to where they want to go because of obstacles. 

As we enter the site, we slowly submerge ourselves into a group of religious women. The cave-like room has white-washed walls that stretch up into a domed ceiling. The huge arched tomb rests at the very back and is covered with a white embroidered cloth. Women and whispers forcefully press in on all sides. We follow Odelya hand-in-hand as she expertly wades through the crowd. Reaching the front, she wraps a white knit scarf around her shoulders and prays into her small Siddur. When it’s my turn to touch the tomb, I press my left hand into the cloth and close my eyes. I feel a thin electric trickle down my vein and think:  your blood is my blood, bone of my bone, life of my life, death of my death. And then it stops, I feel nothing.

 I wander back through a sea of foreign faces: haggard, paunchy, sharp, strange. Outside, women are sifting flour in big plastic bowls. Odelya explains that in ancient times people brought bread sacrifices to the Temple. Today, women symbolically continue the tradition by preparing bread at the tomb and baking it at home. Baking Challah is one of the three things women are compelled to do in Judaism.  “When women come together to pray it is very powerful. We are not allowed to study Kabbalah,” Odelya says, “we are not required to study Torah. Why?” She looks at all of us in the eyes. “Women are more spiritual than men. Men have to work to get to a spiritual place. They need the book to help them get there,” she curls her hand into a fist and motions an imaginary line from her heart to the sky. “Women are always there, they just have to open their mouths and speak it. According to Torah, man is light that grows and spreads everywhere. Women are vessels, the containers. Some men resent being contained, but those borders make the light concentrated and exact, like a laser beam,” she puts her hands together and cuts a line of air in front of us. “Otherwise they are only light that does nothing. A man is compelled to marry a woman, but a woman is not compelled to marry a man in Judaism. They need women’s help you see.”

            “Then why do women have such a small part of the Western Wall?” my friend asks in a quiet voice.

            “Men do not know...they still do not know...people do not understand,” she answers.

            Odelya is beautiful and as she speaks other women turn to look at her in wonder. I know very little about her, only that she is Yemenite, not married, university educated, and religious. Mostly, I know that she inspires me.

            “Can we take a picture with you?” my friend asks.

              “Yes, yes,” she quickly walks over to the sign that says Nashim: Women.  She points and grins. “Here, this’ll be a feminist picture.”

          

Nationalism

Today we had a seminar on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords. That year marked a real turning point in which the Palestinian Liberation Front finally acknowledged Israel’s right to exist and Israel finally acknowledged the PLO as an authoritative entity over a unified people.

            The teacher shows us film clip after bloody film clip of the First and Second Intifadas. I’m shocked by a room filled with a shallow lake of bright blood being swept up by an Israeli emergency response worker, two cowering Palestinian boys being shot point-blank, and lynch mobs on both sides. The seminar ends with footage of an Orthodox Jewish family being removed from their settlement homes in the Gaza Strip. In 2005, that narrow piece of land was transferred back to the Palestinians. The mother and children scream in rage and claw as they’re gently carried out.

            Tonight, I hear our Madricha talking in our dimly lit apartment. The girl I live with mentions that someone in class asked if the Palestinians must have felt the same way when forced to flee their homes in 1948. The counselor pauses before answering.

            “With my humanity glasses on, yes, I can see the similarities, but no, I don’t think so. At the end of the day, I see it from my side and I want to protect my country.”

            I slip into my bedroom. I scowl until my brain hurts and I feel like I’m going to suffocate from all the contradictions. There has not been peace in the Middle-East since the invention of writing. A state by its nature will fall and when borders turn to vapor we’ll maybe see each other as the herds we’ve become. So if you have them, why the fuck would you take your humanity glasses off.

I was just thinking

     The last time I drove Highway 1 I caught a glimpse of the sun peering like a giant eye through smoky clouds. I pulled over and parked on one of those raised sandy turnouts that overlook the ocean. The pearly light was spread over the grey-green water as it sloshed up on the sand. Suddenly, I saw the ancient golden statues I had glorified liquefy into the blood that built them and all of the stone temples crumble into the bones of our first ancestors laid open and unburied under the sun. And as civilization reversed its flow in one deafening inhale I sat in the burnt out fields of California. Even so, I still traveled over 7,000 miles from my home,  even if it's just to see really good magic.