A lengthy post before Signing off...

I'm back in North America, specifically Philadelphia, taking a much needed break at Margaret's parent's house before flying back to South Korea after the holidays.

Its been revelatory having some distance and headspace to reflect on being in Palestine and the Middle East for just over four months. My mind feels fragmented most of the time because I'm now living in the keystone of the United States, which is about the complete opposite end of the spectrum from living in Palestine. There are no nightly gunfire exchanges, no sonic booms from drone jets flying overhead, no loud Minarets, no fighting children, no shouting in Arabic. In comparison, everything is massive here - extra large pizzas; giant backyards that need raking; behemoth automobiles that were christened by Ares himself. Don't get me started on American television..... But why the eff do Puff Daddy, Britney Spears, Anne Hathaway and Tim McGraw have their own perfume/colognes, those sellout bitches - but I guess the global economic crisis truly affects everyone eh?? At least Ralph Nader isn't selling Nikes.

I usually start the day reading the Globe & Mail, the New York Times and Ha'aretz (in that order) and I know there's an entire side of the story that people just aren't getting when they read about the Middle East. I feel hoarse in the throat before I even begin to explain what its actually like there to people and sometimes I feel like I'm suffering from Cassandra Complex.

In Jerusalem, as I watched all the American, British, French, Italian, etc, etc, tourists walk by in their tour groups and get onto their tour buses, I wondered if they ever considered bothering to see the other side of things just over the giant Wall. The Wall isn't just a barricade for the Israelis, its a way to stop the dissemination of information from permeating back to the people. The only Israelis that visit Palestine are soldiers (certainly not non-biased observers) because its illegal for Israelis to visit Palestine unless your a settler. So Palestinians have a narrow view of Israelis and Israelis (and most of the Western world) have a narrow view of what life is like in Palestine. Because of this, I'd like to illuminate two central points I've learnt in Palestine that I don't believe are common knowledge back home.

(1) The Cause of Conflict

The current Israeli-Arab conflict does not have its roots in thousands or even hundreds of years of conflict; this is a common misconception. If you talk to older Palestinians and Jews that lived in the Levant before 1948, they will tell you that British Mandate Palestine, although under colonial rule, had many Jewish and Muslim communities not merely co-existing, but fully intregrated with one another. The animosity of today's conflict is a product of:

(a) the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, and 

(b) the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. 

There were many conflicts between Pagan and non-Jewish tribes in the Levant during pre-Christian times (including tribes that ascend from modern-day Arabs) this was the norm rather than the exception between divergent ethnic/religious groups during the period, rather than a specifically Arab-Jew conflict. While the Arab people certainly existed before pre-Islamic times, what solidified the modern ethnic Arab identity was the emergence of Islam which didn't formalize itself as a religion until the late 7th century. Additionally, during the height of the Arab empire, Jews flourished in the Ottoman Empire, escaping brutal persecution from the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition.

While Zionism claims that before the state of Israel was founded, Israel was "a land without a people, for a people without a land" there were several hundred thousand Arab Palestinians that lived and had homes there. Lord Balfour, who signed the declaration with his namesake, carried out his mission that "Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. We do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country."

(2) Arab Identity

Palestinians in the West Bank resent Gazans for being so 'extreme' while Gazans resent West Bankers for being so 'elitist.'  

Palestinian Jerusalemites (who hold special permit status) look down on West Bankers and Gazans for being 'uncivilized.'

Palestinian urban West Bankers resent the refugees in the refugee camps in their cities, calling them "majnoon u mish shatir" meaning "crazy and stupid" in Arabic. 

Almost everyone hates the Arabs who stayed in Israel and became Israeli citizens, calling them 'traitors.'

The two major Palestinian political parties, Fateh and Hamas, think they both just want power and are equally corrupt, incessantly fighting with each other.

In one of the smallest regions in the World, the West Bank has citizens that live less than a half hour drive away from one another that NEVER visit each other because of Israeli checkpoints that take hours of humilation and degradation to pass through IF even allowed to pass through at all.  The refugee camps I worked in housed 40,000 people in an area of less than one square kilometre, which are subject to Israeli Soldiers coming into their homes in the middle of the night demanding to see proper identification while staring down the barrel of an automatic. What do you think this does to the psychology of a child when their only exposure to Israelis is this? Gazans cannot freely travel to the West Bank because there are no properly connecting roads for travel, and even cities in the West Bank are extremely restricted by travel because of specialized road networks kept solely for the use of settlers.  A divided Palestinian community will find it next to impossible to achieve statehood because they have been strangled when it comes to speaking with a unified voice.

While these are but my opinions based on my experiences there, I believe they are informed and come from sources that have been marginalized by an oppressive regime.

Not one to simply complain about a shit situation, I recommend several solutions that I doubt will ever be implemented because of egos, mistrust and a general misunderstanding of each others' situations. Furthermore, one of the exacerbations of Israeli government policy towards Palestine has been the emergence of suicide bombings, beginning in the early days of the second Intifada. Fear of suicide bombers from the Israeli side is a legitimate concern. Its an abbhoration of conscience to attack anybody so ruthlessly and I don't condone the behavior of these so-called 'marytrs of Palestine.' However, suicide bombing, in the words of Amira Hass (an Israeli journalist for Ha'aretz who reported and lived in Gaza City for several years in the 1990's) is "an act of desperation by the weak." Suicide bombing is a signal, a warning sign of anxiety from a society that has misplaced the value of life. A independent child psychologist from Norway came to Gaza and the West Bank and conducted several interviews and studies during the 1990's, concluding that children in refugee camps have lost their will to live. Palestinian Refugee camps are the worst place I've ever been to and are breeding grounds of extemist behavior. Camps are inflitrated regularly by soldiers who harrass children, there are no playgrounds and no parks, there is no proper sewage sanitation, and almost everyone has a family member/s that have been killed or injured by random shellings, stray gun-fire, or soldier ruthlessness. These are the conditions that breed extremist behavior, and such conditions were created by Occupation.  

(1) Israel must absolutely 100% pull all of its settlements and outposts out of the West Bank. Settlers are fucking nutjobs who believe that they have a religious and ideological right to the Greater Israel, and they have hatred filled in their hearts. Settlers are not typical Israelis mind you, but they are guarded and protected by the IDF, and all settlers are required, BY LAW to carry semi-automatic weapons everywhere they go. Read up on the West Bank city of Hebron, the most extreme and horrible example of settlers living in Palestine. 

(2) Take down the Wall piece by piece. For anyone who doesn't know this, the West Bank is almost completely surrounded by a giant 20 foot high concrete wall built by the Israeli government on the premise that it will keep suicide bombers out of Israel. Unfortunately, if you buy this garbage justifcation, its a short-term solution that will develop a future long-term problem. Because of the Great Barrier/Apartheid Wall/Seperation Wall, Palestinians have been cut off from their families, lost land, no longer have proper access to water sanitation, and now have to wait hours before crossing checkpoints to get proper medical treatment. The seperation barrier has without a doubt, reduced many cities and villages to ghettos. If checkpoints are to remain, for god's sake, have them run by independent third party coalitions like NATO, so that Palestinians are no longer subjected to humilating interogations and absurdly cruel treatment. 

(3) Bolster infrastructure. Don't just throw money at a problem and give the PLO whatever sum of money they request. Corruption runs deep because the PLO doesn't really have any power, only the power Israel decides to delegate to it. They can't run anything resembling a state when they aren't even permitted basic human rights, let alone jumpstarting an economy that is so heavily restricted on imports and exports. They'll end up creating a black market using tunnels like in Gaza. 

Thank you to my friends and family who constitute the readership of this blog. I learnt a lot from my experiences, and I hope that through this blog I have inspired others to understand a very complex region of the world we all share.

Lastly, I believe the greatest tragedy of the 20th century was not the Holocaust, but that the state of Israel, to the shame of its victims' memories, is slowly and unconciously perpetuating the same tyranny and injustice of their former oppressors. To paraphrase Marx, "Somewhere all great historic facts and personages recur twice; once as tragedy, and again as farce." Unless things change, its only a matter of time.