This weekend we had a boil water advisory. It was inconvinient, it was annoying, but it had everyone joking about this song, which I think deserves a post for New Orleans and Palestine.

Dave Matthews-Don't Drink the Water

Come out, come out, no use in hiding.
Come now, come now, can you not see?
There's no place here, what were you expecting?
No room for both, just room for me.

So you will lay your arms down,
Yes, I will call this home.

Away, away, you have been banished.
Your land is gone, and given to me.

And here I will spread my wings.
Yes, I will call this home.

What's this you say, you feel a right to remain?
Then stay and I will bury you.

What's that you say, your father's spirit still lives in this place?
Well, I will silence you.

Here's the hitch, your horse is leaving.
Don't miss your boat, it's leaving now.

And as you go I will spread my wings.
Yes, I will call this home.
I have no time to justify to you,
Fool, you're blind, move aside for me.

All I can say to you my new neighbor,
You must move on or I will bury you.

Now as I rest my feet by this fire
Those hands once warmed here, but I have retired them.
I can breathe my own air and I can sleep more soundly
Upon these poor souls,
I'll build Heaven and call it home.
Cause you're all dead now.

I live with my justice
And I live with my greedy need
I live with no mercy
And I live with my frenzied feeding
I live with my hatred
And I live with my jealousy
I live with the notion that I don't need anyone but me

Don't Drink the Water
Don't Drink the Water
Blood in the water
Don't Drink the Water

The fifth graders at my school are learning about Native American culture right now. It wasn't until 10th grade that my history class delved into Howard Zinn and I started to understand how brutal colonization was. Now we have the facts, but there are still so many unanswered questions. If we put everyone back on the boat and took a vote, would we do it all over again?

One Pro-Israel argument uses the expulsion of Native Americans to say the historical line is too blurry to condemn Israel for its expulsion of Palestinians. If we could go back, would we really choose to build our culture alongside Native American culture? Would would our country look like today?

I agree that the collective forgetting of Native American rights is something that can legitimately be thrown back at the United States. Was it ok then, because they lived in teepees and didn't understand our language? Are Palestinians more human because many have cars and microwaves and facebook pages? Is it only wrong now because we have "international law?"

What would Israel be like if Jewish immigrants settled alongside, not on top of, Arab culture? If Zionist leaders could turn back the clock, would they undo the expulsion orders and let Palestinians who fled return to their homes?

This year the Knesset passed legislation allowing the finance minister to withdraw funds from organizations that commemorate the expulsion, as doing so would challenge the Jewish nature of the state. Among the activities forbidden by the "Nakba law" are marking Independence Day and the founding of Israel with mourning ceremonies and physical disdain towards the flag and State symbols.

Eitan Bronstein founded Zochrot, an Israeli group that seeks to raise awareness of the Nakba. Here's a snippet from their webpage:

"The Jewish people in Israel, or at least most of them, live in complete ignorance or even denial of the Palestinian disaster that took place in 1948, the Nakba. The Nakba has no place in the language, the landscape, the environment, and the memory of the Jewish collective in Israel.

Traveling in Israel, one may find signposts, landmarks and memorials that create and sustain the Jewish-Israeli narrative. Jewish-Israeli events that took place more than 2,000 years ago are celebrated through these memorials while Palestinian memorials are nowhere to be seen. Moreover, there is an attempt to erase this memory from the collective consciousness and from the landscape. We, the Israelis, study in our schools that the Jews came to Israel to transform the desert into a blooming country, because we were a “people without a land” returning to a “land without a people.”

Zochrot is an NGO whose goal is to introduce the Palestinian Nakba to the Israeli-Jewish public, to express the Nakba in Hebrew, to enable a place for the Nakba in the language and in the environment. This is in order to promote an alternative memory to the hegemonic Zionist memory. The Nakba is the disaster of the Palestinian people: the destruction of the villages and cities, the killing, the expulsion, the erasure of Palestinian culture. But the Nakba, I believe, is also our story, the story of the Jews who live in Israel, who enjoy the privileges of being the ‘winners.’"

Non-government Organization is right, they're not getting any fundingggg. But in spite of the ring-wing nutjobs, discourse is happening. Hopefully it won't take centuries for the Nakba to make it into fifth grade classrooms.