Lovely Day

On Wednesday I went to the Students for Justice in Palestine weekly meeting at UC Berkeley. It was a great group of people. We all went around and introduced ourselves and said why we were there, and what superpower we want. One guy before me nabbed mine-the ability to freeze time and get everything done that you need to do. I think most of the time that would mean taking a long nap.

We also played Palestine Jeopardy, which officially made it the best activist meeting I've ever been to. What artist recently cancelled his performance at the Friends of the IDF Fundraiser in LA? Stevie Wonder!

Anyways, it was great to soak up that energy, and volunteer some future time to their tabling, flyering, event-attending...they're showing 5 Broken Cameras next week, and having a discussion with people who've been to the demonstrations against the wall in the West Bank. That would be really interesting to go to, I could find a lot of mutual friends there.

Here's a trailer for the documentary about the Berkeley SJP passing their divestment resolution. I haven't seen it yet but it looks fascinating.

"This not only student politics. What you are doing is taking place in the real world...."

"Pressure Points" trailer from Metier Productions on Vimeo.


Conversations of people walking by me at UC Berkeley:

"I just put some tofu and vegetables and sautee some brown rice..."

"And then you your mace..."
"Nah I have a taser"
"Good job! I'm not even gonna, wow..."

"And they were all eating crab, I guess that's like, a big thing..."

After the meeting I walked around campus a little bit. Around the main square there was an a capella group singing to passersby. That was really cool to see, and it made me miss my old grup in college. They were singing this song:




I didn't even know there was a version after Bill Withers, and how I could've possibly missed this 90's gem....

Wadi Fouqin

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting with the Save Wadi Fouqin group in Alameda, across the Bay. Save Wadi Fouqin is a mission of the Buena Vista United Methodist Church in Alameda, and they have a great group of people, led by Pastor Michael Yoshii, advocating for the little village that sits in the path of Israel's separation wall. I didn't know that the village has an alliance with an Israeli town just across the line. The wall threatens to cut that connection.

It was great to talk about advocacy and social media and play off each other's energy, and now I'd like to promote their Lenten campaign!

40 Days of Love.

I love Wadi Fouqin because.....

Pastor Shawn on Mardi Gras

I had to post this because Pastor Shawn (from my old congregation First Grace) is shouting out my home city.

It's weird to see people posting pictures from Mardi Gras on Facebook, and not being there. I only celebrated one Mardi Gras in New Orleans, but I still feel like I own it.

But this is well-said. Everyone owns Mardi Gras.

“Your Cadillac ain’t no hipper than my bus stop.”

The gospel according to native son,

Mac Rebennack (Dr. John)

Fat Tuesday People,

And so the story goes (and it may just be that...)

You may not know the name, Paul Allen, but surely you know his business Partner Bill Gates.  The two of them founded one of those little tech companies—Microsoft.  In a chance conversation this week, I was told the story like this…Mr. Allen, who now owns the Seattle Seahawks and just about anything he wants to own, brought himself and 300 of his closest friends to New Orleans the first weekend of 2013 Carnival to celebrate his birthday.  All stayed at a posh downtown, St. Charles Ave Hotel.  So good so far…Somewhere on the first Friday night of parading, Mr. Allen called for limo service for himself and friends.  How do you convince someone from Seattle with a million dollars in his back pocket that no personal treasure can stop a Mardi Gras Parade, but rather that Mardi Gras Parades, and sometimes just one brass band in the street can stop a whole fleet of Cadillacs.  Mardi Gras reality affects us all differently, but at some magical moment we all realize we are just another reveler looking for a pottie.  It’s not that Mr. Allen does not own Mardi Gras—he does.  But, he owns Mardi Gras like a kid with a ladder owns Mardi Gras.  We all own Mardi Gras. 

There is so much more to say, but for now…it is 11:58 PM.  Tomorrow on Fat Tuesday, my nine year old daughter will be dressed up like a “butterfly bird” in a handmade costume (thank you Adrienne Rathert), my 6 year old son will be a “reading egg”, my 29 year old wife is still working on three different costumes trying to decide which will weather the weather best, and I will be “the man in purple.”  Tomorrow we will wiggle our way through a city in which nearly all forms of commerce have been suspended, and static, worldly relational boundaries that no law can change will be gleefully grayed.  Revelers will pose for pictures, children will feel like queens and kings and joy will be the language.   It’s not heaven, but it is Mardi Gras.

Be good to yourself and happy Mardi Gras,

Pastor Shawn

I'll Cover You

I watched the second half of RENT on the elliptical today, starting with this scene. This is the one that always gets me verklempt.



My dad took me to see the show when I was a senior in high school and I became obsessed with it and memorized the soundtrack. When I got to college there were a few girls on my dorm floor who'd done the same, and we had Take Me or Leave Me and La Vie Boheme singing sprees.

I don't remember when the movie came out, but my dad and I went to see it, and at the end of I'll Cover You, where Collins and Angel kiss, the row of boys behind us erupted with "ahhhhh gross, ohhhhh man, that's so nasty, duuuuuude."

My face went red. I wanted to smack them. Why did they even want to watch this movie?

How about love, measure in love....

Buqayah

Today on Facebook I saw a beautiful picture. It was a picture of the village of Buqayah, in the Northern Galilee. My friend Hanna was from there. 

 Even now when I think of destroyed villages, hundreds of destroyed villages, I think of scattered houses, shacks, tin-roofed barns, like Bedouin communities. There's an emotional detachment to those images, and legal uncertainties about land ownership, and if and when the paperwork changed with the regime....

But you see an image like this and it's so scenic, it's like a movie. It's colorful. Nurit Peled-Elhanan really had a point when she talked about Israeli schoolbooks and the depictions of Arab life as colorless, or brown and yellow. 

Look at this picture! 

It looks like a screenshot from a movie...about the Holy Land. This is the Galilee. And this community was forcibly re-written. How can that be Holy?

Here's a description I found from the document linked below:

Hanna is from the village of Buqayah, in the Upper Galilee inside Israel
Proper. On the maps of Israel the village is called Peqiin, or Ancient Peqiin,
because New Peqiin is now a Jewish settlement built on land originally part of
Buqayah. The village has been inhabited for millennia and, recently, a cave was
discovered with ceramic coffins, skeletons, and artifacts that date back seven
thousand years. Hanna grew up there, in a small community of five different
religious groups: Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Druze, Jewish, and Muslim.

-------

I first met Hanna at a coffee shop in Wallingford, a Seattle neighborhood.  I was meeting with Ed Mast, a long-time Seattle activist who got the "End U.S. to Israel" bus ads put up. Ed had met his wife while they were ISM activists in Palestine. Ed reminded me of my politics professor at Whitman. I liked Ed. 

His friend Hanna was there too, and when Ed took off, I found myself alone facing Hanna, going "umm...hey, so...where you from?"  

We ended up talking for two hours. I didn't know much about the situation of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. Some call them Israeli Arabs, some call them '48 Palestinians, they're often exploited to prove that Israel is a democracy. I mentioned that to Hanna and he said, "you want proof? I'll give you proof..." and he listed off several ways the system discriminates against non-Jews. I remember one: he has a number zero at the beginning of his ID number that sets him apart from Jewish Israelis. There were many others, anyways, I learned a lot from Hanna, and found out he spearheaded the Team Palestine soccer team in Seattle. I filmed them practicing and playing at the All Nations tournament in Tukwila a few weeks later. 

After I saw the picture of his village, I went back and Googled Buqayah. I found Hanna and Ed's theater project about a destroyed village. Their play actually got a lot of exposure.  Read this....it's an amazing story.  

The play, titled Sahmatah, was performed in Seattle and around the Pacific
Northwest in 1996. In 1998, Sahmatah traveled to Israel/Palestine, to be performed
on the actual stones of the village itself.
The project began five years ago.

The story of Sahmatah


Also, check out the movie The Time That Remains. It's about a Arab family from Nazareth, from 1948 to today, and it's fantastic. 

Oh Jesulein Suss

When I went home this Christmas, my parents were looking at a German hymn in their Carol book. It's an old family favorite, and my mother wanted us to sing it as a Christmas present for her aunt, who's recovering from Leukemia. It was the first time we'd attempted something classical together, but we're all choir nerds, so it only took a few sessions in front of the piano to get it down...

At first I didn't find the song that interesting, but when we got all four parts together, I melted like buttah.

The words are so sweet too. God comes down from the heavenly kingdom to be like us mortals...it softened the German language to me. I've sung in German in choir and lessons, but I don't have a strong relationship to it, unlike my parents. I still find it aggressive a lot of the time.

Michael was coming up from California to meet the fam on Christmas day, so I told my mom he could record us and help us Skype our song out. We were just deciding on whether to sing the words or sing on "doo's" and I suggested that yes, on the day my Jewish boyfriend meets my family we should bust some German out in 4-part harmony...

 "Dad, what's the literal meaning of Himmel reich?"

"Umm...heavenly kingdom."

"K...just checkin."

Kids

I'm trying to publish as much of my footage as possible, even if it's in bits and pieces.

My favorite videos are of kids....


 

 --------

 

Fool in the Rain

This is my favorite Led Zeppelin song. I learned it on piano in high school, but never got a real jam going on that end part. It's kind of like a tongue twister though, by the fifth time around it sounds like jibberish...


Yesterday was very, very interesting. Michael had signed himself up for a Bay Area meetup group called Yalla Arabi, which had advertised a screening of The Law in These Parts in San Francisco, and he said we should check it out! I was surprised, because joining that group is something I would've (or should've) done, and also because halfway through the last Palestine film I took him to (Five Broken Cameras), he looked at me and said, "you're not going back there."

I knew he meant to the demonstrations, so I assured him that Bil'in had calmed down a lot since the movie was made. I couldn't lie and say I wouldn't go back. I just tried to watch the movie from the eyes of someone who'd never been, and after the screening, I got Iyad to give him assurance that Bil'in is actually a nice place, and I was well taken care of there.

So we went to see the Law in These Parts. I was looking forward to getting some good legal background on the occupation. Most of the movie was a series of up-close interviews with Israeli military judges from the 80's and 90's.

In the end, it didn't stick with me that much. A little way through the movie I realized the target audience was Israelis, and what I learned from the judges was mostly swallowed up by the absence of Palestinians. The makers of the film had determined that they weren't in the scope, that it had to be done a certain way, and I tried to understand their vision. I tried to think, "if I were an Israeli and didn't know a lot about the Territories, I would need this information presented to me in this way...." like when Israel was credited with giving occupied Palestinians the chance to petition the Israeli High Court, I understood it was more than a fact, we were meant to put the occupation on a pedestal so we could scrutinize it more clearly.

 I tried to put myself in that mindset, to see fairness and balance as a tactic, to appreciate the candor, anything to forget the personal tragedy that wasn't shown, and may not have been felt by the target audience. I tried to remind myself of why the humanity of Palestinians wasn't really in the scope....

When the interviewer read testimonies from prisoners who had been tortured, it went on for minutes, showing videos of prisoners blindfolded and lying in strange positions....mostly the camera was tuned in on the judges' stoic faces. When asked if he knew there was torture going on, one of them said, "yes, of course I knew!"

I saw my friends. I saw countless friends of friends, and Ashraf, and Saed, and Souli, who never told me everything. I saw their families, mothers, brothers, friends, that I knew...and that fact that they weren't on the screen smiling and working and arguing politics and smoking argheela and eating maqloubeh and lamenting the slowness of internet...my head was too small a space for all of that, so I cried. Michael held my hand, and I kept crying.

One by one, the interviews ended and the ex-judges unclipped their microphones and got up from their chairs, after which they must've headed back to their houses and gone to sleep. I wondered if they slept the same or worse that night.

As the credits rolled I pulled myself together. We chatted with the girl who was sitting next to us. I'd recognized her face from her profile picture, she had organized the Yalla Arabi group. We learned that her grandfather was from Jaffa, and he'd been expelled to Nablus, but she'd never been to the Middle East. She'd been in the Bay Area her whole life, and was a photographer now. I told her I was interested in an Arabic lesson, and we talked about activism and politics as she drove us back to Michael's car.

We reviewed and discussed and argued and as we drove across the Bay Bridge and back into the East Bay, he said, "I still feel guilty for what we've done."

"Why do you feel guilty?"

"I can't help but say we..."

......

"What did you think about all this before we met?"

"That it was just a bunch of crazy Arabs and crazy Jews fighting each other for hundreds of years. I still kind of do, but at least now I know what the Palestinians have been through..."

"You thought the Israelis were crazy?"

"Yeah. That's why I didn't go on Birthright. A conflict goes on for that long, there has to be something wrong on both sides..."

Though my head was still swimming, careening up a suburban hill in the dark gave me a strange sense of peace. Who was inside these houses? We dodged around their fenced-in fortresses, through that neat little mess of slumbering humanity....I would always have one foot on the other side of the globe, but here I could put my thoughts to rest a bit. Until tomorrow.

New blog to check out

Hey everyone!

My former student Urwa just starting his first blog! His voice is so important because he's an activist in the Jordan Valley while all these demolitions are going on.

Check it out:

Valley of Jordan-Urwa's Blog

Shed A Little Light

One of my favorite songs :)




Today I'm meeting up with the Rebuilding Alliance team and the founder of Canaan Fair Trade! We're going to talk about how to better promote their Fair trade olive oil in the Bay Area. I lived so close to Canaan Fair Trade in Al Aqaba, it would've been about 30-40 minutes to Burqin, Jenin. I'll have to go next time!