On Peace and Power

I have a suggestion to make. It is a very serious one, and it comes from the bottom of my heart. The suggestion is that we stop use the word peace. I am starting to realize what a dangerous word it is. It is dangerous because it conceals more than it reveals. What is the meaning of peace, anyway? When somebody talks about peace, we tend to think in terms of happiness, friendship, white doves, singing birds, blooming flowers and the absence of war. When somebody says he wants peace, we thus naturally assume that he wants something good. And on that ground we conclude that we agree - after all, who doesn't want something good?

But who is to define what happiness is? And whose peace is to be implemented? The problem is that apart from denoting something good, the word peace has no specific meaning. It allows those using it to cover up hidden motives while pretending to work for the greater common good. Power can hide in the word peace.

I'll give you an example. Upon his return from his visit to Israel earlier this spring, Foreign Minister of Norway Jonas Gahr Støre was quoted in the paper Morgenbladet saying that although the situation in the Middle East didn't look too good, he was sure it would eventually come to some sort of a happy ending, seeing that 'both sides want peace'.

Now, this statement only serves to obscure reality. Both sides want to live in peace, for sure, in the sense that they want not to have to fear for their lives every single day. But there is a very important difference here. For most Israelis, the word peace equals security. As long as they have security, the rest of the matter is not so important. For Palestinians, on the other hand, the word peace means sovereignty and freedom. So when Støre is saying they both want peace, he is putting a veil over the truth, imposing a common goal on a situation where there is no common goal.

For this reason I suggest we limit our use of the word peace wherever and whenever we can. Let's try to be a little bit more honest, let's set our agendas straight. Let's try to be brave enough to face the world as it is, not as we would want it to be.

For my part, I will substitute 'peace' with justice. Working for peace can mean so many things, but working for justice has only one true meaning: the struggle for our equal rights and our indisputable dignity as human beings, on the basis of our common humanity.

Under the Carpet

Jerusalem wakes up to yet another sunny day, and while everything seems normal here, in Gaza hell contiunes. Interior ministry bombed, rockets fired at Abbas' offices, water and electricity still gone, humanitarian crisis imminent. The world objects, the U.S. remains silent and nothing happens except for horror. Though Jerusalem is calm as yet I find it hard to concentrate on my project. It's so hard to believe that all this horror take place so close by, and even harder to realize that nobody cares. It's like being in the midst of a gruesome traffic accident where nobody comes to rescue, although everybody can see what happened. And at times it's also somewhat hard to be a visitor here, knowing that my mere presence in the country contributes to the tourist business in a state that doesn't give a damn about human rights and international law. When I think about it I feel like taking a taxi to the airport and leave promptly.

Instead I'll post some pictures from our trip around The Other Jerusalem, to the wall and the occupied Palestinian neighbourhoods that no Israeli visit unless he or she is already part of some activist group. The trip was organized by the organization Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), who has been of great help to my project. Its founder, Jeff Halper, an extraordinary wise and courageous man as well as a brilliant academic, is now nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize together with a Palestinian named Ghassan Andoni.

The invisible occupation. This picture says nothing an at the same time everything. It is taken in the Muslim part of the Old City. Tourists walk around here, it's nice and exotic, and it's hard to realize it belongs to the territories occupied in 1967. What is intersting with the picture is that the building in the background is part of an illegal settlement. Israeli flags (hardly visible on the photo) have been put up on what used to be Palestinian land. Impossible to know unless someone tells you.

The Wall 5 minutes from central Jerusalem. Further to the right of the picture it cuts across what used to be a main street connecting East Jerusalem to the West Bank.

Uprooted olive trees on Palestinian land seen from the road. Olive trees belonging to Palestinian farmers are more often than not uprooted by Israel for 'security reasons', depriving their owners of their livelyhood.

Garbage in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Anata. Although the inhabitants of Anata pay more tax to the Israeli state than residents in West Jerusalem (the Jewish part of the city), they are denied basic communal services such as garbage removal. For this reason garbage lie around everywhere, and the only way to get rid of it is by burning it.

What used to be a home... A demolished house in Anata. The residents there live under a constant threat of house demolitions - leaving their home in the morning they can never be sure that it's there when they return. A family we had lunch with in Anata have had theirs demolished four times. They got 10 minutes to get out of the house before bulldozers ran over it. The last time the family's daughter went blind - her eyes simply couldn't bear it. Israel justifies such house demolitions on the ground that the houses are built illegally, i.e. without a building permit. However, a building permit is virtually impossible to obtain if you are Palestinian, even if the land is yours and it's regulated for housing. As a result many families are forced to build illegally in order to survive.

Qalandia checkpoint. What used to be a temporary checkpoint to enter the West Bank north of Jerusalem is now institutionalized - a whole terminal is built around it. The feeling I had at the mere sight of innocent civilians being lined up, forced to wait for no particular reason and humiliated by 18-year old soldiers is hard to put into words. Over the gate a friendly sign displaying a scrolling "Welcome" in three languages just encapsulated the cruelty of it all. We had to walk through four heavily guarded gates, in which children are often separated from their parents because of the requirement that one can enter only one by one. There is alot to say about the wall and the checkpoints, but its essence can be summarized thus: institutionalized violence. The imprisoning of human freedom.

This morning the IDF barred Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem - who carries Israeli ID cards and thus are to be counted as Israeli citizens - from using the Betlehem crossing, one of the main gates to the West Bank. The reason? Security. Of course. Those dangerous Palestinians can not be given permission to see their relatives.

Ok, I'll try to do some work now. If you're interested in first hand accounts of life under occupation, check out the journalist Laila El-Haddad's blog Raising Yousuf, linked on the right.
Peace out.

Do you have a Gun?

One feature of Israeli society serves as a more or less constant reminder that something is not as peaceful and harmonious as the immidiate surface will have it: wherever you go, you run into a rather sick obsession with security. Closely connected to that, ironically enough I would say, there is the widespread presence of guns and soldiers. Now, not only soldiers carry weapons around in the streets; ordinary civilians armed with a rifle is a common sight, the rifle usually hung over the shoulder with the same ease that I carry my bag around. There are security checks virtually everywhere; armed guards are placed outside shops, restaurants, bus stations, shopping centers and so on - not to mention holy places like the Wailing Wall - and you need to open your bag and let the guard look into it before entering. Some places you even have to send your belongings through x-ray machines, as when entering departure areas in airports. The funny thing is that carrying a weapon doesn't seem to be too much of a hinderance to be let through, and I don't really get the point as most of the time the guards don't care the least what's on the bottom of your bag. It should be rather easy to enter with a bomb hidden away somewhere, so what's the point?

This morning I went to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to meet with an interviewee who is studying there. Just the process of getting in to the campus was quite interesting. First I was stopped by two guards asking to see my ID, and so I had to give them my passport. The guard examined it closely and asked me some questions about where I was from, what I was doing and why I wanted to enter into the university campus. I told him I was there to see a friend, which was then judged as an acceptable reason to let me in. Then came the question: "do you have a gun?" - phrased in a tone so casual and at the same time so serious it almost made me laugh. Well, I was eventually let in - whether or not it had anything to do with the fact that I didn't have a gun remains unknown - only to be faced with yet another security check. This time with beeping gates and x-ray machines, but no further questions asked. All this just to get inside the main building of the faculty of social sciences.

Where fear reigns, 'security measures' is good business.
I guess it also facilitates control, seeing that a frightened public is also an easily manipulated one.

Hope?

I was going to write a blog about hope. After all, that's what I'm trying to do here... focusing on hope. I'm interviewing people in the peace movement here in Israel, trying to find out what made these people break out of the official collective narrative, based as it is on myths that shape the mainstream interpretations of both past and current events and that thus make every peace process seem inconcievable. I'm talking to people who are objecting to it, trying to create an alternative viable framework of the conflict, one that focus less on 'security' and more on justice. What made them change, what made them realize that what's going on is unjust? I believe that this is where hope is. And I wanted to tell you about them, the small minority working hard to change the dangerous course of an overwhelming indifferent current. But in the face of a horrible invasion of an overpopulated impovered small strip of land, where people already are fighting hard for their daily lives, stripped of virtually every right theoretically entitled to all that fit the label 'human being' and even internationally boycotted on top of it all (!), how can I?

Just kilometres away, Israeli tanks entered Gaza last night. Operation Summer Rain (what cruel brains are naming horror after beauty?) has begun. Electricity and water is cut off, bridges bombed, sonic booms dropped, everything explained by the need to rescue the Israeli soldier who was kidnapped on Sunday. Seeing that Israel has what is probably the best and most effective intelligence services in the world, the need for 'extreme actions' (as Olmert put it) to win the soldier back is somewhat hard to believe. Consider this: The state of Israel can track down a wanted high-ranking Palestinian leader in a matter of minutes and assassinate him on the spot if they so wish (the killings of several Hamas leaders in 2004 serves as a good example). They are able to do this because of the many desperate Palestinian informants that get assurance that their house will not be abolished or a permit to visit relatives in Israel proper as payment for information useful to Israel. Shin Bet was even able to sack a Palestianian teacher in an Arab village just because he had told his students about the PLO in the classroom one day (an act which was of course deemed highly illegal). It's virtually impossible to hide anything. And yet they are not able to locate a kidnapped soldier? Don't bullshit me. Why does the world believe this shit? How can the world let this happen? Why are nobody stopping it? When will the world realize that violence and force only reproduce violence and force?

I feel like paying Ehud Olmert a visit, I feel like picking up the phone and call The White House, I feel like running into the UN's General Assembly, anywhere where this God-stolen power is gathered, hands are shaken and nothing but top-salaries are improving, I want to rush in there, and scream.
A lone, loud, intolerable scream.
In the midst of silent dark suits and nicely decorated neckties.
Would somebody then understand?
Would somebody then care?

Inivisibilities, Wars and Blindness

Time passes, and so I am beginning to grasp parts of how reality reveals itself here in the holy land. I am starting to see how the surprisingly calm and peaceful surface that shocked me so much when I first arrived is not just a carpet hiding a much more cruel reality, but actually an important part of that cruel reality itself.
I should have guessed.
The opposite of love and empathy, after all, is not hatred but indifference.
It makes sense in some bizarre way.
There is so much ignorance here, you wouldn't believe it. People are so blind. For most Israelis (and I am of course making broad generalizations here, but you get the point), the occupation is non-existent. And why is it non-existent? For the simple reason that it's invisible. Out of sight, out of mind. Although only kilometres away (or some places not even a kilometre), the general feeling is that it's at least as far to the territories (as the occupation is called most of the time) as it is to Norway ("Norway? What countries are next to Norway?" as a security guard at the wailing wall put it). You could perhaps arrest me for oversimplifying the matter, but this is even my own feeling here I am sitting in a nice wired café in West Jerusalem. The horror and daily humiliation of the occupation is far away. It must be far away, how else can I explain the indifference around me? How else can I explain the way people continue to be preoccupied by their investments, the latest fashion and the best drinks while their prime minister is planning a war on Gaza?

Again, there is some serious generalization here. But then again, walking by the beach in Tel Aviv yesterday, I rather unvoluntary was accompanied by a man who assured me he could tell me anything I wanted to know. Although this man was a bit... what can I say, off the mainstream in terms of intelligence, it serves as a good example of the general attitude around here. Noticing my Lonely Planet book of the Middle East he exclaimed "Oooohhh! Book about Middle East! Why you have book, I am here! I know everything! Ask me!" But then he asked me instead, wondering where I was from.
"Norway," I said.
"Ohhhhh!! Norway! Nice! I have very very nice memory of Norway!"
"Oh, so you've been there?"
"No!! Never!"
"?"
"But I have been to Greece!"
"???"
"I met nice girl in Greece! Her name Hilde! Ohhhh very beautiful you know! I love her! I love Norway!"
I guess I should have ended the conversation at this point, but I had nothing particular planned for the next minutes, so I went on to ask him what he thought about the conflict.
"Ohhh! About the conflict, I don't care! What do you think, you can tell me anything you think! Anything! I don't get angry, for me it means nothing!"
So I diplomatically told him I found the whole situation a bit... unequal.
"Ohh, unequal, really! But look, how can you say that! It's not all black and white you know! It is more like grey. Yeah grey! And when all is grey, what can I say! It's grey!"
And then he went on to complain about the stockmarket and his boredom on his day off and urged me to let him buy me a drink.
But I had just spent an hour talking to another jerk on the very same beach, patiently listening to his complaints about how all the Muslims of the world wanted to throw the Jews into the sea and all that (and in vain trying to put some other ideas into his brainwashed head), so I politely refused the invitation and decided to look for something more sane.

I expected to find so much hatred. I expected to find a war. I prepared for violence, that of the overt and direct kind. And I was shocked when I found a society where everything seemed completely unaffected by everything that's going on. I almost felt like my eyes betrayed me.
I still do, to some extent. It's difficult to believe how people can be so ignorant and indifferent to the cruel and racist policies their own government is implementing. Well, if its due to complete ignorance, in the sense that people don't have a clue about what's going on, it's somehow understandable. And truth is that their state is doing its best to hide the occupation from the public. For example, there are highways, 'safe passages', where Israelis can travel from one part of the country to another without having to get even a single glimpse of the wall. Or, where the roads run close to it, it's been decorated so that you don't even realize it's a wall unless you know that's what it is. I've seen it myself, I would never have guessed if the people from the oranization I travelled with hadn't pointed it out. But still, the great majority knows at least something; it's just so much more convenient to look another way.

So here I am, drinking coffee, transcribing and preparing interviews in my favorite Jerusalem cafe, life outside is as normal as that of Oslo on a summer's day (except for the rather common sight of civil men walking around with AG3's), and nobody would have guessed the wall is less than a 10 minutes drive away. I open Aftenposten's internet site and huge black fonts informs me that Israel is preparing for war.

War? What war?
For those who would take the effort to find out, they could buy a copy of Haaretz, Israel's biggest newspaper, or even just open their web page, and they could read that the IDF (Israel's Defence Forces) is preparing for an invasion of Gaza after an Israeli soldier was kidnapped yesterday, in a Hamas-led attack of a control post that came as a response to the killing of 30 Palestinian civilians during the last weeks. Citing prime minister Ehud Olmert:
"The age of restraint has come to an end... We will respond forcefully, with an operation that will last more than a day or two."
And nobody seems to care.

Fuck this cruel world.

Poetry Interlude

How Did a Flag

How did a flag come into being?
Let's assume that in the beginning
there was something whole, which was
then torn into pieces, both big enough
for two battling armies.

Or like the ragged striped fabric
of a beach chair of my childhood,
flapping in the wind. This
too could be a flag making you arise
to follow it or to weep at its side,
to betray it or to forget.

I don't know. In my wars
no flag-bearer marched in front
of the gray soldiers in clouds of dust and smoke.
I've seen things starting as spring,
ending up with hasty retreat
in pale dunes.
I'm far away from all that, like one
who in the middle of a bridge
forgets both its ends
and remains standing there
bent over the railing
to look down into the streaming water.
This too is a flag.

(Yehuda Amichai, Israeli poet)

Dead Sea

If 'slowly' was the main clue in my last blog, 'fast' is a more appropriate one for this one. Things are really speeding up, and that feels incredibly good. Started interviewing and have made some important contacts and promising appointments - still confused like a chicken lost in elephants' land, but anyhow the overall feeling is that things are moving. Forward, hopefully. (My newly acquired and good-looking recording device even decided to be my friend and work perfectly instead of being against me and work improperly. Nice of it!) I can assure you that it's much better to feel lost in a forward-moving manner than in a stucked-chicken kind of way. Ok, so far about the fieldwork stuff, updates on Very Important Findings from Silje the Researcher (or the chicken, depending on my self-confidence) may or may not follow more or less suddenly.

What I wanted to tell you is that on Sunday we went for the tourist-thing and did an amazing tour of Masada, Qumran, Jericho and the Dead Sea with three other travellers and a nice Palestinian-Israeli guide with a van. I don't think I've ever done as much in one day ever before, and I can't possibly fit it all into one single blog post so I'll divide it a bit. Those of you who know me well may recall that guided tours are on top of my list of things I strongly dislike, but even so this one was great.


The definitely coolest spot on our trip was the Dead Sea. It's just totally weird! You simply cannot sink, no matter how much you try. Walking into it you cannot even stand straight when the water reaches your belly, it pushes you upwards. People where floating around with stones on their backs. I knew this is the way the Dead Sea works, but the feeling of it was just amazing. - Except for the burning. I had some scars between my toes and it burnt like hell. And when I say hell I really mean HELL. I guess the 28% of salts and minerals in the water may have something to do with it. I couldn't stay in there for more than a few minutes because of that. Even so it was awesome.


And then there's something fascinating and intriguing with the fact that it really is a dead sea. Nothing lives there. Nothing can sink into it, except for very heavy stones.
An unsinkable sea.
Bottomless somehow, even though one has to suppose
there is a bottom.
Only dead and heavy things can stay there, things that are stronger than the water's gentle and constant upward push.

Jerusalem continued

Slowly, very slowly. The world is starting to come together somehow, I am beginning to feel some sort of solid ground under my feet. That doesn't really mean things make completely sense, though. Being in Jerusalem for the first time, after previously having spent four months in a Palestinian refugee camp and having read dozens of books about the tragedies and the violence going on around here leaves you with the feeling that you're the main character in one of your own bizarre dreams. You somehow recognize the place you're in, but it's all twisted and strange, and what you see doesn't fit what you know.
And you tell yourself I am only dreaming and you expect to wake up and find the world in its usual shape, things finally falling into recognizable places, blurred images sharpened, twisted corners straightened out.
But you don't.

But that's of course exactly what makes travelling so rewarding. Living live dreams. As bizarre as this dream may be, it's still an extremely interesting one. I'll start my interviews tomorrow and I'm very excited! And then again, my friend Gro is here with me the first week (she had a job interview for a Jerusalem-based UN-organization some days ago so she came with me, and that's great!), and we live in the most fantastic guest house ever. The window on the picture is from our bedroom. Underneath: Notes stuffed in the Wailing Wall.

Jerusalem (War is Peace)

After two days in Jerusalem (or one really, yesterday I was so tired I walked around like a cotton-brained zombie) the biggest shock is that everything seems so normal. The surface is beautiful, quiet and harmonious; Jews, Muslims and Christians of all sorts filling the narrow alleyways of the old town, kids playing, street vendors inviting tourists for coffee, tourists photgraphing street vendors (and other exotic appearances), Jews praying at the western wall, old men playing backgammon in the streets, allah o-akhbar from the mosques, church bells ringing, birds singing, everything surrounded by extremely old stone walls, blue skies, doves and cobblestones.

And this is exactly what I find so disturbing: it is perfectly possible to arrive at Ben Gurion airport, take a taxi to Jerusalem, stay there two weeks and leave again without getting to know a single thing about all the madness going on around here. The surface is a vicious betrayal of reality, like an embroidered carpet hiding a horrible dark hole in the ground. How can everything seem so normal and peaceful when truth is this country is totally fucked up?

I drink my coffee on the wonderful roof terrasse on top of our super-cozy youth hostel in the heart of the old city, the afternoon breeze cooling my over-heated mind, the amazing fairytale-view fooling me into believing that I really have come to the land of milk and honey. And only kilometres away, a whole family was blown up while having a picnick at the beach in Gaza last Friday, only the 10-year old daughter survived. Violence breeds violence, and in the distance, if you look very closely, right there in the horizon behind a cypress tree in some Jerusalem garden, there is a glimpse of the apartheid wall. A reminder in stone and steel that oppression is the flip side of this peaceful surface, if people only would lift the carpet and look that far.

View of the World

Summer. Time?

I've had this strange feeling lately that I don't really know where I am.
Or perhaps rather when I am, if I can put it that way. What day is it? How fast does a week go? Is this week over yet? When is tomorrow? And what month is it really?
And you may ask yourself, how did I get here.
I look out the window and I am reminded that I am now at our summer place in the far south of Norway. It's sunny outside, summer-sunny. Flowers are busy blooming. The sea looks tempting, blue skies are already swimming in it. Wind in trees. Flies in windows.
Me in vertigo.
Am I leaving on Tuesday?
Apparently.
Have I remembered everything?
No idea.

But then again,
time exists just on your wrist so don't panic.

Life at the Moment

News from Enjoyable Tourist Hell

Not much to report from Gran Tourist Hell, apart from the fact that we're enjoying ourselves far beyond what one would deem possible in a tourist hole like this.
Photos still waiting to be posted.
We rented a car and drove far away to find the Perfect Beach, but of course it did not exist after all. But then we found another one which was pretty ok (see picture).
I've managed to get a really nice tan, and Anders is jealous because he can't match it.
Our swimming pool has a perfect temperature to cool us down when the heat is too hot.
And I have seen the scandinavian medical center from the inside, after waking up one day just to find out I couldn't move my head. They took an x-ray and gave me an injection, which almost made me faint (don't know why, I'm not afraid of injections?). Anders bought me coke, and now I'm pretty much ok.
For some reason I have the habit of seeing doctors for unexpected reasons whenever I travel, so I guess it's how it should be.
Time for dinner out at our veranda.
The sunset is beautiful.
Sangria is good, and so is life.
Oh je.