Dove's Eye View

Lizzy Ratner seeks her history in Poland

Lizzy Ratner returned to Poland to visit the land of her ancestors. Three out of four American Jews have at least one ancestor from pre-Nazi Poland. My own children have one such ancestor, through my husband, whose mother is descended from Russian and Polish Jews.

Ratner writes of a moment in her trip:

Again and again, as I stared at the remnants of ghetto walls, I wondered, baffled, how a people that was forced to live – and die – behind walls could force another people to live – and die – behind walls?

Thank you, Lizzy Ratner. This is the heart of the matter.

And thank you to Phil Weiss and the blog Mondoweiss for hosting great writing and reporting on this painful topic.

Hillary Clinton erupts in laughter

Entirely appropriate, derisive laughter at the mention of a right wing demagogue:

Think Progress » Hillary Clinton erupts in laughter at the mention of ‘John Bolton.’.

(Secretary of State Clinton says) "It is a recognition that certain countries that I think are kind of beyond the pale the rule of law hold people and subject them to long prison terms that are absolutely unfair and unwarranted."

I agree that North Korea is beyond the rule of law. But when I point a finger I have to notice that the other four fingers point back at me. Who else holds people for long prison terms without trial? Who else acts beyond the rule of law , bombing civilians without mercy and detaining people for prison terms that are absolutely unfair and unwarranted?

Yes it's true I've been posting pretty pictures and summer updates of late. You may suspect that advanced cancer has made me retreat into a cocoon where I hum positive affirmations and prattle about The Light. Sometimes I fear that my blog stance has become that of the Good Arab: docile, conciliatory, anxious to avoid commenting on atrocity, and eager to share recipes. Never mind the murder, have some hummus!

The love light of God heals all errors and mistakes. I do affirm that. And when I see hypocrisy I still call it out.

I erupt in laughter at the mention of John Bolton too, and unfortunately I also erupt in laughter at the idea that Hilary Clinton applies the rule of law fairly to Arabs. May God heal this situation because I cannot.

Ain el Helweh Lives

New York journalist Philip Weiss  had his eyes opened about Israel's occupation of Palestine a few years ago, and now blogs events from a Jewish anti-Zionist perspective. He even went to Gaza earlier this summer to witness for himself.

Today he reports on his reaction to Sacha Baron Cohen's latest movie, and he remembers what I wrote about Ain el Helweh:

Mondoweiss: inside 'Bruno,' a glimpse of the Nakba.

Thank you, Phil, for remembering Ain el Helweh's traumas, rather than laughing along with a useless comic. Some of us never forget what Israel has done to our neighbors. As Mahmoud Darwish said, and As'ad Abu-Khalil repeats daily, "All that you have done to our people is written in notebooks."

I am honored that my digital notebook page has entered the memory of those who have never set foot in Ain el Helweh.

If you are new to this blog, please note that I own a bit of property in Ain el Helweh, inherited from my grandfather. The Lebanese government asked my family to host Palestinian refugees there during the Nakba of 1948, "for two weeks." We began receiving 12 Lebanese lira a year rent at that time, which is now less than a dollar. The land is worth a great deal more than that. The saga of our suit for compensation would make a latter-day Dickens tale of lawyers, wars, and bureaucracy.

Since I grew up visiting Ain el Helweh and even attended school on its doorstep, I have always felt that the suffering of its residents was my personal business. These people are my neighbors, however unwilling their tenancy. They deserve to be remembered. They deserve justice.

They do not deserve the derision of clueless Westerners.

Lebanese Elections 2009

I follow the Lebanese election with the help of Qifa Nabki. Rami Zurayk, As'ad Abu-Khalil, and Josh Landis provide alternatives to the usual cant in the mainstream American media.

My own village, I have discovered, is solidly in the March 8 camp, because its representative is a member of Nabih Berri's Liberation and Development bloc. Berri is one of the Shi'ite representatives of my district, but since my village is Christian, we vote for the Catholic representative, Michel Moussa.

I am not sectarian at all, but I do notice that the three Lebanese bloggers I linked to above are all Southerners - like my father.

The more I learn about Lebanese elections, the more confused I get. But it is a good thing that they voted, that the elections were generally pretty fair and impartial, and that everybody seems to be accepting the results.

Let's hope that things calm down and everybody lives in freedom, liberation and sustainable development. No war!

Permaculture in Palestine

Never give up. Keep planting. Keep growing. Never, ever, ever give up.

ei: Palestinian farmers use permaculture to challenge occupation.

Those who want peace and call for non-violence need to support the work of these farmers.

Thanks to Rami Zurayk for the tip.

See what permaculturist Starhawk says about Obama's Cairo speech. She pitches it very positively at the beginning. Stick with it. She goes on to say things like:

I would have liked Obama to urge nonviolence on all of us: Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians alike. I would have liked him to at least acknowledge that indeed, many Palestinians have chosen nonviolent means of struggle, that for years now, villages have resisted the confiscation of their land for Israel's 'security wall' with peace camps, nonviolent demonstrations and civil resistance.

Obama's Speech: The Roundup

I appreciate the symbolism of Obama's speech in Cairo. It's a significant gesture and took some guts. I am also tickled that my president has a new nickname in the Arab world: Abu-Hussein. For the rest of it - well, we shall see.

Other people are better qualified to pontificate. Among the most interesting:

Al Jazeera report here, with reactions. (thanks to Alison Chaiken).

Journalist Helena Cobban was in Damascus, interviewing Khaled Meshaal of Hamas, and got his reactions.

The Arabist, an Arab journalist in Cairo, writes paragraph by paragraph response.

As'ad Abu-Khalil has extensive coverage. His long, no-line-break rant here, worth reading. His News Hour appearance here. His link to another commentator here . I don't care to take on Abu-Khalil's negative view of events, but he knows whereof he speaks, and his critique must be considered. He gives no quarter to corruption and abuse of power.

A Syrian reaction by Ehsani, published at Syria Comment.

Juan Cole's roundup and comment, invaluable.

Philip Weiss, who was there in the room with our President, having just returned from a visit to Gaza. Weiss has had a transformation in the last five years. Scales of prejudice and tribalism have dropped from his eyes.

Anthony Lowenstein says action matters, not words. (At Mondoweiss which is on fire these days).

Ali Abu-Nimeh provides further criticism.

Richard Silverstein likes the speech and has hope.

Colonel Patrick Lang, Middle East expert and retired US Army Intelligence senior officer, says Baby Steps.

BBC roundup of reactions, including Hamas, Hizbullah, Teheran, Israel and other parties. Alison Chaiken points out that the NY Times (and the BBC) quote negative Hamas statements, whereas Al Jazeera pulls a more positive quote from the same spokesman.

Tony Karon wrote this on Facebook:

The most important part of Obama's speech today, I thought, was his invoking of the Nakbah and the Holocaust. In fact, urging the Muslim world to reckon with the legacy of the Holocaust in understanding Israelis is far more honestly a legacy of South Africa than is Obama's false suggestion, in passing, that the ANC's struggle against apartheid was based on non-violent civil disobedience a la MLK... For the record, Bam, the ANC never renounced violence until the regime agreed to democracy... But here's my 2006 piece on What Arab Holocaust Deniers Should Learn from Apartheid.

Saifedean Ammous posted a note on Facebook which he permits me to reprint, below the jump.

Art against the Iraq war - Bitter Fruits

Laura McCallum, a sculptor and teacher in Brooklyn, NY, began a project six years ago to draw a tiny image in honor of each American killed in the Iraq war. The scroll now has 4,259 images on it, and takes up an enormous hallway.

Laura stood up with me at my marriage to David MacLeod, and more recently traveled with me to Lebanon and Syria in 2008.

Positivity: The Science

Four weeks ago I had a literary and spiritual crisis. I had just read a profoundly beautiful work of fiction that made me depressed about the future of humanity. The book is a masterpiece, and I felt there was no way I could write a story so well, nor could I stand to create a work that examined the cruelest impulses of human beings in such detail.

Upon finishing the book, I threw it on the bed and said aloud: I give up.

What did I mean? Give up on human beings. Give up trying to write fiction. What was the point? So many masterful writers describe war, poverty and suffering with such power (and many of them are friends or teachers of mine). I could not bear to write into such dark territory.

Furthermore, if the vision of human life I read in the book was true, then we're all screwed. What's the use of writing about signs of hope in the blog, even?

I called my friend Carolina De Robertis, who is a fiction writer of the highest caliber, and who is also wise in the ways of the soul. She came right over with her new baby and a photocopy of an article from The Sun Magazine:

The Science Of Happiness.

It's an interview with researcher Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina, who studies emotions and positive psychology. Dr. Fredrickson has developed a theory that positive emotions lead to novel, expansive, or exploratory behavior. One paragraph describes what I meant to do when I started this blog five years ago:

"Negative experiences can demand our attention so much that it takes self-discipline, willpower, and practice not to focus solely on them, and to look at all that's positive in our situations, as well. Negativity doesn't always feel like a choice; it feels like it just lands on you, and you have to deal with it. Positive emotions, I think, are more of a choice."

The interviewer asked "Isn't focusing on positive emotions a luxury available to only those who can afford it? What about people who are mired in conflict, or poverty, or awful social conditions?"

That has been my conundrum in this blog since the beginning. If I keep posting signs of hope while the world goes to hell, am I not just flaunting my own privilege and fortune? Perhaps I am even collaborating with evildoers if I chirp about kite-flying and school-painting while the forces of oppression commit great crimes, out of the way of the cameras.

Here is Fredrickson's answer:

"Positive emotions are available to everybody." Research conducted on the lives of slum-dwellers and prostitutes around the world suggests that "positive emotions have less to do with material resources than we might think; it's really about your attitude and approach to your circumstances.... "We think that having certain illnesses or physical limitations must be terrible all the time. But...you find that (people in extreme circumstances) still feel good when they are with their friends or families.... It's in the ordinary transactions of life that positive emotions grow."

My own experiences bear this out. I have had more than the usual share of trouble in the last eight years: illness, war, many deaths in the family in rapid succession. And yet even during chemo, even now with the shadow of cancer always hanging over me, I have moments, hours, days of great joy. Fredrickson also says,

"...Researchers have found some stunning correlations between expressing more positive emotions and living longer. My role is to ask, How does that happen? How do you go from experiencing these pleasant momentary states to living longer — perhaps even ten years longer?"

While she works on the research, I am going ahead with applying the theory. Yes the world is full of trouble. The Buddha famously said that all life is full of suffering. Our job while here is to refuse to be tossed away by the miseries. Our job is to keep breathing and be awake to the glory: the beauty: the power and joy of each moment of this life.

So I will continue to post signs of hope, and instructions for dinner, in order to keep myself and perhaps the rest of you going a little while longer.

Palestine Literature Festival: the Twitter feed

The Palestine Literature Festival just completed its five day run, and they have now compiled their Twitters, text and pictures, in a single page:

Twitter Series.

Sponsored by the British Council and the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization, this festival brought writers from around the world to different locations in Palestine. They held panels, cocktail parties, and poetry readings. They were shut out of their opening and closing nights in Jerusalem by Israeli police, because their activity is political and therefore illegal under the occupier's rules.

Too bad for the military, because with YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, the world could follow along and see for themselves what it looks like to try to have  culture when your occupiers want you to shut up and disappear. Doesn't make for great public relations for Israel, does it? What do they say, 'the only democracy in the Middle East?' If that's democracy, then I'm a Republican.

The sign of hope: never give up. Never, ever, ever give up. And poetry can live no matter how brutal the prison.

Mondoweiss: Gaza is alive

Philip Weiss, the American journalist, is in Gaza and has filed a report that sounds like something I would say. He gets it. He is now looking at signs of hope - amid the rubble, yes. Hope always lives.

Mondoweiss: Gaza is alive.

I remember during the Gaza slaughter that some tried to stop commentators from comparing Gaza to the Warsaw ghetto. Now I am here and I find the analogy helpful. In the Warsaw ghetto, and in slavery in the south, or in Jim Crow 100 years later--in any of these historical episodes of persecution that had a racist component--it wasn't as if the victimized people laid down and died. No, the blacks of the south created a rich culture on whatever terms were afforded to them. And the books my mother gave me of the Warsaw ghetto conveyed the treasure of Jewish life and culture that persisted even under the most humiliating circumstances. So in Gaza, with Israeli jeeps creeping up one border and gunboats cruising along the other, and bomb craters everywhere, and no one allowed to pursue their dreams, Palestinians are still leading engaged, serious, and even at-time joyous lives. Last night I watched the European Cup finals with about 100 of them in a crowded restaurant. The cruelty of the fact that a global festival that calls on talent from across the world is in no real way open to the people in the place was lost for an hour or two amid the shouts for Messi and Barcelona.

Mondoweiss, the blog, has been on fire lately. It is a must-read for information on Palestine, Israel, and organizing to change the status quo. Today there's a post about Einstein's view of Zionism and Israel (it wasn't fond). Weiss' thesis is that Judaism does not equal Zionism, and being a good Jew does not mean you automatically support the state of Israel and all of its actions and works. He is also outraged at the way coverage of Palestine has been suppressed in this country.