Tonight the state of Georgia executed justice.
Which is not to say that the state of Georgia executed justice, but instead that the state of Georgia executed justice: Her Limbs strapped to gurney, palms open towards sky, veins open like sky as backdrop to strange fruit hanging from limbs, strapped to gurney. Does a body laid lifeless on gurney lay like a body laid lifeless on bloodied Burger King pavement. Body bound to pavement by bullets. There were no bullets tonight, but I imagine that for some, though unseen, there was that grand finale, a tap dance in autumn sky under bridge or pole or canopy. A lifeless body hangs like it lays. Lifeless. Tonight there is no life. There are just colors as canvas for tears that have no color.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Unemployment:A Middle East Remix (Part 1)
Seven weeks ago I purchased my tickets from O’Hare to Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel-Aviv, Israel. Two weeks later I stepped off the plane in a land promised to me by me, and while no one was there to welcome me home, a ritual familiar to many of those whose chosen status has earned them a free trip to the Promised Land, for the four weeks that followed I tried to find my room in an already very crowded house.
What follows is an account of this search, written clumsily by fingers that seem to have lost a dexterity they may or may not have once possessed.
I don’t know if I expected to find a room in a place that had no room for the world’s most beloved Virgin and her Nazarene boo, but I certainly found a lot of couches and well-worn mattresses where I could birth the following thoughts, infantile in both their form and content. Read with caution, and an abundance of grace for a writer whose thoughts are as disjointed as the land and people that evoked them.
Some of you may be reading this because you have been encouraging me to pursue a hobby, writing, that I all but abandoned after college. For you, reading this amateur travel blog will probably leave you wishing you had encouraged less writing, and more job searching. Some of you may be reading this because you think that you may find some interesting musings on “the situation” in the Middle East. For you, I can assure you that if you can patiently swim through the ocean of self-indulgent drivel that will inevitably follow, you may indeed find small islands of provocative commentary. Well, provocative may be a strong word. Some of you may be reading this because you want to read some booze-soaked stories about terrorists, military checkpoints, and Bar Rafaeli look-alikes. For you, with enough embellishment, perhaps I can even offer you reason to read on. Most of you however, are probably just reading this because unlike me, you have day jobs, and subsequently, you are looking for any procrastination material available. For you, this very long-winded blog may be your own metaphoric promised land, although I would suggest that more enjoyable procrastination material may be found at www.reddit.com, or, www.youtube.com, or www.imgur.com, or www.whythefuckdidIgetarealjob.org. And lastly, some of you are reading this because you are family and feel obligated to do so. For you, well, sucks to be family sometimes.
I think that covers all five people who will probably read this.
What you five will find here is mostly written in retrospect, now a week or so removed from my trip, but I have sporadically included incoherent journal entries/poetry/notes/pictures from my travel notebook as well. Again, read with caution, grace, and an irreverence that matches the irreverence displayed by the writer.
Beginnings.
For the sake of orientation, it seems appropriate to start this travel blog with a map. However, it is worth noting that any map of the tiny piece of land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River is inherently political, and most of them tend to be more disorienting than orienting, as they attempt to impose coherence on what may be the least coherent piece of geography on the planet. This cartographical dilemma, or paradox as it may be, will undoubtedly be exposed, extracted and explained directly and indirectly throughout this blog. But I will remind you, as I so often remind myself, that when mapping, either geographies or experiences, it is best that we leave our predilection for coherence at the door [I DO have the right to refuse entry, right?].
So for starters, if one focuses on Israel, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Palestine), here is the most benign map I could find of the place where I spent the last month:
And here is a less benign but more accurate map, just to make things more interesting but less coherent:
If the discrepancies between these two maps interest you, you can look at these maps before reading about my journey through them. If they don’t interest you, you can just read about my journey through them, much of which you may find tremendously boring.
And so we begin…
2/20-2/24 (ish) – Tel-Aviv, Israel
A vibrant and conspicuously modern city on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, Tel-Aviv was everything I imagined it would be.
Known as Israel’s bastion of secular hedonism, the city’s decadence is distinctly European: bustling streets lined with cafés, boutiques and falafel shops that loudly express each day’s vitality, an exuberant vitality calmed only momentarily, so as to let the idyllic sunset that pours itself over rolling Mediterranean waves call forth a new night. A Tel-Aviv night. 
A night whose long hours are lengthened in boisterous bars screening soccer matches and nightclubs that dance to the unrelenting pulse of eclectic beats, only silenced by the sidewalk side-talk spoken in a tongue neither forgotten nor remembered, just never learned. And throaty. Very throaty. Hebrew is impressively jugular.
At some point, a city that never seems to sleep sleeps, and imbibed dreams give way to a new morning, where cigarettes and street-side cappuccinos cure hangovers while the white waves of the Mediterranean wash away the sins of a city’s night, like some grand act of absolution that belongs 40 miles southeast, tucked in-between the walls of old Jerusalem.
And Tel-Aviv is fucking expensive.
And there is an abundance of longhaired, wetsuit-sporting surfers whose chill seaside presence almost comically belies the Israeli F-16s that pass ominously above them. And without a doubt, this city is the epicenter of Israel’s most pervasive and inspiring quality: sexiness. I don’t know if the people in Tel-Aviv are the most attractive people in a country of seriously attractive people, or it’s just the one place you get to see a lot of them in scant swimsuits, but Tel-Aviv is not a recommended destination for anyone with serious self-esteem issues. The women there will make the straightest men straighter, and the men there will make the straightest [and gayest] man gayer, and neither will make you feel any better about your own physical aesthetic.
Tel-Aviv was a very strange place for me to start my trip.
Why was Tel-Aviv a strange place for me to start my trip?
[Good use of the direct question as a transitional device, Garret, you fucking amateur.]
My guess is that 50% of the people reading this blog, so about 2.5 people, have at least a very basic idea of why seven weeks ago I spontaneously decided to purchase a $725 plane ticket to go a place whose only known appeals include: a really salty sea, lots of old religious shit, a handful of suicide bombers, and about 1.2 million handfuls of Jews. You other 2.5 readers should know that for a reason that seems to change every time I attempt to articulate it, I have spent the last few years of my life indulging a strange sense of attachment to the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
The entirety of my senior year of college was passed reading and writing about the perpetuity of conflict and the [im?]possibilities of peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. The “peace” walls that had surrounded me while studying intercommunal conflict in Belfast became the walls that have turned the West Bank into a tragic mosaic of fragmented beauty. My mind moved from Belfast to Jerusalem with greater ease than even the cheapest British Airways flight, and as I sat complacently in a Chicago office last year managing the development of financial technology, my mind was consistently stuck at some unknown Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank, passport in hand. Instead of finding a much needed hobby to pass the hours I wasn’t committing to financial technology [5-9], I started volunteering with a non-profit whose only other volunteers are Jewish and Muslim and have a more obvious reason to care about peace-building in Israel-Palestine. I start most of my morning coffees with Haaretz and Al-Jazeera, and it is only the last sips that wash down more geographically relevant Huffington Post links. Strange? Maybe. But maybe I’m surprised more people don’t find cycles of suicide bombings, state-sanctioned terrorism, and illegal settlement building to be more intriguing than boringly incessant examples of corporate malefaction and the theatre we call politics here. Maybe I just find ethno-national violence more genuine than other manifestations of the human condition, whether it be Obama’s State of the Union or Keeping Up With The Kardashians, a judgment not meant to take away from the fact that Barack can give a damn good speech and Kim has some damn good boobs.
Ultimately I don’t think I knew the reason I finally decided to go to the place I have so strangely invested myself in until Toamhe, a Palestinian-Israeli, served it to me with a side of shawarma at his restaurant in Nazareth. Because I had to wait until I went to figure out why I was going, it’s only appropriate that I make you do the same. We are still in Tel-Aviv, and you’ll find out in Nazareth. It was certainly worth the wait for me; maybe it will be for you as well.
Initially though, I, like almost every other American who goes to the [not so] Holy Land, saw my trip as a sort of pilgrimage. Except I, unlike almost every other American who goes to the [not so] Holy Land, imagined myself on a sort of political pilgrimage. On the traditional religious pilgrimage, a pilgrim visits a place whose embodied meaning resonates with and fortifies the most intimate and salient aspects of their fixed religious identity. Similarly, I found myself visiting a place that has become a meaningful part of my own identity, albeit an identity that I find too multifarious and elusive to categorize as either “religious” or “political.” Perhaps what distinguished my conception of “political pilgrimage” from the more conventional notion of pilgrimage however, is that I anticipated that actually “experiencing” my place of pilgrimage could cause its meaning to transform in unforeseeable ways, potentially changing its relation to my identity, my worldview, my passions, etc, in unpredictable ways. In other words, I was leaving myself open to change, whereas I think many pilgrims are just looking for emotional reinforcement, to put it crudely. The more important distinction between my pilgrimage to the Holy Land and a religious pilgrimage to the Holy Land however, is much more surface level: Some people go to the Holy Land cause they want to see God; I was going because I wanted to see politics, and more specifically, conflict.
Maybe you find this sickening, like I’m some kind of conflict junky who would probably get off to late-night Al-Jazeera over late-night Cinemax, or inject war intravenously if he could. Neither of these is [entirely] true, and putting your judgment aside, the point is that the reason I decided to spend my unemployment dollars 6211 miles from Chicago is because I wanted to actually see the conflict I have spent years reading about.
Or maybe I just wanted to get drunk with hot Israeli girls. [No, I know my strengths, and anyone who has seen me interact with either booze or hot women knows that my strengths do not lie therein. I am a lightweight with tendencies towards social awkwardness, or as my less PC, more honest friends put it, “slight social autism.” As much as I wish I could say I went for the women, the truth is, I went for the war. Which sounds surprisingly less gay than I anticipated.]
And that is why Tel-Aviv was a strange place to start my trip. [That’s what we call coming full-circle]
I flew 6211 miles to see a society I have always reduced to its conflict, and when I got there, this conflict was nowhere in sight. Tel-Aviv was not Israel. It was Chicago, or some version of Chicago that lacks rampant political corruption, budgetary incompetence, and a winter brutal enough to drive the most affable, Prozac-popping optimist to the brink of suicide. So it was San Francisco. Or Miami, if you replaced all the Latinos with secular Jews and Lebron James with Omri Casspi. In short, it was awesome.
But the relevant difference between Miami or San Francisco and Tel-Aviv, is that neither Miami nor San Francisco are located 40 miles northeast of the Gaza Strip; the most god-forsaken 140 square miles on Earth, whose attractions include frequent yet unpredictable Israeli aerial assaults, an unimpressive yet terrifyingly indiscriminate collection of Qassam rockets, a desperately deprived economy, and an ever-growing list of dead foreign activists. To put this proximity in perspective for my Chicago readers, Chicago is Tel-Aviv and Gaza is Aurora. For my Ohio readers, Tel-Aviv is Cincinnati and Gaza is Oxford. For my other readers 1) who are you? and 2) your home is Tel-Aviv and some familiar location about 40 miles away from your home is Gaza. And in case that doesn’t make you feel close enough, compound that physical proximity with the mental proximity caused by the fact that you are or were serving in the military that helps write each chapter of the tragedy that is the Gaza-Israel novella. [everyone, men and women, serve in the Israeli army, with a few exceptions]
And yet, outside of the occasional passing F-16, and an omnipresent fear-complex that sits dormant in the Israeli sub-conscious, awakening occasionally at the request of a prodding foreigner or opportunistic politician, there is no visible evidence of Gaza or war or ethnic hostility in Tel-Aviv. There is only the banality of our daily play, acted out by a cast of disproportionately sexy actors.
I wrote this journal entry while sitting in a posh, street-side café a few days into my trip. I should note that I was reading Mahmoud Darwish’s "Memory and Forgetting" at the time, an account of his experiences during one day of heavy Israeli shelling during the 1982 war invasion of Beruit:
Journal Entry from 2/23/2011 – Tel-Aviv, Israel
There is a startling WWI poem, John McCrae’s “In Flanders Field”, about birds flying high above a WWI battlefield. The poem captures the unsettling albeit strangely comforting simultaneity of the atrocious gore unfolding on the battlefield and the birds flying above with unencumbered tranquility. Their flight and song is an affront to the violence they transcend, both literally and symbolically. Their apathy is a force powerful enough to trivialize the most meaningful and horrific expression of human depravity. We find refuge in this trivialization, even as it offends our more patriotic urges.
Mahmoud Darwish elicits this same juxtaposition in the beginning of "Memory and Forgetting" when he writes about the sparrows in Beirut, whose songs share the air with exploding metal.
Tel-Aviv feels like those birds to me.
There is something reassuring about a place that operates life’s machine without inhibition despite its proximity to and complicity in the depravity of Gaza. Reassuring because Israelis, like Gazans –who are slowly but surely becoming cognitive separates from “Palestinians” –must continue living their monotony regardless of this proximity. This is the absurdity of war; perhaps it’s the absurdity of all injustice. Life is lived over and within the simultaneity, over and within and outside of this juxtaposition. War is life and life is war and life is life, whether you’re in Gaza or Tel-Aviv. This, of course, does not render McCrae’s duality meaningless. Instead, the banality we share becomes that which constitutes, or conditions, our empathy, or our ignorance as it may be. The trivialities of life are only trivialities because they are trivial; our trivialities are not trivialities if their fulfillment is our struggle. I drink this coffee trivial in one Tel-Aviv’s posh street-side cafes, but for Darwish, for Beruit, every sip of coffee is an act of resistance. His own personal act of war against the war that causes the city around him to crumble. We are not equals, despite our shared love for the bitter taste of Arabic black.
End of Journal Entry.
It was the discomfiting beauty of these cycling trivialities (coffee, cigarette, work, shopping, surfing, beer, etc) that made me decide that 4 days in Tel-Aviv was enough; that if I wanted to expose myself to the conflict, which I would later find out takes on its own semblance of triviality, I needed to leave Tel-Aviv.
So I did. I boarded a bus to Jerusalem’s Central Bus Station, where yesterday morning a bomb exploded in a suitcase left curbside, killing one 60 year-old British woman and injuring 30 others. Some say I left just in time, others say a week too early.
As this blog moves from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem, it has left many experiences in Tel-Aviv unspoken: walks through the beautiful yet contentious ancient port city of Jaffa, or Yafo, as its Arab residents would have it; trips to Israeli military museums, where memory and forgetting, memorialization and sanitization, are strange cohabitants; and an inspiring day with an organization that is trying to bridge the Palestinian-Israeli divide by starting cross-communal basketball teams that compete in Israel’s youth basketball league. I imagine that later reflections in this blog will conjure up these experiences and they won’t remain unspoken. But until it is time to find a wife and make beautiful progeny, we won’t be returning to Tel-Aviv. At least not in this blog.
See in you in Jerusalem, the place of guns, gods, and rocks thrown through tour bus windows. [and yes, more good-looking Israeli women who I would fail to make out with.]
What follows is an account of this search, written clumsily by fingers that seem to have lost a dexterity they may or may not have once possessed.
I don’t know if I expected to find a room in a place that had no room for the world’s most beloved Virgin and her Nazarene boo, but I certainly found a lot of couches and well-worn mattresses where I could birth the following thoughts, infantile in both their form and content. Read with caution, and an abundance of grace for a writer whose thoughts are as disjointed as the land and people that evoked them.
Some of you may be reading this because you have been encouraging me to pursue a hobby, writing, that I all but abandoned after college. For you, reading this amateur travel blog will probably leave you wishing you had encouraged less writing, and more job searching. Some of you may be reading this because you think that you may find some interesting musings on “the situation” in the Middle East. For you, I can assure you that if you can patiently swim through the ocean of self-indulgent drivel that will inevitably follow, you may indeed find small islands of provocative commentary. Well, provocative may be a strong word. Some of you may be reading this because you want to read some booze-soaked stories about terrorists, military checkpoints, and Bar Rafaeli look-alikes. For you, with enough embellishment, perhaps I can even offer you reason to read on. Most of you however, are probably just reading this because unlike me, you have day jobs, and subsequently, you are looking for any procrastination material available. For you, this very long-winded blog may be your own metaphoric promised land, although I would suggest that more enjoyable procrastination material may be found at www.reddit.com, or, www.youtube.com, or www.imgur.com, or www.whythefuckdidIgetarealjob.org. And lastly, some of you are reading this because you are family and feel obligated to do so. For you, well, sucks to be family sometimes.
I think that covers all five people who will probably read this.
What you five will find here is mostly written in retrospect, now a week or so removed from my trip, but I have sporadically included incoherent journal entries/poetry/notes/pictures from my travel notebook as well. Again, read with caution, grace, and an irreverence that matches the irreverence displayed by the writer.
Beginnings.
For the sake of orientation, it seems appropriate to start this travel blog with a map. However, it is worth noting that any map of the tiny piece of land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River is inherently political, and most of them tend to be more disorienting than orienting, as they attempt to impose coherence on what may be the least coherent piece of geography on the planet. This cartographical dilemma, or paradox as it may be, will undoubtedly be exposed, extracted and explained directly and indirectly throughout this blog. But I will remind you, as I so often remind myself, that when mapping, either geographies or experiences, it is best that we leave our predilection for coherence at the door [I DO have the right to refuse entry, right?].
So for starters, if one focuses on Israel, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Palestine), here is the most benign map I could find of the place where I spent the last month:
And here is a less benign but more accurate map, just to make things more interesting but less coherent:
If the discrepancies between these two maps interest you, you can look at these maps before reading about my journey through them. If they don’t interest you, you can just read about my journey through them, much of which you may find tremendously boring.
And so we begin…
2/20-2/24 (ish) – Tel-Aviv, Israel
A vibrant and conspicuously modern city on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, Tel-Aviv was everything I imagined it would be.
Known as Israel’s bastion of secular hedonism, the city’s decadence is distinctly European: bustling streets lined with cafés, boutiques and falafel shops that loudly express each day’s vitality, an exuberant vitality calmed only momentarily, so as to let the idyllic sunset that pours itself over rolling Mediterranean waves call forth a new night. A Tel-Aviv night. 
A night whose long hours are lengthened in boisterous bars screening soccer matches and nightclubs that dance to the unrelenting pulse of eclectic beats, only silenced by the sidewalk side-talk spoken in a tongue neither forgotten nor remembered, just never learned. And throaty. Very throaty. Hebrew is impressively jugular. At some point, a city that never seems to sleep sleeps, and imbibed dreams give way to a new morning, where cigarettes and street-side cappuccinos cure hangovers while the white waves of the Mediterranean wash away the sins of a city’s night, like some grand act of absolution that belongs 40 miles southeast, tucked in-between the walls of old Jerusalem.
And Tel-Aviv is fucking expensive.
And there is an abundance of longhaired, wetsuit-sporting surfers whose chill seaside presence almost comically belies the Israeli F-16s that pass ominously above them. And without a doubt, this city is the epicenter of Israel’s most pervasive and inspiring quality: sexiness. I don’t know if the people in Tel-Aviv are the most attractive people in a country of seriously attractive people, or it’s just the one place you get to see a lot of them in scant swimsuits, but Tel-Aviv is not a recommended destination for anyone with serious self-esteem issues. The women there will make the straightest men straighter, and the men there will make the straightest [and gayest] man gayer, and neither will make you feel any better about your own physical aesthetic. Tel-Aviv was a very strange place for me to start my trip.
Why was Tel-Aviv a strange place for me to start my trip?
[Good use of the direct question as a transitional device, Garret, you fucking amateur.]
My guess is that 50% of the people reading this blog, so about 2.5 people, have at least a very basic idea of why seven weeks ago I spontaneously decided to purchase a $725 plane ticket to go a place whose only known appeals include: a really salty sea, lots of old religious shit, a handful of suicide bombers, and about 1.2 million handfuls of Jews. You other 2.5 readers should know that for a reason that seems to change every time I attempt to articulate it, I have spent the last few years of my life indulging a strange sense of attachment to the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
The entirety of my senior year of college was passed reading and writing about the perpetuity of conflict and the [im?]possibilities of peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. The “peace” walls that had surrounded me while studying intercommunal conflict in Belfast became the walls that have turned the West Bank into a tragic mosaic of fragmented beauty. My mind moved from Belfast to Jerusalem with greater ease than even the cheapest British Airways flight, and as I sat complacently in a Chicago office last year managing the development of financial technology, my mind was consistently stuck at some unknown Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank, passport in hand. Instead of finding a much needed hobby to pass the hours I wasn’t committing to financial technology [5-9], I started volunteering with a non-profit whose only other volunteers are Jewish and Muslim and have a more obvious reason to care about peace-building in Israel-Palestine. I start most of my morning coffees with Haaretz and Al-Jazeera, and it is only the last sips that wash down more geographically relevant Huffington Post links. Strange? Maybe. But maybe I’m surprised more people don’t find cycles of suicide bombings, state-sanctioned terrorism, and illegal settlement building to be more intriguing than boringly incessant examples of corporate malefaction and the theatre we call politics here. Maybe I just find ethno-national violence more genuine than other manifestations of the human condition, whether it be Obama’s State of the Union or Keeping Up With The Kardashians, a judgment not meant to take away from the fact that Barack can give a damn good speech and Kim has some damn good boobs.
Ultimately I don’t think I knew the reason I finally decided to go to the place I have so strangely invested myself in until Toamhe, a Palestinian-Israeli, served it to me with a side of shawarma at his restaurant in Nazareth. Because I had to wait until I went to figure out why I was going, it’s only appropriate that I make you do the same. We are still in Tel-Aviv, and you’ll find out in Nazareth. It was certainly worth the wait for me; maybe it will be for you as well.
Initially though, I, like almost every other American who goes to the [not so] Holy Land, saw my trip as a sort of pilgrimage. Except I, unlike almost every other American who goes to the [not so] Holy Land, imagined myself on a sort of political pilgrimage. On the traditional religious pilgrimage, a pilgrim visits a place whose embodied meaning resonates with and fortifies the most intimate and salient aspects of their fixed religious identity. Similarly, I found myself visiting a place that has become a meaningful part of my own identity, albeit an identity that I find too multifarious and elusive to categorize as either “religious” or “political.” Perhaps what distinguished my conception of “political pilgrimage” from the more conventional notion of pilgrimage however, is that I anticipated that actually “experiencing” my place of pilgrimage could cause its meaning to transform in unforeseeable ways, potentially changing its relation to my identity, my worldview, my passions, etc, in unpredictable ways. In other words, I was leaving myself open to change, whereas I think many pilgrims are just looking for emotional reinforcement, to put it crudely. The more important distinction between my pilgrimage to the Holy Land and a religious pilgrimage to the Holy Land however, is much more surface level: Some people go to the Holy Land cause they want to see God; I was going because I wanted to see politics, and more specifically, conflict.
Maybe you find this sickening, like I’m some kind of conflict junky who would probably get off to late-night Al-Jazeera over late-night Cinemax, or inject war intravenously if he could. Neither of these is [entirely] true, and putting your judgment aside, the point is that the reason I decided to spend my unemployment dollars 6211 miles from Chicago is because I wanted to actually see the conflict I have spent years reading about.
Or maybe I just wanted to get drunk with hot Israeli girls. [No, I know my strengths, and anyone who has seen me interact with either booze or hot women knows that my strengths do not lie therein. I am a lightweight with tendencies towards social awkwardness, or as my less PC, more honest friends put it, “slight social autism.” As much as I wish I could say I went for the women, the truth is, I went for the war. Which sounds surprisingly less gay than I anticipated.]
And that is why Tel-Aviv was a strange place to start my trip. [That’s what we call coming full-circle]
I flew 6211 miles to see a society I have always reduced to its conflict, and when I got there, this conflict was nowhere in sight. Tel-Aviv was not Israel. It was Chicago, or some version of Chicago that lacks rampant political corruption, budgetary incompetence, and a winter brutal enough to drive the most affable, Prozac-popping optimist to the brink of suicide. So it was San Francisco. Or Miami, if you replaced all the Latinos with secular Jews and Lebron James with Omri Casspi. In short, it was awesome.
But the relevant difference between Miami or San Francisco and Tel-Aviv, is that neither Miami nor San Francisco are located 40 miles northeast of the Gaza Strip; the most god-forsaken 140 square miles on Earth, whose attractions include frequent yet unpredictable Israeli aerial assaults, an unimpressive yet terrifyingly indiscriminate collection of Qassam rockets, a desperately deprived economy, and an ever-growing list of dead foreign activists. To put this proximity in perspective for my Chicago readers, Chicago is Tel-Aviv and Gaza is Aurora. For my Ohio readers, Tel-Aviv is Cincinnati and Gaza is Oxford. For my other readers 1) who are you? and 2) your home is Tel-Aviv and some familiar location about 40 miles away from your home is Gaza. And in case that doesn’t make you feel close enough, compound that physical proximity with the mental proximity caused by the fact that you are or were serving in the military that helps write each chapter of the tragedy that is the Gaza-Israel novella. [everyone, men and women, serve in the Israeli army, with a few exceptions]
And yet, outside of the occasional passing F-16, and an omnipresent fear-complex that sits dormant in the Israeli sub-conscious, awakening occasionally at the request of a prodding foreigner or opportunistic politician, there is no visible evidence of Gaza or war or ethnic hostility in Tel-Aviv. There is only the banality of our daily play, acted out by a cast of disproportionately sexy actors.
I wrote this journal entry while sitting in a posh, street-side café a few days into my trip. I should note that I was reading Mahmoud Darwish’s "Memory and Forgetting" at the time, an account of his experiences during one day of heavy Israeli shelling during the 1982 war invasion of Beruit:
Journal Entry from 2/23/2011 – Tel-Aviv, Israel
There is a startling WWI poem, John McCrae’s “In Flanders Field”, about birds flying high above a WWI battlefield. The poem captures the unsettling albeit strangely comforting simultaneity of the atrocious gore unfolding on the battlefield and the birds flying above with unencumbered tranquility. Their flight and song is an affront to the violence they transcend, both literally and symbolically. Their apathy is a force powerful enough to trivialize the most meaningful and horrific expression of human depravity. We find refuge in this trivialization, even as it offends our more patriotic urges.
Mahmoud Darwish elicits this same juxtaposition in the beginning of "Memory and Forgetting" when he writes about the sparrows in Beirut, whose songs share the air with exploding metal.
Tel-Aviv feels like those birds to me.
There is something reassuring about a place that operates life’s machine without inhibition despite its proximity to and complicity in the depravity of Gaza. Reassuring because Israelis, like Gazans –who are slowly but surely becoming cognitive separates from “Palestinians” –must continue living their monotony regardless of this proximity. This is the absurdity of war; perhaps it’s the absurdity of all injustice. Life is lived over and within the simultaneity, over and within and outside of this juxtaposition. War is life and life is war and life is life, whether you’re in Gaza or Tel-Aviv. This, of course, does not render McCrae’s duality meaningless. Instead, the banality we share becomes that which constitutes, or conditions, our empathy, or our ignorance as it may be. The trivialities of life are only trivialities because they are trivial; our trivialities are not trivialities if their fulfillment is our struggle. I drink this coffee trivial in one Tel-Aviv’s posh street-side cafes, but for Darwish, for Beruit, every sip of coffee is an act of resistance. His own personal act of war against the war that causes the city around him to crumble. We are not equals, despite our shared love for the bitter taste of Arabic black.
End of Journal Entry.
It was the discomfiting beauty of these cycling trivialities (coffee, cigarette, work, shopping, surfing, beer, etc) that made me decide that 4 days in Tel-Aviv was enough; that if I wanted to expose myself to the conflict, which I would later find out takes on its own semblance of triviality, I needed to leave Tel-Aviv.
So I did. I boarded a bus to Jerusalem’s Central Bus Station, where yesterday morning a bomb exploded in a suitcase left curbside, killing one 60 year-old British woman and injuring 30 others. Some say I left just in time, others say a week too early.
As this blog moves from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem, it has left many experiences in Tel-Aviv unspoken: walks through the beautiful yet contentious ancient port city of Jaffa, or Yafo, as its Arab residents would have it; trips to Israeli military museums, where memory and forgetting, memorialization and sanitization, are strange cohabitants; and an inspiring day with an organization that is trying to bridge the Palestinian-Israeli divide by starting cross-communal basketball teams that compete in Israel’s youth basketball league. I imagine that later reflections in this blog will conjure up these experiences and they won’t remain unspoken. But until it is time to find a wife and make beautiful progeny, we won’t be returning to Tel-Aviv. At least not in this blog.
See in you in Jerusalem, the place of guns, gods, and rocks thrown through tour bus windows. [and yes, more good-looking Israeli women who I would fail to make out with.]
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