Category: Israel

Souciant, June 8, 2011

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood before a special joint session of the United States Congress. A foreign leader, he looked at home as he thumbed his nose at US President Barack Obama. Just days before, Obama had reaffirmed his administration’s commitment to two states—one for the Palestinians, the other for Israelis—based on pre-Six Day War borders. Netanyahu defied Obama as he told Congress (and international audiences watching the live broadcast) that Israel would not withdraw to the 1967 lines.

Netanyahu’s words were the final nail in the coffin of the twenty-six year old ‘peace process’, which had begun under the sponsorship of his former archrival, the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. They also marked a gulf between Congress and the President. And it is here, in this space, that a unique opportunity for the American public suddenly emerged.

Continue reading “The entitled people”

Souciant, May 18, 2011

In May of 2011, the Palestinians made a brave attempt to start the Third Intifada.

On the northern borders, the grandsons and granddaughters of those who had been dispossessed during the nakba attempted to exercise their United Nations-acknowledged right of return. These were the grandsons of those who had been driven from their homes, which were later declared “abandoned” by a law created by the new “Jewish and democratic” state. The grandsons of those who were locked out of the land in which they were born; the grandsons of those were then declared “infiltrators” when they tried to return.

Israeli soldiers, ignoring their own protocol, did not shoot to disable. They shot to kill. Some of these grandsons died on the Lebanese border. Others were slain near the line that separates Syria from the Israeli Occupied Golan Heights, which Israeli annexed unilaterally in 1981, a move that was deemed illegal by the United Nations.

Continue reading “Imagining Israel’s future”

Souciant, April 6, 2011

Sometimes I’m not sure what to call her. Is it Yafo? Or Jaffa? Then there is the old Arabic nickname, Urs al-Bahr, Bride of the Sea. Each word has its history.

And each has its fate.

If things had gone according to plan—the UN’s 1947 Partition Plan that is—Jaffa would have been part of a Palestinian state. But there was a war here, and there was a nakba, and the Bride of the Sea ended up inside of Israel, alone. In 1950, the municipality of Tel Aviv annexed her and (as husbands sometimes do) gave Jaffa a new name, a Hebraicized one: Yafo.

I took these photos while I was working on a story about gentrification in Yafo/Jaffa. It was a rainy day and I was, characteristically, unprepared for the weather. My lens kept getting wet. While I found this mildly irritating at the time, when I got home I was pleased with the aesthetic result—I felt like I was looking at this once hopeful Bride of the Sea through thick eyelashes, heavy with tears.

Continue reading “Bride of the Sea”

Souciant, March 17, 2011

It was cold outside and pouring rain. The cafe was packed, upstairs and down. “It’s really a commune here, huh?” the woman next to me said as I sat down. I smiled, nodded, and asked if it would annoy her if I plugged my laptop in. The wire would run right behind her, grazing her back. “No problem,” she said.

I listened in to her conversation with her friend, a blonde woman digging into a big bowl of organic fruit, yogurt, and granola. (It was one of those cool, lefty, organic coffee places). They were talking about an opening at an art gallery I have been to on many occasions; they discussed some grant in New York that one of the women was thinking about applying to. I could tell these women were cultured, educated, well-traveled. They were the type of girls I would sit in a café with. And it’s likely that we have mutual friends already.

On my other side was a large group of Russian tourists who looked to be in their late ens and early twenties.

When the blonde woman next to me opened the window behind her, eyebrows went up all around us. Russian, Israeli—it didn’t matter—we reached a quiet consensus that the window should stay closed.

Continue reading “A state of narcissism”