Category: Writing

Articles by Mya Guarnieri

Palestinian identity under attack in Israel

by adminin Writing

dsc01008Maan News Agency, April 29, 2011

Earlier in April, the Israeli Ministry of Education decided to add a question about the Holocaust to the matriculation exam of Arab students.

Because the state has banned any study of the Nakba– going so far as to strike the word from the textbooks– the move has drawn sharp criticism in Israel’s Palestinian community.

The Abraham Fund — a joint Jewish-Arab organization that advocates for equality within in Israel — remarked that, “It is important that Arab students learn about the Holocaust and understand the history and pain of the Jewish people… At the same time, it is important that Jewish students learn about the history of the Palestinian minority in Israel, especially those aspects tied to the state of Israel and her existence.”

Sawsan Zaher is a Palestinian who was born and raised in Israel. An attorney at Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, Zaher recalls that she did not learn about the Nakba until she studied it on her own, in her early twenties.

“I finished high school without being able to study Palestinian history–about what was here before 1948, about the nakba.”

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Bin Laden’s death should not be celebrated

by adminin Writing

flag-half-staffMondoweiss, May 2, 2011
The Huffington Post, May 3, 2011

Osama Bin Laden is dead. And Americans are celebrating.

Last night, the crowds cheered and sang before the White House and in Manhattan. And, today, the jingoistic, congratulatory op-eds hit the papers.

It’s been particularly troubling to me, an American-Israeli, to watch these events unfold from Tel Aviv. I’ve heard too many Israelis justify the occupation of Palestinian territory with statements like, “They’re animals, they celebrate when we’re killed.” I’ve heard the same rhetoric come from American mouths, “The Muslim world cheered after the 9/11 attacks.”

Americans–many of whom consider their so-called War on Terror morally righteous–must ask themselves if the images of their celebrations really look so different than those that they condemn.

We must remember that a tremendous majority of the Arab and Muslim world did not revel in the horror of 9/11. The attacks were largely denounced–from Ramallah to Pakistan and almost everywhere in between.

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Bride of the Sea

by adminin Israel, Writing

dsc03604Souciant, 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.

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A new nakba?

by adminin Israel, Writing

dsc03419Counterpunch, April 22, 2011

Several weeks ago, Israeli authorities arrested M, a pregnant woman, along with her three-year-old, Israeli-born son. The young family—sans the father, who had been deported several months before—was briefly detained then expelled from the country.

But don’t break out those Palestinian flags just yet. This was a family of migrant workers.

The father is Thai; the mother, Filipina. They both arrived in Israel, legally, on state-issued work visas. Here, they met and fell in love. And that’s how they became “illegal.”

The father lost his visa because of an Israeli policy that forbids romantic relationships between migrant workers (read: non-Jews). The mother lost her legal status due to the governmental policy that forces women to choose between their visa and their baby. M made the choice most women would—after she gave birth, she refused to send her infant to live with extended family in a faraway land. So she became “illegal”, along with her child.

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Israeli town rallies against African refugees

by adminin Writing

dsc03914Al Jazeera English, April 13, 2011

James Anei was a 16-year-old boy when he witnessed a massacre, carried out by militias loyal to the government in Khartoum. Terrified, he fled his village in South Sudan.

“You see someone dying in front of you and you know this guy and you know his parents and so you run… because you fear that you will be killed, too,” Anei says.

“I find myself in another place,” he adds, explaining that he was so frightened that he didn’t know he’d been running until he stopped.

Once he realized he’d escaped, Anei headed north. That year, 1999, he arrived in Khartoum. There, he managed to scrape together a living and go to school. Not knowing whether or not his parents survived the massacre, Anei remembers crying sometimes when he saw his classmates with their mothers and fathers.

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Israel’s uneven justice

by adminin Writing

dsc09574Maan News Agency, April 13, 2011

Last week, Israeli immigration police arrested and deported a three-year-old boy, born and raised in Israel.

The toddler was detained and expelled to the Philippines along with his mother, M, who is pregnant. The children’s father is a migrant worker from Thailand who was deported several months ago. Distance and poverty makes it unlikely that the family, torn apart by the state of Israel, will be reunited.

This is just one heartrending story that has surfaced as Israeli government steps up its current efforts to ensure a “Jewish and democratic” state—by deporting non-Jewish, Israeli-born children of migrant workers, along with their parents.

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Boycotting Israel… from within

by adminin Writing

dsc03633Al Jazeera English, March 26, 2011

It was Egypt that got me thinking about the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement in a serious way. I was already conducting a quiet targeted boycott of settlement goods—silently reading labels at the grocery store to make sure I wasn’t buying anything that came from over the Green Line. I’d been doing this for a long time.

But, at some point, I realized that my private targeted boycott was a bit naïve. And I understood that it wasn’t enough. It’s not just the settlements and the occupation, two sides of the same coin, which pose a serious obstacle to peace and infringe on the Palestinians’ human rights. It’s everything that supports them—the government and its institutions. It’s the bubble that many Israelis live in, the illusion of normality. It’s the Israeli feeling that the status quo is sustainable.

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A state of narcissism

by adminin Israel, Writing

tel-aviv-banksySouciant, 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.

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Deployed

by adminin Migrant workers, Writing

dsc01218Tablet, March 11, 2011

On a Friday night, Filipino congregants are praying in a tiny, unmarked church tucked off a nameless alley in south Tel Aviv. The church is one room, with wood laminate floors and plastic chairs. Burgundy banners read “Elohim” and “Yahweh” in Roman letters. A Star of David made of spoons hangs in the window that looks out over the Neve Sha’anan neighborhood, four floors below.

The congregants are evangelical Christians—a group that is sometimes referred to in the Philippines as “charismatics”—and their love for both the Bible and the Jewish people inspires them to use bits of Judaism in their services. About a year and a half ago, the church was raided by Israeli immigration authorities. Standing here, I try to imagine police swarming the place. But the service is so peaceful, the praying so earnest, that I can’t imagine anything but this.

The pastora of the church, who asked that her name not be used, to protect the privacy of her congregants, stands at the clear acrylic pulpit, which also holds a menorah and kiddush cup. A guitarist, keyboardist, drummer, and an Israeli flag are behind her. Her eyes are closed, her face tipped up. She pushes her hands to her heart as she leads the group in song: “We worship you,” the congregation sings. Then the music slows, softens, and stops. Someone blows a shofar. The congregants cry out to God in Hebrew.

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House evictions forge new alliances in Israel

by adminin Writing

dsc03488Al Jazeera English, March 11, 2011

Yafit Cohen is a wife and mother of four – her youngest child is just a few months old. Cohen makes her way up the stairs, slowly, easing her baby carriage around a gaping hole. “Watch out,” she says to me.

I look down. I can easily imagine her 8-year-old son, a talkative little boy who has raced ahead, falling through. I gasp at the thought.

“I know. It’s dangerous,” Cohen says, adding: “And it’s not legal.”

Cohen, a Jewish Israeli, lives in low-income, subsidised housing. Worried that her children, or those of her Palestinian neighbours, could be injured or killed, she has asked the state to fix the stairs. They have not.

What the state is working on, however, is making Cohen and her family homeless. The housing authority wants to put Cohen, her husband, their four children, her brother-in-law and niece – “eight souls,” as she says – on the street.

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