Drowning in Mixed Metaphors

"It is possible to practice meeting the world, rather than regarding it as an object of knoweledge, to leave behind the desire to appropriate experience, and begin to think in terms of relation. Levinas says that ethics is a response to the face of a stranger that "summons me, questions me, stirs me, provokes my response or my responsibility." This stranger is anyone other than ourselves. We don't write "about" the Other or another, purporting to capture, describe, render, or represent Otherness. We write out of our encounter and out of our being marked by it."
--Carolyn Forche


A white dove lands on a water cistern on a rooftop across from our apartment building in Nablus. It might just be an albino pidgeon or something--I'm not sure doves actually thrive in this environment any more than humans do. The irony is almost too much for me; the bird stands on a building raided by the Israeli Defense Forces only two weeks ago, and there is nothing peaceful here. Even at night, the sounds of Israeli Humvees, barking dogs, and occasional gunshots and explosions disturb and threaten. I would like to write a pretty, hopeful poem about the proverbial white dove carrying its olive branch, but here the olive tree, still a symbol of land, is far from a symbol of peace.

Even in Noah's time, the olive branch was symbolic of land, and at its heart it remains so in Palestine and Israel today, as land is at the root of this conflict. Palestinians are are kept from their olive orchards by restricted roads they can't cross. Trees are uprooted and moved onto Israeli lands as a regular practice, so that thousand-year-old olive trees are appropriated from families who can trace the original plantings back to their own family trees. Olive orchards are razed to make way for Israeli settlements, and an estimated two million trees have been cut down to make room for the separation wall which divides communities and even individual families. Israelis plant trees to erase the presence (and absence) of former Palestinian villages; even Yad Vashem, the most important Holocaust museum in the world, sits inside the Jerusalem Forest, land which was once a thriving Palestinian village (I remember putting my quarters into little cards at synagogue as a child, proud to make the world greener and totally unaware of how those trees were being used to erase the lives of others).

In South Mt. Hebron, Jewish settlers sneak onto Palestinian lands and cut down their olive trees, trying to ruin their livelihoods enough to chase them away. Two months ago settlers were even caught on film attacking a Palestinian family with axes, an incident which made international press thanks to videocameras their neighbors had been given by activists to help document such raids. Our guides show us a film in which an old orthodox rabbi shouts obscenities and throws stones at Palestinians he claims have stolen his wheat. When reminded that it's the sabbath, he justifies his violence with lines from the Old Testament, and I find myself feeling sick. In another film, 10-year-old settlement girls shove Palestinian girls to the ground as they try to leave school, while Jewish boys in orthodox dress throw stones at the girls who manage to escape. And I find myself drowning in metaphors, smothered by the contrasts, lost as I try to figure out whether fighting for peace has ever led to anything but more violence.

The streets of Nablus are lined with posters of fallen martyrs, young boys no older than my students, many of whom hold guns and are honored for their violence. On the other side of the wall in Hebron, Israeli soldiers around the same age finger their triggers while they look at my papers and search my bags suspiciously, and they are no friendlier when I tell them "Ani Yehudit," I am a Jew, even as the words catch in my throat and choke me with disdain. A small group of Palestinian men walks by as the Israeli police write down our names and passport numbers just for walking, just for being there; one Palestinian catches my eye and I see solidarity in his gaze and the slight nod we both hope the soldiers won't see. Settler boys with yamulkes and prayer strings hanging from their waists stop to gather stones on a hill above us and all I want to do is stop thinking, stop noticing the hypocrisies, find a way to become hardened and accustomed like those who live these realities daily. We leave through Hebron's old city, nets above our heads holding back the garbage Jewish settlers drop down onto the Palestinian market. An Irishman working in Ramallah tells me the settlers have switched from throwing garbage to pouring urine and acid out their windows since the nets went up.

There is too much hatred to take in, and each time I see the wall, painted with Ghandi's face or lines that compare walled-in Palestinian villages to the Warsaw Ghetto of World War II, I find myself more confused about how any of this is supposed to be godly or bring peace. Walls have never helped; across the globe humans have built them again and again, and all they ever do is increase the chasms and violence between us, separating us from the Other until we forget we were once the same people. This country looks like Swiss cheese on maps now, the wall splitting lands and winding in circles, not really keeping Palestine and Israel separate so much as complicating all movement and enforcing so-called security. We are reminded in Hebron that the new maps are three dimensional, Isreli-controlled roads going over Palestinian villages, Palestinian roads tunneling under Israeli ones, Jewish settlers living above Muslims. It's too late for a two-state solution, and one state would require a change of heart I'm not sure humans are actually capable of anymore.

Activist and writer Jeff Halper, founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition, describes Israeli policy in terms of an apartment building much like the one the dove landed on in Nablus. All the rooms are more or less autonomous, although one can expect regular visits from the IDF to make sure things are running according to their rules inside. Outside those rooms, Israel controls the doors and hallways completely. Ariel Sharon said Israel would "squeeze Arabs like a giant pastrami sandwich." And I don't know which is harder: knowing that my cultural family tree is the bread, the ones who police hallways and doors, or trying to live in these tiny sealed-off rooms, finding myself at the meat of the sandwich with the feeling that nothing I can contribute will ever be enough.

Sitting on Saed's porch watching the late afternoon sun kiss the white stone and turn it gold, I see another white dove fly overhead. We have this freedom, Liz and I, and even with the checkpoints and hassles that turn a 15-mile trip into a five-hour ordeal, we know we can come in and out as we want to, American passports in hand, even if they grill me at Ben Gurion Airport about why I was in Hebron. Saed is waxing philosophical as always; the Koran, he tells me, doesn't condone any of this, and neither does Jewish scripture. He has known many Jews horrified to discover good values being applied in such hateful ways, and most Palestinians feel the same way about those who twist the Koran into a justification for violence. Both religions teach us to give of ourselves to fulfill the needs of others, requiring us to respond when others are oppressed. I linger in the sounds of the call to prayer which echo around us, mesmerized as always by its beauty and devotion, my memory bringing up the image of bowed heads and backs in crowded mosques. My upbringing taught me to want the peace I hear in this melody, a lasting peace that brings justice for everyone, even if it's as impossible to reach as the dove over our heads. And we sip at our tea and listen, none of us really able to understand how devotion to a loving God could be used to justify separation and hatred where brotherhood and coexistence might once have been possible.