Boycotting Israel

I am pleased to report the first US university to divest from Israel: http://stopthewall.org/worldwideactivism/1846.shtml I can only hope that this is a trend that offers an economic tool to pressure Israel into a more just situation than the current occupation and racism within its state offer.

I'm a vegetarian, and I love tofu. But the only tofu I can get in Palestine comes from East Jerusalem and is in a can, which is completely unappetizing to me. There are health food stores in West Jerusalem where I can find fresh tofu, but the problem is I boycott the Israeli economy in as much as is possible. Yesterday in Tel Aviv I was hanging out with an Israeli who lives in the city. He is vegan. And I told him how much I miss tofu, so he directed me to a store down the street where I can buy tofu. I told him I can't because I boycott Israeli products and stores. He reminded me of what I know all too well: it's impossible. Not simply because I was in Israel itself, but because there is a deeply entrenched occupation that controls the products on Palestinian shelves. In East Jerusalem--legally Palestine--one cannot find the most basic Palestinian products like water. In Ramallah I can but the majority of products are Israeli and those that aren't still have to go through Israel to get to us, which means ultimately that the Israeli economy benefits. Nonetheless I believe whole-heartedly that we who live in Palestine should do our best to support the Palestinian economy and not the Israeli one. It just doesn't make sense to fund the occupation. And while it is so challenging to boycott Israeli products here because they are sometimes the only option, outside of Palestine and Israel it is much much easier. I hope that people around the world join in the growing BDS movement and use their buying power to fight injustice and apartheid. Here's a list of companies who support Israel. I hope it helps you start daily demanding justice in this simple but vital way:

One Prisoner Back on the Streets

Last night a man of 27 was outside my house. He was surrounded with maybe fifty family and friends who were celebrating his return. They stood outside all talking with intense energy and enthusiasm, for this man of 27 was released from Israeli prison yesterday after 6 years there. He was apparently held for a conspiracy against a soldier. I don’t think the way forward in this situation is to blame others. That said, we exist within systems of power relations, and these systems often bind us to certain roles and possibilities. He may or may not have been responsible for planning or was part of the executing of a plan to kill an Israeli soldier. I don’t know, and I don’t care. The point is that there is a cycle of violence here, and not one that we can easily dismiss as intractable and incomprehensible. There is an explanation for conspiracies against soldiers or the state. There is a brutal military occupation of the Palestinian land and people that is enforced everyday by those two mechanisms. This man was bred to violence. Now that may seem a highly contestable claim, but he was in fact born into a violent existence, one created by occupation. The soldier is the symbol of Palestinian oppression and so it makes sense to hate that symbol and to want to destroy it. He may have participated in a conspiracy, and he is accountable for that violence, but that violence cannot be stopped with six years in prison, or even a hundred. It can only be stopped with the violence to which it responds also stops. Only then can 20 year old young men live their lives instead of being defined as symbols of violence.

I'm Back

I’m not sure where to start. I’m back in Palestine. The first change I noticed was when I entered Israel, all of the Israeli soldiers, staff, and passport control especially, were so friendly to me. A lot of friends have asked me how I thought Gaza would affect my ability to enter Israel and return to Palestine (for those who don’t know, the occupation of Palestine means that anyone coming to Palestine enters through Israel and their passport control before crossing into Palestine, which has no air, land or sea control). I answered frankly that I didn’t know. I didn’t have any idea if entering would be more difficult or what. My experience says Israel is giving itself a makeover, embodied in that line repeated to me a good six times as I went through security and passport control: “Welcome to Israel.” My analysis is that the image of Israel is so poor after their massacring the people of Gaza that this is one of Israel’s attempts at rectifying the damage. The problem is, the damage is not just one of image. The damage is someone’s home that they built after 20 years of saving their salaries. The schools destroyed. The mosques decimated. The brothers, the daughters, and grandmothers dead. The father who lost his legs and the mother who lost her skin. The child who lost her eyes. The burned school books and pictures. The clothes and food supplies. Life. The health, safety, education, and future of an entire people. Maybe more than those futures are their presents. No shelter, no food or water, no mother or brother now. All dead, destroyed, massacred. Wouldn’t it be incredible if fixing the damage was an honest endeavor, not about branding Israel differently but of rebuilding lives and changing a decades long policy of ethnic cleansing. That sounds so simple that it rings of absurdity. And yet, how is it that halting violent ethnic cleansing could possibly sound absurd?