Searching for a Protest

Today I woke up really late. 9 1/2 hours of sleep is a really, really, really good thing. Especially for me.

I saw Susie for a few minutes, and she told me that all of East Jerusalem is closed due to protests about the situation in Gaza. She couldn't even go across the Jordanian border today and will have to wait until tomorrow to cross. The death toll in Gaza has now risen, I think past 100, with many of them children. Children. We build playgrounds for children so that they may play together. The IDF just kills them. As a child, I never felt afraid of death - not my own death, not the death of anyone I knew - but children in Gaza must always know that they could be killed at any time. Can you imagine being only 4 or 5 years old and knowing that one day you could be killed by shrapnel, a bullet, a rocket...? What kind of childhood is this?

The Israeli government has officially declared a holocaust - yes, they actually dared use that word - on the Palestinian people, saying that Palestinians have brought it on themselves. How can a people bring a holocaust on themselves? Were the Jews, Gypsies, and disabled people responsible for the holocaust during World War II? Would anyone ever say that they brought that on themselves?

Definition of genocide (from http://www.preventgenocide.org/genocide/officialtext.htm):

The international legal definition of the crime of genocide is found in Articles II and III of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.

"Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Article III: The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide. "

It is still so painful for me to know that there are people I care about who support Zionism and the state of Israel. I am here. I am witnessing the daily humiliation that Palestinians go through at the hands of the Israeli government. I am hearing about the mass killings of Palestinians by the IDF. And now I am talking to you who believe in this murderous state: How can you support all of this? I know you are not awful people. I know you care about other human beings. So how can you think that any of this is justified? If you only knew Palestinians, if you could only see all of this...

It is hard for me to be here and bear witness to this genocide and to think that I could possibly go back to the U.S. and be able to interact with people who support it. Though I know all the arguments Zionists use to justify the existence of the state of Israel, I can't understand how people can have such cognitive dissonance to actually beleive that any of it justifies this genocide.

So today I went searching for a protest, more specifically the protest against the IDF's killings of Palestinians in Gaza. You'd think it would be easy to find a protest, but I couldn't find one for the life of me. I walked from the Mount of Olives all the way to the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, and I walked around and around this area (with the help of a pretty crappy map out of my crappy guidebook). I couldn't find anything! I think I might have arrived too late.
But the search was interesting. I hit almost every street in the souk, eventually wandering into the Christian and Armenian Quarters. Then I gave up and decided that, instead of going to the protest, I would take pictures of Christian holy sites to send to Samer's (my husband) grandmother, Sitou Mairie. She would really appreciate that kind of thing. So I followed my map and followed my map and eventually saw a shwarma joint. I figured Sitou Mairie would want me to be well-fed, so I popped in and tried to order a shwarma sandwich in Arabic. Since my Arabic still sucks, I ended up talking with them in English, and the guy charged me the tourist price for a sandwich. As I was eating the sandwich on a bench outside, Alaa, a young man who works in the restaurant, approached me and started talking. We talked for a while, and I told him about my background, as well as what I was doing in Palestine. He and the owner apologized for charging me the tourist price and invited me in for a coffee. For the next few hours, we got lost in conversation - about Palestine, about families, about life - and they even helped me with my Arabic. The owner (I will not mention his name in this blog) told me a story about how his son was once arrested for having a pocket knife (the kind you peel oranges with). He was a child, just walking to school, when he was stopped, searched, arrested, and held in jail. In the end, Fawaz had to pay a few thousand shekels just to get him released.

Alaa, who is only 20 years old, has an Israeli ID, and this allows him more freedom than the average Palestinian. He is an amazing young man who is currently a university student and is in his second year. He has another 6 years to go before he can achieve his goal of becoming a tour guide. He speaks Arabic and Hebrew fluently, and he has been studying English as well (and he speaks some Russian, which he learned from the tourists). Once the restaurant was closed, Alaa took me all around the Old City and up to the Jerusalem Wall. He took me to the rooftops for a view of the whole thing. Wow. There is something so solid and timeless about the Old City. So many of the structures have been there for thousands of years, not like our American construction, which seems to fall apart after only decades. And Alaa is an excellent tour guide (I hope he is reading this post so that he can know how much I appreciated his help and guidance today).

Though I took pictures of Alaa and the restaurant owner for my own memories, out of respect to them I will not post them on this blog. I do not want to get them in trouble for being associated with an American who speaks out against Israel, as they are only trying to make a living with the hard work of running a business in Jerusalem.

I took the bus back to the Mount of Olives (it's almost completely uphill on the way back), and it was already dark by that time. I stopped in a souvenir shop that Susie recommended to me. I bought a few souvenirs for some of the essential folks and, again, had a wonderful conversation with a wonderful salesman. This guy is a salesman in a souvenir shop but has a degree in dentistry from Eastern Europe. Because he is Palestinian, he has to wait until the Israeli government allows him to take the certification test for dentists to be able to work here. He's been back in Jerusalem for about 2 years now and is still waiting. Again, I will not use his name or the name of the shop, as the shop is Palestinian owned and I would not want to cause anyone problems because of anything I write here.

Side note: I didn't really come to Palestine to shop, so I'm going to try to keep souvenirs to a minimum. In any case, I don't know how much time I'll have to just be a tourist. Sorry, everyone!

As I travel through Palestine, I try to imagine what life was like here before Zionists made this land into an apartheid state. I try to close my eyes and visualize the Old City of Jerusalem without all the IDF soldiers and their massive machine guns and imperial gaits, the countryside of the West Bank without the settlements and checkpoints, the day's news without photographs of dead Gazan children and the tear-stained faces of their parents. It is hard to imagine, but I will keep trying.