If you happen to live in Gaza, the one problem with accepting the ice-bucket challenge is that it requires a plentiful supply of ice. After seven weeks of bombardment, water is in short supply in Gaza, and electricity is scarce, so there’s no way to make ice. As journalist Ayman al-Aloul noted, however, what Gaza has in abundance is rubble. In fact thanks to the Israel Defense Forces, it has whole neighborhoods of it. Thus: the rubble-bucket challenge, which I accepted this afternoon halfway round the world in Seattle.  Please consider this an open invitation to take the challenge too:

(The rubble I used came, either ironically or appropriately, from a building site.)

I am going to wage peace upon everyone who disagrees with me. It will be an aggressive, offensive and hostile strike that will continue until I inflict the final death blow to misunderstandings and conflict. I will gather all my available resources & weapons for this assault. I will never surrender until the foes of harmony surrender. I declare war on war. I will inflict peace on everyone and occupy your fear with understanding. You will suffer under my brutal campaign of tranquility. The enemy will endure the horrors of justice, tolerance, compassion and freedom. I will indoctrinate the aggressors with acceptance until the resistance is futile. I will show no mercy for hate. If you are not with me you are against warmth, love and little furry baby animals.

This brief manifesto was posted on Facebook earlier today by Palestinian-American stand-up comedian Aron Kader, followed by this update:

My war against war begins tomorrow. I will be on CNN tomorrow on the Brooke Baldwin program to talk about the murder of my cousin Mohammed Abu Khdeir and the police beating of Tariq Abu Khdeir. Also my plea for ceasefire in Gaza and how you will never convince me we cannot have peace.

To say I’m an instant fan doesn’t begin to cover it.  Finally, a war I can support!

I still have no words that I trust.  Only this photo of a doctor weeping in the overflowing morgue of Shifa hospital in Gaza:

(photographer: Oliver Weiken, for the New York Times).

My disgust with the Israeli government is so deep that I don’t trust myself with words.

But really, two articles in today’s New York Times say it all.

In the first, foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman is quoted advocating the Israeli invasion of Gaza in order to ensure “a normal summer vacation for our kids”  (the quote is way down in the 14th paragraph of the story).

In the second, we see what appears to be Lieberman’s idea of a kids’ summer vacation in Gaza:  four boys, ages 9, 10, and 11, killed by Israeli bombs while playing soccer on the beach.  It’s accompanied by this photo by the award-winning Tyler Hicks:

Reports from eyewitness foreign journalists here.

So here’s where all you sophisticated cynics get to tell me I’m being naïve, and yesterday’s UN recognition of Palestine as a non-voting member state is merely symbolic, and it makes no difference to what’s actually happening etc etc.

To which my reply is:  Never underestimate the power of symbolism.  Or the sense of an alternate historical inevitability strengthened by this move.

Historical inevitability is exactly what Israel has been trying to create since 1967 with “facts on the ground,” aka “settlements” — a totally misleading term since it calls up images of small outposts, while the bulk of the Israeli settlement project in the West Bank is by now huge swathes of urban and suburban housing.  As if to underline this, today’s Israeli reaction to the UN move was to formally announce yet another urban expansion, this one intended to cut off Ramallah and Bethlehem from Jerusalem.

The New York Times seems to imagine that this is in retaliation for the UN vote, but they’re wrong.  It’s part of Israel’s long-term plan, which has been, since the late 1960s, to create an “irreversible” pattern of Israeli settlement in Palestine — I reported on this way back in the 1970s — and to make daily existence so burdensome for Palestinians in so many ways that they will up and leave “of their own accord” (a kind of ethnic cleansing lite.)

But history is nothing if not a long pattern of reversals.  And it now looks very much like both Israel and the United States (along with Palau, Panama, Micronesia, Canada, and the Czech Republic — the less-than-impressive array of countries voting against acceptance of heightened status for Palestine) are on the wrong side of history.

I have absolutely no idea how this might work out in the long run.  In fact when I try to imagine it, I find myself in despair.  The hard truth is that a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza is in all probability economically, geographically, and politically non-viable — a “two-state solution” that solves nothing at all.  And while the “one-state solution” thus seems the only logical outcome, logic has nothing to do with the politics of identity.  One state would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, since it would then have a non-Jewish majority;  whether you support the idea of a Jewish state or not, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that Israel will never agree to dissolve its foundational raison d’être. 

Which leaves us where?

Without a vision of a positive outcome, the all-or-nothing hardliners are in the ascendance, promising nothing but more violence.  So could the rest of us be suffering from a dismaying lack of imagination?  Is there a third way?  Or a fourth or a fifth?  I have no answers, just the stubborn faith that there has to be.  For the first time in over a decade, the UN decision gives me a sense of forward movement.  If that’s illusory, I’ll take it for now.

Hillary Clinton’s tight-lipped glare says it all.  The expected ceasefire in Gaza today did not materialize.  Israel still bombing, Hamas still launching rockets.

I watch as the hardliners on both sides reinforce each other — delegitimizing not Israel, nor Hamas, but the Palestinian Authority.

Worse still,  they knowingly do so at the cost of other people’s lives.

I watch in wordless misery.

“I can’t believe you don’t believe in anything!” someone wrote on this blog a while back, commenting on my agnosticism (actually, she used capital letters and lots of exclamation marks, but I’ll refrain).   And I was a bit shocked by that.  What kind of human being can I claim to be if I don’t believe in anything?  A nihilist?  A god-forsaken creature left to the whims and mercies of fate?    A craven whimpering coward afraid to commit herself?

So in between keeping up with what’s happening in Egypt and Tunisia and Bahrain and Yemen and Jordan and Iraq and Iran and oh-my-god Libya, I’ve been haunted by what she said — and have realized that she placed the stress on the wrong word.  It doesn’t belong on the word ‘anything,’ but on the word before it:  ‘in.’

Of course there are things I believe.  I just don’t generally feel the need to believe in them.  I may well believe that such-and-such a thing is true, though in fact this is much the same thing as saying “I think that…” or the more amorphous “I feel that…”  and I’m trying not to be amorphous here.  And in fact there are some things I do believe in, prime among them the possibility of some seemingly impossible form of peace between Israel and Palestine.

If I look at Israel/Palestine rationally right now, I see no way to a peaceful resolution.   So in the lack of empirical evidence, I have no choice but to fall back on belief – that is, on the conviction that peace is possible, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I’m not being over-idealistic here.   The first step in any thinking about peace is to get rid of all those images of doves fluttering around all over the place and everyone falling on each others’ shoulders in universal brother/sisterhood.  Peace is far more mundane than that.  It’s the absence of war.  It’s people not being killed.  It’s the willingness to live and let live.  And that will do just fine.

There’s no love lost between England and Germany, for instance, but they’re at peace after two utterly devastating wars in the first half of the 20^th century.  There’s less than no love lost between Egypt and Israel – in fact it’s safe to say that for the most part, they detest each other —  but that peace treaty, signed by an Egyptian dictator and an Israeli former terrorist, has lasted three decades.  It’s nobody’s ideal of peace, but however uneasily, it’s held, and will likely hold whatever the changes in Egypt – a frigid kind of peace, but peace nonetheless.

But even thinking in terms of pragmatic, undramatic, boring peace, which once seemed as impossible for England and Germany, and for Egypt and Israel, as for Israel and Palestine, I still can’t see it.  Of course this may simply mean that I have a very limited imagination, and so can’t see the forest for the trees.   But to think that something is impossible because I can’t see it is not only an absurd assumption, but also a dangerous one.

What we believe affects how we act.   If we stop believing that Israel/Palestine peace is possible, or even desirable, as the Israeli government seems to have done, then that affects how we act:  we really do make it impossible.  That is, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy of unending conflict.   We act in our own worst interests.

I’d rather be naïve than nihilistic.  So in face of the despair that often overtakes me at the latest news from Gaza or from the West Bank, I have to fall back on belief in the possibility of peace, no matter how seemingly irrational.  After all, if it was rational, it wouldn’t require belief.

One definition of despair is in the inability to imagine oneself into the future.  It is, in a very real sense, a failure of the imagination.  So perhaps this is what belief really is:  an act of imagination.   The astonishing human ability to imagine something into existence, and to act in accordance with that imagination.

That’s what we’ve seen these past few weeks in Tunisia and Egypt and Bahrain (and maybe even in Libya), and that’s what’s been so inspiring about it:  belief transformed into possibility.   Belief not as faith in the divine, but as faith in the human ability to act and to change the future.   Belief, that is, in ourselves.

London’s The Guardian newspaper calls it “an incendiary document written with courage and furious energy…  an extraordinary, impassioned cyber-scream.”  It’s the Gaza Youth’s Manifesto for Change, written just three weeks ago by a group of cyber-activist students in Gaza — three women and five men — as enraged by Hamas as they are by Israel.

It demands to be read, so here it is, in full:

Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community! We want to scream and break this wall of silence, injustice and indifference like the Israeli F16’s breaking the wall of sound; scream with all the power in our souls in order to release this immense frustration that consumes us because of this fucking situation we live in; we are like lice between two nails living a nightmare inside a nightmare, no room for hope, no space for freedom.

We are sick of being caught in this political struggle; sick of coal dark nights with airplanes circling above our homes; sick of innocent farmers getting shot in the buffer zone because they are taking care of their lands; sick of bearded guys walking around with their guns abusing their power, beating up or incarcerating young people demonstrating for what they believe in; sick of the wall of shame that separates us from the rest of our country and keeps us imprisoned in a stamp-sized piece of land; sick of being portrayed as terrorists, homemade fanatics with explosives in our pockets and evil in our eyes; sick of the indifference we meet from the international community, the so-called experts in expressing concerns and drafting resolutions but cowards in enforcing anything they agree on; we are sick and tired of living a shitty life, being kept in jail by Israel, beaten up by Hamas and completely ignored by the rest of the world.
There is a revolution growing inside of us, an immense dissatisfaction and frustration that will destroy us unless we find a way of canalizing this energy into something that can challenge the status quo and give us some kind of hope. The final drop that made our hearts tremble with frustration and hopelessness happened 30rd November, when Hamas’ officers came to Sharek Youth Forum, a leading youth organization (www.sharek.ps) with their guns, lies and aggressiveness, throwing everybody outside, incarcerating some and prohibiting Sharek from working. A few days later, demonstrators in front of Sharek were beaten and some incarcerated. We are really living a nightmare inside a nightmare.

It is difficult to find words for the pressure we are under. We barely survived the Operation Cast Lead, where Israel very effectively bombed the shit out of us, destroying thousands of homes and even more lives and dreams. They did not get rid of Hamas, as they intended, but they sure scared us forever and distributed post traumatic stress syndrome to everybody, as there was nowhere to run.

We are youth with heavy hearts. We carry in ourselves a heaviness so immense that it makes it difficult to us to enjoy the sunset. How to enjoy it when dark clouds paint the horizon and bleak memories run past our eyes every time we close them? We smile in order to hide the pain. We laugh in order to forget the war. We hope in order not to commit suicide here and now. During the war we got the unmistakable feeling that Israel wanted to erase us from the face of the earth. During the last years Hamas has been doing all they can to control our thoughts, behaviour and aspirations. We are a generation of young people used to face missiles, carrying what seems to be a impossible mission of living a normal and healthy life, and only barely tolerated by a massive organization that has spread in our society as a malicious cancer disease, causing mayhem and effectively killing all living cells, thoughts and dreams on its way as well as paralyzing people with its terror regime. Not to mention the prison we live in, a prison sustained by a so-called democratic country.

History is repeating itself in its most cruel way and nobody seems to care. We are scared. Here in Gaza we are scared of being incarcerated, interrogated, hit, tortured, bombed, killed. We are afraid of living, because every single step we take has to be considered and well-thought, there are limitations everywhere, we cannot move as we want, say what we want, do what we want, sometimes we even cant think what we want because the occupation has occupied our brains and hearts so terrible that it hurts and it makes us want to shed endless tears of frustration and rage!

We do not want to hate, we do not want to feel all of this feelings, we do not want to be victims anymore. ENOUGH! Enough pain, enough tears, enough suffering, enough control, limitations, unjust justifications, terror, torture, excuses, bombings, sleepless nights, dead civilians, black memories, bleak future, heart aching present, disturbed politics, fanatic politicians, religious bullshit, enough incarceration! WE SAY STOP! This is not the future we want!

We want three things. We want to be free. We want to be able to live a normal life. We want peace. Is that too much to ask? We are a peace movement consistent of young people in Gaza and supporters elsewhere that will not rest until the truth about Gaza is known by everybody in this whole world and in such a degree that no more silent consent or loud indifference will be accepted.

This is the Gazan youth’s manifesto for change!

We will start by destroying the occupation that surrounds ourselves, we will break free from this mental incarceration and regain our dignity and self respect. We will carry our heads high even though we will face resistance. We will work day and night in order to change these miserable conditions we are living under. We will build dreams where we meet walls.

We only hope that you – yes, you reading this statement right now! – can support us. In order to find out how, please write on our Facebook wall (Gaza Youth Breaks Out — GYBO) or contact us directly: freegazayouth@hotmail.com

We want to be free, we want to live, we want peace.
FREE GAZA YOUTH!

Is it rational to believe that peace is possible in the Middle East?  Sometimes it seems not.   A good friend in New York, a long-time Middle East peace activist, confided that the Israeli use of deadly force against the Gaza-bound flotilla had brought her close to despair.   Yet historian Tony Judt in an op-ed today sees some form of peace as inevitable:

As American officials privately acknowledge, sooner or later Israel (or someone) will have to talk to Hamas.  From French Algeria through South Africa to the Provisional I.R.A., the story repeats itself:  the dominant power denies the legitimacy of the “terrorists,” thereby strengthening their hand; then it secretly negotiates with them;  finally, it concedes power, independence or a place at the table.  Israel will negotiate with Hamas:  the only question is why not now.

I respect Judt’s historical certainty — he’s right, of course — but do I believe it?    I should, since I know how blindly mistaken despair can be.

I was close to despair when Menahem Begin was elected prime minister of Israel in 1976, yet just a few months later came the phone call from a well-informed friend telling me to turn on the radio for the next newscast, since Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was about to announce that he was coming to Jerusalem to visit Yad Vashem and talk to all 120 Members of Knesset.    I thought he was joking .  Sadat?  The arch-enemy?  No way.  And then I turned on the radio.

I remember staring at the plane as it landed in November 1977, as the door opened and then, for a long while, remained blank:  an empty black space against the white of the airplane body.  An unwanted part of my mind whispered that Egyptian commandos were about to burst out and gun down all of Israel’s leadership gathered on the tarmac at the bottom of the stairs.  Or that worse still, nobody at all would appear — that the opening would remain blank and empty, and it was all a cruel hoax.

I remember the heavy sinking feeling of September 1978 when after so much hope, it sounded as though the Camp David summit convened by Jimmy Carter between Begin and Sadat was going nowhere.  There was a blackout on news of the negotiations, and as they dragged on, commentator after commentator confidently declared that they were doomed.   Yet the Camp David accords were signed, and the following year, a full peace treaty.

So I need to remind myself that if even I can’t muster Tony Judt’s certainty,  hope is not irrational.  In fact it may be the only rational response to the seemingly ever-worsening mess in the Middle East.

My model is Pascal’s wager, an early form of game theory applied to the existence of God, and on my mind right now because I recently rented Eric Rohmer’s classic 1969 movie My Night at Maud’s, which includes the kind of Pascalian discussion that could only take place in a nouvelle vague French movie (worth a look, if only to instantly burnish your artsy credentials, let alone your philosophical pretensions).

Since the essence of the divine is “infinitely incomprehensible,” Pascal argued in  his Pensées, reason can neither prove nor disprove the  existence of God.  Basically, it comes down to a coin toss:  on the one side, reason, and on the other,  the possibility (given that he was in Catholic France) of eternal afterlife happiness.

(This doesn’t quite work for me, of course, since eternal life seems to me at best a nightmare and at worst a curse — as it was for the creators of the legends of the Wandering Jew and of Dracula and of Frankenstein — but I’ll bear with Pascal for now.)

To believe in the existence of God, he argued, demands no cost (sic) but results in high possible gain (the infinite happiness bit).  That is, the reward for belief is infinite if it turns out to be justified, and there is no penalty if it does not.  It makes no difference how slim the possibility of that reward might be.   “If you gain, you gain all,” he concluded,  “and if you lose, you lose nothing.”    Thus the only rational option, per Pascal, is to be irrational, and believe.

Why focus on this when the whole idea of betting on the existence of God seems to me an exercise in absurdity?   Because while I may not be a big fan of Pascal when it comes to God or not-God, the principle behind his thinking strikes me as extraordinarily apt when the subject is Middle East peace.  So let me try it out here — a kind of minimalist Pascalian argument, as distorted by myself, for hope:

If you give up hope and assume that peace in the Middle East is impossible, you essentially render it impossible.  That is, you stop envisioning peace or anything remotely approaching it.  You accept the status quo, which is in fact not a status quo, but an ever-downward spiral.    This appears to be the assumption of the current Israeli government, and the use of deadly force in the assault on the Gaza flotilla is yet another result of such an assumption.    It is the penalty for not believing in the possibility of peace.

If you follow Pascal’s logic, this is irrational.    Deny all possibility of peace, and you doom yourself to unending conflict.  To assume that peace is possible, no matter how slim the chance appears to be,  is thus the only rational option.    (And yes, this applies as much to Hamas as to Israel.)     The fact that you cannot see how to make peace does not mean that it’s impossible.   It may merely mean that you can’t see.

In  those months leading up to Sadat’s announcement of his visit to Jerusalem, when everything seemed so dark and no rational observer would have predicted anything remotely resembling peace, quiet negotiations were going on far from the public eye.  Does that mean such negotiations are going on now?   I seriously doubt it, though I obviously don’t know.   Nevertheless, for my own sanity, let alone for the future sanity of the Middle East and everyone in it, I have no option but to believe not only that negotiations could be going on, but that they should be — to believe, that is, in improbability instead of impossibility.   Or hope instead of despair.

Next post:  what peace really looks like.

Can something good be coming out of the Israel-Gaza-blockade-flotilla mess?  This lead story in today’s NYT indicates maybe so:

The Obama administration considers Israel’s blockade of Gaza to be untenable and plans to press for another approach to ensure Israel’s security while allowing more supplies into the impoverished Palestinian area, senior American officials said Wednesday.The officials say that Israel’s deadly attack on a flotilla trying to break the siege and the resulting international condemnation create a new opportunity to push for increased engagement with the Palestinian Authority and a less harsh policy toward Gaza.

“There is no question that we need a new approach to Gaza,” said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the policy shift is still in the early stages. He was reflecting a broadly held view in the upper reaches of the administration.

And later in the day, on the NYT website:

After insisting all week that its blockade of Gaza was essential to its security, the Israeli government is now “exploring new ways” of supplying the coastal enclave, an official said Thursday.In the face of unrelenting international outrage over a deadly raid on an aid flotilla bound for Gaza this week, the official said that Israel was determined that every ship heading to the enclave be inspected to prevent the smuggling of rockets and other weapons. But at the same time, the government wants to facilitate the entry of civilian goods, said the official, who described the latest thinking within the government on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Could some real movement toward at least easing the siege, if not ending it, be underway?  Could wisdom actually prevail?  Or am I just reading tea leaves?

Seventy miles off the coast of Gaza, “at least 10”  more lives now need to be remembered on this USA Memorial Day.

I am all but speechless.

Military commandos dropped from helicopters onto a Free Gaza civilian ship in international waters and, per an Israeli government spokesman, were astonished when some people on deck stood their ground and attacked them with knives and iron bars. The commandos, he said, were unprepared for such resistance.  They had no option but to use guns.

No option?   Did nobody consider teargas?  Is Israel really going to claim that it was the victim here?

The simplest solution would have been for Israel to stand back and let the flotilla through.   But that would have been to acknowledge that the three-year siege of Gaza — let alone the three-week ‘Operation Cast Lead‘ assault on it eighteen months ago — has been self-defeating.    As Bradley Burston put it  in Haaretz:

Here in Israel, we have still yet to learn the lesson: We are no longer defending Israel. We are now defending the siege. The siege itself is becoming Israel’s Vietnam.

Indeed.  By laying siege to Gaza,  Israel is only laying siege to itself.  Perhaps now, under the rapidly building storm of international condemnation (this time, after all, it was not “only Palestinians” who were killed), the Israeli government will finally have  no option  but to use words instead of bullets, and face reality — the need not just to lift the blockade, but to start negotiating with the Hamas-led government of Gaza.

———————

End of the day postscript:   The deaths on the largest ship in the Free Gaza flotilla may yet achieve the goal that the flotilla itself could not — forcing Israel to lift the siege.  I can’t see how Israel can continue it now (though this may be simply a failure of my political imagination).  If indeed the siege/blockade is lifted or at least eased, could Israel finally come to terms with the reality of Hamas?  Or am I just desperately looking for a silver lining to this very black day?

Where I wish I was right now:  on board a Free Gaza boat heading for the coast with relief supplies.  From Friday’s NYT:

Israel braced for a showdown with a flotilla of nine vessels carrying hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists and thousands of tons of supplies headed for Gaza. It was the most ambitious attempt so far to break Israel’s maritime blockade of the Hamas-run coastal enclave.

The naval police in Gaza City on Wednesday made preparations for the arrival of a flotilla carrying activists and supplies.

The flotilla of cargo ships and passenger boats, led by the Free Gaza Movement and a Turkish organization, Insani Yardim Vakfi, converged at sea from a number of countries over the last 10 days.

Israel, which says it allows basic supplies into Gaza through points along the land border, denounced the flotilla as a political provocation and has vowed not to let the boats reach Gaza.

The Israeli blockade has been going on nearly three years, to what should be Israel’s utter shame.   It may well be what Ariel Sharon had in mind when he ordered Israel’s “withdrawal” from Gaza in 2005 — get out, surround the whole strip with barbed wire and military, establish absolute control over what and who comes in and out, and  turn it into a kind of huge internment camp.  On paper:  withdrawal.  In practice:  a stranglehold.

It makes me want to scream.