milk and honey

first, minor things of note:

bob barr, who wrote the defense of marriage act (DOMA), says it should be repealed. now super-new news, and not for extraordinarily noble reasons, but hey.

check out pop damage. they review lovely things. it's pretty and witty and fun-tastic, and i'm doing a little editing for them.

speaking of damage... but i love coffee! uh oh. also, i've been listening to a lot of aesop rock lately, and this makes me thing of that song.


now, more serious things.

over 1,000 palestinians are dead in the gaza strip.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza said 1,010 people have died in the conflict which started 19 days ago.

More than 300 of the dead are said to be children and about 4,700 people in Gaza have been injured.

Thirteen Israelis have been killed, including three civilians and one soldier from rockets fired from Gaza and nine soldiers killed in fighting in Gaza.

by the way, the population of the gaza strip is roughly 1,450,000. same as philadelphia.

as if it isn't enough of a mess, apparently bin laden's still playing with his camcorder.

i went to israel in 2006, during my semester abroad. we flew into tel aviv, which ian (who lived in israel for, i don't know, a while?) once likened to hilton head -- generally far removed from the conflict and violence associated with israel. we took a bus to jerusalem/al-quds and stayed in a hostel in the old city. we explored jerusalem, spent a day in bethlehem and a day in ramallah/al-bireh, and did a little 2-day drive around the west bank, complete with camping out on a cliff. i got to climb all over the caves at qumran, which was kind of life-changingly awesome for me. i waded into the dead sea up to my ankles (i couldn't go much farther or i would have fallen over). i got a tan walking around masada. we had a few tense moments, but they were mainly the result of not being fully accustomed to our surroundings.

we didn't go to gaza, clearly. that would have been a different experience. but after seeing some of the places we went in the west bank, i wanted to.

wherever we went, whether in israel or the west bank, everything was just... awe inspiring. even broken-down neighborhoods where the windows of all the buildings are blown out and garbage is piling up in the streets. i can't really qualify it. i haven't written much about it because words couldn't possibly do it justice. i spent a whole semester in athens, and just five days in the middle east, and they got under my skin equally.

occasionally, since i've been back and it's come up in conversation, people will ask me why the israeli-palestinian conflict is forever ongoing. they'll ask why someone doesn't just stop it. why no one can reach an agreement. now, there are either a million answers i could give this question (not that i actually know what many of them are -- i'm still learning). but i doubt that any of them especially matter. americans' tendency is to try to make logical sense of it, like it's some great rational puzzle that humans' brains just haven't learned to solve yet. it's not.

please bear in mind, i'm playing off of my own observations and responses to the people i talked to there, as well as people i grew up around (by which i mean, squirrel hill jews... orthodox and hasidim).

there's all kinds of rational and/or political discussion circulating on both sides of the table when third parties get involved, but when all the sugar-coating and circular logic is set aside, the big answer to the big question of, "why won't you just put actual effort into finding an actual, peaceful, livable solution for everyone involved?" seems to be, "we just don't want to."

i've heard that as a direct quote from several palestinians, and phrased slightly more diplomatically from a number of jews. and nobody's saying, "we don't want the killing to end," or, "we really like feeling threatened and oppressed and miserable." they're just saying, "we've been fighting over this since i was born, and we're damned well not going to give up now."

i'm not downplaying anyone's personal tragedy, but literally everyone has twenty stories about awful things the other side did. it's been going on for too long now, and in too small a space, for it not to be an intensely personal situation for... everyone.

there's a phenomenon called jerusalem syndrome. i've heard there's a wikipedia page, though i haven't been to it myself (and, apparently, a movie i haven't seen). basically, it's when someone goes to jerusalem and is so overcome with...? the significance of actually being in Jerusalem, i guess? -- that they become delusional. psychotic. display signs of what i can only think of describing as religious mania (like, the real kind, not the kind where americans send their kids to children on fire -- seen jesus camp, by the way?). anxiety. obsession with cleanliness. dressing in white. wandering away from family, friends, tour group, or whatever and street-corner preaching. an australian lad tried to set fire to al-aqsa back in the sixties.

perfectly stable, well-balanced people go to jerusalem and lose their minds. and when they leave, they immediately recover.

i'm happy to say i didn't experience anything so extreme during my visit.

(i'm thinking, right now, of all the emphatic warnings in the bible against growing too attached to the world. about how attachment will distract you from eternal life. how it will damn you. i'm thinking maybe the holy land is exhibit A. and now i'm hoping that doesn't qualify as blasphemy.)

understandably there's been skepticism about some cases, but i want to clarify that i believe jerusalem syndrome itself to be a very real thing. whether it's true psychosis i can't say, because i have no training in that area. but i do know that something happens to people. only, while it's generally recognized as a phenomenon affecting visitors, i think something like it affects the people who live there and have lived there for generations every bit as much. and i don't think it's just jerusalem. it may be the epicenter, but the whole region is ridden with places of historic ethnic and religious significance.

the ongoing recent violence in gaza and along its borders have very real, tangible, news-reportable reasons (for excellent summary, maps, and a timeline of conflict in gaza, check out the region's bbc profile). but at the heart of all those reasons, i think, is something much more basic, inherent, and difficult to address.

these are just a few of my thoughts or opinions on this subject. to do actually address it and do it justice, i'd need a whole new blog. and i intentionally haven't made this a fiery tirade about how palestinians are being systematically exterminated and are getting desperate (though it's true). i'm just reminding myself, as much as anything, that i am a young person, a product of a young culture in a young nation -- a nation which, i'll add, is not a religious state (in theory), nor does it have any extreme religious significance to... well... anyone. if things here can get as complicated, tense, and seemingly irreversible as they sometimes do, it stands to reason that things there would be much more complicated and tense, and therefore even more seemingly irreversible.

from the qur'an:

[ 2:190 ] You may fight in the cause of GOD against those who attack you, but do not aggress. GOD does not love the aggressors.
[ 2:191 ] You may kill those who wage war against you, and you may evict them whence they evicted you. Oppression is worse than murder.

from deuteronomy (hebrew bible/old testament):

[ 7:1] When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations -- the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you --
[ 7:2 ] and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.

i could respond to either of these at great length, but at the moment it just seems best to leave them alone. responsible interpretation doesn't have a thing to do with the present situation, i don't think.

i wish i could wrap on a positive note. rationally, i'm not naive enough to claim that a place with such a rich and lengthy history couldn't possibly wipe itself out. that region has been subject to invasions* and migrations and relocations and wars and natural disasters and on and on since the dawn of time as we know it. maybe it's all building up to something, or maybe this is just another era of a pattern that will continue endlessly. i really have absolutely no idea how to begin to fix this. in my crazy place, though -- in that part of my mind that almost couldn't handle being there, it was so wonderful -- something is telling me that it's too important, too precious, to self-destruct.





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