Hello

Sometimes, nowadays, as I sit around and reflect, images of Palestine come racing back. Little snapshots of times spent laughing my heart out, playing a joke; running from a low-hanging cumulous cloud of tear gas, or cursing the faceless soldier whose bullet whizzes past my face; feeling the impotence of life under occupation. There was hoola hooping with little Sarita outside her home in Sheikh Jarrah, occupied by people carrying out ‘God´s will’. For her, it was playtime; for me, a chance to break the routine of watching out for trouble, to just pretend for a second that after playing, we’ll go back into her house and I’ll sit her down on my knees in front of the TV, and everyone will be laughing and eating sweets and talking about local gossip. But that won’t happen today or tomorrow. Maybe never.

I think about this circle of violence that always seems to run through history, looping over and over again like a broken record. Around me, in my everyday immediacies, I can find examples of change, or at least some hope that things will change. A friendship, an understanding, a good community, a local butcher. Then I take a step back but the rest of the world seems to be spinning out of control. A 16 year-old boy killed in Nablus, shot in the back by another faceless soldier. Or a quiet American woman named Ellen, to whom everything seems to happen, this time finding herself on an operating table, the doctors removing a Israeli rubber bullet from her shattered wrist.

The U.S. is having disagreements with Israel over planned Jewish construction in Jerusalem! The media tells us of Israeli restraint, of the worst ‘diplomatic crisis in decades’. Do they dare remind us how a few years back, there was another ‘crisis’ when Israel planned to build in Jabal Abu Ghneim, near Bethlehem? Yes, there was a ‘crisis’ then, too. But now go to Jabal Abu Ghneim – now known mostly by its Israeli name, Har Homa – and you will see that there are no more trees, just concrete and Israeli flags. How easily we forget.

And so, we are turned again to Palestine and the Palestinians. Always this indecipherable blob of something to us. They never have the right to be individuals, just a collective enigma, a pestilent sore that won’t go away. They have no right to be lovers, fathers, sisters, dreamers, wanderers, achievers, punks. Just this body of stuff upon which history repeats itself. They aren’t allowed to break from the cycle of violence. It just happens to them.

I don’t have much to say, really; I just think too much these days. The spring is coming, to Europe, to Palestine, to Berkeley, California. There are birds outside my window. Green buds on tree branches. But I feel nervous.

There’s a little turtle in an aquarium beside me, and he is always moving about. If I put my finger in, he eagerly comes out of his shell to investigate it. He’s always scratching at the glass trying to get out. I wonder if he feels anxious.