When I heard the Toronto International Film Festival
(TIFF) was holding a celebratory "spotlight" on Tel Aviv, I felt
ashamed of Toronto, the city where I live. I thought immediately of
Mona Al Shawa, a Palestinian women's rights activist I met on a recent trip to
Gaza. "We had more hope during the attacks," she told me. "At least then we
believed things would change."
Israel's latest peace initiative was only a few hours old when it ran into fierce opposition from the US and the Palestinians.
Ignoring pleas from the Obama administration that Israel should suspend all building work at Jewish settlements, officials unveiled a plan today authorising the construction of hundreds more houses on Palestinian soil.
In a nod to Washington, Binyamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister, said he would then agree to a temporary freeze on settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Edward Said would not be pleased.
The towering Palestinian American intellectual had no patience for Holocaust deniers in the Arab world or in the Palestinian liberation movement.
He understood the calamity that was the Holocaust, and he believed in telling the truth about it, and about everything else.
Writing in Le Monde Diplomatique in 1998, Said noted: "Whether we like it or not, the Jews are not ordinary colonialists. Yes, they suffered the holocaust, and yes, they are the victims of anti-Semitism."
The US has decided to be ‘flexible'
regarding its once touted call for a total Israeli freeze on the expansion
of its occupied territories' settlements, all illegal under international
law.
Upon finding out that I am
Palestinian, many people I meet at college in the United States are
eager to inform me of various activities that they have participated in
that promote "coexistence" and "dialogue" between both sides of the
"conflict," no doubt expecting me to give a nod of approval. However,
these efforts are harmful and undermine the Palestinian civil society
call for boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israel -- the only way of
pressuring Israel to cease its violations of Palestinians' rights.
A year ago, 44 ordinary people from 17 different countries sailed to Gaza in two small wooden boats. We did what our governments would not do -- we broke through the Israeli siege. During the last year the Free Gaza Movement has organized seven more voyages, successfully arriving to Gaza on five separate occasions.
On 2 August 2009, after cordoning off part of the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in east Jerusalem, Israeli police evicted two Palestinian families (more than 50 people) from their homes; Jewish settlers immediately moved into the emptied houses. Although Israeli police cited a ruling by the country's supreme court, the evicted Arab families had been living there for more than 50 years. The event – which, rather exceptionally, did attract the attention of the world media – is part of a much larger and mostly ignored ongoing process.
I was gliding along the Massachusetts Turnpike, enjoying a summer Sunday in the Berkshires, thinking I was on vacation, when I got an urgent cell phone call from a news anchor at one of the nation's most progressive radio stations. "Will you comment on today's news from Israel?" he asked.
"What news?" I was on vacation from the world and its problems.
I first
knew Ezra Nawi as the man with the roses. He was not a florist. He was a plumber, a
gentle Jerusalemite who would show up every Friday at French Square, his rucksack brimming with
bouquets of long-stemmed roses. He would cross the moat of Friday traffic to
where we stood: 20 or so women, wearing black and holding little hand-shaped
signs that read, "Stop the Occupation" in Hebrew, Arabic and English. Smiling,
Ezra would slowly circle the low wall on which we perched, stopping to hand a
rose to each and every one of us.
At the top of the hill, a few dozen meters from where a house now stands, there used to be an irrigation pool for the village citrus groves. I swim every morning at the municipal swimming pool built on the ruins of the village irrigation pool. Palestinian Jaffa oranges grew in the now-vanished groves. My house stands there now. The land was "redeemed," as land acquisition was called in Zionist propaganda.
