‫יְרוּשָׁלַיִם‬ Jerusalem ‫القُدس‬

Summertime in Palestine
by Matthew Graber
Table of Contents

The Little City of Bethlehem..................................................................................... 1

Social Work in the Occupied Territy of Palestine..................................................... 3

Final Scores............................................................................................................... 5

Looking for Peace in the Middle East.......................................................................8

Nonviolent Tactics....................................................................................................11

When the Caged Bird Sings..................................................................................... 12

Amazing Documentary on Nonviolence in the West Bank.................................... 18

Meeting Blacksmiths and Shephards..................................................................... 20

Understanding Western Views of Islam.................................................................26

Fighting Apathy.......................................................................................................29
The Little City of Bethlehem
July 17, 2010

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I’ll be living in a refugee camp for the next month. It’s not what you may consider a
refugee camp. It’s certainly not what I consider a refugee camp, and I wouldn’t consider
the people living there to be refugees.* Structurally, it is about the size of six American
city blocks (2×3), with one main street, a little larger than the width of a car, cutting
down the middle. There is a maze of 3-foot-wide alleyways cutting through thirty-foot
concrete homes. The concrete is as overwhelming as it sounds, and it is very possible to
lose your place within the world, or even within the little city of Bethlehem, when wan-
dering through alleyways decorated with graffiti.

Why is the camp like this? When the people currently living here were forced from their
homes in Israel in 1948, they set up this camp. Over the years, the camp has expanded
upwards, rather than outwards, due to a lack of land. So my host family’s home was just
one story when they first built it, but now it looms over the alleyways, three stories high.

The people are so loving here. The first night, they said, “We have eight people in our
family. With you, we now have nine.” But there is a cloud of gloom looming over the
household, as my host father’s brother passed away last week.

And this sadness, which is so palpable in our household, lies in the heart of the major-
ity of people here. We laugh anyways. But eight years ago, seven years ago, and even
two years ago, there has been war in this place. Children have been killed. Homes de-
stroyed. There are bullet holes on the main street in the camp, and damage from shrap-
nel dots the storage barrels on our rooftop. The people living here are not permitted to
travel beyond the land controlled by Palestine, so they are sequestered to a small portion
of the West Bank.

I am sad here. And this will be reflected in my writing. But I challenge you to come with
me, and to learn about this remarkable place. Do not avert your eyes and your ears. Lis-
ten, ask, know, and love. I hope that you’ll keep in touch with me. I will certainly need
your love and support.

PS Please comment and let me know what you would like to hear more about. Tonight
I’ll be meeting with a whole gaggle of internationals volunteering for the Summer here
in Bethlehem as I am, sharing dinner and having a good night out. Then tomorrow we
will have a tour of the Old City of Jerusalem. And on Monday I will start a volunteer
placement at the Holy Land Trust (www.holylandtrust.org).

I also have pictures of tanks and troops coming into Bethlehem in 2003, and much to
share about my host family. So let me know what you would like to hear about.

* There are some points in my journal entries where the opinion which I express is different at the time
it was written from at the time of publication. I have not editted my entries for the sake of preserving the
viewpoint expressed by someone not entirely familiar with the history of Israel and Palestine.

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Social Work in the Occupied Territory of Palestine
July 21, 2010

Last night at the Alternative Information Cafe (http://www.alternativenews.org/eng-

lish/), Ferdoos Alissa, a Professor of Social Work at Bethlehem University, presented the
current situation of Social Work and Psychiatric Therapy in Gaza and the West Bank.

Just as some quick stats regarding the first intifada (1987-1993):

* 130,472 injuries to Palestinians

* 1,282 deaths (~30% under age 18)
* ~57,000 Palestinians arrested, and often subjected to physical and psychological
torture
* 2,532 lost their homes

Professor Alissa spoke of the constant internal conflict of those with Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder: the struggle to remember or forget. The scenes and experiences wit-
nessed were so horrifying, and the memories of the experiences can be debilitating to
everyday life, so, on one hand, it is advantageous to forget. But on the other hand, there
is pride and honor, as well as some relief, taken from remembering the experiences.
There is pride in having served on behalf of the Palestinian people, and the memory is a
constant reminder of the on-going struggle for freedom – the struggle to build a new life.
So to forget would be to ignore not only individual sadness, but collective oppression as
well.

Professor Alissa also spoke about trans-generational trauma – how the parents of today
have internalized the suffering of their parents since 1948, when they were forced from
their land by Israel. And how trans-generational and other forms of indirect trauma
(not due to personal experience, but passed between individuals) often can be much
more debilitating to a family than individual trauma.

Finally, Professor Alissa spoke of cycles of aggression, and how more people turn to
drugs or violence today as a means of coping and finding control in their lives. There
are higher rates of domestic abuse, drug abuse, and gang violence today because of the
violence and trauma that people have experienced over the past 25 years.

For me, I found this talk fascinating because it was a completely different way of framing
the Israel-Palestine conflict.

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Final Scores
July 24, 2010
My host sister slept for about two hours last night because of anxiety. No, there is no war
here. There hasn’t been a trace of violence, not even a fist fight, since I arrived here. She
isn’t worried about the stalled international peace process between Israel and Palestine,
or the growing settlements on the hill across the valley from Bethlehem. She was wor-
ried all night about her final score from high school. She graduated from high school in
June, and has been awaiting her final score since then.

And this is not just any score. The students have a final examination, the equivalent to
the SAT, which they must take upon graduating. They are given a month off from school
to prepare for the exam.

And today, at 8:30 this morning, she found out her grade. It wasn’t by means of any-
thing in the mail; there was no paper delivered to our house. Instead, the scores of
graduating seniors were published in newspapers – available at every street corner in
Bethlehem – and broadcast over the radio.

My host sister got a score of 82 out of 100.

How good is this?

Well, I spoke to one American volunteer, and she said that she has talked with people
and they have said that this means that my sister can get into a university, no problem.

But that isn’t how my sister, Sharah, reacted. She immediately broke out crying hysteri-
cally, and she didn’t eat today. She has refused to leave the house, while other students
can be seen driving around town, honking horns, setting off fireworks (yes, while in their
cars), hanging out of car windows, and celebrating in revelry.

So why isn’t Sharah celebrating?

Because the family can’t afford for her to go to university.

On the first night that I arrived, she told me that she wants to study chemistry at univer-
sity. Then she plans to work in a chemistry laboratory, doing blood analysis and

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assisting with transfusions.

But she needed a 90 on the exam to get the necessary scholarships. Otherwise, the fam-
ily can’t afford for her to go to university.

Najati, the oldest child, a 20 year-old guy, had to drop out of Jerusalem Open University
last year because the family couldn’t afford his studies. So instead, he works at the falafel
shop on the corner of our street in the refugee camp. It’s basically the same as flipping
burgers in the states.

These economic problems for the family stem from their father not having work. He nor-
mally works in Jerusalem, doing construction. But he hasn’t been able to find anybody
to work for in the past 3 months, and these recent problems are part of a continued lack
of jobs in the West Bank. While houses and construction booms in Israeli territory, the
main purpose for bulldozers in Palestinian territory is to tear down homes.

But the larger Palestinian problem is pretty well embodied by the family I’m living with.
Heck, I haven’t had running water in the house for the past 3 days to wash. The utilities
are run by Israeli companies.

Where’s the hope in all of this? I’m still looking… I just hope Sharah sleeps tonight.

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-7-
My host brother, Saddan
Looking for Peace in the Middle East
July 24, 2010
Language, as often as it allows us to express ourselves, constrains our ability to express
ourselves. How often, whether in your love life, family life, or with strangers, have you
been absolutely unable to express yourself with words? The essence of life – the juice
and the pulp, the sweetness of the fruit – doesn’t lie in words, but in action.

So when I come across somebody like my host father, I am astounded by the power of
words. English is not his first or second language, and he often bounces around words to
get to the word which he wishes to express. But other times, he uses words that express
so much more than a simple word.

When my host sister was asking, in Arabic, how to conjugate a verb, he told her, ‘Just
say it. They [the other international in the house and I] will understand.’

On my first day here, there were maybe six people sitting around the coffee table in the
living room, drinking coffee, watching television, and exchanging banter in Arabic. I
was staring off. My host father turned to me and said, ‘Where your head: in America, in
Turkey, or here?’ I replied, ‘In America.’

He told me that it would of course take a few days of getting used to living in Bethlehem,
before my head came here.

Now, I think an English speaker may have turned to me, and said, ‘What are you think-
ing about: America, Turkey, or here?’ But this wouldn’t have expressed the fact that, by
thinking of a place, we can actually BE in another place. Magical.

Today, following a training on nonviolent tactics of demonstrating , I was thinking about

Peace. I asked my host father, ‘How do you say ‘peace’ in Arabic?’

‘Salaam,’ he said. ‘But not just not war.’

So if peace is not the opposite of war, then what is it? In the Middle East, where peace

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agreements often preserve and establish control for one people over another by means
of military, resource, and legal control, what would a just peace look like?

Salaam.

My mother’s organization in Newport News, Virginia, Transitions Family Violence Ser-

vices, has the slogan, ‘Peace in the world begins at home.’ And I think this touches on
‘salaam.’

The word ‘salaam’ was not a new word for me. I use it all the time to greet Muslim
friends, I just didn’t think of what I was saying when I said, ‘Asalaam aleikum.’ Peace be
upon you.

When Israelis and Palestinians interact, Israelis are wearing military uniforms and
carrying M-16s. The few opportunities for interaction come when Israeli military come
to Palestinian territory, or when Palestinians try to go into Israeli territory. Otherwise,
there is a 20-foot wall and a difference of languages (Hebrew and Arabic) thoroughly
separating the two societies. So when Israelis and Palestinians interact, the basis is usu-
ally hate and fear.

But when I, an American, talk with Palestinians, it is very different. For example, today
I went to the flower shop and bought flowers for my host sister; then I went to another
store with a friend who was going to a wedding and needed to buy a gift. The store
owner asked me, ‘Where are you from?’ I replied, ‘America.’ He said, ‘Oh, my Uncle was
just in America six months. New York.’ ‘Nice,’ I said. Ten seconds later, I was holding
this man’s phone and talking to his Uncle, who is back from NYC and here in Bethlehem.
We’re going to sit down over coffee, tea, or a traditional Arabic meal some time next
week.

I think this is the closest thing to peace that I have ever known.

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Nonviolent Tactics
July 24, 2010
Today, following a training on nonviolent tactics of demonstrating (basically how to not
be charged with assault; how to protect others, particularly Palestinians, from being
arrested; how to spend as little time in Israeli jail as possible; and how to avoid being
blacklisted and banished from Israel and/or the West Bank for the rest of your life),
I started wondering about the methods used to achieve peace. Is protecting ourselves
from the obtuse, unjust, and oppressive civilian legal system of Israel the best means
possible for eliminating this oppressive legal system?

There are no military zones right now in the West Bank. But, if we choose to hold a dem-
onstration, then the Israeli Army can apply to create a military zone, and then charge us
for being in a military zone. This is the most common charge against protesters.

Our facilitator in the training today told us that we should immediately question the
procedure of the Israeli military in applying for and authorizing a military zone. If they
do not show the proper paperwork, or if this paper is not properly dated and signed,
then we have a means for getting out of jail much more expediently. If their paperwork
is in order, then they can charge us, and we may have to spend up to 24 hours in jail and
agree to several stipulations, such as agreeing not to demonstrate, agreeing not to go to
certain cities in the West Bank, etc.

But here is my question to you: when a law is so blatantly oppressive and subject to the
discretion of the enforcers – read, “unjust” – is arguing against the law the best means
for eliminating it? I feel as though by arguing on their terms, we are merely legitimizing
their oppression.

But how can we shift the frame? How can we appeal to 18 year-olds with M-16s whose
sole occupation is to enforce unjust laws?

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When the Caged Bird Sings
August 3, 2010
Let me preface this story by telling you about my roommate, Ryan. Ryan is one of the
top five kindest people I have ever met in my life; a 24-year-old Australian with all in-
tentions to move to the Middle East in the next year to the dismay of his partner of six
years. I share the basement of our host family’s home with Ryan, and we share many of
our experiences together, while he teaches me so much – how to adjust the metering and
ISO levels on our Nikon cameras, to the affects of the civil war in Lebanon on the Israeli
apartheid.

So what does a wonderful day in Palestine look like?

Well, we started today in Ramallah, the headquarters for the Palestinian Authority and a
city that has seen a massive boom (no pun intended) of investment in the last five years.
Our tour group was staying last night at a plush hotel, and then we were planning to go
from Ramallah to Nablus to see sites in Nablus for the day (I say tour group, but I mean
all of the people who have been volunteering. At times I feel like these individuals want
to do meaningful work in Palestine while we are here; but other times they act like 20
year-old college kids and want to do nothing but hook up and drink – endeavors which
don’t fly with the majority of Muslims).

So, for the first time in the three weeks that I have been here, I, along with Ryan, left the
group of twenty-five Americans, and we chose to trek out into Ramallah on our own.
Our host family had asked that we be back home by four o’clock so that we could all
go out on a picnic; the bus from Nablus wasn’t going to make it back to Bethlehem by
four, so we had to make it to Bethlehem on our own. For the sake of being slightly more
adventurous and not tagging along for another tour, we chose not go to Nablus entirely,
and instead we walked to the bus station in Ramallah, caught the first bus to Jerusalem,
then transferred buses in Jerusalem to get to the check point to Bethlehem.

If you have an international passport, or are a Palestinian in East Jerusalem, you can get
from Ramallah to Bethlehem in 25 minutes. If you’re a Palestinian from the West Bank,
you must take the 90 minutes drive around Jerusalem to Bethlehem. This is because the
majority of Palestinians (my host family members being among them) are not allowed
into Jerusalem, and they are not allowed to use a number of Israeli-only roads.

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“Let me put away my literature,” Ryan said, as he tucked away his three books: “Pales-
tine Monitor: the Story of the Gaza Invasion,” “Jerusalem Arabic for English Speakers,”
and “My Father was a Freedom Fighter.” Any literature that hints at sympathy for the
Palestinians is immediately suspect when Israeli soldiers search through your things,
so we didn’t want to take our chances. Fortunately, when the soldier came onto our bus
with his M-16 Assault Rifle, he only glanced at the passports of all of the internation-
als on board the bus, checking their faces and ensuring that they had Israeli visas. We
didn’t need to give them an elaborate story for why we might be in Ramallah.

Once in Jerusalem, Ryan showed me an amazing bookstore near the Damascus Gate of
the Old City of Jerusalem. There were about thirty bookshelves full of literature on the
Israeli apartheid, including fiction, poetry, historical background, and sociological, reli-
gious, photographic, and philosophical analyses – all in English. I’ll be going back there
this week, at least once, to sit down, have a cool lemonade, and read for hours on end.

We went from the bookstore to the bus station, where we took a local bus to the check-
point into Bethlehem. Only some vehicles – those with Israeli license plates – are al-
lowed to enter the West Bank through check points (this way Israel can control what the
West Bank imports and exports, and what products they buy). These buses only took
us to the check point, at which time we had to get off the bus and walk through a maze
of gates and barbed wire under the gaze of soldiers behind bullet-proof glass, there to
inspect our passports. From the check point, we walked to our refugee camp, al Azzeh
Camp.

Our host family was struggling with a pump to get water to the house. All of the other
families in the camp had running water, but for some odd reason, there was no water
pressure getting the water into our home. So they were not in the highest of spirits when
we arrived, and Ryan and I crashed from exhaustion for an hour or two while they tried
to get water into their home for the first time in ten days.

It’s points like this when I feel absolutely helpless: when the locals are struggling with
something like getting the water running, but I don’t speak the language, don’t know
how a water pump would get water going in their system, and am not familiar with the
necessary tools to fix the problem. So Ryan and I rested.

Around five P.M., my host father, Muhammad, my host sister, Shada, Ryan, and I piled
into a taxi that took us to a small stone home overlooking terraced cliffs of fruit trees.
We met Muhammad’s friend, Aref, and his family there; soon after, the three other host
sisters, Sarah, Moodi, and Rahed, and the two host brothers, Najati and Saddam, arrived
with our host mother.

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 Photo by Meg
- 14 -
What followed was nothing short of amazing. Ryan and Najati wandered off while ev-
erybody else scavenged up and down the mountainside, raiding the trees and vines for
fruit. Take one pear, put it in the bucket. Take another, put it in your mouth. Take two
prunes, put them in the bucket, take another and put it in your mouth. Take a bundle of
grapes, and just eat the whole thing while climbing down the terrace to the next almond
tree (the fresh almonds are SO good!). We scavenged up and down the terrace for about
two hours, filling our bellies and horsing around. Ryan and Najati finally returned after
trekking over the hillside. Najati had seen a gazelle galloping over the hillside, and so
they had chased after it.

We had running water and open space at this old stone house. It was everything that we
don’t have in the camp, and so much more. The neighbors’ home is literally 3 feet away
from my host family’s front door. Their home only goes up, and the only soil or greenery
is growing in the buckets and bathtub that line the staircase and rooftop in the refugee
camp. So today, we had kilometers of terraced, rolling hills, fruit and olive trees, fresh
air, and an unobstructed sunset. All in all, it was some peace that I think we’ve all been
looking for in a country where free spaces are all too rare.

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Photo by Ryan
Amazing Documentary on Nonviolence in the
Middle East
August 5, 2010
So we went to a screening of the film, ‘Budrus,’ in the village of al Walaja, which is about
10 kilometers away from Bethlehem. They are currently building the wall there, and the
screening was given to inspire the local people to nonviolently oppose the construction
of the Israeli Wall on their land.

Here’s an e-mail I received on the issue. The Nicholas Kristof article is quite good:

Dear Friends,
The momentum for our work continues to grow. After publishing an op-ed in The New
York Times calling Budrus “ this year’s must-see documentary,” Pulitzer Prize-winning
columnist Nicholas Kristof just posted a video online in which he calls the film “terrific,”
interviews protagonist Ayed Morrar and explores the potential of unarmed struggle to
change the current reality in the Middle East.

In the last few weeks we have won the Honorable Mention for Best Documentary in the
Spirit of Freedom Award category at the Jerusalem International Film Festival, as well
as the top prize – “Best of Fest in Nonfiction”- at Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film
Festival. You can view photos of these screenings as well as our San Francisco Jewish
Film Festival premiere on our Facebook page.

For those in NYC, there are new opportunities to see Budrus in advance of our theatrical
release on October 8th. Join us this Friday, August 6th, @ 7:45 pm and next Thursday,
August 12th, @ 7:45 pm at the IFC theatre, 323 Sixth Avenue at West Third Street. Both
screenings will be followed by Q&A sessions with director/producer Julia Bacha.
Finally and most significantly, our team in Sheikh Jarrah has been bringing the film to
Palestinian communities who are facing the loss of their lands. You can read a moving
blog post about our recent screening of Budrus for the villagers of al-Walaja. As one Is-
raeli viewer wrote in his blog following the screening, “I returned full of hope and anger,
full of anger and pain, full of love…”

Stay tuned for screenings in Toronto, Montreal, Los Angeles, Jerusalem, New York, Rio,

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London, Bethlehem and beyond. In the meantime, please consider joining us at IFC in
the coming days, and making a tax-deductible donation to Just Vision so we can con-
tinue to shine a spotlight on Palestinian and Israeli civilians working to end the conflict
without arms.

With appreciation,
Ronit Avni
Founder & Executive Director
Just Vision

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Meeting Blacksmiths and Shephards
August 5, 2010

The place where I’m volunteering just produced a report on Husan village, which is
slated to be quarantined by the Israeli apartheid wall in the coming months and years.
My supervisor asked me to go out to the village and take photographs for the report, so
this entry is about my experience wandering around the Palestinian village of Husan.

The report mentioned Roman terraces and irrigation systems amidst the farmlands of
Hunan – so this was the first thing that I wanted to see. I thought this would be just one
or two stones; it turned out to be two huge valleys lined with olive trees, as well as even
more fertile ground bursting with fruits and vegetables: lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers,
mangoes, apples, pears, almonds, and other fruits. When I went to have a closer look at
this lush farmland, I hear the shouts of children.

I descended a staircase built into the rock of the hillside that looked like it was built in
Roman times and found a group of ten children in a swimming pool, built into the face
of the hillside, with Hahwia Spring flowing into it. When you’re living in a country that
averages 15 cm of rainfall a year (and I didn’t have running water in my home for 23
days), it’s pretty spectacular to see a freshwater spring flowing into a pool.

These children were commanding a flock of twenty or so sheep, washing them with
soap and water. There was a film crew on the ledge of the pool with a cameraman and a
broadcaster.

“Where are you guys from?” I asked the cameraman.

“Denmark.”

“And what brings you here?”

“We’re doing a documentary on how people can live with peace and cooperation.”

“How’s that going?” I replied.

“Not so well. All we have so far is sheep.”

If these Danes didn’t find what they were looking for by speaking with the shepherd who

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brought his sheep to the spring amidst the Roman architecture, then I don’t think he’ll
ever find what he was looking for.

Husan village lies about 15 kilometers from the city of Bethlehem, of Biblical notoriety.
And these are people who fully utilize the Roman architecture, which was probably also
there at the time of Jesus’ birth. So these people have maintained an agrarian lifestyle
for thousands of years on this same land. What’s more peaceful than that?

So I rambled on from the valleys and hillsides into the village, stopping intermittently
underneath olive trees to rehydrate myself and take cover from the oppressive heat.
Judging by the number of people staring or calling out to me, I knew I was an anomaly
in this quiet village. I greeted most people, save for the teenagers who eagerly called out
from doorways and rooftops, “What’s your name?”

Then, as I walked into the center of town, a man sitting in an empty building with no
front, like a concrete box, waved me over. He was in a circle of other men, sitting and
drinking coffee; there were just two men and 5 boys when I arrived, but by the end of
our conversation, there were twelve men from the village sitting in a circle together,
chatting.

The two men there initially were Ismael and Ahmad. Ahmad’s sister died the day before,
in Jordan, of old age; so this gathering in the village center was a means for men to con-
sole the grieving. Ahmad didn’t speak English, but Ismael spoke fluently.

He asked me what I was doing in the village, and I told him I was taking pictures of the
village for a local news agency. Then, when we were inquiring about families, marriage,
and our ages, we diverged into a discussion of traditions. He said that most men of my
age (25) are married in the village. And women marry much earlier than that, perhaps
16 or 18. He said that it is permitted for a man to hold several wives, the reason for this
being an unequal proportion of men to women. But women can’t have several husbands
because then there could be dispute as to who the father of her children are. So in soci-
eties where there are more women than men, say, in a place where there is war, there is
a much greater proportion of single women. Ismael’s example: in Iraq, 80% of women
aren’t married; in Palestine, just 1%.

But very few men in the village have more than one wife; only the wealthiest men have
two. Ismael himself isn’t married. He studied English in the university for a year with
the dream of going abroad. When his Visa was denied for America, he gave up on his
academic as well as his traveling aspirations.

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“What is your story about?” He asked me.

“The Israelis and the wall that they’re building in your village,” I replied.

“There is no wall here,” he said. Which is true: there is only a major highway that cuts
along the edge of the village, dividing two homes from the rest of the village. There is
20-foot high fence next to the highway; but no wall yet.

“They want to build one,” I told him, as he conferred with the other men in the circle.

“Well, then they will.”

“I have friends in al Wallajeh, today, trying to stop the wall.”

“Ah yes. In al Wallajeh, they do have the wall. But we cannot stop them. They will do as
they like.”

“Well, that’s why I’m writing the story. Maybe if I tell people in America, then we can do
something.”

“Yes. Americans can stop the wall. But we can’t,” he said, resolutely.

Then, as more men joined the circle, I found it rude to speak in English while they all
were left out of the conversation. Ismael told me of the conversation that they were
having: one man has been planning a wedding in the village center for his daughter, the
following day. And they were debating whether it was right to have a wedding ceremony
right after the death of the sister of a friend. After a bit, I went off to take more pictures.

I walked down the main street, ignoring the calls of teenagers to “Come! Come!” There
was a bank, the Palestinian Investment Bank, and a window shop with some young men
working. Then there was a small dark shop, with no lights on and a faded Arabic sign
adorning the entrance; more like a garage than a shop. Then the blue flame of a welder’s
torch burst from the darkness. I had to check this out.

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Salim, the blacksmith, is from Turkey. He invited me in to sit and drink coffee with him.
He allowed me to take his photo, though his hands were stained black by iron and his
face was sweaty and dirty.

Salim studied philosophy in Casablanca, then met his wife in Istanbul; she passed away
last year. He is 57 years old. He has brothers in Toronto, Ohio, and Sydney, and a son
getting his doctorate in computer science in Ohio. Salim dreams of going to Sydney, or
to the US, but is waiting for his visa to be granted. Until then, he will live alone in Beit
Jala, the town next to Bethlehem, and work here in Husan village. He had a man offer
him $120,000 for his house in Beit Jala, and said he would happily sell it and find work
in the states if he has that opportunity. But he also said that he would just like to go for
three or four months, just to see his family. He told me this as if I were the man who
would be approving or denying his visa application.

I gave the blacksmith my address and phone number, in case he or his children ever
wanted to contact me. During the course of our conversation (in English), he was pro-
fusely apologizing for not speaking English well. He asked if I knew any Turkish, Ger-
man, or French. I told him no, but that I just knew a bit of Kazakh, which is much like
Turkish. I counted to ten in Kazakh (the numbers in particular are basically the same
between the two languages), and, beaming, Salim said, “Ah, how wonderful! You are
like Ahmad John Kennedy, Jr.!”

With a smile, we enjoyed a moment of silence. I bid him farewell and caught the bus
across the street heading to Bethlehem.

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Understanding Western Views of Islam
Augusts 7, 2010
I want you to read through the following excerpt from Edward Said’s, Orientalism.
Take your time to understand it, and perhaps read through it a couple of times. Then,
if you’re in your home, share it with a family member. If you’re online, share it with a
friend via facebook. Perhaps post a link to this blog on your profile. If you’re at work,
call over a coworker and see what they think of it.

Then, after you’ve read it, consider what you know about Terrorism, Terrorists, Mus-
lims, Islam, Saddam Hussein, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Osama Bin Laden, al Qaeda, or Af-
ghanistan. What is your source of information regarding these topics: is it from local or
national media? Is it from friends or family, colleagues or strangers? What informs us
about our views of these topics, and how have we been taught to NOT LISTEN to these
very people when they present their own viewpoints and beliefs? As if people in America
who know absolutely nothing of their lives and opinions, their struggles and beliefs, can
be greater experts on people on this side of the world than the very people who live here.

Without any more exposition, Edward Said:

In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an
idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality… There were – and are – cultures
and nations whose location is in the East, and their lives, histories, and customs have
a brute reality obviously greater than anything that could be said about them in the
West. About that fact this study of Orientalism has very little to contribute, except
to acknowledge it tacitly. But the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deal
principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the
internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient (the East as career)
despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a “real” Orient. My point
is that Disreali’s statement about the East refers mainly to that created consistency,
that regular constellation of ideas as the pre-eminent thing about the Orient, and not
to its mere being, as Wallace Stevens’s phrase has it.

A second qualification is that ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be un-
derstood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of
power, also being studied. To believe that the Orient was created – or, as I call it,

- 26 -
“Orientalized” – and to believe that such things happen simply as a necessity of the
imagination, is to be disingenuous. The relationship between Occident and Orient is
a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony,
and is quite accurately indicated in the title of K. M. Panikkar’s classic Asia and West-
ern Dominance. The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to
be “Oriental” in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-
century European, but also because it could be – that is, submitted to being – made
Oriental. There is little consent to be found, for example, in the fact that Flaubert’s
encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Ori-
ental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, pres-
ence, or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively
wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only
to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what
way she was “typically Oriental.” My argument is that Flaubert’s situation of strength
in relation to Kuchuk Hanem was not an isolated instance. It fairly stands for the pat-
tern of relative strength between East and West, and the discourse about the Orient
that it enabled.

This brings us to a third qualification. One ought never to assume that the structure
of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or of myths which, were the
truth about them to be told, would simply blow away. I myself believe that Oriental-
ism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Ori-
ent than it is as a veridic discourse about the Orient (which is what, in its academic or
scholarly form, it claims to be). Nevertheless, what we must respect and try to grasp
is the sheer knitted-together strength of Orientalist discourse, its very close ties to
the enabling socio-economic and political institutions, and its redoubtable durabil-
ity. After all, any system of ideas that can remain unchanged as teachable wisdom (in
academies, books, congresses, universities, foreign-service institutes) from the period
of Ernest Renan in the late 1840s until the present in the United States must be some-
thing more formidable than a mere collection of lies. Orientalism, therefore, is not
an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice
in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment.
Continued investment made Orientalism, as a system of knowledge about the Orient,
an accepted grid for filtering though the Orient into Western consciousness, just as
that same investment multiplied – indeed, made truly productive – the statements
proliferating out from Orientalism into the general culture.

Gramsci has made the useful analytical distinction between civil and political society
in which the former is made up of voluntary (or at least rational and noncoercive) af-
filiations like schools, families, and unions, the latter of state institutions (the army,

- 27 -
the police, the central bureaucracy) whose role in the polity is direct domination.
Culture, of course, is to be found operating within civil society, where the influence
of ideas, of institutions, and of other persons works not through domination but by
what Gramsci calls consent. In any society not totalitarian, then, certain cultural
forms predominate over others, just as certain ideas are more influential than others;
the form of this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified as hegemony, an
indispensable concept for any understanding of cultural life in the industrial West. It
is hegemony, or rather the result of cultural hegemony at work, that gives Oriental-
ism the durability and the strength I have been speaking about so far. Orientalism
is never far from what Denys Hay has called the idea of Europe, a collective notion
identifying “us” Europeans as against all “those” non-Europeans, and indeed it can
be argued that the major component of European culture is precisely what made that
culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a
superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures. There is
in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating
European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility
that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have had different views
on the matter."

- 28 -
Fighting Apathy
August 25, 2010

The whole time I was traveling, I acted in dire need of information and knowledge, al-
ways exploring, always discovering.

But I’m down in Virginia now, and it’s hard to find the novel, dire, and needy. Now that I
have such comfort, I’m settling in. And down in my heart, it leaves me needing so much
more.

I’m hoping that when I go back to Philly I can find a proper outlet for the passion that
inspired me in Palestine. I know that I was passionate last school year, and there were
people doing some amazing things there.

America’s role in the world’s suffering is absolutely undeniable. But its going to take a
revolution, and nothing short of it, to demilitarize America, bring the soldiers home, and
teach people how to live with love.

- 29 -
Photo by Ryan
 Acknowledgements
Thanks go out to the Holy Land Trust for organizing spectacular speakers, tours, lan-
guage lessons, and living arrangements in Bethlehem. And thanks to those speakers for
enlightening me beyond expectations - Amira Haas, Ben White, Hanin Zoabi, and oth-
ers. Also thanks to Ryan for teaching me more than the speakers.

For purposes of security and confidentiality, I have not used the full names of Ryan,
Meg, or my host family. Please contact me for their information.

Thank you to my friends and family for bearing with me while I've been away, and wel-
coming me back home with open arms.

Finally, and most importantly, thank you to my entire host family (whom I cannot name
for security reasons) for opening their doors and counting me as a member of their fam-
ily. God willing, I'll be seeing you soon.

Peace and love.

Further Reading
To understand why I didn't have running water, and why many Palestinians don't have
equitable access to water, see Amnesty International's (2009) report, "Troubled waters -
Palestinians denied fair access to water. Israel-Occupied Palestinian Territories," avail-
able at http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/MDE15/027/2009/en/e9892ce4-
7fba-469b-96b9-c1e1084c620c/mde150272009en.pdf

For more on water issues in the West Bank, and Israeli land confiscation in zone C, see
the 2010 Emergency Water Sanitation and Hygiene in the occupied Palestinian Territo-
ries (EWASH) report, "Access to water, sanitation, and hygiene in Area C," available at
http://www.ewash.org/files/library/5Factsheet5-AccesstoWASHinAreaC.pdf

An in-depth reporting of the recent history of the Middle East comes from Robert Fisk
(2007), "The great war for civilization," Vintage Publishing.

For thorough, reasonably fair reporting and analysis, see al Jazeera News (www.al-
jazeera.net) or Haaretz News (www.haaretz.com).
 About the Author

Matthew Graber currently lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Matt taught English in

Cherkassk village, Kazakhstan for two years with the Peace Corps (2007-09).

Feel free to contact Matt at MDEGraber@gmail.com with your comments.