The Banality of Suffering

The Banality of Suffering

Nathalie Khankan writing from Ramallah, occupied Palestine,

Live from Palestine, 7 December 2006

Is it looking at my own students at Birzeit University that reminds me of my old English teacher John S.? Every Tuesday and Thursday at 3:10 pm, and ten minutes before the end of class, they are all restless in their chairs, eager to continue their day without me. I do not take it personally. I feel their energy. But I do remember John fondly.

I recall his ability to last throughout the lesson and to end it with a virtual cliffhanger. Not all, but some of us would just be sitting there, nailed to our chairs, as the bell rang and other students began chatting, doors opening, noise everywhere. And, in the midst of clatter and laughter, John's last sentence would linger in the air. His cliffhanger.

One such cliffhanger I remember particularly well. We were discussing Brueghel's Fall of Icarus painting--the one that you can find in Musee des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. The myth of Icarus and his father Daedelus who made wings with wax to escape their Crete-prison. Flight. Youthful desire. Hubris. Icarus flying too close to the sun. Wings melting. The young Icarus falling into the sea and drowning. Tragedy.

In fact, not much of Icarus is showing in the painting. Only his white legs sticking up from the water in the bottom right-hand corner. But there are other people depicted, all going about their everyday lives. One man is ploughing. I do not remember the details, only the big panorama of a landscape with people in it, doing their things, like ploughing, undisturbed by the boy drowning. Icarus. The silent drama of a boy dying.

Did we talk about Auden's poem, as well? The one that speaks to Brueghel's painting:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along ...

Maybe we did, or maybe I read the poem later. I do not remember. But I know the cliffhanger still hangs strong: Brueghel's painting as a depiction of the banality of great suffering. We just sat there, some of us, thinking on as the classroom emptied and John packed away his books. Not really knowing then what it means or could also mean. The banality of suffering ... its human position ...

Suffering ... its headline position. The headlines on the front pages of al-Quds and al-Ayyam that we read every day. Every day there is a number.

The number of casualties, Palestinians injured or killed or murdered under occupation. This month there have been headlines in white on black background, the colours themselves having their own language.

I wonder what you do when every day the headline contains a count and that count is about you? A relative newcomer to occupied-Palestine realities, I still cannot fully comprehend the idea, let alone fact, of years and decades of outrageous headlines that enumerate the deaths of my people. Like one long headline that forgot it had to change.

On this morning of November 8, Icarus comes from Bayt Hanoun. Eighteen people killed in their sleep. Most of them women and children. Not that men dying is less suffering. From the comfort zone of Ramallah, these numbers are strangely close-far.

The headline continues. And under it, a picture from Ma'an News that makes me want to plough on even harder. It is without sleeping-dead women and children. Three living men are in the picture. They are all in an alley, the ground muddy, stony. There is a pool of water on the ground. On the right-hand side. A pool of red water. In the middle of the picture, one man is down on his knees. Leaning on one knee actually. The other leg (there they are, the legs again!) shows a bare foot. His hands cover his face. His head is bent in grief. The other two men lean towards him, their arms under his. A Beit Hanoun snapshot. Really, it is just two men trying to make a third man stand. But no matter how hard I try, I cannot make it go away.

Nathalie Khankan is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes on modern Palestinian poetry and can be reached at khankan@berkeley.edu. This article was originally published in This Week in Palestine and is republished with the author's permission.

Israeli Supreme Court legalizes state murder

Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that targeted assassinations are LEGAL. Read about it here:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/801083.html

Palestinian Poverty

HAARETZ - December 13th

No Palestinian fishing rod

By Amira Hass

The world is applauding Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus for applying the folk wisdom that a poor man should be given not a fish but rather a fishing pole. That is, to fight poverty, it is necessary not to feed poor people but rather to let them earn a living. And at the same time, the world is being asked to keep giving the Palestinians fish, because it knows very well that Israel will block any shipment of fishing rods.

More than 1.3 million Palestinians, out of a population of 3.7 million (including the inhabitants of East Jerusalem), were defined as poor in 2005. More than half of them, 820,000, were defined as sunk in "deep poverty." The Palestinian National Commission for Poverty Alleviation has set two poverty lines, on the basis of average consumption expenses: The official poverty line relates to nine categories of goods and services, if the daily expenditure for them is less than $2.40 per capita. The "deep poverty line" relates to just three categories - food, clothing and housing (without medical care, education, or transportation expenses), the expenditure for which is less than $2.00 a day.

In the first half of 2006, the number of Palestinians in a state of "deep poverty" reached 1,069,200, as noted in a detailed United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) report that was published in November, headed "Prolonged Crisis in the Occupied Palestinian Territory: Recent Socio-Economic Impacts on Refugees and Non-Refugees." Their number did decline by half toward the end of 2006 because of aid they received and the payment of part of the public sector salaries. One-third of the Palestinian public reported that it had received aid during the second half of 2006: 15.3 percent of the West Bank's inhabitants and 56.9 percent of the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Nearly 78 percent reported that the aid was in the form of food. This is a matter of sums that range between NIS 200 and NIS 489 per family.

On the backdrop of these shocking cumulative reports, last week the UN agencies in partnership with 14 non-governmental organizations embarked on a campaign to raise $453.6 million for emergency humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. This places the Palestinian territories in third place among 13 focal points for aid, all the others of which are in Africa: after Sudan and Congo, and before Somalia and Zimbabwe. Even if the sums are not covered in their entirety, the high ceiling reflects the assessment that the crisis will continue in the coming years. It shows that the international boycott of the Hamas government cannot really work, because the "African" poverty that has been created here is more threatening: from the perspective of health, politics, security and morality.

And above all, the high aid ceiling reflects the depths of the leniency toward Israel, or the absence of the political ability to cause Israel to do one of two things: Either to recognize its obligations as the occupying power under international covenants, and to care for the occupied population, or to desist immediately from its policy of intentional economic strangulation. For years, Israel has been using the weapon of economic strangulation as a means of political pressure. And the tempest this policy has reaped has thus far been that the Palestinians are growing closer to Iran.

Israel is continuing to steal hundreds of thousands of shekels in customs and tax monies that do not belong to it, which it is not transferring to the Palestinian treasury. This is the proximate cause of the deepening of the crisis. The continuing, permanent and historic cause are the limitations on movement Israel imposes, contrary to the repeated promises (particularly to the World Bank and the American State Department) to "ease up": The closing of the Gaza Strip crossing points and the positioning of hundreds of roadblocks and barriers in the West Bank are the factors that make any economic activity a gamble, to the point of bankruptcy and giving up a priori. It is much easier for the Western countries to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to subsidize food that Israel is not allowing the Palestinians to produce and purchase themselves than it is to cause Israel to stop behaving as though it stands above international law.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/800259.html

For Allende...

Jimmy Carter

Former President Jimmy Carter addresses, in general, the response to his recent book "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid".

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-carter8dec08,0,7999232.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

LA Times Op-ed,

December 8, 2006

Speaking frankly about Israel and Palestine

Jimmy Carter says his recent book is drawing knee-jerk accusations of anti-Israel bias.

By Jimmy Carter

JIMMY CARTER was the 39th president of the United States. His newest book is "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," published last month.

I SIGNED A CONTRACT with Simon & Schuster two years ago to write a book about the Middle East, based on my personal observations, as the Carter Center monitored three elections in Palestine and on my consultations with Israeli political leaders and peace activists.

We covered every Palestinian community in 1996, 2005 and 2006, when Yasser Arafat, and later Mahmoud Abbas, were elected president and members of parliament were chosen. The elections were almost flawless, and turnout was very high, except in East Jerusalem, where, under severe Israeli restraints, only about 2% of registered voters managed to cast ballots.

The many controversial issues concerning Palestine and the path to peace for Israel are intensely debated among Israelis and throughout other nations, but not in the United States. For the last 30 years, I have witnessed and experienced the severe restraints on any free and balanced discussion of the facts. This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American-Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices.

It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine, to suggest that Israel comply with international law or to speak in defense of justice or human rights for Palestinians. Very few would ever deign to visit the Palestinian cities of Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, Gaza City, or even Bethlehem, and talk to the beleaguered residents. What is even more difficult to comprehend is why the editorial pages of the major newspapers and magazines in the United States exercise similar self-restraint, quite contrary to private assessments expressed quite forcefully by their correspondents in the Holy Land.

With some degree of reluctance and some uncertainty about the reception my book would receive, I used maps, text and documents to describe the situation accurately and to analyze the only possible path to peace: Israelis and Palestinians living side by side within their own internationally recognized boundaries. These options are consistent with key U.N. resolutions supported by the U.S. and Israel, official American policy since 1967, agreements consummated by Israeli leaders and their governments in 1978 and 1993 (for which they earned Nobel Peace Prizes), the Arab League's offer to recognize Israel in 2002 and the International Quartet's "Roadmap for Peace," which has been accepted by the PLO and largely rejected by Israel.

The book is devoted to circumstances and events in Palestine and not in Israel, where democracy prevails and citizens live together and are legally guaranteed equal status.

Although I have spent only a week or so on a book tour so far, it is already possible to judge public and media reaction. Sales are brisk, and I have had interesting interviews on TV, including "Larry King Live," "Hardball," "Meet the Press," "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," the "Charlie Rose" show, C-SPAN and others. But I have seen few news stories in major newspapers about what I have written.

Book reviews in the mainstream media have been written mostly by representatives of Jewish organizations who would be unlikely to visit the occupied territories, and their primary criticism is that the book is anti-Israel. Two members of Congress have been publicly critical. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for instance, issued a statement (before the book was published) saying that "he does not speak for the Democratic Party on Israel." Some reviews posted on Amazon.com call me "anti-Semitic," and others accuse the book of "lies" and "distortions." A former Carter Center fellow has taken issue with it, and Alan Dershowitz called the book's title "indecent."

Out in the real world, however, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. I've signed books in five stores, with more than 1,000 buyers at each site. I've had one negative remark "that I should be tried for treason", and one caller on C-SPAN said that I was an anti-Semite. My most troubling experience has been the rejection of my offers to speak, for free, about the book on university campuses with high Jewish enrollment and to answer questions from students and professors. I have been most encouraged by prominent Jewish citizens and members of Congress who have thanked me privately for presenting the facts and some new ideas.

The book describes the abominable oppression and persecution in the occupied Palestinian territories, with a rigid system of required passes and strict segregation between Palestine's citizens and Jewish settlers in the West Bank. An enormous imprisonment wall is now under construction, snaking through what is left of Palestine to encompass more and more land for Israeli settlers. In many ways, this is more oppressive than what blacks lived under in South Africa during apartheid. I have made it clear that the motivation is not racism but the desire of a minority of Israelis to confiscate and colonize choice sites in Palestine, and then to forcefully suppress any objections from the displaced citizens. Obviously, I condemn any acts of terrorism or violence against innocent civilians, and I present information about the terrible casualties on both sides.

The ultimate purpose of my book is to present facts about the Middle East that are largely unknown in America, to precipitate discussion and to help restart peace talks (now absent for six years) that can lead to permanent peace for Israel and its neighbors. Another hope is that Jews and other Americans who share this same goal might be motivated to express their views, even publicly, and perhaps in concert. I would be glad to help with that effort