Schwartz - The Long Awaited Update

"Clever got me this far, then tricky got me in..."
from The Package by A Perfect Circle

"Close the door, put out the light. No, they won't be home tonight. The snow falls hard and don't you know? The winds of Thor are blowing cold. They're wearing steel that's bright and true They carry news that must get through, oooh. They choose the path where no-one goes. They hold no quarter. They hold no quarter."
from No Quarter by Led Zeppelin

I've been away from the blog for some weeks. The last time you heard from me, the crisis with the volunteer apartments was still underway. Well, that was happily resolved. In fact, after chewing out my ear, my boss was evidently content enough with my work that she asked me to re-plaster and re-paint another apartment!

This entry is divided into three sections: What I've Been Doing, Events and News.

Click on "continue reading."

[Please forgive any typos and mangled grammar; I wanted to get this entry out quickly because it's been too long since I last wrote anything for the blog.]

What I've been doing
The village received an influx of new volunteers from Europe, freeing me up to do more constructive labor. I was reassigned to Voltaire to help him with his maintenance tasks at the village's elementary school. This was a great task for two reasons: first, even though the hours were longer and the labor sometimes menial, my work had a direct impact on an important project for the village; and second, I got to work with the West Bankers, which helped me improve my Arabic and grow closer to them as a friend.

Sadly, Voltaire only needed me for about two weeks. When he was done with me, I was reassigned to the hotel (also known as the "guesthouse" or "White Dove.") I've heard horror stories from former volunteers and villagers about hotel labor: endless, exhausting cleaning. Well, thankfully, the hotel staff is a very cool bunch, and so far I've done mostly minor maintanence and physical tasks, and for now the cleaning isn't too much of a nuisance. Yet, the ease of this assignment is mostly due to the fact that officially I am still working two assignments: a morning shift, during which I worked for the volunteer coordinator, then Voltaire and now the hotel, and an afternoon shift, during which I have only worked at the pool. However, as the swimming season winds down, I am needed less and less at the pool. I often get away with just showing up at the beginning and end of my shift, and sometimes not showing up at all. This has freed me up alot to do other work: edit "Pyretta Blaze," continue researching the village, figure out my student loans and airplane tickets, and so on.

But there is a problem looming on the horizon: in a little over two weeks the pool shall close and I will be working full time at the hotel, 7-3. I dread this because I know the tedium of cleaning rooms over and over again will murder all my intellectual ability. Furthermore, I am increasingly faced with one of several ethical dilemmas: what good am I doing for the Conflict? There was a time in the village, many years ago, when international volunteers played a critical role in the peace project here, maintaining this hill as an outpost of progressivism. (There was even a year when an older volunteer was elected mayor!) Yet, as material security gradually came to the village, the role of the international volunteers was reduced, until finally we became nothing more than cheap butlers. (The story is the same for volunteers in kibbutzim. And now there is a tiny movement within the kibbutzim and even here in the village to eliminate volunteering altogether!) So, if I am to spend the next three-to-four months cleaning the hotel -- whose profits do not go to the village but stay in the hotel corporation! (besides, the hotel barely breaks even these days) -- and exhausting myself doing so to such a point that I don't even have the energy to travel the countryside or write in the blog (which was what happened when I worked for Voltaire), then why am I even in Israel-Palestine?

However, there is good news. In Damascus Gate, East Jerusaelm, resides the Faisal Hostel, the main hub for international peace volunteers and alternative media journalists on the Green Line. I spent a weekend in the Old City of Jerusalem with this hostel as my base camp instantly fell in love with the place. In turn, its small staff were intrigued by me. A sudden spark of inspiration came to me and I asked them if they could use a new employee or volunteer. They happilly said yes and we talked over some logistics. They are now very interested in having me there for the remainder of my stay in Israel-Palestine. There are just some hurtles that need to be crossed before I can leave the village: renewing my visa, finishing my article for WireTap e-zine, and getting my absentee ballot (which will be addressed for the village).

So, the plan forming in my head is to stay here in the village at least until October 11th, then to move camp to East Jerusalem.

Events
Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salaam vs. the State of Israel Ministry of Education While I was working with Voltaire, a crisis involving the village's school, long brewing since before I began working and living here, finally boiled over. According to the information I've managed to cull from an assortment of sources, the current Israeli Minister of Education has divided all schools in the country into two categories, Jewish (under the direct control of the Ministry of Education) and Arab (organized into a confederation of administrators who work indirectly for the Minister). There is no Jewish-Arab category. The village's elementary school is thus listed simultaneously as a Jewish School and an Arab School, which has resulted in several oddities.

For instance, a few years ago when the Second Intifada started and Israeli police shot dead twelve Arab Israeli protestors, the Arab School administration announced a country-wide strike. This included the Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salaam elementary school, which became the only "Arab School" with Jewish students in the strike.

Another oddity is that the Ministry of Education has become determined to install its own handpicked principal in the elementary school. This is a very complicated issue, involving a rather bitter history on the part of the villagers.

You see, the school (I'll refer to it as the beit sefer from now on), for the first ten years of its existence, was an unofficial entity, meaning the teachers and the administration received little in the way of instutional support from the State of Israel. Then in the 1990s it became an official school, which helped the pensions of the teachers and provided a small but steady amount of finances. The beit sefer underwent something of a renaissance, with Jewish and Arab parents from all across the Latrun region enrolling their children. Then the crisis with the principals began.

From the Ministry of Education's perspective, the beit sefer is a rogue institution. All Jewish Schools have principals appointed from on high annually. At the end of every school year, the teachers and administrators approve or disapprove the principal -- this is supposed to be done based on the merit of their performance -- to serve for another year. However, for many years this was not the case for the village beit sefer. Then the Ministry of Education became concerned: if the beit sefer maintained its independence, then perhaps other Jewish Schools would "rebel." So for the last three years the Ministry has forced the village to accept a principal. The village sued, and the case went all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court. I attended the hearing and I'll write about it in a moment.

Meanwhile, the villagers began a revolt against the Ministry in the beit sefer itself. The information I have received about this has been unclear, but apparently one year the villagers even sacked the entire Jewish-Arab teacher corps, (falsely) claiming "dissatisfaction" with their performance. Increasingly the villagers have stepped in to disrupt the curriculum, dismiss teachers, even block administrators from enterring the school, and during the annual review of the Ministry principals, though all the principals have apparently been very good and even receive commendations from the villagers, they are still officially disapproved. Needless to say, it's been a messy affair, but it gets messier: at least according to the Jewish residents, the perpetrators have been largely Palestinian residents who view this as a battle against Israeli apartheid. The revolt has been going on so long that the school's enrollment is imploding (including enrollment of residents' children), its curriculum and textbooks are rapidly becoming outdated, dreams for establishing a high school have been dashed, and the village income has decreased as a result. The crisis, one of many the village faces, has opened up old wounds between the residents and has created new ones, and has severely damaged the image of the village to the surrounding region. I have met several parents who have withdrawn their children from the beit sefer and are throwing up their hands in defeat regarding hopes for the village's future. The conflict has become so intolerable to some that there is now a movement within the village to de-officialize the beit sefer, an incredibly counterintuitive move that would have the most severe repercussions for the instutition's economic and professional wellbeing.

All these issues simmered in the back of everyone's minds in the court. During the trial, the village's lawyers argued that the beit sefer, as a Jewish-Arab instution wherein both languages are spoken, has special needs, and only the village-appointed principal has the skills necessary to head such an operation; the Ministry's lawyers countered that the principal appointed this year is a Moroccan Jew with some foreknowledge of Arabic and an interest to learn more, volunteered for the assignment knowing the tumultous history of her predecessors, and had the necessary skills to run a bilingual and politically sensitive operation (indeed, she has been commended by many of the beit sefer's teachers, and on her first day she even vowed to the children to learn Arabic). Furthermore, they argued that if the Ministry lost control of this Jewish School, then it risked losing control over all Jewish Schools (an argument which made me wonder about the circumstances that could inspire such a rebellion, and also made me wonder why the Ministry so feared institutional autonomy).

The Judges ultimately ruled against neither party but also not for the village. They suggested that the Ministry's principal remain in office until the annual review, and that the village's candidate be given a managerial position, i.e., a "consultant." They told the lawyers to decide, and gave them a short recess to do so. Outside the courtroom, the lawyers and villagers clashed. The villagers found the compromise wholly unsatisfactory: either the Ministry give them autonomy or create a special Jewish-Arab School category. After the recess, the lawyers proclaimed this to the Judges, but to no avail. Since the lawyers apparently couldn't agree to the compromise themselves, the Judges enforced it themselves and then closed the case.

To observers of the Israeli judicial scene, the ambivalence of the Judges may come as a bit of a surprise. The Israeli Supreme Court has actually been a very progressive entity. Just recently it proclaimed that the Fourth Geneva Convention must apply to the Occupied Territories, and it concurred with the International Court's ruling against the Separation Wall. Why did the Judges take such a wish-washy position? You see, the State of Israel does not have a constitution. In 1948 a constitutional assembly was planned, but it has never come about. The Declaration of Independence, which established the current governmental structure, and political precedence have served as a de facto constitution, and also, just as in the United States, Supreme Court decisions. Yet, the American Supreme Court has the advantage of possessing a document it can read and interpret; the Israeli Supreme Court, on the other hand, with every ruling essentially creates the Israeli constitution. Thus the Judges were very reluctant to make a decision that could effect the educational structure of the nation-state for years to come. Also, the truth is that the Ministry's principal is a qualified individual.

The battle continues. Villagers intend to stage demonstrations and further protests... but with each passing year, the quality of education in the beit sefer continues to suffer, and with it, the mission of the village.

Travels In my blog entry On a Voyage to an Untamed Land, I wrote about a very important ideal of mine, which I call the "Theonaut," a new kind of explorer for a new type of Age of Exploration. In that entry I reflected on a dilemma: when to embark on internal journeys across uncharted emotional-intellectual-spiritual dimensions of the private psyche, and when to embark on external journeys across the uncharted sociopolitical dimensions of the 21st Century. In that entry I opted for the first choice. A few weeks ago I came to the conclusion that I had done enough intratrekking and that it was high time I did some extratrekking, or to put another way, I said to myself, 'I'm spending too much goddamn time in this dinky village!' So I've spent several days on the move.

First I went to the Old City of Jerusalem on the weekend of September 11th. I visited many of the famous religious and historical sites, in particular the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the various churches on the Mt. of Olives and the Separation Wall in Abu Dis and Bethany. Unfortunately Israeli security would not let me into the Haram as-Sharif/Har Ha'Beit (Temple Mount). But I managed to snag this snazzy photograph of the As-Sakhra/Ha'Kippa (Dome of the Rock) from the Dome of the Rock. Unfortunately my digital camera hit maximum capacity, so I was not able to take photographs of my tour of the Separation Wall -- but if you happened to be watching German news, you would have seen televised footage of an anti-Wall protest that took place on the very place my taxi driver took me. I will return to the Wall in the future for Thinking-East.net and Politicus, the LaSalle University political awareness magazine.

A Semitic Viet Nam... Regarding the Wall, both in terms of efficacy and morality, I'd like to say this much: it is a sham, a demonic falsehood that will enslave Israeli freedom and democracy to the forces of Fear, Oppression and Evil. But the Wall is just one of the most gruesome symptoms of a national sickness, born by the festering and gangrene wounds of the Occupation and the twisted priorities of thirty years of pseudo-Zionistisc imperialism. Another symptom has been the recent Histradut strike. The Histradut is the national labor union which controls almost all the working-class municipal and municipal-related occupations in Israel, from airport clerks to postmen. It resorted to this desperate action, which shut down the country for several days, because many Israeli workers have not been paid by the state in over a year! Why? I've been told that Sharon and the Likud have directed so much of the state's finances into the Occupation that the Knesset has slashed the budge of almost every governmental and government subsidized program in the country, including welfare, pensions, salaries and even university humanities programs.

Just as the Separation Wall threatens the future of Israeli liberty, it will demolish any hopes for Palestinian stability, freedom and democracy as well -- quite literally demolish, for everywhere I went along the immense barrier (it is taller than a mansion in most places) I saw the dust left behind by bulldozed houses -- and symbollically demolished, for the barrier in being built not only right through the middle of many Palestinian communities, totally disrupting the economic and cultural sphere of entire towns and cities, but the Wall is also lined with observation towers bearing security cameras which shall keep an attentive Orwellian eye upon the local populace. Israel should take a page from Chinese history: no state can wall itself; the barbarians shall invade if peace is not made. The Separation Wall is checkered with gaping holes. All I had to do was hop onto an Arab bus and take a ten minute ride to Abu Dis, where there is a steady flow of people hopping through a gap in the concrete. Moreover, Israel, being the Jewish State, should take a page from Jewish history: peoples who have tried to wall themselves in only succeed in transforming themselves into a ghetto, with all the socioeconomic, psychological and spiritual suffering such a situation entails.

Shana Tova! A few days after my trip to Jerusalem I went to Eilon, a formerly Marxist kibbutz in the north of Israel for Rosha Shannah, the Jewish New Year. I came down with a stomach bug, so I was bedridden for most of my first day there, but I improved well enough to take part in the big dinner. The next few days I toured the kibbutz and the local region. Eilon is only about a kilometer south of the Lebanese border, and only a few kilometers from the Mediterranean coast, in particular an area of cliffs dotted by grotos that was the site of a trans-Mediterranean destroyed by Jewish guerillas during the 1948 War. The photograph at the top of this entry is of the Mediterranean at sunset; the black blob in the distance is an Israeli warship patrolling the Lebanese border. The photograph to the right of this paragraph is of the Lebanese mountains, which overlook the kibbutz (please forgive the grainy quality and black smudge; my digital camera has been having problems lately). On the crest of the mountains is another Israeli kibbutz and an Israeli Bedouin village.

This past weekend I returned to Jerusalem for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. (If you're not acquainted with Jews yet, you might be noticing the bundled frequency of their holidays. "We like to get them all out of the way at once," one Israeli remarked. Two more holidays are coming up this week and next week!) I figured that there was no other appropriate place for me to be. This was a particularly special Yom Kippur because it fell on the Shabbat, which occurs only once every seven years, making it, so to speak, doubly holy. (Unlike the Christian calender, which is completely solar and seasonal, and the Muslim calendar, which is completely lunar, the Jewish calendar is partially solar, lunar and seasonal, which means the months and holidays fluctuate year to year, but only a little. For instance, Rosha Shannah is always in September, but sometimes closer to the beginning and other times closer to the end.) I spent my Yom Kippur walking the Via Dolorossa, the Path of Suffering, which is the traditional route of Jesus' last day as a mortal, from the Antonian Palace to Golgotha, which is supposed to be housed in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Of course there is debate concerning the route, especially its starting and ending-point. I visited the alternative sites as well. It was a very moving experience for me... but in an unexpectedly dark way. In the Bible, Jesus condemns Jerusalem yet, to fulfill his mission as Messiah, sacrifices himself for the city:

The same day there came certain of the Pharisees, saying unto him, Get thee out, and depart hence: for Herod will kill thee. And he said unto them, Go ye, and tell that fox, Behold, I cast out devils, and I do cures to day and to morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected. Nevertheless I must walk to day, and to morrow, and the day following: for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate: and verily I say unto you, Ye shall not see me, until the time come when ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord. [Luke 13:31-35, King James translation. See also Luke 19:41-44.].

To this day it remains a cesspool of thieves and fanatics ("No wonder it's a holy city!" exclaimed a British journalist I met in the Faisel Hostel). Palestinian peddlers, desperate for a quick buck and totally misunderstanding my desire to be left alone, vulturously pursued me at every turn; touristic, paganistic pilgrims slavishly threw themselves upon the altars of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; and the priests of the various Christianities which comprise the Church bickered with each other (their ridiculous bickering has often turned violent, and sometimes has dragged states into armed conflict). While I successfully resisted the temptation to snag photographs of my trip, I am guilty of my own small crimes and petty prides. All in all, a very black and murky experience for me, and I think I'd like to leave it at that.

So now I'm back in Neve Shalom, and it's time for the Theonaut to turn inward again. I have student loans, overseas ballot forms, a visa renewal and an article for an e-zine to worry about now. Wish me luck!

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Some other photographs from my travels:

From the Eilon sculpture garden: statue of a child butchered in battle (the figure on the right is screaming as a tank shell buries itself into the figure's shoulder -- sorry about the poor quality). One of the kibbutz's great heroes was a general who fought in the 1948 War and who, apparently tortured by many of the horrors he witnessed in battle, turned to art to exorcise his demons. He was particularly interested in modernist interpretations of Phillistine sculptry. The garden is filled with disturbing but insightful representations of ancient and modern barbarism -- minotaurs, slithering satanic snakes, mindless masses of people, and other assorted semi-human beasts.

Murals from a wall in the Faisal Hostel. The rightmost section of the mural depicts International Solidarity Movement volunteers placing themselves in the line of fire between Palestinian insurgents and Israeli soldiers. Apparently painted in the radical heyday of the ISM, someome stuck a poster of slain ISM activist Rachel Corrie as a reminder of the dangers of radicalism. Corrie was bulldozed to death by an Israeli soldier when she placed herself in between the bulldozer and a Palestinian house. The ISM, famous for its ingenius idea of using international volunteers as "human shields" to protect Palestinian civilians and leaders from Israeli bullets (rarely does the IDF dare harm an international, for fear of the repercussions), also has a darker side: in the name of nonviolent protest ISM activists, many of whom have enlisted really for the a cheap Indiana Jones thrill in a Third World country, have verbally abused Israeli soldiers, sometimes even attacked them, and have also developed a bad reputation among Palestinians as overbearing, that is, trying to control the lives of those they were supposed to protect. A new generation of ISM activists -- many of whom are Israeli Palestinians -- are seeking to reform the operation from the inside, to make it less radical and bring it closer to true Ghandian strategies. As one of the reformers, who recently appeared on the Muslim Broadcasting Chanel about ISM training, put it to me, "How does swinging from the turret of an Israeli tank help Palestine? Many have no respect for Israelis, don't understand the soldiers, don't care for Hebrew. This needs to be changed. I avoided getting involved with the ISM for years because of this, but now I hope that maybe from the inside I can cause real change."

Mishmash, the feline princess of the Faisal Hostel. One of the Faisal Hostel's managers called Mishmash the "sexiest cat in East Jerusalem." Conservative speculations of the managers, workers and frequent hostel guests say that she has born over fifty kittens. Apparently she has never not been pregnant for more than a few months. The managers particularly liked an American analogy which I thought was fitting: "So she's kinda like the town bike: everyone's had a ride." Sadly (or maybe not so sadly), Mishmash will finally be undergoing an operation soon.

The famouse Damascus Gate, viewed from the Faisel Hostel lounge. The entrance into wisdom?
"Think for yourself. Question authority. Throughout human history as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are or where we are going in this ocean of chance, it has been the authorities, the political, the religious, the educational authorities who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing, forming in our minds their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself."
- Timothy Leary

Posted by Schwartz at September 27, 2004 01:47 PM