Trip to Bethlehem
This past week, I got acquainted with members of the executive committee of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR)," a century-old Nonviolent Noncooperative Resistance organization with 60 branches worldwide. The executive committee was having its annual planning session at the NSWAS hotel and School for Peace. They let me sit in some of their talks, including a fascinating one by a top representative of the far-progressive Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and Rabbis for Human Rights (who are currently involved, among many other activities, trying to protect Palestinian olive farmers from Israeli attacks), who talked to us about current opportunities for Nonviolence in the current Intifada (Gandhian-style, such as the Christian Peacemaker Team [CPT] in Hebron, and the more iffy ISM), as well as the IDF's attitude toward peace activists (often worse than toward Intifadists, if you can believe it!), the threat of a new Intifada errupting among the Bedouins in the Negev (I'll be writing something about that in this blog, inshallah), and the general humanitarian situation in Israel-Palestine during Oslo leading up the the outbreak of violence four years ago.

Then this past weekend, IFOR let me tag along for a special tour of the legendary city of Bethlehem, birthplace of Jesus, meeting-place of Islam and Christianity, and unfortunate hotspot in the current conflict. We were shown around by the well-known Wi`am Palestinian Center for Conflict Resolution, which is based in the city. There were long discussions about current Nonviolent grassroots initiatives in Palestine, relations between Nonviolent operations such as Wi`am and violent extremist operations such as HAMAS, and an interfaith discussion about what we religionists who are believers in Nonviolence should do when confronted by (or when we are ourselves confronting) fundamentalists, the zealous scourge of our century. We also toured the Separation Wall near the Ayda refugee camp (a slum if I ever saw one), and scouted the immense, illegal and immoral Israeli settlement of Har Homa.

When the IFOR bus first enterred Bethlehem, we drove headlong into a fight between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians. It was a tragic thing to see... A story for another day, dear reader.

So, the highlights...

1. Meeting Zuhair Manasrah, the Governor of Bethlehem For eight years during the Oslo period, Manasrah was the governor of Jenin. He involved himself in many crossborder activities with the mayors of Israeli cities, including Amram Mitzna, former mayor of Haifa and the Avoda (Labor Party)'s candidate for prime minister during the last election cycle in Israel. In particular Manasrah and the Israeli mayors designed a plan for evacuating illegal Israeli settlements by offering the settlers new houses in Israel proper and financial reimbursement for their lost properties. The plan, unfortunately, never went into action. In 2002, Manasrah temporarily served as the head of the West Bank Preventive Security Service, rounding up insurgents in Bethlehem (an incredibly difficult and thankless job considering that the IDF will not allow Palestinian police to bear arms). Then he was appointed governor of Bethlehem. During his term he has continued to try reaching out to Israelis on the other side of the Green Line. He was involved in the famous (and unimplemented) Geneva Accord, an alternative peace plan drawn up by Israeli activist Yossi Beilin and Palestinian activist Abed Rabbo. (For more information, read this article.) And yes, that is indeed an immense Palestinian flag hanging behind the governor in the photograph.

2. The Israeli military presence around Rachel's Tomb The important Biblical matriach Rachel (or "Rahel," in Hebrew) is supposed to have been laid to rest in this area millennia ago. It is a site highly revered by the Jewish faithful, and is lusted for by the zealous fringe. The IDF has established three forts around the area of Rachel's Tomb, not far from the mouth of Bethlehem in an apparent attempt to unofficially annex the territory to "Greater Jerusalem" (see this article.) The fort in the photograph used to be a Palestinian hotel before it was confiscated by the army (most Israeli military outposts and bases in the West are civilian properties, primarily residences. You might recall that in the American Bill of Rights the quartering of troops is outlawed as a violation of basic human rights. This principle was globally enshrived in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.)

3. Ayda Refugee Camp and the Separation Wall The Ayda Refugee Camp is one of three Palestinian camps in Bethlehem, and one of hundreds throughout Israel-Palestine and the Middle East. The occupants of the camps were those compelled and expelled from their homes in the various Arab-Israeli wars and the expansions of the Jewish State. The Right of Return for these refugees has been a point of bitter contention between Israelis and Palestinians. Israel is, of course, famous for its principle of Right of Return for Jews around the world--which has resulted in an incredible 300% growth in the country's population in its brief 50-year existence, with over 1 million Russian Jews having flooded the state as recently as the early 1990s! However, Israel continues to deny the Right of Return for Palestinians. As immoral as this obviously is, resolving this issue will not be as simple as just opening the borders. Many of the refugees have had children, even grandchildren: do they have a legitimate claim to the property? Many Palestinian areas have now been converted into farmland and cities, and the land is being drastically harmed from overuse and ultracultivation. What would the influx of up to 4 million impovershed refugees do to the environment, not to mention the economy--and if the economy buckles and collapses, civil war is not an impossibility. Some thinkers have suggested a limited Right of Return for the refugees (heck, Israel is already choosey when it comes to which Jews it'll let return: if you're a White European Jew, come on in! But Elohim forbid if you're an African or Asian Jew, because that means your Black) with an Affirmative Action-style program to get them (and others, like the Bedouins and newly immigrated Jews) back on their feet, financial and perhaps even professional reimbursement for those not allowed back, and by making peace with the Arab states (another big no-no in Israeli political discourse), helping those countries integrate their Palestinian populations (rather than pissing on them as they have for half a century.) But no matter how you slice the cake, you're looking at a final-status population of 10 or so million Jews and Arabs. Can the land really sustain them? It certanily can't the way Israelis and Palestinians rape their natural resources... For information about the issue of Palestinian refugees, read this article.

And then there's the Separation Wall, Sharon's great experiment in denial and genocide. If the Conflict is a kind of dialogue, political polarization has rapidly reduced the vocabulary of peace on both sides in favor of a demagogy of absolute war. Sharon--since the 1970s, the architect of the illegal Israeli settlements that checker the Gaza Strip and West Bank and instigated the current uprising--has vowed to impose a peace upon the Palestinians. His “peace” is in truth the ringing silence that follows a gunshot. He has sidelined Arafat and with him any form of binationalism, allowing the religious and nationalist fanaticisms of HAMAS, Islamic Jihad and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade to fill the growing chasm of ideological legitimacy that has been widening in the minds of Palestinian youth. With each terrorist attack, the frightened and misinformed Israeli public--more and more of whom, as it happens, are serving as soldiers of the Occupation, forced to oppress and even murder innocent Palestinians, and repress their own ethical instincts, for a shadowy imperialist agenda--becomes more racist and desperately bourgeoisie, surrenders more responsibility over to their prime minister, and looks away as he builds his incredible, illegal and immoral “security fence,” a Hebrew Great Wall of China, which is devouring the most precious properties and resources of the West Bank as he prepares for apartheid and neverending war. (Read James Bennet's August 15th, 2004 article for the New York Times Magazine entitled “Sharon’s Wars.”)

In my last entry, The Long Awaited Update," I already wrote about the dangers of the Wall to the well-being of the Jewish State. But the Wall is having an even more diastrous effect: instigating, reviving fanatical hatred of Jews. Look closely at the photograph and you'll notice a swastika. Well, to the far left of that swastika was some graffiti, which doesn't show up in the photograph but shocked me when I first saw it: a Star of David, an equals sign, and a Swastika. Is this what Sharon considers progress for the Jewish people?!

4. Beit Suhar and Har Homa Beit Suhar became famous during the 1st Intifada for its nonviolent methods of resistance: very simply, the residents of this sleepy Bethlehem Christian suburb refused to pay anymore taxes to the Occupation government. In response, the IDF raided the village several times and confiscated tons of property. The action of the Beit Suharis was the equivalent of a Palestinian Rosa Parks, and the IDF's response the equivalent of an Israeli Montgomery police force arresting a little Black woman who just couldn't take it anymore.

And then there's Har Homa, built atop a mountain once called Abu Ghanim. This is one of the cities Sharon has been illegally building in the West Bank. As you can see in the photograph, it's capacity is immense. Well, lemme tell you just how big: 60,000 settlers are scheduled to live there, 60,000! Some are already there, but the bulk are going to move in en masse all at once--right next to a Palestinian city 300,000-strong. And this is supposed to go over well? At the moment Har Homa is surrounded by an electronic fence, rigged with infrared sensors and some say electrified. This is actually a temporary section of the Separation Wall. Sharon does not yet know how he will build the Wall in this region: he has to somehow enclose all the settlements in the Bethlehem area, go northward then eastward to connect to two very distant settlements in the Jericho area--all while somehow maintaining his "Greater Jewish Jerusalem" and not somehow entrapping hundreds of thousands of Palestinians inside the expanded municipality.

5. The Church of the Nativity That's me in front of the Church of the Nativity, build on the spot where Jesus was born. A wonderful church that was involved in a horrible seige a few years back: Palestinian guerillas fled the Israeli military, taking hostage/gaining asylum the monks inside (the information has never been clear) while the Israeli soldiers surrounded this 2000-year-old church with tanks and guns. A mentally handicapped monk was killed by the Israelis and there was gunfire (I saw the bullet holes when I was there). This was my generation's Cuban Missile Crisis: every Muslim and every Third World Christian were ready to take up arms against Israel if the IDF demolished the church--as it had threatened to do! I remember the tension in the air: it was as if an antimatter cyclone were brewing in the skies, just itching for the spark to set it loose. Thankfully, thankfully, a deal was negotiated: the guerillas were allowed to leave Palestine and the soldiers retreated from the city.

I plan to return to Bethlehem for Christmas; spend a week there, see the fireworks, go to service in the church. Wish me luck. ;)

Projects
1. Still working on "Promised Lands," progressing slowly but surely. I've been doing alot of reading and thinking which is (positively) influencing the direction in which the story is heading. Currently I am reading Neil Gaiman's "American Gods." The premise of his book is, what if the spirits and polytheistic deities of old were real, flesh and blood and metaphysical beings, who were sustained by belief? And would not these creatures have been brought to America during the millennia of exploration and immigration--from ancient Egyptian and Viking wanderers to the Scotch-Irish settlers of the Old West to the Arab Muslim taxi drivers of New York City? But the old gods have been forgotten, discarded; they are aging and dying, trapped in the existential wasteland of the United States as new gods rise: the credit card, the television... The story follows Shadow, an ex-con-turned-Beowulf, hero of the mysterious Mr. Wednesday (Odin), as he treks across the American Northwest. But the story is not epic in the traditional sense: it spends almost all its ink charting his travels, his encounters with everyday Blacks, Whites, Natives, immigrants. The book studies the insidious economic and spiritual poverty that is choking the Rustbelt, seizing and squeezing the heart of America. It is really a story about everyday people and the lifespan of ideas.

Heh, at some point I'll pick up some good fiction about Israel-Palestine. (I'm particularly interested in dredging up a copy of "Blood Brothers," which is about, as I recall, a Hasidic Jew who has close Palestinian friends, and how the 1967 War destroys their relationship.) But hey, in a way, reflecting about my homeland from the other side of the planet is kind of in keeping with my own Theonauting ideals and the spirit of traveling. Lawrence George Durrell once remarked, “Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.” The traveller, be he a Westerner or Easterner, is on a quest to experience alien realities, societies which evolved according to logics different from that of his homeland, in the hope of acquiring insight and wisdom about a wide assortment of matters: himself, his home, his world, humanity.

2. Revising "Israel-Palestine: What America Was, Good and Bad" into a new, fuller (and less grammatically challenged) article which will I re-publish here on this blog, on Thinking-East.net, and submit to WireTap e-zine and ZNet (Noam Chomsky's outfit). This second edition will serve as the kernel of a larger article I have been intending to write for WireTap since July.

3. As soon as my bigger English-language tasks are complete, I shall begin studying Hebrew and Arabic again. I shant leave this country as unconversant as when I arrived. I may also start teaching English to some of the children here in the village.

4. I have some Palestinian friends and acquaintances who desperately want to immigrate to America for financial and educational reasons (not to mention psychological reasons: as one Palestinian I met put it, "In this Intifada, neither of us, Israel or Palestine, see a light at the end of the tunnel, not even a little one. We just don't know how this will all end.") As the only American they know, I'm investigating options while also trying to warn them about the harsh realities of immigrant life in the US. I've only done a little research thusfar... They're depending on me, so I need to pick up the pace a bit.

5. I'm also investigating my own immigration possibilities to Israel (a process called "aaliyah" in Hebrew, "going up.") Why? Well, for one thing, it's always good to have a second passport, even from an isolated country like Israel, especially if matters go south back home. Second, despite its problems the Jewish State does have a wonderful healthcare and educational system, much better than the US, and citizenship would give me access to it. Third, peace activists detained by Israeli authorities who are not Israeli citizens are deported, sometimes permanently; but Israeli peace activists most often just get a slap on the hand and a kick in the ass, to live and fight another day. And fourth, I learned that Israel gives all new immigrants $10,000 as a get-on-your-feet cash basket. If I could somehow hold onto all or most of that $10,000 (say, by getting a job here), that money would go a long way to eliminating my evil student loans. There are a few hitches I've learned about already: five month minimum stay in Israel, and the money might not all come in one package--and of course military service, but I've heard of viable ways of escaping conscription.

'Wait,' you might say, 'you would immigrate to Israel primarily to steal its money?' Well, when they aren't being enslaved or fleeing genocide, to make money is usually why people immigrate; just ask any Scottish or Irish-descent White, Mexican, Arab, Hindu in the US (but don't ask the Blacks: they were stolen from their land to assist those already-well-to-do English who immigrated to America to reap even grosser amounts of cash and power than they possessed back in the Old World; and don't ask the Viet Namese and Cambodians: they were fleeing a US-instigated Indochinese holocaust.) Israel is one of the only countries on the planet where people immigrate for ideological reasons. In fact, besides the old USSR, Taliban Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, totalitarian states deluded by dreams of dystopia, and occassionally the US (a peculiar half-assed totalitarian empire in its own right. but one which has had some brilliant diamonds of idealism floating in the tar, such as religious liberty), Israel is the only country I can think of where people immigrate out of idealistic motivations. That said, the $10,000 is American money anyway, the tax money of me, my parents, and all Americans, given to Israel without most Americans' consent when it could be used for domestic debt relief, getting Sharon to behave himself, or any number of progressive and constructive ends other than just filling the pocketbooks of a few filfthy rich Ashkenazim Iraelis, Reagonomically sustaining Israel's increasingly decrepit economy. Israel's economy, by the way, is completely dependent upon American foreign aid. The country receives over $100 billion in aid from America, more than any other place on the earth (even Egypt, which is #2 and receives $60 billion, and Colombia, which is #3 and receives something similar to Egypt.)

But for all you moralists out there, if it turns out that moving to Israel is just too impractical, or if I can't elude military service, don't worry, I won't immigrate. 'Sides, there's always the United Kingdom, which has universal healthcare and better respect for the English language. ;)

6. I will soon be putting on this blog a NSWAS list of Israeli and Palestinian peace, humanitarian, civil society and social justice groups.

7. Finally, I am researching into alternative American political parties. I'm through with the two-party system in the US. The Republicans have been completely hijacked by the extremist fringe, and the Democrats are such a hodgepodge alliance of competing interests in most other countries it would be three or four different parties. Moreover, the two-party system simply isn't democratic. What kind of choice is it when it is only two choices? Democracy should not be a do-or-die, winner-takes-all Pascalian wager. Whatever happened to Madison's free market of ideas!

And there is another problem. BBC Online correspondent Tom Carver describes this coming US presidential election as a "make or break" for the Republicans and Democats: if Bush loses, the Republicans may shatter into ideological civil war between the ruling radicals and pragmatists; if Kerry loses, the Democrats may vanish into ineffectiveness for the decade. I intuitively feel that what this reporter says is accurate.

But there is another issue the reporter hasn't seen: the Republicans are striving to transform the US into a laissez-faire, plutocratic Soviet Union with elements of Iranian-style theocracy:
-a single ruling party (the Republicans themselves)
-a single ruling ideology (Christian Zionism) with a concomitant worship of the state ("God Bless America") and Stalinesque "motherland" traditionalism (the new marriage and religion requirements for eligibility to receive Workfare benefits; the so-called "faith-based initiatives," which hand over to fundamentalist, Republican-aligned churches the state's task of distributing Welfare and other socioeconomic aid to the poor, while legally empowering these institutions to evangelize and ransom the recipients; a rewriting of American history to blot out the state's history of slavery and oppression of minorites in the name of "renewing American self-esteem")
-a guardian council, a-la` Iran (Christianist justices on the Supreme Court)
-a fundamentalist legal code, also a-la` Iran (attempts to redefine the US as a "Christian Nation"; establishing the Pat Robertsonian interpretation of the Ten Commandments and other Old Testament laws as the basis of all civil law)
-a ubiquituous treacherous foe and scapegoat (the Democrats/liberals, the French)
-a managerial class (the transnational corporate structure)
-state-sponsored exportation of the "revolution" (maintaining an iron grip on the IMF and World Bank, resorting to military action when felt necessary)
-a "liberated" underclass (poor Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, and the poor of the Third World, fully integrated into the American-dominated "global free market," all slaving for their precious 2$ a day, "because after all, working in a sweatshop is better than not having a job at all")
-government and military as the largest employers (all the supposed "economic recovery" and "new jobs" Bush keeps boasting about has all been in the form of governmental and civilian contracts; already, the military now consumes a quarter of the US annual budget, and comprises something like an eighth of the American economy)
-a secret police (the post-Patriot Acts I and II FBI)
-an Orwellian atmosphere of permanent war (the Wars on Terrorism, Drugs and Crime).

We mustn't forget that the current elders of the Republican Party are the Cold Warriors of yesteryear, many of whom were involved or implicated in the Iran-Contra Affair. When one fights an opponent for as long as these fellows battled the USSR, it is inevitable that eventually the psychological, ethical and ideological differences between the two foes become blurred until they become just like their enemies.

Current Status as NSWAS Volunteer
I've postponed any decisions about leaving Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salaam until after November 3rd, the day after the Presidential Election in the US. Why? For three reasons: first, there are other opportunities emerging here within and around the village; second, I'm starting to get a new understanding of the village's project; and third, who is president on 12/3 may change the fate of all Americans, because that is the day Congress is set to vote on whether or not to impose an Israel-style universal draft in the United States.

1. In the last few weeks, as I've been deliberating with myself whether to stay or go, a number of villagers and individuals associated with the village have approached me about volunteering opportunities in and around NSWAS. The School for Peace would like me to help them write grant proposals to NGOs in English, and one facilitator from the school, who also works in the village's public relations office, needs me to help him write several letters in English. As I see it, this would be valuable work, much more so than sweeping streets. I've also been propositioned by several individuals from outside the village, in particular two men from a poor Israeli Arab village in the vicinity of Nazareth called Kufr Manda. The people of that village are attempting to, for lack of a better term, mondernize, and need English teachers, especially those for whom English is a first language.

Meanwhile, hotel labor isn't all that bad. Truth be told, it's actually fairly easy most of the time, and quite varied. One day I'll be repairing roofs, painting walls, changing pipes--physical work, for which I've discovered a strong passion in the last few months--and the next day I'll be cleaning bedrooms, and the day after that some gardening. Most of the time I'm on my own, just me, my work, and Shatiakh, the hotel dog (whose name is Hebrew for "carpet"). I have found that I prefer the solitude. It lets me reflect undisturbed. One result has been greater clarity in my vision of myself and my purpose. Another result is that I've developed the habit of always keeping a small notepad in my pocket, a perpetual To-Do list that also serves as a shorthand journal, whose pages or scribbles every night I insert into my actual journal.

Working in the hotel has not exhausted me or isolated me as I feared. I still have enough energy, albeit nowhere near as much as I need, to get some of my own personal work done, such as writing e-mails, this blog entry and articles, and sorting out my financial situation back in the US. Moreover, working at the hotel has actually helped me to meet people. A few weeks ago I hung out with some volunteers for the United Nations World Food Program. We ended up going to Modi'in (ugliest damn city in all the Middle East) and Jersualem, where they introduced me to an American mercenary, ahem, I mean "contractor," who is the Israel "area projects manager" for the infamous DynCorp. That was an interesting few hours, as I'm sure you can imagine. And then of course there was IFOR.

So, the point I'm trying to make is: wow, that's pretty good for just a few weeks working full-time at the hotel. Makes me wonder what's up next.

2. After long conversations with Voltaire, Ariela Friedman and Rayek Rizak, three of the village's first permanent residents, individuals I see as pioneers and true rebels, I've begun to understand this village, its nature, its purpose, its aims, in a very different light than when I enterred this place three months ago.

Over 25 years ago Bruno Hussar, a half-Jewish Dominican priest who spent his youth in Egypt, established an outpost of Israeli-Palestinian/Jewish-Christian-Muslim cooperation atop one of the highest peaks here, in the ancient al-Latrun region. His dream was to establish, amidst the ruins of Crusader castles, rusting husks of Israeli tanks, and the ghosts of Palestinian villages massacred and “evacuated” in the bloody wars of 1948 and 1967, a sacred “Oasis of Peace.” At first only he and a few international volunteers lived here, in tents and fragile wooden huts, with no infrastructure, stricken by mosquitos and exposure, challenged by Satan at every turn with disease, obscurity and hopelessness. Then in the early 1980s the first Israeli and Palestinian families began to settle, the School for Peace was established, and slowly something miraculous appeared: a miniature binational society. You see, in all of Israel-Palestine there are many mixed cities and towns, but none are so by choice: from Hebron to Haifa, wherever Jews and Arabs can be found living together--almost always unhappily--it is because the unholy forces of nationalism, fanaticism and armed conflict thrusted them together. Today 50 families, 25 Israeli and 25 Palestinian, all citizens of Israel, now live upon the hilltop, and soon 90 more families shall join the community. The wilderness has been conquered; the mosquitos are gone, and the terrain is resplendent with green; and despite the immense difficulties generated by the ongoing Intifada, existence here is otherwise very ordinary, marked by all the peaks and pitfalls of normal middle-class First World life. The villagers have developed a web of friendships, rivalries and private traditions based more upon the everyday frictions, fancies and feelings more common to small-town culture than the serpentine faultlines of the “Situation”--but because the vicious Conflict exists, a war in which two wounded peoples vie to carve up their shared land into two ethnocentric and ethnocrazed semi-states, it is this very mundaneness which makes Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salaam so revolutionary, so experimental.

So, what does it mean to be a volunteer here? When I came to this village, I conceived of volunteering strictly according to professional terms: the type of labor I was to perform, and that labor's impact on this village's continued existence. now I realize it is not only the type of labor--which is still important, but is for the villagers to decide how to use me; I can only suggest and hint as we go along--but also to have an open ear , to listen to their stories. Somewhere in the process there seems to be an interaction of some sort, and that interaction may potentially enlighten not only me, but the speaker as well, and hopefully, inshallah, this village, its dream, its quest.

As I write this, I think of a fellow activist, who served in Palestine a few months before I arrived. On her MySpace.com profile, she writes, I ran with the bulls with a Basque separatist during the Basque uprising who literally cried out for independence. I have listened to the quivering anger of those whose land has been taken only to be given back incomplete and in shambles. I have heard the terrified whispers of those silenced by Assad. I screamed at prison guards who were beating and spitting on refugees and asylum seekers in the heinous Woomera Detention Center. I sat with people who have forfeited their entire livelihood to sit in Canberra to protest for what they believe in. I had coffee with a man whose entire family was killed by Tamil Tigers next to the Sydney Harbor. I have been slapped for helping an old woman across a puddle at Kulundia. I have wiped the tears off of a little girls cheeck who was crying because the explosions were hurting her ears. I witnessed the death of a child as he was shot running away from and IDF soldier at Atarot. I saw a man stare down the barrel of a gun and shoot into a crowd of people who were chanting, 'FREE PALESTINE!' I have been captured because people thought that I wasn’t American, I have been let go because I was, and I have be exiled from a foreign country because my passport is a threat. But more importantly I have seen the human ressolve and the incredible ability for people to adapt and survive despite unimaginable circumstances. I have seen the beauty life has to offer. I have seen living history unfold and been witness to it all, and because of this I am addicted to the truth. I swear the truth is out there. I am not a revolutionary, but my experience comes with a certain amount of responsibility to help people find it. Those last few sentences are intrinsic to my Theonauting ideal, and if I can find what she found, and what others like her found--Rabbi Abraham Heschel, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Che Guevera, Muhammad the Last Prophet of Allah, Yeshua the Christ--it will make me a better writer, a better man... and I believe that maybe, just maybe, to continue volunteering at NSWAS will help me to achieve this.

That doesn't preclude other activist opportunities, of course. Even if I can't teach English at Kufr Manda, surely there are other important services I can provide for them. And of course there's nothing, save maybe deportation (heh heh), that can stop me from joining protests in the West Bank. I know that will make my parents' hair stand up on end, which leads me to the next item...

3. I believe that to be an American means to PUSH FRONTIERS, to CHALLENGE WHAT HAS BEEN--in oneself, in the world, in current thinking. If that means to step across the Green Line, to see what lies on the other side, then so be it, because I can only get more out of my life if I am willing to risk that life.

It is true that my having an American passport is not always a bulletproof vest, and it is true that my sympathy for both peoples is not insurance against the murderous pathology of an extremist from either side. In fact, NSWAS sits right in the center of farmlands the IDF uses for military excercises, and several times soldiers have come here in the night to hunt for Palestinians. They've busted down doors and threatened us with rifles. Moreover, I have already been harassed by the Shin Bet Khaf just because I supposedly resemble an Arab. I've been stopped and interrogated in public on Rehovot Yaffo, one of the main thoroughfares of West Jerusalem, three times now, and I have even been trailed by plainclothes intelligence officers--a terrifying, humiliating experience each time, one which I faced with resolve, letting them know with the steadiness of my voice and my gaze that they could not break me. What nearly broke me, though, was when a very personal letter I wrote to Chon was opened and read, possibly by either Israeli or American security services, and then sent to her ripped and mangled.

But what am I to do? Run and hide in America until Bush's FBI, which is becoming more and more Hooverian everyday comes and gets me? Don't kid yourself, everybody: the transvestite ghost of J. Edgar Hoover is haunting FBI headquarters. My friend the special agent is more and more worried about what he sees happening in the FBI. He knows the agency's history; he knows how far it has progressed, evolved, but how much farther it still needs to go, and just how quickly it could completely regress.

And if Bush wins the election, come the day after, on November 3rd, there may be nowhere for anyone my age to flee. Did you notice that as part of his closing statement during the first debate? He said, "The next four years we will continue to strengthen our homeland defenses. We will strengthen our intelligence-gathering services. We will reform our military. The military will be an all-volunteer army." Why did he feel the need to stress that the army would remain "all-volunteer"? Because a week later, at the second debate, a 20-something American man asked him about the possibility of a draft, which he vehemently denied. Americans my age are waking up and realizing that right now there is a bill on the floor of the House of Representatives called the Universal National Service Act of 2003. It was started by Black Democratic representative Charles Rangel from New York State as a way to embarass the Bush administration. The majority of our troops in Iraq are minorities from the inner cities; a draft would suck in the White suburbanites. You might recall that Rangel caused such a controversy Rumsfeld had to have a special press conference for it back during the first days of the invasion.

The controversy has persisted: the Bush campaign has a whole webpage devoted to refuting any talk of a draft, but just this past May and July two Republicans in the House have sponsored the bill even when many of its original sponsors have retracted their support. It is unclear how much support this bill actually has in the Congress, but if Bush can't even leash his own puppy dog agents in the House, and as the Republican Party slips further and further into complete ideological madness, there is no telling what might happen.

The bill is set to be voted on November 3rd, the day after the election. Why? Obviously because the Republicans want to see who is in office come January. If Bush wins, we may have an Israel-style universal draft in the US. What am I to do then? Run to Canada like Clinton did? On September 11th, I told my mother that I didn't care what happened, I will not fight and kill in any madman's war. At the time I did say I would go to Canada, as many American reservists are now doing to avoid the backdoor draft which is dragging all our armed services into Iraq. But now I feel the urge--if the universal draft does happen--to stand and fight, to refuse to have blood on my hands. (Lord knows, as a modern White American, there is already so much blood on my hands, just indirectly, because of our nation's lifestyle.) But that would mean I would yet again have to put myself into harm's way, but to keep myself and my loved ones and others from being put into harm's way. This is the reality of the 21st Century: there is no hiding, from yourself, from the world.

Whether you go the highest hilltop of Latrun, the lowest pit in the valleys of Palestine, or the sprawling plains of the American Northwest or Africa, oppression, servitude, slavery, and death pursue, a vulture, a virus, a power-hungry politician, with one leechy desire: to keep you and everyone you love and your entire world from achieving true, complete, existential liberty. So a revolution must be fought, and it can be fought by only two means: nonviolent noncooperative resistance, and by always staying on the offensive. How? By staying true to yourself, The Revolution must be fought but it must be gradual, and never by the sword. For me, my weapon of choice and fate is the pen. And even though the Night will be long, the Day is coming when we shall awake to the dawn of a new world. So I shall fight against the Ceasers, Pharoahs, Abu Jahls and Satans of human existence, and I shant never bow to any of them ever again. I will write what I will write. I will love who I shall love, how I should love. I will adventure as I must, think as I must, dream as I must, hope as I must. I will believe as only I can believe.

"If you are to survive, you must believe."
--from American Gods