Pretend Palestinians at Israel’s Party

First I would like to – seriously – extend my best wishes to the Israel of organizations like Peace Now and B’Tselem, and of Israelis like Meron Benvenisti, Uri Avnery, and Eran Riklis.  Peace Now (photo credit) requires no explanation of its work, but here’s a blurb for the others who represent an Israel that can be a good neighbor:

• B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
• Meron Benvenisti, whose West Bank Data Project documented the metastasizing settlements over decades
• Uri Avnery, formerly of the Irgun, now a peace activist
• Eran Riklis, director of “The Syrian Bride,” a film about the human cost of love across borders.

To these and other Israelis of similar sensibilities, happy 60th anniversary, and may your vision of Israel prevail.

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Now let’s play Pretend Palestinian ©, where you get to imagine what it’s like when your neighbor/occupier has a 60th birthday party all this month – but you’re not invited!

To make the “game” work, you have to put yourself in the role of resident of a semi-imaginary Washington DC surrounded by, and in some senses occupied by, a hostile Virginia and a domineering Maryland.  Where Washington’s Northwest quadrant – NW – is dotted with settlements of Virginians and Marylanders, a kind of “Area C” – the Oslo Accords term referring to that 60% of West Bank territory that is outside of Palestine Authority control.  In our “game,” it’s the place where non-Virginians or un-Marylanders are regularly evicted from their homes, to fend for themselves in SE.

You, as a resident of SE or NE Washington, have to use a slow two-lane road with traffic lights every 1,000 feet to visit your relatives in suburban Wheaton Maryland – but must make a detour via Baltimore.  The Beltway ring road, you see, is reserved for Maryland and Virginia citizens only, and allows them to bypass those parts of Washington that are run by the “DC Authority.”  The “DC Authority,” which has issued defiant “No Taxation Without Representation” vehicle registration plates, has no Senatorial representation, so its protests are largely ignored.

On the Fourth of July, picnicking Virginians and Marylanders gaze at fireworks on The Mall, but people in SE can only catch a distant glimpse of the “bombs bursting in air” above the Security Barrier that has been erected just east of Capitol Hill...

Okay, you can only go so far with the analogy, but you get the picture.

Palestine could have been celebrating its 60th anniversary this month along with its Israeli twin, but history got in the way.  To convey a sense of what was lost, BBC World TV has been broadcasting a poignant half hour documentary this week called “Jaffa Stories,” by Adam LeBor, author of “City of Oranges.”  Bittersweet, it shows Jewish and Arab residents of what was – and some hope might become again – a picturesque port city where peaceful coexistence ruled.  Jaffa might have remained a major Palestinian city, had the Arab residents not fled Irgun/Stern terrorism in 1948.  One Israeli Arab Jaffa resident on the BBC program hints that his father made the right decision by staying on when most of the family fled.  But that is a judgment only possible in retrospect.

To stay or to leave – that is again the question confronting Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in 2008.  Every day, they face humiliation and frustration that would have long ago overcome other less hardy peoples.  2008: Israel’s 60th anniversary, and the 41st anniversary of the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza (okay, Gaza is no longer “occupied,” it’s just under siege, and East Jerusalem and much surrounding West Bank land have been annexed into Israel).

Somehow, Palestinians struggle on, still striving for a few crumbs of land in the hope of constituting a rump state, a tiny remnant of what their fathers and grandfathers spurned in 1948.  By expanding settlements in the face of international opposition, by appropriating water resources vital to Palestinian existence, and by myriad daily bureaucratic “deaths of a thousand cuts” (and cutting down thousands of ancient olive trees), Israeli treatment of the people in its Occupied Territories is calculated to discourage and demoralize.  So as Israelis quaff their birthday champagne, here’s one for the persevering Palestinians.