Few Americans have any idea what is going on in the Palestinian mind

[Photo by Friends of Freedom and Justice in Bilin]

Americans live in a bubble. I live in one, too.

I spent Thursday with Jews mostly, talking about the issue. We talked about all the progress we are making changing the discourse. We spoke about how afraid the Zionists are of the new non-Zionists.

Then at 9:30 p.m. I met a Palestinian acquaintance who’s visiting New York. We got together in a park on the Lower East Side, and sat on a bench for a while in the dark.

He told me that no one he sees here knows anything about Palestine. No one knows about the weekly non-violent protests in Bi’lin. Yes, you write about it on this website, but none of his American friends has any idea.They know that Palestinians are terrorists. That image is still solid. It will take sophisticated, Max-Blumenthal-like media to change the image, but this has not happened yet in the American mind (and it is why he is being censored).

"I didn’t know you were so political," I said.

"I am completely political. I am just not an activist. I am political all day on the internet."

"How many Palestinians are political?"

"Almost all," he said. "They have no choice. Because they are miserable."

I said, "The Israelis are miserable too. That’s what I found out the one time I visited. They can only imagine war into the future. That is misery."

He smiled politely. "They have freedom. Israeli youths have the ability to imagine their future. To dream about going here or there, of innovating in life, of getting education and participating in the world. Palestinian youth has almost none of that."

Yes, my friend has a pretty good job. He’s from a "good" family. But even for him, it is difficult to travel, to get out.

He said, "I would rather have all or nothing. I don’t want crumbs. Right now we don’t have a real life. I would rather that they make that official, that they push all the Palestinians out of Palestine and we have to live in Bahrain or in other places, and have to make new lives. So it becomes the Jewish state. That would resolve things finally. Or–" and he ticked off his fingers– "the ‘67 borders, and full rights. The right of return, or a negotiation of that right. The right to our land. But you cannot give us bantustans and the PA attacking the Palestinians. It is no way to live."

I said, "What about the idea of two states on any terms and then you being a civil rights struggle for true democracy?"

"I think that is naive," he said. "You know, the sad thing I see is that Palestinian society is being destroyed. It is falling apart. I notice, just in the last 15 years, the ways that people are giving up. Some of them have turned completely off. All they think about is some way to make money. There is despair."

"The Israelis said they wanted to create in the Palestinian mind the belief that you are a defeated people," I put in.

He stood up. His cousin had come to meet us. She’s also Palestinian. She lives in New York. We went to a bar and the cousins got white wine and I got a beer.

I said that Gaza had changed something in the U.S. The cousin agreed. She has seen it. But my friend said, "Don’t make Gaza the emphasis. There has been so much before. It has happened again and again. Before Gaza there was Lebanon, twice. There was Jenin. There were the targeted assassinations. Gaza is merely repetition."

He went on, "I remember when they first shot missiles into houses in Palestine. It was in the second intifadah. We thought that such a thing would never happen. Before they had used bulldozers. Now they shot a missile and destroyed a house and a family in an instant. I was abroad, at university. A friend told me, they had shot missiles from planes at Palestinians. I could not believe it."

His cousin said, "That was because of Oslo and the P.A. Before the Palestinian Authority, you never saw guns in the West Bank. You would not believe what they took from you when you came into the border. Pens, they took. Candy. Anything."

"They took my ruler with a calculator built into it," my friend said. "I was so proud to have it, and they confiscated it at the Allenby Bridge."

Well after Oslo you saw guns in Palestine, because the P.A. had guns. And it upped the ante.

I live in a bubble. I had spent the day with Jewish friends talking about how the issue was changing, and I have no idea what real Palestinian conditions are like. And here I am, getting the news in a hip East Village bar. And I must admit, I identify with educated, secular people; so it is educated Palestinians who have the greatest impact on my ideas. 

I said, "What about Obama?"

"Obama is good," the cousin said. "Obama offers hope. He might get Americans to care about what happens outside the US. But so far I don’t see much of a difference."

My friend and his cousin talked about what should happen. The cousin is for a non-racist Israeli state. "The world is much better without apartheid and Nazis. Think how it would be without a state that is built on the destruction of the rights of the Palestinian people.. I think  that is the moral challenge, though it is unpopular, it is the only hope." 

My friend chimed in. "Remember what Naomi Klein said in Ramallah. She said, ‘Why are we just talking about a settlement freeze? What about No Settlements? Why is the left containing itself? Why aren’t we talking about one democratic state?’"

I said it was American Jewish leadership and culture, which cannot give up its role, acquired in 1967-73, of enabling the Jewish state in anything it wants to do. In a word, the lobby. My friend said it was more than that, it was a general American belief in the evil of Arabs, born of 9/11. But his cousin seemed to agree with me. She sees little diversity in the New York discourse. She wonders what happens to Jews like me. Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions is huge in England, she said. English students took over universities after Gaza to demand change. Here if she went into a supermarket and put stickers on products that were made in Israel, they would sell out! We all laughed.

As it is, she goes into the supermarket and hides the things behind other things on the shelves.

I remembered a simple truth. The Palestinian condition always goes back to political powerlessness, the lack of a right of self-determination. They were promised a state 61 years ago, and since then Kosovo and Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan have gotten states, but they still don’t have one, and we will negotiate the terms forever, on false premises. Statelessness produces despair. I am reading Herzl’s amazing Diaries. They are filled with the despair of Jews denied political representation in central Europe. When Herzl saw the "liberal strongholds" of Vienna elect anti-Semitic city councilmen, he dared to step forward as the political leader of the Jews. And we rallied behind him because we sought honor and equity in the societies we lived in. 

The cousins paid for drinks. Without trotting out the cliches about Arab hospitality, it is a true fact. The whole time the cousin had smiled and nodded as we spoke, and saved me from her anger. She was so polite. I said good night and got a cab to Grand Central. I remembered what an anti-Zionist Jew had told me earlier in the day, about why an Israeli friend went every Saturday for 16 years to bring medical supplies into the West Bank. "Shame and rage."