[PAA-Discuss] Fw: Starhawk on Gaza

[carolekeene at juno.com]

Very well said.

carolekeene at juno.com
http://carolekeene.byregion.net
"Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail
you."-- Frank Lloyd Wright
"You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones
will teach you that which you can never learn from masters" - Saint
Bernard


kaisan at xplornet.com>
To: PNCPoliticalActivists at yahoogroups.com
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2008 18:08:38 -0400
Subject: [PNCPoliticalActivists] Starhawk on Gaza

This is quite touching.......


http://codepink4peace.org/blog/2008/12/thoughts-and-action-on-gaza-from-s
tarhawk/ 


All day I’ve been thinking about Gaza, listening to reports on NPR,
following the news on the internet when I can spare a moment.  I’ve been
thinking about the friends I made there four years ago, and wondering how
they are faring, and imagining their terror as the bombs fall on that
giant, open-air prison.
The Israeli ambassador speaks movingly of the terror felt by Israeli
children as Hamas rockets explode in the night.  I agree with him—that no
child should have her sleep menaced by rocket fire, or wake in the night
fearing death.
But I can’t help but remember one night on the Rafah border, sleeping in
a house close to the line, watching the children dive for cover as
bullets thudded into the walls. There was a shell-hole in the back room
they liked to jump through into the garden, which at that time still held
fruit trees and chickens.  Their mother fed me eggs, and their
grandmother stuffed oranges into my pockets with the shy pride every
gardener shares.
That house is gone, now, along with all of its neighbors.  Those children
wake in the night, every night of their lives, in terror.  I don’t know
if they have survived the hunger, the lack of medical supplies, the
bombs.  I only know that they are children, too.
I’ve ridden on buses in Israel.  I understand that gnawing fear, the
squirrely feeling in the pit or your stomach, how you eye your fellow
passengers wondering if any of them are too thick around the middle.
Could that portly fellow be wearing a suicide belt, or just too many late
night snacks of hummus?  That’s no way to live.
But I’ve also walked the pock-marked streets of Rafah, where every house
bears the scars of Israeli snipers, where tanks prowled the border every
night, where children played in the rubble, sometimes under fire, and
this was all four years ago, when things were much, much better there.
And I just don’t get it.  I mean, I get why suicide bombs and homemade
rockets that kill innocent civilians are wrong. I just don’t get why
bombs from F16s that kill far more innocent civilians are right.  Why a
kid from the ghetto who shoots a cop is a criminal, but a pilot who bombs
a police station from the air is a hero.
Is it a distance thing?  Does the air or the altitude confer a purifying
effect?  Or is it a matter of scale?  Individual murder is vile, but mass
murder, carried out by a state as an aspect of national policy, that’s a
fine and noble thing?
I don’t get how my own people can be doing this.  Or rather, I do get it.
 I am a Jew, by birth and upbringing, born six years after the Holocaust
ended, raised on the myth and hope of Israel.  The myth goes like this:
“For two thousand years we wandered in exile, homeless and persecuted,
nearly destroyed utterly by the Nazis.  But out of that suffering was
born one good thing—the homeland that we have come back to, our own land
at last, where we can be safe, and proud, and strong.”
That’s a powerful story, a moving story.  There’s only one problem with
it—it leaves the Palestinians out.  It has to leave them out, for if we
were to admit that the homeland belonged to another people, well, that
spoils the story.
The result is a kind of psychic blind spot where the Palestinians are
concerned.  If you are truly invested in Israel as the Jewish homeland,
the Jewish state, then you can’t let the Palestinians be real to you. 
It’s like you can’t really focus on them.  Golda Meir said, “The
Palestinians, who are they?  They don’t exist.”  We hear, “There is no
partner for peace,”  “There is no one to talk to.”
And so Israel, a modern state with high standards of hygiene, a state
rooted in a religion that requires washing your hands before you eat and
regular, ritual baths, builds settlements that don’t bother to construct
sewage treatment plants. They just dump raw sewage onto the Palestinian
fields across the fence, somewhat like a spaceship ejecting its wastes
into the void.  I am truly not making this up—I’ve seen it, smelled it,
and it’s a known though shameful fact.  But if the Palestinians aren’t
really real—who are they?  They don’t exist!—then the land they inhabit
becomes a kind of void in the psyche, and it isn’t really real, either. 
At times, in those border villages, walking the fencelines of
settlements, you feel like you have slipped into a science fiction movie,
where parallel universes exist in the same space, but in different
strands of reality, that never touch.
When I was on the West Bank, during Israeli incursions the Israeli
military would often take over a Palestinian house to billet their
soldiers.  Many times, they would simply lock the family who owned it
into one room, and keep them there, sometimes for hours, sometimes for
days—parents, grandparents, kids and all.  I’ve sat with a family,
singing to the children while soldiers trashed their house, and I’ve been
detained by a group of soldiers playing cards in the kitchen with a
family locked in the other room.  (I got out of that one—but that’s
another story.)
It’s a kind of uneasy feeling, having something locked away in a room in
your house that you can’t look at.  Ever caught a mouse in a glue trap? 
And you can’t bear to watch it suffer, so you leave the room and close
the door and don’t come back until it’s really, really dead.
Like a horrific fractal, the locked room repeats on different scales. 
The Israelis have built a wall to lock away the West Bank.  And Gaza
itself is one huge, locked room.  Close the borders, keep food and
medical supplies and necessities from getting through, and perhaps they
will just quietly fade out of existence and stop spoiling our story.
“All we want is a return to calm,” the Israeli ambassador says.  “All we
want is peace.”
One way to get peace is to exterminate what threatens you.  In fact, that
may be the prime directive of the last few thousand years.
But attempts to exterminate pests breed resistance, whether you’re
dealing with insects or bacteria or people.  The more insecticides you
pour on a field, the more pests you have to deal with—because
insecticides are always more potent at killing the beneficial bugs than
the pesky ones.
The harshness, the crackdowns, the border closings, the checkpoints, the
assassinations, the incursions, the building of settlements deep into
Palestinian territory, all the daily frustrations and humiliations of
occupation, have been breeding the conditions for Hamas, or something
like it, to thrive.  If Israel truly wants peace, there’s a more subtle,
a more intelligent and more effective strategy to pursue than simply
trying to kill the enemy and anyone else who happens to be in the
vicinity.
It’s this—instead of killing what threatens you, feed what you want to
grow.  Consider in what conditions peace can thrive, and create them,
just as you would prepare the bed for the crops you want to plant. Find
those among your opponents who also want peace, and support them.  Make
alliances.  Offer your enemies incentives to change, and reward your
friends.
Of course, to follow such a strategy, you must actually see and know your
enemy.  If they are nothing to you but cartoon characters of terrorists,
you will not be able to tell one from another, to discern the religious
fanatic from the guy muttering under his breath, “F-ing Hammas, they
closed the cinema again!”
And you must be willing to give something up.  No one gets peace if your
basic bargaining position is, “I get everything I want, and you eat my
shit.”  You might get a temporary victory, but it will never be a
peaceful one.
To know and see the enemy, you must let them into the story.  They must
become real to you, nuanced, distinctive as individuals.
But when we let the Palestinians into the story, it changes.  Oh, how
painfully it changes!  For there is no way to tell a new story, one that
includes both peoples of the land, without starting like this:
“In our yearning for a homeland, in our attempts as a threatened and
traumatized people to find safety and power, we have done a great wrong
to another people, and now we must atone.”
Just try saying it. If you, like me, were raised on that other story,
just try this one out.  Say it three times.  It hurts, yes, but it might
also bring a great, liberating sense of relief with it.
And if you’re not Jewish, if you’re American, if you’re white, if you’re
German, if you’re a thousand other things, really, if you’re a human
being, there’s probably some version of that story that is true for you.
Out of our own great need and fear and pain, we have often done great
harm, and we are called to atone.  To atone is to be at one—to stop
drawing a circle that includes our tribe and excludes the other, and
start drawing a larger circle that takes everyone in.
How do we atone? Open your eyes.  Look into the face of the enemy, and
see a human being, flawed, distinct, unique and precious.  Stop killing. 
Start talking. Compost the shit and the rot and feed the olive trees.
Act.  Cross the line.  There are Israelis who do it all the time, joining
with Palestinians on the West Bank to protest the wall, watching at
checkpoints, refusing to serve in the occupying army, standing for peace.
 Thousands have demonstrated this week in Tel Aviv.
There are Palestinians who advocate nonviolent resistance, who have
organized their villages to protest the wall, who face tear gas,
beatings, arrests, rubber bullets and real bullets to make their stand.
There are internationals who have put themselves on the line—like the
boatload of human rights activists, journalists and doctors on board the
Dignity, the ship from the Free Gaza movement that was rammed and fired
on by the Israeli navy yesterday as it attempted to reach Gaza with
humanitarian aid.
Maybe we can’t all do that. But we can all write a letter, make a phone
call, send an email. We can make the Palestinian people visible to us,
and to the world.  When we do so, we make a world that is safer for every
child.
__._,_.___  


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