I always feel a tiny bit self-indulgent when I get on about politics when really, this blog is about writing, but then I think: the best books are the ones where you can just feel the author’s passion flowing from her brain, through her fingers, the keyboard, and finally, reaching right into your own heart.

Passion is the raw material from which you can hope to mold a novel you can feel proud of, one that some people (and this is key… if you’ve managed to please everyone, it;s because you stayed in that vanilla-like place in the middle) will feel passionate about in return. I read a new review of Fashionable Late today where the reviewer alludes to my very obvious love for Cuba. That line tells me that whatever the flaws of the book, that primary fire that got me to dive into that book came across.

In the spirit of passionate blogging, I’m going to post the letter I wrote in response to an infuratiang press release I recieved from a representative of theLiberals, Canada’s current opposition party, in relation to the mess in Gaza.

It’s one of those statements that, in its efforts to remain perfectly dispassionate, ends up saying nothing at all. I would seriously rather hear someone say that Palestinians should be wiped off the face of the planet rather than the meaningless drivel that landed in my inbox today.

Here’s the PR statement, followed by my response.

I know, I know, no one will read it, no one cares to read it, and I just totaly wasted half an hour of my life that might have been better spent on a treadmill working off the post-holiday pooch, but if there’s a bat’s chance out of hell that it does get read - even if it gets tossed - then it was the least I could do.

Dear Concerned Citizen,

Thank you for your letter concerning the conflict in Gaza. Your humanitarian concerns are shared by all Canadians.

We join in the calls for a genuine and deeply shared ceasefire. This means an end to the Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli civilians as well as an end to the air and land attack in Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces and an immediate response to the humanitarian crisis in the region. The position of the Liberal Party reflects long standing commitments of our party and country to peace, stability, justice and human rights the Middle East

I attach below the official statement of our Party`s leader, one that reflects the spirit and position of the Liberal Party of Canada.

As always, thank you for your concerns.
Sincerely,
Hon Bob Rae
MP Toronto Centre

“I am greatly concerned by the deepening violence in Israel and the Gaza Strip and the fear and suffering on all sides that this mounting instability has caused.

The Liberal Party of Canada unequivocally condemns the rocket attacks launched by Hamas against Israeli civilians and calls for an immediate end to these attacks. We affirm Israel’s right to defend itself against such attacks, and also its right to exist in peace and security.

We regret the loss of life sustained on all sides of the conflict. We call on all parties to end these hostilities, mindful that a durable ceasefire will be necessary to prevent continued civilian casualties and lasting damage to essential civilian infrastructure.

The international community has a responsibility to ensure that the cost of conflict is not borne by the innocent and Canada must stand ready to assist and ensure that basic humanitarian assistance reaches those who need it.

Our thoughts are with those in Israel and the Gaza Strip whose lives are imperiled by the cycle of violence in the region. In the midst of this crisis, we continue to stand for a peaceful resolution. We firmly believe that the basis of this peace will be the mutual recognition by both Israelis and Palestinians of two states, living side by side in peace and security, with a full resolution of the issue of refugees and settlements, as well as secure and internationally recognized borders and boundaries.”

Enlightening, isn’t it?

This was my response:

Dear Mr. Rae,

I am 30 years old, and I am quite sure that you sir, are close to twice my age.

I raise this point because I would like to remind you that when you were my age, you had inherited a world where the rights of aggrieved non-white, non-male populations had finally been brought to the forefront of public discourse and addressed with some justice. It was a world populated with an informed, politicized citizenry, that held its leaders’ feet to the fire when those leaders did not heed the will of those people who elected them, whether those people were female, male, African, European, Latin American, or Asian.

Now that you have reflected on the world which you inherited, please take a moment to reflect on the world that you will bequeath to me.

It is a world where we are asked to weigh the loss of nearly 800 over 1,000 civilians in an illegal, internationally condemned assault, as equal to the loss of 2013 people .

If every life is precious, then the Palestinians of Gaza have suffered with 780  987 more lives in the past twelve days than the citizens of Israel’s border towns. In the past 18 months, Gazans have also had to suffer the slow torture of having their inflow of food and medicine drastically reduced, as well as their access to emergency care and basic electricity, where the children of Israel went to bed every night with their stomachs full and their homes heated. For some reason, you have not weighed this bit of suffering in your equation.

This is very similar to the path Iraqi civilians were on before the ill-fated US invasion - a decade-long, punishing embargo which left an estimated 500,000 dead children in its wake, followed by a crushing military assault.

Our neighbor to the south has now elected a president who ran on a platform to end the bloodletting in Iraq - of both Iraqi civilians and American soldiers.

US polls have also indicated that while the US congress bleats sheepishly those same tired lines you have just delivered in your letter, the American population is beginning to see Israel’s aggression for what it is - a lop-sided assault on citizens where nearly 40 Palestinians must die to avenge one Israeli death. In your government’s efforts to show yourself as impartial and fair, you have shown only, to quote Mr. Zbigniew Brzezinski in a now infamous interview, that you have but the most stunningly superficial understanding of the situation. Please do not assume that your constituency shares the same superficial level of understanding, nor that they will tolerate wilful ignorance from their elected officials. The tide is slowly turning, and fair-minded people would like it to turn fast enough to spare whatever lives can be spared when this carnage finally meets its inevitable end.

Sir, a man of your age and station, and moreover, a person who had once inherited a slightly more just, more thoughtful world, should have the decency to leave such a world behind for me.

If you want to read a proper article by someone who actually has something substantial to say and not some Sarah Palin-esque, cotton candy word concoction that means absolutely nothing, here’s one of the most popular articles in this weekend’s London Independent, which is one of the most well-read and respected newspapers in the world.

It’s taken the NT Times over 700 Palestinian dead and some 2,000 injured before presenting an alternative to the official Israeli line on the current Gaza massacre.

It’s clear, unequivocal, and analytical in tone, as opposed to emotional, which is the only tone Western media outlets will deign to hear the brown masses speak in, because for some reason, it’s okay to be hysterically emotional when 3,000 Americans die in a cold-blooded act of paramilitary cruelty (and expect the world to join in your hysteria as well), but it’s, like, totally uncool to show emotion when 700 brown people, er, Palestinians, die in a cold-blooded act of military cruelty.

It’s a great piece from beginning to end, but it’s the last line, a 2002 quote from an Israeli Defense Forces chief that really brings it home:

“The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”

There are two separate, defining moments in my life as a Palestinian that this quote reminds me of.

Back in college I wrote a paper for a political science class about the 1980s Intifada (the Arabic word for ‘uprising’ which has come to represent the mass protests - mostly peaceful - of Palestinians against the occupation of their territories. The first Intifada ended with the 1993 peace accords, and the second Intifada, this one not so peaceful, began in 2000 when the peace accords gasped their last breath.)

I read a lot of books and quoted a lot of “experts” and threw in a bunch of stats, and when I showed the end result to my dad, I expected nothing less than to be showered with fatherly pride. Instead he told me that I’d missed the whole point.

The Intifada didn’t happen just because Israel had diverted fresh water sources for its own use and away from the Palestinians, or because Palestinians had being slowly bullied off the land for decades, or humiliated at checkpoints. The Intifada was the spontaneous, grassroots response by everyday Palestinians to an attempt by Israeli state policy to slowly eat away at their will to exist as a nation.

Somehow every book I’d read on the subject had missed that subtle but crucial point.

The second moment was a defining one only in retrospect - at the time it was just an innocuous afternoon of English Lit class spent sitting for a quiz about an innocuous story, or so I thought when I was reading it. I can’t even remember what it was called, or the name of the author. It might have been a famous story, but I couldn’t tell you. All I can remember is that it was a particularly grim but otherwise totally forgettable Holocaust story with forgettable characters. There was no heroic comedy, as in Roberto Begnini’s “Life Is Beautiful”, no love story, no kid hiding in an attic, heroically scribbling away her thoughts while everything around her crumbled.

When our teacher collected the quiz back from up and quickly scanned the results, he declared, unsurprisingly, that no one had gotten the last question right - the one that asked what the whole point of the story was.

The point, my friends, turned out to be about this: the human right to weakness.

When we’re programmed to glorify firefighters who dash into smoking buildings to rescue babies, soldiers who willingly sacrifice themselves for the good of humanity, it’s easy to forget that in reality, we as a species aren’t wired for heroics although we’d like to think we are. We’re actually quite mediocre, designed to watch out for ourselves and our own, that most of us will give our grandmothers away under torture, and if we think we can’t win a fight, we will simply run away. When we act contrary to our survival instincts, it’s because something else, a belief in something bigger than ourselves has kicked in, and it’s a lot harder to tap into this reserve of heroism than Hollywood would have you believe.

The great irony of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an irony that few books or experts or pundits will tell you about, one that is incredibly subtle but absolutely crucial, is that both sides have been poisoned by the need to rewrite history.

No child of Holocaust survivors relishes the fact that Jews as a group were so weak, so vulnerable to the whims of fanatics and world powers, that 6 million of them perished at the hands of just one such fanatic.

No child of Palestinian refugees can hide from the shame that her people fled their homeland in panic instead of standing their ground and dying, and in doing so, condemned her and generations after her (how many?) to perpetual statelessness, humiliation, and robbed her of any sense of national identity.

Jon Stewart aired a spoof of the Gaza conflict back when headlines were hijacked by news of Israel’s potential withdrawal from the strip, and the ensuing PR circus and protests. The skit showed a desolate slab of barren land, blowing sand, destruction, not much else. This was the joke: is this what you guys are fighting over? Seriously?

It would have been a good joke if a tiny, ugly strip of desert was all what was at stake, instead of the chance to rewrite history, and this time - just this once - come out on top.

An award-winning British poet immortalizes Gaza’s pain…

(pictured - Katyusha rockets, deadly yet almost beautiful)

Katyusha, Katyusha

by Sean O’Brien

Katyusha, Katyusha,
Arrow of fire:
Kingdom Come, is it
Below or above?
Choked in a tunnel
With morphine and bread,
Or charred in the wreck
Of an olive grove?
Katyusha, Katyusha,
Spear of desire,
Are there green pastures,
A brave desert rose,
Or must it be prison
With pillars of flame?
Katyusha, Katyusha,
A grave, or a rose?
Katyusha, Katyusha,
God only knows.

Back in 2000, fresh from my first ever trip to Cuba and desperate to reconnect with the happiness and wonder I found there, I took a salsa class. We were required to switch partners every so often and at one point I found myself dancing with a cute and chatty Mexican-Canadian.

And where was I from, he asked.

“I’m Palestinian” I ventured. You never know what kind of reaction you’re going to get with that, but he seemed like a nice guy, and warm, intelligent eyes. They coaxed an unsettling truth about me that’s the conversational equivalent of a screeching needle stabbing a party anthem to a halt.

To his credit, his response was quick, uncensored, and completely truthful. “It’s very tiring to keep hearing about the Middle East for all these years.”

I couldn’t agree more. It’s tiring. And emotionally draining, and just when your system adapts to the background noise of pain and misery and wretchedness, along comes a (literally) violent jolt that blows to smithereens all your efforts to box the conflict into a manageable spot at the back of your brain, next to humiliating memories from your teenage years and screw-ups from assorted first days on the job.

345 dead (and counting), 1400 thousand injured, and just in time for Christmas in Puerto Rico with mom, dad, and lil’sis.

Last time it was August 2006, smack-dab in the middle of a wonderful Euro-trip to catch up with Spanish cousins and a dear friend who’d married and moved to London. The score: 3000 dead Lebanese, countless injured, and I don’t know how many botched summer vacations and stranded relatives.

Sometimes I wish Israel would pick a less festive season, say, February, to put its war stratagems to the test, but then I wonder if this might not be the whole point all along.

It isn’t fair. I’m entitled to planning a vacation without worrying that I may be jinxing a few hundred Arabs into suffering an Israeli attack. You, dear readers, are also entitled to the upbeat posts, author profiles, and Cuba photos you came here for.

But here’s the rub. Caring is the price of decency. I care, therefore I deserve to exist, if you will.

What about Hamas’s rockets? What about the Israeli dead? (four, as of Tuesday morning) What about Hamas’s commitment to the destruction of Israel???

I get it. There’s only so much caring to go around in this world, and why should you waste any of it on these dusty, dirt-covered (when they’re not hiding behind unbecoming veils, that is), misogynistic Arabs?

Because usually, when we see a large amount of dead/injured people on one side of a conflict and hardly any dead/injured (in this case… one) on the other side, our gut instinct is to see the situation as lopsided and to connect the side with the high deaths/injuries with our sympathy.

But this is not happening here because we’ve been preconditioned to see the masses of Arabs not as individuals, but as hate-mongering machines, bent on the destruction of Israel. But saying that Palestinians - who democratically elected Hamas, a political party with a military wing, to negotiate on their behalf and are being punished for it - are committed to Israel’s destruction is like saying that white red state Republicans are committed to bringing back slavery.

“But Hamas don’t want peace! Retaliation is Israel’s only choice!”

If all you read are American newspapers, then you can’t be blamed for thinking so. The New York Times’s opinion makers, the Friedmans, Krugmans, Cohens and Dowds are silent today, and the lone “opinion” piece on the subject has this for a headline “Israel Reminds Foes it Has Teeth“.

Ridiculous and utterly heartless headline aside, (I’m pretty sure that Palestinians, who have been dying on a fairly regular basis over the last 60 years are aware of Israel’s ‘teeth’), the content was interesting: the jist is that Israel, after suffering unanticipated PR disaster and military mishaps at the hands of a well-organized, moderately armed Hezballah, has decided to pick a weaker target in order to prove it’s still running the ‘hood.

It’s like a schoolyard bully getting an unexpected kick in the shins from the scrawny kid and then turning around and smacking the malnourished one from the poor family to make himself feel better.

I know you’re tired. So am I. I’m especially tired of the cynicism. I cheered along with everyone else when Barack H. Obama was elected and turned down my cyn-o-meter to low, not wanting to become like my parents, completely dissociated from western politics because they’d been bitten one too many times with promises of change and the reality of business as usual. But here we are, on the verge of another year, another president, and yet everything remains the same for Palestinians.

I didn’t want to write this post. I want to go back to making fun of ex-hedge fund managers who are losing their third and fourth homes and who have to fly first class for the first time in years because they can’t afford the Learjet anymore. I want to get back to my book, and my travel articles, and I would have loved to spend that last day in Puerto Rico laughing carelessly with my mom and dad instead of huddling in front of the TV, watching Ehud Barak talk about changing the “rules of the game” as the running headlines at the bottom of the screen reported mounting casualties.

My sister has been singing the praises of that Oprah wunderhit, The Power of Now, over the weekend, so when I saw it at the airport yesterday, I flipped through the opening pages. There was something in there about people in the olden days not being ready for spiritual enlightenment. That Jesus, Buddha and Mohammad only had pieces of truths to offer but it wasn’t time yet to accept the full truth and to accept the burdens of enlightenment and true spirituality. The author then wonders if we’re any readier for enlightenment today than those people were back then.

I don’t know. What I do know though, is that “I’m tired” can’t be an excuse not to care, or to try and find out about why these things are happening. It’s never been easier to get information (maybe too much information, but at least it’s there).

I promise to get back to fun posts tomorrow, but until then, here’s hoping you’ll take some time to read up on this so you can put into perspective the events that will shape the political discourse to come over the next months, possibly years.

Links:

Greg Mitchell on the US Media’s complicity even as Israeli Media questions the attacks on Gaza (Huffington Post)

The True Story Behind this War(Johann Hari, the London Independent)

Robert Fisk (award-winning Middle East correspondent for the London Independent)

“Trying to ‘teach Hamas a lesson’ is Fundamentally Wrong” - Tom Segev, Ha’aretz (an Israeli Daily newspaper)

Israeli Strikes on Gaza: What are the Motives? (The Guardian)