November 5, 2003
My time here is growing increasingly more conflicted with each passing day. For starters, the isolation is really getting to me. I've read half the books I brought with me, already, and have managed to not sleep much at night, when I'm alone. Yesterday, I went to sleep at 7am, and slept straight through the day, not waking up until 5pm. No joke. I tried sleeping last night, but it just didn't happen. So, I locked myself in the bathroom, with the light on, and read all night, until we left for the checkpoint to monitor IDF behavior there.
During the day, I'm consistently tired... Tired in that way that makes your eyes burn, and your head feel like it's on fire. And on top of that, my body was none too excited, upon arriving in Qalqylia, to discover that the toilet in our apartment was little more than a hole in the floor. It took several days for me to actually shit, and by that time, my digestive system was in rather painful knots, and I wound up purging everything in it in a most unpleasant manner. The days are long, given that there is little real work for us to do here, and it only makes this all feel more useless and pointless.
This isn't helped any by the Palestinian Authority. In the last two days, we've had two meetings with the NGO coordinator for the PA, regarding Sunday's international day of action against the apartheid wall. The first meeting accomplished nothing -- absolutely nothing. He hemmed and hawed about shit everyone in the room was perfectly familiar with, and treated our presence as if it were little more than a cultural exchange. The two older women in our group ate it up, too, which did little to steer things in a productive direction. Last night's meeting with him, while accomplishing something marginally more (it took four hours to hammer out what should've taken five minutes), really illuminated for me what seems to be going on, here.
Basically, so far as I can tell, the PA here in Qalqylia is holding out for a political resolution of the conflict, in the hope that whatever Israel agrees to will confer some sort of status to the PA and its membership. So, all decisions about the territories that are not made by Israel, are concentrated within PA agencies. So, for instance, with the day against the wall just a few days away, we have nothing organized, and cannot go directly to any community groups in Qalqylia to hear from them what they'd like to see happen, having instead to rely on this coordinator fella who seems utterly disinterested in anything grassroots, despite his obvious attempts to humor and co-opt such tendencies in the city. During our meeting last night, he (congenially) fought tooth and nail to liquidate the proposed demonstration of anything remotely substantive. He went so far as to try to tell us that marching to the wall was a bad idea, despite that the whole day of actions is anchored around it. He wanted us to march from one random spot in the city, to another equally random spot, and discouraged us from proposing anything non-traditional or creative (i.e. anything but the usual banners, marching, etc.).
Of course, I'm not saying this to dismiss legitimate objections based on the local culture, etc. -- but the truth is, given that this is supposed to be a coalition event, it seemed disingenuous and odd to me that this guy would speak with such finality about it, when he had thus far failed to sit us down with any of the local NGO's, as he'd promised. The whole thing was fucked, from top to bottom. The PA seems to want to trot the ISM out to its constituency as some sort of cultural exchange regiment, while utterly de-fanging grassroots resistance to the occupation, and encouraging the local population to adapt to the wall, and all that comes with it.
Worse still, at least one of the local (Palestinian) ISM coordinators is a passionate apologist for this bullshit, and when I queried him about it, he had not one reasonable argument for it, and tried to frame the discussion as if concentrating this much power in one person was the only way things could possibly be done, and as if it did nothing to betray the democratic objectives of resistance to the occupation. Naturally, this explains why the ISM has little work in Qalqylia -- we're a show piece that is tolerated and congratulated for how "brave" and "selfless" we are, but we're subtly kept on a short leash, while the PA enables the inevitable suffocation of this city, in the hope that they can negotiate some concession of power from Israel before the shit really hits the fan.
News flash: Even Israeli human rights groups are estimating that Palestinian society as a whole has maybe a year left, unless something really dramatic takes place; which says nothing as to the prospects of a city entirely enclosed by a wall, with no freedom of mobility, etc. By encouraging the population to adapt to the wall, the PA isn't encouraging a survival strategy, because the prospects of survival under the current arrangement are more or less nil. If you've studied the Bolshevik compromise of the Russian Revolution, or of Stalin's betrayal of the Spanish Revolution... You can more or less guess what the dynamic here is. It's not very far off the mark, and involves all the classic contradictions. Not shocking that when several Swedish and American ISM coordinators were discussing the December "recess" that the ISM is taking, to regroup and strategize -- and the subsequent suggestion (on the part of some of its founders) that budgets for cell phones, rent stipends, etc. be suspended during that period -- one of our local coordinators (who is an AP photographer -- much better off than your average Qalqylia resident) blurted out "Fuck them both!!!". Sound familiar?
It's not clear how much longer I'll be here, once the Nov. 9th action goes down. After losing a 50 sheckle bill to a phone card machine, and getting ripped off more than once by Israeli cab drivers, I've lost about a week's living expenses, here, and will not be able to afford to stay through my scheduled return, without revisiting my financial arrangement for all of this. There won't be much for me to do here in Qalqylia, and the ISM media office is quite a ways south of here -- and south of Tel Aviv -- which would mean incurring considerable travel expenses just to have something meaningful to do/contribute. Furthermore, I think the situation on the ground here has deteriorated such that it undermines the potential for ISM work as it currently exists. The ISM needs time to regroup, and examine the situation so as to develop a viable strategy for activists on the ground, in relation to the material conditions here in Palestine, amidst recent developments. Staying here beyond the action on the 9th seems, more and more, like an exercise in further spinning the gears.
We'll see, I guess.
During the day, I'm consistently tired... Tired in that way that makes your eyes burn, and your head feel like it's on fire. And on top of that, my body was none too excited, upon arriving in Qalqylia, to discover that the toilet in our apartment was little more than a hole in the floor. It took several days for me to actually shit, and by that time, my digestive system was in rather painful knots, and I wound up purging everything in it in a most unpleasant manner. The days are long, given that there is little real work for us to do here, and it only makes this all feel more useless and pointless.
This isn't helped any by the Palestinian Authority. In the last two days, we've had two meetings with the NGO coordinator for the PA, regarding Sunday's international day of action against the apartheid wall. The first meeting accomplished nothing -- absolutely nothing. He hemmed and hawed about shit everyone in the room was perfectly familiar with, and treated our presence as if it were little more than a cultural exchange. The two older women in our group ate it up, too, which did little to steer things in a productive direction. Last night's meeting with him, while accomplishing something marginally more (it took four hours to hammer out what should've taken five minutes), really illuminated for me what seems to be going on, here.
Basically, so far as I can tell, the PA here in Qalqylia is holding out for a political resolution of the conflict, in the hope that whatever Israel agrees to will confer some sort of status to the PA and its membership. So, all decisions about the territories that are not made by Israel, are concentrated within PA agencies. So, for instance, with the day against the wall just a few days away, we have nothing organized, and cannot go directly to any community groups in Qalqylia to hear from them what they'd like to see happen, having instead to rely on this coordinator fella who seems utterly disinterested in anything grassroots, despite his obvious attempts to humor and co-opt such tendencies in the city. During our meeting last night, he (congenially) fought tooth and nail to liquidate the proposed demonstration of anything remotely substantive. He went so far as to try to tell us that marching to the wall was a bad idea, despite that the whole day of actions is anchored around it. He wanted us to march from one random spot in the city, to another equally random spot, and discouraged us from proposing anything non-traditional or creative (i.e. anything but the usual banners, marching, etc.).
Of course, I'm not saying this to dismiss legitimate objections based on the local culture, etc. -- but the truth is, given that this is supposed to be a coalition event, it seemed disingenuous and odd to me that this guy would speak with such finality about it, when he had thus far failed to sit us down with any of the local NGO's, as he'd promised. The whole thing was fucked, from top to bottom. The PA seems to want to trot the ISM out to its constituency as some sort of cultural exchange regiment, while utterly de-fanging grassroots resistance to the occupation, and encouraging the local population to adapt to the wall, and all that comes with it.
Worse still, at least one of the local (Palestinian) ISM coordinators is a passionate apologist for this bullshit, and when I queried him about it, he had not one reasonable argument for it, and tried to frame the discussion as if concentrating this much power in one person was the only way things could possibly be done, and as if it did nothing to betray the democratic objectives of resistance to the occupation. Naturally, this explains why the ISM has little work in Qalqylia -- we're a show piece that is tolerated and congratulated for how "brave" and "selfless" we are, but we're subtly kept on a short leash, while the PA enables the inevitable suffocation of this city, in the hope that they can negotiate some concession of power from Israel before the shit really hits the fan.
News flash: Even Israeli human rights groups are estimating that Palestinian society as a whole has maybe a year left, unless something really dramatic takes place; which says nothing as to the prospects of a city entirely enclosed by a wall, with no freedom of mobility, etc. By encouraging the population to adapt to the wall, the PA isn't encouraging a survival strategy, because the prospects of survival under the current arrangement are more or less nil. If you've studied the Bolshevik compromise of the Russian Revolution, or of Stalin's betrayal of the Spanish Revolution... You can more or less guess what the dynamic here is. It's not very far off the mark, and involves all the classic contradictions. Not shocking that when several Swedish and American ISM coordinators were discussing the December "recess" that the ISM is taking, to regroup and strategize -- and the subsequent suggestion (on the part of some of its founders) that budgets for cell phones, rent stipends, etc. be suspended during that period -- one of our local coordinators (who is an AP photographer -- much better off than your average Qalqylia resident) blurted out "Fuck them both!!!". Sound familiar?
It's not clear how much longer I'll be here, once the Nov. 9th action goes down. After losing a 50 sheckle bill to a phone card machine, and getting ripped off more than once by Israeli cab drivers, I've lost about a week's living expenses, here, and will not be able to afford to stay through my scheduled return, without revisiting my financial arrangement for all of this. There won't be much for me to do here in Qalqylia, and the ISM media office is quite a ways south of here -- and south of Tel Aviv -- which would mean incurring considerable travel expenses just to have something meaningful to do/contribute. Furthermore, I think the situation on the ground here has deteriorated such that it undermines the potential for ISM work as it currently exists. The ISM needs time to regroup, and examine the situation so as to develop a viable strategy for activists on the ground, in relation to the material conditions here in Palestine, amidst recent developments. Staying here beyond the action on the 9th seems, more and more, like an exercise in further spinning the gears.
We'll see, I guess.
posted by Joshua | 9:20 PM
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