OUTING NETANYAHU

Posted on December 29, 2016 by Patricia Z Smith

The only way to make sense of Netanyahu’s claim that UNSC Resolution #2334 is a declaration of war against Israel is if, in his mind, all of Palestine has belonged to Israel for 3000 years. By this reasoning the boundaries of nearly all nations on our planet would need to be redrawn.

. . .

Most often I write of love, acceptance, beauty, even soul. You may see that as the saccharine babble of an aged flower child, but I was not a flower child. I was a yuppie wife serving brunches of scrambled eggs decorated with truffles cut in the shapes of hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades.

Since this post runs counter to my norm, I want to establish my creds. In Sarajevo I talked down a crazed man with a gun threatening to kill me. In Kabul I uncovered my blonde hair and stepped out of a van to face an approaching phalanx of frightened U.S. soldiers with M16 assault rifles; it was the day after an assassination attempt on Karzai and they thought we were going to attack the embassy. Outside of Bethlehem I ran, with the help of a young colleague, through Israeli tear gas canisters exploding like Fourth of July fireworks behind, in front, and beside us without an iota of justification. At the Qalandia checkout at the edge of Ramallah I photographed Palestinian men behind a dumpster being shot at from the Israeli military towers.

I know there is evil in the world.

Now, let’s talk about Netanyahu.

In 2007 I was photographing a female member of Israel’s Knesset in a sunlit alcove off the hallway along the members’ offices. It was in line with the interviews, photographs, and biographies for the book “Sixty Years, Sixty Voices: Israeli and Palestinian Women” that I produced and edited.

The alcove was warm and quiet, and my subject was generous of spirit. With the camera still to my eye, I turned from her to the hallway behind her when I heard people walking rapidly towards us.

The impact of the smug arrogant face I saw through the closeup lens crashed against the back of my skull. My camera unmasked pomposity, mindless hatred, and a craving for power. It took a couple seconds for me to realize I was looking at Netanyahu.

I put my camera down, shaken, praying he would never again be Israel’s Prime Minister. He was re-elected in 2009.

You cannot understand the actions of Israel without understanding the depth of the wounds of Jews; and we who are not Jews cannot fully understand that depth, its tentacles, and how it begets itself through generations. We should not try to tell ourselves we understand.

Still, we who are not Jews can see what perhaps the majority of Israelis and many non-Israeli Jews cannot see of themselves.

My daughter, perhaps the sanest person I know, is Jewish. She chose the religion of her father. In her cells she viscerally “knows” annihilating catastrophe could happen at any moment. She maps our family and friends escape routes for the vampire invasion or the nuclear bomb. She gives gifts of radios that can be hand cranked to hear broadcasts when the grid goes down.

Over a decade ago, I was driven back to East Jerusalem from Ramallah by a Canadian diplomat. It was the first time I heard someone say aloud what I had come silently to believe – Israelis were enacting on the Palestinians what had been enacted on them, and they did not know it. The inclosing wall, confiscation of property, inability to travel, restriction of goods, night raids, mass imprisonments, dehumanization, destruction of homes and fields, and repeated killings, including of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.

I came to believe, further, that the majority of Jewish Israelis would not – could not — feel safe until they were able to do to the Palestinians (their “enemies”) what had been done to them. Only that amount of power would guarantee their safety. Faced with presumed alienation or survival, most Israelis would deny, and sadly or angrily justify, their actions. Further, the wall and laws against interactions with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza made the suffering invisible if they wished it to be so.

Netanyahu, voted in by the most fearful of the Israelis, has never brought integrity to a peace negotiation. He has been videotaped telling Israeli families he has no intention of following through on any agreements he made.

For him, it has always been about stalling international powers while reclaiming Palestine as the Biblical Judea and Samaria by building “facts on the ground” through settlements. The belief that an Omnipotent Landlord promised this land to the Jews has more reality than the history of the land over time. The lure – perhaps the safety of a promised “homeland” – of this belief cannot be overestimated. Knesset docents explain the Chagall mural of an Israel that includes Judea and Samaria as the present day reality. Fundamental US evangelicals gape in awe, not realizing they are looking at a contiguous map of the nations of Israel and Palestine.

Like most tyrants, Netanyahu has become more delusional with time – more paranoid, frightened, and frightening. He claims UN Security Council Resolution # 2334 is a declaration of war against Israel. What it does, in fact, is reaffirm that Israel’s establishment of settlements has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and is a major obstacle to two States living side-by-side in peace and security, within internationally recognized borders.

The only way to make sense of Netanyahu’s reasoning that the UN revolution is a declaration of war against Israel is if, in his mind as in the mural, all of Palestine has belonged to Israel for 3000 years. By this reasoning the boundaries of nearly all lands on our planet would need to be redrawn.

Truth is difficult to unthread through our mismatched versions of history, but we have learned – or have we? – that arrogant, delusional, narcissistic heads of states are dangerous. Is that something we learn only in retrospect? Are we learning it again?

A constant vigilant closeup lens is require, of Netanyahu and others.

Shoot first or never shoot?

Posted on October 17, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

For a brief period in the fall and winter of 1975 I simultaneously dated two men. One was David Hume Kennerly, the White House photographer for President Ford who received the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his photography in Vietnam and Cambodia. The other was Richard (“Flashlight”) Gordon, a member of a religious commune in New York state and former teacher at Smith College.

David was a little miffed. I don’t remember it being as much about my seeing another man as by the choice of Richard, a dropout with long hair, drawstring pants, and sandals. The Vietnam war was over by only a few months. David had been on the frontlines, he had photographed death.

Once he called me from San Francisco and said there had been an assassination attempt less than an hour before on President Ford. His gut had told him to demand that Ford go around the back of his waiting car, not the front – a move that surely saved the President’s life. The bullet skimmed by David, who credited his gut with saving his life then and in Vietnam.

“Ask that guy you see,” David said, “what he would do if people were running at him and shooting at him.”

Me: “Flashlight, what you do if people were running at you and shooting at you?”

Flashlight: “If I had a gun, I’d shoot them first.”

This issue of shoot first or not at all is a tricky one. Just because both the Pulitzer Prize winner and an imitation yogi agreed on shooting first did not mean to me that it was the best thing to do. (I had also started going to the commune, which centered around universal love. The mice were caught in humane traps and transported off grounds.)

Most significantly, death is permanent. I’m not making a case for no life after death. I am saying that when your body dies you no longer walk, talk, eat, feel, think, dream, kiss, hold hands, study, go to school, go to theater, feed your children, have children, dance, sing, raise a family, make love. You’re dead.

We tend to slide over this fact in regards to other people, especially when the number of dead gets large, especially when we kill by drones, especially after we decide to hate them, especially if they have killed people we like or identify with, especially if they believe things we don’t believe, especially if we are afraid of them, and especially if we think they want to kill us.

Yet we never lose sight of the fact that we personally don’t want to die. We are fully and always aware when it comes to ourselves that death means the end of being here.

So, is it all about clearing the way so we feel we won’t have to die, at least not soon? Some Israelis said of Gaza that it occasionally needs mowing. It’s not that Israelis are meaner than other people. It’s the position they are in that includes fear, historical beliefs and harsh realities, isolation, and having the power at hand to “mow.”

Circumstances, real and imagined, affect how people – individually and collectively – perceive. In turn, what people perceive affects what they are willing to do to others, including to kill them. Given a potent dose of the “right” circumstances many, maybe most, people lose empathy. They become empathetically illiterate.

Look at ISIS. They perceive – literally live in – a different reality than most of us do. Their beliefs, which are circumstances, seal them inside a “truth” that gives them a mission and radical zeal. They want power and territory to bring the world into line with their image of truth and they will kill for it. You and I may not buy into their vision but they are pretty intent about it. They believe their perceived reality.

We could also say that we in the US perceive people are coming at us, and our friends and other good people, with the intent to kill us. It seems real from here. What can we do except shoot before they get here or before the number of dead becomes even more astronomical? Hold that question.

Why two beheadings was a catalyst instead of more than 140,000 dead Syrians and 900,000 Syrian refugees and displaced people is another question. Well, we know why. The beheadings were two from the US home team. Our empathic literacy only spoke English.

In the midst of this violent catastrophe we forget that all people are people are people are people and killing means real people die.

Our major flaw as human animals is that we forget that each of us is potential and future and love and art and creation and compassion and beauty. We forget our existence is an incomprehensible miracle, and it ends.

Given the stakes, you would think we would put more thought and action into creating circumstances where people perceive their good as invested in the good of others, where we give each other what we all need so we become friends and family, so it becomes unthinkable to kill each other.

But once the horror is underway, . . . Well, I, too, would probably pick up the gun and shoot first if the option were between them and me. Certainly I would if it were between them and my family or friends. Now, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to save myself or family or friends if faced with murderous assault.

I know that in reality this is a moot point since I personally will never fight in a war and I will never own a gun, but if I am hypothetically willing to kill in some circumstances, how can I say my nation never can?

And I believe, faced with a choice between my death and that of a member of my family or a close friend, I would go on the sword. Hopefully this is never tested.

But it is tested endlessly around the world, isn’t it? Parents are constantly giving up their lives to save their children due to real and desperate circumstances. Average people do heroic things.

Can we average people do what is needed to prevent future wars and lessen the wars now around us?

Average people brought an end to the war in Vietnam even if it was late in the game. Such a futile stupid war.

Has there ever been a wise war? President Carter referred to war as sometimes a “necessary evil,” which raises the pertinent question of if wars can be prevented in advance by actions taken by you and me, average people.

Assuming the answer is “yes,” the most pertinent question is, are we willing to build communities across cultures, to minister to each other’s needs, and to become empathically literate in all languages?

It would take conscious evolution of our consciences, voluntary opening up, leaps of faith in ourselves and others, and going against our impulses to shut down and shut out. Many good people do peace-making work now. How do we build on their work to create a massive coalition of the willing? This is the question. What are the answers?

The question “shoot first or never shoot” must become obsolete, a relic of when we were more primitive. War photos of dead, wounded, and dying men, women, and children should only be seen in historical archives.

What I Learned on Facebook

Posted on August 19, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

Things I have learned on Facebook:

1) Some people have only one trick – ranting.

2) Cats can learn tricks.

3) Children can be blown into body parts.

4) Black cats and dogs are rescued less often than other cats and dogs.

5) You can usually tell by the first line if a poem is good or bad, and you can always tell by the second line, unless you’re the poet.

6) Conspiracy theorists are everywhere. I just know it.

7) Some people remain sane in the middle of unfathomable horrors, and can report what is happening with clarity and humanity, and we want desperately to let them know we hear them, we thank them, and we care incredibly deeply.

8) Avocados are nutritious and can be arranged decoratively.

9) All children, when whole, are beautiful, even in the middle of rubble, even when cut up by shrapnel, but not so much when they are starving.

10) Sea lions climb onto boats at sea to snuggle, whales breach to say “thank you” after being rescued from fishermen’s nets, baby bears climb ladders to get out of dumpsters, and deers love water sprinklers.

11) People are protesting around the world in support of Palestine, and the boycott and sanctions movement against Israel is expanding, even though it isn’t in the western papers.

12) No matter how fast the breaking news, someone on FB will let you know first, whether it’s an earthquake in Chile or the autopsy of a young black male shot by a policeman.

13) I have a cousin who seems to belong to the Tea Party.

14) Yazidis must not be well connected to the Internet because hardly anyone in the West knew they existed until they were in danger of extinction.

15) Political committees talk in capital letters, ex. BOEHNER WILL BE FLUMMOXED!!!!

16) Some birds are more beautiful than flowers.

17) Hamas and the Israeli Defense Force want you to see their fighters, uniforms, weapons, and logos. Like other political groups, they know how to find you.

18) Most open carry gun advocates would benefit by leaving their camouflage fatigues and/or black sleeveless tops at home with their guns.

19) Young black men are regularly killed by white cops and, thanks to smartphones, we get to see some of those murders. More on that to come. Stay alert FB friends.

20) We loved Robin Williams more than we realized.

21) Indians make the best short self-satire videos. (Hamas and the IDF could learn something there.)

22) Vacation photos of the sea all look alike.

23) We can mourn and laugh collectively, and support and inform each other, and discover we are mostly really good people, excepting for some trolls.

24) Trolls give you the opportunity to practice zen where your annoyance bandwidth intersects with your compassion bandwidth.

25) Some people give gifts – exquisite music, beautiful selfies, videos of people just being nice to each other, and quotes by MLK, Gandhi, and Williams. They give them especially in the middle of wreckage.

26) I love those people.

27) The crisis in Syria is so horrific few of us know what to say about it. Ditto South Sudan, Congo, Guinea, and more.

28) Relief is sometimes only an “unfriend” away.

29) You can “unfriend” people temporarily as a safety measure for friendship, like until after the killing stops in Palestine and Israel.

30) There are people like you – brilliant, sensitive, right – whom you’ve never met but that you can talk with every day, and you’re so damn grateful.

31) Animals form weird loving relationships: elephants with dogs, raccoons with cats, donkeys with sheep, geese with dogs, porpoises with cats, lions with humans.

32) People on FB form weird loving relationships too.

33) We all like to be “liked.”

Slaughter, beauty, art, and obligation

Posted on August 4, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

In the fall of 1950 I arrived to school upset and angry. My parents had not told me we were at war and had been for months. They had treated me like a child, not bothering to tell me the horrendous news of people killing each other. What could possibly be larger or worse than war? How dare they.

I went immediately to the cloakroom where I asked Rosie, Jerry, David, and Tony if they knew we were at war. They did not. I told them it was with Korea, around the world.

Jerry said, “I’m going to be a soldier and I’ll fight and I’ll kill all the bad men.” He was punching his fists in the air. At that moment I realized he was a little boy with no understanding of what war was, that he didn’t even understand what death was. Existential isolation first hit me in the cloakroom of the second grade.

This memory has returned as people kill each other and allow others to kill. We in the U.S. blithely supply weapons for the killing. Death tolls are rounded to the nearest hundred or thousand and the accounting cannot keep up with reality.

But I am not feeling existential isolation. I, like most of us, feel the suffering that permeates our existential commonality. We live together in a world of blood, screams, decimation, death by weapons, hubris, callousness, arrogant self-justification, death close up, death by remote control, convenient self-delusion, and men who fight wars as though they were video games.*

We look for ways to cope, to put slaughter into a context that gives a modicum of relief. We protest, we give money, we write legislators, and we bombard Facebook. We use activism as an antidote to despair.* (I receive more or less 30 posts, videos, photos from Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel each day.)

This onslaught has brought me to a rare place – writer’s block – something I have seldom if ever experienced. This is my sixth attempt to write in over a week. The block does not come from nothing to say, but from too much to say, and that many brilliant writers and analysts are saying it far better than I could.

So what is my part? I cannot bear not helping, but what have I uniquely to give? And if I have nothing uniquely to add, should I simply wait, breath, cry, and pray in the quiet breathing sort of way that I do? It seems impossible to write blogs that are simply amusing.

An answer of sorts has come – a work in progress certainly – that I have only the personal to give. This feels, in one way, like a travesty, an indulgence, an eating of a fruit tart on the edge of a room with body parts in the middle. Do we eat it looking to the floor, to the corner, or to the middle?

Do I exaggerate? No, it feels that strange.

Am I too in-your-face? Perhaps, but at least I am writing again.

And what grants this writing is that I know I am not alone in the agitated distress of those of us who are witnesses. Because we care, we, too, are injured. We hurt.

I have come to that among the things we can do – in addition to protesting, giving money, writing, and other forms of activism – is to remember, even latch onto, beauty and to fiercely participate in creations that transcend devastation.

To state: This is not a time to shop – an obscenity coming out of materialistic responses to slaughter – but a time to embrace, rediscover, and express our creative “better angels” in order to heal and strengthen ourselves and to hold possibility for those who suffer. This is not a time to whimper.

If humans are both savage and divine, we must “activate” our impulses to create harmony and embrace light. We must not be afraid of the startling and cleansing power of light (ours from inside and that that feels as though it comes from outside of ourselves), and we must not feel it is shallow of us to create art or go to a concert when our friends are being killed. Our job is remain conscious of the suffering of others as we tether that suffering to creations offered to us by others or from us to others.

This is a time to write poetry, to create songs, and to paint. This is a time to listen to poetry, to listen to music, to go to galleries. It is a time to make delicate meals, create labyrinths for your children, carry and distribute chocolates, look deeply into flowers, and to dance. These actions may lift us into tears or laughter, but they will help us heal and they will spread. This, in the hands of a master, produces Guernica. This, in the hands of the rest of us, is a power that can change the world.

My grandson told me that humans are the weirdest animals because we talk and we create things. He turned seven two days ago, he is the age Jerry was when he going to kill the bad men. He is smarter than Jerry was, but I do not want him to know people are killing other people. I, like my parents, like all parents, want to protect the children.

Ah, the children. Ah, the children.

We are savages and we allow savagery, but we are also the vessels that divinity has to work with to bring joy and peace.

An Israeli on my Facebook, one of numerous new “friends,” occasionally posts a photo of an Israeli being arrested for protesting against the destruction of Gaza, but more often he posts incongruent beauty – a curve of a violin, a song, the inlaid decoration of a harpsichord. I have come to understand why. Each posting is a candle of beauty that has been, beauty that is, and beauty that will be.

To “never forget” horror is one thing, but to “always remember” our divinity – our better angels – is imperative. It is the stuff of personal and global salvation. We must take it out of the realm of possibility and into the world of reality. We must create beauty, harmony, acknowledgment, love, and forgiveness that can be touched, felt, heard, and seen. We must remind ourselves and others that transcending is something people do. It came in our package. We weirdest of animals can re-create the world for the better.

________

* “men playing video games” and “activism as antidote” are credited to Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD, author, and Jungian analyst, who called during the writing of this post.

A Death That Knocks First

Posted on July 14, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

[Moments after I wrote this blog, I received word that Egypt was working to negotiate a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine. The first deadline for that ceasefire passed as of this morning, July 15. I am sharing this blog as originally written with the undying hope the violence will end. At this point the word to me is that Hamas is reluctant to agree without guarantees of the opening of the Rafah gate between Gaza and Egypt (which seals them off from the world) and the release of the more than 500 Palestinian men arrested in the past three weeks.]

. . .

God speaking, Isaiah 55:3 – Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live.

The third slaughter of Gazans in under five years is happening now. The total number killed in Operation Cast Lead – what the Arab world calls the Gaza Massacre – in the first days of 2009 was around 1400, the majority of them women and children. Thirteen Israelis were killed.

The number of Gazans killed between November 14-21, 2012 in Operation Pillar of Defense was 168, the majority of them women and children. Six Israelis were killed.

The last total I saw for the number of Gazans killed so far in Operation Protective Edge is more than 170 (plus another 1000+ injured), the majority of them women and children. Netanyahu says that with “this kind of enemy” Israel will take any means it needs to defend itself. So far no Israelis have been killed. If they do a ground assault, there will be Israelis killed. It is a guarantee. Everyone is crazy.

Thanks to Facebook I have seen things – body parts, emptied faces and skulls, spilling guts – that will never leave my mind. Ever. I do not regret it, I want to see it, but so far I have not reposted these realities of death as an explosion that tears your body into pieces on FB, and I will not here.

Seeing these things – the redness of blood, the same redness of everyone’s blood, flowing over the grey of concrete reduced to a powder that covers even the body that still bleeds – I am shocked to see my immediate world look the same as always. There are birds in my garden, photos of loved ones on my desk. I have a piano, it is intact and can be played.

People walk by, eat in restaurants, laugh. The world has become surreal, a stage of normalcy while on the other side of the scrim people kill each other. It is not just in Israel and Palestinian, it is many places, but this is the barbarism that has delivered itself to me in video after video at my door.

The IDF and Israeli citizens – the majority judging by what I see – say: “We warn Gazans where we will strike, we give a “knock” ahead of time with a warning shot. We are humane. Hamas is not humane, they don’t warn us where the missile will come” This is posted in varying ways as though it makes sense.

NOTE 1: the IDF only gives warning “knocks” sometimes, and when they do, it provides only a teeny window of time for everyone to evacuate that building before it is destroyed. A “knock” is a smaller, presumably non-lethal bomb launched to a rooftop. That is, the occupants hear of the impending destruction of their home, if not members of their family or themselves, a minute or two in advance.

In one video I saw the “knock” hit one building but the real-deal bomb landed next to that building where the people would have evacuated. Deliberate? I don’t think so. I think the IDF really thinks they are humanitarian by sending warning “knocks” – and pamphlets telling people to flee before the ground invasion. They even occasionally call residents in a building and tell them in Hebrew (huh?) that they have five minutes to flee. Of course, this method of protecting people is not fail safe. Extended families are being wiped off the map.

NOTE 2: Hamas cannot give warnings because they cannot pinpoint their missiles. Hamas launches missiles that go more or less willy-nilly, which along with the effectiveness of Israel’s anti-missile system, Iron Dome, is why to date not a single Hamas missile has killed an Israeli or seriously injured one. Iron Dome has been 90% or more effective, fortunately, in shooting down any missiles coming to populated areas inside Israel.

I am not saying Hamas operatives are, or are not, humane. I am furious that they used funds and time and energy and intent to obtain missiles instead of strengthening the infrastructure, health care, facilities, and education inside Gaza. I understand the boycott on materials, but they got missiles in. I understand the isolation, containment, limitations, and humiliation. Or maybe I don’t. No, of course, I cannot, I have no idea. But to use what little you have to bring in missiles is, as I see it, wrong-headed, even unconscionable.

I think the people launching missiles from Gaza would kill many Israelis if they could. Yet, I do not believe it is sufficient grounds to kill someone – and the innocents near them – on the theory that they would kill you if they could when, in fact, they cannot. There have to be more clever, not to mention more ethical, ways to disarm someone’s desire to kill you. Being a good neighbor for one.

The underlying fault line of the “right to protect yourself” argument is that, when you apply it equally to Palestinians as well as Israeli, the whole premise is exposed as absurd. It is an invitation to cyclical slaughter. It has no applicability towards peace. It shows no inclination towards the creativity, healing, and courage needed to achieve mutual beneficial peace. (It is, bottom line, why most women are better peace builders than the many men who believe bigger and harder is the answer to everything.)

NOTE 3: There are demonstrations against the assault in the UK, Belgium, Australia and elsewhere, and even inside Israel. Haven’t seen anything much in the US.

I have been inundated emotionally and psychologically. I have precious friends – Palestinian and Israeli – who are too close to danger, including Rula Salameh, whose article as a Palestinian mother living in East Jerusalem was in the New York Times last week.

I have read article after article documenting in detail the sequence that set off this opportunity for Netanyahu to continue to destroy the peace process (even Kerry placed the blame at his feet), to destroy a unity government that would have brought Hamas into a moderate coalition with Fatah and the West Bank, and to further weaken Gaza.

For one thing, the Israeli authorities knew within hours that the three kidnapped settlers were dead. They had a phone tape of the shooting and the boys’ blood was found in the kidnappers’ abandoned car. Yet for a week, even without telling the parents, they used the excuse that they were searching for the youth to arrest and imprison more than 500 Palestinian men, demolish and invade homes, have confrontations that led to several Palestinian being killed, and to stir up – unleash? – hatred against Palestinians. It didn’t take much.

Among the things I will never forget are the videos of young Israeli males in the streets of Jerusalem chanting “Death to Arabs” and stopping taxis looking for Palestinian drivers or passengers to beat up. My friend Rula told me by phone that she is scared. This is a woman who has maneuvered me in the West Bank, without bothering to comment, around IDF gun shooting and tear gas. She has a television program on which she sometimes calls Palestinian Authority ministers on camera to help out people in need immediately. She has nerves of steel and decades of experience.

Now she is scared. She lives with her parents and son in Beit Hanina in Arab East Jerusalem only two minutes from the home of the Palestinian boy who was kidnapped and burned to death. Her son is the same age. She told me Israelis are beating shopkeepers.

What can one say? How does one say it? If bombs don’t bring peace – they don’t – then can words?

This crisis has taken me to the Bible, a place I have not visited since I was in high school.

God speaking, Isaiah 55:11-

. . . so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

He’s speaking presumably to the Jews, and He states that He desires a place that will: bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater.

He – I’m ceding to the masculine just to be super-nice – says: Isaiah 55:9 –

As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Are we not to emulate God’s ways, to take the high road?

The hatred I am seeing on Facebook, from people on both sides, is essentially telling God to go to hell. There is a valiant minority – and oh the courage and oh the grief – that calls for an immediate ceasefire and for listening to each other, for tending, for examining one’s own culpability.

We must watch our words so that they are as free as possible of self-delusion, so that they recognize that we are equally human, and so that they have the intent of peace.

I don’t think a “knock” before you bomb people is Yahweh speaking. I don’t think Hamas launching missiles into Israel is Allah speaking.

If our words truly were emulating God, they would be for peace and caring and forgiving and getting our facts rights and not deluding ourselves about our favored status and not denying harm we have done.

Then God says, if you are good boys and girls: Isaiah 55:12 –

You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.

I read this as that to deliberately kill someone else is to deny the God you profess to worship.

And, yes, I know that both the Koran and the Torah can be interpreted from select verses to encourage you either to fight or to reach out in peace. Shouldn’t we choose the verses that bring good to the world – ourselves and others?

Does Gravity Have Weight? Or when will insanity stop?

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

My six-year-old grandson knows the important questions:

“Gramma Trisha, does gravity have weight?”

Me: “I’m not sure. Why don’t we look it up?”

“And if light has weight.”

Me: “Right, un-huh, that too.”

Well, I couldn’t decipher all of the Google entries and complex formulas re gravity having weight, but the consensus seems to be that gravity does not have weight. So that is what I told Ben with the caveat that we might find out in the future that it does have weight.

Also light does not have weight, except – oh, yeah, those photons when light is being particle and not wave – the ultimate morphing job. So it gets wobbly, but I told Ben that most people believe light does not have weight but maybe in the future we would find out that it does. I give the future free reign to surprise us all, hopefully for the good.

It’s not that I think that public opinion about gravity or light having weight is going to fluctuate like opinions about eating gluten or the efficacy of melatonin. It’s that I believe scientific inquiry will continue to advance in corners of civilization shielded from Creationism, Fundamentalism, war, violence, and other social ills. Little clusters of scientists – and other rational people open to change as new evidence comes in – will continue to explore all the aspects of being alive on our planet. The DNA thread with courage, the one that urges us to learn the truth based on repeatable evidence, will prevail through hard times.

Hard times such as when great factions of people are trying to set back the clock on women’s rights, deny climate change, violate the principles of separation of religion and state, carry assault weapons – omg! – into market places, help the rich get richer without caring for the poor, divert funds away from health care and education, and destroy Mother Earth on the assumption that she will just keep on giving to her spoiled children.

Ben reminded me of the important things: we will not fling out into the cosmos whether gravity has weight or not, and the sun will come up tomorrow whether light has weight or not. We have what we need to make love, give joy, and provide health and safety and justice for others on this planet.

Abrupt change right here:

I am in grieving about what is happening in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. I know that I am grieving more profoundly because I have friends there. It is personal.

The deaths in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and the Ukraine are larger, perhaps more horrendous, though Israel is announcing – perhaps has already begun – massive bombing attacks on Gaza and is talking about land forces.

[A moment ago, as I was doing a final check on this blog, reports came in that bombs have reached Jerusalem, missiles seemingly from Gaza. How horrendous this is going to become is beyond my desire to imagine or ability to face at this moment. It is not impossible that Gaza will be decimated. The below continues more or less as originally written.]

These attacks escalated from the actions of two hate-filled violent Palestinians that Hamas seems genuinely not to have known or to have been able to control. We now know that the Israeli authorities knew within hours that the three settler youth were most assuredly dead. They had the phone tape that included the gun shots and the songs of the monsters who killed them, celebrating their deaths. For a week they didn’t tell anyone, including the parents, while they (re)arrested more than 500 Palestinians, demolished homes, and managed in the process to kill at least 10 Palestinians. Gangs of Israelis – mostly young men by the videos I saw – took to the street chanting “Death to Arabs.”

This is the open warfare that I know the most about. It is more manageable and personal to me than Syria, Iraq, Egypt, the Ukraine. I know the territory and can wrap my head around this catastrophe. It just happens to be that way. I have no excuses, just lack of knowledge of the other horrors.

At the same time the US Stock Exchange is reaching new highs. Is this because we feel separated and insular from the fight, therefore safe? We are the island of stability? Or are we grateful that for once we aren’t sending troops anywhere? Let them all kill each other while we will eat cake? Or are investors just oblivious? [Later note: let’s see how the Exchange reacts to today’s suicidal insanity.]

I sold my stock in Caterpillar Inc. a month ago, before the Presbyterian Church divested from its stock holdings in companies like Caterpillar Inc that contribute to Israel’s containment and occupation of Palestinians. I can’t hold stock in a company that helps build nine-meter high concrete walls to hold a nation in and provides bulldozers to level people’s homes.

I don’t think Caterpillar Inc. noticed my sale, though I did send them a note about it. I also told them I would add the sale to my blog. Hence, here it is.

Returning to the light:

Maybe gravity and light have weight yet to be measured. Maybe they don’t.

But death and violence and racism and prejudice and hate do have weight. People fall when they die, when they are battered. So do morals of a culture, so do hopes and aspirations, so do opportunities, so do fragile psyches, so do the minds of children when they lose their parents. (I remember in Afghanistan. You could look into children’s eyes and see immediately who would rise and laugh again and who would be broken for the rest of their lives.)

Light may have weight, or it may not. But it can cleanse and heal and return us to sanity and give us hope and help us to forgive, and that is something of such value that it must have substance.

Whether that substance relates to something in our oh so real physical bodies and brains, or if it is the vapor of an elixir that comes from some great elsewhere doesn’t matter. I believe we can call light into our beings, and into our lives – and we must now. Now.

Each one of us for all of us. Because that’s how light works. It is not exclusive.

If you don’t share light and healing, it will leave you to the dark, which gives you and me only one viable option as I don’t think you like dark and injury anymore than I do.

How Can I Be Snarky When You’re Injured?

Posted on July 1, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

The answer to that is I can’t, even though you are a stranger to me, Linda C.

The original title to this blog was to have been Did You Just Say I Was “do pathic”?

The original first three paragraphs were to have been:

1) “Do pathic” = “so pathetic.” At least that’s how I read Linda’s post to me on Facebook. The sentence, lifted from two paragraphs of attack and sarcasm, is: You are really something I pity you you are do pathic you should be ashamed. June 25 at 5:30pm.

2) Facebook is well suited for snark, but no one had ever out and out blasted me there before so it felt like a christening. I had said something that left irrational people sputtering and unable to spell. I wonder if I would be so proud if her comments had merit.

3) Yes, I, too, can do snark. Who can’t? It’s much easier than thinking.

Then the report came in that the bodies of the three young Israeli settlers had been found. My original paragraphs no longer had a modicum of humor in them. I lay down my snark and surrender to our broken hearts.

The young men deserve their names to be told – Naftali Fraenkel, Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar. At my last count at least six Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) since the kidnapping. They equally deserve their names to be told but the news of their deaths is scattered and piecemeal. The number will rise if IDF bombing continues in Gaza. More than 540 Palestinians have been arrested to date, most held in prison without charges, which is common and legal under Israel law.

If you are on Facebook with me, you know I regularly share news from Israel and Palestine. You might also know that I was the editor, photographer, and – working with my Palestinian and Israeli liaisons – the primary interviewer for the book “Sixty Years, Sixty Voices: Israeli and Palestinian Women” printed in English, Arabic, and Hebrew (available on Amazon). I have also produced a dozen short videos with these and other women.

Between 2003 and 2010 I made 8 or 9 trips to the region of three weeks each, with time divided equally between Israel and the West Bank. I average five to twenty FB updates daily of “conditions on the ground” from Israelis and Palestinians.

[Photographs are coming in right now of the bombing of Gaza. Buildings exploding. The kidnapping and killing of the three Israelis were by two men apparently “rogue” to Hamas. Israeli policy is collective punishment.]

This is an area where I have knowledge – enough knowledge to recognize when someone is denying reality or is grossly misinformed. Enough knowledge to know when someone, even unconsciously, is the problem and not the solution. Enough knowledge to know who is the primary aggressor. Enough knowledge – and direct experience – to know that Netanyahu is arrogant and dangerous. Enough knowledge to know that historical wounds and incalculable fear can sink their claws onto reason and reality and bring them down.

Enough knowledge to know that the death of the three settlers will be used as proof that all Palestinians are dangerous and terrorists. Linda C said it clearly: Patricia Smith You missed the point lady you are actually saying that because no one was killed when terrorist from Gaza hit Sderot then it’s okay. Dont you realize that they want to kill as many Israelis as they can the fact that they miss doesn’t change anything it’s the fact that they are trying.

Of course I did not say that since no one was killed it was okay for missiles to be shot from Gaza to the southern Israel town of Sderot. It’s not okay. Missiles are never okay.

What I said, that prompted Linda to write in the first place, was: I’ve been at Sderot where . . . when I asked in deep sincerity how many people were killed the year before, silence fell, and then someone said,” well, a rocket went through someone’s kitchen ceiling.” Yes, a few people have been killed. Yes, there is fear. But for this over 1300 Gazans were killed in retaliation? June 25 at 4:38pm

Whether you could say that Linda C responded to my question about killing over 1300 (actually more it turned out) Gazans in 22 days at the beginning of 2009 in Operation Cast Iron is questionable. No Israeli, in fact no Jew, has ever responded when I give this reminder. Few have responded to my inquiries about the hundreds of deaths at the hands of the IDF since Cast Iron, about the expanding settlements, about night raids, about house demolishing, or about the more than 5000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

Silence is the prevailing response. The silence of good people, people who care, people who want peace. Silence. I cannot tell you how much I long for this acknowledgment, how much it hurts to have this wall of silence, a wall that I do not know how to interpret. Is it denial? It is emotional freezing caused by fear, or guilt, or scars? The most important question it seems: Is peace possible without ownership of pain caused?

In case I need to say it: I have had two Jewish husbands, my daughter converted, my grandchildren are Jewish. I am literally at home with Jewish warmth, humor, creativity, sense of family, and genius. That is WHY it particularly hurts. It is my family, and they have been deeply wounded – and now they are deeply wounding others.

Linda said: Patricia Smith let me tell you something until you’ve had to go an identify your child by a piece of her clothing because she and several other children were blown to bits by a Palestinian terrorist you have no idea of what real terror is. Believe all the propaganda lies you want because they will never change the fact that you are supporting terrorist until the day comes when they no longer need you as a mouth piece to spread their lies and hate you will realize what a fool you are. June 25 at 5:19pm

This is immense pain talking – the pain of a woman I do not know – and I have no response except I have been with both Israelis and Palestinians whose innocent children were killed by the “other” side. The deaths are exactly the same, the daily and unending grief is exactly the same. No child’s death takes precedence over another.

Snark is not the answer. Hopefully compassion may have a chance because otherwise fear will blind and defeat us all.

Spoiler Alert: Israeli and Palestinian Denials Exposed

Posted on April 15, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

[At the end of this blog is an exclusive interview with Dr. Mohammed Dajani that came in while I was writing. This is your incentive to read the entire blog.]

Two things have converged to overcome my resistance, as a social activist in recovery, to writing a political blog. Both relate to Palestine and Israel, the only conflict in which I am still informed by more than normal daily media. I receive five to ten FB videos, articles, and commentary each day in addition to “keeping up” through friends. It is enough to be thoroughly depressed.

I do not know, as I start, if what I will write will be measured or intemperate, if it will be calm or fed up. I learned early that Palestinians are occupied, unprotected, herded, and blamed. I learned this in a dozen plus trips to the area and as the editor-photographer-interviewer for the book “Sixty Years, Sixty Voices: Israeli and Palestinian Women,” available on Amazon.

Earlier, as the founder and head of the international non-profit organization Peace X Peace, I could not say my truth directly. We will discover together what I will say now.

Note: While this blog focuses on Big Lies and Denials of Israelis and Palestinians, the reader needs to remember that every culture has its lies, denials, and convenient rewriting of history. It is just that the conflicts in this region are alive and kicking – and if they can be overcome, they could be a model of immense value for getting beyond the misconceptions, unexamined stereotypes, and just plain slander the rest of us indulge in.

Thing One: having to do with the Holocaust

Dr. Mohammed Dajani, professor at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem, recently took 27 Palestinian students to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland. He returned home to what the media calls “sharp criticism.” The university issued a statement clarifying they had nothing to do with the trip, and friends advised him to take a leave of absence.

Point is: Some Palestinians do not want to fully acknowledge the Holocaust. It is not emotionally or politically expedient, and they believe it is at least partial fabrication. They say Dr. Dajani is participating in brainwashing Palestinian students.

Dr. Dajani is my friend. He is a gentle bear of a man, studious, a bit shy, has a collection of posters from classic American movies, and founded a moderate political movement called “Wasatia” to provide a voice for moderate Muslims. Wasatia provides a model for the majority of Palestinians who want an option other than an extremist Muslim political party on the one hand and secular political party on the other.

He once made a video named “Big Dream/Small Hope.” It started with the big dreams of both sides. A drawing showed the Palestinian dream of all Israelis leaving Israel on EL AL airlines. The next drawing showed the Israeli dream of all Palestinians leaving the West Bank across the desert on camels. He explained, when the laughter died down, that the big dreams weren’t going to come true for either side so we needed to look at realistic small hopes. Taking the students to Auschwitz was a realistic small, and amazingly big, act of courage. It was looking at truth.

Deeply criticized upon their return, Dr. Dajani said:

My response to all this tirade is that my duty as a teacher is to teach, to have my students explore the unexplored, to open new horizons for my students, to guide my students out of the cave of perceptions and misperceptions to see the facts and the reality on the ground, to break the walls of silence, to demolish the fences of taboos, to swim against the tide in search of truth… I do not regret for one second what I did. I will do it again if given the opportunity. I will not hide, I will not deny. I will not be silent. I will not remain a bystander even if the victims of the suffering I show empathy for are my perpetrators and my occupiers. The aim is not to get any one’s approval but to do the right thing.

How’s that for a statement against lies and convenient denials?

For me, this event has the added dimension that the trip was co-organized by a peace program of Friedrich Schiller University (FSU) in Jenin, Germany. My first connection with FSU was in 1991 when my then husband William Melton and I chose it to be the German university in the Melton International Education Foundation, the first social network to connect university students. It grew to include a university each in India, China, and Chile plus Dillard University in New Orleans. To experience this connection between Muhammed Dajani and FSU has a surreal quality about it as a circle uniting parts of my past.

Thing Two: having to do with Israeli massacres in 1948

Forget “A land without people for people without land.” It never was the truth. The state of Israel was created in 1948 on land where Palestinians had lived for thousands of years, generation after generation. It was the land of their ancestors, and their olive and lemon grove were family. (Other cultural groups had lived there also over the thousands of years but that is not key to this discussion. Also a minority of Jews had lived there, welcomed and peaceful neighbors, for hundreds of years, which could have been key to this discussion in a parallel universe where people found peaceful means to make changes.)

The first major massacre of Arab Palestinians by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was at Deir Yassin where 250 Arab villagers were slaughtered. It doesn’t take as much killing after something like that to have families flee mid-meal when they heard the IDF was only a mile or two from their village. It was a tactic for clearing the territory, and it worked.

Yet there was more killing. I have met old men, refugees, who were children when they saw it. This truth is denied by people – Jewish or not, Israeli or not – who are unable to accept it as something that came out of the Jewish culture. I experience it as a pattern of selective denial that continues with the occupation and enclosure of the West Bank, the ongoing building of illegal settlements, and the siege of Gaza. It is ugly to look at and examine – but how can it be changed if it cannot be acknowledged?

So when Theater J in Washington DC decided, under the directorship of Ari Roth, to perform “The Admission,” a play that examines a probable 1948 massacre of Palestinians in a small village, an ad hoc group set up to protect the image of Israel in arts launched a campaign to have funds withheld to the Jewish Community Center, which owns the building where Theater J is housed. Their argument was that the play was a lie written and propagated by self-hating Jews. The theater, playwright, and ultimately the JCC stood on the side of art having a right to examine and question.

The production appeared close to being cancelled entirely. Some funds were withheld, but a decision was made to “downgrade” the production to a “workshop” with no sets, no costumes, and a shorter run. What happened was, the funds were more than made up by supporters of Ari and Theater J, and the play was sold out every night, received extensive media coverage – and has been given an extended run in a space in another DC theater. I was involved as a supporter from the beginning.

SO WHAT WE HAVE IS: many Israelis and many Palestinians want to deny the essential truths of the other’s unspeakable injuries – and Israelis are fractured today between those who as least suspect what their government (and extremist settlers) are doing on the other side of the wall, and those who don’t know and don’t want to know. Denial is the name of the game in Israel.

JUST A COUPLE PERSONAL EXPERIENCES: I have been told by Israelis that Gazans should all be nuked because they were so violent (try that one on for size!). And I was once confronted as the key speaker in a public forum of women leaders in Jordan with “Excuse me but I need to do an intervention. Mrs. Melton, you are ignoring the fact that the Jews were behind the attack on the Twin Towers.” “What?” “Everyone knows that. And the Jews were warned not to show up for work there that day.” “It’s a lie.”

THIS EXCLUSIVE JUST IN FROM MOHAMMED DAJANI: my questions in italics

Would you make this trip again to Auschwitz?

Certainly I would do this again and for different sectors of society such as women, religious leaders, teachers, journalists, secondary school kids, etc. in order to disseminate the message to the different sectors of the Palestinian community that the Holocaust did take place, it was most evil, and showing respect for the memory of its victims and empathy with those who were the target is the right and moral thing to do.

Is the truth necessary?

The truth is necessary because it is an important part of life. There is an urge in each of us to search for truth and to seek truth. Maybe the search is elusive but it is necessary for our self esteem and self dignity. To know the truth is better than to remain ignorant. I am not for the quote, “Ignorance is bliss.” God in the Quran urges: {And say, O my Lord advance me in knowledge}. God also differentiates between people with knowledge and those who don’t have knowledge: {“God will exalt those who believe among you, and those who have been granted knowledge, to high ranks.”}

If Palestinians know about the Holocaust and if Israelis know and understand the facts of the occupation, including the 1948 Nakba, I believe that this knowledge would generate empathy, and in turn, empathy would advance the reconciliation process.

What is your standing at Al-Quds University now? What is your future?

I am Director of Libraries and Founding Director of the American Studies Center. As for my future, it is in the hands of God.

Are there people who are personally angry with you?

There are those who are full of anger and frustration among the Palestinians as a result of past and present sufferings and they are directing all their anger and frustration against me. How does it make me feel? It is making me feel like a psychiatrist and not a teacher. It hurts me but it does not matter to me since I know I am doing the right thing.

. . .

Dr. Dajani signed off with wishes for “Happy Holidays.” I extend those wishes and join you, surely, in wishing that all people lived by the best tenets of their religions. And that all of us had less fear of the ugly truths of our historic and current actions and more celebration of the search for truth, as shown by Theater J, Ari Roth, and Mohammed Dajani.

PARIS NOTES #5 – “The Hare with Amber Eyes” or Anti-Semitism in the Neighborhood

Posted on November 4, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

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It is not the first thing you see when standing across from 81 rue Monceau, but you see it soon enough – the two faces of the Theater of Life, the tragic and the happy, in stone, mid-way up the elegant 5-story façade. Look more closely and you’ll see that Happiness is younger, innocent perhaps, while Tragedy is older, watchful, wary.

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The house was the mansion of the Ephrussi family. Like the Rothschilds and other fabulously wealthy Jewish families, they had equally wealthy powerful brothers, cousins, uncles, and aunts, in Vienna and London from the end of the 1800’s up to World War II.

Rue Monceau was central to the neighborhood of the newly wealthy Parisian Jews. Well, newly wealthy in European capitals anyway. The Ephrussi were doing very well indeed in St. Petersburg and Odessa from where they had a virtual monopoly on Russian grain trade.

The Camondo family, in an even larger mansion at 63 rue Monceau, arrived massively rich as bankers from outside of Istanbul since the Ottoman Empire. Yesterday I visited this mansion, now the Musee Nissim de Camondo. (More below on that, with photos.)

And the Rothschilds had everything needed for the five sons to branch across Europe with funds from the patriarch Mayer, banker to the royal court of Free Frankfurt. The Ephrussi followed suit, establishing their own banks. Each family collected art. Charles Ephrussi, the youngest son of Leon, the first Ephrussi to come to Paris (1871), was exempt from working in banking or anywhere else that made money. It was always clear he was the arty one.

It was Charles who bought the 264 Japanese netsuke central to “The Hare with Amber Eyes,” written by Edmund De Waal, grandson of Elizabeth Ephrussi of the Vienna branch and inheritor of this exquisite collection that bizarrely survived the ravages of war and anti-Semitism. Charles was primary source-material for Charles Swann in the novels of Marcel Proust.

Charles, an eminent art historian and critic, also collected vast numbers of paintings and supported Degas, Monet, Renoir, and other Impressionists. The family benefitted from this mode of assimilation in a culture where anti-Semitism, like a virus, was biding its time. Even our favorite Impressionists could turn. Renoir, who painted Charles into “Luncheon of the Boating Party” (the man in the back in the top hat), said, given a slight grudge, that Charles collected “only Jew art,” meaning it had gold highlights in it. So much for his soft edges and round women.

The book left me emotionally bruised by anti-Semitism in a way I have not experienced in some time. I am not Jewish, but I have married and loved Jews consistently, and my daughter and grandchildren are Jewish.

What has more formed my current feelings, however, are my connections of the past 12 years in Israel and in Palestine as the founder of Peace X Peace and editor-photographer of the book “Sixty Years, Sixty Voices: Israeli and Palestinian women,” which has gone to every UN ambassador, every US Congressperson, and thousands more people working for healthy peaceful cultures.

Over time my frustration with the Israeli government and policies has grown into anger.

It is difficult not to be angry if you check your facts and believe in truth. But this book brought me back viscerally to how it feels when no matter what good you do or how wealthy or powerful you are, or how long you have been in a place, and how assimilated you feel you are that some people will continue to think of you and condemn you as a scourge, as dirty, as vile, as rapacious.

And it showed me, with the blow-by-blow devastation of the Ephrussi family in Vienna, how monsters can evade your house almost overnight and leave you only with the clothes on your back. How your treasures can be inventoried and carried away, how the only fight you have left is figuring out how to get out of your chosen nation before you, like the treasures, are shipped away.

The book is exquisite, it is terrifying. I recommend it.

Yesterday I saw the faces of Tragedy and Happiness on the face of a mansion. I think, despite the family’s assimilation, wealth, and titles, they knew their history well.

For now I will spare you my thoughts on the current effects and wounds of that history.

Just to acknowledge its truth and burden is enough for one day.

. . .

Yesterday I also spent hours inside the Musee Nissim de Camondo. This sumptuous mansion was built by Moise Camondo in 1911. When his only son Nissim died in 1917 as an aviator on World War I, Moise decided to bequest the mansion and magnificent art, furniture, silver, and china to Les Arts Decoratifs of Paris.

The photos do not show the mansion in its full magnificence as the Impressionist paintings, most well known, are in the Louvre, Musee d’Orsay, and elsewhere.

Moise died in 1935. His daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren died in concentration camps.