Mid-Point
I’m now halfway through my 10-week Israel/Palestine visit, and also halfway through the six-week Beer Sheva portion. The course in Psychology, Law, and Justice I’m teaching at Ben Gurion University has five of its ten class meetings left. The early part of the trip — the week I spent with a Jewish Voice for Peace Health and Human Rights Delegation in Jaffa, Nablus, and Ramallah — seems a distant memory. The final major part — the week or more I’ll spend at Ramallah’s Birzeit University — is still three weeks away, but begins to seem closer.
This would be a good time to think about how the visit’s reality has matched my expectations so far and also about what lies ahead. Unfortunately, it’s past midnight, and once again I’m up way too late. So, again — as I guess has been common for these blog postings over the past five weeks — I can only hint at what I wanted to elaborate on.
I won’t even try now to write more about this past weekend’s visit to Jerusalem’s Old City. I’ve touched on my visit to Al Quds University, but much of what I’ve thought I would comment on has already begun to fade away.
But I can write about tonight. I went to a center for Jewish-Bedouin coexistence to watch a documentary about Tali Fahima, an Israeli Jewish woman now in prison essentially for contacting and becoming friends with Zakaria Zubeidi, head of the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade in Jenin. I’ve been interested in her case over the past few years, partly because of her own situation and partly because, during my trip here two years ago when my group went to Jenin with Physicians for Human Rights, Zubeidi came out to thank the medical people and others for coming to the refugee camp. I took a few photos while wondering if this was when the Israeli army would try once again to assassinate him.
The documentary provided a lot of details, adding to the reasonable conclusion (it seems to me) that Fahima’s real danger to the Israeli establishment was not at all the charge she pled guilty to — translating a wanted poster for the benefit of wanted militants who could read the Hebrew perfectly well on their own. As the film notes and as I’ve heard others emphasize before, Fahima’s real danger was that others would follow in her wake and cross the line to see for themselves the consequences of Israel’s occupation.
Adding to the film experience was the presence of Fahima’s parents, who spoke afterwards about the State’s efforts to keep her in prison beyond the plea-bargained two years. Early in the questioning, when someone criticized Israeli soldiers, a woman in the audience whose son is in the army right now responded vehemently and soon walked out. The tense interchange illustrated all too well the complexities facing Israelis who, like Tali and her parents, reject the widely endorsed official definitions of Us and Them.
It also illustrated some of what makes me so tired.
Indeed, I’ve been more tired than I expected here, perhaps because I succumbed to wishful thinking about my ability to push myself for ten weeks. I’ve mentioned before that a disability adds to my fatigue, but although the medication I’ve been taking for the past year has allowed me to approach a typical workload, my visit here isn’t very typical. This week, finally, has been less packed than before, and I’m hoping it stays like this at least until I leave for Ramallah. But although some of the weariness is no doubt physical — I’m busy more hours a day than I’ve become used to, and it’s not really a good idea to stay up this late (it’s now 1 am) — what’s really tiring is the mental effort needed to observe and absorb what goes on around me.
I’ve been joking that all I can do now is take things in, and that processing the information will have to wait until I go home. It’s not really a joke.
A few weeks ago I was thinking I like to spend time in other places but don’t so much like getting there. More recently I’m thinking that, when it comes to a visit more political and stressful than an ordinary vacation, maybe I like having been other places more than I actually like being there. Or maybe I’m just getting old, fast.
The course I’m teaching is going well enough from my perspective, though as a two-credit, five-week course it’s too short to yield much depth, especially since we’re covering a lot of ground. The discussions are interesting, as are the guest speakers who provide more detail about aspects of Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian law-and-justice issues. I think the students are getting something out of it, at least often enough.
The rest of my Fulbright activities are lighter than they might have been, leaving time for my Hebrew class and Arabic tutor.
I was going to say a little more — about not wandering around in the desert as much as I had planned, about reactions I’ve gotten to what I’m doing here, about other things that escape me at this late moment. But I am now, finally, going to sleep instead. Good night.