West Bank Journal: Last Update -- The Israeli Activist Festival

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Halper spoke eloquently of the need to reframe the issue. As long as the right wing can frame the conflict as a security issue, they control the dialogue and the parameters of the solutions discussed. If we could succeed in reframing it as a political struggle, then political solutions, dialogue and negotiations become possible. But sadly, he ended by saying that all of their work--the resistance to demolitions, the rebuilding projects, the media work -- had so far had little or no impact on overall Israeli public opinion.

You can find his excellent article on Israel's Matrix of Control, and a map of the settlement blocs at the ICAHD website, www.icahd.org/eng. And for a map of the wall, see www.gush-shalom.org/thewall

And I found myself embroiled in many arguments, that often started when someone asked how long I'd been in Israel. "I've been in Palestine for almost a month," I'd say, "but here just for a couple of days."

"As soon as you say the word 'Palestine' you've lost them," Rena said. The basic frame of the story, from the mainstream Israeli point of view, is that there are no 'Palestinians', only an undifferentiated mass of Arabs that could conveniently move on to some other Arab country, there never was a Palestine, only "a land without a people for a people without a land," as the Zionist slogan went. So even to say the word is to challenge the frame, to stake out a side, to reveal your alliance -- and for many Israelis, that alliance alone immediately discredits anything you have to say.

Then Rena and I drove to Tel Aviv for dinner with friends, on the beach, in a restaurant which serves calamari (very unKosher) but by law cannot serve pasta or bread during Passover. Then I grabbed a taxi to catch my flight home.

What happened at the airport is another story, which maybe I'll tell someday. Suffice to say that the authorities made it known that I will not be welcomed back. So I write now with the consciousness of exile, as the news worsens, as Bush has apparently authorized the wall and its annexation and given the green light to another political assassination, as another nonviolent demonstrator is shot and killed in Buddu, as tanks and Apaches menace Rafah, as internationals and journalists are ordered out of Nablus, as even Ramallah is under some kind of closure and the Israeli forces appear to be mobilizing for some new massive incursions. Here the roses are exuberantly blooming and the greenhouse overflowing with lettuce and kale. The hills are dotted with wild iris and blue-eyed grass. A heavy stone of fear sits in my belly -- fear for Neta and her newborn and laughing one-year-old Nawal, for wry Monsour and generous, macho Mohammed, fear for sixteen year old Shams playing the doumbek and singing ,fear for Fatima whirling round in the fields, arms outflung with the exuberant joy of spring, proclaiming, "This is our land! This is our land!" Fear for my friends in the ISM, for serious, responsible Gabe, for red-haired Becca and calm, quiet Shoura, fear for the battle-hardened men and the shy, determined women struggling to forge a nonviolent movement under fire in the midst of a combat zone.

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