Despite being bit tipsy after a steak and beer dinner at Meat Bar last night with a new friend, I nevertheless managed to have a semi-serious conversation with my roommate Danny over wine at home. At some point in the now seemingly-distant past, there were days when all I cared about was getting record scores in Guitar Hero or drinking and eating with friends or racing to finish law school exams to catch a movie nearby. I was reminded of those days during our conversation. Danny’s life philosophy is in a nutshell, something along the lines of hakuna matata from the movie The Lion King, saying that life is too short to worry about anything and not to enjoy living.
But it also got me to thinking how living that kind of life doesn’t seem possible anymore, at least in a complete sense. For the past three weeks, I feel like I’ve absorbed the problems of this country too much in one big gulp. In addition to the occupation, my new Jesuit friend, Fr David, has been telling me about the plight of the foreign workers here in Israel. And in some way, it connects to the problems at home (Manila) too, since Filipinos form a large chunk of the migrant worker community here. Anyhow, here are some of the pictures I took.
Last week’s Hebron Hills tour, conducted by Breaking the Silence (a group of former IDF soldiers who give testimonies about what goes on in the territories) mainly told the story of settler violence against Palestinian villagers.
This weekend’s East Jerusalem tour focused on the haphazard expansion policy by the Israeli government in terms of building settlements and annexing strategic points in the West Bank, the lack of services provided to the Arab residents of East Jerusalem and house demolitions. This particular tour was organized by the group called Combatants for Peace, an Israeli-Palestinian group.
We ended the tour yesterday with a vegetarian lunch in the town of Anata, and where Salem, whose house has been demolished four times by the IDF, spoke about his experience. His house has since become a peace center, rebuilt by volunteers from ICAHD and all over the world. Palestinians whose houses are demolished for lack of a building permit (it is in any case impossible to get a building permit even if one applies) will have to pay a huge fine and clear their own rubble. The municipality doesn’t clear the rubble in the Palestinian neighborhoods as shown in the picture above – there is a picture/drawing of the Palestinian nationalist poet Mahmoud Darwish on the wall.
And of course, Daniel and I ate my favorite sweet knafes at the Old City afterwards, before I caught the sherut back to Tel Aviv. But not before looking at the famous signatures on the lobby of the King David Hotel. Barack Obama’s seemed to be the most recent one at 2008.
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