Through the Looking Glass – Five years in Students for Justice in Palestine

Mondoweiss - Tom Pessah- Some of the best children's stories tell us of a secret passageway, a place that looks completely mundane and uninteresting, that turns out to be a gateway to another world: the wardrobe that leads to Narnia, the station where Harry Potter catches the train to Hogwarts, the rabbit hole and looking glass through which Alice passes into Wonderland. Going through the looking glass is a particularly good metaphor for the journey I've been through in Students for Justice in Palestine, because when the Israelis I grew up with talked about Palestinians, they were really talking about how they themselves were better than other Israelis: cultivated Tel Avivians constantly criticized the fanatic settlers; bourgeois Ashkenazim were more enlightened than those racist, vulgar working class Mizrahim (especially certain soccer fans); the radical left was so much more sincere than the hypocritical Meretz, but they themselves were ridiculed by the fringe socialist groups – everyone talked about other people's attitude to Arabs, but no one really knew any. In a country that with about 20% Palestinian citizens, life in North Tel Aviv was segregated to an extreme degree: apart from the greengrocers, the odd waiter at a hummus joint, the occasional child who cleaned the stairs in our house, I made it into my twenties in the biggest industrial and cultural center of the country without one Palestinian acquaintance, and without having any friend who even knew any.
None in my school, certainly none in my family; most incredibly, even in university, where I became affiliated with Hadash/alJabhah - the country's only officially Jewish-Arab political party, there was a Jewish Hadash student group and an Arab one. It never occurred to me that this was problematic – segregation seemed so natural that I never stopped to think about it.

I have so many stories to tell about the UC Berkeley chapter of SJP that I joined almost five years ago, when it was reestablished in the spring of 2006 – material for more than one post. But I want to share the profound joy of being an activist. It seems almost obscene: how can we talk about our pleasure in what we do, when the situation on the ground in Israel/Palestine remains so horrible, when people are still dying every week from the prevention of medical treatment, from sniping at buffer-zones, from the shooting of protestors? But I don't mean pleasure as a form of entertainment. I'm thinking of Helen Keller, who said "Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose." I'm thinking of my biggest role models, the heroes of the Popular Committee of Bil'in, who get tear-gassed, beaten up, fined, imprisoned, wounded and even killed, and never lose their creativity, never lose the ability to paint themselves blue in their weekly protests and dress up as the Na'vi from Avatar. I'm thinking of the twinkle in Mohammed Khatib's eye when he explained why he was so happy to see Israeli activists joining him (finally he got to see the soldiers beating someone else up); I'm thinking of the scene in the documentary Bil'in My Love where Wajeeh Burnat tries to get his sheep to chant slogans against the occupation; I'm thinking of the recent flashmob action in St. Louis, where the protestors sang and danced so movingly for a boycott of Motorola (which is profiting from the occupation); I'm thinking of my friend and colleague Dina Omar, reciting her June-December 2005: First Time Home:

I refuse Israel
Bombing me into submission
beating me into compromise
suffocating me into silence
exhausting me into inaction
this is our action
our living testament
that torture does not work
I will
dance, fight, yell, plead
debka, zagrett, kick, scream
read, write, sing, bleed
and love
love you into submission
I will love you like Mahmoud Darwish
for our misery
cuz we are the same
dispossessed
exiled
I will love you
like Moses loves his people
to take them to the promise land
to part the red sea with his bare hands
I will love you
ultra orthodox Jewish man
walks urgent in the old city
head buried into the Torah
making love to the scriptures
I will love you
Cuz we are both people of the sun
I will love you
Cuz the sun will beat its heat down on us till we are one

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