BEING BRITISH MEANS TALKING ABOUT THE WEATHER, BEING PALESTINIAN MEANS TALKING ABOUT THE WEATHER MEANS TALKING ABOUT THE OCCUPATION

The thing that strikes you about the occupation is exactly its manifestation in the otherwise least striking facets of everyday life. The juxtaposition of that which is extraordinary – shelling, settler attacks, the wall – alongside the most ordinary – olive harvesting, homework assignments, the walk to work – is simultaneously unsettling, while making the occupation, a surreal phenomenon to the outsider, into something all too palpably real.

My first day in Beit Sahour, I sat drinking tea with my neighbour as he helped colour in his eight-year-old daughter’s art homework. The crayons filled in the grey outline of a scene of awaiting Gazan carnage: rockets in the right-hand corner stalled on paper before their descent onto an UNRWA school.

A few days ago I sat in on a poetry workshop at the women’s centre in the village of Nahalin. The topic was, innocuously enough, ‘Where I’m from’. The women described their beloved balad in stanzas of warm, sensory nostalgia, punctuated with poignant interruptions. Couplets coupled the singing of children with the shouting of soldiers, the mud of the land with the blood of its martyrs.

Something as mundane as turning the tap is entirely prey to the dictates of occupation, since Israel controls the West Bank water, curbing supply to Palestinians, who get less than the WHO’s minimum daily standard while the settlers consume at least five times as much. So, unsurprisingly talk turns to the weather and the sunnier it is, the gloomier the conversation. I had the pleasure of interviewing Tom from Bustan Qaraaqa (it translates as Tortoise Garden, a deceptively unrevolutionary reptilian mascot for a quietly subversive project) who explained the climatic predicament:

“Last year there was a terrible drought; 25% of the predicted rainfall fell. This year there’s a terrible drought. Put the two together and it’s the worse drought on record ever and certainly the worst in living memory. If that wasn’t bad enough, the whole region is short of water even when they’re getting the predicted rainfall. But when the rain doesn’t fall then Israel is thinking, ‘We’ve got a big agricultural sector and our people will not be at all happy if their water supply is interrupted.’ So who loses out? The Palestinians. They live well under the water poverty line and for some people it might mean choosing between feeding their children and washing them, with the inevitable health consequences.”

I’m trying very hard but I must embarrassedly admit that when it does rain, it’s hard to kick the British habit of complaining.

AL QUDS: A HOP, SKIP AND A WALL AWAY

As you drive into Abu Dis, in the Occupied West Bank, there’s a glorious point at which you can see the gilded glimmer of the Dome of the Rock over Israel’s separation wall. But it’s much like the fabled pot of gold at the rainbow’s end, because for most Palestinians it’s unreachable.

Following the 1967 Six Day War Israel illegally occupied and annexed East Jerusalem, then part of the Jordanian administrated Palestinian West Bank. During the first intifada sporadic closures were imposed, preventing Palestinians in other parts of the West Bank from accessing Jerusalem (Al Quds in Arabic). Closure was consolidated into a policy in 1993 when Palestinians were required to apply for permits to enter Jerusalem. Following the start of the second intifada in 2000 the permit system was massively restricted. So now, while tourists saunter freely between Bethlehem and Jerusalem (the grim, grey concrete of the wall is here painted a reassuring beige for their benefit), the vast majority of West Bank Palestinians are severed from their cultural, spiritual and economic centre.

For example, my friend Ahmad, whose first baby – a son named Kenan – was born (mabruk! al-hamdulillah! etc, etc) there last week. His wife Sabrine has a Jerusalem ID and they wanted their baby to be born in Al Quds so that he could also enjoy a Jerusalem ID. Sabrine was in hospital for several days – the first few waiting for Kenan to make a very late appearance, the next few recovering from the required C-section. Meanwhile, on the other side of the wall Ahmad waited, the anxiety of absence added to new father nerves.

When I was last here, in the summer of 2005, the Bethlehem-Jerusalem checkpoint was a small, open-air steel shelter with a single turnstile, metal detector and ID inspection point. Since then the checkpoint has tarted itself up into a ‘terminal’ (which you are politely implored, in Hebrew, Arabic and English, to keep clean – never has the temptation to wantonly litter been so great). It’s a huge building, with shiny blue beaming, high ceilings and magnolia walls. It has male, female and disabled toilets. And at the end, a dozen little booths with glass windows. It’s a checkpoint that calls itself a terminal and looks like a border crossing, feels like a border crossing. Like a border crossing crossed with a labyrinth.

To pass the pseudo-border: you walk up a length caged above by corrugated iron, to the right by a steel fence and to the left by the 6 metre high concrete wall, then pass through a gap in the wall, then through a full length turnstile, you flash your passport/ID to the guard in the booth, walk through a metal detector, around a fenced off section of road, are greeted by three bright yellow signs (Hebrew/Arabic/English), which outline a series of instructions before concluding with the exclamation, ‘MAY YOU GO IN PEACE AND RETURN IN PEACE!’ (I’m still trying to work out which is worse: if it was designed irony-intended or irony-unaware), you then enter a sheltered area where barriers have you zig-zagging back and forth until you’re finally in the terminal building, here there are four queues you can join, although usually you’ll get to the front of one only to be told (in Hebrew, which chances are, you don’t understand) to move to another (and another, and maybe another, and then sometimes back to the first one), when you eventually get to the right one there’s another turnstile, then you remove a random and variable combination of your shoes, belt and jacket, put your bag on the conveyor belt for the scanner, walk through another metal detector, which you may be made to do a handful of times (at this stage if they decide you’re worthy of the ‘VIP’ treatment’ you get taken into a little cubicle marked ‘FURTHER INSPECTION ROOM’), then you can walk either to the left or the right, at each end there’s a door you pass through to enter a small enclosed area, which you attempt to exit through another door, although often you find it won’t open and you’ll have to go back on yourself and then right if you went left and left if you went right, then through the other dual door set, then you approach the row of booths, walk up and down by the empty ones, identify the one or, rarely, two that are open, patiently distract the soldiers inside from their daze/nap/gossip, flash your passport and visa if you’re foreign or your ID and magnetic pass if you’re Palestinian, are maybe questioned and further delayed until you can pass through the final turnstile and then, at long last, you’re on the road to Al Quds.

If that was time-consuming and boring to read, it’s at least ten times more time-consuming and boring to do. But there’s a definite method to the madness. The frustration of extending, by literal twists and turns, a crossing that should take half a minute into a humiliating ordeal that can last hours, intensifies Palestinians’ physical separation from Jerusalem and plants the seeds of a sort of psychological separation. A border to the eye becomes a border in the mind. On a more basic level, it’s bloody annoying and it makes you not want to bother. Which, I suppose, is exactly the point.

DON'T BE LIVNI

International Women's Day in Tel Aviv

Having written about the upsurge in radical feminism (as defined by grassroots action targeted at the root causes of injustice, not to be confused with radical feminism as defined by essentialist and separatist tendencies) in the UK, following the International Women’s Day rally in London last year, it was a real treat to be part of this year's IWD Tel Aviv march – a demonstration with similarly radical credentials and markedly better weather.

One of the organisers, an activist from the Coalition of Women for Peace, explained the purpose of the march as marking an opposition to all crimes against women be it domestic violence, war and occupation, racism, heterosexism, or economic oppression under the neoliberal project.

The previous day Tel Aviv had seen a more mainstream feminist demonstration which didn’t talk about Palestinian women – in Gaza, the West Bank or Israel – and focussed instead on the spheres of the Israeli home, workplace and Knesset.

The sentiments of Friday’s protest were echoed in a statement made today by the Prime Minister: ‘The fact that we mark this day shows that we have not yet reached the worthy status for women in Israel. We must work to change the situation, be it by legislation, through the Authority for Advancement of the Status of Women in Israel or through any other means. Despite the achievements we have in the State of Israel, that includes 21 female Knesset members, there are still concerning trends such as violence, women trafficking and discrimination of women in the workplace. We must deal with this as soon as possible.’

When your vision of feminism coincides exactly with that of Ehud Olmert’s then sister, it might just be time for a rethink.

Undoubtedly, violence, women trafficking and discrimination are important issues for feminists to organise around. But Olmert’s concern about violence certainly doesn’t extend to concern for the thousands of women who were victims of the violence wreaked upon Gaza. Nor does his concern about discrimination extend to concern for those women discriminated against as Palestinian citizens of Israel or residents of East Jerusalem. The message of Saturday’s march was in stark contrast to this ethos. The slogan adorning the leading banner read, ‘Stop Crimes Against Women’ in Arabic, Hebrew and English. And as elaborated upon above, this meant all crimes – be it domestic violence or war – against all women – be they Jewish or Palestinian.

Having recognised the different ways in which different groups of women are oppressed the next step is joining the dots (and thus the struggles). Maya, an activist who travelled from Jerusalem for the demonstration, explained the links she makes as an anti-occupation feminist activist. She talks about how the militarism that sustains the occupation in Palestine breeds a hyper-masculinised, macho culture in Israel which is hugely repressive for women. Similarly, Simona Sharoni, an Israeli activist and academic, has linked violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory to domestic violence in Israel.

Zionism has always been intimately tied to militarism and centred on men and masculinity, enshrining the redemptive ideal of the ‘New Jewish Man’ – tough, assertive, protective, master of his body and emotions and constructed in opposition to traditional conceptions of femininity and the antisemitic portrayal of the weak, effeminate Diaspora Jew. Meanwhile, the Zionist obsession with maintaining the Jewish nature of the state reduces women to wombs in a demographic war.

When Olmert talks about changing the situation of women in Israel ‘by any means’ you can be sure he’s not referring to any project that challenges the ideologies and practices of capitalism, militarism, or Zionism – the triad at the base of contemporary Israeli society and the structural roots of women’s subjugation.

Olmert may hail the 21 female Knesset members as one of the ‘achievments of the State of Israel’, but these women represent only 17 per cent of MKs. And while Tzipi Livni may have run for the office of Prime Minister as the leader of Kadima, one of Israel’s major parties, the Likud’s patriarchally puerile slogan ‘It’s too big for her’ makes it clear that being a woman is still seen as a disability in Israeli politics.

In any case, in assessing how feminism-friendly the makeup of a particular Knesset is policy position analysis is far more important than an X chromosome tally. Most of the current female MKs eschew feminist politics and during the election campaign gender, along with most other issues, was sidelined by the security discourse. Livni, the most powerful woman in Israeli politics, pushed the devastating siege and war on Gaza, and was formerly an MK of the party (Likud) that initiated a frenzy of privatisation, while systematically dismantling the social welfare net, thereby plunging thousands of women below the poverty line. A final case in point: the party with the highest proportion of female MKs is Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu.

Focusing exclusively on political institutions such as the Knesset means prioritising the representation of women so that they may have their rights bestowed upon them, rather than empowering them to fight their own subjugation and involving as many women and men as possible in the struggle to bring about liberation from below.

An Israeli feminism that speaks only of politics inside the Green Line, while ignoring Gaza and the West Bank, only of political issues in terms of gender, without reference to class, sexuality, and race, only of political solutions in terms of legal and policy – rather than structural – change, and only of political power in terms of institutional representation, is a feminism that speaks only for, to and about middle-class, heterosexual, Israeli Jewish women of European origin.

Saturday’s march, however, was a different kettle of very colourful fish: there was a happy turnout of men, women and gender-binary-transcenders (a more eloquent term, or indeed an actual word, eludes me), Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, L, G, B and Ts, communists and anarchists, the very young and the very old. Oh, and samba and sunshine! To be sure, multitudes of identity and disparities in power means this kind of feminist organising is going to throw up all manner of problems that need to be identified and dealt with. And this kind of feminist organising is that of a minority within a minority, overshadowed by a majority of warmongers, who have just elected the most right-wing Knesset in Israeli history.

BUT… let’s please take just a moment to be joyous and celebratory. So, Happy International Women’s Day! And here’s to an Israeli feminism that’s anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-war, anti-occupation and definitively not Tzipi Livni.