The Juan Show

The Quest For the Tomb of the Aga Khan

2008-03-24T08:10:00.000-07:00

The stranger, staring with bloodshot eyes, clawed with failing strength at my collar. Black nails raked my flesh, and he pressed his mouth, rimmed with yellow teeth, to my face. His breath was stale with decay and his voice a rattling whisper, and with the fevered urgency of the doomed, he gasped his last words to my unwilling and horrified ears:

"Seek out the tomb! The tomb of the Aga Khan!"

This didn't really happen. But I did read in the Lonely Planet about a mausoleum on the other side of the Nile that contains the bones of Muhammad Shah, the 48th Aga Khan, descendant of the Prophet (Peace be upon him!), and former head of the obscure but wealthy Ismaili sect of Shi'ite Islam.

He died in 1957, and was interred in a stern-looking tomb on the rocky heights peering down on the Nile and the green riverlands of Aswan, where the old man had spent all his winters. His wife outlived him by more than four decades, passing away in 2000. Every morning until the day of her death, she climbed the hill to the sarcophagus of her husband, and there placed a red rose.

C'est l'amour, non?

This isn't what made me decide to take up the Quest for the Tomb of the Aga Khan. I just really wanted to go to a place that sounds like the "boss" dungeon of a video game.

I took the ferry across the Nile early the next morning. On the other side, a whole caravan of camel drivers bargained for my patronage, offering to deposit me at the tomb's doorstep for 20 pounds after a half hour ride through the desert.

This confused me. According to the Lying Planet's attached map, the tomb was 30m from the riverbank, 400m down the Nile from the ferry drop off. All I had to do was walk along the shore till I stubbed my toe on the front gate, right?

The camel drivers disagreed vigorously. It's too hot! There is no path! There are swamps! The police will stop you! They swore by the beard of Allah and the wounds of Christ that it would be easier to rent a camel and take a roundabout 2-3km jaunt through the desert before coming up behind the tomb.

Nubians. As it turned out, there was a shit-littered path (certainly one less traveled), there were no swamps, and there were no police. But they did tell the truth about one thing.

It was very, very, very hot.

I passed the Tombs of the Nobles along the way. But at that point I was undergoing severe Pharaonic overload and just wasn't up for more hieroglyphery/mummery. I was also rather daunted by the fence- though not half as much as I was by the admission price.

I guess this is the "swamp". Some small stretches of the shore were cultivated. Once or twice I passed tiny plots of land; long and thin, and a Nubian bent over in the dry heat checking on his crops.

The shore was a schizoid hiking trail. On one side, the crystalline Nile, with stretches of golden-tufted reeds and tall, grassy groves. Further out was a large island converted by a former British governor into a botanical garden, ringing with the shouts of visiting schoolchildren, as lateen-sailed feluccas drifted idly by.

On the other side (I literally took this shot by twisting my body from left to right 180 degrees) were the rocky wastes of the western desert.

Thar she blows! Only a little further...

But first, I had to run a gauntlet of camel-mounted Nubians- all of whom wanted to take me back to the ferry for 20 pounds, and none of whom seemed capable of understanding that I had just come from there and had no intention of returning without seeing the tomb of the Aga Khan.

So I ran the black blockade into the tomb compound. The Nubians followed with a shout, clawing at my shoulders and arms and dragging me backwards, and this was the closest I've ever come to punching someone on my travels.

As it turns out, non-Ismailis are barred from entering the compound, which the Nubians were trying to warn me about (so that I would decide to go back to the ferry... on one of their camels.)

I was pissed. Did I just trek through the burning sands- and get sunburned for the first time since I was a 7 year old snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef- to get turned away at the gate?

You know what? I think Muslims should be banned from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and all the Christian holy sites that are also open as tourist attraction to people of all faiths. You heard me. If Christians aren't allowed to enter the Dome of the Rock or the city of Mecca or the Tomb of the Aga Khan, then let's have some tit for tat.

As Kieran says: "It's Notre Dame, not Votre Dame." If I can't go into your mosque or your tomb, stay the fuck out of my church. Jesus!

I gave some serious thought to jumping the wall. Kieran and I have an old tradition of doing this: whenever we see a sign saying we shouldn't do something- pass a certain barrier, or climb a certain monument/ruin- we say: "That sign's in Italian", and then proceed to ignore its warnings. (This started on our first trip to southern Europe a few years ago, when, on the banks of some Italian coastal town, a sign warned us not to pass a metal chain- in Italian. One of us turned to the other and pronounced: "I can't read this sign. It's in Italian." Then we hopped the chain.)

I did not jump the wall this time. The sign isn't always in Italian.

All this way for nuthin'.

The sands beyond the tomb were littered with shards of red pottery. I have no idea where they came from.

Off in the distance, you can see a small line of camels convoying some sweating whiteys back to the ferry. This is the route I would have taken had I rented a camel-ride. The tourists are returning from St. Michael's Monastery, a brick-walled, Coptic monastery a few hundred meters away, long destroyed or abandoned. You can see it to the left of the stone hut in the foreground, off in the distance at the top of the black, pebbly slope.

For lack of anything better to do, I took a jaunt up to the monastery. By this point, I was about as Christianed out as I was Pharaohed out, but anything was better than having to head down that hill and tax my patience (and my wallet) by haggling over the price of a camel-ride with some slack-jawed Nubian.

Ho! The gatekeepers were slumbering. I tried to tiptoe past them, and got about as far as the door on the opposite side before the guy on the left jerked awake- and from the commotion he then made, you'd think I'd raped his mother.

Faced with the choice of (1) a dignified retreat without gaining access to the monastery, and (2) paying an exorbitant admission fee while enduring a self-righteous dressing-down by some sour-mouthed Nubian... wait, that's not much of a choice at all.

So I tried to sneak around the back and jump the wall. There, I encountered a policeman, dressed in a slouch-shouldered, ill-fitting uniform, barefoot, and groggy from the heat. He was huddling unseen in the shadows under a shack made from stones and driftwood, where a coffee pot and a kerosene lamp hung from haywire hooks. I'd thought it was an abandoned bumshack, and was halfway up the wall, when this disheveled figure barreled out of his one-man slum and scared me half to death. I took off down the road, stopping only to wave at him and take a photo.

At least I got a nice view of Aswan from the high dunes.

As I descended the slope to the camel camp, another dozen camel drivers drove their beasts out to greet me, and in a fit of disgust, I hustled away so quickly and instinctively that I plain forgot that I'd intended to ride a camel back to the ferry.

Aswan

2008-03-20T08:40:00.001-07:00

Aswan is down the Nile from Luxor. In Pharaonic times, Aswan marked the end of Egypt Proper and the beginning of Nubia, the stretch of riverine land stretching south from Aswan along the Nile to what is today Khartoum in the Sudan.

Nubia is to Egypt what Ireland is to England- over its long history, the region, with a distinct African ethnicity and culture, has been a rival kingdom, an unequal partner, or a vassal province of Pharaonic Egypt, depending on the strength of the kings in Thebes (Luxor). Aswan is still a stronghold of the Egyptian Nubians, whose numbers were bolstered since the 1960s when several Nubian communities migrated north to Aswan from their traditional lands- which were being drowned by the building of the Aswan High Dam.

More on this in later posts. In fact, most of Egyptian Nubia now lies under Lake Nasser, the huge reservoir created by the Dam. Google "Three Gorges Dam" for a similar tale taking place in China.

Arab Egyptians look on the Nubians in the same way the English still look upon the Irish. Most Arabs in the Nubian region go to great pains to make visitors understand that they are not Nubians, who are implicitly indicated to exist a few rungs lower down on the hierarchy of races.

Lies. Lies. Lies.

Aswan contained a Nubian museum displaying artifacts from its drowned lands, and a cultural center where you could watch traditional dances and get your hands and feet encircled in henna patterns. But I made absolutely no attempt to explore Nubian culture, yielding instead to a heat-induced apathy, and spent most of my time in Aswan at the local sheesha parlor waiting for the sun to set.

In fact, the only thing I discovered of note about the Nubians is that they lie with greater ease and frequency that the Arabs. This did nothing to debunk my Racial Scale of Untrustworthiness, in which, using quantitative evidence garnered from four continents and a dozen countries, I hypothesize that the number of lies told by the average person is positively correlated with the darkness of his skin.

Nubians are just as proud as Arabs to distingush their separateness as a culture, but any assertion I heard to this effect was in the context of tourist touting. A Nubian vendor would respond to accusations of lying or cheating with: "But, sir! I am a Nubian!"- which is akin to saying; "But sir, I am a Nazi!" to a charge of anti-semetism.

This is something called "caster". It is probably the greatest thing that has happened to me since I discovered Irish punk. It's a pastry made of cream and flour, doused with a layer of sugar, and then drowned in hot milk.

A week ago, I read on the BBC that there were angry murmurs on the Egyptian street about the rising cost of bread. The cost of grain is rising worldwide, due to, among other things, rising demand resulting from ethanol-based fuels, rising global population, and folk in rising developing economies like China and India having more funds to buy bread. The average Egyptian's purchasing power is decreasing because of Egypt's stagnant economy, and there is huge pressure on the government to keep the price of bread heavily subsidized.

The result: bread line-ups that hand out pita-shaped loaves at a government-sponsored price. Every town's lower-income population will wait in line every morning, buying as much as they can, because the price is only going to rise here on out. People waddle away from the lines carrying reed trays stacked with bread balanced on their heads.

This is the Unfinished Obelisk- the largest piece of stone ever quarried by human hands. It weighs 1168 tons, and is 42m long- a mute testament to an ancient engineering genius we can only guess at. God alone know what it would have been used for- except that when three out of four sides had been cut, the masons discovered a fault running through the stone, rendering the monstrosity useless.

Elephantine Island, home to a couple of small Nubian villages, water-level measurers from pharaonic times, and... oh what? You can't see it? There's a cruise ship in the way.

You're telling me.

Every time something like this happens, I have this internal shouting match about the pros and cons of accessible, cheap, mass tourism ruining pristine natural areas with huge ecological or cultural significance. I hate having thousands of gringos ruin my romanticized musings at the Pyramids- except that I'm one of them. I hate seeing a dozen cruise ships block my view of the Nile's sapphire sheen- except that the rules that permit their presence also allow mine.

If the Valley of the Kings was allowed only to archaeologists and Aswan only to cultural anthropologists (and locals), those areas would retain their mystical solitudes, preserved solely for those for whom their existences are a vocation or a heritage. On the other hand, the vast majority of us would never have the chance to experience or learn about these wonders, however shallowly or fleetingly.

There has to be a balance between the two.

I had intended to put a hair-raising rant about the hassling that occured on Aswan waterfront involving 16 Nubians in a 400m stretch of pavement attempting to lure, cajole, plead, demand, and infuriate me into boarding their boats- or "feluccas"- for a "sunset cruise to Elephantine! I give you good price! I am Nubian! Sir! Why you walk away? Why you angry? WHY YOU ANGRY!"

But that would be flogging a long-dead horse.

This is Ferial Gardens at the end of the waterfront, the city's one concession to an unobstructed view of the Nile and its environs without having to pay for a cruise ship or board a felucca.

At the entrance, I put down a 20 pound bill to pay the 5 pound entrance fee. The Nubian at the gate surruptitiously shut a drawer containing wads of change and informed me in broken English: "No change. You give me 20 pounds now, and I give you change later."

My response involved the phrase "You shit-colored worm", and ended with me pulling the drawer of change open, changing my own money, and then walking in.

Tree.

Boat.

Boats.

The boat on the bottom right is actually two boats sailing side by side, filled with tourists. Aboard, the Nubian crews led their passengers in a rousing chorus of drum-driven Nubian music, which unlike the undulating tones of Arab "Habibi" ballads, are lively, rhythmic, major-scale African numbers, full of foot-stomping, hand-clapping, and "Ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya!" chants that drifted up raucously from the twilit waters.

Sunset.

Temple Town

2008-03-14T23:09:00.000-07:00

Everything I know about the ancient Egyptians is contained in the sentence you just read.

No, really. I know they drew "hieroglyphics" on "papyrus", and built "pyramids" that stored "mummies", and that their gods had the heads of local wildlife. And according to the Bible, at some point the Egyptians enslaved the Jews... and some Egyptians today would probably like to enslave them again.

Fortunately, I am shameless and vengeful enough to have stolen a Lonely Planet Egypt guidebook from a fellow traveler in Luxor, which I lifted out of his bag while he was taking a piss. (He had the gall to wake me up the previous night to inform me that I was snoring too loudly.)

Luxor was established as the capital of Egypt by the Pharaohs of the New Kingdom (1550 BC- 332 BC), during ancient Egypt's pinnacle of power. With the exception of the Pyramids, every ruin of note today was built during this period.

Just to give you a little idea of the longevity of the Old Time Egyptian civilization: a legendary Pharaoh named Narmer first united the two rival kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt in 3100 BC. The first 6 dynasties were known as the Old Kingdom, during which the Pyramids at Giza were built. After a short warring period between rival powers, there was a Middle Kingdom (2055-1650), followed by another intermediate period in which Egypt was conquered by a Semetic people called the Hyksos.

After a century, Ahmose chased the Hyksos from the Nile, and established the New Kingdom, which finally fell 1200 years later to a succession of foreign powers, including the Persians, Alexander the Great, (his general Ptolemy became Pharaoh after Alexander's death, whose descendant was the Cleopatra), and the Roman Empire. Every single one of these conquerers became Egyptianized, adopting the local gods, dress, and culture... with one exception: the Romans. When Christianity became the state religion of the Empire, the Romans "converted" pagan temples and practices across their dominion, and Pharaonic Egypt finally ground to a halt.

Lies. Arab lies.

Luxor, or Al-Uqsur in Arabic, means "Place of Palaces". It should really be called "Place of Tourist Shops", filled with the usual kitschy treasure trove of Pharaonic whatzits and thingamabobs. Pyramids! Pharaoh heads! Sphinxes! King Tut's death mask in shrink wrap! And creepy little pot-bellied idols with huge, erect penises, which the Lonely Planet urges you to take home and nail to the wall as coat hangers...

"Alabaster Factories". They carve alabaster from the local mountains into little busts and figurines to sell to whitey. There are dozens of them, each named after a pharaoh or god/goddess. Tutenkhamen Alabaster Factory. Ramses Alabaster. Horus Alabaster. Hathor Alabaster. Amun-Ra Alabaster. There's even an "Opera Aida Alabaster Factory".

Not to mention the "Babyrus Factories" a little further up the street. (Clue: Egyptians cannot pronounce "P", and the closest Arabic consonant is "B".)

And now, are you ready for some ruins? Pharaonic overload!

In 1798, the Ottomans ruled Egypt. Then came Napoleon. He faced off against the Turks at the Pyramids, and pointing at them, he declared to his soldiers: "Men, forty centuries of history look down upon you!" The French annihilated the Ottomans in under an hour- though, to be fair, it was gunpowder against swords.

Napoleon ruled for three years before another great man, Horatio Nelson (and the British fleet), chased him out. But in that time, his administration introduced new crops, a new measuring system, reformed the government and legal system (the latter of which still runs according to the French system of law), built public works, compiled a 24-volume encyclopedia of Egyptian history, culture, and ecology, and carried one of the Obelisks at Luxor Temple back to what is now Concorde Square in Paris- the twin of which is pictured above.

Can you believe that this guy was French?

Medinat Habu, or the Funerary Temple of Ramses III, one of the last warrior-kings, built at the zenith of ancient Egypt's power. Probably my favorite of all the sites.

The inner courtyard. I managed to beat the morning rush by getting to Medinat Habu at 9am in the morning, so I had the place to myself. First and last time.

Awww...
...wweee...
...soooooome.

Apparently, somewhere on one of these walls, there was a huge carven depiction of the scribes of Ramses III counting out the enemy dead from one of his battles by sorting their ears and genitals into baskets. I only learned about this after I left, so, as the Bible says: "Too bad, motherfucker!"

Most of the pictures I have of Ramses III's temple carvings are of him making offerings to the gods: Anubis and Osiris, gods of the dead, prominent among them.

The Temple of Hapshepsut, built into a cliff face. She married her half-brother the Pharaoh, and after his death became Pharaoh herself- one of Egypt's few female rulers. After her death, her successor, Tutmosis III, who was not her son, jealously defaced her temple.

Really, really crowded. Not quite Tenth-Circle-of-Hell-crowded... but at least Seventh. In 1997, terrorists from an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood gunned down 58 tourists here. I fantasized about doing the same.

Egyptian schoolkids. Every site was filled chock-a-block with cheeky little kids in brightly colored shawls (for the girls) and soccer jerseys of the Egyptian national team (for the dudes). Every single one of them took the opportunity to practice their English lessons on the tourists, in an exuberant chorus of "Wa-zyo-name! Wa-zyo-name!" Some found this charming and adorable. I did not.

These primary school field trips are (unless they grow up to be Egyptologists or camel guides) the only exposure an Egyptian will ever have to his Pharaonic "heritage". I use quotation marks because the average Egyptian is no more descended from Narmer and Ramses than the average Jew is descended from Moses, or the average Greek from Plato and Leonidas.

It's really frustrating to hear a greasy, gap-toothed camel driver proudly tell you he is descended from the Pharaohs, and therefore not like Saudis, Syrians, or Palestinians. First, it asserts something that plainly isn't true.

Ethnically, the original Egyptians have interbred with every conquering power, from the Macedonians to the Arabs. And as a society, Egyptians are just Arabs: a monochrome Islam, typical of most Arab Muslim societies in that it is undynamic, uninnovative, and inward-looking, fervently religious, unpenetrated by the Enlightenment, and locked in by a calcified bureaucracy and an undefinable cultural malaise.

Secondly, this braggadocio is absurd because it's so disingenuous. The Egyptians don't have the faintest cultural conception of what it means to "be Pharaonic"... nor do they want to. They're comfortably Arab by culture and Muslim by religion, and have been so for fourteen centuries. They only hold to the pharaohs, pyramids, and papyrus as a crutch to their fragile national psyche, which needs to differentiate itself from all the other Arab, Muslim peoples of the Mid East.

Being "Pharaonic" is a way of (1) associating themselves with a greatness and uniqueness that their staid, same-same-but different Arab nation doesn't have, and (2) using their "heritage" as a cash cow for the tourist economy.

Lies! Lies! Damned Arab lies!

The usual tourist chicanery.

This is on shortcut trail that leads up from the Temple of Hapshepsut into the surrounding heights, runs above and behind the Temple along a ridge of bone-bare hills, then drops down into the midst of the Valley of the Kings a short kilometer away. As you can probably deduce, I climbed it. 35 degree heat. No water. Too expensive at $2 a bottle.

Why hike a mountain ridge in the desert? (1) I'm a masochist, (2) the cabs were asking $10 to drive the 4 km from Hapshepsut to the Valley of the Kings, and (3) I wanted to take photos.

So all in all, I got some great pictures, whipped myself a little closer to being in shape, and prevented some greedy cabbie from feeding his kids. Great day.

The Valley of the Kings.

During the Old Kingdom, the kings were buried under piles of bricks that- as you can tell from the great pyramids- just kept getting bigger and taller. There was then still enough space along the banks of the Nile to build gargantuan tombs. But by the time the New Kingdom had come about thousands of years later, Pharaohs found it more economical to hollow tombs out into the hills inland of the river. The Valleys of the Kings, Queens, and Nobles at Luxor are the result- built on the West Bank of the Nile, as the sun setting in the west was symbolic of Ra, the Sun god, descending nightly into the underworld domain of Osiris, shepherding the souls that would be reborn at the following dawn.

The tomb of Tutmosis III, desecrater of Hapshepsut's temple, but worthy in his own right as the Pharaonic Napoleon... one of the New Kingdom's great conquerer-kings. His tomb was interesting for two reasons.

1) Tutmosis went to a lot of effort to design his tomb to waylay grave-robbers. While most of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings are laid out in a standard format of descending chambers and corridors that finally led to a funerary chamber with the sarcophagus and organ-jars, Tutmosis' was rife with right-angles, dead ends, and steep, narrow drops. In addition, it was probably the most inaccessible of all the tombs, isolated and buried atop a steep cliff that can today only be climbed because of a modern metal stairway bolted into the rock-face.

2) No carvings. The hieroglyphics were simplistic stick-figures that looked like they were drawn on with Magic Marker. Compare this to the elaborate, lavish carvings of Ramses at Medinat Habu. Tutmosis was of the 18th Dynasty, and Ramses III of the 20th... great difference a couple of hundred years makes...

But Tutmosis' tomb was apparently the first appearance of the pictographs from a number of important funerary texts: the Book of the Dead, the Book of Caverns, the Book of Gates, the Litany of Ra, the Books of Days and Nights, and a host of other tomes with equally enigmatic and sorcerous names.

Apparently: the night of the underworld is divided into hourly "gates" at which demigods await to assail the souls of the dead. Guided by Ra, these souls must know the rites and passwords to pass the trials of the guardian at each gate, so that they might be emerge into the afterlife. This knowledge is contained in the various "Books"... which is why they were prominently carved into the walls of every tomb.

Tawosret (another female Pharaoh)'s tomb wasn't desecrated by her successor. Instead, Pharaoh Sethnakht simply took it for himself. Above is a bizarre carving of Ra as a winged, ram-headed creature bursting from the darkness of the underworld.

Sarcophagus. No photography was allowed in any of the tombs, so I only took about twenty pictures.

The Colossi of Memnon. The Greeks named them, saying that the big guy is Memnon, a king slain by Achilles in the Trojan War.

Why the "Colossi" of Memnon? Because there's two of them. The other is undergoing a facelift.

The Temples of Karnak, one of the great "composite" temples of Luxor- built not by a single Pharaoh or even a single dynasty, or dedicated to a single god, but to a whole pantheon of gods, constantly elaborated upon for almost 2000 years by a host of dynasties from 1965 BC during the Middle Kingdom past the fall of the last native Egyptian dynasty in ~300 BC. Alexander the Great's general Ptolemy added to it when he became Pharaoh, as did his Greek successors. Even the Christians added to the complex.

During Ramses III's reign, eighty thousand people worked in, around, and on the Temples of Karnak.

A gauntlet of ram-headed sphinxes guard the entrance.

I think this is Ramses II. Or is it Ramses III? Maybe it's Hohemreb, or Amunhotep III. Seti I? Seti II? Or is that Amunhotep IV? Tutmosis? Osmosis? Mitosis?

The entrance to the Great Hypostyle Hall: 134 columns, carved to resemble the stem and flower of the papyrus. Biggest fucking flowers I've ever seen.

The columns.

Here are some German tourists for scale.

Each of the figures in this picture are taller than I am.

You know what Luxor most reminded me of? Diablo II. For the uninitiated, it's an incredibly popular computer game- part of which is set in a vast desert realm of decaying ruins and underground catacombs, populated by scarabs that spout lightning bolts, humanoid vipers and panthers, and lurching mummies with the heads of jackals.

I spent hours in Karnak wandering the Great Hypostyle Hall, mentally slaying hordes of undead (read: tourists) with frost novas, fireballs, and sweeps of my flaming sword. Yes, I am almost 25.

John

2008-03-11T11:06:00.000-07:00

I'm just going to write this out while it's still fresh in my memory. No embellishments, no adjectives. I'm too confused- too angry- to be literary, so bear with me.

I was walking back to my hostel an hour ago when a man strolled up alongside me and tried to get my attention. Lanky, clean cut, and clear-eyed, dressed in a pressed pair of slacks and a collared shirt.

Normally, I just blow by these characters; they're Egyptian tourist touts, trying to lure you back to their brother's travel agency or their uncle's hotel with a a bright smile and a lot of fast talk. Alternately, they're offensively friendly Arabs trying to welcome foreigners by practicing their five-word command of English on them.

This guy got my attention by saying he was from Gaza. Not: "I'm from Falastin." He said: "I am from Gaza."

He seemed calm, yet clingy. He told me that he had escaped from Gaza 35 days ago, when Hamas blew up the border fence between the Strip and the Sinai desert. Half of Gaza's million inhabitants rushed into Egypt to buy supplies of bread and fuel before returning to their homes.

This man stayed. He had no home to return to. His wife, sister, mother, a friend, and his four children had been killed days before, when Israeli bulldozers and tanks cut a swath through his neighborhood. His family was crushed inside his house; his friend died in the lobby of the hotel he operated next door.

John, he said his name was. He had been in Egypt 35 days, living off his last reserves of cash. "Egyptians, they care about Palestine, but they don't care about Palestinians." Now he was out, and he needed money to get him through the night. Could I please lend him some money to get a room and buy a sandwich?

Money, money, money. I stared at him. Either this was the most despicable scam I had ever encountered, or... it did not bear thinking about. Was he lying? His eyes were calm. Not pleading, not desperate. The eyes of a con man? But in my experience, refugees- people who have lost everything- are the calmest, proudest people I have ever encountered. Bereft of all but their dignity, they are determined, at all costs, not to lose that too.

What could I do? We walked, talking, to the nearest sandwich stall. I don't know if that surprises anyone.

Then he asked me if we could sit down and talk. "I need to talk to someone. Not like... (I had to supply the word "strangers" to him; his English wasn't perfect)... but like brothers."

So we did.

"I don't like asking Egyptians for money. I don't want to. They will look down on me. But you are not from here, so I ask you. I am very sorry. I have... big problem. Big problem with food, with sleep, but also... big problem inside.

How to talk about my family? They are gone. They are gone."

And this man gripped my arm, white-knuckled, and began to cry. At a coffee shop, in the middle of Talaat Harb Street in downtown Cairo. With effort, he gathered himself, and talked about his life.

He was a Christian. "My family has been in Gaza for one hundred years! We were from Yemen. It's not easy to be Christian in Gaza. Hamas, they don't like Christians. The Islamists, they don't like Christians.

I used to own a hotel. It was small. Before the trouble, many Western people come and stay, so I can speak some English. But not read! Speak a little only."

He needed to talk, needed to vent. He wasn't angry, or vehement. He didn't seem dead inside either. But it seemed that he needed this, to have coffee with a friend, or a stranger- to do something normal again. To feel human again.

"We are all little people. You know? Not like... er... er... big politicians. I never care about politics. What it matter to me? You know..." - And he grabbed my arm again- "You know... before this, I go many places. I go Amsterdam, I go Bucharest, I sleep in hotel. I have money.

So when I see people with no money, I try to help them.

What good is money? You take with you to Heaven? Give to poor people. Help people. What is more better, money or life?

I don't know why this happen to us. Many of us little people now in Gaza, we have big problem. But why this happen to us? What did I do? What did I do to Israel?"

He was eager to assure me that the money would be repaid to me. He gave me a number, and said that the Palestinian Authority owed him reimbursement for the loss of his property; and in any case, a friend from Sydney would lend him money to get by within a week. If I called him upon returning from Luxor, he would be happy to repay me.

He repeated this several times, each time firmly, punctuating each sentence with: "You understand me?" He didn't want to seem like a beggar. He wanted me to understand that this was a loan between equals. This was nothing like the insistent, assertive, shifty-eyed demands for free cash I get every day from Cairo's streetfolk.

"When I have money, I help people. Now I have no money, and no one will help me. But you did. I will never forget it."

I gave him 50 pounds. This is something less than ten bucks. It would get him through the night, and little further. Part of me screamed that this might still be a scam, and my own dwindling cash reserves could not handle more.

We talked, and talked. He liked to drink and to "go disco", and "talk to women. Not fuck, you know, but just talk. But you know, all women are problem. They want earring, they want necklace."

"And Bush, he make problem. He want all the money. He want from Iraq. I don't like Mubarak, he is like Bush's dog. And France, also, Sarkozy (France's right-wing president, an ally of Bush), he is also Bush's dog.

What about Canada? Who is your leader?"

Harper's name would have meant nothing to John. "He is also Bush's dog," I told him.

We said goodbye after an hour. He shook my hand in the limp-wristed Arab manner, looked me in the eye, and repeated his demand that I call him upon returning from Luxor. He walked away, straight-spined, and did not turn back.

I came back here, to the hostel, my thoughts in turmoil- they still are- and sat down at my laptop.

***

Was this a scam? John's story was, in my buddy Kieran's favorite phrase, "too preposterous to be a lie." His reactions to everything fit; the way he gripped my arm, the correct, dignified behavior of a man who did not want to reveal too much to a stranger, the numb, self-denied manner in which he could not talk about his family, but only about his commercial life. The way he told me to always keep an eye on my finances, because "When you have nothing, who will help you? No one! You must always have money to look out for yourself."

And when he said he'd escaped Gaza through the border with Egypt, he could not possibly have known he was talking to someone who reads the Israeli news websites every morning.

And if it was a scam, I lost a grand total of ten dollars.

But if it wasn't...

I'll probably have more to say on this later. I have to go catch a train to Luxor, and I have to leave now. I'm still so angry, so buggered.

There was a big debate in one of my Political Science classes a year back about the difference between "politics" and "justice".

The debate said that politics is about the ability of grand sweeps of policy to solve big issues, but justice is about making sure that individuals are provided for.

Fool that I was, I couldn't conceive of any difference. Politics is about making sure there can be justice, right? We have grand sweeps of public and foreign policy so that everyone can have a better future, right?

But when Israel bombs Gaza to make a better world for Jews, there's collateral damage. When Bush invades Iraq to make the world safe for democracy, there's collateral damage. When Canada ignores Kyoto so that our economy can thrive and I can have money to travel overseas, there's collateral damage. And John is just one of those faceless billions: the victims of grand, well-meaning sweeps of politics- the collateral damage of history.

What is the difference between politics and justice? I can tell you now. Politics says that the ends justify the means. Justice says that that just ain't so.

Whoever John is, I wish him well. In the world we live in, Palestinian or not, he needs all the luck he can get.

Dune

2008-03-09T07:24:00.000-07:00

The Arabic word for "desert" is "sahara".

Ah, you get it. Before you laugh, consider that we call our mountains: "The Rockies".

Besides, the locals don't call the Sahara "The Sahara". That's the white man's fuck-up. Remember that other time when some native chief on the St Lawrence River said to the British explorers: "Come to my village"? The Brits named our whole damned country "Village".

They- the locals here in Siwa, anyway- call it "The Great Sand Sea".

Tee hee.

The Egyptians say: "Egypt is the River, and Egypt is the Desert." Siwa is the latter; way the hell and gone to the west of the Nile, almost on the border with Libya.

The guy who ran my hostel gave me a brief history of Siwa. Like anything else an Egyptian might tell you, I'd take this with the appropriately-sized grain of salt.

A large number of Berber peoples apparently fled the fighting in the Second World War from Algeria and Morocco, settling in the Siwa oasis. (Was there any fighting in Algeria and Morocco in WWII?) They brought with them a unique Northwest African desert culture, separate from Egypt's riverine, industrial civilization on the banks of the Nile.

The Berbers initially constructed their dwellings out of mud bricks and salt. But "in 1999, 20 years ago!", a heavy deluge collapsed large swaths of Siwa.

You could see the devastation wrought from the top of the Fortress of Shali, a moonscape of stalagmite-like remains; collapsed walls and battlements of formless mud bricks run-together and ruined. I imagine it caved in during the same downpour that flattened the rest of Siwa.

Something else that confused me: Shali was described as "the medieval fortress of Shali".

Well, ok. If the Siwans only arrived during WWII, who built Shali? That Egyptian probably made the whole thing up.

Directly below, a warren of the collapsed dwellings ringing the base of Shali had been taken over (with the fortress) by the Egyptian government, and preserved as a tourist attraction.

Imagine London in 1945... made of mud.

Anything that hadn't collapsed was still being used as a house... or a souvenir shop.

Further out, the modern (and I mean "modern" in a purely relative sense) town was built from brick and concrete; squat, ugly, and functional. But whatever these lacked in charm, they made up for in insolubility.

Siwa only had a real road built to it from the Nile delta in the 1980s. so it's largely caught in a time warp. Donkeys pull carts, spurred on with palm switches by noisy young lads, splattering shit on wide, dusty streets. There are some rattling bicycles here, and the occasional sputtering pickup, but for the most part, donkey carts transport everything from diesel barrels to parsley to people.

Flies buzz on open fruit stands. Chickens jaunt across roofs thatched with dried palm leaves. Thick groves of palm trees ring the town; sometimes rising out of the shells of the collapsed mud huts. Siwa doesn't just run on tourism. The locals harvest dates from the palms, drying them into a kind of natural candy. Many families also own sheep, goats, and cows.

Men- and boys- still wear the gallabiya: the full-length pajama-like robes. Married women wear full, creepily faceless black veils beneath robes and headscarves with brightly embroidered hems, looking like squat, waddling versions of Tolkien's Ringwraiths. Young girls have their hair bound in thick braids, and dress in traditional Bedouin frocks that look like floral, frilly nightgowns.

And of course, there's the usual collection of offensively friendly tourist-trappers and carbon-copy stream of souvenir shops that combine worn collections of Berber handicrafts with 4x4 safari tours into the Great Sand Sea.

There's intermediate signs of a tourist boom. Construction is going up here and there at an Arab pace. (That's somewhere between "slow" and "medium".) Hotels are undergoing renovation. But Siwa is still a true desert town- sleepy, traditional, and for now- Thank God!- largely undisturbed.

And what would a dusty desert town be without the street cats? This is Jessica and Muad'dib. They lived on the roof of my hostel, surrounded by garbage and shards of broken brick.

The day after arriving in Siwa, I took a "safari" out into the dunes. There were five people on the tour: two Japanese girls, a white guy who might have been from Germany or Holland, and a Korean named "Conga". I talked to Conga the most, mostly because I enjoyed saying his name.

Did we really need three Arabs? Of course! One to drive the jeep, and two to hit on the girls.

"The Great Sand Sea." Zero points for originality; but you don't realize how apt the name is until you're standing in the middle of it.

You could get on Google Earth right now and see that the Sahara blankets half a continent and a dozen nations. Or you could Wikipedia its exact measurements, length and breadth. But maps and stats contain only abstract truths; something that your mind pretends it can comprehend without the evidence of the senses.

The Sahara- like everything else, I guess- has to be seen to be believed, and experienced to be understood.

And as our safari party stood on a high windswept ridge, squinting at a low sun as the shadowed dunes faded into a white horizon, nothing poetic or profound came to mind. All I could think was: "Jesus Christ, this desert is big."

Much of the Sahara was covered by water at some point. But then- what wasn't? Something very clever I once read went like this: "How inappropriate to call this planet 'Earth', when clearly, it's 'Ocean'."

This used to be a coral reef.

There are many vast stretches of bone-white fossil beds stretching far into the distance- skeletons of the life that thrived here million of years ago, when the desert lay beneath the waves.

Up close, you can see the individual outlines of seashells and coral.

The desert is well-traveled. And when I say "well-traveled", I mean it's well-traveled in the same way the sky or the sea is. There's heavily-used routes, and the rest of it is impenetrable and unpenetrated. Tracks from previous safaris criss-cross the dunes, slowly being erased by the shifting sands. And off in the distance, you can often make out the small dot of a jeep on another safari, trailing evil-looking fumes and almost swallowed up by the immensity of its surroundings.

The jeep ride was fun. Arabs aren't the most sane of drivers on a city road; can you imagine what they're like in a million square miles of nothingness, with nothing but climbing dunes and steep drops to play around in?

The tour took us to a little oasis in the middle of nowhere, where the local hot spring had been engineered into a little dipping pool. Like most natural hot springs, the water was piping hot, murky, and smelled a little like rotten eggs.

Conga, the German, and I hauled ass to the top of a small, rocky plateau overlooking a small oasis, at the edge of which you can just make out the safari convoy. The Arabs below have lit a small fire, and are serving coffee brewed over the flames to a balding group of Brits.

After this, the German gave a loud shout and launched himself off the top, running full tilt with giant, lurching strides down the slope. After ten steps or so, he lost control of his flailing, gravity-driven limbs, bailed, and ate a faceful of sand.

I tried not to think too hard about this, especially since I was also hurtling down the hill.

Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs. Arabs are sleazeballs.

Sometimes, the vehicular acrobatics go horribly wrong. This isn't our jeep, fortunately. We were up on a high rise, admiring the setting sun, when an approaching jeep carrying a trio of Brits belched a cloud of smoke, ground to an abrupt halt, and skidded down the slope- almost tipping as it finally stopped. Its occupants spilled out helter-skelter, while I hooted and callously documented the whole spectacle.

The Arabs dug the sand out with their bare hands and a shovel, and then rocked the jeep back and forth until it twisted loose and rolled backward downhill- almost crushing one of the Brits, who'd unwisely stationed herself behind the vehicle as it came free from the sand trap.

Look on my words, ye mighty, and despair!

In other news, I have bought a ticket to Barcelona to visit my buddy Garreth. This is money I really don't have, so right now I'm more broke than a Bedouin. I can't even buy a copy of the Economist. I don't know what I'm more worried about: the Canucks making the playoffs, or having enough money to get to Frankfurt.

Thank God for credit cards.

Dance Dance

2008-03-02T01:32:00.001-08:00

So, I've been stuck in Eilat, Israel, for the past two days, waiting for the Egyptian Consulate to open up.

At first, I was pissed. But, as it so often happens, the Good Lord reached down and threw me a bone.

It turns out that Armin Van Buuren, voted in 2007 as the best trance DJ on the planet, was in town. Big-time party on the beach; and half of Eilat was going.

After months of Lonely Planet travel, I'd been itching to see a bit of Israel's youth culture in action. Do something local, but not something mundane.

I didn't know who the fuck Van Buuren was. (I had to Wiki-research him.) And the music was alright... I've heard better tunes from Ryland Clarence's iPod at the Moby Dick. And techno (or house, or trance, or electronica, or whatthefuckever) isn't my scene.

But I wasn't there to party. I was there to watch Israelis party.

At the same time, there's been a bit of a dust-up between the IDF and Hamas. Israel has been squeezing the Gaza Strip: refusing to recognize the Hamas government, freezing funds, blockading supplies of fuel, sealing the borders, and allying itself with Hamas' rivals Fatah, who are given both political and financial resources.

In return, Hamas has been dropping rockets on Sderot, Ashkelon, and other southern towns.

It all reached a head (or the beginning of one) yesterday, when 60+ Palestinians (civilians included, as always) and two Israeli soldiers were killed in a huge military operation. It's all over the papers, with pictures of the dead boys, one with his girlfriend, and pictures of rocket damage in the south.

There's talk of reoccupying Gaza. Israelis under rocket fire in Sderot and Ashkelon are calling for blood. And whatever restraint Hamas has been exercising on its militants is about to reach its limit.

I'm getting on a bus to Cairo either today or tomorrow. I'm not too worried about bombs going off in the Sinai. There aren't any Israelis there to bomb.

But first, the party.

It started at 2pm, but I arrived fashionably late. By the time I got there, the beachside venue was packed with over a thousand tranced-out, trainwrecked Jews.

I managed to share a joint with a kid named Lidor, who was about to be drafted into the army. "I'm want to be a paratrooper!" he announced. He'd apparently taken the test for admission into the pilot program of the Israeli Air Force, and had passed every portion but the psych evaluation. "It said I was, ah, 'unsuitable'."

The hash was terrible, though it did Lidor in right and proper. The hash came, apparently, from Lebanon. And who in Lebanon grows pot? The Shi'ites in the south. Hezbollah- at war with Israel for two decades- makes and sells the hash that Israeli soldiers smoke at raves and porch parties.

Israelis also get their drugs from Bedouin in the Sinai, who smuggle it in on their camels. (This sounds ridiculous, but I'm going on Lidor's word.) But because of the situation with Hamas in Gaza, and the possibility of Hamas militants loose in Sinai, the border with Egypt has been sealed airtight.

"I don't like Arabs," said Lidor, hauling back on his joint. "But they do some things right."

The man himself, Armin Van Buuren. He played four hours of bread-and-butter trance, set off sparks from his stage equipment, and all in all, put on a good show.

I won't lie... I did dance. But only a little.

Everyone was on drugs. There were hash joints everywhere, and people slugging back booze. And of course, the kids on E, who were easy to pick out: they were the ones flailing about with spasmodic, mile-a-minute gyrations, with their eyes rolled into their heads and shit-eating grins pasted on their faces.

My camera sucks, hence the blurriness. But I was so blasted by this point that this is probably what the scene looked like to my naked eye. I don't remember.

The Egyptian Consulate is a small, unimposing bungalow tucked away into a small suburb of Eilat. You could only tell what it was from the Egyptian flag flying from the pole. Almost as if in response, most of the Jewish houses nearby hung Israeli flags from their gates and doorways.

It was 100 shekels for a visa. But for Americans, Germans, Russians, and a few other European nations, it was only 65 shekels. Their governments must sell weapons to Egypt.

The Germans who were there with me chuckled gleefully, while I cursed Canada and its wanky, pacifist scruples.

Mount Moses

2008-02-29T07:13:00.000-08:00

Are you bored of Israel?

Shit, I'm bored of Israel. More significantly, my wallet was hemorrhaging cash... though I'm not sure why I expected something different from living in a country filled with Jews.

So I tried to leave for a cheaper country. Well, guess what? I'm back in Israel. Eilat, specifically.

Long story. But I did manage to snag a few days in the Sinai. I lounged on the beach, snorkeled at Dahab, smoked a ton of sheesha, was cheated sideways by the Egyptians within hours of my arrival, and met up with Kieran and his buddy Sarah Wickstrom from back home, long enough to climb Mt Sinai and swap two months' worth of backpack tales.

I've still got a load of pictures and stories from the Twice-Promised Land. But maybe you guys wouldn't mind a break from Israel. Here are some photos.

This is Alexandria Beach.

Coral reefs line the east coast of the Sinai peninsula, and the diving is world-class. And the stark, bleak red ridges of the Sinai's mountains form a stunning backdrop to the piercing blue sky and sea.

The inevitable result: beach resorts. There are dozens, with more going up every day: kitschy, desert-toned hotel blocks that look like social housing units neo-designed in the style of Ottoman palaces.

Alexandria Beach is one of the last stretches still unmarred by those tacky money-sucks. Just huts of rattan, dried reeds, and wood, with a large common pavilion framed by colorful embroideries, huge cushions, and swinging hammocks.

The beach was empty.

A few weeks ago, the fence between Gaza and Egypt was blown up by Hamas militants. Dozens, maybe hundreds, escaped into Egypt. Israel put out a warning to its citizens: Do not go holidaying in the Sinai. Since the Sinai's clientèle is 90% Israeli, the tourist trade dried up overnight.

Most Sinai Egyptians speak Hebrew. This isn't just due to the tourist trade; the Sinai was occupied by Israel from 1967 (they conquered the peninsula in the Six-Day War) till 1982, when it was returned to Egypt in a "Land for Peace" deal.

It was a bit of a mind-fuck, after two months in a Palestinian hostel, to wake up on Alexandria Beach and hear an Egyptian Arab address me: "Boker tov", or "Good morning"- in Hebrew.

I met up with Kieran and Sarah at Dahab. I'd spent the previous day snorkeling, though I obviously have no pictures of that. The snorkeling turned out poorly; I've run out of contacts, and snorkeling masks can't fit over glasses and maintain an airtight seal around the eyes. Salt water kept leaking in, and I gave up quickly.

And getting to Dahab... that's a whole 'nother story. Suffice it to say, when I was done screaming at all the Egyptians who tried (and succeeded) to cheat me, I was wishing that Israel had never given the Sinai back.

We made it to Mt Sinai. There was a monastery at its foot, called St. Katherine's, that contained the Burning Bush. You know, the bush that Moses talked to while it was on fire. That's the pathetic looking shrub in the photo.

We considered lighting it on fire to see if it would speak.

Mt Sinai. The Arabs call it Jebel Musa, or the mountain of Moses. There are two ways up. (1) There's a winding, gently sloping path that S-curves up the mountain, lined with refreshment stands set up by local Bedouin (broke-ass desert Arabs). (2) The aptly-named Steps of Repentance: thousands of steps built from appropriately-sized slabs of mountain rock going straight up, pieced together by a single monk back in the day. It took him... a while.

We took the first path. It meets up with the Steps of Repentance anyway, some 700 steps from the summit, and that was good enough for us.

This was about halfway up. And no, I didn't try any flying kicks.

Some Bedouin refreshment shops just below the summit. I love this picture; it looks like a "base camp" scene from an RPG or MMORPG. In this shop, you get mana potions, in this shop you repair your armor... fuck, I'm a nerd.

The church on top of Mt Sinai. I tried to imagine the voice of God thundering out of the heavens, calling to a cowering Moses in the midst of a swirling tempest- and failed. Not stoned enough.

Nice view, though.

If you peer really carefully, you'll see a minuscule string of buildings running through the crack of those two big ridges.

Some broke-ass Bedouin on the mountain top. We sat down and shared the white-robed towelhead's ciggy, which was actually a joint filled with some poor quality hash.

The Bedouin actually do sleep on the summit. There were blankets and mattresses laid out along the side of the church. This impressed us all; nights on a desert mountain can be... chilly.

Nothing says "Vancoverites were here" quite like an Inukshuk. We even found a Napoleon's-hat-shaped stone for the big guy.

And what would a day on Mt Sinai without reading from the Bible? Kieran read from Exodus the verses about the gift of the Ten Commandments and the Golden Calf. I read- with great relish- a passage from Ezekiel called "A Lament for Egypt"- basically, a prediction of the Lord laying waste to Egypt with fire and sword, ending with the Pulp Fictionesque words: "I will lay my vengeance upon them, and they will know that I am the Lord."

I was still sore about all those Egyptians cheating me. Was? I mean: am. I hate Egyptians. May all their sons be cripples, and all their daughters barren. May their lying tongues rot away and their greedy, grasping hands shrivel into lifeless claws. May a just God wreak upon them a righteous fury. May their bodies blanket the earth and reach to the sky.

This is Eilat. You can barely see it spread out on the rim of the sea, with the Israeli navy patrol boat out in the foreground.

Why am I here? Basically, the visa issued at the Israel-Egypt border does not allow you to cross the Suez canal. You are allowed only to travel within the Sinai. If you want to travel to Cairo, you need a special visa that can only be issued in Israel.

Of course, I only found out about this when I was already in the Sinai. So now, I'm back in Israel, waiting for the Egyptian consulate to open... on Sunday. And this was after a four-hour search at the border by overzealous Jewish teenagers pulling my bag apart and asking me questions about my family, my education, my time in Lebanon, my Palestinian head scarves, and my collection of books, which unfortunately contained a booklet about the Palestinian victims of Israeli torture.

My favorite part of the interrogation went like this:

Q: What do you want to do with your degree?

Sean: I don't know.

Q: How can you not know? You were in university for what...

Sean: Six years. Look, it's not a crime if I don't know what to do with my life.

Q: *quickly, and with glee* I didn't say it was a crime.

(This was one of those standard interrogation ploys, meant to fluster a questionee. The usual context would be a person saying: "Going to the West Bank is not a crime!" and by quickly retorting: "I didn't say it was a crime", the interrogator confuses the questionee into perhaps admitting that they have Palestinian sympathies.)

Sean: Well... My parents think it's a crime.

The interrogator stared, then burst out laughing. I think I was home-free after that.

I couldn't (and still don't) understand why the Egyptians at the border crossing aren't allowed to hand out the full visas. I've lost many brain cells trying to reason it out. In the end, whatever. Hakuna Matata. If there's anything I've learned from my travels, it's that (1) crossing borders, especially of self-important countries like Egypt and Israel, is always a red-tape obstacle course, and (2) there is something about the concept of "efficiency" that the Arab character finds utterly alien.

Thoughts from Jerusalem

2008-02-28T22:26:00.000-08:00

There's some Jewish kosher law: Do not cook a kid in its mother's milk.

I'm not sure that I've reproduced this faithfully. But the general gist is: Do Not Mix Meat and Dairy.

There are a few other laws. Fish without scales are unkosher- so mussels, clams, etc. And pigs- "Riiight, some kind of wonderful, magical animal, Lisa,"- they're a big no-no.

No clam chowder? No grilled pork chops, no sizzling, greasy bacon, no Christmas ham? Would the Chinese restaurants have char siew? And what about fettucini alfredo with shrimp?

And most importantly: would McDonalds have quarter-pounders with cheese and bacon?

The answer is "No".

In addition, a Big Mac meal- minus cheese- costs about 11 bucks. We called it a "Jew Value Meal."

***

The Mandarin is a Chinese restaurant in West Jerusalem. It was started in 1958; supposedly the oldest in Israel. More importantly, it's non-kosher- so it serves up char siew, sweet & sour pork, and all that good gentile stuff.

The guy who runs it is named Billy. Born a Christian in Hong Kong, Billy immigrated to Israel at the age of 15 with his parents. He hinted that his parents did missionary work, and he's been here 30 years. As Billy took the order, the stereo played a tinny Mandarin version of the hymn "This is the Day that the Lord has made."

I couldn't resist bombarding Billy with questions. The variety of the Chinese diaspora has never ceased to boggle my mind. Here was a Honky who spoke the most butchered, helicoptering, sing-songy, fresh-off-the-boat, Tai Mai Shu, Chicky-flied-lice brand of English you'd expect from the waiters at Hon's in Richmond... and shouted at his Arab accountant in fluent Hebrew in between orders.

Billy is actually an Israeli citizen. More importantly, he has served in the IDF. I didn't press him on this, or on the details of being a Chinese Christian in a Jewish army. And at 45, his army days are over.

But let's logic out some dates.

It's 2008. 30 years ago was 1978; he would have been 15. If he was given citizenship and drafted at 18, it would have been 1981: the year before Israel first invaded Lebanon. I wondered if young Billy, who would have spoken a shaky Hebrew and felt no affiliation to the tribal Jewish jingoism of those days, was in a tank on the outskirts of Beirut, watching the tribes of Lebanon duke it out.

And he would have had a front row seat for the Occupation. He would certainly have seen action in the Second Intifada as a reservist. He might even have fought Hezbollah in Lebanon, in 2006.

More questions, more answers. The Chinese community of Israel is, according to him, about thirty. This seems unbelievable: there are so many foreign workers in Israel today. Billy replied that these were migrant workers; Chinese citizens are few and far between.

Are there Chinese Jews? Yes, he said, two kinds. Some are descended form a tiny, age old community that fled the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, and made their way east into China. Over the centuries, they interbred with the locals, took Chinese names, and built synagogues in the shape of pagodas. Some tiny percentage survived, and came to Israel.

The second source was more recent. After the Holocaust, most Jews went to Israel and America. A tiny number went to China, took Chinese spouses, and had Chinese-looking Jewish kids.

And do you feel Chinese or Israeli?

Billy sighed, his answer confused. "Here, I am Israel," he said. (Not "I am Israeli", but "I am Israel.") "I have been here so many years, I feel Israel. I serve in army, I speak Hebrew. We no celebrate Chinese New Year. Here, is Jewish country, you no feel."

No oranges and new clothing and massive round table feasts? No red packets? He seemed amused at my dismay.

"But!" he continued. "Sometime I go China, Hong Kong. Then I feel. I feel Chinese again. But here, no feel."

So you do feel Chinese! Do you feel more Chinese, or more Israeli? I don't know why I was so intent on this. I think I was trying to answer something about myself, and on behalf of Kevin, and Gavin, and all my banana brethren back home.

Billy shrugged eloquently. "It is like you," he pointed at me suddenly. "Are you Chinese or America?" He thought I was from America. "You are Chinese on outside. Inside, you are America. Inside, I am Israel. But is difficult, because China, I also feel."

"If China fight America, who you fight for? See?" He seemed gleeful, as if he had sprung some kind of verbal trap. "If Israel fight China, I run to church and hide. I cannot fight. I cannot choose."

Meh. Part of me was satisfied by this stalling answer. Identity is any individual's greatest crisis, and the divided loyalties of the hyphenated identity, in my experience, defy articulation. I felt vindicated, somehow, that this Chinese-Israeli felt the same way.

And you feel welcome here?

He waved the question away. "I am Israel. In Jerusalem, is different, maybe. But in Tel Aviv, in Haifa, everywhere, people welcome you. You not Jewish... well, is still ok. You serve in army, you want to be Israel, they say, ok, come."

"But is also hard to be Christian," he went on, not realizing that this hint at exclusion contradicted the earlier claim of belonging. "Because is Jewish country." He wouldn't elaborate further.

All of this said much about Israeli attitudes toward migrants, though it revealed more questions than answers. Apparently, secular Israelis don't care. Being a Zionist is more important than being Jewish, though it was best to be both. Religious Jews are straight-up less welcoming. And the moral climate of a Jewish country can often ostracize non-Jews. Like Chinese Christians.

Above all, I found Billy's faith and his Christian connection to the Holy Land most interesting. In order to remain in Israel, he was willing to serve in the Occupation, and abide by a nationalist ideology of no resonance to his Chinese roots or his Christian beliefs. In order to live as a Christian, he was willing to die for Israel- a country that would always keep him, a non-Jew, at arm's length.

***

Kieran likes to joke that there are two kinds of Arabic music.

(1) Koranic recitations. An old cleric's thin, ululating voice droning verses from the Koran. There are whole radio freeks dedicated to this garbled garbage (especially withering at 8 on a hungover morning ), and the felafel & hummus joint down the road has its television permanently turned to the Islamic MTV: music videos of chanting, white-robed clerics superimposed over images of Mecca or crowds of men praying with their asses in the air and bouncing their foreheads off the ground.

(2) "Habibi" songs. "Habibi" means "my friend" in Arabic, though it also has intimate connotations... like "my dear", "my love", or "my comrade". Arabic pop music is built on a carbon-copy stream of simpering love ballads, each containing the word "Habibi" as its centerpiece- the way hip-hop uses "nigger".

Imagine the most irritating dying-swan ballad ever upchucked by a teenage pop princess. Combine this with a synthesized snake-charmer drumbeat, and the kind of affected, pseudo-coy, ululating Arabic mating call you imagine a virgin in a Turkish harem would belt out, hips gyrating, before being deflowered by the fat, mustachioed sultan.

"Dirka dirka Muhammad jihad habibiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii...*bomp-ti-bomp-ti-bomp-bomp-bomp*"

The first time you hear this, you think: "Ah! How very rhythmic, how sensuous!" Somewhere around your 839th same-same-but-different tune, you start to fantasize about the Israeli army bursting in and filling the stereo with lead.

The best example of this is the Lebanese diva Fairouz. The Lonely Planet: "a voice of silk and flame." This is apt enough; listening to her is like being wrapped in a sheet and set on fire.

The fanciful, literary half of me that takes guidebooks at face-value and romanticizes ancient ruins wants to believe that Arabic ballads are sensuous and exotic- you know... the sultry, unveiled passion of the harem and the lingering serenity of the desert... that kind of fatuous nonsense.

The other half of me, that listens to Irish punk and makes vicious comments about my girl friends' dates, thinks that the first half is an idiot.

When I get back to Vancity, I am going to find my iPod, jam the headphones over my head, put Flogging Molly on repeat, punch something, and thank God for real music.

***

Israelis and Palestinians have absurd names.

Let's start with the Palestinians. I'm not just talking about the Muhammads, the Hassans, the Husseins, and the Alis. Or even the Osamas.

We were doing some film-work, interviewing the workers and patients of a psychology clinic for torture victims of Israeli jails. The psychologist's name was "Thawra"- which means "revolution". Her patient's name was "Falastin", or "Palestine". And back at our hostel (run by a man named Osama), the handyman repairing the lights was "Abu Jihad".

Just to be clear, Arab men, as a sign of respect, address each other with the title "Abu"- Father of- followed by the name of their eldest son. So Abu Jihad probably has a son named Holy War.

Mass movements throw up names like this. You recreate your identity by changing your name. Hippies: Liberty, Rainbow, Phoenix, Dharma; or Lennon, Dylan, Janis. Or blacks and their Back-to-Africa pseudo-Swahili: Ashanti and Shaniqua and Kwame and Kunta-Kinte-Himbohambe-Himbohambo. The Palestinians reshape their names and identities to reflect the Intifada.

And the Israelis. If you study the early days of Israel and Zionism, it's identical to the Palestinian struggle today- complete with the child-of-war names. Jews were changing their Yiddish ghetto names (Hershel Finkelsteinkosherburger?) to heroic Hebrew names, after biblical prophets and kings.

And so your bus driver's last name might be Dror (Freedom), or Ben-Tsyon (Son of Zion), or Ben-David. His first name might be Barak (lightning), or the name of some Old Testament warrior: Gideon or Samson.

I wonder if there's an Israel Ben-Israel out there. Can you imagine a Canadian named "Trudeau Son of the Yukon"? Or "Alberta Freedom"?

Nowadays, most Israelis, secure in their national identity, go for non-biblical, monosyllabic, unisex names: Tal, or Nir, or Gal. My favorite is "Mor". Think of the possibilities in the sack. "Give me MOR! I need MOR! Oh, MOR! MOR! MOR!"

Most Israeli names, however, are hideous and jarring, all guttural consonants and tonsil-jiggling. The girls' names are especially awful and always masculine sounding; they generally end with "T" or "R" because Hebrew feminine nouns tend to end with those letters.

Smadar. Ugh. Or Shachar, the "ch" being a guttural throat-hawk, like "ccchhhhhhhh". "Shachar" is especially tragic because it means "dawn", a lovely name in English.

The worst by far is "Orly", which to me is the quintessential fat chick's name. It sounds like a combination of "Porky", "Oily," and "Roly-poly", all of which have connotations of morbid obesity.

Lately, I've been signing my name onto visitors' books as "Yochanan Ben-Tsona".

It means Sean, Son of a Bitch.

Jewish-Jewish-Jewish

2008-02-23T13:42:00.000-08:00

I was reading a book the other day about the Hasidim, or the ultra-orthodox Jews. Yeah, these guys. The Fiddler On the Roof clones with the twirly locks of temple-hair, the Gimli beards, and the 18th century overcoats, doing their best to ignore the intrusion of the 21st century.

"There's Jewish." An interviewed Hasidic woman declared. "Then there's Jewish-Jewish. We're Jewish-Jewish-Jewish."

The Hasids are beyond satire; already the brunt of a million cover stories and jokes- especially by the secular Israelis, who despise them with a passion usually reserved for Hezbollah and Hamas.

And they're everywhere in Jerusalem. The "segregated" buses, where women and men sit on opposite sides. Girls with a plain, unobtrusive prettiness, in shapeless skirts and shawls, who'll grow old before their time bearing children and making matzo. Men in bearskin hats and silk bathrobes hauling ass for the Western Wall on Shabbat- spindly legs pumping, faces pale and pinched from generations of breeding within a stagnant gene pool- with their plain, wig-wearing wives and cartoonish flocks of offspring in tow.

Most travelers I've met are ambivalent to the Hasids. If anything, they're an entertaining sideshow to the Jerusalemite carnival. The Hasids are the product of a way of life that evolved in the dirt-poor, Yiddish-speaking Jewish ghettos of eastern Europe in the 17th-19th centuries. In the absence of upward and outward mobility in their host nations, the ghetto Jews prized religious learning above all else.

Their lives have become so built around the Jewish Torah that they've seen no reason to update themselves for the modern world. If anything, they've recreated the 18th century Yiddish ghetto in Israel, so that they can go on studying Torah in exactly the same way they did back in the good ol' days, when they were being persecuted by Poles and massacred by Cossacks.

I couldn't even begin to tell you the bizarre tales I've heard of- and experiences I've had with- the Hasids. Travelers swap these stories with relish.

It's whispered that because truly observant Jews aren't allowed to do any work on the Sabbath, some Hasids get a non-Jew to follow them around the house just to open their doors.

And that some Hasidic couples, due to some bizarre biblical ruling, will not touch each other physically during sex- and fuck with the man's penis going through a hole in a sheet.

Hasidic women crop their hair short and wear wigs... although one of Judaism's great living sages recently declared wigs impure according to religious law.

My buddy Jeremy once had his loins blessed by a rabbi, who soaked his groin with water and called upon the Lord to strengthen his seed.

I've been chased down on the street by Hasidic men who hand me little cards printed with the Seven Laws of Noah, which as a gentile I am supposedly ordered by God to follow... even though, they add piously, and without an ounce of self-congratulation or reproach, I do not have the privilege of following the 613 Laws of Judaism.

More recently, I made the mistake of taking pictures in Mea Shearim, the Hasidic enclave in Jerusalem, during the Sabbath (No "work" on the Sabbath!). Worse, I was snapping photos of the synagogue. I was promptly chased out of the neighborhood by a crowd of snowball-throwing youngsters. And I hear that when it isn't snowing in Jerusalem, they use stones.

For secular Israelis, it goes beyond swapping tales about the Hasids' comically retrogressive lifestyle. Kibbutzniks, the Israelis who live and work in Israel's communal, quasi-socialist farms, particularly despise them. Why?

The ultra-orthodox don't serve in the Israeli army. Since those who attend yeshiva (religious schools) are exempt from the army, most Hasids hole themselves in yeshivas until 45, the age at which men become ineligible for the draft.

The Hasids say (tongue-not-in-cheek) that their prayers help persuade God to watch over Israel, and that if God turns His face and allows the Arabs to wipe the state off the map, the study of Torah is the only thing that will keep Jewish culture alive for another 2000 years.

There are exceptions. There's a battalion in the West Bank made completely out of Hasidic Jews. They get time off to pray and study the Torah, their food is koshered to some extreme degree, they have the side-curls hanging down under their combat helmets, and they have an excellent record of shit-kicking Palestinians. It's part of an attempt by the government to ease the ultra-orthodox into the armed forces, though the Hasid rabbis overwhelmingly oppose it.

More absurdly, most of the men don't work. They just study the Jewish scriptures, and commentaries on the scriptures, and commentaries on the commentaries. Every day, all day long (except for the Sabbath), until the age of 45. Until then, it falls to the Missus to cook, clean, raise the brood of Jewlings, and bring the bread home.

I've been begged countless times for donations to ultra-Orthodox charities, serving whole neighborhoods below the poverty line.

"There are many poor children in Israel, families living in poverty, and the government won't provide for them," said one beardo, with his jangling coin box.

You mean Hasidic children?

"Yes, our children. They need..."

Isn't that your job? And if it's not, it certainly ain't mine. Get a job, or have less children.

Weird politics too. Most of the Hasids are- as you might expect- Far Right wing. Like, "Death to the Arabs" right wing. "G-D gave Israel to Abraham" right wing. They pray for all the Arabs to die; they just want other Jews to do the fighting.

There's a bizarre minority, however, called the Naturei Karta, that wants the State of Israel to be destroyed. Apparently, by creating Israel before the return of the Messiah, the Zionists have made some kind of unholy fuck-up that true Jews should not be party to. And so Jews from the Naturei Karta and other sects participated in Ahmedinejad's recent Holocaust denial conference, and burn Israeli flags on Independence Day. One even served as Yasser Arafat's "Minister for Jewish Affairs".

To top it all off, the Hasids are increasing relative to the secular Israelis. "Be fruitful and multiply," says the Bible... and Hasids are very fruitful. Ten-kids-per-family-fruitful. Most secular Israelis have two or three.

So what do you do with a society-within-a-society that (1) leeches on social security nets, (2) without contributing to the economy, (3) has jingoistic foreign policy views based on a literal reading of the Bible, but (4) won't defend the country, and (5) are increasingly gaining the demographic power to dictate government policy?

It's easy for me to laugh at them, and at the secular Israeli's predicament, from my high gentile horse. But the State of Israel's raison d'etre is the protection of Jews. Israel exists so that- unlike the years before 1948- the Hasids can worship God their way without threats from Cossacks, Nazis and all those other peoples who got a little too antsy about "the Jew among you".

But what happens when those the state must protect are the ones endangering the state?

Shit! Missed a good one.

2008-02-22T23:47:00.001-08:00

I skipped out on the weekly Friday Protest at Bil'in yesterday. Been there, done that. Right?

Wrong!

If only I'd known it was the 3rd year anniversary of the beginning of the protests and that between 1000-2500 people would be attending, instead of the usual 50-200...

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!

Here is the link from the ISM, whose report on the event is cut-and-paste from Ha'aretz, easily the most reputable of Israel's newspapers.

20 activists wounded, one in the head.

Missed a good one. I'm so, so, so mad.

Death From Above

2008-02-21T12:52:00.000-08:00

This is the Israeli Air Force (IAF) Museum. Did I say "museum"? I meant: "candy store". It's a huge tarmac filled with over a hundred mothballed warplanes, anti-aircraft batteries and missile-launchers, helicopters, and various forms of ordnance.

Oh, boys and their toys. I haven't had this much fun since I was a six-year-old in the Transformers aisle of Toys R' Us. I swear to God, there is no better way to entertain a guy than to set him loose in a field of war machines.

"As an eagle stirs up her nest, flutters over her young,
spreads abroad her wings, takes them, bears them on her
wings..."- Deuteronomy 32:11

The Bible is Israel's favorite source for jingoistic slogans. And it works.

The insignia of the IAF's squadrons. Hornets, dragons, and long-horned rams with wings, oh my.

A Boeing 707 converted into a theatre. Apparently, this was the plane used to transport Israeli troops to the rescue of the Israeli hostages at Entebbe. I was then treated to a short film about the IAF, complete with cheesy, over-synthesized Top Gun music, frizzy 80's haircuts, the usual repertoire of Danger Zone aerial acrobatics, and dull-voiced, recruitment-video narration.

The IAF is probably the most formidable air force in the world, and no amount of cynicism or try-hard humor can downplay its battle-record.

It has destroyed over 1200 enemy aircraft; over 600 in dogfights. And how many has it lost? 15 in dogfights. 15. That's a ratio of 41:1.

The video didn't say anything about aircraft lost outside of dogfights... say, to anti-aircraft fire... which means that this number is likely much higher than 15. Ssshhhhhhhh.

My favorite part of the video? "The Israeli Air Force's actions are consistent with the values of Judaism."

An interviewed pilot also declared: "Of course, we want the kill. But when the fight is over, and the kill is scored, I like to see the [enemy's parachute] canopy open. [Meaning: he ejected and survived.] I think a lot of guys feel the same way."

I think that the point of the video was to showcase (1) the might of the Israeli air force, and (2) the Israeli pilot as a chivalrous, compassionate warrior: one who fights without malice, and kills without losing his humanity.

In other words:

(1) We kill Arabs good.

(2) But we feel bad about it, so it's okay.

Humble beginnings. At the beginning of 1948, the Jews had a tiny, hodgepodge fleet of leisure planes, aircraft parts abandoned by the British, and rickety contraptions left over from the days of the Wright Brothers. They used all of them. The plane above was used on "bombing" missions, meaning: Jews would throw grenades and fire handguns while hanging out the open windows.

A sea-plane donated to the Jews in 1948 by a lawyer. Beggars can't be choosers.

Eventually, the Jews got their hands on real planes. They built them from leftover parts. They bought and begged them from any country that would sell them. They broke them down into parts and smuggled them with grain convoys into Israel. This is a Spitfire, of Battle of Britain fame.

I skipped over an assload of planes to get to the ones that Israel actually used to kill Arabs.This one did the job for two decades (1962-1982).

It's a Dassault Mirage IIICJ, a French warplane. It's not too well-known that for years, the Israelis almost exclusively used jets built by France.

This one scored 13 kills. 8 Syrians and 5 Egyptians, all Soviet-made MIGs of various make. The first in 1967 and the last in 1974.

Here's another 13-killer. If you're wondering about the writing, Israel began to sell off its Mirages to developing world militaries in the 80s. This one went to Argentina. Argentina later sold the old warhorse back to the IAF for $1.

The other member of the IAF's hall of fame: the American-made McDonnell Douglas F-4E Phantom, Uncle Sam's Cold War workhorse. Israeli Phantoms shot down over 100 enemy planes over the years.

This is a Kfir, one of Israel's attempts at a homegrown plane. They somehow never obtained the fame and scoresheet of the IAF's French and American imports.

In Singapore, I spent a few months, as a 13 year old, in the Air branch of the National Cadet Corps- Singapore's Hitler Youth. They gave us folders listing the specs of all of Singapore's warplanes, and made us memorize them under pain of death.

This busy, bulbous craft was the first I memorized, and I will remember it on my deathbed. It's an A4 Skyhawk- the Kris Draper of the warplane world. It'll fly escort, run ground support, recon, shoot up an SAM, and occasionally, chip in with a dogfight kill. I love you, A4 Skyhawk.

Probably the most modern craft on the field: the McDonnell Douglas F-15A Eagle.

Eagle's asshole.

The IAI Lavi, Israel's last, most spectacular failure at a homegrown product. Despite burning buckets of taxpayer shekels, developers were never able to make the Lavi perform comparably to foreign warplanes. After four years (1982-1986), the government pulled the plug.

The missile mount on the Lavi's wing tip.

The museum had a section dedicated to enemy aircraft: mostly MIGs, since Arab states were supplied by the Soviet Union. For the most part, Israel furnished this portion by buying MIG models used by Egypt and Syria from Soviet-supplied air forces outside the Mid East.

Two exceptions.

The plane above is a MIG-21- the AK-47 of the flying world. It was flown into Israel in 1966 by an Iraqi defector. (You might note that the plane's number is 007.) The Israelis picked it apart, and what it learned gave its pilots the edge on the Arab competition.

Ditto with this one, the MIG-23. In 1989, a Syrian defector flew it into northern Israel.

The remains of an Egyptian MIG.

We sure could use this beast up in the Yukon. The plaque in front of it reported that a chopper of this model once picked up an entire Egyptian radar station and flew away with it.

I have no idea what this thing is, but those missiles are self-explanatory. I had to take a photo of it because it looked like some stereotypical vehicle from Command and Conquer.

The "Gundish". Basically, it's four 23mm cannons mounted on an APC. Cheap, mobile, and surprisingly accurate, it was used by the Syrians to great effect... something like 30% of all Israeli aircraft it hit were shot down.

Some Egyptian donkeydick reassembled by the Israelis. Call me ignorant, but it seems like overkill when a missile is as long as the planes it's intended to shoot down.

This garbled piece of junk looks like it fell off a construction crane. Nonetheless, it's actually a sophistimacated radar detection system and missile launcher, all in one bizarre, alien package. Search and destroy!

I kid you not. An ugly, muddy corner of the Museum grounds housed a caged collection of peacocks, ostriches, hens, geese, and ducks. Above it, a plaque magnanimously declared that Jews must learn to share the skies with birds, even though: "The millions of migrating birds passing over Israel sometimes threaten the safety of our aircraft."

It was called "The Winged Safari".

I'm not sure what I found most funny about this absurd display. Perhaps it was the spectacle of squat, squawking poultry and lithe, striding ostriches bumbling around the same pathetic little dirt patch. Or the anthropocentricism it seemed so comically oblivious to. Or maybe, it seemed to me an appropriate statement about the future of the world, with nature caged behind barbed wire, surrounded by gawking tourists and machines of war.

Perhaps it was simply the delicious irony that the museum of the greatest air force in the world should contain an enclosure completely filled with flightless birds.

A couple of years ago, at a Holocaust memorial ceremony in Poland, Israel flew three fighter jets over Auschwitz. This was despite repeated requests by the Polish government for the Israelis not to do so.

The stated message: if these warplanes had been there 70 years ago, six million Jews would not have died. The real message: Fuck you, Poland. The majority of Jewish Holocaust victims were from Poland, whose citizens could not (some say "would not") lift a finger to prevent the slaughter. Israel inherited the grudge.

The Polish request was not unreasonable. Imagine Australian jets flying over Turkey to commemorate Gallipoli, or German planes over the graveyards of the Somme.

But the Israeli Occupation's last moral trump card is the Holocaust. Israel never misses the opportunity to remind the world that the survivors of Auschwitz should be allowed to do anything.

Same Shit, Different Friday

2008-02-15T10:10:00.000-08:00

The Wall outside of Bil'in. "That's not a wall," you say. "That's just a fence!"

Read the sign.

How did we get so close? Read on.

Same shit, different Friday.

The Israelis are trying a new tactic. Instead of standing their soldiers out in front of the fence and exposing them to physical instigation and close-up media scrutiny, they cluster behind the fence, using large concrete barriers to shield themselves from incoming stones thrown and slung-shot at them by the Palestinian youths.

The protesters took the opportunity to march right up to the fence. Here, you can see them trundling one of the gates open.

Remembering lessons learned from previous protests, I tagged along behind a Brazillian cameraman, with his glaring yellow press jacket. I would now be immune to rubber bullets!

Right?

Wrong, motherfucker!

Too many people had begun to cluster around the gate. The Israelis fired a round of rubber bullets into the crowd. Most whizzed by (probably intentionally), but next to me, there was a loud CRACK and a shower of plastic bits. I didn't bother to follow up on this, and ran for the hills together with everyone else.

Later, I found out that the bullet had smoked our cameraman's vidcam. A crowd gathered around him... he was bleeding from one ear. At first, I thought the sound of gunfire had popped his eardrum, but in retrospect, I think that shrapnel from his camera had cut him in the earlobe.

Both man and camera remained functional for the remainder of the protest.

After a brief meeting, the protesters marched off the road to a section of the wall that was more lightly guarded.

There were two Israeli soldiers there, who didn't take kindly to the sudden invasion. More rubber bullets ensued. Here's everyone taking cover behind rocks and trees, and Justin taking a photo of the soldiers behind the fence, not twenty meters away.

It occurred to me afterward that the only person not under cover here was me.

The soldiers behind the fence, pointing out potential troublemakers (read: target). If they point at you, (A) you raise your arms in the air and freeze, (B) drop to the ground and crawl away, or (C) run.

Internationals mostly get away with (A).

After about 20 minutes of this stalemate, the protesters retreated...

... and the stone-slingers advanced. They pelted the Israelis with rocks, who responded with periodic bursts of rubber bullets. Biblical vs. 21st century technology.

Those slingers knew their craft. They were positioned behind a small hillock... low enough to see their targets behind the wall, and to aim and fire with remarkable accuracy... and high enough for them to duck behind when the Israelis returned fire.

A note about this video: Justin and I were the last two whiteys up in front. At one point, we were rushing up to get better photos, and a rubber bullet rippled the grass a meter in front of Justin's running legs.

I won't lie. I was starting to get nervous.

Stone-slingers up close.

The protesters advanced up the road once more, and resurrected the Semetic shouting match, consisting of such conversational gems as: "You are a fag!" and "Your mother is the village whore!"

A tire is casually and jokingly lit on fire, and the Palestinians stage a few shots for the press.

This is the picture that would make the morning paper. You'd almost think it was a real protest.

This is absurd. Here's a Japanese activist (and this one's actually an activist) playing the hero. He's chasing down a tire at the base of the fence, trying to drag it over to our side so that the Palestinians can set it on fire later for another photo-op.

The Israelis fired on him. A bullhorn blared: "Do not touch! DO NOT TOUCH!"

The Jap ignored them, and kept going after the tire, until he finally pulled it back across the fence. The Palestinians cheered and heckled the Israelis mercilessly.

Pointless and childish? I don't know. In a system of total control like a military occupation, any small act of defiance you can throw in the face of your occupier is a victory- whether it's throwing a stone, stealing a tire, or just heckling. It represents a crack in the system of control.

This was fun. A group of Israeli soldiers had snuck across the Wall and hidden behind a Palestinian's house, waiting for the signal to flank the protesters.

The protesters found them first. Check out the following video.

Caught in the act. Poor Israeli kids. They don't know what the fuck to do.

Watch the crowd of press swoop in on the fight side of the screen, as the surrounding protesters bang bottles and chant. The Leader (the guy with the flag) takes the opportunity to scold the Israelis for trespassing.

Face-to-face clash. The soldiers stand around sheepishly, waiting for orders to withdraw. Meanwhile, half the Palestinians try to pick a fight, while the other half hold the first half back and gloatingly tell the Israelis to "Go home! Go home!" The Leader, sensing a camera behind him, launched himself without provocation into the face of the Israeli commander, staging a "confrontation" for the media scrum.

The soldiers are "persuaded" to leave... but frankly, surrounded by righteous indignation and faced with the possibility of a scuffle in which their long-range firepower would be rendered useless, they have no choice.

The Palestinians follow and heckle them all the way back to the wall. On the way, a crowd of kids in the distance hurl rocks at them, and the Israelis opened fire on them.

Howls of mocking laughter and taunts of "Hero! Hero" and "Robin Hood!" ensued.

The soldiers are chased back to the wall. The stalemate resumes.

Three Palestinians decided to use Justin and I as human shields. We decided to let them.

So we stood on top of a rock that added a good meter to our height, allowing us to better shield the Palestinians behind us... arms folded, shooting the shit, while the Palestinians crouched behind us and hurled stones over the fence.

It lasted about a minute before a soldier lost his patience and pointed the barrel of his rifle at the hazy area between Justin's body and mine.

A conversation:

Sean: "So, you realize that we're human shields."

Justin: "Yep! Man up!"

Sean: "I don't want to get shot."

Justin: "You aren't getting shot. They're rubber bullets."

Sean: "What? You ever been hit by a rubber bullet?"

Justin: "No."

Sean: "Me neither, and I don't ever plan to."

*The soldier raised his gun and aimed at us.*

Sean: "You see that-"

Justin: "Yeah, I see it-"

Sean: "Time to go."

Justin: "Yep."

We casually leaped off the rock, just in time for a round of gunfire to split the air.

I love Fridays.

Kaoru Kishida, Activist

2008-02-14T22:58:00.001-08:00

On my last trip to the Friday Protest at Bil'in, I mentioned that a Japanese tourist had been popped in the eye socket with a rubber bullet and had temporarily lost his sight.

His name is Kaoru Kishida- a laid back forty-something who plays a mean cover of Norwegian Wood. He's the guy to the right on the photo above.

KK was back in the hostel that evening, with a plastic bubble taped over his swollen-shut eye. He kept- as he had before- to the Japanese crowd, and inquiries about his pirate patch were met by stoic, dude-change-the-subject-already shrugs.

As far as I could tell, his English vocabulary was limited to Beatles lyrics, and the only conversation I ever exchanged with him went like this:

"How's your eye, bro?"

"Er. Er... not... not good!"

Anyway, the International Solidarity Movement just wrote up a brief update on KK on their website. Besides reporting that he may not regain his eyesight after surgery, the ISM described the guy as an "activist". The exact words: "Kaoru Kishida, a Japanese activist shot in the eye..."

Ugh.

Kaoru Kishida, as far as I know, was not an activist. He was a tourist. He was an independent traveler who happened to be staying at the Faisal Hostel, and was roped into visiting the Bil'in Protest by peer pressure.

This happens every week.

Mieko, a Japanese activist who had married an Israeli and lived in the country 16 years, had been making the rounds with the Jap crowd, preaching Palestinian politics. She urged them to check out the Friday Protests.

Japanese are herd animals. If one Jap decides to go, chances are that the entire flock will blindly follow. As it does every week, Mieko's recruiting session snowballed into a big tour group day trip involving the hostel's entire Japanese contingent.

Kaoru had no idea what he was signing up for. I know this because Mieko was wringing her hands that evening, saying that she hadn't adequately warned those Japanese about the potential hazards of lining up against the Israeli army.

The man was a damned tourist.

But the ISM had to put their little spin on it, and make him a part of the propaganda war. And so civilian victims of suicide bombings are "soldiers of the nation", Palestinian militants are "martyrs", and Japanese tourists on an Intifada photo-op are "activists".

It's Friday, and I'm headed for Bil'in with Justin.

Last week, some Israeli soldier forgot to check his magazines before clipping them into his M16, and was spraying live bullets at the crowd. No casualties.

The link, again, is from the ISM website, so beware of bias. I prefer to think that a Jewish trooper was stressed and loaded the wrong clip... and that the Israeli army wasn't intentionally firing on unarmed protesters and Japanese tourists.

If I get capped today, I just want you all to know:

My name is Sean Low.

I am a backpacker and a dispassionate observer of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with no vested interest in the goals of either side. I am checking out the Intifada as a tourist experience, not as a political cause.

I am not a statistic, and I am not a pawn for your propaganda.

I am not a Zionist.

And I am not an activist.

And Man made God in His own Image

2008-02-12T05:18:00.000-08:00

This is the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, which celebrates the good news given to Mary by the archangel Gabriel: that she would bear the Son of God. It was to be the first case of artificial insemination in human history... or more likely, the most original cover-up ever invented by an unfaithful wife.

It's also been the subject of a million jokes, my favorite of which is:

Q: What did the Virgin Mary cry out in the sack?

A: Oh, God! Oh, GOD! OH, GOD!

This church, bar none, my favorite church of all time... and I've been to the Vatican, Notre Dame, and Westminster Abbey.

It's not the unique depictions of Mary and Gabriel carven into the church's frontal facade...

... or the colorful backdrop to the tabernacle and altar...

Rather, it's the "Our Lady" murals. The interior and surrounding cloister of the church are decorated by dozens of murals and mosaics, each depicting a single theme: the Virgin Mother and Child.

But more interestingly, each mural is designed and assembled by artists from a different nation- each displaying the cultural and political coloring of the nation that created it.

The Good Book says that God made Man in His own image.

Wrong. It's the other way round.

Oh, one more thing. The murals were predominantly done by Catholic nations, or Catholic communities in non-Catholic states.

Protestants. They're hopeless. I learned today that they don't even cross themselves in church.

There were some bread and butter offerings. Take this one from France... doesn't really push the envelope.

Justin came up to me at one point and said: "Dude, you're not going to like this. But the US made the best one, and Canada made the worst." The space-age one above is Our Lady of the USA. Personally, I think she looks like a ghost made out of tin foil, but there's still something arresting and futuristic about its composition and exploding-galaxy backdrop. Our Lady of Science Fiction.

This is Canada's. It looks like it was jigsawed together by a Grade 6 pottery class. My only excuse to Justin was that it was designed by a Quebecois.

I don't know who did this, but it's awesome.

Japan. Now, I'm sure there are still some folk in the the Red States who believe that Jesus was white. But this is ridiculous.

Sorry. This is ridiculous. Our Lady of Africa, by Uganda.

The outer cloister of the church, and more murals.

The Vatican sent a beautiful mosaic in, with some pope figuring prominently.

The Greeks may not be Catholic, but no one does iconography better than the Eastern Orthodox Churches. They invented Christianity, after all.

Nationalism comes into play. This is from the Ukraine, with Mary's adoring fans decked out in folk clothing.

Mary tries out an outfit in the colors of the Romanian flag.

The countryside, heraldry, and Celtic whorls of Ireland.

Spain's mural depicts Mary in Queen Amidala garments...

... as do those of her former colonial possessions, like Bolivia. Bolivian Mary is brown as a cocoa nut, however, while Spain's is white as porcelain.

Koreans. They play computer games and worship Jesus. There should be a Starcraft logo worked into this.

Indonesia. Mary's pretty hot in this one, if you like mocha-colored chicks.

China has the largest growing Christian population in the world, most of whom, I believe are Catholic.

Vietnam has a pretty generic one. But the Thai one... this one's for you, Nickie.

Best for last. Singapore had to throw its little "multiculturalism" slant in. There's a white kid, and an Indian kid, and a Malay kid, and a Chinese kid. Of course, Mary and Jesus are Chinese. Those Malays and Indians have to understand who's boss in Singapore.

Beach Drums

2008-02-12T01:53:00.000-08:00

We swung north to Tel Aviv about a week ago. Jerusalem was too cold. And I was tired of wearing plastic bags over my socks- the melting slush was constantly seeping into my $14 Syrian-made imitation Adidas sneakers.

And now that I'm back in freezy, breezy J-Town, I'm reminded of why I left.

I didn't take any photos of Tel Aviv. If you want to know what it looks like, take a jaunt down Robson, Granville, Commercial, Jericho Beach, or the waterfront. Tel Aviv is Vancouver- only everyone, from beggars to bus drivers to businessmen, is a Jew.

And I mean: "Everyone's a Jew", not "Everyone is Jewish". Jerusalem is Jewish. Tel Aviv is Vancouver with Hebrew street signs.

Tel Aviv's an anomaly in the Middle East... a secular, Western city. Western individualism and freewheeling hedonism. Secondhand English bookstores and coffee parlors. Clubs, pubs, skate shops, and theatre houses. Thai noodle bars, beach volleyball, dreadlocked hippies, pretentious scenesters, iPods, and regular bus schedules with set fares.

And girls. Normal girls. Not "girls with adjectives": ______ girls, Muslim girls, Maronite girls, Yemeni girls, girls with some weird aesthetic or religious quirk. Just girls.

Sure, teenage soldiers pack the bus stations, on route to their weekly deployments to the Bank or the Golan. Sure, the police will blow your bag up if you leave it unattended for more than ten minutes. Sure, every second person is carrying an automatic rifle over their shoulder like a handbag. Sure, there's a metal detector and a bored guard in front of every building.

Other than that, it's like home. Even the price of living. $30 a night for a dorm bed... Jesus Christ.

We stayed in a hostel called "HaYarkon 48", where, according to a dorm-mate (a verbose Jewish-Brazillian BBC technician), a pair of suicide bombers had stayed the night before collecting their forty virgins in two beachfront restaurants the following day, back during the Second Intifada.

Management should put that on the wall:

"HaYarkon 48: Best Youth Hostel in Tel Aviv 6 years running. Hot showers, huge kitchen, free cable and pool table. Recommended by the Lonely Planet and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade."

Sadly, we just missed Sextival, a three day exposition of... er... bedroom appliances and product demonstrations.

Anyway, one evening we headed down to the beach to listen to a drum convention. Every so often, a collection of drummers gather at the edge of one of the huge breakwater piers lining the beach front. For hours, they pound away, while young couples and families watch the sunset and hippies sway druggedly to the beat.

There were a few of us. Dave, a former Royal Army engineer from Edinburgh who now wanders the world living off odd jobs, smoking hash, and dispensing a collection of surprisingly hard-won, well-read wisdoms. James Ring, whose hard-drinking habits make him look a three-days-dead Heath Ledger. And a guy from Ireland with the unbearably Gaelic name of Ruaidhri Oisin Giblin. ("It's 'Rory'", Giblin would say. "You don't pronounce the A, the I, the D, or the H.") And Justin, my buddy from Beirut, who most recently had been dancing and chewing qat with tribesmen in Yemen.

In the summer, the beach looks like this:

These days, it looks a little more like this:

A Week in Jerusalem

2008-01-30T05:50:00.000-08:00

Beitar Jerusalem is the local football team. The prenom "Beitar" comes from a militant Jewish youth movement formed before the birth of modern Israel... which in turn took the name from a fortress whose Jewish defenders were slaughtered by the Roman legions before the birth of Christ.

Jews have long memories.

In other parts of the world, sport goes hand in hand with politics and ethnicity. For example, in Rome, SS Lazio was Mussolini's team of choice, and its fans- and some of its players- are right-wing fascists.

Beitar fans are Israel's Lazio fans. Religious, yarmulke-wearing, footie fanatics who spend Friday nights in the synagogue and Saturday nights in the stadium. They wear yellow-and-black skull-caps embroidered with the menorah and the Lion of Judah. And they hate Arabs.

They're the kind of Jews who won't vote for the Likud because it's not extreme enough.

They're the kind of Jews who want Israel to be a "Jewish State", not a "State of Jews"- read: theocracy.

Beitar fans booed during a memorial service for Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by a right wing zealot, Yigal Amir... and then sang raucous songs of praise for Amir.

Beitar fans are known for chanting "Death to the Arabs" for the full length of a football match.

Beitar fans took out space in the obituary sections in all of Israel's major papers after they lost the 2004 league final to Sakhnin, their archrivals and the only Arab Israeli team in the league. Why? To declare Israeli soccer dead.

More recently, Beitar fans were banned from attending one home match- their team would play to an empty stadium. The crime? Chanting "Muhammad is dead! Muhammad is dead!" at a previous match.

I'll grant them this: Muhammad is dead. But it's still kinda offensive.

The team Beitar would play for that "banned attendance" match was- oh, IRONY!- the Arab team from Sakhnin.

So I went to the next match, against some chumps from Petah Tikva. Beitar won 2-1, but really, I was there for the fans.

They did not disappoint. Those matches are just excuses for Jews to swear at each other in choreographed chants.

I love my Canucks, and my city. But we need to borrow some fans from the footballing world.

* * *

This is Yamata-san.

He's the product of a new Japanese fad: a teddy named "Relaxed Bear"- the Japanese name defeats my tongue. There is a zip in the teddy's back, into which you can stuff...er... items. Keep this in mind; it becomes important.

Yamata-san was originally owned by an enigmatic Jap named "Lucky", who dressed in black and wore a balaclava. He'd brought his teddy on his trek across Asia, taking pictures of him in front of famous monuments and landscapes... and then posted the pictures on a Japanese blog that chronicled The Adventures of Yamata-san.

Lucky, in turn, bequeathed the teddy to Kazumi, a spunky 36-yr old who looks like she's 17, has had two Israeli boyfriends younger than me, and used to sing in a Japanese death metal band.

Kazumi told me that Yamata-san used to have a toy model of a little old man stuffed in through the zip in his back. The idea: Yamata-san is not really the teddy, but the little old man- who is wearing the teddy bear as clothing.

Every time I get a glimpse into the twisted workings of the Japanese psyche, I feel like I just swallowed the red pill.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again. I will go to Hell long before I ever go to Japan. I ain't tumbling down that rabbit hole.

* * *

It's snowing in Jerusalem.

Israel, like Vancouver, has neither infrastructure nor inhabitants built for snowfall. All Jerusalem shut down yesterday. Shops, churches, mosques, and malls. The felafel guy down the street took the day off, so I couldn't get breakfast. The priests at the Lutheran church stayed home to pray, so I couldn't climb the church spire to catch a view of the snowed-in Old City. The street drainage systems aren't built to handle more than rain, so the melting snow has been causing flash floods. Half the Old City's twisting, climbing streets turned into waterfalls and running rivers.

On a funnier note. Jeremy pointed out that the nearby Valley of Hinnom was used as a giant refuse pit in the time of Jesus, which was periodically set on fire. The garbage would burn for weeks. So in the Gospels, whenever Jesus referred to "Gehinnom", or Hell, he was talking about the burning garbage heaps of Hinnom Valley as the very incarnation of Hell.

Jeremy said that if you walked by Jaffa Gate, you could see that the Valley of Hinnom was completely snowed in.

Hell has frozen over.

* * *

Mar Saba is a rambling, ziggurat-like monastery east of Bethlehem. It clings to the side of a rocky cliff, overlooking miles of raw, rolling desert hills.

The monastery's founder, St Sabas, was one of those mad ascetics that young religions are famous for throwing up. Disgusted by the sinful world, he retreated into the Judean foothills for five years, living alone in a tiny cave hollowed into a stratified cliff-face, perched over a hundred foot drop.

Mar Saba's 15 monks are all Eastern Orthodox. They live without electricity- and without women, who are not even allowed to cross the threshold.

The Brother who showed us around had been a monk for 30 years, and the isolation and lack of sex had unhinged him a little. He rambled aimlessly, spoke incoherently, took the opportunity to get Jeremy to explain the English instructions on the back of his phone card, and apropos of nothing, expressed a desire to learn more about Native Americans.

Mar Saba was beautiful.

The tomb of Sabas had been this copper-domed structure, since moved to the side of the main chapel. Both tomb and chapel were painted with stunning, Sistine-quality murals from the Bible: a stream of animals tumbling out of Noah's Arc, Abraham with his dagger poised mournfully over Isaac, the gift of the Ten Commandments at Mt Sinai, Archangels Michael and Gabriel... all in the bold, stylized lines, rich hues, and hollow-cheeked, stern-faced visages unique to Eastern Orthodox iconography.

We were not allowed to take more than a few photos. The Brother forbade it. The monks, in the first place, did not want Mar Saba to turn into a tourist attraction. Prayer and photography are a zero sum game. Banning cameras are a simple way to ensure that visitors act like pilgrims, and not like Japanese.

But the monks had something more important in mind. I'll let the Brother explain.

"You know, people come here, take 120 photos, but they don't feel. They photo other people praying, but they don't pray. They run around, photo everything- but they forget to stand here and, you know... (And here, the old guy spread his arms, tilted his head, and took a deep, exaggerated, blissful breath.) They are so busy taking photos to remember for tomorrow, they forget about today. They forget about now. They forget to see and feel and know where they are.

This is why we don't want photos. Don't take photos and forget to live. Don't sacrifice the now for the memories."

* * *

I was in a record store in West J-town. I was trying to find music that Israelis listen to... Zionist hip-hop or something. Instead, I found some Hallmark cards for Israeli teens about to enter the mandatory Army service.

"So you're going to the Army!"

"... I hear in my mind all of these voices
I hear in my mind all of these words
I hear in my mind all of this music..."

* * *

The Temple Institute is made up of Messianic Christians and Jews whose fanaticism makes Saint Sabas look tame. Their ultimate goal is to destroy the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount and rebuild the Jewish Temple.

They've gone to the effort of recreating all the priestly items used for the sacrifices in the Second Temple two thousand years ago. Apart from the regular knick-knacks: incense vessels, lamps, silver spoons, oils, and vestments, the Institute has tried to breed red cows, which according to the Bible are reserved solely for sacrifice to the Lord. (The breeding attempts failed.)

The crowning achievement of this biblical recreation is the Menorah, a towering, five-foot candlestick covered with 43 kilos of pure gold.

The idea is that in the End Times- which every year is predicted to be the following year- Israel will blow the golden lid off the Dome of the Rock, resurrect the Temple, shove in that candlestick...

And HALLELUJAH, the Lord will descend from the heavens with armies of armored angels to battle the legions of Hell, lead by demons, hooded horsemen on pale horses, and a giant, naked whore with ten breasts who some say is Hilary Clinton.

It sounds like quite a show.

Celebrity Look-Alikes

2008-01-30T04:07:00.000-08:00

This is James Ring, from Kent, England.

Now, here's a question. Does James look more like (1) Gary Busey, (2) Heath Ledger, or (3) Nick Nolte?

CON-VOY!

2008-01-27T04:03:00.000-08:00

This post will be like an elementary school class plan. First, a short lecture, then a lot of pictures. Skip the prose if you like; I'll never find out, and don't care.

The last week has been the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF).

Every year, the richest corporate magnates on the planet assemble- captains of industry, powerful lobbiers, CEOs, tycoons... and of course, one or two lame-duck lackeys from a government or two. The WEF is something like the parties the French court held at Versailles before the peasants got fed up and stormed the Bastille. Our Global Nobles spend a week neck-deep in conspiracy and hedonism, brainstorming ways to further fill their moneybags... oh, I'm sorry... I meant: promote Free Trade.

Fuckit, whatever. I had a whole paragraph written here, and deleted it. You can learn about it yourself, or not. Be warned, however. The WEF, and meetings like it, is how our planet is ruled... and ruined. Ignore it at your own peril.

The (very weak) counterpoint to the WEF is the World Social Forum (WSF), a Tower-of-Babble mishmash of what we might call the "Left": anyone who opposes the New World Order. Anarchists, anti-globalization-ers, alter-globalization-ers, environmentalists, feminists, Marxists, and "freedom fighter" movements like the Basques, Kosovars, and Kurds.

Officially, the WSF is against neocolonization/neoimperialism, neoliberalism, racism, sexism, and war. In other words, they're against everything, and for nothing.

Every year, the WSF holds a Global Action Day to coincide with the WEF meetings. Traditionally held in one place, this year's WSF was broken down into dozens of localized demonstrations and meetings.

Palestine recently got in on the WSF action by tagging the Palestinian national struggle in with anti-neoimperialism (by Israel and the US), anti-war, anti-sexism, and anti-whogivesafuck. Sean's assessment: Palestinian organizers saw an opportunity to increase publicity over the Occupation by tying the Palestinian cause in with the World Social Forum.

So, in association with WSF Global Action Day 2008, a convoy was organized to bring food and medicine to the border of the Gaza Strip. Scores of cars and six big tour buses, packed with food and lefties.

The plan: to "run the blockade" and get the supplies into Gaza.

Horseshit. None of us harbored any illusions that we'd actually get into Gaza. There would be a protest, the border would remain sealed, and the food would be confiscated by the Israeli border guards and donated to ultra-Orthodox charities.

Here are your pictures.

Decorating the buses.

Decorating the cars.

CON-VOOOOOOOOY!

The WSF breeds strange bedfellows. Here are some Communists...

... some Palestinian nationalists...

... and some anarchists! Which of these is not like the other...

The ringleader. "1...2...3...4! We don't want your bloody war! We want real peace! US out of Middle East!"

Here comes the Left.

Here's what you see on the front page.

Here's what you don't see. Check out all the press on the right side of the picture.

A man with a sack of rice on his shoulder. It won't get into Gaza, anymore than I will.

A video of the scope of the crowd. There are over 1000 people here.

Yes, and no.

Uri Avnery, a highly articulate writer and Knesset member. He's a hero of the Left, and with good reason. This man, I believe, used to fight the British in Mandate Palestine, which makes him a former terrorist. I used to read his shit in university, and he must be one of the last Israelis left who doesn't believe that Jews have a monopoly on suffering.

A girl from Sderot, Hamas' favorite rocket target. She gave a short speech in Hebrew, and was given a rousing ovation.

That's all.

I'd like to head for the Galilee next, but it's raining all next week.

Friday Protest III

2008-01-26T23:35:00.000-08:00

Today was a mess.

All the photos here belong to my travel buddy Jeremy "Yirmeyahu" Kroeker, all rights reserved. I have similar photos, but his are just... better. There's a couple of videos, too. Watch them.

I think I need to buy a real camera.

Internationals. Japanese tourists, anarchists, activists from the International Solidarity Movement, a Jew or two from www.activestills.org, and a Korean photographer named John-John who works for National Geographic and recently sold one of his photographs for $20,000. Despite this, John-John has holes in his shoes and is constantly glueing his patchwork camera back together.

Aw.

It's Friiii-day.

The razor wire usually stops the protesters 70-100m from the Israelis. This delays them long enough for the soldiers to lob off a little tear gas, pre-empting a physical confrontation. Alternately, it forces the protesters to wait for a few minutes and "calm down" until the razor wire can be cut down and dragged away. Today, those silly Jews didn't set it up properly. There was a huge gap in the wire on one side, and the whole mob surged through it as though the wire wasn't even there. Tempers were still a little hot when the two sides met, and that boded poorly for later.

The scrum began without much ado. The Israeli commander- the kid with the bullhorn- seemed a little taken aback. The lines swiftly degenerated into the usual mosh of shouting Semites and camera-clicking Japanese.

Halt, in the name of the Lord.

Let's call this guy "Shrek". He was a fucking juggernaut. I first encountered him when he smashed through the line like a battering ram, swatted me (and three others) backwards like a fly, and bellowed wordlessly at the wide-eyed Palestinians, all of whom scattered like pigeons. He had a voice that was a combination between a Howitzer going off and Thor's hammer collapsing a mountain.

He reminded me of this guy. I cannot even tell you how similar this scene was to my encounter with that Goliath. The expressions on their faces were exactly the same- as were those on mine and Sam Gamgee's.

Ruaidhri, one of my hostel-mates, took one look at this roaring minotaur of a Jew and scurried backward. "That bloke should not have a gun," he muttered incredulously. The Israelis used him as a prison guard for all the arrested Palestinians. He would stand there, gargantuan and imperious, watching over two or three suddenly-meek protesters.

The Leader has NOT been shot. Nor is he sleeping on the job. He's leading the protesters in a sit-down.

Chaos.

More chaos.

At this point, it starts to get scrappy. There's a lot of tussling and swearing. The Israelis were beginning to lose their tempers, and the neat lines had completely broken down. It was starting to look as if the Israeli commander had lost control of the situation; Palestinians were getting in his face and screaming, and protesters and press had free rein in front, behind, and between his boys.

And this is where I got a lesson in riot control. The Israelis must have written the book on it. It all took about five seconds. The soldiers reformed the line, pulled the pins on three or four stun grenades, and threw them into the midst of the crowd.

Those things are deafening. They do nothing but make a piercing *BANG*, and in retrospect were little more than firecrackers on steroids. But if you're standing next to one when it explodes- particularly if you've never heard one before- it sounds like the world just folded in upon itself.

Then they started with the tear gas grenades- which they can fire from gun-mounted launchers or throw by hand. This was the latter. The crowd scattered with fumes licking at their heels. Half were Japanese tourists who had no idea that they'd signed up for this. The Israelis were literally throwing those things at our heels.

Leon and Beardo, a couple of Asians from the ISM. Beardo, the Japanese guy with his hands raised, had a ten-inch beard and balls the size of grapefruits. He works with Arab kids in Hebron, and at one point, was the last person standing in front of the Israelis, with every Arab in Bil'in at least 20m away. At one point, he picked up a spent stun grenade, held it up to an Israeli's face, and asked: "How much?"

This might be a stun grenade, or a tear gas grenade. Who cares which? Both kinds make a loud noise and make you run away.

Recognize the guy with the green trim on a black jacket? In all my travels, there have been only three things that I've ever disliked: ouzo, Arabic music, and tear gas.

You can see the old Israeli hippie. You can just barely make out my hero, Muhammad Xavier, who's confined to a wheelchair after getting shot in the spine by the army at the beginning of the Second Intifada.

Ok, you win.

Jeremy was most proud of this shot. It's a stun grenade going off. The guy on the left with his ears covered, Leon, is with the ISM. He had one or two go off against his leg- I saw it. He admitted it hurt, but not badly, and indeed, the explosion hadn't left a mark on his jeans.

Things like this make me angry. The villagers hang out and watch foreigners get shot on their behalf. Admittedly, the risk to them is greater- the Israelis won't get in trouble for capping dune coons. But still. One Japanese was shot in the eye socket today. If he's lucky, he'll regain his sight in three weeks. I don't care if he was in Bil'in as a tourist. He might have lost an eye, and they sit there and have a picnic?

I've seen ISM kids get knee-dropped and shit-kicked and cough up lungs for Palestine. I don't care how biased or elementary this rant is... if I have to dodge rubber bullets so that my friends can learn about the Occupation from my photos, you can damn sure take the same risk.

Get. In. The. Fucking. Line.

I suppose I should mention, just for shits, that another Jap was injured when a rock thrown by a Palestinian clunked him in the head. One Palestinian was shot in the torso (rubber bullet), and was evacuated by ambulance. I think three Palestinians were arrested, including the Leader.

A stone thrower. This was after we had all retreated, and the protest leaders had called it off for the day. But here's part of the routine. Once "our side" has cleared out of the way, the kids start to sling rocks at the faraway Israelis...

...who respond by lobbing tear gas at us.

A couple of kids watch the fog unfold.

The Palestinians and Israelis exchanged stones and tear gas for so long that the commander ordered a general advance. Squads of soldiers came charging up the roads. They would then halt in a line and fire off a few rubber rounds at the whooping, retreating crowds of kids. Interspersed among them were the activists and Japanese tourists- and from a distance, they all look the same. Either that or the Israelis didn't care and were relishing the excuse to "accidentally" shoot a few of those pesky foreigners who shoved cameras in their faces every week.

This is a big "Oh, shit" moment. The shot was taken long afterwards, but I'm holding a rubber bullet that was fired at me and me alone. How do I know this?

(1) I was the only person in a twenty meter radius, between a retreating crowd of Palestinians behind me and a clump of press to my right. I was wearing an Arab scarf, so they must have thought I was a local.

(2) I heard the whistle of bullets whizzing by, and when I turned around, the gravel at my heels were spurting up in small impact explosions- pffft, pffft, pffft. So, they really do aim at your legs.

So I ran over to where the press had gathered, with their unmistakable cameras and canary-yellow jackets. Ah, press immunity. It was like a Halo shield bubble. I was suddenly, as far as Israelis were concerned, invisible and off limits.

Here they go, sprinting by, chasing the Palestinians.

Bang. Bang. Fish in a barrel.

Run, run away.

Souvenirs.

That's it.

See you next Friday.

Rocket Town

2008-01-24T08:07:00.000-08:00

Sderot is a town on the outskirts of the Gaza Strip.

It was founded a few decades ago as a "development town": a town artificially created by the Israeli government to take population pressure off Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and the other big cities.

Of course, no high-class European immigrant or sabra (native born) would go to a sun-baked sandbox like Sderot willingly. So the government has made a policy of shunting all of Israel's second-class Jews into the development towns- Ethiopian Jews, Moroccan Jews, Russian Jews.

Sderot isn't a dirty "Arab" shantytown, which is what people from Tel Aviv would have you think of a place that's predominantly Moroccan Jewish. It's a lovely little town that looks like it's built out of Lego blocks, with short, rectanguloid buildings splashed in bright coats of color, blue lamp-posts, and not a shred of garbage on the streets.

Sderot, nowadays, is known for being the primary target of Qassam rockets from the Gaza Strip, run by the Islamic militant movement Hamas.

Part of the reason behind the present fuel blockade of Gaza has been Hamas' ongoing shelling of southern towns like Sderot. Israel hopes that buy collectively punishing the Gazans for Hamas' actions, Gaza will vote them out and elect Fatah leaders instead, who recognize Israel and would be more willing to... er... "compromise".

It hasn't worked, and it continues to rain rockets down south. Last Tuesday, I had planned to visit Sderot, and woke up with the flu. I stayed home, writing emails.

That day, 18 Qassams fell on Sderot, and 40 on the south altogether. No casualties.

I went today.

* * *

If there is an incoming Qassam, a siren wails throughout the town. You then have about half a minute to take cover before the rocket lands. From beneath safe cover, you wait until from somewhere, you hear a *BOOM*.

Then you call your family one by one.

And where would you take cover? Well, every bus stop is constructed to double as a bomb shelter.

Also, large concrete bunkers- eerily painted with sunny, cheerful murals by local artists and school groups- are set up on all the major roads at 50 meter intervals. And! - they fit in perfectly with Sderot's "Lego" theme. But no amount of artwork could disguise their purpose. This little toy town's at war.

This is the local elementary school. It has a huge, arcing bomb shield built over it. It's an utter necessity; half the town's youngsters are in there on any given day. Of course, Gaza's schools have no funds to build any sort of similar protection... but then... Israel's armed forces don't intentionally target civilians. Oh, wait- that's right. They just starve them with embargoes and blockades.

* * *

There's a rocket gallery at the local cop station.

Hundreds of makeshift, homemade Qassams, in various degrees of wreckage, displayed on racks. Big ones, small ones, long ones, thin ones. Some were rusting from years in the past; others fell as recently as two days ago.

Qassams are crude but effective, and easy to manufacture. The warheads consist of a detonator in the nose of the missile that's designed to trigger upon impact with the ground. Behind the nose is about 1 to 5 kg of gunpowder, packed with metal shrapnel. Behind this is a mixture of gunpowder and propellant that can shoot the rocket anywhere from 4 to 12 km.

Most Qassams tend to land way off course, in fields or open ground. But enough meet their mark, and Hamas gets better with practice- at calculating range, at targeting, and at production.

This one landed on Jan 21, 2008. That's three days ago.

This donkeycock landed in December last year.

When I was in Lebanon, walking the remains of a town indiscriminately bombed flat by Israel, with cluster bomb pockmarks in the roads and jagged holes in the buildings, I told myself that I'd try to see the conflict from Israeli eyes.

Here's what I've learned. They're all killing each other for the same reasons- for a Home of their own- but difference between Hamas and Hezbollah, and Israel, is that Israel has an air force.

And that difference makes all the difference. To compare the damage done to Sderot to the damage done to Gaza or southern Lebanon is to compare the Israeli Occupation to the Holocaust.

Well, yeah. Might makes right. To demand that Israel not use its full resources to "protect" its own citizens is unrealistic. Even though these resources vastly outweigh those of their enemies. Especially if these resources vastly outweigh those of their enemies.

But when I compare Maroun Al-Ras in Lebanon to Sderot... It's still hard for me to think of the Israelis as victims. It disgusts me to admit that. I just today read a story about a young Sderot girl who- a couple of years ago- flung herself on her little brother to protect him when the "Incoming!" siren howled and neither could see any cover. Her brother survived, but she died.

It's a vain hope that Israel will use its military might not simply in tit-for-tat retaliatory strikes, but as a considerable bargaining chip in an as-yet nonexistent process to remove the root causes of terrorism... a fair shake for the Shi'ites in Lebanon, and for the Palestinians in the Holy Land.

But the politics are too complicated, and hatreds too deep, for that to ever happen.

Vigil for Gaza (Video)

2008-01-21T10:30:00.000-08:00

Gaza has had its fuel supplies cut off by Israel. There is no power in the Strip. The sewage systems, the hospitals, the water... everything is starting to fail.

It's collective punishment for the rockets Hamas has been raining down on Sderot and the southern towns the past few weeks. This, in turn, has been only half of the exchange: Israel unloads missiles and launches raids on Gaza. The israeli government claims they're targeting militants, but of course, there's a fair amount of- I LOVE this term- collateral damage.

Which is the chicken, and which is the egg? Who cares?

I won't write about it. You can read about it on CNN, BBC, NY Times, or watch it on any news channel.

An hour ago, two hundred Palestinians- mostly young men- gathered outside the Damascus Gate in the Old City to protest the blockade and show solidarity with their countrymen in Gaza. Holding lit candles, they chanted, sang, and prayed.

A bunch of us were sitting in the common room of the hostel, a hundred meters away, and we could hear them bellowing Allahu akhbar! Allahu Akhbar! through the window. We grabbed our cameras.

The video is of poor quality, but so is my camera and cinematographic know-how.

Waiting for the W.

2008-01-20T13:20:00.001-08:00

On Wednesday, January 9th, 2008, George W. Bush made his long-awaited- and highly overblown- visit to Israel and the West Bank.

His plan: blow through a series of closed-door meetings with Israeli and Palestinian officials, thump his Bible in Bethlehem, and then head east for tea and conspiracy with the petro-states of the Persian Gulf- America's loyal vassals.

All in three days.

Why? First: to lay out his vision for an independent Palestinian state in 2008. (That's this year. Hahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaa.)

Second: to shore up a coalition of (1) oil-rich sheikhdoms whose autocrats have lucrative dealings with US corporations and gov't leaders (Saudi, UAE, Bahrain, Oman), (2) states propped up by US foreign aid (Jordan and Egypt), and (3) Israel... against the Evil, Soon-To-Be-Nuclear Empire of Iran and its sidekick, Syria.

None of these states have anything in common- except that they (more accurately, their ruling classes and families) benefit from American Hegemony... and are directly threatened by the looming ascendance of Iran as a regional power.

That's all the politics I'll subject you to.

* * *

The Israelis were tripping over themselves to toss Bush's salad.

Security. They called it "Operation Clear Skies". The King David Hotel was evacuated for His exclusive use. 10,450 cops hit the block, shutting down businesses and closing down streets where Bush's convoy would pass. 1500 flags were manufactured for the visit and strung on streetlamps- in lieu of cheering crowds, I guess.

At about 12pm, Jan 29th, Bush stepped off Air Force One, was greeted by the entire Israeli Cabinet, and stood to attention for the Star Spangled Banner. He then headed into Jerusalem in a cloud of dust and self-congratulation.

I didn't see any of this. In the first place, the whole area was in lockdown. Secondly, I was in Ramallah, in the West Bank.

* * *

Bush wasn't scheduled to show up in Ramallah till the following day, Jan 10th. He was supposed to meet the Palestinian president, Abu Mazen, at the Muqatta, the administrative compound where Yasser Arafat had been besieged for several years during the last intifada.

But I'd wanted to arrive early in case they shut down the entrances to the city ahead of his arrival. I also wanted to see a protest that I'd been told would be held that day at the Manara, Ramallah's town square.

Long story short. There was no protest to be found. In fact, the locals were eager to assure me that there would be no protest. It's safe, don't worry, it's safe! No protest today. Please, welcome to Ramallah. Welcome to Palestine.

Shit. But what about tomorrow? Will there be a protest then?

Worried looks. Well, maybe tomorrow. But be careful!

These people didn't seem to understand that I wanted to see a protest. And why would they? They live in the bloody West Bank. A protest is a novelty to me, a Facebook photo-op. For them, it's a hazard and an inconvenience.

Ramallah's shopkeepers were more concerned- and resentful- that Bush's visit would cause all of Thursday's commerce and community to grind to a halt.

Every street and business within a 3km radius of the Muqatta was to be shut down. Moreover, the Israelis would clamp down on travel within the West Bank. Every checkpoint in the Bank and on roads into Ramallah would be doubly... er... "vigilant"... on the lookout for terrorists. Which means: a twice-as-long-as-usual wait at the checkpoints on the way to your job or your family.

Silent streets, poor business, canceled plans, and hamstrung mobility. Most of Ramallah will be staying home... and wishing Bush had done the same.

* * *

Cops and press everywhere.

Cameramen speed-walked around with their bazooka-sized newscams, getting Before-The-Storm B-roll: footage of ordinary townsfolk strolling the streets, frying felafels, hawking clothing. Correspondents coiffed their hair and adjusted their microphones, speaking in those lifeless "He's dead, Jim," monotones they must have beaten into them at Reporter School.

Despite the absence of a protest, the cops had showed up early, and in force. Already, they were beginning to shut down the streets for the next day. From what I know about Arab efficiency, those cops would need all the time they could get.

By the way, those cops confirmed every thought I've ever had about Third World public services.

Check this out.

First, they stood in a huge clump by the side of the street for an hour, drinking tea and shooting the shit. Then the Biker Convention began. Half of them got onto motorbikes and roared off in a thunder of engine-reving and sirens. Ten minutes later, they came rocketing back towards us, parked their bikes, and held a conference in the middle of the Manara... then saddled up again, and rode off in the opposite direction.

And ten minutes later, they were back again. What the fuck were they doing? Riding in circles around the city? Didn't they have a job to do?

The climax of all this busyplay came when a reporter asked the police chief to stage some footage for the gathered press.

Cops ran to the streets leading into the Manara's traffic circle, halting incoming cars. The flock of bike-mounted cops then proceeded to speed-race five or six howling laps around the Manara, while newscameras on the street corners lapped it all up. Watch for it on the six o'clock! The watching standers-by and drivers shook their heads at this staged showboating.

You would not believe how much "live footage" is actually staged. I've been learning this over and over again. The next time you watch the news and you see a live, genuine, battlefield shot of a police bikes racing to a crisis, or a Palestinian sling-shot a stone, remember this:

There are probably fifteen unseen videocameras and news crews watching, all clustered together, out of each others' line of sight. More importantly, it's all as planned and performed as a theater production; a series of takes edited by the network into "live footage".

* * *

I got bored after a while, so I went back to the Muqatta and the tomb of Yasser Arafat, which I'd visited once before. He'd requested to be buried in East Jerusalem. The Israelis laughed.

The Old Man's honor-guard was dressed in gaudy, ostentatious frippery, and armed with obsolete rifles that had probably last saw action in the American Civil War.

How fitting.

Oh, Bush is long gone by now. Good riddance.

Jewed!

2008-01-20T11:55:00.000-08:00

Un-fucking-believable.

I've just been slapped by a 100 shekel (~$25) fine for... get this... jaywalking.

Everywhere in the Middle East that I've previously been, you cross the streets at any point you choose, at any time you like. You don't have to wait for the red light. You don't need to find a crossing. Hell, you don't have to wait for a lull in the traffic.

In Cairo, Damascus, Beirut... I would cross the road by stepping off the curb into onrushing waves of honking, smoke-belching vehicles. Sometimes they would grind to a grudging halt as I sauntered across the road, allow me to cross their path before zooming on. Sometimes they'd ignore me and rocket on, missing my toes or heels by mere centimeters.

Some days, I would feel chicken-livered... and would- such cowardice!- actually wait for a break in the traffic before running across the street. But I certainly never... ever... stooped to using a zebra-crossing, or waited for the little flashing green man's permission.

Imagine my surprise when one day, on a sunny day in Jerusalem, I sauntered across an empty street with the little walking man on the traffic light flashing bright red, only to encounter a cop on the other side. He had a sharkish grin on his face and a clipboard in his hand.

Apparently, Israeli drivers are so reckless, and road-crossing accidents so frequent, that the government has instituted a mandatory 100 shekel fine for jaywalking.

Israel is the worst kind of driving society, because its road rules occupy a strange no-man's-land between order and chaos.

Consider. On one extreme, there is Law: in Canada, for example, there are Rules on the road. People obey them- and expect them to be obeyed. Everyone knows what should and should not happen, and thus are accidents avoided. On the other extreme, there is complete Lawlessness: in Arab countries, there are no road rules. It's a Might Makes Right, Dog Eat Dog world. But because there are no rules, and no one expects there to be any, the Arab highway and byway runs according to its own logic. Arab drivers have to be on their toes all the time, but because they are, accidents are avoided.

If the Canadian road is predictably predictable, the Arab one is predictably unpredictable. See?

Israel waffles between the two, and this is what kills people. The Israeli road has Rules, and people expect them to be followed... like in Canada. But a country that has fought six (or seven?) wars breeds an impatient people. Eat, fuck, and drive like a maniac, because you could die tomorrow. So Israeli roadsters frequently disobey rules for which there is some societal expectation that they will be followed.

And that's why I am now out 100 shekels.

Well, I've already funded terrorism by buying a shirt from Hezbollah in Lebanon. Now, I've officially funded Zionism as well. What's next, Hamas?

Jewed!

Friday Protest II

2008-01-19T11:26:00.000-08:00

See Friday Protest I for background.

Unfortunately for Kieran, this time it was far more interesting. There were twice as many internationals as the last time, including a large contingent from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the largest and most well-known (Israelis would say "notorious") of the international pro-Palestinian protest organizations.

More importantly, we got face-to-face with the Israeli soldiers.

A kid with his school project. No idea who the girl is, but I think the stuff on the other side of the placard includes grenades and TG canisters.

It's Friiii-day.

Beautiful day for a protest. Off in the distance you can see the line of Israeli soldiers. They're going to have a more stressful day than the last time I was here.

The press gathered on the thin road to film the coming chaos. You can see the razor wire across the bottom of the screen. Most of the Palestinians were about ten meters to the left. About ten seconds after I took this photo, the first tear gas canisters were fired. One ricocheted off the ground in front of me, and hurtled past my ear, missing by about half a meter.

I love the smell of tear gas in the morning.

A lot happened in between the last photo and this one. First, some ISM kids pulled the razor wire off the road. A contingent of ISMers, Palestinians, and foreign press then walked up the road to confront the Israelis. A full scale scuffle broke out, all of which was caught on camera by one of the ISM cameras. "I love zoom," murmured the blonde activist with the videocam.

She wasn't quite so enthusiastic a couple of minutes later, when one of her buddies was knee-dropped by a pissed-off Israeli and arrested.

Meanwhile, a pair of Japanese and I decided to join the frontline. Throwing our hands in the air for the benefit of unseen Israeli snipers, we walked down to where the fun was. The photo was taken just after the scuffle and just before I started walking towards the crowd.

Never thought we'd get this close. The Israeli front and center in this picture was later pulled off the front line by his commander. The kid had lost his cool, grabbed the Palestinian flag from a protester, and flung it on the ground. (Of course, he'd been instigated; the Arab with the flag had stood in front of him, and let the wind flap the flag into the soldier's face. The ISM won't tell you that.)

The Israelis are, believe it or not, honestly out to avoid undue confrontation. All they have to do is hold the line without embarrassing Israel in front of Western cameras with a "disproportionate" display of violence. They know the Palestinians won't actually try to breach the line. They just need to keep their teenage troopers calm enough to get through four hours of clicking cameras and shouted abuse.

Soldiers who are too surly or hot-tempered are yanked off the front line. Likewise for those who are unsure of themselves. No heroes. You keep your place in line if you can stand still and keep a straight face. Let the Palestinians and the goyim flap their arms and wag their tongues. They'll go home soon enough. They always do.

The picture sucks because in this little kerfuffle, I got bumped into. The guy on the ground is a white activist, and he is getting destroyed. To be fair, he had been protecting a local Palestinian leader from being curb-stomped, and in doing so, had chased down an offending Israeli soldier and aimed a kick at him. He was immediately tackled by another two soldiers. The kid got kicked a few times, but he gave as good as he got.

A protest is 90% theatre. The guy on the ground must have been the class clown in high school. Here, he's balancing a huge rock on his belly (to anchor him in place symbolically) while shouting Palestinian slogans. Shutters flash, videocams whirr. Another image of the Intifada for the history books. I wondered what those Israeli kids thought of this man's posturing.

I found myself feeling sorry for those Israeli boys. Most were younger than me. Look at this fatso being toyed with by the class clown. He should be eating a chocolate bar, playing Halo 3.

How many of them were here against their convictions? How many of them hated having to be prison guards for four million caged Palestinians, to participate in this weekly farce, and to be demonized as the brutal, unthinking pawns of the Zionist War Machine- as the very faces of Occupation?

At the same time, how many were the sons of settlers? How many thought of Arabs as no better than cockroaches and believed in Israeli Manifest Destiny?

How many were one step away from refusing to serve in the army because of the Occupation? How many thought the Occupation appalling, but in the absence of strong leaders on both sides and a clear plan for peace, believed its temporary continuance necessary for Israel's security? And how many thought it desirable, and wanted to throw the Palestinians over the Jordan?

Remember this guy? He was shot in the knee a couple of weeks ago. He's since made a full recovery. Here he negotiates with the Israeli obersturmbannfuhrer.

The negotiations continue. What for? He's talking to a wall.

Israeli snipers. There are four of them in this picture.

Some farmer is going to be pissed. A bunch of kids set his spare tire on fire. Later, this scene got one-upped. A crowd of hollering youth found a tractor tire- it was almost five feet tall. They proceeded to roll it down the hill at the Israelis. Later, they set it on fire.

This guy is my hero. A cripple in a powered wheelchair, this guy was at the front of the last Friday Protest I was at, as well as this one. Here, he Xaviers past the remains of a tire fire.

A salvo of tear gas canisters explode in the fields ahead of us.

It wasn't till I saw this that I understood the fundamental point of the Friday Protests. I suddenly became aware of how much of a performance they are. The Palestinians aren't trying to tear down the Wall- hell, they aren't even trying to reach it. They aren't trying to hurt or abuse Israeli soldiers, or get some measure of physical vengeance.

They are performing.

For the tourists, for the visiting journalists, for the newscameras, putting on as theatrical and memorable a display as possible. They want the pictures and video taken to be as powerful, as symbolic as possible, so that when they are uploaded into Facebook albums and splashed on newspapers and websites, the people who see them- whether they are idealistic Westerners reading ISM publications, ordinary rat-racers checking the morning news on BBC.co.uk, or families of Japanese tourists looking up their daughters' blogs- will know, and remember, what is happening in Palestine.

The Leader gives a thundering interview to a Reuters cameraman from Brazil, flag in hand.

Yep. These guys all stay at my hostel in Jerusalem. Different Japs from a couple weeks ago, but who can tell? Here, the Leader is making a speech thanking the Japanese for coming to Bil'in, and asking them to let everyone they meet know about the Friday Protests. There were so many Japs there yesterday that at one point, one of the chants was: "The People of Palestine! The People of Japan! The People of Palestine! The People of Japan!"

A pity they understood neither chant nor speech.

I'll be back in Bil'in next week. With a face mask.

Friday Protest I

2008-01-19T07:42:00.000-08:00

The small Palestinian village of Bil’in, sitting almost on top of the Green Line that divides Israel from the West Bank, holds a demonstration every Friday to protest The Wall, just a kilometer out of town.

Of course, I’m sure the villagers wouldn’t go to all that hassle of being shot at with rubber bullets, drinking tear gas by the chamber-full, and lighting the town’s dwindling supply of spare tires on fire… if over half the town’s farmland wasn’t located on the Israeli side of The Wall.

Every Friday, with the chants of the noonday prayers barely faded, Bil’in’s leaders and youth are joined by “internationals”: a motley mix of human rights and anti-globalization activists, and chattering, camera-clicking Japanese tourists. Together, they march down to The Wall, where, without fail, a Thin Olive-Green Line of Israeli troopers wait. For a few hours, the two sides exchange gifts. The Palestinians offer chanted slogans and stones; the Israelis have tear gas canisters, stun grenades, and rubber bullets.

I’ve been twice: the first time a couple of weeks ago with Kieran Nelson, and once again yesterday by myself.

Some idiot (clearly not a writer) once said: "A picture's worth a thousand words." So here's a few thousand words. Plus commentary.

Kieran took all the photos for Friday Protest I. Those from Friday Protest II are mine.

***

This is Ferdinand, an Austrian documentarian. He had a homemade press jacket and a newscamera the size of a rocket-launcher from Halo. His advice for us? Munch on an onion to help with the tear gas. Don't duck or crouch, because Israeli snipers aim for the lower body. And Sean? Is that your name? Don't wear that head scarf, or they'll think you're a Palestinian.

This picture was staged as all hell. An older man made this tyke pose with the Fatah flag for a sequence of clicking cameras: Reuters, Japanese tourists, and Kieran.

Abu Ammar, or Yasser Arafat. His people's greatest hero and greatest villain. He had the vision and the will to lead Palestine onto the world stage, and the petty ego and tolerance for cronyism that made the Palestinian Authority an inflexible, calcified, corrupt joke of a government. His ugly mug adorns the mosque from which Bil'in's young men will soon stream to march down to The Wall.

The march begins. It's carnivalesque. Half the crowd is made up of young boys who earlier were trying to sell us beans and bracelets. Shouted slogans, flying banners- typical CNN B-roll. Here's what's weird: a curious lack anger, of fervor, of intention, in the crowd. It was passionate and boisterous, yes… but it had the playful, just-for-shits feel of a campus pep-rally, empty of the seething rage I’d always expected a Palestinian protest to contain. The villagers played it up for the cameras, pressing their faces into the lenses- it seemed that the volume of their chanting increased in proportion to their proximity to a videocamera.

A fair number of "internationals" in the crowd. The way Clay (an American I met who'd been before) explained it, whiteys and Jappos are there so that the Israelis don't use live ammo. They don't want to shoot foreigners... too much bad press. This wasn't very reassuring, considering that Clay had five stitches in the forehead from being hit in the face by a tear gas canister.

The Thin Olive Green Line. You had to zoom on the camera to see them. They were about 100 meters away. Later, I learned that tear gas launchers have a range of over 100 meters.

You can't tell, but there are twice as many Japanese tourists as Palestinians at the front. Most of the Arabs- especially the youth (who knew what was coming), and all the boys (no children were allowed near the front)- started to straggle backward as we approached the Jews. The Israelis laid razor wire across the road to prevent us getting face-to-face with them. It worked today.

Japanese. Those cartoonish herds of faceless bobble-heads, with their galaxies of SLR cameras and mind-bending mouse-chatter of a language, who roam the world with their Lonely Planet guidebooks held out in front of their noses. At least they're getting good photos for Facebook; this is at the very front line. When the Intifada turn into a tourist attraction?

These soldiers are very, very close to Kieran. They snuck up on our flank, to use the lingo. One of them caught him by surprise, and Kieran found himself staring down the barrel of a gun about 15 meters away. He was...er... surprised.

So this picture sucks. It was when the tear gas started exploding in our midst. It all happened very suddenly. One second, there was a line of Arabs shouting at a line of Jews, with a line of Japanese (and me) documenting them. Next second, I was face down on the ground with clouds of tear gas going off everywhere. One of Palestinian ringleaders had been shot in the knee, and was writhing on the ground. I filmed him rolling about for about five seconds before the tear gas made it impossible for me to see, breathe, or film. Then I ran.

And Kieran wept. And then Kieran munched on his onion.

You may not be able to tell, but I had just met up with Kieran after five minutes of hacking up a lung, weeping buckets of tears, and toweling my face with the sleeve of my rain-soaked jacket. I'd never been tear gassed before, and as I ran, I held the camera to my face and shouted into it. I watched the footage afterwards. There was my face, red-eyed, with the camera rocking back and forth as I ran full-tilt, shouting: "It's like fuckin' bear mace!"

Tear gas is incredibly effective. It does no permanent harm, but it's incapacitating. You can't see or breathe, and it feels like your nasal passages and exposed skin is on fire. You can't film... or fight. And when one- or ten- persons flee, the herd reaction follows. One well-placed tear gas canister can do the work of a hundred cops. Fortunately, the effects only last for five minutes. Then you go back for more.

And later, you feel foggy and heavy-headed, like you've smoked too much sheesha.

An activist we met who'd served in the German army told us that Israeli snipers couldn't hit the broad side of a barn. Yeah? They aimed well enough to pick out the ringleader of the protest and bounce a rubber bullet off his knee, when he was standing side by side with two internationals.

Kieran saw the bruise left by the rubber bullet and scoffed. I'm sure it hurt, but this guy was writhing... like... well... he'd been shot. Shot for real, I mean. I don't want to say he hammed it up for the surrounding cameras- and there were many. I've never been rubber-bulleted before, and don't ever plan to find out if this guy was faking the pain.

This all took place in a concrete garage, which served as a kind of field hospital for protest victims. The Israelis, possibly not realizing that an injured man was inside, unloaded tear gas and rubber bullets at the building. Ferdinand, who was inside at the time, later told me he had tried to haul ass out of the garage, but was, in his words, "under fire".

The injured man was later evacuated by a local van. As it pulled away, all the Palestinians made loud, howling noises, meant to simulate the siren of an ambulance.

A Palestinian stone-thrower and his sling. And yes, I've heard all the David and Goliath references already. And yes, it is ironic.

Kieran must have been crying.

Ugh.

These kids have balls. They are also seemingly immune to tear gas. I've seen children run up to an erupting canister, pick it up with their bare hands, and fling it back at the Israelis. Alternately, they boot it a safe distance down the road. Or, like this kid, they wait for them to stop gassing, then collect some souvenirs.

My first Friday Protest was... disillusioning. There was a tame, tired routine to it all, an elaborate pantomime where both sides knew exactly what was going to happen and what was expected of each other.

For the Palestinians, it was the Friday afternoon father-and-son activity. It's Fri-day. Ain't got no jo-oh-ob. Time to hide behind the foreigners, throw some stones, shout some slogans, dodge some bullets, breathe some gas, perform for the cameras, make that token effort to keep the Intifada going. Oh, it's raining. Shit. I guess we'll cut it short today and go home for tea.

Familiarity breeds contempt. How many Protests have there been? Fifty? Sixty? All the spontaneity, the seething rage and fervor, has been boiled out of what's become a weekly picnic. You should have seen those whooping, laughing Palestinian lads. This was a lark to them- a game, not a war.

And the Israelis. It's routine for them too. "Oh, here come the Arabs. They'll stop at the razor wire. Yep, that's right. Ok. Now, Shlomo, lob off some tear gas at them. No, wait. We'll let Galit do it this time, because she's a girl. Oh, sorry, Galit, you're a woman. Ok. Pinchas, shoot that silly bastard organizing them in the knee. He knows it's coming. Try not to hit the white guy next to him, or you'll be scrubbing latrines for a month. Listen up, guys. It's going to rain soon. Maybe we can end this earlier than last week. With any luck, we'll... er... discourage them a little, and the rain will do the rest."

And the Japanese. It seems like the Intifada had become something you cross off your Holy Land “Things to See” checklist. “Ok, I’ve swam in the Dead Sea, been to Bethlehem for Christmas, seen the Western Wall… and been shot at by the Israel Defense Forces. Check, check, check, and check.”

Bah, I was cynical that day. Maybe I swallowed too much tear gas.

Kung Fu Fighting

2008-01-11T10:39:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, we were in ruined Petra- a city carved into the rose-tinged cliffs of southern Jordan by a civilization called the Nabateans.

We climbed to the top of a towering promontory, up a winding stairway with thousands of rough steps hewn into the rock, to... I shit you not... "The High Place of Sacrifice". The name, I think, is pretty self-explanatory.

In honor of our location, the following ensued.

No Canadians were harmed in the making of this pictures.

Hebron

2008-01-10T05:54:00.000-08:00

If you talk to a Jewish settler about whether Jews or Palestinians have the right to claim Hebron, he will inevitably point you towards the Bible. One settler even had a bible on him. He gestured vehemently at the appropriate verses, urging me to read them. “You see? Do you see?”

The script was in Hebrew.

I’ll save you the trouble of shaking the dust off your family bible. Hebron was King David’s capital before he conquered Jerusalem. Long before that, Hebron was- and still is- the site of the Cave of Machpela, an old series of family graves that house some of the most famous bones in history. You’ll recognize them.

Abraham. Sarah. Isaac. Leah. Jacob. Rebecca. Popularly known as the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, the Bible will tell you that they are the founding fathers of the Jews- to whom God promised the Holy Land.

But the Jews left. To be fair, they were thrown out- by the Babylonians, then again by the Romans. A few centuries later, in rode the Muslims.

Here’s where it gets sticky. Abraham and his progeny aren’t holy just to Jews. According to the Koran, Abraham (or Ibrahim), is also the forefather of the Arabs through his son Ishmael, brother of Isaac. Yes, this is also in the Bible. By association, the “Jewish” Patriarchs are also “Muslim”, held as mighty prophets in their own right.

The Muslims renamed the city Al-Khalil (or “The Friend”, as Abraham was a “friend” of Allah), repopulated it, and converted the rotting structure atop Abe’s boneyard into a mosque, called the Ibrahimi Mosque.

In 1967, the Jews came back. Look up “The Six Day War” on Wikipedia. And religious Jews, waving the Torah in one hand and rifles in the other, rushed into what was now a densely populated city of Arab Muslims. They built a settlement in the heart of the city, and to this day they remain: an armored enclave of yarmulke-wearing fanatics quoting lines from the Book of Genesis.

Some stats on Hebron:

500 Jewish settlers
2000 soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces
120,000 pissed off Palestinians

Let’s just say that tensions are high.

* * *

The labyrinthine marketplace surrounding the Mosque, once a thriving bazaar with hundreds of vendors, is a ghost town. All the shops have moved west, to where the roving, clashing gangs of settler and Arab youth can’t ruin business.

A knot of roughhousing Arab youngsters caught me on my way through the silent alleys.

“Hey, Chi-iiii-na! Ni how!”

“Korea! Ko-reeeeee-ah!”

“Jah-pan! Jah-pan!”

One kid, younger than the rest, sauntered up behind me, hands shoved in his pockets, smiling smugly. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he preened for his friends, tailing the oblivious foreigner. Then he aimed a kick at my knees.

A howl from the watching boys erupted.

I turned; he sprinted back towards the safety of his gang, bellowing gleefully. He skipped merrily away, taunting me over his shoulder… and ran straight into a slap to the face.

I stared. Every boy in that group was shouting at the kid in torrent Arabic. The eldest, a kid no older than sixteen, cuffed him hard, again, in the ear. He burst into tears, then grabbed an old rusted bucket and swung it at his peers in a wild circle. They responded with swift kicks and a flood of harsh words.

I turned my back on the scene. Spare the rod, you know the rest.

Another boy chased me down, apologizing profusely in passable English.

“But you know, it’s the Jews. They make things… er… very bad.”

Pardon me?

“The Jews. Because of what they do, we are angry. The boy, he angry. He get crazy. He…er…urm…”

I got the point.

* * *

In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a local settler, walked into the Ibrahimi Mosque and gunned down twenty-three Muslims as they knelt in prayer. I believe he was ripped apart by the survivors. Ever since, the mosque has been segregated into Muslim and Jewish portions.

I went first to the Muslim entrance, and joined a short line of waddling, headscarved old women and sullen-faced young men. The usual precautions: large plastic barricades, roped-off S-curve queues, metal detectors, and teenaged Israeli soldiers in their olive green uniforms, nonchalantly toting their M-16s. Another day at the office.

“You have knife?”

No.

“You have bomb?”

No.

“Are you Jewish?”

What?

“Here, Muslim. Here, no Jew. Jew, go other side. Are you Jewish?”

I’m Chinese, dude. The boy-soldier stared blankly at me. He didn’t seem to understand that there are as many Chinese Jews as saber-toothed tigers. I resisted a sudden urge to pinch the oozing zit on his nose.

Okay. I’m not Jewish.

“Go. Next!” He beckoned at the crease-faced grandmother behind me.

The Muslim section of the tomb was a plain, darkly-lit, whitewashed hall. Noon prayers were forty minutes away. I left after five.

* * *

A large crowd of kids spilled out onto the streets and ran, shouting and laughing, around the corner towards the Jewish entrance. They were all wearing yarmulkes. Many had side-curls. A pair of chaperones, both bearded men with yarmulkes, had M-16s slung over their shoulders. Neither wore uniforms.

I followed them.

A sour-faced Arab shopkeeper watched them file past his little shop. Those kids, he said, were settlers. The Jews from Kiryat Arba and the surrounding settlements and outposts would routinely schedule field trips to the Abe’s grave. Sometimes huge tour buses would arrive from Jerusalem, or New York. They would be loud, they would be yarmulked, they would be side-curled, and they would speak in Hebrew or New-Yawk-Tawk. They would walk and act with an infuriating air of entitlement, as if to tell the old man: “Hebron is ours, not yours.”

He then pointed out the invisible lines on the ground. Behind the Mosque stood a walled off, wire-fenced “security area” barred to Palestinians. It stretched all the way from the Mosque itself to Kiryat Arba, the main Jewish settlement, and comprised a sealed off, depopulated urban area and several “security roads” where settlers could drive without having their cars riddled with stones or bullets. For a square kilometer behind us were the abandoned corridors of the Old Bazaar.

For all intents, there was a Jewish bubble surrounding the Ibrahimi Mosque, beyond which no Palestinian could pass without the permission of an armed trooper.

The streets in front of the Mosque were controlled by the Israelis. Palestinians arriving to worship at the Mosque were required to file along a narrow sidewalk formed by big orange and white barricades, keeping all Palestinians off the street itself.

In the middle of the street stood the Gutnick Center, an Orthodox Jewish community center. Beyond the invisible line formed by this building and the opposite side of the street, Palestinians could not pass. Around the far side of the Gutnick Center was the entrance to the Jewish half of the Mosque, called by Jews the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

But I can go?

The old shopkeeper’s eyes narrowed. “Are you Muslim?”

No.

“Are you Jewish?

No!

“Christian, then? Yes, of course you can go there.”

I followed the settlers up to the gate. The kids ran about, playing tag, or sitting in small clusters, chattering in Hebrew. I noted rather belatedly that they were all boys. A dozen picnics started. A small knot of boys, all of them with side-curls and skullcaps, posed noisily for a picture by a tall settler with a gun. They shouted cheerily at me.

“Shalom! Shalom! Welcome to Israel! Welcome to Hebron!” I smiled and waved (I reserve the right to smile and wave at all children), and the boys cheered. The older man smiled, too- warily, but proudly. He nodded at me, then turned away. A folk song started- lively, with clapping hands; Eastern European in lilt and melody.

The old shopkeeper was right. These Jews were behaving as though they were in their own backyards. They weren’t tourists. They weren’t strangers; an alien population implanted by armed force on top of shackled masses of natives. They were home.

And this is probably what is most damaging to the psyche of Hebron’s Palestinians. They cannot understand how settlers can so blithely, so wholly, and with such conviction, ignore the reality that Hebron is Arab.

The existence of a costly military occupation, of 120,000 caged Arabs, of 1400 years of Arabic culture and government, of territorial claims backed not by Biblical verses, but by title deeds, house keys, and the continuous occupation of generations- these didn’t even remotely intrude upon the settlers’ Biblical wet-dream.

* * *

Of course, the Israelis had kept the important part of the Mosque for themselves.

The Muslim section, as I’ve mentioned, is simply a dark, open hall. The Jewish portion is smaller, sectioned off into study rooms and synagogues. However, it also contains the tombs of the patriarchs and matriarchs.

Hey, to the victors go the spoils.

The room straggled with bearded ultra-orthodox. All ignored me. They leaned over scrolls and books, chanting quietly. The walls were lined with bookshelves and framed posters overflowing with the ornate Hebrew script.

I picked up a bound Torah and flipped to a favorite chapter. I knew the words in English; the Hebrew was utterly arcane. An old caretaker approached me; wizened, dark, Ethiopian. “You read Hebrew?”

I read him a line, pronouncing the words phonetically. (Arts language credits!) The old guy beamed, his eyes disappearing into wrinkle-crinkles. “You are Jewish!”

No.

“You are not Jewish?” His face fell, and his eyes reappeared. They seemed confused.

No, sir. Christian.

The forbidden C-word. He sighed and turned away. Oy vey.

* * *

By the sides of this main hall were rooms walled off by iron grates. These were the tombs of Abraham’s family. In front of one grate, a shawled settler woman wept and prayed fervently, rocking back and forth. A small black sign embossed with gold Hebrew lettering hung from the grate:

“AVRAHAM AVINU”

Abraham, our father. Here was the old man himself. Around the sides, on similar grates barring similar rooms, similar signs hung. Jacob, our father. Sarah, our mother. Leah, our mother. The signs were all in Hebrew, and the Jews managed the tombs and prayed around them.

But beyond the grates, inside the rooms, the Patriarchs and Matriarchs had been given a Muslim memorial, surrounded by Muslim trappings. The large, peaked coffin or monument that marked the spot of burial was draped by large cloths with Arabesque embroidery. The walls of the small, square rooms were decorated with the calligraphy and patterns unique to Islamic art.

They looked identical to the tombs of Muslim figures I had seen in shrines and mosques in Cairo and Damascus. They looked like the tombs of Saladin, or Sayida Zeinab. The same coffin. The same cloth. The same decoration. The same grates walling off the coffin. The same square block of a room.

The Jews try to lay sole claim to the legacy of the Patriarchs, but the evidence belies this. As much as the settlers want to write off the Arabs and the Muslims as a bastard offshoot, Arab history is written upon the cities and the land- even the tombs.

And the Jews, try as they might, cannot change this. They cannot change the character of Hebron, or Nablus, or East Jerusalem, any more than they can change the character of Abraham’s Muslim tomb.

All they can do is hang a sign outside in Hebrew.

As if on cue, the call to noonday prayers sounded- bellowed deafeningly, and almost maliciously, from the minaret of the adjoining Muslim hall.

Not a single Jew in the room moved a muscle. No one looked up; no one voiced a word of annoyance. They kept chanting, reading, praying; pointedly ignoring the Arabic wails now echoing through the halls.

Santa's Ghetto

2008-01-01T08:20:00.000-08:00

The little town of Bethlehem has changed a lot in two thousand and eight years.

You won't feel as though you're walking through the pages of the Bible. The cradle of Christianity is a typical West Bank Palestinian town- dirty, disorganized, and blocked off from Israel Proper by a huge concrete monstrosity that the Israelis call "The Security Fence" and the Palestinians call "The Apartheid Wall".

Sometime after 9/11, Ariel Sharon spearheaded the building of a huge, snaking barrier- dozens of kilometres long- that would ring off Jerusalem and several huge settlement blocs from West Bank towns. The given reason: to stop suicide bombers from infiltrating Jewish areas.

It was immediately denounced as a "land grab". Most settlements reach deep into the West Bank- land that the Palestinians want for their future state. They protested that Israel, by physically separating these settlement lands from the West Bank, was taking one further step to annexing them for good.

Part of this wall now blockades Bethlehem from Jerusalem to the north. It runs along the outskirts of the town, an imposing, Orwellian length of concrete and barbed wire.

There are now two attractions in Bethlehem. One. The age-old Church of the Nativity, and Christmas Mass at Manger Square.

Two. Countless activists and artists have since made pilgrimages here to leave their mark on the Wall. The Palestinian side is covered with murals, stickers, quotes, and prayers- the graffiti of pride and protest, rage and revolution.

Today, I went down to read the writing on the wall. Here are some pictures.

Oh,one last thing. I've seen this Wall.

It is not a fucking fence.

Five fingers of the same hand. Brings a tear to a glass eye.

No parking allowed. Violaters will be towed.

The Palestinian Guernica.

Palestine vs. Israel. Round... 6? 7? 12? Who's even keeping track?

Happiest Place on Earth.

What. The. Fuck.

Stairway to Freedom and a giant termite knocking segments of the Wall down.

On either side of this mural were the names of all the Palestinian villages destroyed since 1948. It's a long list.

A series of murals, each depicting a Palestinian village or town destroyed or taken over by Israel since 1948. There were a couple of dozen along that stretch of road.

Where's Dick Cheney?

"This is for the broken confessions lost in translation." Whatever the fuck that means. What happened to "Give me liberty or give me death!", or "Workers of the world, unite!"?

"Another world is not only possible; she's on the way. Many of us won't be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if you listen very carefully, you can almost hear her breathing."- Arundhati Roy.

A Christmas tree ringed by the wall, surrounded by stumps. You can figure this one out on your own.

"Me? Tell a lie?"

I didn't get this till I went around the other side. There, in equally large lettering: "I am from Berlin."

Maybe they brought the local elementary school down one day. "Ok, kids. On today's field trip, we're going to decorate the symbol of our oppression!"

If you understand this, you are destined to be either my best man or my wife.

If only it were that easy.

Why we fight.

Nothing lasts forever.

Window to the outside world.

The entrance and exit to Bethlehem.

Peace be upon you.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

2007-12-30T01:05:00.000-08:00

Before I start, I want to state unequivocally that I had an amazing Christmas in the Holy Land. What follows is simply a bit of a reflection.

* * *

One of the things I’d most looked forward to in the Middle East was the prospect of Christmas in Bethlehem.

To explain this, a trip down Memory Lane. First stop: Desolation Row. Yes, the old blog, which I ran with Kieran Nelson. One of his first posts was titled: “The War on Christmas.” Some excerpts:

“Tis the season to be ranting about my favorite love-hate holiday of the year: Christmas…

It’s the season of cheap Tim Allen movies, crappy weather, mass-manufactured lawn art, crowded grocery stores with empty shelves, and christmas wish lists being eagerly scribed by soon-to-be-disappointed young children. It means garish decorations in overcrowded shopping malls with filled parking lots. It means countless ads for video games and annoying plastic race-car tracks. It means bratty offspring act like angels for two weeks so they can reap hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of gifts on Christmas morning. It means infomercial ads for poor quality tool sets, specifically designed to lure wives into buying them for their husbands.

And the songs. The constant music; the recurrent bubble-gummy, cat-strangling renditions of festive English Christmas songs. Not to mention the most irritating and unlistenable song of all: Jingle Bell Rock...

, …we have to withstand an onslaught of unappealing culture that a lot of people accept without really paying attention to its commercial undertones, or its cheap, fake, manufactured glow.

… I for one am not going to spend my Christmas listening to awful jingles, joining queues to enter stores in bustling malls, watching reruns of Charlie Brown in between endless annoying ads, maxing out my Visa, or putting effigies of Santa on the lawn… Perhaps with effort, I can take from Christmas this year only the aspects I like, and entirely ignore the ugly and superficial culture that surrounds it.

Happy Holidays from Desolation Row.”

Yeah, it’s cynical. But if you think that’s all it is, you’re missing the point. Kieran’s saying that North American Christmas is cheapened by the runaway "Deck The Malls" commercialization of everything great about the holiday season: family, friends, food, fireplaces, and fun.

And I agreed. I wanted a meaningful Christmas. I wanted to celebrate Christmas as a holiday, not consume it as a product. And I figured the best way to do that was to put the “Christ” back in Christmas.

Now, I don’t subscribe to the mythology of a mad Jewish rabbi, who, supposedly born to a virgin in Roman Palestine two thousand years ago, later performed the metaphysically-astounding feat of removing all the sins of Mankind by being nailed to a pair of two-by-fours. Not anymore, anyway.

But I was raised Catholic (back in the Dark Ages), and some old feelings die hard. Why not go back to my roots? A solemn, sacred, pilgrim’s Christmas, free of the trappings of Santa and Sinatra and the strip mall, in the pressing aura of the cradle of Christianity.

And so it was.

There were no jingles on the radio. No heaps of red and green bunting strung from streetlamps. No lights hung from the balconies of apartments or from the rafters of the malls. No twenty-foot plastic trees, strung with a hundred yards of tinsel and a thousand multicolored balls, crowned with a sequined star, towering above public squares and inside building lobbies. No Santa Clauses. No frantic, last-minute shopping expeditions. No 20-lbs turkeys, sitting pimply pink and naked, at the supermarket’s meat section.

Just the regular hustle-bustle of life. This was Israel and Palestine. Jews and Muslims. They didn’t celebrate Christmas, and certainly not our model of it.

Instead, it was religious. In Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher, lines of pilgrims mumbled the Rosary in the shadow of the rocks of Golgotha, where Christ was crucified. They wept and prostrated themselves over the slab of rose-tinted rock where his body was laid out for burial. They stood silently in line to enter the rickety wooden shack that marked the cave where he was buried for three days. In Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, they kissed the silver star embedded in the marble floor, where a solemn Greek priest told the crowd the manger had once been.

Catholic nuns in their plain habits. Greek Orthodox priests in their black robes. Decadent, sumptuous iconography- dim-flaring lamps, heavy crucifixes and carvings of the Virgin Mother and Child, dripping with gold and silver. Intricate, multi-hued mosaics. Towering church arches and candle-lit prayer cellars. Choirs. Processions. Prayers. Homilies. Mass after mass after mass. The sweet musk of incense and the dull murmur of prayer. Our Father, who art in Heaven. Hail Mary, full of grace.

Amidst the holiness was an oddly touching sense of community. In this land of Jews and Muslims, people had come from the four corners of the earth, just once every year, to be Christians. There was an unspoken tribal solidarity in those churches. In a dozen languages, tips, favors, and good wishes were traded.

There was also a tired routine to the experience- something very rinsed-and-repeated about the way the faceless masses herded past the same holy sites, posed for pictures (some would stand, lips pressed against some old rock or painting for half a minute, while their wife or brother-in-law fumbled with the camera), mumbled rushed prayers, and were chased on by priests anxious to avoid a clog-up: “Okay, there are a lot of people waiting, yes? Pray quickly, yes? Move along. Next!”

I imagined that every morning of the holiday season, all the priests of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Church of the Nativity would gather for a pep-talk:

“Okay, lads. Take a knee. Whew. Okay. Lotta gringos comin’ in today. Lotta tourists. We gotta get them through quickly. Don’t let ‘em pray for more than thirty seconds. And don’t let them kiss the Burial Slab for too long. Some of ‘em practically make out with the damned thing, and the saliva’s a bitch to mop up. You, Brother Gregorios, you big lunk. Don’t let ‘em take pictures inside the Tomb of Christ. The flash ruins the paint. Any questions? Okay, hands in, hands in. One! Two! Three! AMEN!”

I won’t lie. Everyone’s a Christian-for-the-holidays in the Holy Land. I said the Lord’s Prayer for the first time in a decade. I didn’t even flinch when a fat old woman from Spain crushed my bones with a hug, wept on my shoulder, and blubbered: “Lord Jesus bless you, child. I love you!” (I think I responded: “Peace be with you too, ma’am.”) I visited every icon and shrine. (And actually kissed one. It was slimy.) I read the Bible. I went to mass, mumbled the appropriate lines, and even crossed myself a few times. Spectacles, testicles…

And I didn’t feel a thing.

No sense of belonging. No resonance. I didn’t feel touched by the hand of God. The whole experience was as alien to me as an Iroquois rain dance. If anything, there was that bemused, analytical detachment I get whenever I read economic theory or visit a mosque. Hell, I had more of an emotional connection to…

… secret Santas?

What the fuck?

The last time my friends and I organized Secret Santas had been two years ago, before we had all graduated. We stayed up till God-awful in the morning, listening to those bubble-gummy jingles and watching cheesy Christmas cartoons, drinking egg nog and munching on some tasty pastry the girls had concocted. I had bought Nick a Canucks T-shirt (Nick could never have too many clean shirts), and Mike had bought me a rice-cooker… cheeky bastard.

I stood there in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and a flood of memories rushed back. Laughing at the try-hards in my old neighborhood who strung up their Christmas lights in November… and then putting up our own a week later. Looking for Boxing Week sales with Gavin or my old man at Richmond Mall, with its Chinese Santa Claus who spoke Cantonese and was probably repeating his last name three times: “Ho! Ho! Ho!” Groaning at- and then singing along to- the diarrhea stream of carbon copy tunes on everyone’s iTunes. (Nick’s mix was titled “S-antastic Cl-awesome”.) The bursting catalogues of video games, hardware and other big boys’ toys released specially for the holidays, that I could max out my visa on. And yes, those goddamned fake, twenty-foot plastic trees that don’t even have that good ol’ earthy pine scent.

I realized I missed North American Christmas. Yes, even with “its commercial undertones, and its cheap, fake, manufactured glow.” This model of Christmas, with all its familiar flaws, was all that I knew and loved. It’s MY culture and heritage. I realized that the spiritual experience I’d hoped for couldn’t be gotten from intoned rituals and these supposed holy places of “mystique” and “sanctity”. It comes from community, from being with friends and family, and all that is familiar and that resonates with your past. It’s being where you know you are “home”.

It took many years for a million niggling hints to form up into this one conclusion. Christmas in Israel just pushed it over the edge. Hey, I know I'll never stop wandering and wondering. I’ve seen the sun rise on many a foreign shore, and watched the stars wheel over many a strange skyline. Ultramodern Singapore and quaint Halifax. Marble-sheathed Rome and smog-shrouded Bangkok. Schizoid, tribal Beirut. And Jerusalem, of bronze and light and gold.

But I’ll never again pretend that Vancity- that cosmopolitan, image-driven Ikea showcase of a town- isn’t home.

Next year, no matter where I am in November, I know where I’ll be in December. I’m going home for the holidays. Vancouver, between the mountains and the sea. No place like it.

Yes, even with Jingle Bell Rock and Boxing Day line-ups.

Hell. Especially with Jingle Bell Rock and Boxing Day line-ups.

I'm Going to Disneyland!

2007-12-19T18:35:00.000-08:00

This is what I've been up to in the last fortnight. Briefly.

After the Hotel Talal crew dispersed to the four corners of the earth, Nickie, Kristen, and Kieran flew into Beirut. We had work to do.

Kieran's my long-time partner-in-revolution, a large, bearish character with the grace of a drunk Viking, the mind of a Greek philosopher, and the ambition of a Roman emperor. Kristen's his opinionated little sister, all cheeky grins, contagious chuckles, and offhand comments that are as insightful as they are belligerent. Nickie's another old friend and kindred spirit, who's worked as a borderline-escort in the Japanese corporate underworld, almost died making a documentary about Malay jihadists in southern Thailand, and is launching a revolutionary social media website for the environment.

Nickie's done a lot of freelance film work, and using her contacts to several distributors- including Al-Jazeera- she scored agreements for these distributors to purchase a series of short films that we would make about the region during a month of travel.

So far, we've:

1) Filmed a Climate Change Walkathon in Beirut in association with the Global Awareness Day on Climate Change and the global conference held this year in Bali. Such a march, which involved over a thousand people, had never been held in the Arab world before. It was the first time I'd ever held a videocamera, or held interviews news-style: run in, shove your mike in a guy's face, ask him five questions, then rinse and repeat. Nickie and I nabbed a choice interview from Wael Hmaidan, the organizer of the event, who had a million optimistic comments about the possibility for putting climate change on the agenda of the next Arab League Summit, the repercussions of erosion, rising coastlines, and water scarcity in the Arab world, and the economic opportunities available in an Arab "green" economy. The war-torn, petrodollar-fueled Arab world, of course, doesn't give two shits about the environment... but hey. A Walkathon begins with a single step. Right? Sigh.

2) Filmed a community of human rights dissidents from Syria. These included a number of ordinary rankers- journalists, writers, activists- a Kurdish family that fled after one of the daughters was falsely accused of insulting President Bashar Assad, and a pair of reasonably high-profile politicians, one of whom was interviewed in exile, and the other secretly in Damascus. The latter was arrested the day after we interviewed him. I almost puked upon hearing the news, and fervently prayed that our interview had not been the trigger for his arrest. Sometime, I will write up the story of my buddy Ahed, who had a tale and a half to tell, and who was almost solely responsible for putting together this film short.

A number of potential film shorts fell through, including one on Sunni street politics, which I wrote up in my previous post in lieu of making a pod. Too much blue tape- the powers-that-be in Tareek Al-Jadidah didn't want us filming or probing their security arrangements. Whoops. Hope Sam can keep a secret. By the way, that isn't his real name.

We then blew through Damascus, stopping only for our clandestine (or was it?) interview and a few intense sessions at the local sheesha parlor. My head still hurts. We had been fed a lot of paranoid warnings about the unseen hands and eyes of the Syrian Security Services, known as the mukhabarat, by my exiled buddy Ahed- and we were wary of even speaking about him or the regime in public... as, it seems, was the entire country. We went from Lebanon, a country that lived and breathed politics, to a country where it was the one forbidden, untouchable issue.

Portraits of Bashar Assad- the figurehead for an Alawite regime puppeteered by Bashar's stronger little brother Maher and old associates of the dead founder of the regime, Hafez Assad, were everywhere. There could be four framed pictures of the guy in a single shop. His face was on bridges, buildings, taxi windows, shopfronts... and it all had one message: leave the politics to us. Big Brother.

Tongue-in-cheek, we called Bashar Assad "You Know Who", or "He Who Must not be Named." Alternately, we used Lord of the Rings lingo: Bashar was "The Dark Lord", or "Sauron". The mukhabarat were "Dark Riders", or "Nazgul". The army were "orcs".

We raced into Jordan, to find that the currency was pegged a third again higher than the US dollar, and everything was insanely overpriced as a result. Our wallets hemorrhaged, and this caused much bitterness. There isn't a drop of oil in Jordan. How could the currency remain so strong?

I figured that the Americans and Saudis are propping up the Jordanians with aid and petrofunds because of its location and loyalties. Jordan is south of Syria, north of Saudi, west of Iraq, and east of Israel and the Bank. It's one of the last strong allies of the States, and one of only two nations to sign a full peace with Israel. 30% of the people are descended from Bedouin, and are ethnically most similar to Iraqis and Saudis. More importantly, 70% are Palestinians, descendants of refugees from 1948. Jordan must be one of the only countries in the world whose currency boasts a monument from another state: the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

It's an island of stability in a sea of madness, and the West should want to keep it that way. If the monarchy fell and the "Jordanian" identity was lost for those millions of Palestinians-Jordanians, Jordan could become anything from a Syrian vassal state, to a base for Islamist extemists or Iraqi militants and refugees, to a neo-Palestinian state that might serve as a base for West Bank and Gaza nationalists against Israel. And the best way to stave this off is to keep the bellies of the people full.

Anyway, we blew through a day in Petra, the rose-red city carved into a winding canyon by a civilization called the Nabateans, who were contemporaries of Christ.

Now we are in a town called Madaba, an hour from the the King Hussein Bridge, and the land know by Syrian journalists as "Disneyland", or "Dixie", and by the Arab world as "the Zionist Entity": Israel.

All of us have a place in the world that we're dying to see... and most of the time we have no roots there. Nickie's a South East Asia buff, and fulfilled a longtime dream to make the region her stomping ground when she filmed her documentary. Kieran was a Russian in another life, though I can't quite decide if he was a Czarist or a Red revolutionary. My cousin Gavin, who can't speak a word of Mandarin, goes through books on China at an astounding rate. My friend Maddie back home is obsessed with India- and she's British-Canadian. Other friends, white as sheets and Canadian as maple syrup- are obsessed with Latin America, East Africa, Central Asia.

For my part, I've waited for what seems like my entire life to see Israel and Jerusalem. And now that I'm a couple of hours from its gates, I can't sleep.

There's work and play to be had. Films to make, sights to see. Interviews to craft and trips to plan. A few days from now, Christmas in Bethlehem, and New Year's in Tel Aviv. But right now, I couldn't care less. I'm going to Jerusalem. The Church, the Mount, the Wall, the Gates. I've no words for it, and probably won't for a long time.

I'm going to Disneyland!

The Sunni Street

2007-12-19T05:52:00.001-08:00

“To be Lebanese is to be political.” Sam leaned forward. His manner was grave, as if he were trying to explain Newton’s Second Law, or some other fundamental fact about the universe. “You drink politics with your coffee. You eat it with your food. You breathe it with the air. Everything is sect… sectal? Sectarian? Yeah. Sectarian.”

Anyone remember Sam?

I’d met him a couple of weeks before, walking through the packed slum-burbs of South Beirut with a bunch of Hotel Talal-ers on route to Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp, an animated, personable kid who’d learned English during a year in New Mexico.

“Shatila? That’s the lion’s den.” He volunteered to be our safari guide.

Sam spent the afternoon shepherding us about, translating Arabic pick-up lines into English, and broadsiding us with a shipload of political opinions. Two things became clear.

One. Sam was a Sunni jarhead- a mouthpiece for a million little pro-Sunni jingoisms and beliefs. Two. In a country of tight lips, Sam had a very loose tongue- and no one, it seemed, had told him to bite it in front of strangers.

A couple of weeks later, he offered to give me a rundown of Sunni politics- from the grassroots. Street-level politics, steeped in the daily life of the neighborhood, where hard-eyed men in coffee-shops and back-alleys form the backbones of Lebanon’s tribes.

I jumped at the chance.

It would occur to me much later, in the midst of one of Sam’s motor-mouthed monologues, that a casual backpacker like myself had no business knowing some of the facts that he so casually gave away.

Sam began with the basics. The Law of the Jungle: your tribe is everything. A man is dependent on wasta- or “connections”- for everything from a job, to a scholarship, to political voice. And in Lebanon, wasta is rooted in the tribe: strings of patronage to tribal godfathers and standing in the community.

Every individual life thus becomes tied to the interests of one’s tribe. Nothing is outside politics. Even the color of your clothing betrays your loyalties.

“Blue for Hariri and the Sunnis, orange for Aoun and his Maronites. Yellow for Hezbollah and the Shi’ites,” Sam ticked his fingers off one by one. “Red, green… even the rainbow is taken by the Druze. The only color I can wear that hasn’t been claimed is black.”

He paused. “Yet.”

Later, he took us on a tour of his neighborhood, Tareek Al-Jadidah.

A fiercely Sunni enclave in South Beirut loyal to the Hariri clan, it’s a dense network of ragged complexes decorated with huge murals and banners of Sunni godfathers and Islamic scholars. Many buildings sport curtains and awnings in bright Hariri blue. Flags imprinted with the logo of Hariri’s Future Movement hang from balconies and food stands. Walls of blue graffiti declare the neighborhood’s loyalties in jingoistic Arabic: “With our blood and souls, we sacrifice for you!”

“We are the base of the pyramid.” Sam explained, with his usual cheery bluster, gesturing at the noisy afternoon scene. Around us, crowds of men and women swirled and bustled about their business. Nothing is outside politics. To live in this neighborhood was in itself a political act- an oath of allegiance to the Sunnis, and to vote for their godfathers with the ballot or with the bullet.

Sam stopped by a mosque on one main street, stained glass windows ornately emblazoned with the names of Islam’s first four caliphs- Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali- the first three of whom are regarded as illegitimate by the Shi’a, whose name translates into something like: “Followers of Ali”. It was decorated with colored bunting for the upcoming haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Green, red, white.

“There’s one color missing.” Sam had one of those inside-joke smirks. “It should be there, but… we… don’t like that color.”

I didn’t answer or ask. Yellow. Hezbollah.

The Sunnis of Tareek Al-Jadidah had chosen to flaunt their old hatreds on the walls of their mosque, their schools, their streets, and their flags. All this heraldry- the banners, the graffiti, and the colors- was meant to send only one message: This is Sunni land.

Tareek Al-Jadidah is a square block, about two kilometers on each side, and framed on every side but the south by a major road or a bridge. To the west and north are neighborhoods of mixed population, a short drive from the climbing, half-reconstructed skyline of the Corniche and the downtown commercial strips. To the east is a flat, open area- sparsely populated, rolling slowly up into the outskirting highlands.

The south is where Sunni eyes turn with wary distrust. The southern border of Tareek Al-Jadidah is Shatila, that ugly Palestinian refugee camp abandoned by Fatah, the Lebanese government, and Allah- everyone, apparently, but Hezbollah and the Shi’ites. According to Sam, Shatila is a vassal state of Hezbollah, which gives them funding in exchange for a tenuous allegiance.

Fair enough. But funding for what? Health services? Education? Utilities? Or weaponry? I found myself weighing the pros and cons of having an Islamist militia, untouchable by the government in Beirut, buying the loyalties of downtrodden Palestinians- even if they were probably bought with medicines and schoolbooks.

Shatila is, in any case, the least of Tareek’s worries. Just beyond those hovels are the neighborhoods of Dahiyeh- a huge swath of Shi’ite land that one writer rather colorfully labeled “The Belt of Misery”. Dahiyeh covers a territory several times the size of Tareek Al-Jadidah, stretching across the south and up onto its eastern border. More importantly, it’s a stronghold of Hezbollah, much of which was bombed flat by Israel during the 2006 war.

“Dahiyeh used to be Sunni land.” Sam explained. “Then the Shi’ites came. They moved into apartment after apartment, first as individual families, then in huge groups. They took over the leases and drove the Sunnis out. That’s how we lost Dahiyeh. That’s how we’ll lose Tareek Al-Jadidah, and Beirut itself, if we don’t fight against it.”

Was this a war over lebensraum? Were the Shi’ites breeding out the Sunnis? I thought about the swarms of Chinese settlers in Tibetan and Uighur lands, sent by Beijing to crowd out the natives. The Sunnis were facing death by demographics, and they knew it. The Shi’ites could cry all they wanted about wanting roofs for their childrens’ heads- to Tareek Al-Jadidah, this was genocide disguised as housing rights.

We ended up at a bright blue building, multistoried, festooned with cedar flags. The sign on the front announced: Secure Plus. “This is our neighborhood watch headquarters. Don’t take any pictures.”

Sam made us wait while he conferred with one of the watchmen leaders. I peeked inside the building; it was spare, with darkly lit concrete walls, like the inside of an East Bronx boxing gym. Grim young men stalked about in groups. A small circle of youths, stubble-chinned and pleather-jacketed, formed around Sam as he argued with a tall, greasy-haired watchman. Hostile stares. I thought of my first day in high school.

Suddenly, I was spun about by an insistent tug and a harsh whisper. It was a girl from Hotel Talal- she was eastern European but spoke Arabic well. “What are you doing here?”

What?

“Are you in trouble? What are you doing here? Please, I can talk to someone for you. You shouldn’t be here.”

What the hell? I assured the girl that I wasn’t in trouble, and that I was here by invitation. She walked away skeptically. It suddenly occurred to me that this wasn’t a neighborhood watch any more than Hezbollah was. This wasn’t a group of middle aged-men keeping an eye on drunk teenagers. This was the headquarters of Tareek Al-Jadidah’s militia.

Sam reappeared. He looked relieved. “Okay, we can keep going with the tour. No pictures, though.”

So who were those guys?

“Secure Plus.” Sam drew out the organizational structure of his neighborhood watch, but he was very careful never to say the taboo word “militia”.

Secure Plus is a Sunni security firm, a legitimate, professional business that provides bodyguards and surveillance for Sunni communities and figures. It also doubles as a secret training ground for two smaller watch-groups, the Panthers and the Eagles. These two groups are organized gangs of non-professionals, crewed by youths in their teens and twenties. They aren’t necessarily thugs and toughs- Sam certainly wasn’t- but I wouldn’t be surprised it there were a few hardheads.

After having proved a certain degree of loyalty and competence in the Panthers or the Eagles, youths are chosen to undergo combat training with Secure Plus. Some remain; most return to the ranks of the two watch groups. This is how Tareek Al-Jadidah screens and trains its foot soldiers.

“We use electrical prods,” said Sam. “Tasers.” And guns? “No!” A vehement negative. “We don’t use guns.”

Against who?

“Thieves. And people who are unwelcome.”

Like Shi’ites and Palestinians from the south?

“Well, yeah. Who else?”

The neighborhood is divided into several watch zones amongst the Panthers and Eagles, with a highly organized chain of command. The section leaders, mostly middle-aged men, have noms du guerre that seem to have been stolen right out of a B-movie. Abu Dam- Father of Blood. Father of Suffocation. Father of Troubles. And one figure known, almost comically, as The King.

“We have day-time and night-time patrols. Some are mobile- we have men on scooters and in cars. On street corners and the entrances to important buildings, we have watchmen in plainclothes. They look like everyone else; you would have no idea who they are. If you look suspicious, they stop you and question you.”

What questions?

“Oh, you know. What your last name is. What village your father came from.” In other words, what sect you’re from. And if you’re not Sunni?

Sam didn’t answer. I assumed he didn’t hear the question, and I did not repeat it.

“We let Shi’ites and Palestinians in to visit,” he went on. “The Shi’ites won’t even do that. If you’re Sunni and you’re in a Shi’ite area, you have to pretend to be Shi’ite- use all their greetings and phrases- or they’ll heckle you out. We welcome Shi’ites and Palestinian visitors, but not to live here. We do not let the Shi’ites buy land, lease land, or rent apartments in groups. That’s how they took Dahiyeh.”

Later, Sam spread out a tourist map of Beirut on a table- complete with descriptions of the National Museum and other attractions. Dead serious, he pointed out the borders of his hood and possible avenues of attack by Shi’ites or Palestinians. “What’s in the north?”

Downtown. The Corniche. the Parliament, the tent city, the malls…

“Yes, yes.” Sam was impatient. “But who’s there? Who could protect the Sunnis?”

That was easy. It was election crunch-time. There were APCs on every street corner and troopers on every sidewalk- crewed by Sunnis, commanded by their Maronite allies. The Lebanese army.

“Yep. If the Shi’ites come from the north or the west, the army will crush them.”

Okay. What about the east, and this flat, open green space before it?

“Yep.” A grim tone, dead serious. “There’ll be snipers in those buildings.” He pointed at the long street that formed Tareek’s easternmost boundary. “We’ll have men up there watching the open ground. They can’t attack us from an open area; it’s suicide.”

And the south?

“Yeah, the south. That’s where the trouble is. That where most of our strength is concentrated.”

I listened to this little briefing intently. But part of me was incredulous. Was this a genuine tactical assessment, learned in the war-rooms of the community leaders, or was this an overzealous teenager playing general in front of a foreigner?

And snipers in buildings to the east? Sam’s loose lips had just given away a rather ugly secret: Tareek Al-Jadidah had guns in its arsenal. I didn’t call him on it.

More importantly, I was struck dumb by the tone and character of his words. Sam might as well have said of Dahiyeh: “Here be Mordor.” Here be the Forces of Evil, arrayed against the silver-armored defenders of Tareek Al-Jadidah. Here be the orcish Shi’ite hordes, playing the Persia to Tareek’s Spartans. These were the words and the beliefs of a people who knew themselves to be under siege. And their politics reflected this. The politics of Tareek Al-Jadidah were all, in one way or another, preparing for or responding to the perceived threat of Lebanon’s other tribes.

Was Sam just a jarhead? On some level, of course he knew better. He knew as well as any Lebanese that if the tribes didn’t find a way to break free of the old hatreds, Lebanon would be doomed to civil war- or cold peace- until the Day of Judgment. And he knew that the youth would have to spearhead this change. They would have to replace the beliefs of their elders- before they became them.

“I’m in a group called Future Youth,” he explained. Isn’t that the name of Hariri’s party? You know, a Sunni-only club? “No, that’s the Future Movement. It’s the actual political party. Future Youth was founded by Sunnis, yeah, but it’s for young people only, and its non-political. Shi’ites can join, and Christians too. ‘Future’ for me doesn’t mean what it does for Hariri, for the Future Movement. ‘Future’ isn’t just a name; it’s a necessity. We have to see past our differences.”

The tragedy is this kind of end-of-the-road vision-of-a-vision is drowned by the everyday reality of tribal rivalry. Dirty, day-by-day competition for jobs, for lebensraum, for political power. And with several hundred thousand frustrated, bombed-out Shi’ites clamoring on the doorstep of Tareek Al-Jadidah, well-meaning musings about olive branches and tribal unity drift away like ashes. Over the years, the moral climate of South Beirut’s single Sunni bastion have forced Sam to absorb- and live out- the skewed perspectives of his tribe.

Just like the Shi’ites of Dahiyeh, or the Palestinians of Shatila.

No, I don’t begrudge Sam his beliefs or his taser.

As he walked away for that last time, grinning cheekily and promising to Facebook me, I thought fleetingly about the movie The Departed, and its take on Good and Evil:

When you’re staring down the barrel of a loaded gun, does it really matter?

The Rovers

2007-12-11T04:16:00.000-08:00

“There was Barney McGee from the banks of the Lee
There was Hogan from County Tyrone
There was Johnny McGurk, who was scared stiff of work
And a man from West Meath named Malone
There was Slugger O’Toole who was drunk as a rule
And fighting Bill Tracy from Dover
And your man Mick McCann from the banks of the Bann
Was the skipper of the Irish Rover.”

Hotel Talal, sitting square on the Green Line that divided Christian East Beirut from Sunni West Beirut during the Civil War, has been a breeding ground for some quirky personalities.

Lebanon’s a political circus at the best of times, but for a couple of weeks, the situation descended firmly into the “gong show” category. President Lahoud vacated the Grand Serail, the mammoth, Versailles-style presidential chateau, to little fanfare and much apathy. The godfathers bandied crooked words, and the Lebanese Army choked off Beirut’s arteries with armor and barbwire. Hezbollah made calculated threats from their southern lairs. The West and Syria/Iran used Lebanon as their personal chessboard, moving tribal militias, parties, and religious authorities about like so many pawns and bishops. Strife was on the horizon. Blood was in the air.

And like bees to honey- or like crows to corpses- the adventurers, humanitarians, and reporters of the West bought tickets to the show.

Hotel Talal filled up. Small-time journalists hoping for the scoop that would break them into the big-time. Middle-East academics taking the opportunity to do some frontline research. Aimless vagabonds and sunburnt backpackers looking for a little tourism in the headlines- hoping to bring back photos of burning tires, memories of martial law, and a Hezbollah T-shirt or two back home as souvenirs. Party-goers who came to check out the “Paris of the Middle East”- only to find a bizarre mix of Paris 2008 and Paris 1919.

There was Darcy, the baby-faced, hard-drinking son of an infamous Aussie activist, who wanted to promote a one-world government vision he called “pan-Terranism”- through pornography. Patrick, a Polish photographer who “researched” natural hallucinogens in his spare time- everything from mushrooms, to hashish, to opium, to qat. Didier, the Quebecois math student who was arrested by an unknown militia group and slept blindfolded in a dank jail for a night.

Zoltan, a warble-voiced, nerdy Hungarian freelancer with a crushing handshake and a fluent command of Arabic. Leo, a tattooed Brazilian researching Palestinian refugee society in a squallid Bekaa Valley camp. Alan, a grungy, white-haired “freelance humanitarian” who had spent his life jetting between the hellholes of the Third World lending a helping hand.

Steve, a portly, balding blowhard who overcompensated for his cartoonish appearance and a writing career that didn’t quite match up to his own overexpectations by fancying- and worse, by advertising- himself as the James Bond of journalism. Pompous and secretive, paranoid and gullible, Steve was the laughingstock of the hostel. He eavesdropped on every conversation in a half-mile radius, talked in whispers, and boasted emptily of his sexual prowess and two-bit accomplishments.

The hostel crowd, in retaliation, delighted in pranking him. Yesterday, Steve turned green with jealousy when we convinced him that we had interviewed Amin Gemayal, the most well-known of the Maronite godfathers- an elitist prick who wouldn’t give anyone in Hotel Talal the time of day.

There was a small crew of people I hung out with in particular… a little mismatched group that- like the best travel crews- were mashed together by the Providence of Hotel Talal’s dorm-room-distribution, and would never have been friends off the backpack trail.

Jeremy, who rode his motorbike in from Turkey three weeks ago on his way to Iran- a lanky, low-key daredevil who’s rappelled out of helicopters for a forest fire rapid-reaction force, ice-climbed a score of frozen waterfalls, was bitten by a poisonous snake when he chased it to impress a girl, and wrote a book about riding his bike from Alberta to Panama to recover from a broken heart. “It’s called ‘Motorcycle Therapy’,” he’d quip, to good-natured eye rolling at the dinner table. “In stores now. Also available on amazon.com.”

Drew, a hulking, easy-going Californian who spent most of the last year hiking around east Africa, working for a typically obscure NGO in Kenya, and who once escaped being stalked by a pride of lionesses. Justin, who ditched Seattle’s yuppie scene to entertain the world’s backpackers with an astounding repertoire of hip-hop moves, pick-up lines, and insights about American foreign policy.

Tiny, waif-like Miriam, daughter of a former “interrogation expert” for the US army, who studies at a Turkish university and danced as if she were on the set of Grease: The Musical. Sam and Ola, an Aussie and a Brit who used their Muslim backgrounds to score nursing jobs in Saudi Arabia, and who entertained me with tales of the repressed sexuality and tribal-based incest of Saudi Arabia’s medieval culture over a few nights of losing ourselves in Beirut’s space-age nightlife.

And _______, an irreverent, one-man comedy show with verbal diarrhea. Combining a blunt, vulgar sense of humor with a less-than-perfect command of the English language, he provided a sound-bite for every occasion, regaling us with outrageous, barely believable tales of his sexual exploits and past pranks, and leading the tormenting of Steve with malicious glee.

His jovial, rakish demeanor was also completely at odds with a shady past as a political dissident in a nearby Arab state, from which he fled into exile some time ago. With impossible casualness, he’s told me an incredible tale about suffering the consequences of being a rank-and-file member of the underground, and taken me to meet a number of his fellow exiles.

I will relate this to you all after I leave the country from which he fled, for if I become linked to him while there, I will likely face… er… “questioning”.

So what’s happened since?

Simply put, things calmed down. Impossibly, the godfathers realized that perhaps civil war wasn’t in their best interests. Consensus slowly formed around General Michel Suleiman, commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces (which, in case you were wondering, isn’t a militia, but actually is the legitimate army of the state). Despite the obligatory heming, hawing, and tire-burning, the tribes are falling into line. About a week ago, it became apparent that Suleiman was going to be President, and that the rest is just details. Now, all that’s left is for the godfathers to divide up the political pie: what tribe gets what ministry and what jurisdiction in a new government.

No more civil war. Crisis averted. The Lebanese heaved a sigh of relief, and Hotel Talal buzzed with mixed feelings. From Steve: “Did I want something to happen? Fuck yeah!” From Jeremy: “I was hoping that nothing would happen. But if something had, I would’ve been glad to see it.” He related to me a story about his girlfriend, studying for a medical degree: “She would tell me, that as a doctor, you want to cure sickness, to ease suffering. But you also always want to see the most vile, fucked-up diseases in action… because… it’s… cool.”

When I find a better way to describe those twin desires, indescribable and paradoxical, I’ll let you know.

So one by one, the crew left. The bees buzzed off; the crows flew away. To Damascus, to Istanbul, to Paris, to Jerusalem. On the road again. Today, besides that noxious oaf Steve, I’m the last.

So now, I find myself filing away a heap of good memories with good people- of an experience as schizoid as Lebanon itself. Politics and partying. Barbed wire, bombs, bimbos, and beers. Protests and tension by day; debauchery by night. Wandering the ruins of Baalbek and the ruins of Maroun Al Ras. In Beirut, on the intersection between Middle-East and West, between war and peace, between slum-like poverty and ultra-modernity, between the hospitality demanded by Arab customs and the paranoia fueled by countless years of rivalry and war.

I knew half of them about half as well as I should’ve liked, and the other half about half as well as they deserved.

Good luck to you all. See you on the road.

In Deep Shi'ite

2007-12-01T09:57:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, four of us rented a car, filled its tank with dirt-cheap Arab oil, wrangled a travel permit from scowling bureaucrats, and racked up 400 km on the backroads of southern Lebanon- the heartland of Hezbollah, where Shi’ites roam and the Lonely Planet fears to tread.

From here, during the Civil War, Arafat’s guerillas launched the needling raids that finally, in 1982, brought the wrath of Ariel Sharon down upon Lebanon. Israel set the Shi’ite homelands afire in bloody, ill-considered retaliation for Palestinian terrorism. In doing so, they earned an eternal enemy in the Lebanese Shi’ites, yet another Middle Eastern tribe known for their long suffering and long memories.

In 2006, after years of ceaseless, self-perpetuating war, Hezbollah crossed the border and snagged two Israeli soldiers. Israel invaded, determined to bury Hezbollah with that oldest of tactics: punishing the peasants for the actions of Robin Hood. For 33 days, the whistle of falling bombs and the thunder of tank threads were heard once again in Lebanon, while Hezbollah showered northern Israel with homemade rockets.

After a month, Israel retreated red-faced, unable to uproot Hezbollah or turn the Shi’ites against it. The south had been flattened. Hezbollah declared a “divine victory”, and the UN rushed in 14,000 blue helmets to anchor a tenuous peace.

* * *

The view from Beaufort castle was breathtaking.

A hulking wreck of decaying battlements, crowned by a rusting watchtower, Beaufort straddles a strategic height that overlooks most of southern Lebanon, the Golan Heights, and a large swath of northern Israel- or as the huge sign at the entrance will inform you, “Occupied Northern Palestine”.

Originally built by Romans, the fort passed over the centuries through the hands of the Levant’s various conquerors: Crusaders, Ottomans, French. Palestinian guerillas used it as a base during the Civil War, but after Israeli troopers scoured the area in 1982, it became, as the entrance sign once again proclaims, the “Zionist Outpost of Beaufort”. From Beaufort, the Israelis kept an ironfisted watch over the south and defended their convoy lines.

We climbed up rusted ladders and sauntered across the overgrown paths criss-crossing the castle top. A few lonely remnants indicated that the battlements had once stood much higher, and that a roof had perhaps once sheltered the ground where we now stood in open sunlight. But I didn’t know- and never found out- if this had been caused by the slow decay of time or a rain of Israeli bombs.

Down below, the towns of the south took shape: square-blocked low-rises sprinkled across the ridges of the arid hills, clinging to the heights and then spilling haphazardly over into the valleys. Tiny vehicles raced along snaking roads. Pointing to the south and west, we squinted at the Golan and the Galilee.

From that height, I couldn’t tell where the Golan ended and the Galilee began, or within what areas Shi’ites or Jews raised their children. Where were the borders drawn up in our newspapers and textbooks? It was all one land that shared the same clouds, trees, and soil… claimed by three tribes, and divided with invisible lines by wasteful hatreds and the twisted workings of history.

Above us, an Israeli recon plane left long jet-streams in its wake as it made a pass to the south, then turned back towards home. From Beaufort’s silent watchtower, a ragged Hezbollah flag fluttered in the breeze.

* * *

In another nameless town, we sighted a group of blue vested soldiers sipping coffee in a little hole-in-the-wall. A large van parked outside flew the UN colors, with a placard announcing: “United Nations Observer Group in Lebanon”. We strolled in under the pretense of getting snacks, and badgered a friendly Argentinean officer into a conversation.

Frederico, a burly man with eyes as bright as his sky-blue vest, explained that the UN contingent in Lebanon is divided into two: the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), and the UN Observer Group, of which he was a part. UNIFIL is the military arm. Comprising 14,000 troops, it’s charged with overseeing the 2006 ceasefire and patrolling the border. The Observers are a smaller, unarmed contingent, which reports violations of the peace to UNIFIL and the Lebanese and Israeli governments.

It’s an open secret that UNIFIL’s a paper tiger. Peace in the south hinges not on UNIFIL’s ability to enforce it, but on Hezbollah’s desire to accept it. If civil war broke out and Hezbollah went on the warpath, UNIFIL wouldn’t be protecting the south; it would need protection from the south. In 1982, Reagan pulled American peacekeepers out after 241 marines were suicide-bombed in their barracks. Today, it would take far less for UNIFIL’s donor states to do the same.

I kept this to myself, and listened attentively as Frederico explained the mechanics of cluster-bombing: a missile containing dozens of smaller bombs breaks apart in mid-air, showering an area with deadly little explosions. When we asked him which southern towns had been bombed by Israel, he seemed surprised at our ignorance. “All of them!” Israel, he explained, had bombed every town south of the Litani that didn’t have a Christian majority.

As we drove out of the town we passed a mine-clearing vehicle in a distant field. Beside it, a small group of men were gathered in a circle, crouched over the ground. Days later, I would read that Israel had yet to turn over to Lebanon its maps of southern mine fields and cluster bomb targets.

One of the guys mentioned that he’d heard in passing that Israel painted its cluster bombs a playful pink so that unexploded ordnance could be more easily found. We debated whether this was so that they could be disposed off, or so that they could maim curious children.

* * *

A tall, chain-linked fence topped with lines of barbed wire marked Lebanon’s border with Israel.

It ran parallel to a 400m stretch of road. UNIFIL convoys trundled past regularly- trucks filled with Italian blue-helmets, and armored jeeps painted glaring white and marked boldly with UN insignia. A UN helicopter buzzed over us, keeping well to the Lebanese side of the border.

On the Israeli side, a kilometer in the distance, about fifty white-walled houses with sloping, red-tiled roofs neatly ringed a small hill topped by a radio tower. In the car, we whooped and hollered in glee. We were sure it was a settlement- and it was surreal to actually see one in the flesh.

We paused for pictures on a high ridge. It was like staring at two worlds.

On the Lebanese side of the barbed wire stretched a half-wrecked township of abandoned houses, shelled ruins, and half-reconstructed dwellings. The land was dry, arid; largely unfarmed. But on the Israeli side, the settlement clustered prettily on a hilltop framed with tall green trees- harmless, picturesque, unviolated. Pleasantville in a warzone. The land bloomed with green orchards and furrowed farmland. Some, dangerously close to the border, were guarded by camouflaged bunkers and unseen Israeli soldiers.

Standing there, it was not hard to imagine the ease with which either side could shell each other with million-dollar or homemade weaponry. How many Katyusha rockets had Hezbollah militants fired at those distant Israeli roofs over the years? How many potshots had bored Israeli soldiers taken at Shi’ite villagers across that wire fence? During the war, did Israel shell that wrecked town with artillery from miles away, or did it fly American-made F-15s dropping American-made bombs down on it? Why had Hezbollah not rained rockets down on that settlement- a stone’s throw from the border- in retaliation?

I’m going to find that same settlement from the other side, and see the barbwire border from Israeli eyes.

* * *

The Shi’ites have, over the years, done their share of damage to the Israeli army. Road mines planted in dirt roads pack enough punch to overturn state-of-the-art Merkava tanks. RPGs supplied by Iran turned Israeli APCs and tanks into flaming wrecks.

These mangled but intact hulks have been turned into monuments, perched proudly on stone platforms on prominent street corners in many a southern town. Carven plaques proclaim the heroism of Hezbollah’s martyrs and warn Israelis who will never read them of the folly of invading Shi’ite land. Most have Hezbollah posters stuck upright with steel posts into the tank turrets.

I thought of an old Latin phrase: “Nemo me impune lacessit”. No one harms me with impunity. Crush my farmlands with your tanks, and I’ll take seven or eight as souvenirs. Wreck my towns with your million-dollar bombs, and I’ll drop a patchwork rocket into your front yard. Put your dick in my mouth, and I will bite it off.

My favorite “tank” moment came at an army checkpoint. An old-model Merkava sat on a roadside embankment, mounted with a massive cutout of Ayatollah Khomeini.

As we snapped pictures of the tank, one soldier, a blue-eyed Maronite, gestured at the Ayatollah, with his stern, hawk-like face and flowing beard.

“Papa Noel!” he shouted at us, grinning. “Papa Noel!”

* * *

Maroun Al-Ras is a small hilltop town to which Hezbollah fighters retreated during the 2006 war. In response, Israel bombed it flat.

Rebuilding has begun in earnest. When we got there, a dozen concrete low-rises were taking shape, and the largest pieces of rubble had been carted away from bomb sites. Bright, busy posters memorializing fallen militants punctuated the streets. Murals with Islamic slogans covered the few walls left intact. Signboards announced that funding provided by the European Commission, the UNDP, various aid organizations, and Hezbollah itself was being used to resurrect the town.

But there might as well have been a sixteen-foot neon sign that read: “ISRAEL WAS HERE.” We climbed over large swaths of rubble stretched over whole blocks, cameras clicking. Concrete slabs riddled with twisted rebar- the remains of walls, and ceilings, and floors- lay in thick grey piles. One ground zero was reduced to nothing more than the concrete archway of what had been the main entrance. I thought of the marble arches of Roman ruins. Some townsfolk had planted a Hezbollah flag on top of the lonely structure.

The people of Maroun Al-Ras had come back to rebuild their homes and lives- but not all of them. The streets echoed with the honking of passing cars, the shouts of neighbors, the clank of machinery, the squawk of livestock. But still, there were far too few. I wondered where the others had gone. Absorbed into the slums of south Beirut? Other towns? Had they fled to Syria?

Those who returned had set up their shops and homes in the remaining functional buildings. If it hadn’t collapsed, it was inhabited by a business or a family- sometimes both. I saw an autoshop whose walls were riddled with large shrapnel holes. Families clustered in still-upright apartment complexes hung their clothing out to dry in the gaping spaces of what had once been a living room, or a bedroom.

Lying abandoned in fields or on roadsides were the rusting remains of blown-up cars and minibuses. Roads were pockmarked with cluster-bomb pits- holes six to eight inches in diameter that had been filled in with sand.

I recalled a joke by my buddy Justin from a few days before, standing amidst the crumbling Roman temples of Baalbek in eastern Lebanon.

“It’s all ruined,” he’d scoffed, tongue-in-cheek. “It’s like someone came in here and trashed the place.”

The remains of the town made me think of those Israeli tanks. Earlier, one of the guys had pointed that three or four Israeli boys had probably burned to death inside of each tank so we could take those pictures and act like goofy tourists.

The remains of war are often so sterile, so bloodless. You can’t truly understand the carnage of trench warfare by visiting the Somme, or the methodical madness of the Holocaust while strolling the walkways of Auschwitz. It’s been cleaned up. The blood’s been scrubbed off, and the screams have died away.

No amount of wreckage, no memorial, no words, could ever make real to me the visceral, slow-motion horror of war’s ground zero moments.

We stopped by an old man by a collection of blackened houses and asked him for directions out of Maroun Al-Ras. Not understanding our query, he responded with a toothless grin. “Ahlan!” He said. “Ahlan wa sahlan!”

Welcome. My house is your house.

* * *

As the sun faded into twilight, we passed a huge, white armored jeep. A black soldier in a blue helmet peered curiously at us from his machine-gun perch. On the other side of the road, a small group of black troopers in UN colors sat, guns propped up on chairs and walls, in the shelter of a concrete garage that had seen better days.

They were from Ghana. Products of British colonialism, they spoke perfect English. One man, short and animated, grabbed my hand and pumped it. “You’re a long way from home!” I told him. “Yes, yes.” he returned. Almost conspiratorially, he then leaned in and whispered: “I miss my home, you know. You know why?”

I blinked at him, thinking he was going to say something about a pregnant wife, or the threat of civil war, or having to risk dying for a cause that didn’t in the least concern him so he could collect his monthly paycheck.

He stared dolefully at me. “Because here, it is very cold!” And he rubbed his arms and shivered in an exaggerated pantomime, then burst into a booming laugh.

His commander, a far grimmer man with a bristly mustache, gave us permission to take a picture of the jeep. “But not with Israel!” he cautioned. We could not take a photograph with the Israeli countryside in the background. Espionage. Well, guess what, Israel. It’s a world of google maps and GPS-equipped cell phones. Take a hint.

All of us nabbed lovely shots of the UN battlewagon, posed stoically against the red sunset, with its Ghanaian gunner, far from home, staring off into the distance.

* * *

Hezbollah territory wasn’t in the least bit dangerous. I’d been expecting an interrogation or two, demands for my passport, pointed questions about my political opinions. I’d been expecting men in slovenly clothing and keffiyehs to be patrolling the towns with AKs. I’d expected reams of red tape at every army checkpoint from brusque officers intent in keeping curious tourists out of the south.

Nothing of the sort. We were waved through every checkpoint. I never saw a gun, and never heard an insult. Maybe the merry men of Hezbollah were always just hidden around the corner, out of sight- but all I saw were the peasants. The commoners. The people who take care of Hezbollah, because Hezbollah takes care of them.

The south isn’t quite what the Maronites and Israelis make it out to be. It isn’t a den of thieves and murderers. It’s just the asshole of Lebanon- the part that always gets fucked. The south has a weary population- and as a result, extreme politics. The Shi’ites would negotiate with words with they could, but they’ve been talking to deaf ears for decades. So now, they negotiate with guns… and somehow ended up on the wrong side of the post-9/11 fence between Good and Evil.

Postponed. Again.

2007-11-23T10:15:00.000-08:00

The election has been delayed for the fifth time. The dealine is moved to next Friday.

So in about four hours, at the stroke of midnight, Lebanon will have no president.

There's a bunch of us watching a broadcast in Arabic of politicians from all the factions, as well as the deputy speaker of the House, give meaningless speeches about Lebanese unity and holding to the constitutional process. The army has been charged with maintaining the peace. Veiled, insinuous comments are made about rival parties and godfathers.

Obviously, the dons can't just admit: "Hey, we've got no president becase we're corrupt warlords who won't compromise on our tribal agendas for the security of our country!"... even if this has the virtue of being the truth.

So now, we've got another week of suspense, deserted streets, checkpoints, and surly soldiers.

Some hostel-mates and I might take the delay to head south to Shi'ite-held areas that the Lonely Planet is silent about. See some real Hezbollah country.