It warms my ancient, withered heart to see the news of all the campus protests popping up around the country lately, nowhere more than at my alma mater, Indiana University. I continue to stand by the position I held when this most recent disaster started back in October: I have absolutely no idea how to solve the problem of Israel/Palestine, but I am absolutely certain that Benjamin Netanyahu should be nowhere near it, and while I don’t know what we should do, carpet bombing Gaza and murdering 30,000 people, half of which are children, is absolutely and unequivocally not what should be done.
Are there people at, and around, these protests who are advocating other policies that I am going to disagree with? Yep. I’m sure there are. I’m also capable of enough nuance to recognize that one guy screaming “Death to Jews” or whatever does not cancel out hundreds of other people suggesting peacefully that maybe their university ought not to invest their tuition money in apartheid regimes. Being anti-Zionist does not equate to antisemitism, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t some out there.
But, one way or another, this is an example of people using their power to bring attention to an issue that has a chance of achieving the goals that they want. The more pressure that can be brought upon US institutions in general, not just the government, to put pressure on the Israeli government to stop acting like fucking monsters, the better. And the great thing is that it’s clearly working– you didn’t hear squat about any kind of anti-Zionist movements a few years ago, and being openly pro-Palestinian was virtually unheard of. They’re moving their position into the mainstream with these protests, which is what needs to be done in order to effect any kind of systematic change. Good for them. I’m proud.
You might remember a few years ago that I did a project called Read Around the World, where I read one book from every US state and from as many countries as I could manage in a year. The final-final-final update never got published, and has a few more countries on it than the “final” 2021 update did, but I never managed to read anything from Israel during that time. I can remember thinking about what to do if I read something from a Palestinian author during the project– would I count that as Israel? Should Gaza and the West Bank count as their own place, and leave, for lack of a better word, Israel Israel untouched? Well, I never had to decide, because I wasn’t about to try rereading the biography of David ben-Gurion I bought when I was in Israel on a dig after college, and nothing else ended up dropping into my lap.
I haven’t really worried about geographical diversity too much since 2021. Or, at least, I didn’t until October 7 happened, and I decided to make a stronger effort to find some books by Palestinian authors to read. I don’t think I talked much, if at all, about Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, which I read in … December? I think? But Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World has been sitting on my shelf for way too long, and since I wanted something different after three straight Red Rising books, I decided it was time to dig into it.
So, I just wrote a post where I told you to read Red Rising because it was good. I still stand by that post, obviously. But you need to read Against the Loveless World because it is important, which is not quite the same thing. Don’t misunderstand me– it is also good; I would not have, for the second day in a row, read an entire book in less than 24 hours if it was not a good book– but it is a story that Americans in particular need to hear.
Against the Loveless World is a novel, not a memoir, but it is written in the style of a memoir and both Abulhawa and the main character, Nahr, are Kuwaiti-born Palestinian refugees. Abulhawa has lived in America since she was 13 and Nahr narrates her book from solitary confinement inside an Israeli Supermax prison, so this is clearly not a self-insert. It feels a lot like My Government Means to Kill Me in that respect. Nahr grows up more or less happily in Kuwait, but the Iraqi invasion leads to persecution of Palestinians and her family is forced to move to Jordan. She and her family spend the rest of the book moving back and forth between Jordan and Palestine; I don’t know for sure that the word “Israel” is ever used in the book; when it is grammatically necessary to refer to it the phrase “the Zionist entity” is often used. The book takes its time with her radicalization, saving the events that put her in prison for the last fifth or so of the book, but from the moment Saddam invades it becomes clear over and over that by virtue of being a Palestinian and in particular a Palestinian woman she is considered to be less than nothing by everyone with any power around her. When her husband abruptly abandons her and disappears things get even worse and she is forced(*) into prostitution for a while, she manages to provide for her family but at the cost of not being able to admit to anyone how she is doing it.
Her first trip to Palestine is so that she can obtain a divorce, which of course she can’t do without permission of her husband, the guy who abandoned her and prompted the need for a divorce in the first place. He more or less signs power of attorney over to his brother, and it is when the two meet that the book really takes off. She’s able to meet some members of her family for the first time as well, family members who were never able to come visit in Jordan or Kuwait because leaving the country would have led to the Israeli government stealing their homes out from underneath her. At one point she visits her mother’s childhood home, which is occupied by a colonizer at the time. It’s … quite a moment.
At any rate, the book is marvelous, and I don’t want to spoil a lot of it. But I will read more by Susan Abulhawa, and I think I’m going to try to find a few more Palestinian fiction authors to read work by, which I’ll be able to get to in a million years, since I am so far behind. You really, really, really ought to strongly consider picking this one up. It’s cheap. Do it.
(*) It’s more complicated than that word implies, and Nahr’s relationship with her, uh, procuress is incredibly layered and frankly one of the highlights of the book. If you’re thinking you might need a trigger warning about this book, though, you’re right.
I don’t have any idea what the hell can be done about the current iteration of the war between Israel and Hamas. Americans like to pick sides during a war, and assign “good guys” and “bad guys,” and as near as I can tell this is a situation where both sides gave up any pretense to the moral high ground quite a while ago. It’s bad guys all the way down. I have said in the past, both in this space and others, that any time I see an unarmed person throwing a rock at a tank, my general inclination is to support the person throwing the rock. And Israel has operated as a de facto apartheid state for most of its existence, and particularly so since fucking Netanyahu came into power. I believe all of that is true, and I believe that both Israel and Palestine have a right to exist. But the Palestinians are controlled by fucking lunatics too, and I refuse to hold people who murder and kidnap civilians at a fucking music festival up as someone who should be supported. I have said before, and I think I still believe this, that Palestine’s only chance at ever actually achieving a two-state solution is to bring forth a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King. The problem is that the hardliners would kill him before the world found out he existed. The closest Israel can claim is Yitzhak Rabin, and he was assassinated by an Israeli.
Neither side wants peace. I’m entirely willing to believe that the people of both Israel and Palestine want peace, and the Palestinian people have absolutely and undeniably gotten the short end of the stick here; I probably can’t honestly say that I understand their rage, having never had to live under apartheid, but I’m at least willing to try. But none of their leaders want peace right now, and there isn’t going to be peace until that changes. Neither side really believes in the other’s right to exist. That’s not something you can really find a compromise on. Palestine will continue to have a steady supply of hopeless, angry young men for as long as Israel denies their right to live freely, and the Israeli government will accept nothing short of full second-class, boot-on-their-necks subjugation for the Palestinians, which guarantees that supply of hopeless, angry young men will never end.
This will end in genocide, eventually. It’s close enough as it is, but that’s where it’s headed. Again.
Nobody reminded me, but luckily for y’all I remembered on my own. If you don’t feel like clicking through to the AITA, here’s the gist: an avid, experienced hiker wants to take a bunch of his (athletic, hiker-adjacent) friends on a rather difficult 8-mile hike. He prepares these friends in advance for what they’re about to get into and makes sure everyone has proper footwear, water, snacks, hats, that sort of thing. And then one of them drags along a friend who in every available way is unprepared for the hike– and, after pointing out that the person is genuinely endangering herself if she tries this and getting nowhere, he bails on the hike entirely. Later in the day, one of his friends sends him pictures from the ER that two members of the group, including the girl, ended up in, because basically everything went wrong that dude said would go wrong.
This is a not-the-asshole situation for me, and it got me thinking about something that happened when I was in Israel just after graduating college. I was there for a dig at Tel Beth Shemesh, which is a Bronze Age site just west of Jerusalem. We were there for a month, and two of the weekends featured preprogrammed touristy stuff on a rented bus with a guide. The first weekend we were supposed to go to the northern part of the country, and for the second weekend we were supposed to head south. Now, if you know anything about Israel, you might be aware that there is a staggering climate difference between the lovely, temperate, Mediterranean northern half of the country and the fucking Negev desert that occupies most of the southern half. Staggering enough that you dress significantly differently depending on which way you’re going.
We were all rather surprised when we realized which direction the bus was headed, and where our tour guide took us. South. To the desert. To the hot.
Oh, and there was going to be a hike. A three-mile hike, roughly, at Ein Avdat, which is Hebrew for “one motherfucker.” Ein Avdat is beautiful! It looks like this:
I don’t know if the place has gotten more popular since 1998 or what, but I remember it being deserted (heh) when we were there. But it’s gorgeous! Seriously!
There are parts of the hike that are like this, though:
Those are steps carved into the side of the canyon. I don’t know for sure that we carved these specific ones, because I remember there being handholds, but you get the idea.
Going back, by the way, is not an option, because once they drop you off the other side of the hike is … well, three miles away, and your bus drops you off and heads tot he other side. So when we got to the very last part of the hike, I took one look at what they expected me to do to get out of this hot-ass canyon that I didn’t know I was going to be fucking hiking in (and I was not in much better shape in college than I am now) and declared that somebody was sending me a fucking helicopter. Because this is the last part of the hike. After three miles. With no water:
Yeah. That’s a metal ladder. Again, I’m not 100% sure that’s our actual ladder– I remember the rungs being more rebar-y, but again, you get the idea. Nah. Send me a damn helicopter. I ain’t doing it.
…
I did, eventually, make it out of the canyon. And I forced everyone on the trip with me to take a picture giving the canyon the finger. I didn’t go find that picture today, but when I checked my 22-year-old memories (Christ, literally half my life ago) with a friend of mine who was with me on the trip, she sent me this one. Look at our shoes:
That’s the Dead Sea behind us, so this wasn’t immediately after the hike, but it was the same weekend, and it was definitely the same fucking Birkenstocks. A three mile hike in a box canyon in the desert in Israel in June, with insufficient water and fucking Birks on my feet, because the trip organizers fucked up what weekend we were heading north.
The next day after the hike, we went to Masada, which by rights should have been one of the highlights of the fucking trip. Masada is a Jewish fortress on the top of a mountain. There are two ways to get to it: through what basically amounts to a ski lift, and by climbing the earthen ramp the Romans built while they were laying siege to the place so that they could kill everyone there. It’s called the Snake Path.
This is the fucking Snake Path:
Now, again, each of these two things is on different sides of the complex. There was a small riot on the bus when we pulled up to the Snake Path side of the mountain, and after some debate everyone got off the bus and got ready to hike some more.
Not me. Nope. I took one look at that entirely uphill climb, the day after an unscheduled three-mile desert canyon hell trek, and noped right the fuck out. There are certain things I simply cannot be manipulated into doing, and that bullshit was definitely on that list. I stayed on the bus, and as it ended up had a fascinating conversation with our Palestinian bus driver while everyone else nearly died trying to hike straight up. So I went to Israel and went to Masada, but I have never been inside Masada … but on the other hand, I’m still alive, and I can to this day recite this guy’s explanation of the Arab-Israeli conflict, complete with broken English and the map that he drew a bunch of lines on to indicate which parts of Israel should be given back.
And that’s why I’m not about to get angry with somebody for telling someone he doesn’t think it’s a good idea for her to go on a hike.
I may start doing these more often; forcing myself to write to a prompt every now and again seems like a good thing. Here’s today’s:
What giant step did you take where you hoped your leg wouldn’t break? Was it worth it, were you successful in walking on the moon, or did your leg break?
The summer after graduating from college, I went to Israel for a month. It was a program sponsored by the university; we were on a dig at Tel Beth Shemesh. (This was 1998, so it fascinates me that the girl next to the pile of pots on that page, the third picture down, was on my dig. That’s an old picture. I remember everybody going nuts when we found that refuse pile.)
Here’s how the dig worked: we worked five days a week, and weekends were programmed trips around the country with a tour guide. One afternoon– Tuesdays, I think?– we were on our own on the afternoons, and most of us took the time to go into Jerusalem and shop or sightsee or whatever. The problem was, by the time the digging was over and we’d had time to go home and clean up and grab some food and catch the bus, it was impossible to get to the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount before it closed for the day, seeing as how it’s an active religious site and not actually a 24/7 tourist site.
The thought of being able to tour the Dome of the Rock was a sizable portion of the reason I’d wanted to go on the trip in the first place. I was thousands and thousands of miles from home with no real reason to believe I’d ever be in Israel again. Missing out was not acceptable. So on the night before our last Tuesday half day, I dropped in on one of the dig directors in his office and let him know I was taking a sick day the next day. And I got up early in the morning, got on the bus, and went into Jerusalem. By myself. I was 21 and spoke no Hebrew (I could read it, which wasn’t terribly useful) and had never been overseas before. Also: 1998, so no cell phone or means to get ahold of anyone. But there was no way in hell I was leaving Israel without a tour of that building, and if that meant I had to do it by myself that was what was going to happen.
You have very likely never been to the Old City. It’s a maze. And, worse, it’s a maze that shuts down around prayer times and a few other times as well, meaning that all the shops close and you can lose your bearings very easily when all of your landmarks suddenly go away. You remembered the jewelry shop on the corner was where you turned right? Good luck when the face of the jewelry store suddenly turns into a piece of plywood. I hired a guide. Agreed on a reasonable price. He took me on a little tour, where I did my best to make sure to memorize my route because I was alone and half-convinced I was about to be robbed, and then brought me to the Temple Mount.
Where he attempted to double his price. There was shouting. He switched to Arabic. I switched to Spanish. This was clearly a performance on his part, figuring the American was going to back down quickly rather than attract the notice of the local authorities– and we were certainly starting to attract notice. I, on the other hand, was firmly in “getting arrested on the Temple Mount makes the story better” mode, and wasn’t about to back down to the dude, figuring that the blue passport around my neck and my connection to Hebrew University through the dig was going to sort everything out sooner or later. (Yay, privilege!) He backed down and left. And I took my shoes off, got in line and got my tour of one of the most beautiful, spiritual places on the planet. I met my friends a couple of hours later without any real incident, managing to get to the spot where we’d agreed to join up without getting lost or anything else stupid happening.
Secondary funny Israel story: On the first trip into Jerusalem, we went to the Holy Sepulchre. The history of the Sepulchre is fascinating and well worth a read if you’re unfamiliar with it, but suffice it to say that there’s a shrine in there that is believed to be the actual location of Jesus’ tomb. You have to crawl, or at least squat, to get in there:
This is, in case it’s not clear, a really small room, with space for no more than a few people, and those shoved tightly together. And that little entryway is several feet long, so it’s possible to stand up too early as you’re walking in. And hit your head. On a stone arch.
If you do that, shouting “OW! JESUS!” at the top of your lungs is frowned upon.
(It wasn’t me. Thank God. But I was right behind her and oh lord keeping a straight face in a situation like that is incredibly difficult. Also, I can safely report that it is in fact impossible to literally die of embarrassment or Betsy surely would have done so on the spot.)
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