Madness in the Machpela

Some cities are too holy for their own good. Hebron is one such sacred place. Revered by persons of the Mosaic faith as the 2nd-holiest locale, folks believe that no fewer than 7 biblical primogenitors are buried in a place called the Tomb of the Patriarchs. Now also a mosque built atop the site of what had been an ancient synagogue and then subsequently a church, the current site is at the crux of perhaps the hottest conflict between the warring parties in the Holy Land.

Hebron is a disaster. Hebron is on the front lines. Hebron leads me to believe that this nonsense about making hierarchical lists of the holiness of cities ultimately results in absurdly excessive attachments to purportedly sacred spots. When groups seek to justify fanatical behavior, they rattle off what position a site occupies on their reified list. These rankings morph truly abstract concepts of sanctity and spiritual value into excuses for the most disgusting reactions to the challenges of everyday life. If life isn't going well, then hell, I might as well go dig up my faith's holiness list to find one to go defend before it is conquered by the infidels. Today, I think it's about time to fight for #4. Perhaps by the time tomorrow rolls around, #2 will be so endangered that it will deserve my utmost jihadi attitude.

Folks in Hebron justify the most incredidly incidious form of segregation by means of their sacred link to the site where their antecedents are eternally entombed. I personally am in favor of there being a limited Jewish presence in this city due to the irrefutable importance of the site. However, it seems that these holiness rankings drive people to utter insanity. Such rankings need to be struck down by the world's secular and reasonable folk. Israelites in Hebron attack the Palestinian population with impunity. The IDF has no power to restrain them. 20k Arabs have left the H2 sector to escape the injustice that transpires there.

When I traveled to Hebron, I traveled as a nonpartisan observer but I was accompanied by Muslim folks. Therefore, I had access to the sort of experience that would not necessarily be available to folks who travel to this city to be protected by the occupational forces. We encountered a livid IDF chum who, while merely doing his job, demanded that we speedily remove ourselves from H2 so as not to be a menace to the settler presence there. He came at us with his gun half-drawn, and this was no pretty sight. It's not terribly pleasant to be opposite an M-16 in Hebron. Nonetheless, I was able to "pass" as a Muslim and gain access to the Ibrahimi mosque with my Turkish and Palestinian acquaintances. Jews are currently only allowed to access this part of the revered Tomb of the Patriarchs 20 days a year, due to a bloodbath that Baruch Goldstein unleashed in 1996. Maybe the Jews in the area see that event as part of some sort of historical justice that remedied a horrendous massacre of Jews in 1929. Either way, the Jews who current live in Hebron (al-Khalil) do not deserve to cause the sort of harm that they exact on a daily basis.

Remove these extremists now. Replace them with sane stewards who can keep the Jewish holy sites intact and allow Jewish access to them. Do not remove these people so that the policy of segregation can be perfected, but remove them because they have lost their right to claim holiness. They ostensibly occupy the 2nd rung on this ranking of holy cities. But their behavior puts them on the list of ridiculous offenders of human sensibility. The Islamically-motivated folks who erupted in furious rage upon the Israeli digging near the Mugrabi gate are no better. They seek to justify violent provocation on the basis of Jerusalem's status as #3 on the Muslim list. Sanctity is not supposed to be commensurable. Religiosity shall not be broken down into quantifiable units. Deconstruct the shallow faith of these disingenuous believers. They believe. They believe in causing trouble. They believe in the power of the rock and the legitimacy of religiously-based violence. The Hebron settlers have got to go. The Muslim radicals of the Temple Mount must go as well. These sites should both be under the stewardship of some internationally sovereign body and under the religious supervision of the respective religious authorities. Do not allow these folks to hold the rest of us hostage.

Sites cannot be holy when they are militarized. The particularities of sectarian conflict are shocking to peace-loving idealists such as myself. Nonetheless, I understand the cyclically intractable nature of the conflict. The same day that I obseved Hebron's uber-tense situation, I visited a refugee camp of 9,000 Palestinians north of Hebron called Arroub. We visitors were holed up in an NGO office just off the main street as tear gas began to pour into the main street. Palestinian youngsters were doing what they do best. They were slingshotting rocks at the soldiers who stand by the watchtower at the front end of the camp. We got to experience what folks in the camp see every day.

Tear gas, rock, and rubber bullets are ordinary. My first exposure to tear gas was accompanied by the embittered words of one of my Palestinian hosts, who invited me to spend time in Israeli security prisons after I asked him what he would do if rocks were thrown in his direction. Though it is indeed important not to get bogged down in the details of the occupation, the fundamentally and viscerally violent reaction on the part of the Palestinians has not allowed for resolution to this conflict. If all of these rebel yells and renegade youths instead put down their slingshots and simply marched peacefully towards Israel, the occupation would be discredited in several minutes. The fact that intransigently violent characters are blocking the path towards peace means that strict military control and vigilance will continue to be in place. Palestinian parents need to teach their children that there are more viable ways of building a state. Israeli leaders need to tell their ideological settlers that they will not allow the Israeli nation to be held hostage to the hypocrisies of the fundamentalist crusade.

In a final peace deal, Hebron's Palestinians should be under Arab rule. However, the Jewish holy site should have a limited number of sane stewards who can ensure that Jewish religious observance is permissible. Enough of this living in cages.

Reflections on Holy Land

This soil is cherished. The land upon which I am situated has inspired some of the most divisive conflict in human history. From the Knights of Templar and King Solomon to Canaanites and Hyksos, this turf has instigated bestial battle after senseless battle. What we refer to as Semites are likely a blend of Semitic, Persian, Greek, Roman, Turkic, and North African peoples. The illusory notion that pure blood lines tracing back to some frozen, classical era of national glory is far-fetched at best. However, the nationalistic spell is quite potent for all those who claim to be pure descendants of the land's true occupants. And, while the various peoples have varying levels of justification for their practical and/or ancestral-religious claims to the land, ultimately some utilitarian justice must be attained in order quell the irrational and fantastic sense of holy war that swells ethnic egos, fans sectarian strife, and results in a land that becames violent and thusly much less sacred.

Facts on the ground are a popularly imagined way of sizing up the current situation in the context of who lives where, who has to deal with which problems, and where sensible borders lie. While there is rampant unpopularity of the Israeli dream throughout the world, this national-mythological dream is no less genuine or beneficient than the american dream or the european dream, both of which are also dreams founded on western principles, on the backs of slaves/ssubaltern people, in the colonial process of usurpation and eventually permanent attempts at territorial reclamation on behalf of the conquered folks.

Walls that divide civilizations are convenient so that people understand where they are safest, most comfortable, most useful. Even so, ideas we have about permanence and the objective basis for territorial acquisition, settlement, and negotiation are far from eternal. People tend to remember the immediacy of suffering best. And, in the Israeli-Arab conflict, the crucial periods of intense national suffering occurred a mere three years apart. Full-on justification for the Israeli nation-state arose from the ashes of World War II as a combination of Western guilt and Jewish-Zionist redemption forged the possibility of an ethnic-religious homeland. A mere three years later, the Palestinians underwent what they refer to as the "catastrophe" - Nakba. Whereas Israelis refer to this triumphant occasion as "liberation" or "independence." The dualism inherent in this act of passing on "genocide credit" lives on.

The cycles of violence and dim hopes of permanent peace rage on. While a viable economic and geographic unit exists within Israeli borders, the outlying satelite communities of Palestine, which remain halfway under Israeli rule in a semi-Apartheid arrangement, languish and devolve into chaos. Heaps of rubble, omnipresent checkpoints, dug out trenches, ancient fridges contrast with fresh skyscrapers, booming hi-tech, serene beaches, and most of all, the ability to wield POWER. The ability to force submission, arbitrarily enforce law, and create a relationship where colonial oppression gradually rots the once glorious Zionist enterprise. The result is a post-Zionist reality in which naivete has been shattered. The growing threat of political dissolution on both sides leads to a swollen yet broken fantasy in which corruption and complacency prevent the pragmatic discussion of future potential. What can the present tell us about the complex landscape into which we venture?

Am I even a credible observer if I'm not committed to living in this mess? Are my ideals and/or objectivity not possible if I'm not actually from here and/or planning to remain here for the long term? I have a complex about becoming an ideological crusader or a naive intellectual dabbler who refuses to admit where vested interest lies. Is objective evaluation of the circumstances possible given my background? Perhaps most parties in this conflict are not interested in anything more than a subjective account of reality. Scholarly/journalistic accounts of what's truly transpiring might not be attractive for most people who, on a daily basis, must accept the bare facts on the ground. No simple answers are waiting under a mattress in Gaza. No reality is possible other than that which can actually be fostered, nourished, and developed. There is not yet a will, a collective ambition, or a unified mentality on either side that could result in what has formally and colloquially been referred to as "lasting peace."

No one could possibly know what this place will actually look like in 100 years. It would have been impossible three times over to predict one hundred years ago during the final years of Ottoman occupation what would befall this land just 100 years later. It's rather doubtful that the same blue Stars of David will be majestically flying over this land a century down the road. History has sped up exponentially, and fantasy is a hell of a drug.

Vicarious Homeric Experience

These days we all get unlimited access to the craziest experiences through various pop culture media. Perhaps because our everyday lives have become more sterile and predictable, movies and the internet have had to make up for the outrageous stories and exchanges that are no longer possible in hyper-organized, regimented existences. Take this picture of a young woman with Homer Simpson tatooed upon her nether region. This tatoo artist's rendition of those Homeric lips is pretty fly. I assume that this is indeed a permanent tatoo and that this young woman probably didn't know hundreds of thousands of strangers across the weblogistan would have visual access to her genital region. Thanks young Betty for providing us the pleasure of viewing your tatoo artist's illustration. You allow us to see phenomenal art on the internet that we would otherwise never have had the opportunity to peep.

This is the beauty of pop culture these days. Every instance that we submit to the power of entertainment media, we encounter episodes that are created precisely because we would likely not run into such events or images elsewhere. Interpersonal violence and pornography are two broad categories of experience that generally broaden our horizons as we are exposed to them in the media. For better or for worse, our entertainment options today permit us to indulge ourselves in sights that range from absolutely horrendous and shockingly gruesome to fanatically arousing and absurdly tantalizing. Either way, the vast majority of what we perceive on beaming screens is beyond the pale of our caveman ancestors.

There are a few examples of gruesome images in movies that I've viewed over the course of the past week. Capote features both gangland-style shotgun killings and a mildly conclusive act of capital punishment by hanging, which rapidly contorts the spine until it snaps. Munich, despite all its excessive sentimentality and over-produced inducements, provides cheap action thrills, replete with blood smattering walls and body parts rolling around on the ground. These two movies derive their cinematic energy from the shock and disbelief that goes into the witnessing of violent behavior. Regardless of how sophisticated the descriptive mechanisms are to embellish the tales, both films hinge on primordial violence and the subsequent reaction of political and literary agents.

There are three more examples that I wish to cite. Dancer in the Dark also is resolved in the brutal hanging of a blind Bjork, whose mystical aura is stamped out by heartless punishers and an uncompromising criminal justice system. Next, the Hungarian film Kontroll depicts the savagery encountered by subway employees as they check for peoples' tickets. With bodies shoved into the tracks and mutilated appendages galore, the movie cleverly portrays the struggle of Budapest metro workers to perform their daily grind. Lastly, Million Dollar Baby features a sliced tongue that leads to a geyser of blood, nastily broken noses, and a series of other viscerally horrific boxing-related injuries.

Given these five films I've just seen that deal in seriously gory images, I'm not really sure what to conclude about my cinematic preferences. Do I preselect movies that are bound to be visually extreme? Is there a basic standard of nastiness that must be displayed for a movie to excite? Are these specific films even that extreme in their depictions, relative to other films? Most of these images are definitely extreme enough that normal people would not encounter them in the course of a lifetime. Maybe the role of our entertainment culture is to provide us with enough vicarious experience that we don't actually seek to replicate such scenes in our own actual lives. Maybe humans emotionally need to be exposed to an extreme level of disgusting physical pain and suffering so that we can psychologically limit such experience to the realm of the imagination. Does this fantasy world represent a universal human aspiration? I suppose the violence of our movies does not directly correlate with our problems with gun culture and international militarism. But, it is certainly an expression of something deep within our zeitgeist.

Back to skin. Sexually amusing or enthralling images are certainly an outlet for much of the repression that characterizes American sexuality. Does the media consciously seek to provide us with enough vicarious experience (sex and gore) so that we remain distracted and immersed inadvertently in the spectacular convergence of drama and technology that we cannot possibly seek extreme pleasures in the real world? The virtual experience accessible to the modern-day media consumer is incredible. Dilbert can go to sleep happy because he was thoroughly fufilled by looking at his cousin Homer Simpson tatooed onto the underside of a comely young lady. If only Dilbert could see Homer's lips in person...then he wouldn't need the internets. And, if we fed heretics to the lions in Madison Square Garden, then Hollywood would be out of business.